Trump DOJ jumps into Musk xAI court battle as diversity fight heats up

By Fox News · Fox News

The Department of Justice joined forces with Elon Musk on Friday by backing a lawsuit his company xAI brought against Colorado alleging a state law regulating artificial intelligence developers was a masked effort to force them to adopt diversity, equity and inclusion on their platforms. DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon said DOJ's intervention was the department's first constitutional challenge in an AI case. Colorado faces allegations from the DOJ and xAI that its state law, set to take effect in June, violates the First and Fourteenth amendments by forcing AI developers to inadvertently discriminate, an allegation familiar to Colorado, which has faced a string of legal losses in other high-profile culture-war cases in recent years. "We join @xai's landmark suit, and stand against woke DEI standards being imposed by Colorado," Dhillon said. COLORADO'S LATEST SUPREME COURT LOSS ADDS TO GROWING STRING OF CULTURE WAR DEFEATS The lawsuit arose from a controversial consumer protection bill the Colorado legislature passed in 2024 that required "high-risk" developers like xAI, which built the popular platform Grok, to exercise "reasonable care" to protect consumers from "algorithmic discrimination," saying AI tools must not result in discrimination based on protected classes in the state, such as race and religion. Musk founded xAI in 2023. The Colorado law also targeted entities that deploy the AI platforms, like hospitals or banks, saying the law was intended to make sure consumers in those areas were treated fairly. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis reluctantly signed the bill into law in 2024 but has raised concerns over whether it would alienate tech innovators in his state because of the slate of burdensome regulations it imposed on them. Fox News Digital reached out to Polis' office for comment on DOJ's intervention in the lawsuit. The DOJ lawyers argued in their lawsuit that Colorado's bill actually "fosters further discrimination," citing language in the…