After a session in which Colorado legislators introduced and debated more potential technology regulations than during any previous year, a pattern can be seen that Gov. Jared Polis was willing to sign just those bills that didn’t carry substantial legal risk — or risk of generating unintended consequences.
That specific lesson admittedly could be short-lived, as Polis is term-limited and will step aside in January. But his writings in a host of veto letters could serve as a sort of precedent as a new governor steps into office next year and is likely to deal with many of the same issues — or natural extensions of them — that legislators have debated the past two years.
The Democratic governor sent a strong message in 2025 by vetoing or threatening to veto three bills seeking to boost online protections for children, warning each would violate Colorado online privacy laws or upended civil rights inappropriately in the name of safety. He warned that such bills also could slow innovation in the technology industry and vetoed another that sought to put nation-leading guardrails around an emerging sector that he feels holds great promise — autonomous vehicles.
Unwilling to walk away from such debates at a time when parents have sued social media sites for everything from allowing the illegal drug sales that killed their children to enabling chatbots the encouraged their kids’ suicide, legislators came roaring back this year. Those who limited the reach of the guardrails they sought to put on social-media sites or artificial-intelligence usage — even at the cost of parental backlash — found success, while officials who reached for wide impact more often went home with vetoes.
Requiring action — but not judge/ jury power — from technology platforms
Gov. Jared Polis signs Senate Bill 11 while surrounded by backers of the law in March.
For instance, Senate Bill 11, one of the earlier bills Polis signed requires large social-media sites to respond to law-enforcement warrants within 72 hours and to lay out clearly on their websites how law enforcement can contact them about postings. That was a successor to a bill that got a high-profile veto in 2025 after seeking the same response timeframe — but also requiring sites to take down profiles flagged for potential criminal behavior within 24 hours, which the governor said could violate civil rights.
Polis also signed SB 51, which requires computer-system operators to collect information on a primary user’s age and then transmit to application developers information about the age brackets of those uses — holding private their exact information but permitting app pages from blocking children from adult-only apps. And he signed House Bill 1058, which requires adult creators of revenue-generating online content to set aside a portion of the earnings in trust funds for minors who star in the content — a regulation that puts the onus on content creators rather than social-media sites to comply.
But the eighth-year governor vetoed HB 1255, which sought to go further and establish a warrant-response timeline of 24 hours — and to mandate that social-media platforms report within 24 hours to law enforcement any posts with specific or imminent threats that violate their own policies. The bill was ambiguous about what type of content would trigger this response, Polis wrote in his May 28 veto letter, and that could lead companies to take down even protected speech as a precaution to avoid potential litigation.
Leery of new fees on gamers
“The First Amendment does not tolerate the chilling or infringement of protected speech, and the Fourth Amendment likely requires more than one report of a policy violation to trigger law enforcement searches and seizure,” Polis wrote. “The loss of constitutional freedom, even for a moment, is an irreparable injury to an individual and to our democracy.”
On two other bills he vetoed, the governor seemed most concerned not about the potential actions against social-media platforms and users but against the state of Colorado.
Colorado state Reps. Sean Camacho and Yara Zokaie discuss HB 1418, their bill to add fees for certain purchases in video games, on the House floor.
HB 1418 sought to add a 5% fee to all in-game purchases made by online game players — think extra weapons or character upgrades — to fund youth mental-health services, with sponsors targeting the fee at games aimed at minors. Opponents from game developers to fiscal conservatives argued, however, that there was little nexus between fee payers and the services, as adult gamers wouldn’t benefit and neither would the vast majority of kids who don’t access those services.
Polis, in another May 28 veto letter, agreed and said further that the bill would open the state to lawsuits alleging Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights violations and threaten the stability of the funded programs, including some that are not funded by general taxpayer revenues. “Creating an enterprise that is vulnerable to legal jeopardy could lead to significant financial penalties and disrupt those programs and those served by them,” he wrote.
Swipe fees carry “too much legal risk”
SB 134, which sought to bar credit-card companies from charging swipe fees on sales taxes and stood to save retailers and restaurants some $217 million annually, drew warnings from banks and credit-card companies that such a regulation was pre-empted under federal law. And after significant back-and-forth between proponents and opponents of the bill, Polis wrote in his June 3 veto letter that the ongoing lawsuit and federal claims over a similar if differently worded law passed in Illinois showed that the bill may never go into effect in Colorado if signed, muting any benefits for the small businesses it aimed to help.
Colorado state Sens. Iman Jodeh and William Lindstedt discuss SB 134, their bill to limit some credit-care swipe fees, in the Senate.
“Ultimately, the bill presents too much legal risk to Colorado’s business environment and consumers, with limited upside for our small businesses, for me to be comfortable signing,” he wrote.
In the case of HB 1210, a business-opposed bill that would ban the use of surveillance data in setting individualized prices or wages, Polis agreed with critics that the biggest risk would be to consumers’ pocketbooks. The bill, he wrote, could ban many common types of discounts as well as loyalty programs that offered different levels of discounts to customers based on their purchasing history.
“We should be championing, not deterring, opportunities for Coloradans to save money,” the governor wrote in that veto letter.
When technology regulations could hurt consumers
And on HB 1286, which sought to require that licensed commercial truck drivers be present in the cabs of commercial vehicles with automated driving systems, Polis said the risk was to Colorado companies’ abilities to innovate in this sector, particularly as the state looks for ways to reduce vehicle crashes. Bipartisan proponents painted it as a public-safety safeguard and as a way to protect truck drivers’ jobs, but Polis, who vetoed an almost identical bill last year, criticized them once again for potentially stunting progress by looking to make Colorado the first state with such a rule.
Colorado state Sens. Chris Kolker and Larry Liston discuss HB 1286, their bill to regulated commercial trucks with automated driving systems, on the Senate floor.
Sometimes the governor, whose history is as a tech-enabled industry disruptor who launched and sold two Internet retail companies at great profits some 25 years ago, didn’t get a chance to decide which tech risks were too great. A House committee killed Senate Bill 90, which would have exempted infrastructure such as power grids and financial networks from a 2024 law that allows electronics-system owners the right to repair their devices without having to go through manufacturers, when computer-repair-industry officials warned it was just a way to grant repair monopolies to large companies.
And Democrats on the House State, Civic, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee killed an effort, House Concurrent Resolution 1002, to ask voters to require age-verification tools on pornographic websites. Critics said the proposed definitions of pornography were too broad and that the subject did not belong in the already overcrowded state constitution.
AI guardrails found success
The one area where Polis, then, seemed especially keen to allow more guardrails was around artificial intelligence. That came despite the governor pushing and signing Senate Bill 189, which loosened some general regulations around AI developers and deployers after everyone from tech giants to school districts told him the yet-to-be implemented rules set forth in a precedent-setting 2024 law were so cumbersome as to limit use of the technology in Colorado.
Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, sponsor of Senate Bill 189, listens as Anaya Robinson, public policy director for the ACLU of Colorado, testifies for the bill in committee.
HB 1195 limits the use of AI in psychotherapy to administrative functions like note-taking and scheduling and prohibits providers from using AI solely to provide therapy to patients. Meanwhile, HB 1139 requires human review of any proposed AI-driven denial of health-care benefits, and it prohibits insurers from reimbursing psychotherapy services conducted directly by artificial intelligence.
HB 1263 puts the first general rules around increasingly popular chatbots, requiring developers them to inform users they are AI, implement response protocols if users indicate suicidal ideation and make every effort to protect kids from sexual exploitation. But this bill only passed after parental safety groups like Blue Rising opposed it, saying that it didn’t do enough to protect kids who had been groomed and pushed into suicide by chatbots and that it gave Big Tech legal cover for doing minimal work.
If all of this didn’t amount to a neat and tidy way of determining what Polis would sign and veto, it did produce a framework showing that the higher the risk that a bill presented for legal action against the state or harm against consumers, the less likely it was to become law. And it’s likely that everyone from tech leaders to regulation-weary legislators could point to that framework next year and impact the debates that are sure to come again regarding the omnipresence of evolving technology in Coloradans’ lives.