Metro Denver Profs and Pints

Profs and Pints Denver presents: “Governing AI,” on debates in Colorado and other states over how to prevent artificial intelligence from being an instrument of harm, with Stefani Langehennig, assistant professor of the practice at the University of Denver, lead director of its Center for Analytics and Innovation with Data, and scholar focused on the intersection of data science, public policy, and law.

[Doors open at 5 pm and the talk begins at 6:30. Advance tickets $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/denver-governing-ai ]

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a technology news story. It’s also becoming a governance story, with the nation’s state lawmakers scrambling to determine who gets to decide how AI is used, what AI safeguards matter, and the public’s proper role in shaping the rules.

Get brought up to speed on state debates over AI with Stefani Langehennig, leader of the U.S. State AI Policy Tracker, a public-facing project that collects and analyzes state AI legislation and studies how AI and state governments affect each other.

Using Colorado as a starting point, she’ll describe how state legislatures are grappling with AI’s role in areas where automated systems can shape people’s lives, focusing especially on hiring, housing, and policing.

Among the specific points of contention she will discuss is whether employers should be required to notify workers when AI screens or ranks them, and who bears liability when an algorithm rejects a qualified candidate based on a proxy for race or some other protected characteristic. She’ll use the contrasting approaches of Colorado, Illinois, and New York City—which each have enacted AI hiring protections through very different legal mechanisms—to illustrate how states are running different experiments on the same problem.

She’ll also touch on debates over automated underwriting systems that may perpetuate housing discrimination. Then she’ll turn to policing, where she’ll examine whether AI trained on historical arrest data can be racially neutral, as well as what lessons to draw from recent wrongful arrests due to misidentification by facial recognition systems.

We’ll look at how Colorado has been at the center of the AI regulation debate. In 2024, Gov. Jared Polis signed what was then one of the most ambitious AI consumer protection laws in the country, then publicly urged the legislature to revisit it. What followed was a failed special session, a federal lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s xAI with the Justice Department intervening on the company’s side, and, ultimately, a recent replacement law taking a narrower approach. It’s a case study in how AI policy actually gets made.

Dr. Langehennig will discuss similar debates taking place in California, Illinois, and Texas, and she’ll consider how all such legislative efforts could be impacted by President Trump's December 2025 executive order calling for the Justice Department to challenge state AI laws deemed as burdensome to innovation.

You’ll gain an appreciation of how much state governments have become important laboratories for AI governance. You’ll also leave with a resource you can use to track legislation in your own state and a clearer sense of how to make your voice heard as these rules take shape. (Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID.)

Image by Canva.