Colorado lawmakers wrapped up the legislative session Wednesday evening but not before calls for a special session rang out over an impasse on first-in-the-nation regulations for artificial intelligence — and amid resignation over likely funding cuts soon to come from the federal government.

The legislature passed nearly 500 bills in its 120 days of work, which ended with early evening adjournments for the House and Senate. They ranged from the relatively mundane to sweeping legal protections for marginalized Coloradans in the face of federal immigration crackdowns. A gray fiscal cloud hung over lawmakers and their lawmaking as they passed a budget that cut $1.2 billion from planned spending and grappled with how to craft policies that cost no money.

But the most dramatic fireworks were saved for a bill that died Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, killed a bill that would have updated AI regulations he helped push into law last year. Critics of the rules paint them as a near-existential threat to Colorado businesses. And those fears fueled a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to delay the law’s implementation by amending a separate bill late Tuesday.

The House had just finished debating a contentious transgender rights bill, and the attempted AI law delay that followed failed at literally the last minute — 11:59 p.m. — but with ripples that carried into the final day.

The new regulations, passed in 2024, are set to go into effect Feb. 1. They will require companies to notify Colorado residents when they interact with AI and to remove underlying bias from AI tools. They also require certain companies that use AI for “consequential” decisions to disclose the use and purpose of the technology to consumers, job applicants and others who interact with it.

But critics warn that the regulations, as written, stretch too broadly and will touch nearly every business in the state. Delaying them further would buy policymakers more time to fine-tune the rules and give businesses time to adjust to what may come from the negotiations — instead of adapting to rules that may be tossed out in the first month of the next legislative session next year.

“We need to have a delay so that we can get these regulations right,” Rep. William Lindstedt, a Broomfield Democrat, said when he ran the delay amendment Tuesday night, “so that people don’t lose their jobs. So that people who are working hard in our school districts aren’t adversely impacted by these regulations because we didn’t follow through on passing a bill.”

He added, “I don’t want to be back here later this summer having this discussion.” He proposed a delay until January 2027.

But Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat who authored the AI regulations with Rodriguez, won the fight Tuesday night.

Democratic leadership sought to limit debate — a tactic usually reserved for contentious social issues to fight Republican filibusters — to meet the midnight deadline for passage to ensure there was time for final adoption Wednesday.

Titone managed to run the clock out anyway.

Prospect of ‘an unprecedented regulation’

Critics had a year to work with her and Rodriguez on changes, Titone said. And there’s still nearly a year before the new rules go into effect. But other lawmakers, following a call Monday by Gov. Jared Polis and several other top Colorado Democrats “to take action now,” sought a blanket delay on the new rules.

“We offered them a solution to make it easier,” Titone said of those who criticized the state’s AI regulations, referring to her offer to delay the law’s effective date slightly, to next April. “And then that wasn’t sufficient. So they cut off their noses to spite their face.”

She added: “They were insistent on a super-long runway that serves nothing but to give them time to undermine the full intent” of the new regulations.

In the fallout of the delay’s failure, Bryan Leach, the CEO of Denver-based digital promotions network Ibotta, called Wednesday for a special session that would return lawmakers to the Capitol this year. Leach started Ibotta in a Denver basement in 2012; last year, it launched one of the largest initial public offerings of a tech company in state history.

The new rules would, in effect, impose “an unprecedented regulation of every entity that uses software in the state of Colorado,” Leach said.

Although the new law is framed as affecting AI, its definition is so broad that it encompasses many software algorithms, he said. Further, it puts the onus on companies that use covered software to ensure compliance, potentially dragging them into costly, time-consuming fights.

In short, he warned, the regulations could cause untold harm to Colorado’s business reputation.

Leach emphasized that he didn’t want a special session to repeal the 2024 law — only to address concerns acknowledged in a June 2024 letter signed by Rodriguez, Polis and Attorney General Phil Weiser.

Waiting until the next regular session, which starts in January, won’t work for businesses that need to start working toward compliance now, he said.