Image generated using AI tools
There is a slab of marble set into a wall on the Place Vendôme in Paris, at street level, where anyone walking past can put a hand on it. It is a little over three feet long, with a groove cut horizontally into the stone and a raised flange at each end. Between those two flanges is one metre.
In 1796 the French government installed sixteen of these around the city and called them mètres étalons, standard metres. The revolution had abolished a measuring system in which the same word meant one length in Lyon and a different length in Marseille, and in which the length a merchant used was frequently the length that suited the merchant. The new unit had to be taught to people who had never heard of it and had no reason to trust it. So the state cut it into stone and put it in the walls, at the height of a person’s hands, in the streets where people actually bought and sold. A draper could bring his cloth to the wall.
Two of the sixteen survive. The one on the Place Vendôme is still there, and it is still correct.
That is a stranger sentence than it looks, because the official definition of the metre has been replaced four times since that marble was cut. In 1799 it became the length of a platinum bar deposited in the Archives. In 1889 it became a different bar, of platinum and iridium, held near Paris and copied out to the nations. In 1960 it stopped being an object at all and became a number of wavelengths of light emitted by krypton-86. In 1983 it became the distance light travels in a vacuum in one part of 299,792,458 of a second.
Four definitions. Four moments when the authoritative answer to “what is a metre” was replaced by a different authoritative answer. And through all four, the draper on the Place Vendôme was measuring his cloth against a groove in a wall, and getting the right answer every time, because the cloth was the length the cloth was. The definition kept moving. The thing being measured never did.
On the fourteenth of May this year, the Governor of Colorado signed a bill repealing the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act.
The Act had been signed two years earlier, in May of 2024, and it was the first comprehensive state AI law in the United States. It was supposed to take effect on the first of February 2026. That date was pushed back. Then, before the new date arrived, the legislature repealed the whole thing and replaced it with a narrower law that takes effect on the first of January 2027, which is to say that the most consequential AI statute in the country was in force for exactly zero days.
Look at what was removed. The duty of care is gone. The requirement to run impact assessments on high-risk systems is gone. The requirement to operate a risk management program is gone. The whole framework built around algorithmic discrimination has been replaced by a framework built around disclosure, in which the obligation is largely to tell people that an automated system was involved in a decision about them.
Somewhere in Denver there is a company that spent eighteen months and a real budget building an impact assessment process for a statute that never came into force, and has now been told that the requirement it was built for does not exist.
Let’s be careful about the easy reading here, which is that this company wasted its money and that the sensible ones were those who waited. I do not think that is what happened, and the reason has nothing to do with law.
Consider what an impact assessment was for. Under the repealed Act, a company deploying a system that helped decide who got hired, or who got a loan, or who got into a program, had to examine whether that system treated people differently in ways it could not justify. Not whether it filed the right form. Whether the thing it had built did what it believed it did, to the people it did it to.
That question did not get repealed. It cannot get repealed. It is a fact about the system, sitting in the company’s own infrastructure, doing whatever it does every day to whoever it does it to, entirely indifferent to the Colorado General Assembly’s calendar.
The statute was never the ruler. The statute was one government’s attempt, at one moment, to say which measurements it would require you to take. The measurement itself, whether your hiring model rejects applicants from certain neighborhoods at a rate you cannot explain, is the groove in the wall. It was true before the Act, it was true during the Act, and it is true now that the Act is gone.
I am not arguing that the repeal does not matter. It matters a great deal, and any company operating in Colorado has to understand what it now owes and when. What I am arguing is narrower and, I think, more uncomfortable. If a company built its entire understanding of its own AI systems out of a statute, then when the statute was repealed, the company lost its understanding along with its obligation. It did not just stop having to file. It stopped knowing.
And there is a version of this that is worse than wasted money. A company that ran those assessments and found nothing troubling has learned something durable and can say so to a customer, a court, or a board, in 2027 and in 2030. A company that ran them, found something troubling, and has now quietly stopped looking because nobody is requiring it to look, has converted a finding into a silence.
The second company will look identical to the first from the outside. Both will have a folder of documents from 2025 and no documents from 2026. Only one of them knows why.
Nine other states have AI legislation at some stage. The European framework has its own timetable and its own carve-outs. A federal executive order landed in December and changed the political weather. Somewhere in the next three years, some of these will be delayed, some narrowed, some struck down, and at least one will be replaced by something nobody has drafted yet.
Every one of those events will move the statute. Not one of them will move the system.
So here is what I keep turning over. In May, when Colorado repealed the Act, a great many companies recalibrated. Some of them canceled the assessment program, some of them shelved the documentation, some of them moved the person who had been running it onto something else.
If you were one of them, or if you work for one of them, there is a question worth sitting with, and it is not a question about Colorado.
When the requirement went away, did you find out that your systems had actually got better?
Or did you only find out that you no longer had to say?
Until next week
Idea, thinking and editing: Suneeta Modekurty
Drafting: AI