The Federal Trade Commission voted 2-0 on July 1 to open public comment on a proposed policy statement that reclassifies AI “ideological bias” as potentially deceptive conduct under Section 5 of the FTC Act, with Colorado’s recently revised Artificial Intelligence Act named as the target.

The document, docketed as FTC-2026-0859-0001, argues that consumers hold “a reasonable expectation that AI systems aim to give truthful and accurate outputs,” and that Colorado’s law “appears to coerce companies into altering the output of their AI models to comply with and advance the state’s ideological objectives.” That framing inverts a decade of civil-rights-adjacent AI regulation: bias mitigation, in the commission’s telling, becomes the deception.

The preemption theory is the load-bearing move. The statement concedes the FTC Act “does not expressly preempt state law,” then argues state law is “impliedly preempted to the extent it conflicts with a federal regulatory scheme.” Liability lands on developers, not on Denver. “Ultimately, it is the company’s responsibility to ensure compliance with Section 5,” the statement reads, with a safe harbor available for those making “truthful, non-misleading representations” about model aims.

The action traces to a December 2025 Trump executive order directing the agency to address state laws requiring alteration of “truthful outputs of AI models.” Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson cast the effort as designed to “advance President Donald Trump’s goal of expanding America’s global dominance in artificial intelligence.” Anthropic and OpenAI didn’t respond to Reuters; Google declined to comment.

Comments close July 31. Whatever the commission finalizes will operate inside a post-Humphrey’s Executor environment, the FTC newly stripped of independence by the Supreme Court’s at-will removal ruling. An agency historically prized for insulation is now issuing preemption doctrine directly aligned with a sitting president’s industrial policy. That’s the structural story, and it precedes the chatbots.

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