Colorado SB 21-169
A 2021 Colorado law barring insurers from using external data or models that unfairly discriminate, implemented by the Division of Insurance line by line.
Colorado Senate Bill 21-169, enacted in 2021, directed the state’s insurance commissioner to write rules under which insurers must demonstrate that they have tested their predictive models and external consumer data for unfair discrimination. The statutory bar in subsection (1)(a) reaches insurance practices outright, but the limb aimed at models and external data operates “pursuant to rules adopted by the commissioner,” and subsection (6) puts title insurance, surety bonds, and most commercial policies outside the section altogether.
Rulemaking started with life insurance underwriting, where accelerated underwriting had replaced blood tests and medical records. The rule in force is Regulation 10-1-1 (3 CCR 702-10), a governance and risk management framework requirement that was amended in October 2025 so that it now covers three lines: individually issued life, private passenger auto, and health benefit plans. What that framework has to be designed to detect is narrower than the statute’s list of protected classes: the regulation says unfair discrimination with respect to race. A separate quantitative testing regulation remains in draft, and since June 2024 there have been two competing drafts on the table, one from the Division and one from the American Council of Life Insurers.
SB 21-169 is the foundation of Colorado’s insurance AI regulation. It showed that state insurance departments could impose model-specific testing obligations without waiting for a national standard. The later Colorado AI Act, SB 24-205, and its successor SB 26-189 applied to a broader range of AI decision-making, and both defer back to this statute for the practice of insurance. The deference narrowed on the way through. SB 24-205 also covered fraternal benefit societies and the developers of AI systems used by insurers; SB 26-189 covers an insurer and its affiliated entities, and nobody else. See our analysis of Colorado SB 26-189, and our page on Colorado’s AI insurance law for Regulation 10-1-1 read against the NAIC model bulletin.