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As the AI industry explodes in the United States, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in investments from tech companies, Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders are calling on Congress to protect Black Americans and marginalized groups from bias.
“We need to be able to trust that when as we, as Black Americans, go to apply for a bank loan, secure employment or even enter our own homes, we will not be denied on the basis of algorithmic bias,” said U.S. Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, on Tuesday as a group of Democrats re-introduced the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act.
“Americans have the same civil liberties online as they do wherever else they live their lives, and when these liberties are not just infringed upon, but ignored, insulted and abused to the degree that we have seen in AI…any inaction from this point forward is totally unacceptable.”
Clarke, joined by Reps. Summer Lee, D-Pa., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and U.S. Senator Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-sponsored the legislation.
The bill, first introduced by Markey in 2024, would “establish protections for individual rights with respect to computational algorithms, and for other purposes.”
Senator Markey explained on Tuesday that AI tools are “biased against marginalized communities.”
“I call this the AI garbage problem. Garbage-biased data breeds garbage-biased results, or more succinctly, garbage in, garbage out,” said Markey.
The progressive senator cited several studies between 2019 and 2025 showing racial bias in AI, including biased mortgage approval algorithms that led to lenders being 80% more likely to reject Black applicants than white applicants. Other studies found that AI models missed liver disease diagnoses in women, and AI resume screening tools “almost never” selected Black men based on their names.
Congresswoman Lee described the issue of AI bias with an example involving a hypothetical single mom.
“Think about our picture…She’s applying for housing. She has the steady work, she’s done everything that she was told to do, and she still gets denied…not by a landlord, right, who she can’t talk to. It’s not by a person who can explain why she was denied. She got denied by an algorithm,” said Lee. “Too often, the burden falls on the Black communities, Brown communities, immigrants, poor, working-class people who are already dealing with their share of burden.”
The Democrats were joined by civil rights attorneys, Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Hewitt decried the lack of oversight or even “recognition” of the “abuses” associated with biased AI tools.
“These algorithmic technologies are built using data that reflects generations of discrimination and redlining. They often replicate and reinforce generations of racial discrimination because the teams that develop these tools don’t reflect our communities,” he said. “There are so many blind spots and biased assumptions baked into the tools, and because inadequate testing doesn’t actually address the harms that are clear and obvious, our lives and our experiences get reduced to laboratory conditions, not real-world problems.”
Wiley emphasized the AI Civil Rights Act being about civil rights, which she acknowledged are under attack under the Trump administration.
“We are in an administration that is refusing to acknowledge this fact: it protects every single one of us,” she said.
Wiley said the legislation is “about whether now, today, we are going to chart a course for a civil rights-rich future,” adding, “Because artificial intelligence is a paradigm shift.”
