Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has joined with civil society partners to oppose California’s SB 690, which would amend the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) to retroactively remove private rights of action against companies using pen registries to track individuals.
The Privacy Paradox: How Government Data Has Become Less Private and Less Useful
Providing ready access to information collected and maintained by the government promotes accountability, innovation, and research, making transparency a core responsibility of serving as a steward of the public’s data. Public agencies must also safeguard sensitive information when making data publicly available.
The 2026 legislative session has shown a continued but shifted focus on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), with most bills — both introduced and passed — grappling with the rise and use of chatbots in a variety of contexts.
Will the Open Internet Survive the War on Bots? Mapping the Debate Over “AI Preferences”
When should individuals and organizations be able to use automated tools or “bots” to collect data from or interact with openly published websites — whether we call it “scraping”, “crawling,” or simply automated data collection?
Defending State Data: Lessons from California v. USDA
As the federal government increasingly seeks access to state administrative data, policymakers should consider not only legal authority and privacy implications, but also the practical effects on public confidence, program effectiveness, and states’ ability to fulfill their obligations to residents.
Changing Course to Get It Right: The Advisory Committee Reviews Its AI Evidence Rule
CDT is keeping a close eye on Proposed Federal Rule of Evidence 707, which would govern when AI-generated information can be admitted as evidence in federal court — and many state courts where the federal rules are routinely adopted — without a human expert to explain it.
Can Generative Intermediaries Deliver When It Comes to Information Quality?
LLM-powered systems are mediating what people know and believe, the decisions they make, their ability to participate in democracy, and their ability to access trustworthy information on the issues that matter most to them.
CDT and Partners Urge Passage of the California Location Privacy Act of 2025 (AB 322)
Location data is particularly sensitive, and when collected across time it can reveal a broad range of intrusive insights such as medical conditions, sexual orientation, political activities, and religious beliefs.
Absent meaningful guardrails, ALPRs — which can effortlessly reconstruct where a person lives, works, shops, socializes, seeks medical care, and more — can be weaponized for pervasive surveillance and misconduct
