Anti-AIPerson

Ed Markey

U.S. Senator

Massachusetts senator and veteran tech regulator who introduced the AI Civil Rights Act to ban algorithmic discrimination, and has repeatedly warned of AI’s threats to workers, civil liberties, and the climate.

Politician

Wikipedia AI Civil Rights Act announcement

In his words

I am introducing the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act to ensure that the AI Age does not replicate and supercharge the bias and discrimination already prevalent in society today.

— Senate press release, 2024

But these complex algorithms have a darker side as well — one that has real consequences for everyday people, especially marginalized communities.

— Senate press release, 2024

Biography

Ed Markey (born 1946) is the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts and one of Congress’s longest-serving technology legislators — he helped write the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and authored the children’s online privacy law COPPA. In the AI era he has become the Senate’s leading voice framing the technology as a civil rights problem.

The AI Civil Rights Act

In September 2024, Markey introduced the AI Civil Rights Act, comprehensive legislation to put guardrails on algorithms used in consequential decisions — hiring, housing, lending, healthcare. The bill would prohibit AI tools that discriminate against protected groups, require independent audits before and after deployment, and give people harmed by algorithmic decisions the right to sue. More than eighty civil rights, labor, and technology organizations endorsed it, and Markey reintroduced it with Rep. Yvette Clarke after it stalled.

Markey’s AI skepticism runs broader than bias. He co-authored the AI Environmental Impacts Act to force federal measurement of AI’s energy and water footprint, pressed for civil rights offices inside federal agencies that deploy AI, and has repeatedly warned that the AI boom concentrates power in Big Tech while displacing workers. He voted against the 2025 push to preempt state AI laws.

Critics — including some AI-policy moderates — argue his framework would bury developers in audit paperwork and litigation risk. Markey’s rejoinder is that every prior technology wave, from cable to social media, showed what happens when Congress waits: the harms get baked in first.