Colorado SB 21-169
A 2021 Colorado law requiring insurers to prove that predictive models and external data used in life insurance do not unfairly discriminate.
Colorado Senate Bill 21-169, enacted in 2021, was the first state law in the U.S. to require insurers to test predictive models and external consumer data for unfair discrimination. It applies primarily to life insurance, where accelerated underwriting and algorithmic models had increasingly replaced traditional blood tests and medical records.
The law directed the Colorado Division of Insurance to adopt rules requiring life insurers to test their data, models, and algorithms for unfair discrimination against protected classes. The result was the quantitative testing rule, 3 CCR 702-10, which set out how insurers must document and report those tests.
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, built on that momentum but applied to a broader range of AI decision-making. See our analysis of Colorado SB 26-189.