President Donald Trump gave artificial intelligence a promotion at the United Nations this week. He said the government would begin calling it “superintelligence” and made clear he does not want fears about the technology to stifle its growth.
The argument is familiar by now. America is in a race. Move faster. Build more. Stay ahead.
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Many Americans are looking in the other direction. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found 55% supported slowing AI development, while 73% said safe and responsible development mattered more than global competitiveness.
From Colorado, the argument looks less like a choice between an accelerator and a brake.
We have spent the past two years finding out what happens when artificial intelligence leaves the speeches, laboratories and product demonstrations and enters ordinary institutions.
It becomes a hiring question. A lending question. A question about children talking to chatbots. Then, almost suddenly, it becomes an electricity question, a water question and a question about what gets built down the street.
That is why Colorado has become an interesting place in the national AI debate.
The state has already gone through one ambitious attempt to govern automated decisions, watched that approach collide with practical and legal objections and replaced much of it this year with a narrower law. The new framework passed with large majorities in both chambers, and the attorney general is now writing the rules that will put it into practice.
There is a temptation to judge that history as a simple success or failure.
I think it tells us something more useful.
Colorado arrived at the complications early.
Consider what happened in Colorado Springs this month.
A proposed artificial intelligence data center near Garden of the Gods Road brought residents, developers and city officials into an hourslong debate. The proposed facility could use as much as 50 megawatts of electricity. Residents raised questions about noise, water and power. The City Council eventually postponed its decision until next year.
There was no debate about whether machines will someday become smarter than people.
The questions were much more immediate.
How much power will this building use? What will the community get in return? What happens to nearby residents? What infrastructure will be required?
This is what the AI race begins to look like when it reaches a real place.
For years, we have spoken about artificial intelligence as if it were almost weightless. A new model appears on a screen. A chatbot answers a question. Software gets smarter.
The physical system underneath it is harder to ignore now.
Large-scale computing needs electricity. Electricity needs generation and transmission. Servers produce heat. Buildings need cooling. New facilities occupy land and become customers of utilities whose infrastructure was built long before the current AI boom.
Colorado lawmakers confronted some of those questions this year. One proposal sought to encourage large data center investment and create tax incentives. Another focused more heavily on electricity, water and the costs large customers can impose on the utility system. Neither proposal became law.
That disagreement is more revealing than it first appears.
At the federal level, the Trump administration wants faster AI development and infrastructure construction. Its national policy framework also says residential customers should not see their electricity bills increase because of new AI data centers. The same framework seeks a more uniform national approach to AI regulation while preserving important state powers over areas such as consumer protection, children and the placement of AI infrastructure.
Those goals sound compatible when written on paper.
Making them coexist in an actual community is harder.
Build quickly but do not shift costs to households.
Create a national market but preserve local authority over where the infrastructure goes.
Encourage innovation but protect children and consumers when the technology causes harm.
Those tensions will not be settled by deciding whether someone is “pro-AI” or “anti-AI.”
Colorado has already learned that lesson with regulation. Now we are learning it with infrastructure.
This is why the state matters to the larger national conversation.
Colorado does not have to become the national model for artificial intelligence. It does not have to prove that every law passed here was wise. Some ideas will survive contact with reality. Others will need to be changed.
That process itself produces something Washington needs: evidence.
We can see what happens when an AI protection that sounds straightforward has to be implemented by an employer. We can see what happens when lawmakers try to protect children without requiring every website to know everything about them. We can see what happens when a national technology boom arrives before communities have decided how much power, water and land they are prepared to devote to it.
The country is searching for one grand answer to artificial intelligence.
Colorado’s experience suggests there may not be one.
The choices will be made in different places by institutions solving different problems: Congress thinking about national competition, a state legislature writing consumer law, a utility planning its grid, an employer deciding whether to trust a piece of software, a city council deciding what can be built beside a neighborhood.
Calling the technology “superintelligence” does not make those choices disappear.
If anything, the more capable the technology becomes, the more ordinary its politics will become.
The machines may be new. The arguments over power, responsibility, cost and who gets a say are not.
Colorado got to those arguments early.
That may turn out to be our most useful contribution to the national AI debate.
Aashis Luitel, of Aurora, works in cybersecurity, public-sector security and AI governance and teaches artificial intelligence at the graduate level. He previously worked on Microsoft Security Copilot and served on active duty in the U.S. Navy. The views expressed are his own.