Illinois amends Human Rights Act to restrict discriminatory AI in employment

Governor J.B. Pritzker signed House Bill 3773, amending the Illinois Human Rights Act to bar employers from using artificial intelligence in ways that produce discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, sex, disability or age. The law defines AI broadly, covering “machine-based” systems that infer outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions, and explicitly includes generative AI.

The amendment covers AI use across the employment lifecycle — recruitment, hiring, promotion, discipline, discharge and the terms and conditions of employment — and separately prohibits using an applicant’s zip code as a proxy for a protected class, closing a route by which geographic data can encode race or national origin even when a system never uses those categories directly. Employers must notify employees and applicants when AI is being used for a covered purpose, though the statute leaves the format and detail of that notice to be worked out in rulemaking by the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which was given enforcement authority under the Act’s existing remedies.

Illinois followed Colorado, which had passed a broader AI Act months earlier, making it the second state to legislate specifically against discriminatory employment AI — part of a wider pattern of state-level action filling the gap left by the absence of federal AI legislation. The law does not take effect until 1 January 2026, giving employers roughly seventeen months to review the automated screening and scoring tools already in wide use in US hiring.