Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act (TRAIGA), HB 149
Any person who conducts business in Texas, produces a product or service used by Texas residents, or develops or deploys an AI system in Texas. No employer-size threshold and no employment-specific trigger. Several of the heavier duties bind governmental entities only. Local AI ordinances are preempted.
- 01Refrain from developing or deploying an AI system with the intent to unlawfully discriminate against a protected class.
- 02Refrain from deploying AI intended to incite self-harm, harm to others, or criminal activity.
- 03That is substantially the whole of it for a private employer. Substantially complying with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework is an affirmative defence, not a duty.
- 01The same intent-based prohibitions apply symmetrically to developers. There is no documentation, model-card, impact-assessment, audit or disclosure-to-deployer obligation.
- 01No impact assessments, algorithmic audits or bias testing of any kind.
- 02No notice to applicants or employees that AI is in use.
- 03No registration, inventory or filing with the state for private employers.
- 04No general duty for a private business to disclose that a person is talking to an AI — that provision reaches governmental agencies, plus a health-care carve-in.
- 05Nothing is triggered by disparate impact. The statute says so expressly, and this is the single most misread thing about it.
- 06No private right of action.
Attorney General has exclusive enforcement, with mandatory written notice and a 60-day cure period. Civil penalties of $10,000–$12,000 for a curable violation, $80,000–$200,000 for an uncurable one, and $2,000–$40,000 per day for a continuing violation.
We include this row because of what it does not do. TRAIGA requires intent, and expressly forecloses disparate impact as a route to liability — so despite being the most-cited new AI statute of the year, it imposes almost nothing on a private employer using AI to hire. Any vendor selling TRAIGA compliance is selling you something you do not need. Your Title VII and Texas Commission on Human Rights Act exposure is entirely untouched by it.
“a disparate impact is not sufficient by itself to demonstrate an intent to discriminate”
Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 552.056(c)
Office of the Texas Attorney General, Consumer AI Rights and complaint mechanism.