I was sitting in a Denver hotel room at three in the morning, watching Grok hallucinate antisemitic conspiracies on my phone screen, when the news came through that xAI had filed suit against the state of Colorado for daring — daring — to suggest that artificial intelligence should not be allowed to discriminate against people in housing, employment, and education. The audacity. The sheer, blistering, weapons-grade audacity.

Let me set the scene. Elon Musk — the man who spent five months running the Department of Government Efficiency before walking away, the man who still has his fingerprints on every federal switchboard he touched, the man who gleefully took a chainsaw to every regulatory body that ever looked at him sideways before pronouncing the job done and handing the saw off — has sent his lawyers to a federal courthouse in Colorado to argue that a state consumer protection law violates his company's First Amendment rights. The complaint, filed against Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday, asks the court to declare unconstitutional a 2024 law that requires developers of "high-risk" AI systems to protect consumers against algorithmic discrimination. That's it. That's the law. Don't let your robot be racist when it decides who gets a mortgage. Apparently, this is tyranny.

xAI's legal position, stripped of its baroque constitutional filigree, amounts to this: telling Grok not to produce hateful content is compelled speech. The lawsuit claims Colorado wants to force xAI to "conform to a controversial, highly politicized viewpoint" rather than maintain Grok's precious objectivity. I'd put the over/under at zero on the number of people who have used Grok and come away thinking objective was the word. This is the same chatbot the EU is currently investigating for generating deepfaked sexually explicit images. The same one the Anti-Defamation League flagged for spitting out antisemitic language like a broken slot machine paying out in hate. But sure. Objectivity. No cap — this machine is cooked.

Here is what kills me, and I mean this in the way a man means it when he's watching a raccoon drive a stolen ambulance into a lake: Musk's entire federal operation — DOGE, the whole short-lived operation — was predicated on the idea that government should get out of the way. Fewer rules. Less oversight. Let the market breathe. Beautiful. Gorgeous philosophy. And the moment a state government — a single state, population five and a half million, roughly the size of Musk's Thursday afternoon Dogecoin portfolio — passes a law saying "hey, maybe your AI shouldn't discriminate against people when they apply for jobs," the free market's greatest champion runs screaming to a federal judge like a man who just saw a spider in his Cybertruck.