The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a US nonprofit civil-liberties organization founded in 1920, operating through litigation and advocacy on constitutional and statutory rights. It describes itself as the country's largest public-interest law firm, with a 50-state network of staffed, autonomous affiliate offices and 54 local offices (Source: aclu.org). On AI policy it acts as a US civil-society litigation counterpart on AI civil-rights questions, alongside Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose focus is on technology and rights, and Access Now, whose focus is international digital rights. Its AI work spans surveillance, hiring discrimination, content moderation, government procurement, free-speech questions raised by AI developers and agents, and state-level legislation, and connects to the substantive policy area covered in AI and Civil Liberties.
Overview
The ACLU pursues civil-liberties objectives through both litigation and legislative advocacy, and its AI work occupies both modes. Court cases proceed under existing law, including Title VII, the Fourth Amendment, and state biometric-privacy statutes, while advocacy targets newer state AI statutes. The organization at times appears on opposing sides of AI free-speech questions, both defending AI-generated speech and challenging compelled-disclosure laws that affect AI users.
Its AI work is carried by several national programs. The Racial Justice Program maintains a program on accountability in artificial intelligence that challenges AI's capacity to preserve and exacerbate systemic racism and other inequities, with particular focus on employment, housing, and credit decisions; the program's framing is that algorithmic bias built into systems that do not account for existing discrimination produces predictive decisions that discriminate in ways that are difficult to see (Source: aclu.org). The Speech, Privacy & Technology Project and the National Security Project supply the organization's spokespeople on AI agents and AI-enabled government surveillance respectively (see below).
Activities
Surveillance and face recognition
On AI-driven surveillance, the ACLU litigates against AI face-recognition deployment by law enforcement, advocates for state-level moratoria, and brings lawsuits over predictive-policing tools and biometric-data collection. Its 2022 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act case against Clearview AI ended with a consent decree limiting the company's US commercial sales (AI and Surveillance).
On June 10, 2026, the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida filed a wrongful-arrest suit on behalf of Robert Dillon, a Florida man arrested after police relied on an incorrect facial-recognition match; the organization has also pursued administrative complaints against Maryland police departments over the wrongful arrest of a woman based on an erroneous facial-recognition search result (Source: aclu.org). Reporting on the Dillon suit states that he was arrested at his home, roughly 300 miles from the crime scene, and that sources differed on whether the arrest occurred in 2023 or 2024 (Source: theguardian.com; statescoop.com).
The ACLU has also sued over what it describes as a pattern of suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests and racial profiling of Minnesotans by ICE and CBP, including through the use of facial recognition (Hussen v. Noem) (Source: techpolicy.press). See ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (AI Deployer).
License-plate readers and Flock Safety
The organization launched a campaign in June 2026 coordinating affiliate litigation and legislative work against automatic license-plate readers. When Flock Safety announced changes in August 2026 (a reduction of standard data retention from 30 days to one week, local control over what offences other customers may search for, mandatory search reasons, and a wider rollout of an audit-assistance tool), the ACLU argued that most "stand little chance of making a positive difference for civil liberties." Its stated concerns were that the retention change turns on the scope of an "Evidence Mode" exception, that the search-purpose requirement had been circumvented before, and that the audit tool had not been independently evaluated; senior policy counsel Chad Marlow argued that Flock's venture funding "has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits" (Source: aclu.org). A separate ACLU analysis concluded that the changes appeared "more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create," while calling the shorter retention period a potential "step in the right direction" (Source: theverge.com).
Government AI and national security
On March 16, 2026 the ACLU and the Center for Democracy & Technology filed an amicus brief in the D.C. Circuit proceeding parallel to Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, framing the case in civil-liberties rather than commercial terms. Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said that "AI-powered surveillance poses immense dangers to our democracy," that Anthropic's advocacy "is laudable and protected by the First Amendment — not something the Pentagon should be punishing," and that "our privacy laws are lagging decades behind the government's ability to capture and exploit our data using AI tools." The brief tied the case to the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (Source: aclu.org). Samir Jain, Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey were on the brief; the D.C. Circuit denied Anthropic's petitions on September 25, 2026, holding that Anthropic's advocacy was protected by the First Amendment but that the Department excluded it for refusing a contract term rather than for that advocacy (Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War — D.C. Circuit Opinion, Nos. 26-1049 and 26-1162 (September 25, 2026)).
On government AI procurement, the organization advocates for procurement transparency, in contrast to the opaque-procurement-criteria problem described in Procurement-Driven AI Governance. With the Center for Democracy & Technology it has argued for stronger public transparency on waivers granted under OMB's federal AI-use memorandum (OMB Memorandum M-24-10).
Hiring, content moderation and AI agents
On AI hiring discrimination, it pursues disparate-impact litigation against AI hiring systems. The principal US test case on AI hiring tools, Mobley v. Workday, Inc., drew an amicus brief from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at the motion-to-dismiss stage (Source: clearinghouse.net). On AI content moderation, the ACLU litigates over platform AI content-moderation decisions affecting protected speech, an area that intersects with the free-speech dimension of AI and Civil Liberties.
The ACLU, the ACLU of Northern California and the Knight First Amendment Institute filed as amici at the merits stage of Amazon v. Perplexity in the Ninth Circuit, a case over Amazon's attempt to bar Perplexity's Comet AI shopping agent from its marketplace under unauthorized-access theories (Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444 (9th Cir. Aug. 4, 2026) — Opinion). Lauren Yu, a fellow with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project and one of the counsel listed for the ACLU amici, said on August 1, 2026 that US liability for rogue AI agents remains unsettled because too few relevant cases have been decided: "Just because you're using an AI agent or AI model, that shouldn't somehow absolve you of any liability, but it's going to depend a lot on the facts" (Source: wired.com). See AI Liability.
Legislation
On state-level AI legislation, the ACLU advocates around the California AI Act, the Colorado AI Act, and other state AI-bias and transparency requirements. It joined the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association and TechNet in opposing the final version of Illinois's Children's Social Media Safety Act (HB 5511), signed July 31, 2026; the available reporting does not state the grounds each organization gave (Source: capitolnewsillinois.com).
At the federal level, the ACLU backs the bipartisan JAWBONE Act alongside FIRE, the Knight First Amendment Institute and Americans for Tax Reform (Source: arstechnica.com). During passage of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, the EFF and ACLU argued that the takedown duty's speed and low notice threshold risked over-removal of satire, parody and protected speech, and civil-liberties groups including the ACLU have flagged the privacy costs of the age-verification methods on which bills such as the GUARD Act depend.
Affiliations
The ACLU was among the nonprofit and civil-society partners that joined the Partnership on AI after its 2016 founding as an industry-led consortium.
Relationships
- related: AI and Civil Liberties (the substantive policy area).
- related: Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) (civil-society peers).
- litigates: Amazon v. Perplexity AI (amicus), Anthropic v. United States (Pentagon ban challenge) (amicus in the parallel D.C. Circuit proceeding).
- related: Mobley v. Workday, Inc., xAI LLC v. Weiser (challenging the Colorado AI Act) — AI civil-rights cases in the organization's policy areas.
- related: Flock Safety, ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (AI Deployer), Illinois House Bill 5511 — Children's Social Media Safety Act, JAWBONE Act.
- related: AI Bias and Discrimination, AI and Privacy, AI and Surveillance, Surveillance Technology, AI Liability.