Europe Is Regulating AI Hiring; Why Isn’t The United States?
In 2018, Amazon unveiled a groundbreaking AI hiring tool. But what began as a promise to revolutionize how the company identified talent devolved into an algorithm that “did not like women.” The model, trained on a decade of old resumes mostly from men, penalized references to women’s organizations and graduates of women’s colleges. Although Amazon abandoned the tool, the incident revealed a more fundamental problem: In automating hiring, employers are also automating bias. Today, AI plays a major role in hiring, yet the U.S. has failed to establish coherent guardrails even as jurisdictions like the European Union have acted decisively.