Proponent Ben Gellhouse says Initiative 266 would make a 'digital soul' inalienable property and bar unauthorized AI use

A committee hearing on March 19 in House Committee Room 109 reviewed Initiative 266, which would establish the "digital soul" as an inalienable personal property right for Colorado residents and create systems to record, audit and seek restitution for unauthorized data use, proponents and staff said. Proponent Ben Gellhouse described technical measures intended to prevent AI from generating images of a person without their consent.

The proposal, summarized by legislative council staff in a memorandum dated March 17, lists core elements including a master deed registry for residents to grant or revoke consent, audit-marker signatures to detect unauthorized ingestion and automatically trigger statutory damages, authorization for the attorney general to execute master settlements for historical extraction, and a routing system to distribute dividends or royalties to residents' sovereignty accounts. Haroja Jawah of legislative council staff read the memo for the record.

Why it matters: The initiative attempts to pair a rights declaration with concrete enforcement and revenue mechanisms — a combination that raised repeated legal and practical questions from staff, including whether the measure satisfies Colorado's single-subject rule and how retroactive remedies would comport with constitutional limits.

Proponent explanation and technical approach
Ben Gellhouse told staff the core intent was to treat a person's data as a "mathematical formula" that can be tokenized and encrypted so "you can't generate my image" without explicit authorization. He said the idea began as a privacy measure to prevent deepfakes but "evolved" into a wider package of protections and infrastructure proposals.

Staff questions and legal flags
Committee staff (Office of Legislative Legal Services) flagged at least a dozen substantive issues in their memorandum and asked the proponents to explain them for the record. Key staff concerns included:

- Single-subject compliance (Article V, §1.5 of the Colorado Constitution). Staff asked proponents to identify the initiative's single subject and to justify how the varied provisions fit within it. Proponent said the bill originally focused on personal property rights and later branched into complementary items.

- Retroactivity and enforcement via settlements. Staff queried how authorizing the attorney general to pursue master settlements for historical violations would avoid constitutional prohibitions on retrospective laws; proponent compared the approach to the tobacco master settlement model and said settlement mechanisms can address past harms without enacting retroactive penalties as a statute.

- Effective date and system deployment. Staff reminded proponents that an approved initiative's default effective date is the governor's proclamation; proponents acknowledged they would adjust drafting. Staff also asked what it means for statutory rights to be "self-executing" while technical registries and audit systems are phased in. The proponent said rights should exist immediately, with infrastructure built over time.

- Undefined entities and terms. The memorandum noted repeated references to entities (a state trust, a consumer-protection enterprise, and enforcement offices including an Office of Digital Oversight) and to technical terms such as "honeypot signatures" and "rope a dope" that appear in headings but not always in statutory text. Proponents said some terms were working labels and that they had modularized the package into companion measures and multiple draft sections.

- Spousal veto and family-law interaction. Staff asked how a spousal veto over digital-soul transactions would interact with Colorado marital property law and whether revocations would affect previously exercised vetoes. The proponent said the measure creates multiple categories of spousal privileges and consent-management mechanisms, and that revocation would alter future authorizations.

What the hearing did not do
The hearing did not include a public-comment period (the session is aimed at proponents and staff review), nor did it produce a committee vote. Staff offered to walk through technical comments in the memorandum; proponents said they had considered them and declined further immediate discussion.

Next steps
Legislative staff will likely transmit their comments and suggested drafting changes back to proponents; proponents indicated they planned to revise language on effective dates, definitions, and statutory cross-references.

Sources: Remarks by legislative council staff and proponents at the March 19, 2026 initiative review hearing in House Committee Room 109. All quoted or paraphrased statements are taken from the hearing record and attributed to those who spoke for the record.