MM1 Comment from Maria Webb Consulting, LLC

I am submitting this comment in strong opposition to the FTC’s proposed policy statement on AI accuracy, Matter No. P264200 / Docket FTC-2026-0859. This proposed statement does not protect consumers from AI harm. It protects AI companies from accountability for discriminatory and structurally harmful outputs by reframing equity-centered correction and anti-discrimination safeguards as potential consumer deception. AI systems are not neutral. They are trained on datasets shaped by historical inequality, colonial archives, racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy, ableist assumptions, language dominance, and institutional exclusion. When those systems are used in consequential decisions, the harms are real. They affect jobs, housing, credit, healthcare, education, public benefits, legal systems, immigration, and personal safety. The FTC’s own prior interagency position recognized that automated systems can perpetuate unlawful bias, automate unlawful discrimination, and produce harmful outcomes. The FTC must not now adopt a policy that treats correction of those harms as suspicious steering. The proposed policy statement’s treatment of Colorado’s AI accountability law is dangerous. State laws that require companies to address algorithmic discrimination are not ideological coercion. They are consumer protection. They are civil-rights protection. They are public accountability. Section 5 of the FTC Act must not be used to preempt state-level AI accountability and anti-discrimination protections. State protections against algorithmic discrimination do not conflict with consumer protection. They are a necessary form of consumer protection. The proposed statement does not center the communities most harmed by uncorrected AI bias, including people of the global majority, disabled people, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, workers, tenants, patients, students, and people targeted by surveillance and criminal legal systems. I urge the Commission to withdraw this proposed policy statement. I urge the Commission to commission independent research on the documented harms of algorithmic discrimination. I urge the Commission to develop any future AI accuracy guidance through a process that centers the communities most harmed by AI systems, not the companies most protected by them. Signed, Maria Webb, Lexington, MI, USA, Author, Real Estate Broker and Holistic Coach.