As AI has gotten more and more capable, we have handed it more and more of our daily workload. Including hiring.

Which sounds amazing when you think about it!

AI agents taking over one of the hardest, most time-consuming tasks (recruiting & hiring), off your plate, done while you sleep… Say less!

But this year, excitement is turning into pessimism, and potential liability.
And poses a growing question:

‘Should we be letting AI make these types of decisions, at all?’

Now, Legislators have stopped shrugging it off with the passing of the EU AI Act, World’s First Comprehensive AI Law

The EU just put strict rules on AI hiring tools that make the call on their own.

The kind of tools that auto-reject a resume, or decide who moves forward, or screen someone out before a person ever looks.

And now… If you break those rules, the fines could run into millions of dollars.

And where Europe goes first on this stuff, the US usually follows.

Now, if your instinct is that: ‘This is a European problem’, your wrong!

Look in your own backyard for a second. Because it is already here, and it is further along than almost anyone realizes.

In 2016, US legislatures passed exactly one AI-related law.

In 2024, they passed 131.

The scary part is the lawsuits that follow.

There is a case working through the courts right now where a candidate sued not just the company, but the software vendor whose AI screened him out.

And the court allowed it to move forward as a potential class action covering people nationwide!

The "we just used the tool the vendor sold us" defense may not save you. If anything, it now drags the vendor into the fire right alongside you.

Here is what makes this different from a normal compliance headache.

The more you let AI make the actual decision, the more exposed you are, on every front at once.

🚩 One rule says you have to disclose when AI is used.
🚩 Another says a human has to be able to override it.
🚩 Another says you owe candidates a way to reach a person.
🚩 Another says you need documentation proving the tool was tested.

Every time AI makes a call with no human in the loop, you are potentially tripping several of those at once, silently, without ever deciding to.

And you often cannot see it happening.

An AI recruitment agent trained on your past hiring runs on its own logic, on every applicant, while you have no real visibility into what it is doing or why.

So what do you do with this. Not next year. This month.

You do not need a law degree and you do not need to panic. You need to know what is running inside your own process, and fix it in the right order.

You do not have to do all five this week. Start at the top and keep moving.

If you need a jump start, I built a COMPLETELY FREE one-page AI Hiring Risk Audit you can run against your own process in minutes. It maps it to 5-simple steps, with checkboxes and a snapshot of which rules are live now and which land in 2027.

Grab The AI Hiring Risk Audit →

And to be clear, this is not about using less AI.

The best tools are built for exactly this. VINE, the software I built, surfaces the talent hiding in the market and hands it straight to the hiring manager to act on. The AI does the finding. The human does the deciding.

That is the model these laws are effectively mandating, and it is also just how ‘good hiring’ has always worked.

If you strip away the legal language and every one of these rules is asking for the same thing. A person has to stay accountable for the decision.

I work with AI every day and I am genuinely excited about what it can do for hiring.

But I have always believed recruiting is a human art at its core, and no tool changes that.

That belief is now also the safe place to stand, legally.

The companies facing a hard couple of years are the ones that handed the whole decision to a tool and stopped paying attention.

The ones that kept a person in charge have very little to worry about, because they were already doing what these laws now require.

Open up your hiring process and find the exact moment a candidate can get rejected without a single human seeing them.

If that moment exists, that is your number one risk and your number one thing to fix. Put a person back in front of it this week.

Everything else on the list can wait a beat. That one cannot.

The law is catching up to AI in hiring, and you can be held responsible for what a tool decides on its own, even when you never saw it happen.

The fix is simple… Keep a human accountable for every hiring decision. Do that, and there is nothing to scramble for.

In this video, I break down the four major hiring shifts redefining the 2026 job market. You will see how AI in hiring is actually playing out in practice, why most companies failed to implement effective AI recruiting systems, and why in-person interviews, compliance, and human-in-the-loop recruiting are becoming critical again.

See you next Tuesday,

Jared Black
Founder, The Hire-archy

P.S. This is not legal advice, just a heads up from someone watching this closely.

If AI touches your hiring, a real conversation with an employment attorney this year is time and money well spent. Hit reply if you want to tell me what you are running. I read every one.