AI Bill Challenges Newsom’s Tech Ties in California

Key Highlights

• Legislation: California lawmakers passed Senate Bill 53, requiring AI companies to undergo new safety tests.
• Transparency: The bill mandates disclosure of safety incidents involving AI systems and clarifies safety protocols.
• Industry Response: Some tech companies have softened their opposition to the legislation, while others remain critical.
• Political Dynamics: Governor Newsom’s support may hinge on balancing campaign contributions from tech firms.

Last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a wildly popular (among the public) and wildly controversial (among tech companies) bill that would have established robust safety guidelines for the development and operation of artificial intelligence models. Now he’ll have a second shot—this time with at least part of the tech industry giving him the green light. On Saturday, California lawmakers passed Senate Bill 53, a landmark piece of legislation that would require AI companies to submit to new safety tests.

Senate Bill 53, which now awaits the governor’s signature to become law in the state, would require companies building “frontier” AI models—systems that require massive amounts of data and computing power to operate—to provide more transparency into their processes. That would include disclosing safety incidents involving dangerous or deceptive behavior by autonomous AI systems, providing more clarity into safety and security protocols and risk evaluations, and providing protections for whistleblowers who are concerned about the potential harms that may come from models they are working on.

The bill—which would apply to the work of companies like OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and others—has certainly been dulled from previous attempts to set up a broad safety framework for the AI industry. The bill that Newsom vetoed last year, for instance, would have established a mandatory “kill switch” for models to address the potential of them going rogue. That’s nowhere to be found here. An earlier version of SB 53 also applied the safety requirements to smaller companies, but that has changed. In the version that passed the Senate and Assembly, companies bringing in less than $500 million in annual revenue only have to disclose high-level safety details rather than more granular information, per Politico—a change made in part at the behest of the tech industry.

Whether that’s enough to satisfy Newsom (or more specifically, satisfy the tech companies from whom he would like to continue receiving campaign contributions) is yet to be seen. Anthropic recently softened on the legislation, opting to throw its support behind it just days before it officially passed. But trade groups like the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and Chamber for Progress, which count among its members companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta, have come out in opposition to the bill. OpenAI also signaled its opposition to regulations California has been pursuing without specifically naming SB 53.

After the Trump administration tried and failed to implement a 10-year moratorium on states implementing regulations on AI, California has the opportunity to lead on the issue—which makes sense, given most of the companies at the forefront of the space are operating within its borders. But that fact also seems to be part of the reason Newsom is so shy to pull the trigger on regulations despite all his bluster on many other issues. His political ambitions require money to run, and those companies have a whole lot of it to offer.