California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks throughout the 2025 Clinton International Initiative (CGI) in New York Metropolis, U.S., September 24, 2025.
Kylie Cooper | Reuters
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into state legislation on Monday a requirement that ChatGPT developer OpenAI and different large gamers disclose how they plan to mitigate potential catastrophic dangers from their cutting-edge AI fashions.
California is the house to high AI corporations together with OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta Platforms Nvidia and Anthropic, and with this legislation seeks to guide on regulation of an trade vital to its financial system, Newsom stated.
“California has confirmed that we are able to set up rules to guard our communities whereas additionally making certain that the rising AI trade continues to thrive,” Newsom stated in a press launch.
Newsom’s workplace stated the legislation, often known as SB 53, fills a niche left by the U.S. Congress, which thus far has not handed broad AI laws, and offers a mannequin for the U.S. to observe.
If federal requirements are put in place, Newsom stated, the state legislature ought to “guarantee alignment with these requirements – all whereas sustaining the excessive bar established by SB 53.”
Final yr, Newsom vetoed California’s first try at AI laws, which had confronted fierce trade pushback. The invoice would have required corporations that spent greater than $100 million on their AI fashions to rent third-party auditors yearly to evaluate threat assessments and allowed the state to levy penalties within the a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.
The brand new legislation requires corporations with greater than $500 million in income to evaluate the danger that their cutting-edge know-how might break freed from human management or help the event of bioweapons, and disclose these assessments to the general public. It permits for fines of as much as $1 million per violation.
Jack Clark, co-founder of AI firm Anthropic, referred to as the legislation “a powerful framework that balances public security with continued innovation.”
The trade nonetheless hopes for a federal framework that might change the California legislation, in addition to others prefer it enacted lately in Colorado and New York. Final yr, a bid by some Republicans within the U.S. Congress to dam states from regulating AI was voted down within the Senate 99-1.
“The largest hazard of SB 53 is that it units a precedent for states, relatively than the federal authorities, to take the lead in governing the nationwide AI market – making a patchwork of fifty compliance regimes that startups do not have the sources to navigate,” stated Collin McCune, head of presidency affairs at Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz.
U.S. Consultant Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, is engaged on AI laws that might preempt some state legal guidelines, his workplace stated, though it declined to remark additional on pending laws.
Some Democrats are additionally discussing how one can enact a federal customary.
“It is not whether or not we’re gonna regulate AI, it is would you like 17 states doing it, or would you like Congress to do it?” U.S. Consultant Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Los Angeles, stated at a latest listening to on AI laws within the U.S. Home of Representatives.