California State Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced new amendments to his latest bill, SB 53, that would require the world’s largest AI companies to publish safety and security protocols and issue reports when safety incidents occur.
If signed into law, California would be the first state to impose meaningful transparency requirements onto leading AI developers, likely including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI.
Senator Wiener’s previous AI bill, SB 1047, included similar requirements for AI model developers to publish safety reports. However, Silicon Valley fought ferociously against that bill, and it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. California’s Governor then called for a group of AI leaders — including the leading Stanford researcher and co-founder of World Labs, Fei Fei Li — to form a policy group and set goals for the state’s AI safety efforts.
California’s AI policy group recently published their final recommendations, citing a need for “requirements on industry to publish information about their systems” in order to establish a “robust and transparent evidence environment.” Senator Wiener’s office said in a press release that SB 53’s amendments were heavily influenced by this report.
“The bill continues to be a work in progress, and I look forward to working with all stakeholders in the coming weeks to refine this proposal into the most scientific and fair law it can be,” Senator Wiener said in the release.
SB 53 aims to strike a balance that Governor Newsom claimed SB 1047 failed to achieve — ideally, creating meaningful transparency requirements for the largest AI developers without thwarting the rapid growth of California’s AI industry.
“These are concerns that my organization and others have been talking about for a while,” said Nathan Calvin, VP of State Affairs for the nonprofit AI safety group, Encode, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Having companies explain to the public and government what measures they’re taking to address these risks feels like a bare minimum, reasonable step to take.”
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The bill also creates whistleblower protections for employees of AI labs who believe their company’s technology poses a “critical risk” to society — defined in the bill as contributing to the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damage.
Additionally, the bill aims to create CalCompute, a public cloud computing cluster to support startups and researchers developing large-scale AI.
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