California Lawmaker Pushes for AI Safety Reports

California’s AI Safety Efforts

California State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced new amendments to his 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 against that bill, and it was ultimately vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. California’s governor then called for a group of AI leaders 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.

Key Provisions of SB 53

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. The bill also creates whistleblower protections for employees of AI labs who believe their company’s technology poses a “critical risk” to society.

Additionally, the bill aims to create CalCompute, a public cloud computing cluster to support startups and researchers developing large-scale AI. Unlike SB 1047, Senator Wiener’s new bill does not make AI model developers liable for the harms of their AI models. SB 53 was also designed not to pose a burden on startups and researchers that fine-tune AI models from leading AI developers, or use open source models.