Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared to signal support on Wednesday for legislation to regulate artificial intelligence that he said “strikes the right balance” between addressing concerns about the technology and bolstering the state’s homegrown industry.
Newsom made the comments while on a panel with former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City on Wednesday.
“We have a bill that’s on my desk that we think strikes the right balance,” Newsom said. “We worked with industry, but we didn’t submit to industry. We’re not doing things to them, but we’re not necessarily doing things for them.”
He also noted that he’d worked with “Fei-Fei Li, the godmother of AI. We're working with Stanford, MIT, we've worked with Berkeley” — a possible reference to the group of experts he commissioned to write a report this year on recommendations for regulating AI safety.
Ambitious San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener used that report as a basis for his AI transparency bill this year, SB 53.
While Newsom did not say Wednesday which AI bill he supported, Wiener’s legislation has become one of the most closely watched proposals on the technology to reach the governor this year, facing intense lobbying from the industry and safety advocates alike.
It’s Wiener’s second attempt at passing measures meant to safeguard the public from potential harms, like AI creating bioweapons, after Newsom vetoed a broader proposal he drafted last year, citing impacts on innovation.
SB 53 requires some AI developers to publicly disclose their safety and security protocols and creates a way to report major safety incidents to the state. It also creates whistleblower protections for AI workers should the technology go awry, and lays the groundwork for a public cloud computing cluster dubbed CalCompute.
Major AI labs did not publicly oppose the bill this year after coming out against Wiener’s previous effort. Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, has backed the measure.
When asked about Newsom's remarks Wednesday, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told POLITICO: "We don't know what bill he's referring to. I would just say we are really grateful for the governor's serious and substantive engagement on this question of AI policy and we think that the decisions made in California will have tremendous impact on the course of AI policy generally."
Wiener’s bill this year came after consultations with both the tech industry and the Newsom administration, among others. If Newsom does sign the bill, it would be a major step at the state level that could help sow the seeds for a burgeoning national standard on AI safety, given California’s role as the home of the industry.
Some in Congress have discussed crafting a national AI safety framework with possible carve-outs for state rules. But as Newsom noted, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also continued to push a freeze on state AI laws, arguing conflicting rules create a complicated patchwork for companies to navigate.
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