California governor goes on AI law signing spree, but demurs on the big one

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed five AI-related bills into law this week, but a pivotal one remains unsigned, and the Democrat politico isn't sure about its future.

Speaking to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff yesterday at the company's Dreamforce conference, Newsom expressed doubt as to whether Senate Bill 1047 was the right approach to broad regulation of the AI industry.

SB 1047, which would impose a series of guardrails and transparency requirements on large AI models, has been divisive in the Golden State since being introduced in February by state senator Scott Wiener. On one side is the AI industry, which has resisted the bill and called it heavy-handed; on the other side is the public, which has largely supported the bill as written.

The bill would place a number of requirements on AI firms, but only the largest companies with the biggest models are covered. The only things SB 1047 creates enforcement powers over are "frontier models," which it defines as those requiring more than 1026 FLOPS to build, or cost more than $100 million, based on average market prices, to train.

Companies training those models would be required to report their AI's potential to cause critical harm, define protections to prevent such harm, and include kill switches on AI to prevent them from going haywire.

The AI industry has already managed to get several changes made to the bill, putting limits on enforcement penalties, eliminating perjury provisions for lying about AI models, and other softening of language and requirements.

Newsom, who has had SB 1047 on his desk for more than a week, still seems uncertain which side to take. Speaking to Benioff, Newsom said that California has spent the past couple of years working to come up with "rational regulation that supports risk taking, but not recklessness," and he's unsure SB 1047 is the right fit for that philosophy.

Regulation is "challenging now in this space, particularly with SB 1047, because of the sort of outsized impact that legislation could have, and the chilling effect, particularly in the open source community," Newsom told Benioff.

Newsom doesn't hesitate to veto AI regulation, having killed regulations that would have required autonomous trucks to have human operators last year. His reasoning all along has been that if the AI industry is pushed too hard, it might flee California and take its billions in funding with it.

"We dominate in [the tech] space. I want to continue to dominate in this space," Newsom said in May. "I don't want to cede this space to other states or other countries."

What that means for the future of SB 1047 is unclear. We've contacted Newsom's and Wiener's offices for comment, but haven't heard back.

Newsom signs five AI laws in pen-wielding spree

Uncertain future of SB 1047 aside, Newsom is also perfectly willing to sign AI regulation that he thinks is appropriate - he signed five such bills yesterday alone.

Two of the bills center on protecting actors from AI-driven misuse of their likeness, Assembly Bills 2602 and 1836. The first requires contracts to specify any potential use of AI-generated digital replicas of an actor's likeness or voice, while the latter prohibits the use of digital replicas of deceased performers without the consent of their estate.

"We continue to wade through uncharted territory when it comes to how AI and digital media is transforming the entertainment industry, but our North Star has always been to protect workers," Newsom said. "This legislation ensures the industry can continue thriving while strengthening protections for workers and how their likeness can or cannot be used."

The other three AI bills, signed on stage at Dreamforce, all center on preventing the spread of AI-generated or modified election misinformation.

AB 2655 requires large online platforms (those with more than one million Californian users over the past 12 months) to remove or label "deceptive and digitally altered or created content" during the 120 days leading up to an election, and for 60 days thereafter.

AB 2839 makes it illegal to knowingly distribute deceptive or altered content related to an election within the same time frame as AB 2655, and expands the scope of existing law to prohibit deceptive content about political officials, candidates, and election workers.

AB 2355, finally, requires disclosure of the use of AI in any campaign material. All three laws include provisions for victims and others to file civil action or injunctive relief.

"There are a lot of deepfakes out there. There's not a lot of disclosure or labeling," Newsom said of the three laws before pulling them out of his jacket and signing them to applause. "Why waste your time with a politician unless they're going to do something for you?" ®