California’s proposed frontier-model safety duties split labs, academia, and Silicon Valley before the veto.
SB 1047 proposed safety duties for developers of models above compute thresholds, with incident reporting and evaluations.
Supporters cited catastrophic risks; critics feared a chill on open source and startups. In September 2024, Governor Newsom vetoed the final version.
Though it did not become law, SB 1047 defined the vocabulary of federal and state debate on thresholds, liability, and open weights.
Alongside its federal ask, OpenAI in September 2026 is backing four California AI safety bills focused on auditor standards, biological-threat screening, and related duties. The move illustrates state–federal tension after capability jumps and agentic incidents.
On 30 September 2026 Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of laws strengthening California’s AI framework: human oversight of automated firings, tech-displacement notices, limits on workplace surveillance, doctors’ final clinical judgment, watermarking and provenance, plus an executive order insisting the technology be called “artificial intelligence.”
In December 2023, European negotiators reached political agreement on the AI Act, with risk-tiered obligations.