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California’s state Senate has approved an AI safety bill that would force AI labs working on “frontier models” to be transparent about their safety protocols and create whistleblower protections for employees, Politico reports.
The bill, SB 53, would also establish new technical initiatives, including the creation of a public cloud to expand compute access, known as CalCompute, which could be based at the University of California.
However, the legislation still needs approval from Governor Gavin Newsom to become law. He vetoed a comparable bill late last year, put forward by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). The original bill was then later revised following consultations with a California tech policy group.
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Frontier models mean AIs that are trained on broad datasets, with general-purpose applications, for example, ChatGPT or Google Gemini, rather than a niche mobile app.
Not all AI firms working on these frontier models are treated equally under the bill. While companies making less than $500 million a year in revenue would still face scrutiny, they would not be expected to conform to the same level of oversight as firms generating more than that. The bill has garnered support from some of the largest AI firms in the industry, including Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot. The company’s co-founder, Jack Clark, said it “creates a solid blueprint for AI governance that cannot be ignored” in the absence of a federal standard.
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But many other firms have been far less keen on the legislation. The head of AI policy and chief legal officer at Andreessen Horowitz—one of the largest investors in the tech industry—argued that bills like this “require complex, costly administrative processes that don’t meaningfully improve safety, and may even make AI products worse.”
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He added that “little tech,” for example, startups, has the fewest options to avoid these burdens.
Meanwhile, lobbying groups such as the California Chamber of Commerce and TechNet criticized “the bill’s focus on ‘large developers’ to the exclusion of other developers of models with advanced capabilities that pose risks of catastrophic harm,” in a letter seen by Politico.
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