Gov. Newsom vetoes California’s controversial AI bill, SB 1047
The bill was authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and would have made companies that develop AI models liable for implementing safety protocols to prevent “critical harms.” The rules would only have applied to models that cost at least $100 million and use 10^26 FLOPS (floating point operations, a measure of computation) during training.
SB 1047 was opposed by many in Silicon Valley, including companies like OpenAI, high-profile technologists like Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and even Democratic politicians such as U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna. That said, the bill had also been amended based on suggestions by AI company Anthropic and other opponents.
While California’s state legislature passed SB 1047, opponents were holding out hope that Newsom might veto it — and indeed, he’d already indicated that he had reservations about the bill.
In a statement about today’s veto, Newsom said, “While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data. Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”
