California lawmakers pass AI safety bill SB 53 -- but Newsom could still veto

Source: TechCrunch

California’s state senate gave final approval early on Saturday morning to a major AI safety bill setting new transparency requirements on large companies.

As described by its author, state senator Scott Wiener, SB 53 “requires large AI labs to be transparent about their safety protocols, creates whistleblower protections for [employees] at AI labs & creates a public cloud to expand compute access (CalCompute).”

The bill now goes to California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign or veto. He has not commented publicly on SB 53, but last year, he vetoed a more expansive safety bill also authored by Wiener, while signing narrower legislation targeting issues like deepfakes.

At the time, Newsom acknowledged the importance of “protecting the public from real threats posed by this technology,” but criticized Wiener’s previous bill for applying “stringent standards” to large models regardless of whether they were “deployed in high-risk environments, [involved] critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data.”

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Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/13/california-lawmakers-pass-ai-safety-bill-sb-53-but-newsom-could-still-veto/