California’s state senategave final approvalearly on Saturday morning to a major AI safety bill setting new transparency requirements on large companies.
Asdescribed 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).”
And Andreessen Horowitz’s head of AI policy and chief legal officerrecently claimedthat ”many of today’s state AI bills — like proposals in California and New York — risk” crossing a line by violating constitutional limits on how states can regulate interstate commerce.
a16z’s co-founders had previously pointed to tech regulation as one of the factors leading them toback Donald Trump’s bid for a second term. The Trump administration and its allies subsequently called fora 10-year ban on state AI regulation.
Anthropic, meanwhile, hascome out in favor of SB 53.
“We have long said we would prefer a federal standard,” said Anthropic co-founder Jack Clarkin a post. “But in the absence of that this creates a solid blueprint for AI governance that cannot be ignored.”
Source: Techcrunch
