California governor Newsom vetoes AI safety law

If you thought that California was going to regulate AI this year, you've got another thing coming: Governor Gavin Newsom's veto pen. The AI Safety bill passed by legislators there is "contentious" (CNN) and "controversial" (WSJ) and dead.

Newsom on Sunday vetoed a hotly contested artificial intelligence safety bill, after the tech industry raised objections, saying it could drive AI companies from the state and hinder innovation. … The bill's author, Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener, said legislation was necessary to protect the public before advances in AI become either unwieldy or uncontrollable. The AI industry is growing fast in California and some leaders questioned the future of these companies in the state if the bill became law. Wiener said Sunday the veto makes California less safe and means "companies aiming to create an extremely powerful technology face no binding restrictions."

Newsom claims the bill was not "encompassing" enough. Reasonable claims were made about the bill's arbitrary financial and technical thresholds; it was feared that it could make small and open-source models increasingly unfeasible as computing power advanced. Proponents claim these problems were addressed in revisions. The veto was praised by OpenAI et al, who had long made clear the commercial priorities at hand:

"SB 1047 would threaten that growth, slow the pace of innovation, and lead California's world-class engineers and entrepreneurs to leave the state in search of greater opportunity elsewhere," OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon wrote in a letter sent last month to Wiener.