A crackdown on predictive software that sets prices and can rip you off seemed to be brewing in the California Legislature earlier this year, but last week lawmakers eased up, voting to kill bills that would have kept software from setting the price of apartment rentals and other goods and services.

Another bill, which sought to bar the use of personal information to set prices, was reined in to apply only to grocery stores.

Lawmakers also killed a bill that aimed to protect electric utility customers from bearing higher costs associated with data center proliferation, which has been driven in part by energy-hungry artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. The measure would have required data centers to publicly disclose how much energy they use.

The author of the legislation, Democ

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