California lawmakers pass AI safety bill SB 53

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 technol