andreessen and Altman both opposed California’s AI regulatory efforts. Altman’s company, OpenAI, even issued a subpoena to policy geek Nathan Calvin. requesting “All documentation related to SB 53 or its potential impact on OpenAI.” Calvin is an attorney at the AI think tank Encode, where he worked on SB 53. He told The New Republic that the bill is “the first time we’ve seen a U.S. jurisdiction say very clearly, ‘We believe that the catastrophic risks posed by cutting-edge AI models are worth taking seriously, and that we should take proactive steps to make businesses wary of them and governments to prepare for them.'”
Now that the law is in place, OpenAI has asked Governor Newsom to be deemed compliant with the state’s requirements because it has signed the European Union Code of Conduct for AI. Compliance with EU norms is voluntary.
Weiner spent years crafting the legislation that would become SB 53, first passing the bill known as SB 1047. The bill would create more guardrails for AI companies, requiring third-party audits and kill switches for AI models. OpenAI lobbied against SB 1047, and Google also lobbied against it. Meta lobbied against this. Andreessen Horowitz lobbied against this. Eight members of California’s congressional delegation (Lofgren, Eshoo, Khanna, Cárdenas, Correa Barrigan, Vela, and Peters) sent a letter to Gavin Newsom asking him to veto 1047, complaining that the bill is “biased toward addressing extreme abuse scenarios and hypothetical existential risks while largely ignoring demonstrable AI risks such as misinformation, discrimination, nonconsensual deepfakes, and environmental concerns.” Impact and workplace relocation. ”
