California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed SB 53, a first-in-the-nation bill that sets new transparency requirements on large AI companies.

SB 53, which passed the state legislature two weeks ago, requires large AI labs — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind — to be transparent about safety protocols. It also ensures whistleblower protections for employees at those companies.  

In addition, SB 53 creates a mechanism for AI companies and the public to report potential critical safety incidents to California’s Office of Emergency Services. Companies also have to report incidents related to crimes committed without human oversight, such as cyberattacks, and deceptive behavior by a model that isn’t required under the EU AI Act.  

The bill has received mixed reactions from the AI industry. Tech firms have broadly argued that state-level AI policy risks creating a “patchwork of regulation” that would hinder innovation, although Anthropic endorsed the bill. Meta and OpenAI lobbied against it. OpenAI even wrote and published an open letter to Gov. Newsom that discouraged his signing of SB 53.

The new bill comes as some of Silicon Valley’s tech elite have poured hundreds of millions into super PACs to back candidates that support a light-touch approach to AI regulation. Leaders at OpenAI and Meta have in recent weeks launched pro-AI super PACs that aim to back candidates and bills that are friendly to AI. 

Still, other states might look to California for inspiration as they attempt to curb the potential harms caused by the unmitigated advancement of such a powerful emerging technology. In New York, a similar bill was passed by state lawmakers and is awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature or veto.  

“California has proven that we can establish regulations to protect our communities while also ensuring that the growing AI industry continues to thrive,” Newsom said in a statement. “This legislation strikes that balance. AI is the new frontier in innovation, and California is not only here for it — but stands strong as a national leader by enacting the first-in-the-nation frontier AI safety legislation that builds public trust as this emerging technology rapidly evolves.” 

The governor is also weighing another bill — SB 243 — that passed both the State Assembly and Senate with bipartisan support this month. The bill would regulate AI companion chatbots, requiring operators to implement safety protocols, and hold them legally accountable if their bots fail to meet those standards.  

SB 53 is Senator Scott Wiener’s second attempt at an AI safety bill after Newsom vetoed his more sweeping SB 1047 last year amid major pushback from AI companies. With this bill, Wiener reached out to major AI companies to attempt to help them understand the changes he made to the bill.  

Making democracy work isn’t easy, as recent events have made clear. Some critics would argue that technology is making it worse. But one startup is hoping that AI could help bridge some differences instead of widen them.

“I had an a-ha moment one day when I realized people are asking AI to explain something like they’re five years old,” Tommy Lorsch, co-founder and CEO of Complex Chaos, told TechCrunch. “What if we use it as a facilitator to help people understand each other and find common ground?”

He and co-founder Maya Ben Dror are developing tools to help people arrive at a consensus. One of their first test cases involved climate negotiations, but it really doesn’t matter what the issue is. His goal is to foster cooperation and shorten the time it takes for groups to come to agreement.

“Everyone is building software for collaboration like Slack, Google Docs, whatever,” Lorsch said. “Cooperation is a different piece.”

Facilitating cooperation isn’t something that scales well, he said. Typically, trained facilitators will spend time with groups to help them arrive at a consensus, but that process can slow down when negotiations or preparations happen across time zones or even in different rooms.

Lorsch was buoyed by a recent LLM developed by Google called the Habermas Machine, which was developed explicitly with that goal in mind. “This is basically an AI that generates group consensus statements where people feel represented both majority and minority point of view,” he said.

Lorsch and Ben Dror recently trialed their startup’s tool to help young delegates from nine African nations prepare for climate-related negotiations at a United Nations campus in Bonn, Germany. The tool incorporates both Google’s Habermas Machine and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate questions, come up with goals for conversations, and help summarize long documents.

The goal, Ben Dror said, is to help the delegates arrive at consensus as a bloc before they began negotiations with others. 

Ideally, the tool would help speed things during negotiations, too. When blocs, or delegates fro groups of aligned countries, encounter new information in the process of a large negotiating session, they often need to regroup to process the new information. “Blocs are usually the reason why negotiations have to stop. The bloc has to come out, renegotiate, reposition, and then go back in. And that creates a lot of friction,” Ben Dror said. Complex Chaos hopes that its tool can help shorten that time.

In the trial with the delegates from African countries, Complex Chaos said that participants reported up to a 60% reduction in the time it took to coordinate, and that 91% of participants said that the AI tool helped them see perspectives they would have otherwise missed.

Complex Chaos is also pitching its cooperation tool to companies, including tech companies and large consultancies. “Strategic planning by AI and basically the same problem,” Lorsch said. “The annual strategic planning process of most companies takes about three months of the year with back and forth negotiations, multi-layer, across time zones, across teams, and so on and so forth.”

But Lorsch and Ben Dror are most enthusiastic when talking about climate negotiations. 

“If AI can shorten these processes, simplify them, then we’d be so much better off. Not just for climate, for anything sustainability, for any big challenge that we’re facing,” Ben Dror said.