But Newsom vetoed SB 1047. In the days before his decision, he talked about AI regulation onstage in downtown San Francisco, saying: “I can’t solve for everything. What can we solve for?”
That pretty clearly sums up how many policymakers are thinking about catastrophic AI risk today. It’s just not a problem with a practical solution.
Even so, SB 1047 was flawed beyond its focus on catastrophic AI risk. The bill regulated AI models based on size, in an attempt to only regulate the largest players. However, that didn’t account for new techniques such as test-time compute or the rise of small AI models, which leading AI labs are already pivoting to. Furthermore, the bill was widely considered an assault on open source AI — and by proxy, the research world — because it would have limited firms like Meta and Mistral from releasing highly customizable frontier AI models.