California Governor Shocks with Veto of Landmark AI Safety Bill: Tech Impact and Future Risks

Governor Newsom of California has signed 17 bills to fight false information and deepfakes as part of his promise to protect the public from AI risks.

A important bill to protect artificial intelligence (AI) was stopped by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. Big tech companies were strongly against the bill.

Some of the first rules about AI in the US would have been put in place by the proposed law. Mr. Newsom said the bill might stop people from coming up with new ideas and could make AI coders leave the state.

The bill’s author, Senator Scott Wiener, said that the veto lets companies keep working on extremely powerful technology without any help from the government.

According to the bill, the strongest AI models would have had to be checked for safety. This meant that tech companies had to build a “kill switch” into their goods. It would be possible for companies to shut down an AI system if it became a danger by using a “kill switch.”

Also, governments would have had to keep an eye on the creation of so-called “Frontier Models,” which are the strongest AI systems. Mr. Newsom said in a statement that the bill “does not take into account whether an Al system is used in high-risk environments, for making important decisions, or with sensitive data.”

“Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions – so long as a large system deploys it,” he said.

On the other hand, Mr. Newsom said he would keep people safe from the risks of AI and asked the best experts to help him do that.

In the past few weeks, Mr. Newsom has also signed 17 bills, some of which aim to crack down on false information and so-called “deep fakes,” which are images, videos, or audio material made using generative AI.

Most of the world’s top tech-related companies are based in the state. This means that any bill that regulates the sector would have a big effect on the industry all over the world. Mr. Wiener said that since the bill was vetoed, AI companies have “no binding restrictions from US policymakers,” especially since Congress is still not able to regulate the tech industry in a real way.

Congress’s efforts to put limits on AI have stopped. A lot of big tech companies, like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, spoke out against the bill and said it would slow down the growth of an important technology.