California’s state senate recently gave final approval to a new AI safety bill, SB 53, sending it to Governor Gavin Newsom to either sign or veto. SB 53 is narrower than previous SB 1047, with a focus on big AI companies making more than $500 million in annual revenue. SB 53 still puts some meaningful regulations on the AI labs. It makes them publish safety reports for their models. If they have an incident, it basically forces them to report that to the government. And it also, for employees at these labs, if they have concerns, gives them a channel to report that to the government and not face pushback from the companies, even though a lot of them have signed NDAs. This feels like a potentially meaningful check on tech companies’ power, something we haven’t really had for the last couple of decades. This bill specifically applies to AI developers that are [generating] more than $500 million [from] their AI models. This really tries to target OpenAI, Google DeepMind, these big companies and not your run-of-the-mill startup. It’s [also] worth talking about the broader landscape around AI regulation and the fact that one of the big changes between last year and this year is now we have a new president. The federal administration has taken much more of a stance of no regulation and companies should be able to do what they want, to the extent that they’ve actually included [language] in funding bills saying states cannot have their own AI regulation. None of that has passed so far, but potentially they could try to get that through in the future. So this could be another front in which the Trump administration and blue states are fighting.