California Senator Adds Transparency Requirements to AI Bill

On July 9, 2025, California State Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) announced amendments to Senate Bill (SB) 53, expanding the bill to include “a first-in-the-nation transparency requirement for the largest AI companies.” The amendments draw on the recommendations from the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, which was convened in September 2024 and released a Final Report on June 17, 2025. Specifically, SB 53:

• establishes transparency by requiring the companies to publish their safety and security protocols and risk evaluations, in redacted form as necessary to protect intellectual property, cybersecurity, public safety, or the national security of the United States;
• mandates reporting of critical safety incidents (e.g., model-enabled chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats, major cyber-attacks, or loss of model control) within 15 days to the Attorney General; and
• protects employees and contractors who reveal evidence of critical risk or violations of the act by AI developers.

These provisions apply to “large developers,” which are persons who have trained or initiated training of a foundation model using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 operations.

• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
• Technology