California governor vetoes controversial AI bill, setting back regulation push

Tech executives, investors and prominent California politicians, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D), had argued the bill would quash innovation by making it legally risky to develop new AI systems, since it could be difficult or impossible to test for all the potential harms of the multipurpose technology. Opponents also argued that those who used AI for harm — not the developers — should be penalized.

The bill’s proponents, including pioneering AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, argued that the law only formalized commitments that tech companies had already made voluntarily. California state Sen. Scott Wiener, the Democrat who authored the law, said the state must act to fill the vacuum left by lawmakers in Washington, where no new AI regulations have passed despite vocal support for the idea.

Hollywood also weighed in, with Star Wars director J.J. Abrams and “Moonlight” actor Mahershala Ali among more than 120 actors and producers who signed a letter this past week asking Newsom to sign the bill.

California’s AI bill had already been weakened several times by the state’s legislature, and the law gained support from AI company Anthropic and X owner Elon Musk. But lobbyists from Meta, Google and major venture capital firms, as well as founders of many tech start-ups, still opposed it.

At a tech conference in San Francisco earlier this month, Newsom said the measure had “created its own weather system,” triggering an outpouring of emotional comments. He also noted that the California legislature had passed other AI bills that were more “surgical” than 1047.

Newsom’s veto came after he signed 17 other AI-related laws, which impose new restrictions on some of the same tech companies that opposed the law he blocked. The regulations include a ban on AI-generated images that seek to deceive voters in the months ahead of elections; a requirement that movie studios negotiate with actors for the right to use their likeness in AI-generated videos; and rules forcing AI companies to create digital “watermark” technology to make it easier to detect AI videos, images and audio.

Newsom’s veto is a major setback for the AI safety movement, a collection of researchers and advocates who believe smarter-than-human AI could be invented soon and argue that humanity must urgently prepare for that scenario. The group is closely connected to the effective altruism community, which has funded think tanks and fellowships on Capitol Hill to influence AI policy and been derided as a “cult” by some tech leaders, such as Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.

Despite those concerns, the majority of AI executives, engineers and researchers are focused on the challenges of building and selling workable AI products, not the risk of the technology one day developing into an able assistant for terrorists or swinging elections with disinformation.

This is a developing story.

Andrea Jimenez contributed to this report.