California’s Newsom to Decide on AI Safety Bill, Again
Key highlights this week:
We’re tracking 1,093 bills in all 50 states related to AI during the 2025 legislative session.
A federal moratorium on state AI regulations is back in play in Congress.
And lawmakers in California sent 11 AI-related bills to the governor as they adjourned for the year, including Sen. Wiener’s AI safety bill, setting up a replay of last year’s SB 1047 debate, which is the topic of this week’s deep dive.
Last week, the California Legislature wrapped up its 2025 legislative session, but not before passing several AI-related bills, including a major AI safety bill aimed at AI model developers (CA SB 53). Known as the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (TFAIA), Senator Scott Wiener’s (D) measure is designed to protect against catastrophic risk posed by certain “frontier” AI models. If signed into law, it could provide a template for other states to follow.
Unlike the law enacted in Colorado last year, TFAIA focuses only on developers and not “deployers” of AI. Like the RAISE Act passed in New York earlier this summer, the bill seeks to regulate certain “frontier models,” which it defines as “a foundation model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations.” This compute threshold was originally derived from a 2023 Biden Administration Executive Order and was used in last year’s AI safety bill from Sen. Weiner that was ultimately vetoed. Currently, very few models reach this threshold, although it is expected that more will reach this mark in the near future. Notably, this threshold is higher than the 10^25 integer or floating-point operations standard set in the European Union AI Act.
