California lawmakers are racing to finish business for the year ahead of a Saturday adjournment deadline.
Hundreds of bills are still in play, including several related to artificial intelligence, data privacy, social media and other tech issues. The week is filled with marathon floor sessions, behind-the-scenes arm twisting, and last-minute efforts by opponents to kill bills.
Even if pieces of legislation survive the countdown clock, there is no guarantee Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will sign them. He holds his veto intentions close to the vest.
But concerns about what Newsom will do can wait. Bill authors must spend this week whipping up support for their measures in the opposite house so they get a vote and are passed.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D) was doing so on behalf of his controversial bill to regulate frontier AI models, aimed at preventing them from going rogue.
“We’re working very hard to make the case to my colleagues in the Assembly that this bill is worthy of supporting,” Wiener said. “We certainly have a path to pass it off of the Assembly floor.”
Here are six of the tech-related bills we’re watching this week.
Algorithmic discrimination: Signature legislation from Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D), chair of the privacy committee, seeks to regulate AI-backed systems that play a substantial role in making consequential decisions about people’s lives.
The bill was originally aimed at protecting consumers from algorithmic discrimination in employment, housing, education and other arenas. But the Senate Appropriations Committee scaled it back earlier this month to only cover employment matters.
The measure would require testing to ensure systems do not discriminate and prohibit systems that do from hitting the market. It would also mandate that employees and job applicants know if AI is being used to evaluate them, among other provisions.
Bauer-Kahan first introduced the bill last year. She unveiled an updated version in February that boasted the support of Microsoft and Workday. But Workday dropped its endorsement after the bill was amended during the legislative process.
BSA The Software Alliance, a trade group representing the enterprise software industry, also opposes the bill and is urging lawmakers to vote no unless it is amended.
Read more: Top tech firm pulls support for Calif. AI bill
AI run amok: Sen. Wiener’s closely watched bill to regulate the largest, most powerful AI systems — known as frontier models — aims to prevent calamities such as AI unleashing a biological or chemical attack or shutting down the banking system.
Wiener says this is not the stuff of science fiction and needs to be taken seriously. The bill, which he calls a “light touch” approach, has split the AI community. Elon Musk, head of X, Tesla and Space X, endorsed the bill Monday.
Read more: California senator urges passage of pioneering AI safety bill
The Assembly passed it Wednesday. While it still needs a concurrence vote in the Senate, the wildcard is whether Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will sign it. He has signaled wariness about any legislation that could hamper AI innovation in California, which is currently home to 35 of the top 50 AI companies in the world.
Social media fines: Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D) wants to make social media companies feel some pain if they harm children. But his proposal to impose fines of up to $1 million on platforms that breach their duty of care to kids has been trimmed.
Read more: Calif. bill would allow $1M in damages per child for social media harms
The maximum fine of the amended bill is now $250,000 or three times the amount of the actual damages to the child, whichever is more. And instead of sending at least half of the civil penalties to the harmed child, the revised measure would instead earmark that money for a new Safe Social Media Fund to educate kids on safe use of social media.
The bill is sponsored by Common Sense Media and has backing from the California Teachers Association and other advocacy groups. The tech industry opposes it.
Addictive social media feeds: Modeled on legislation that passed in New York this year, a bill from Sen. Nancy Skinner (D) would bar algorithmically curated social media feeds for minors unless their parents said it was OK. That means the default would likely be chronological feeds.
Read more: Hochul signs landmark social media, youth data privacy bills
The bill would also prohibit social media sites from sending notifications to minors during the school day and overnight without a parent’s consent. Other default settings, which parents could change, would limit a child’s access to the platform to one hour a day and restrict interactions with strangers.
Starting in 2027, social media companies would have to verify a user’s age to comply with the law, something ACLU California Action has flagged as intrusive and potentially burdensome.
Trade groups representing social media companies have lined up to oppose the bill.
Do not sell: The digital advertising industry relies on information collected from consumers as they browse the internet. A bill from Assemblymember Lowenthal, and sponsored by the California Privacy Protection Agency, aims to make it easier for consumers to opt out of being tracked online.
It would require Google, Safari and other internet browsers, along with mobile operating systems, to come with a setting that allows users to send a signal to businesses telling them not to collect their information.
Read more: Ad opt-out bill introduced in California
California law already allows consumers to tell a company not to sell or share their data. This proposed law would take that a step further and make it easy for consumers to exercise that right by toggling a set-it-and-forget-it switch on their browser.
The bill has backing from consumer rights, public interest and electronic privacy groups but has drawn opposition from the advertising industry and the California Chamber of Commerce, among others. The Senate passed it Tuesday, and it is now heading back to the Assembly for a final concurrence vote.
Neuro data rights: Following on the heels of a first-in-the-nation Colorado law, California lawmakers are poised to adopt legislation to protect the privacy of brain waves.
As more consumer wearable devices that can record and collect neural data hit the market, there is growing alarm about how that information could be used and potentially misused.
A bill from Sen. Josh Becker (D) would add neural data to the definition of sensitive data under California’s Consumer Privacy Act.
Becker, a former tech venture capitalist, told Pluribus News this summer that advocates at the NeuroRights Foundation brought the issue to him and he agreed that safeguards are needed.
“If this neurodata is out there, I’m concerned that we could soon be living in a world where companies can collect, buy and sell our neurodata and build databases with tens of millions of brain scans. … And it could one day be used to identify individuals against their will,” Becker said.
Read more: Q&A: California Sen. Josh Becker, sponsor of neural privacy legislation
A coalition of industry associations oppose the bill and say it will “ensnare vast swaths of technology that have nothing to do with mental privacy,” according to a legislative analysis.
This story was updated to reflect Sen. Wiener’s bill being passed by the Assembly.