Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic became the first major tech company Monday to endorse a California bill that would regulate the most advanced artificial intelligence models.
Proposed by state Sen. Scott Wiener, SB 53, if passed, would create the first broad legal requirements for large developers of AI models in the United States.
Among other conditions, the bill would require large AI companies offering services in California to create, publicly share and adhere to safety-focused guidelines and procedures stipulating how each company attempts to mitigate risks from AI. The bill would also strengthen whistleblower requirements by creating stronger pathways for employees to flag concerns about severe or potentially catastrophic risks that might otherwise go unreported.
“With SB 53, developers can compete while ensuring they remain transparent about AI capabilities that pose risks to public safety,” Anthropic said in a statement.
The bill would largely codify existing voluntary commitments made by the world’s largest AI companies, emphasizing transparency and attention to risks from advanced AI systems. For example, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and other companies have already committed to assessing how their products could be used for nefarious purposes and to lay out mitigations to prevent these threats. Recent research has shown that AI models can help users execute cyberattacks and lower barriers to acquiring biological weapons.
SB 53 would make many of those commitments mandatory, requiring companies to post their approaches to AI risk on their websites and to share summaries of “catastrophic risk” assessments directly with a state-level office.
The new California bill would apply only to AI companies building cutting-edge models that demand massive computing power. Within that subset of AI companies, the strictest requirements in the bill would apply only to those with annual revenues exceeding $500 million.
SB 53 would also establish an emergency reporting system through which an AI developer or members of the public could report critical safety incidents related to a model.
“Anthropic is a leader on AI safety, and we’re really grateful for the company’s support,” Wiener told NBC News.
The bill appears likely to pass, having received overwhelming support in both the Assembly and the Senate in recent voting rounds. The Legislature must cast its final vote on the bill by Friday night.
“Frontier AI companies have made many voluntary commitments for safety, often without following through. This legislation takes a small but important first step toward making AI safer by making many of these voluntary commitments mandatory,” Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, told NBC News. “While we need much more rigorous regulation to manage AI risks, SB 53 — and Anthropic’s public support for it — are an encouraging development.”
However, industry trade groups like the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and the Chamber of Progress are highly critical of the bill. The CTA said last week on X, “California SB 53 and similar bills will weaken California and U.S.