SB 1047 was vetoed, but public commentary now can assist future AI safety legislation

Governor Newsom has vetoed SB 1047. This is a very disappointing decision, but it has still been heartening to see such a big coalition come out in favor of the bill as described in a press release from the bill’s sponsors here:

A broad bipartisan coalition came together to support SB 1047, including over 70 academic researchers (including Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton), the California legislature, 77% of California voters, 120+ employees at frontier AI companies, 100+ youth leaders, unions (including SEIU, SAG-AFTRA, UFCW, the Iron Workers, and the California Federation of Labor Unions), 180+ artists (primarily from Hollywood), the National Organization for Women, Parents Together, the Latino Community Foundation, various start-ups developing or using AI (including Imbue, Magic.Dev, and Notion), non-profit organizations, and more. Over 4,000 supporters called the Governor’s office in September asking him to sign the bill, and over 7,000 signed a petition in support of the bill sponsored by Accountable Tech. Anthropic said it believes SB 1047 is good on balance, and the bill was also praised by Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) and Elon Musk (founder of xAI).

First – thank you to all of you who wrote letters to Governor Newsom on SB 1047. Your support has been invaluable and we are extremely grateful for it.

Your voice still matters. Please share on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram about why you are disappointed in the veto, and tag @GavinNewsom. It’s important to show that many people are disappointed with the Governor’s decision because that will be priced in when policymakers decide on future bills.

Here are some example tweets you can share from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mark Ruffalo, Dan Hendrycks, Tess Hegarty, Courage California, Rob Weissman, and Jack Clark.

More information can be found here.

Thank you!