Governor Newsom on California AI bill SB 1047: ‘I can’t solve for everything’

California Governor Gavin Newsom said there are 38 bills on his desk that would create laws around artificial intelligence on Tuesday, but one looms larger than all of them: SB 1047, California’s bill that tries to prevent AI systems from causing catastrophes. For the first time, California’s Governor shared how he’s thinking about the controversial bill.

In short, he thinks SB 1047 has problems. Newsom said he’s interested in AI bills that can solve today’s problems without upsetting California’s booming AI industry. That’s not very promising for the future of SB 1047, which aims to protect against disasters by holding big AI vendors liable if their products are used to cause grievous harm, like bringing down critical infrastructure. At the same time, signing the bill would upset large swaths of the AI industry who want Newsom to veto the bill.

“We’ve been working over the last couple years to come up with some rational regulation that supports risk taking, but not recklessness,” said Newsom in a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on Tuesday, on stage at the 2024 Dreamforce conference. “That’s challenging now in this space, particularly with SB 1047, because of the sort of outsized impact that legislation could have, and the chilling effect, particularly in the open source community.”

Newsom went on to say he must consider demonstrable risks versus hypothetical risks. He later noted, “I can’t solve for everything. What can we solve for?”

The governor hit on a major criticism of SB 1047: the bill tries to prevent AI’s role in mass casualty events and cyber security events costing more than $500 million, but does little to hold tech companies accountable for anything short of that. Critics of SB 1047 have argued that the bill could stifle innovation, while failing to regulate the short-term issues AI systems are creating today.

Newsom gave these remarks to a room full of people attending an enterprise technology conference in the heart of San Francisco. At most tech conferences I’ve attended recently, you hear rumblings in the bathroom line about SB 1047’s many problems. Newsom likely knew which kind of voters were in the audience, and may have been playing to the crowd.

That said, the governor is putting his AI regulation where his mouth is. Earlier on Tuesday, California’s Governor signed five bills into law that address AI problems we’ve already seen play out in 2024, such as AI-generated election misinformation and Hollywood studios creating AI clones of actors. These may be the “demonstrable risks” Newsom is referencing.

At the same time, Newsom lamented on Tuesday how the federal government has “failed to regulate” in the AI space. The governor noted how California has led previous on tech regulation – namely, social media and privacy – and he isn’t surprised that people are looking to the state for leadership again.

A spokesperson for SB 1047’s author, California state Senator Scott Wiener, did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

“[AI] is a space where we dominate, and I want to maintain our dominance,” said Newsom. “At the same time, you feel a deep sense of responsibility to address some of the more extreme concerns that many of us have – even the biggest and strongest promoters of this technology have – and that’s a difficult place to land.”

Newsom alluded that it’s probably been overstated how signing SB 1047 would disrupt the AI industry overnight. However, he noted how the impact of signing the wrong bills over the course of a few years could profoundly impact California’s lead.

The California governor didn’t explicitly say on Tuesday whether he would sign or veto the bill. OpenAI, Nancy Pelosi, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Big Tech trade groups are pushing Newsom to veto SB 1047. On the other side, Elon Musk, Anthropic, and some well regarded AI researchers have expressed tepid enthusiasm.

Governor Newsom has two weeks to make his decision. Until then, we’re left with a pile of remarks that don’t look promising for the bill’s future.