Gavin Newsom signs major tech laws as AI doomsday looms 2 years after he vetoed stricter rules

Gov.Gavin Newsom signed a raft of technology bills Thursday while sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence — even though, two years ago, he pulled the plug on California’s strongest attempt to rein in the powerful technology.At a press conference overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Newsom warned that rapidly advancing AI could pose a “five-alarm fire,” just moments before he defended his 2024 veto of legislation that would have imposed stricter safety requirements on companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and others developing the world’s most powerful models.“I was very happy where we landed,” Newsom said when asked about his decision to reject San Francisco state Sen.

Scott Wiener’s landmark bill, SB 1047.Newsom credited subsequent work by researchers from the University of California, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, along with Fei-Fei Li — the Stanford professor known as the “godmother of AI” who founded her own billion-dollar AI startup — with producing a policy blueprint that led to a narrower law approved last year.“That white paper ultimately led to SB 53, the nation’s first bill as it relates to large language models, frontier models, and transparency, safety,” Newsom said, referencing a watered-down bill that was signed into law last year.Newsom’s bill-signing presser comes amid a string of unnerving developments in the AI industry.Roughly 1,200 experimental OpenAI agents recently coordinated a cyberattack against the AI platform Hugging Face, while former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit the company this week and warned that developers were racing toward self-improving superintelligence that could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade. A senior Anthropic safety researcher later said he believed the chance of AI causing human extinction within 10 years was greater than 10%.On Wednesday, US Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) sent a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, calling him “reckless” and announcing a probe...