San Francisco: California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill aimed at regulating powerful artificial intelligence models following pushback from tech giants and critics who argued the law went too far. The bill had faced a barrage of critics, including members of US Congress from Newsom's Democratic party, who argued that threats of punitive measures against developers in a nascent field would throttle innovation. In a statement on Sunday, Newsom acknowledged that SB-1047 was "well-intentioned" but expressed concern that the bill was too "stringent" and unfairly focused on "the most expensive and large-scale models.
" "The bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions -- so long as a large system deploys it," the governor noted. He added, "smaller, specialized models may emerge as equally or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB 1047 -- at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good." The bill's sponsor, Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, lamented the "setback," saying it left AI safety in the hands of the tech giants racing to release the technology.
Wiener had hoped the bill would set rules for AI giants in Silicon Valley's home state, filling a void left by Washington, where a politically divided Congress struggles to pass legislation. "This veto leaves us with the troubling reality that companies aiming to create an extremely powerful technology face no.