SACRAMENTO, California — Sacramento’s ambitions of reining in tech just collided with political reality.
Legislators entered the year determined to act on artificial intelligence and social media. California’s homegrown technology industry responded by flexing its lobbying muscles, beating back much of Democrats’ regulatory agenda by diluting and sidelining bills meant to protect kids from social media, root out biased algorithms and divert some of platforms’ profits toward journalists.
Now they want to finish the job by persuading Gov. Gavin Newsom, a longtime industry ally who has touted AI’s economic potential , to kill off a nationally watched AI safety bill that Silicon Valley opponents deride as a damper on a promising and rapidly growing sector. He has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the measure.
The fight now before Newsom over San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill caps a year in which technology issues dominated Sacramento’s agenda, attracting heavy lobbying from major players like Google, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI. Democratic lawmakers in the state argued California had the political will and the responsibility to curb the hazards emanating from untrammeled social media platforms and artificial intelligence systems emerging in its backyard, acting where Congress had failed.