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The California State Assembly has passed the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047), Reuters<\/em> reports<\/a>. The bill is one of the first significant regulations of artificial intelligence in the US.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The bill, which has been a flashpoint for debate in Silicon Valley and beyond, would obligate AI companies operating in California to implement a number of precautions before they train a sophisticated foundation model. Those include making it possible to quickly and fully shut the model down, ensuring the model is protected against \u201cunsafe post-training modifications,\u201d and maintaining a testing procedure to evaluate whether a model or its derivatives is especially at risk of \u201ccausing or enabling a critical harm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Senator Scott Wiener, the bill\u2019s main author, said<\/a> SB 1047 is a highly reasonable bill that asks large AI labs to do what they\u2019ve already committed to doing: test their large models for catastrophic safety risk. \u201cWe\u2019ve worked hard all year, with open source advocates, Anthropic, and others, to refine and improve the bill. SB 1047 is well calibrated to what we know about forseeable AI risks, and it deserves to be enacted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Critics of SB 1047 \u2014\u00a0including OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a>, politicians Zoe Lofgren<\/a> and Nancy Pelosi<\/a>, and California\u2019s Chamber of Commerce<\/a> \u2014\u00a0have argued that it\u2019s overly focused on catastrophic harms and could unduly harm small, open-source AI developers. The bill<\/a> was amended in response, replacing potential criminal penalties with civil ones, narrowing enforcement powers granted to California\u2019s attorney general, and adjusting requirements to join a \u201cBoard of Frontier Models\u201d created by the bill.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After the State Senate votes on the amended bill \u2014 a vote that\u2019s expected to pass \u2014 the AI safety bill will head to Governor Gavin Newsom, who will have until the end of September to decide its fate, according to The New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Anthropic declined to comment beyond pointing to a letter sent by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to Governor Newsom last week<\/a>. OpenAI didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n