The veto of California's SB 1047
The governor of California rejected a bill that would have required developers of the largest models to run safety testing and provide a shutdown capability.
Why it matters
The most serious attempt to bind frontier models with mandatory rules where they are made did not pass.
The bill covered models whose training cost more than a hundred million dollars, and required assessment of catastrophic-harm risk, a full shutdown capability and reporting. It was backed by some researchers and two laboratories; most technology companies and a number of academics opposed it, partly out of concern for open weights. In the veto message the governor wrote that a threshold based on training cost aims at the wrong thing: what makes a model dangerous is its use, not its size. In place of the law the state announced a set of initiatives with no binding force.