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Gov. Gavin Newsom said he anticipated signing more technology safety regulations after an artificial intelligence researcher said California-based behemoths Anthropic and OpenAI were “racing” to build technology that could end humanity by 2030.
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Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company in a Tuesday X post that went viral and prompted calls for federal lawmakers to intervene legislatively.
“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote.
He told Axios he quit two months before his equity could vest, which means he likely forewent earning millions if Anthropic goes public as anticipated by year’s end.
Last year, California enacted a bill from Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, that requires AI companies to enact and publish safety protocols and report critical safety incidents to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
On Wednesday, Newsom praised that bill as making California the first in the U.S. to regulate large AI models during an interview with video content creator Shelby Church at a YouTube-sponsored event in Sacramento.
“These companies are thriving, not just surviving in a regulated environment in California,” Newsom said of California AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. “And I think in many ways we are a model of the nation. We’re not exclusive in this space, but we’re the leader in this space, and I want to maintain that.”
However, Wiener told Mission Local this week, that bill left out kill switches and third-party auditor mandates, which meant it would not have covered a May incident in which 1,200 OpenAI agents went rogue and attacked rival machine learning platform Hugging Face.
Newsom was an early tech champion, and has spoken about how often he relies on AI models like Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, joking that the latter helped him during a recent living room remodel.
Church asked if he believed such models should compensate creators like herself, when they use her content to help redefine themselves for future output.
Newsom said it was a “tough topic,” and did not give a definitive answer, citing ongoing litigation against Google and other internet giants.
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“This notion of data, who owns not just their name, image, likeness, but who owns that data, is profound and precious at this moment,” he said. “And that’s a debate we need to have until it’s too late.”
Newsom told Church that he anticipated more forthcoming safety legislation, in contrast to the hands-off approach urged by White House advisors like David Sachs.
“With all due respect, we’ve got to start appropriately regulating against recklessness, not risk-taking,” Newsom said. “It’s not easy. It’s art and science, but we have to take responsibility.”
At the same time, he said he thought Anthropic executive Dario Amodei’s previous estimates that AI would lead to a white-collar job “bloodbath” were overblown.
“You had a lot of folks doubling down on that played into that anxiety,” Newsom said. “Now it seems like everybody’s pulling back from that.”
Hours before the event, Newsom signed two bills into law that require the state to vet outside safety groups to independently assess AI models, and creates a registry of and standards for third-party AI auditors. Both bills — Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405 — were backed by OpenAI and Anthropic.
“AI has the potential to improve our lives, but without effective guardrails, it poses significant risks. Just this week we learned that the most powerful AI systems teamed with AI agents pose real threats to humanity,” said Sen. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, who sponsored one of the bills. “This landmark law codifies one of the primary recommendations of the governor’s blue-ribbon panel on AI by establishing independent, third-party evaluations of artificial intelligence to help ensure that the technology remains safe and beneficial.”
Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, another sponsor, also applauded Newsom.
“Californians deserve to know that the AI systems and models shaping their lives are safe and secure. We cannot expect industry to simply grade its own homework; third-party auditors are essential to ensuring AI is safe for our communities and critical infrastructure,” Bauer-Kahan said in a statement.
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