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Senator Wiener Introduces Safety Framework in Artificial Intelligence Legislation
September 13, 2023
SACRAMENTO – As the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to demonstrate increasingly astonishing capabilities, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) unveiled SB 294, the Safety in Artificial Intelligence Act. SB 294 presents a framework for California to ensure the safe development of AI models within its borders. Under the framework, AI labs would be required to practice responsible scaling by testing the most advanced models rigorously for safety risks and disclose their planned responses to the State if safety risks are discovered. It also establishes strong liability for damages caused by foreseeable safety risks. To ensure California remains the center of AI innovation and guide the development of large AI models toward safe practices, the proposal would also create CalCompute, a cloud-based compute cluster available for use by AI researchers and smaller developers housed in California’s world-class public university system.
SB 294 is an intent bill, a type of legislation that is ineligible to move through the typical legislative process at this stage of the year. Lawmakers sometimes use intent bills to generate discussion and feedback for a period of time before amending them with full legislative text and moving them through the formal legislative process. A bill to enact single-payer healthcare is currently employing a similar approach in the Assembly. Senator Wiener’s AI bill establishes the intent of the Legislature to enact sweeping safety rules governing AI development, a key first step before moving through the regular legislative process next year. Over the coming months, Senator Wiener looks forward to receiving significant feedback and engagement from a range of stakeholders inside and outside the industry.
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Behind these rapid advances is a massive increase in the amount of computer hardware used to train the largest AI systems, ballooning the cost of developing the most advanced AI systems from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for the most advanced AI engines. According to some analyses, the amount of effective computation used for the largest AI systems doubled roughly every 3.4 months for much of the last decade, an acceleration seven times faster than the famous Moore’s law, which drove the rapid development of computational power in consumer electronics over the past four decades. For these reasons, AI models are likely to improve their current capabilities further, and to suddenly develop new and surprising capabilities very rapidly. Thus, policymakers cannot afford to wait to engage with the technology: this technology is too important for us to wait to react until risks have already been realized. Good policy can help us contain risks at low cost while harnessing this technology’s power for good.
An overwhelming share of this innovation and progress has occurred in California. The state is home to 35 of the world’s top 50 AI companies and a quarter of all AI patents, conference papers, and companies globally.
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To nurture the benefits that AI practitioners hope to deliver, SB 294 proposes to launch CalCompute - an AI cloud compute cluster dedicated to research into the safe and secure development of large-scale AI systems. The system can foster innovation for small businesses while guiding AI development research toward safe and secure practices. CalCompute builds on Stanford’s National Research Cloud proposal, leveraging California’s world-class public university and community college system to advance the state of the art for an industry that has long called California home.
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“It’s great that between the legislature and the executive, California is taking AI regulation seriously,” tweeted Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta. “California is the center of where so much AI gets — and should continue to get — built, and we have a critical role to play. Here’s to pushing more public dollars for research along with appropriate limits on AI.”
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