California Gov. Newsome is said to veto controversial AI safety bill

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed an artificial-intelligence safety bill that stirred controversy between some major tech companies and esteemed scientists who developed the technology.

The Democrat decided to bury the measure because it applies only to the biggest and most expensive AI models and leaves others unregulated, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing a person with knowledge of his thinking.

Smaller AI models could create problems, too, leading the governor to prefer a legal framework that’s all-encompassing, the Journal reported.

The vetoed bill, SB 1047, would have required creators of large AI models to take “reasonable care” to ensure that the technology didn’t pose “unreasonable risk of causing or materially enabling a critical harm.”

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Meta (NASDAQ:META), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and OpenAI objected to the bill, claiming it imposed vague standards in the name of safety.

Computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who developed much of the technology on which current generative AI is based, were outspoken supporters of the bill, the Journal reported.