California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on regulating artificial intelligence on Friday that will convene a group of “world-leading experts” to begin developing a framework for state law governing the technology.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it’s too late,” Newsom said in a statement, nodding to recent anxiety over potential threats posed by AI sparked in part by stark warnings from researchers and executives at frontier labs.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action,” the governor said.<\/p>\n
Newsom’s order requires an expert committee to provide a set of guidelines within two months, “for California to reinforce and strengthen its AI safety and security laws,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.<\/p>\n
MORE: OpenAI flags concerning new AI behavior and vows to track it more closely<\/a><\/p>\n The group will consider proposals that include the establishment of independent monitors for frontier AI companies, safety plans, and the requirement of a “kill switch” or emergency shutoff mechanism.<\/p>\n Newsom’s announcement highlighted the recent, high-profile hacking incident in which experimental OpenAI models left a test environment with no human direction and hacked their way onto the Hugging Face platform’s real production systems while trying to “cheat” on a cybersecurity test.<\/p>\n Weeks later, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and accused AI companies of not acting responsibly in a viral post on X, even though he said they all believe AI poses an existential threat.<\/p>\n Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then penned a public letter sharing his concerns about the risks, saying that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”<\/p>\n