{"id":70562,"date":"2025-11-26T11:10:47","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T11:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/70562\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T11:10:47","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T11:10:47","slug":"californias-first-partner-pushes-to-regulate-ai-as-trump-threatens-to-forbid-regulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/70562\/","title":{"rendered":"California’s first partner pushes to regulate AI as Trump threatens to forbid regulations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom<\/a> recently convened a meeting that might rank among the top sweat-inducing nightmare scenarios for Silicon Valley\u2019s tech bros \u2014 a group of the Golden State\u2019s smartest, most powerful women brainstorming ways to regulate artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n

Regulation is the last thing<\/a> this particular California-dominated industry wants, and it\u2019s spent a lot of cash at both the state and federal capitols to avoid it \u2014 including funding President Trump\u2019s new ballroom<\/a>. Regulation by a bunch of ladies, many mothers, with profit a distant second to our kids when it comes to concerns? <\/p>\n

I\u2019ll let you figure out how popular that is likely be with the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. <\/p>\n

But as Siebel Newsom said, \u201cIf a platform reaches a child, it carries a responsibility to protect that child. Period. Our children\u2019s safety can never be second to the bottom line.\u201d <\/p>\n

Agreed. <\/p>\n

Siebel Newsom\u2019s push for California to do more to regulate AI comes at the same time that Trump is threatening to stop states from overseeing the technology \u2014 and is ramping up a national effort that will open America\u2019s coffers to AI moguls for decades to come. <\/p>\n

Right now, the U.S. is facing its own nightmare scenario: the most powerful and world-changing technology we have seen in our lifetimes being developed and unleashed under almost no rules or restraints other than those chosen by the men who seek personal benefit from the outcome. <\/p>\n

To put it simply, the plan right now seems to be that these tech barons will change the world as they see fit to make money for themselves, and we as taxpayers will pay them to do it. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen decisions are mainly driven by power and profit instead of care and responsibility, we completely lose our way, and given the current alignment between tech titans and the federal administration, I believe we have lost our way,\u201d Siebel Newsom said. <\/p>\n

To recap what the way has been so far, Trump recently tried to sneak a 10-year ban on the ability of states to oversee the industry into his ridiculously named \u201cBig Beautiful Bill,\u201d but it was pulled out by a bipartisan group in the Senate \u2014 an early indicator of how inflammatory this issue is. <\/p>\n

Faced with that unexpected blockade, Trump has threatened to sign a mysterious executive order<\/a> crippling states\u2019 ability to regulate AI and attempting to withhold funds from those that try. <\/p>\n

Simultaneously, the most craven and cowardly among Republican congresspeople have suggested adding a 10-year ban to the upcoming defense policy bill that will almost certainly pass. Of course, Congress has also declined to move forward on any meaningful federal regulations itself, while technology CEOs including Trump frenemy Musk, Apple\u2019s Tim Cook, Meta\u2019s Zuckerberg and many others chum it up at fancy events inside the White House. <\/p>\n

Which may be why this week, Trump announced the \u201cGenesis Mission<\/a>,\u201d an executive order that seemingly will take the unimaginable vastness of government research efforts across disciplines and dump them into some kind of AI model that will \u201crevolutionize the way scientific research is conducted.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n

While I am sure that nothing could possibly go wrong in that scenario, that\u2019s not actually the part that is immediately alarming. This is: The project will be overseen by Trump science and technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios, who holds no science or engineering degrees but was formerly a top executive for Thiel and former head of another AI company that works on warfare-related projects with the Pentagon. <\/p>\n

Kratsios is considered one of the main reasons Trump has embraced the tech bros with such adoration in his second term. Genesis will almost certainly mean huge government contracts for these private-sector \u201cpartners,\u201d fueling the AI boom (or bubble) with taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n

Siebel Newsom\u2019s message in the face of all this is that we are not helpless \u2014 and California, as the home of many of these companies and the world\u2019s fourth-largest economy in its own right, should have a say in how this technology advances, and make sure it does so in a way that benefits and protects us all. <\/p>\n

\u201cCalifornia is uniquely positioned to lead the effort in showing innovation and responsibility and how they can go hand in hand,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve always believed that stronger guardrails are actually good for business over the long term. Safer tech means better outcomes for consumers and greater consumer trust and loyalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the pressure to cave under the might of these companies is intense, as Siebel Newsom\u2019s husband knows. <\/p>\n

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the last few years trying to thread the needle on state legislation<\/a> that offers some sort of oversight while allowing for the innovation that rightly keeps California and the United States competitive on the global front. The tech industry has spent millions in lobbying, legal fights and pressure campaigns to water down even the most benign of efforts, even threatening to leave the state if rules are enacted. <\/p>\n

Last year, the industry unsuccessfully tried to stop Senate Bill 53, landmark legislation<\/a> signed by Newsom. It\u2019s a basic transparency measure on \u201cfrontier\u201d AI models that requires companies to have safety and security protocols and report known \u201ccatastrophic\u201d risks, such as when these models show tendencies toward behavior that could kill more than 50 people \u2014 which they have, believe it or not. <\/p>\n

But the industry was able to stop other efforts. Newsom vetoed<\/a> both Senate Bill 7, which would have required employers to notify workers when using AI in hiring and promotions; and Assembly Bill 1064, which would have barred companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors if they couldn\u2019t prove they wouldn\u2019t do things like encourage kids to self-harm, which again, these chatbots have done. <\/p>\n

Still, California (along with New York and a few other states) has pushed forward, and speaking at Siebel Newsom\u2019s event, the governor said that last session, \u201cwe took a number of at-bats at this and we made tremendous progress.\u201d <\/p>\n

He promised more. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have agency. We can shape the future,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a unique responsibility as it relates to these tools of technology, because, well, this is the center of that universe.\u201d <\/p>\n

If Newsom does keep pushing forward, it will be in no small part because of Siebel Newsom, and women like her, who keep the counter-pressure on. <\/p>\n

In fact, it was another powerful mom, First Lady Melania Trump, who forced the federal government into a tiny bit of action this year when she championed the \u201cTake It Down Act<\/a>\u201d<\/a>, which requires tech companies to quickly remove nonconsensual explicit images. I sincerely doubt her husband would have signed that particular bill without her urging. <\/p>\n

So, if we are lucky, the efforts of women like Siebel Newsom may turn out to be the bit of powerful sanity needed to put a check on the world-domination fantasies of the broligarchy. <\/p>\n

Because tech bros are not yet all-powerful, despite their best efforts, and certainly not yet immune to the power of moms. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom recently convened a meeting that might rank among the top sweat-inducing nightmare…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2007,15152,41588,7,9,8,4416,41589,4189,21403,41590,1301,20547,41587,1970,1519,8843],"class_list":["post-70562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-ai","tag-ai-company","tag-ai-model","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-effort","tag-first-partner","tag-golden-state","tag-industry","tag-powerful-woman","tag-regulation","tag-responsibility","tag-siebel-newsom","tag-technology","tag-trump","tag-way"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}