Overview

• Developers of frontier models must publish a public safety framework and pre-deployment transparency reports with risk assessments and any third-party evaluations.
• Critical safety incidents must be reported to California’s Office of Emergency Services within 15 days, or within 24 hours if there is an imminent risk of death or serious injury.
• The statute protects covered employees who raise catastrophic-risk concerns, enabling anonymous internal reports and court injunctions with attorneys’ fees for retaliation.
• Enforcement rests with the Attorney General with civil penalties up to $1 million per violation, and coverage is limited to models using more than 10^26 operations and firms with over $500 million in revenue.
• Compared with the vetoed SB 1047, the new law drops a mandated “kill switch,” emphasizes disclosures over liability for harms, establishes the CalCompute planning consortium, and takes effect January 1, 2026.