65% of California voters say they would hold Governor Newsom responsible for an ‘AI-enabled catastrophe’ if he were to overrule the Senate and State Assembly and veto SB 1047, a landmark AI safety bill.
The poll from the AI Policy Institute (AIPI) also found that 70% of respondents now support the bill, up from 65% at the start of August.
SB 1047 passed the California Senate by an overwhelming 32 to 1 vote, and will end up on Governor Newsom’s desk if it passes the State Assembly. Newsom will have the option to veto the bill, but such a move would be wildly unpopular with voters of all affiliations, especially with supporters of his own party (78% of Democrats support the bill compared to 67% of Republicans and 60% of independents).
The bill, which applies to all entities doing business in California, would require companies training models costing over $100 million to implement ‘reasonable’ protocols to ensure that the model does not cause mass casualties or more than $500 million in damages. Scott Wiener, the sponsor of the bill, has called it a ‘light-touch’ piece of legislation that will help society to get ahead of the risks of advanced artificial intelligence.
Despite facing opposition from tech giant Meta and venture capital firm a16z, the bill has received support from the two most cited AI researchers of all time, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton; AI company Anthropic (whose founders left OpenAI over safety concerns); and most recently, Elon Musk, who said AI should be regulated ‘just as we regulate any product/technology that is a potential risk,’ mentioning his more than 20 years of advocacy for AI regulation.
An open letter from Bengio and Hinton argued the next generation of AI models could cause severe harms to humanity, ranging from cyber attacks to the development of dangerous weapons, risks worsened by the prospect of autonomous AI agents that could act without human oversight or instruction. The letter states that SB 1047 is ‘the bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology’.
Read more: SB 1047 ‘reasonable first step’ according to Hinton, Bengio, and Russell
Governor Newsom is yet to publicly comment on the bill.