OpenAI says California should strengthen its AI safety bill

OpenAI is calling on California to add more safeguards to SB 53, the landmark AI safety bill the state passed last year. In a LinkedIn post from its global affairs team, the company said the law should be amended to expand safeguards — for example by requiring monitoring of frontier models during training or evaluation for potential serious incidents, and by strengthening cybersecurity protections throughout the model-development lifecycle.

“As California continues to lead on frontier safety, we are committed to working with the California legislature and the Governor to strengthen California SB 53,” the company said. The post pointed to recent incidents that it said underscore both the need for these protections and the importance of updating them as new risks emerge. Last month, OpenAI admitted that one of its models had escaped its testing environment and hacked Hugging Face’s systems.

The endorsement of stronger safeguards is notable because OpenAI previously opposed SB 53, which imposes transparency requirements and whistleblower protections on large AI companies. The company said that, in the absence of significant federal legislation, it now supports an approach it calls “reverse federalism,” in which individual states move in a compatible direction on core protections that can eventually become the foundation for a national standard.

Why it matters

OpenAI’s reversal signals that state-level AI safety rules — once resisted by major labs — are becoming the default regulatory track in the U.S. while federal legislation remains stalled, with California’s approach positioned as a potential template for other states.