Antropic is closer to supporting California’s AI bill after the latest changes

Anthropic’s cautious approval comes just a month after the company proposed a series of amendments to SB 1047 — which was first introduced in the state legislature by Sen. Scott Wiener in February.

In a letter sent to state leaders in July, Anthropic called for a greater focus on discouraging companies from building unsafe designs, rather than imposing strict laws before catastrophic incidents. He also suggested that companies could set their own standards for safety testing instead of adhering to state-mandated regulations.

An amended version of the bill published on August 19 includes several changes. First, it limits the scope of civil penalties for violations that do not result in harm or imminent risk, according to a post by Nathan Calvin, senior policy adviser at the Center for AI Safety Action Fund, which is a co-sponsor of the project of the law and has been working with Anthropic since the bill was first introduced.

There are also some key language changes. Where the bill originally required companies to demonstrate “reasonable insurance” against potential damages, it now requires them to demonstrate “reasonable care,” which “helps clarify the bill’s focus on risk testing and mitigation,” according to Calvin . It is also “the most common existing standard in tort,” he wrote.

The updated version also reduced a new government agency that would enforce AI regulations, once called the Frontier Model Division, to a board known as the Board of Frontier Models and placed it within the already existing Government Operations Agency. This board now has nine members instead of five. However, reporting requirements for companies have also increased. Companies must release safety reports publicly and send unredacted versions to state attorneys general.

The updated bill removes the penalty for perjury, thus eliminating any criminal liability for companies and imposing only civil liabilities. Companies are now required to submit “statements of compliance” to the Attorney General and not “certifications of compliance” to the Frontier Model Division.

Amodei said the bill now “appears to us to be halfway between our suggested version and the original bill.” The benefits of developing publicly available safety and security protocols, mitigating downstream damage and forcing companies to seriously question the risks of their technologies will “significantly improve” the industry’s ability to combat threats.

Anthropic bills itself as a “security and research company” and has won about $4 billion in backing from Amazon. In 2021, a group of former OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, started the company because they believed AI would have a dramatic impact on the world and wanted to build a company that would ensure it was aligned with human values.

Wiener was “very pleased to see the kind of detailed commitment that Anthropic brought to ‘supporting the amended letter,'” Calvin told Business Insider. “I really hope this encourages other companies to get involved substantially and try to address some of this with nuance and realize that this kind of false trade-off between innovation and safety is not going to be in the long-term interest of this industries. .”

Other companies that will be affected by the new legislation were more hesitant. OpenAI sent a letter this week to California state leaders who oppose the bill. One of his key concerns was that the new regulations would push AI companies out of California. Meta also argued that the bill “actively discourages the release of open-source AI.”