Newsom floats prospect of special session or executive action on AI The California governor told POLITICO he plans to take further action on AI safety before leaving office. SAN FRANCISCO — Gavin Newsom told POLITICO he plans to take further action on AI safety before leaving office, raising the possibility of a special California legislative session amid escalating concerns about the technology’s potential risks to humanity. His plans, he said, could take the form of a special session, executive action or steps by state agencies under their existing authority.
Is there a framework around a special session in that respect? Is there executive action?” Newsom said, adding he was also looking at “authority within existing agencies that have oversight authority based on laws, rules, and regulations.” “We’re looking at across the spectrum,” the governor said. He said he has been in discussion with state legislative leaders, tech safety advocates and those representing AI labs, among others, in crafting a response.
Any additional move by California, the global locus of the tech and AI industry, could have major national and even global repercussions. Newsom said he felt spurred to act in part because of “the tendency of the Trump administration to do absolutely nothing.” His remarks come amid deep fissures in the industry — and in Washington — over how to regulate the industry, and with President Donald Trump repeatedly dismissing concerns about AI.In California, Newsom said, “We’re mindful that we need to continue to iterate and that we must continue to lead.” Newsom’s signature last year on California’s first-in-the-nation AI transparency and incident reporting law set off a cross-country tour of copycat lawmaking in states like New York and Illinois. And last week he signed two AI safety bills to regulate the kind of third-party safety checks now being called for by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
He described those new laws as the “first steps to the kind of independent third-party reviews and safety standards that people are advocating for.” Newsomvetoed an earlier version of the state’s AI transparency law that would have required pre-release safety checks for some AI programs. The bill would have also required companies to have shutdown capabilities for some AI programs, echoing the rekindled debate over “kill switch” failsafes in the wake of recent autonomous cyberattacks. In the interview, he called the pared-back law he ultimately signed last year as “the floor, not the ceiling,” and said the bills he signed last week were a representation of an effort “to continue to build off that to begin to scaffold the next steps and to organize the next steps as new information presents itself, as conditions arise.” The politics for Newsom are especially fraught.
He has upheld California as a national leader on AI regulation, arguing the safety law he brokered last year struck a careful balance of addressing catastrophic incidents while protecting a vital industry. That record will come under intense scrutiny if Newsom runs for president in a cycle expected to be dominated by AI concerns. He will face questions about whether California did enough under his leadership to limit the risk from a homegrown industry that he consistently championed as an economic engine.
Outside of California, the landscape is shifting rapidly. Washington is still scrambling to react to an AI whistleblower’s blunt warning last week that Silicon Valley saw a real possibility of a technologically-spurred apocalypse. Newsom told reporters last week that he was well aware of that hazard, saying he’d been “hearing for years now” about the concerns raised by the whistleblower, while adding the Hugging Face attack should “scare the hell out of anyone.” By signing up, you acknowledge and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service .
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