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TLDR: SB1047 is bill in the California legislature, written by the "Center for AI Safety". If it passes, it will limit the future release of open-weights LLMs. If you live in California, right now, today, is a particularly good time to call or email a representative to influence whether it passes.
The intent of SB1047 is to make creators of large-scale LLM language models more liable for large-scale damages that result from misuse of such models. For instance, if Meta were to release Llama 4 and someone were to use it to help hack computers in a way causing sufficiently large damages; or to use it to help kill several people, Meta could held be liable beneath SB1047.
It is unclear how Meta could guarantee that they were not liable for a model they release as open-sourced. For instance, Meta would still be held liable for damages caused by fine-tuned Llama models, even substantially fine-tuned Llama models, beneath the bill, if the damage were sufficient and a court said they hadn't taken sufficient precautions. This level of future liability — that no one agrees about, it's very disputed what a company would actually be liable for, or what means would suffice to get rid of this liabilty — is likely to slow or prevent future LLM releases.
The bill is being supported by orgs such as:
- PauseAI, whose policy proposals are awful. Like they say the government should have to grant "approval for new training runs of AI models above a certain size (e.g. 1 billion parameters)." Read their proposals, I guarantee they are worse than you think.
- The Future Society, which in the past proposed banning the open distribution of LLMs that do better than 68% on the MMLU
- Etc, the usual list of EA-funded orgs
The bill has a hearing in the Assembly Appropriations committee on August 15th, tomorrow.
If you don't live in California…. idk, there's not much you can do, upvote this post, try to get someone who lives in California to do something.
If you live in California, here's what you can do:
Email or call the Chair (Buffy Wicks, D) and Vice-Chair (Kate Sanchez, R) of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Tell them politely that you oppose the bill.
Buffy Wicks: assemblymember.wicks@assembly.ca.gov, (916) 319-2014
Kate Sanchez: assemblymember.sanchez@assembly.ca.gov, (916) 319-2071
The email / conversation does not need to be long. Just say that you oppose SB 1047, would like it not to pass, find the protections for open weights models in the bill to be insufficient, and think that this kind of bill is premature and will hurt innovation.
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