Keypoint: The California legislature has many pending privacy and AI-related bills to consider before it closes on August 31.
The California legislature left for its summer recess on July 3 and will reconvene on August 5. Once it returns, the legislature will have twenty-six days to pass bills before it recesses for the year on August 31.
In the below article, we identify and briefly summarize the pending privacy and AI bills and where they stand in the legislative process. The bills cover a wide range of topics, including kid’s privacy, opt-out preference signals, neural data, and algorithmic discrimination. All together, we are tracking fourteen bills, one of which was signed into law on July 15. The remaining thirteen bills all passed through their chamber of origin prior to the May 24 deadline and are at various stages of consideration in the opposite chamber.
Privacy Bills
AB 2877 (Use of Personal Information with AI)
Summary: The bill amends the CCPA to prohibit a developer from using a consumer’s personal information to train or fine-tune an artificial intelligence system or service unless the consumer or the consumer’s parent or guardian has affirmatively authorized such use.
Current Status: The bill unanimously passed the Assembly in May and is currently scheduled for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
AB 3048 (Opt-Out Preference Signals)
Summary: The bill prohibits businesses from developing or maintaining a browser that does not include a setting that enables a consumer to send an opt-out preference signal to a business with which the consumer interacts through the browser. The bill also prohibits businesses from developing or maintaining a mobile operating system through which a consumer interacts with a business that does not include a setting that enables the consumer to send an opt-out preference signal to that business.
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in May by a 53-7 vote and is currently scheduled for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
AB 1949 (Kid’s Privacy)
Summary: The bill amends the CCPA to prohibit businesses from collecting, selling, sharing, using or disclosing the personal information of kid’s ages 13 to 17 without the kid’s consent or, for children under 13, without parental/guardian consent. A business must have actual knowledge that the consumer is below 18 or 13. A business that willfully disregards the consumer’s age is deemed to have actual knowledge. In addition, a business must treat a consumer as under 18 years of age if the consumer, through a platform, technology, or mechanism, transmits a signal indicating that the consumer is less than 18 years of age.
Current Status: The bill unanimously passed the Assembly in May and is scheduled for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
SB 1223 (Neural Data)
Summary: The bill amends the CCPA’s definition of sensitive personal information to include neural data.
Current Status: The bill unanimously passed the Senate in May and is currently with the Assembly Appropriations committee.
AB 1008 (Personal Information and AI Systems)
Summary: The bill amends the CCPA to specify that personal information can exist in various formats, including artificial intelligence systems that are capable of outputting personal information. As explained in the CPPA’s position paper written by Deputy Director of Policy & Legislation Maureen Mahoney: “[T]his bill seeks to underscore that personal information that exists in AI systems is still personal information, and therefore subject to existing CCPA obligations on businesses, such as data minimization, and the requirement to respond to consumer requests to access, delete, correct, and stop the sale/sharing of their personal information.”
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in 2023 (not 2024) and was, at the time of passage, unrelated to the CCPA. It was amended in the Senate and is now set for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
AB 1824 (Recognition of Prior Opt-Outs in M&A Deals)
Summary: The bill amends the CCPA to require a business to which another business transfers the personal information of a consumer as an asset that is part of a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, or other transaction in which the transferee assumes control of all or part of the transferor to comply with a consumer’s opt-out direction to the transferor.
Current Status: The bill unanimously passed the Assembly in early May and was ordered to a third reading in the Senate on June 20.
AB 3286 (Monetary Thresholds)
Summary: The bill authorizes the California Privacy Protection Agency to make changes to certain CCPA monetary thresholds. The bill also makes changes to the CCPA’s consumer privacy fund.
Current Status: Signed into law on July 15.
AI Bills
In this section, we focus on bills that, if passed, would impact private sector companies. We also provided a summary of these bills in our June 5 article.
AB 2930 (Algorithmic Discrimination)
Summary: The bill would minimize algorithmic discrimination in a manner similar to Colorado’s recently passed CAIA. The bill broadly prohibits deployers and developers of automated decision tools from using these tools or making such tools available that result in algorithmic discrimination.
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in May by a 50-14 vote, and is scheduled for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
SB 1047 (“Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act”)
Summary: The bill would implement clear standards for the largest and most powerful AI models.
Current Status: The bill passed the Senate in May by a 32-1 vote and is currently under consideration by the Assembly Appropriations committee.
AB 3211 (Provenance, Authenticity and Watermarking Standards)
Summary: Among other provisions, the bill would require generative AI system providers to: (1) place watermarks containing provenance data into their AI generated content; (2) provide public tools or services that can determine whether a piece of content was created by the provider’s generative AI system; (3) conduct regular “red-teaming exercises” to test whether watermarks can be easily removed or fabricated; (4) publicly disclose the discovery of any vulnerability or failure in their generative AI system; and (5) make certain disclosures to users of the developer’s “conversational AI systems.”
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in May by a 62-0 vote, and is scheduled for an August 5 hearing in the Senate Appropriations committee.
AB 2013 (AI Training Data Transparency)
Summary: The bill would require developers of AI systems or services to post a high-level summary of the datasets used in the development of the system or service on their website, with certain details described in the bill. The bill would also require developers to disclose whether the system uses “synthetic data generation.”
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in May 20 by a 56-8 vote. It was ordered to third reading in the Senate on June 27.
AB 2885 (Definition of AI)
Summary: The bill would incorporate a new definition of “artificial intelligence” into existing California law.
Current Status: The bill unanimously passed the Assembly in May. In the Senate, it was read for a second time and ordered to the consent calendar on July 2.
AB 1791 (Digital Content Provenance)
Summary: The bill would require social media platforms to redact personal provenance data from content uploaded by a user but prohibit platforms from redacting system provenance data from such content (with exceptions).
Current Status: The bill passed the Assembly in May by a 50-10 vote. On July 1, it was placed on the suspense file.
SB 942 (California AI Transparency Act)
Summary: Among other provisions, the bill would require a covered provider (a business that provides generative AI systems with one million monthly users on average) to create an AI detection tool that a person could use to identify what text, image, video, audio, or multimedia content was created by the provider’s generative AI system. Additionally, a covered provider would be required to include a visible disclosure that content is AI-generated for any image, text, video, or multimedia content created by its system.
Current Status: The bill passed the Senate in May by a 32-1 vote. It is currently with the Assembly Appropriations committee.