Senator Wiener Responds to Speaker Emerita Pelosi's Opposition to SB 1047

“I am aware of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s statement opposing SB 1047. While I have enormous respect for the Speaker Emerita, I respectfully and strongly disagree with her statement. Like the Speaker Emerita, I support the exciting AI innovation happening in our great city of San Francisco and beyond. SB 1047 supports and encourages that innovation. I encourage the Speaker Emerita to have a conversation with the AI luminaries who are quite “informed” and who are supporting SB 1047, including the “godfathers” of AI — Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton (who previously ran AI at Google) — open source advocate and Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, and UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell. I also encourage the Speaker Emerita to speak with any of the various AI startups that support the bill.

”I introduced SB 1047 to ensure California stays in the lead on AI innovation while also protecting the health and safety of our residents from potential catastrophic risks. Innovation and safety are not mutually exclusive, and I reject the false claim that in order to innovate, we must leave safety solely in the hands of technology companies and venture capitalists. While a large majority of people innovating in the AI space are highly ethical people who want to do right by society, we’ve also learned the hard way over the years that pure industry self-regulation doesn’t work out well for society.

”SB 1047 is a straight-forward, common-sense, light-touch bill that builds on President Biden’s executive order and that has garnered broad support among Democrats in the California Legislature and overwhelming support among voters, according to several polls. Tech workers support the bill at even higher rates than the general public. 

“The bill requires only the largest AI developers to do what each and every one of them has repeatedly committed to do: Perform basic safety testing on massively powerful AI models. I’ll repeat myself: Each and every one of the large AI labs has promised to perform the tests that SB 1047 requires them to do — the same safety tests that some are now claiming would somehow harm innovation.

“Since untrue narratives have continued to percolate about SB 1047, I’ll repeat this too: The narrative that this bill is a play to entrench Big Tech is false, and frankly cynical. Startups are not covered by the bill and Google and Meta oppose the bill. While we have engaged with the largest tech companies in addition to startups and academics, none of the largest developers support SB 1047 and most currently oppose it.”

”When technology companies promise to perform safety testing and then balk at oversight of that safety testing, it makes one think hard about how well self-regulation will work out for humanity.

”I’m very appreciative of the various technology companies, academics, and other experts who have come forward and worked with us by providing constructive feedback on the bill — feedback that has helped us make a good bill even better. For example, stakeholders in the open source space, such as GitHub, provided invaluable feedback that led us to amend the bill to ensure open source AI can continue to thrive. Anthropic recently provided us valuable feedback that also led us to amend the bill in very helpful ways.

”Unfortunately, others in the tech space have taken a ‘get off my lawn’ approach to policymakers, telling us we should do nothing while offering no constructive policy ideas other than to just let technology companies do whatever they want to do without even minimal regulation in the public interest.

”This aggressively anti-regulatory approach by the tech sector has led to almost no federal protections for public health and safety relative to technology. As a result, California has repeatedly stepped in to protect our residents and to fill the void left by Congressional inaction. For example:

—When certain technology companies made billions by scraping and selling people’s private information, Congress failed to protect people’s data privacy, so the California Legislature stepped in and passed a data privacy law. The technology companies that had crushed any federal effort to pass data privacy protections told us we should defer to Congress and that tech companies would leave California if we were to pass a data privacy law. We passed the law, tech companies did not leave, and six years later Congress still has not acted on data privacy.

—When social media platforms addicted children and helped spur our youth mental health crisis, Congress failed to protect these children by passing legislation (other than banning TikTok). The California Legislature stepped in and passed such a law. Tech companies sued us, and Congress still has not acted.

—When big telecom and cable companies persuaded the Trump Administration to eliminate federal net neutrality protections, the California Legislature stepped in and passed a net neutrality law, which I authored with the support and help of the Speaker Emerita (thank you, Madame Speaker!) and Congresswoman Eshoo. Six years later, Congress has yet to pass a federal net neutrality law.

“To be clear, I know that many members of Congress have worked extremely hard to try to pass smart, thoughtful technology regulation. I applaud their work and very much want them to succeed. Yet, while Congress has successfully passed many transformational policies in recent years — thank you, Madame Speaker, for leading on many of those efforts — it has struggled to act when it comes to technology regulation.

“As I have said from the beginning of this legislative process — a process that we started almost a year ago for a bill that reflects enormous work and constructive feedback — I would welcome a strong federal AI safety law that preempts SB 1047. Unless and until Congress is able to pass such a law, California should continue to lead on policies like SB 1047 that foster innovation while also protecting the public.”