Anthropic supports California AI bill, despite ongoing concerns

The benefits of California’s revised bill that seeks to regulate how artificial intelligence is developed and deployed in the state likely outweigh the costs, Anthropic said this week.

San Francisco-based Anthropic is a rival to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and is backed by Amazon (AMZN.O) and Alphabet (GOOGL.O).

California’s proposed bill on AI regulation, SB 1047, advanced by State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat, mandates safety testing for many of the most advanced AI models that cost more than $100 million to develop or those that require a defined amount of computing power.

Developers of AI software operating in the state would need to outline methods for turning off the AI models if they go awry, effectively a kill switch. The bill would also give the state attorney general the power to sue if developers are not compliant.

Senator Wiener recently revised the bill to appease tech companies, relying in part on input from Anthropic. The revised bill did away with a provision for a government AI oversight committee.

Tech companies developing AI – which can respond to prompts with fully-formed text, images or audio as well as run repetitive tasks with minimal intervention – have largely balked at the bill.

Alphabet’s Google and Meta (META.O) have expressed concerns in letters to Wiener, with Meta saying the bill threatens to make the state unfavorable to AI development and deployment.

OpenAI had said AI should be regulated by the federal government and that the California bill creates an uncertain legal environment.

“In our assessment the new SB 1047 is substantially improved, to the point where we believe its benefits likely outweigh its costs. However, we are not certain of this, and there are still some aspects of the bill which seem concerning or ambiguous to us,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom on Aug. 21.

“Our initial concerns about the bill potentially hindering innovation due to the rapidly evolving nature of the field have been greatly reduced in the amended version.”