OpenAI officially opposes California's controversial AI safety bill

The battle over California's polarizing AI safety bill just dragged its biggest heavyweight into the ring.

OpenAI officially broke its silence on Tuesday, sending a formal opposition letter to state Senator Scott Wiener and Governor Gavin Newsom. Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon argued that the legislation, known as SB 1047, would slow down the pace of innovation and force California's world-class engineers and founders to pack up and leave the state.

To back up that rhetoric with real estate, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has actually put talks to expand its San Francisco office space on hold due to regulatory uncertainty. The lab recently moved into a massive Mission Bay office once occupied by Uber, but further local growth is now frozen.

The lawmaker claps back

Senator Wiener was quick to return fire on Wednesday, calling OpenAI's core argument tired and completely nonsensical.

Wiener pointed out that OpenAI failed to criticize even a single specific provision inside the bill. More crucially, he noted that moving out of California wouldn't actually spare anyone from the law. SB 1047 applies to any developer that builds models past certain size thresholds and does business with California residents. Whether a company is headquartered in San Francisco or Austin, if Californians can access the model, the rules apply.

So what does the bill actually demand? It requires developers of frontier AI models to exercise reasonable care to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as enabling bioweapons that cause mass casualties or triggering more than $500 million in damages. Developers must also build in a kill switch to shut down rogue systems and submit a compliance statement to the state attorney general.

OpenAI pushed for uniform federal standards instead of a patchwork of state rules. But Wiener noted that tech giants have used this exact playbook before on data privacy, lobbying for federal legislation that Congress rarely manages to pass.

With OpenAI officially opposed, it joins a formidable coalition that includes venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, trade groups representing Meta and Google, and senior Democratic lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Zoe Lofgren. The bill faces a final Assembly vote and could land on Governor Newsom's desk by the end of the month.

Why it matters

For builders and AI startups, regulatory creep is becoming a tangible threat. Even though SB 1047 was modified to target only massive, multi-million-dollar training runs, the fear is that liability risk will inevitably trickle down to open-source developers and downstream fine-tuners. Complying with state-by-state safety edicts could turn into a bureaucratic nightmare that favors well-funded incumbents over scrappy competitors.

Politically, OpenAI's maneuver reveals a familiar playbook. The company has eagerly endorsed federal oversight, including the formalization of the U.S. AI Safety Institute, where it enjoys significant lobbying sway. But it is aggressively resisting state-level enforcement where local politicians are moving faster than Congress. We think calling a freeze on local real estate expansion is a calculated flex designed to put raw economic pressure on Governor Newsom.

Newsom is now caught in a lose-lose political bind. If he signs SB 1047, he risks alienating the state's most lucrative tech sector just as it drives an economic revival. If he vetoes it, he leaves frontier models operating in a regulatory vacuum. Either way, the era of zero legal accountability for cutting-edge AI labs is rapidly closing.