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Kelsey Piper’s article on SB 1047 says
This is one of the questions animating the current raging discourse in tech over California’s SB 1047, newly passed legislation that mandates safety training for that companies that spend more than $100 million on training a “frontier model” in AI — like the in-progress GPT-5. Otherwise, they would be liable if their AI system leads to a “mass casualty event” or more than $500 million in damages in a single incident or set of closely linked incidents.
I’ve seen similar statements elsewhere too. But after I spent some time today reading through the bill, this seems to be wrong? Liability for developers doesn’t seem to be dependent on whether “critical harm” is actually done. Instead, if the developer fails to take reasonable care to prevent critical harm (or some other violation), even if there is no critical harm done, violations that cause death/bodily harm/etc can lead to fines of 10% or 30% of compute. Here’s the relevant section from the bill:
(a) The Attorney General may bring a civil action for a violation of this chapter and to recover all of the following:
(1) For a violation that causes death or bodily harm to another human, harm to property, theft or misappropriation of property, or that constitutes an imminent risk or threat to public safety that occurs on or after January 1, 2026, a civil penalty in an amount not exceeding 10 percent of the cost of the quantity of computing power used to train the covered model to be calculated using average market prices of cloud compute at the time of training for a first violation and in an amount not exceeding 30 percent of that value for any subsequent violation.
Has there been discussion about this somewhere else already? Is the Vox article wrong or am I misunderstanding the bill?
In today's Time article about Anthropic, Daniela Amodei says about EA,
That's a notable change from her March 2025 comments to Wired:
To me it reads a bit different, though. Here is the full paragraph from the same article:
This reads more like "oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren't actually part of that movement at all." and I think it is understandable. It is basically reputation management efforts after the FTX scandal.
I agree with your assessment, but "oh yeah, we share the same principles, but we aren't actually part of that movement at all." still seems like a warm change since “I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term.”.
Not a huge change perhaps, but still different.
Agreed, I think it's reasonably read as saying "we're 'lowercase' effective altruists, even though we don't identify with the community or organizations." It's probably not helpful to speculate further here (is this just the optimal PR play? or are they being honest?), but regardless it seems clearly better than whatever was happening in that Wired article.
I guess my point was that the underlying position hasn't changed yet. This is just PR efforts. The people who are close to money, do not discuss anything publicly to "inform" the public; it is all to shape public opinion on certain things. But yeah, you are right in the sense that semantically the two statements are different.
I think they were laughed at enough after the Wired article (from here and elsewhere) that maintaining the previous line was no longer tenable for them.
I also separately think their current stated position is more accurate than the previous one, but I'm just observing that the incentives are a larger fraction of the story behind what they're saying than what ppl might otherwise be reading them as.