Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (SB 53)
Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, Business and Professions Code section 22757.10 et seq. (Senate Bill 53, chapter 138 of the statutes of 2025)
Summary
Requires a frontier developer to report critical safety incidents, including loss of control of a frontier model causing death or bodily injury, to the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services within 15 days of discovery, and to retain information for five years.
Scope
Frontier models and foundation models of frontier developers and large frontier developers, as defined in Business and Professions Code section 22757.10 et seq.
Requires
- incident-reporting
- record-preservation
Dates
introduced: — | adopted: 2025-09-29 | inForce: — | appliesFrom: —
Sponsors
Scott Wiener
Sources
- California State Assembly, Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection — 2025-09-11 — primary — https://apcp.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2025-09/sb-53-wiener-apcp-analysis-9.11.pdf
- California Governor's Office of Emergency Services — 2026-09-28 — primary — https://www.caloes.ca.gov/office-of-the-director/operations/homeland-security/california-cybersecurity-integration-center/transparency-in-frontier-ai-act-reporting/
- California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General — 2026-09-28 — primary — https://www.oag.ca.gov/sb53
- Office of the Governor of California — 2025-09-29 — primary — https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/09/29/governor-newsom-signs-sb-53-advancing-californias-world-leading-artificial-intelligence-industry/
Notes
The definition that puts this instrument in the register
“Critical safety incident”, all four limbs, quoted from the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection’s analysis of the bill:
Unauthorized access to, modification of, or exfiltration of, the model weights of a frontier model that results in death or bodily injury; Harm resulting from the materialization of a catastrophic risk; Loss of control of a frontier model causing death or bodily injury; or A frontier model that uses deceptive techniques against the frontier developer to subvert the controls or monitoring of its frontier developer outside of the context of an evaluation designed to elicit this behavior and in a manner that demonstrates materially increased catastrophic risk.
The third limb — loss of control of a frontier model causing death or bodily injury — is the reason this instrument is tracked here.
Shared drafting. New York’s General Business Law section 1420 defines “critical safety incident” in word-for-word identical terms. See us-ny-raise-act. This register treats the two as one drafting adopted twice, not as two independent instruments reaching the same conclusion.
No shutdown or disable requirement
None of the four primary sources states any requirement to shut down or disable a model. The committee analysis says in terms that the bill does not require developers to maintain a capability to shut down or disable a model. This has been confirmed across four publishers and three verification passes, and it is recorded because a common secondary characterisation of this Act says otherwise.
Deadlines and retention
Reporting is required “within 15 days of discovering the critical safety incident”, and
where there is imminent danger, “within 24 hours to an authority, including any law
enforcement agency or public safety agency”. Frontier developers must “retain the
unredacted information for five years”, which is the basis for the
record-preservation tag.
Provenance caveat
The document retrieved is the committee’s analysis of the bill as it stood on 2025-09-11,
which is the version chaptered on 2025-09-29 — not the codified Business and Professions
Code text. The codified sections remain unretrieved: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov is
disallowed by robots.txt across every path attempted in three verification passes. This
entry does not rest on the codified text and should not be cited as if it did.
inForce is omitted because no retrieved primary states an effective date. It is not
inferred from California’s usual commencement convention.