This month, the California State Assembly will vote on whether to pass Senate Bill 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. While proponents tout amendments made "in direct response to" concerns voiced by "the open source community," critics of the bill argue that it would crush the development of open-source AI models.
As written, S.B. 1047 would disincentivize developers from open-sourcing their models by mandating complex safety protocols and holding developers liable for harmful modifications and misuse by bad actors. The bill offers no concrete guidance on the types of features or guardrails developers could build to avoid liability. As a result, developers would likely keep their models closed rather than risk getting sued, handicapping startups and slowing domestic AI development.
