San Francisco, United States – In his last few executive orders signed as California governor, Gavin Newsom, whose final term ends in January, issued one asking for independent verification of artificial intelligence models and set up an expert committee to create kill switches for AI agents that could go rogue and cause harm. In 2024, Newsom vetoed a bill, passed in the state assembly, asking for similar requirements that the governor has now called for in his executive order. Newsom said at the time that it would amount to “thwarting the promise of this technology”.
Now eyeing a 2028 United States presidential run, he wants to expand the definition of safety incidents, potentially to include the recent series of safety breaches, explore a kill switch and include other measures that were in the vetoed bill. After vetoing the 2024 bill, Newsom had asked Scott Wiener, the state senator who drafted the bill, to redraft it in consultation with an expert committee. He signed that frontier AI bill, the nation’s first, into law in October 2025.
It asks large developers to disclose certain safety incidents, including the deaths of 50 or more people, large-scale cyberattacks or monetary theft. Christabel Randolph, associate director at the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP), says, “It seems the governor operated from the premise that a slower pace of regulation would be sufficient because the companies would pace their investments, and did not anticipate that the companies would be accelerating the risks.” AI companies have reportedly had thousands of safety incidents in internal and real-world tests in the last few months. These include efforts by agents to get information from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Census Bureau, as well as confidential information from Australian and Canadian government sites.
AI startup Hugging Face had earlier revealed that OpenAI agents had infiltrated its systems, one among a spate of such incidents. In his message vetoing the bill in September 2024, Newsom had said “the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions” and noted that 32 of the world’s 50 leading AI companies are in California. Industry representatives, too, had rallied against the bill.
If enacted, it would force AI founders to move elsewhere, Midha warned. But Hamid Ekbia, professor at Syracuse University and founding director of the Academic Alliance for AI Policy, says industry cannot be relied on to regulate itself. Newsom has now set up an expert committee to examine setting up a kill switch, which had been proposed in a more comprehensive manner in the original bill.
DAIR’s Hanna says that with the order, Newsom “is showing he is attentive without planning anything drastic”. Newsom has asked the California Emergency Services Office to send recommendations on AI regulation by November 15 and could convene a special legislative session to discuss how to implement these, possibly before his term ends. This would be in contrast to the federal government, which has pushed for self-regulation by industry.
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