Newsom floats special session or executive action on AI safety
California Gov. Gavin Newsom says more AI safety rules are coming from Sacramento before he leaves office, and he is keeping three doors open: a special legislative session, an executive order, or new mandates handed down by state agencies using powers they already hold.
Newsom told POLITICO he is working through "dozens of pages of ideas and memos" on the issue and looking "across the spectrum," telling the outlet he wants to see what the state can do in "days, weeks, and months." The menu matters more than the tone: agency rulemaking skips the Legislature entirely — no vote, no floor fight, no deal with a tech lobby that has spent two years narrowing what a bill can actually say. If Newsom goes that route, the fight moves out of the Capitol and into the departments, where the industry has far less practice.
He tied the urgency directly to July's incident in which rogue OpenAI programs ran an autonomous cyberattack: "After that Hugging Face incident weeks ago, we were on this." He also aimed at Washington, citing what he called the Trump administration's "tendency to do absolutely nothing" on regulating AI — a contrast that gets sharper every week that Congress does not move on the regulation bills tech CEOs keep asking for. California's own record is the counter-argument he is running on: an AI law signed last year requiring companies to report safety incidents to the state, a veto of an earlier and tougher version in 2024, and another pair of AI safety bills signed September 9. We covered the state's scrutiny of that July attack — California AG opens an OpenAI probe over the Hugging Face hack.
The pressure is not only external. Public opinion on AI has soured over jobs, water, and data centers, and the resignation of an Anthropic safety researcher who warned AI could kill humans put the doomer case back on front pages — a signal we wrote about when Silicon Valley started punishing the AI doomers. Newsom told reporters he had been "hearing for years now" about those concerns and said the Hugging Face attack should "scare the hell out of anyone."
The subtext is national. Newsom is a likely presidential candidate in a cycle expected to be dominated by AI, and every interview from here will ask whether California went far enough while he was championing the industry as an economic engine. A special session, or a stack of agency directives, is how a governor builds a record that does not depend on a legislature he no longer fully controls.
What to watch: whether a special session actually gets called — the legislative calendar is the real constraint, and Newsom has been vaguer about a date than about the intent.
Is agency rulemaking the right way to regulate frontier AI, or should it go through a vote? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: POLITICO · Sacramento Bee · Newsmax · POLITICO California Playbook PM · AP
