California just passed the first law that … well, it’s complicated.
On Sept. 29, 2025, Governor Newsom signed the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (TFAIA). It’s a sweeping AI safety law: the first to require that providers of the biggest models assess and disclose the risks to society created by those models.
TFAIA only applies to models so big that just ten of them exist at the moment, though that number will climb. (It applies to AI systems with 10 to the 26th floating-point operations – a.k.a. 100 octillion FLOPS. That’s 10x larger than the highest threshold in the EU AI Act.) So this isn’t your problem unless you work for OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, or one of the other usual suspects with truly enormous systems.
TFAIA requires that AI vendors create, publish, and regularly update an “AI framework.” That’s a plan for addressing society-level risks created by gigantic AI models – e.g., risks of injury to 50 or more people and losses of $1B or more.
The law applies to all providers of those models used in California, not just those based in the state. (CA has 32 of the world’s 50 biggest AI companies anyway.)
Interestingly, the big AI companies supported this law, including OpenAI and Meta.
It’s … possible we’ll all be a bit safer …
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