California Approves Voluntary Frontier AI Pre-Release Testing Law

California's legislature approved SB 813, authored by state Sen. Jerry McNerney, establishing a voluntary framework of Independent Verification Organizations to conduct third-party safety assessments of frontier AI models before release. Critics argue the framework is already outdated given the scale and cost of evaluating modern AI systems: frontier models have grown so large that other AI models are required to analyze them, and a METR investigation into the OpenAI Hugging Face hack consumed $400,000 in AI compute, paid for by OpenAI.