OpenAI Asks Newsom to Add Shutdown Controls to Already-Signed SB 53

OpenAI sent a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom requesting that California's SB 53 be amended to include AI R&D precautions, shutdown controls, annual audits, and cybersecurity requirements. SB 53, formally titled the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, was signed into law on September 29, 2025. As enacted, it establishes transparency and accountability standards for frontier AI models, creates CalCompute as a public computing infrastructure, and builds on existing California regulations including automated decision-making rules under the CCPA. The law is currently limited in scope to frontier models, though it hints at potentially expanding requirements to other models and smaller developers. The shutdown controls, annual audits, and AI R&D precautions OpenAI is requesting are not part of the law as signed. Separately, OpenAI's Chris Lehane praised the bipartisan FRONTIER Act and called for mandatory pre-deployment testing, and OpenAI called for a federally funded cybersecurity overhaul with expanded incident reporting requirements.