Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
California sets the rules for who may audit an AI system
Newsom signed two bills on September 9 creating independent verification organizations for AI systems and a state registry of auditors with standards for their independence. Vendors now have a defined party to satisfy.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405, which his office describes as first-in-the-nation standards for third-party audits and independent assessments of AI systems.
- SB 813, from Senator Jerry McNerney, sets up a framework for independent verification organizations that can assess AI systems and models for compliance with state law.
- AB 1405, from Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, creates a state registry for AI auditors and sets standards for their independence, transparency and integrity.
- Newsom used the signing to call on the federal government to enact national AI regulation, saying the technology's scale demands action from every level of government.
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Why it matters
- constraint Nothing in the announcement lets a product team size the work, because the state has described who may audit without describing who must be audited or when.
- capability Enterprise buyers who have been asking vendors for independent assessment will be able to name a registered auditor in a contract. Independence stops being whatever the vendor asserts it is.
- decision Teams choose now between instrumenting their pipelines to produce dated evidence and reconstructing that evidence later, once a registered assessor or a customer asks for it.
- precedent By registering the auditors and policing their conflicts, California makes the assessor's own independence a compliance question that other states copying this structure will inherit.
Somebody at a mid-size software company will open a customer security questionnaire next quarter and find a line asking who independently assessed the model. California has now answered half of that question, and the half it answered is the assessor.
Both statutes act on the auditor. Senate Bill 813 defines the organizations that can assess AI systems and models for compliance with state law [3]. Assembly Bill 1405 decides who lands on the state list and what independence, transparency and integrity mean for the firms on it [4]. The governor's office did not say which developers or deployers must obtain an assessment, what triggers one, or when the registry starts taking applicants [14].
There is preparation work to do in the meantime: keeping the records an outside assessor would ask for, with dates attached. An assessor checking a claim about a model wants the evaluation run that produced the number and the change record for the model that produced it. Both carry timestamps, and a timestamp cannot be back-filled in the week the request arrives.
The bills' authors were explicit about the problem they think this fixes. "We cannot expect industry to simply grade its own homework; third-party auditors are essential to ensuring AI is safe for our communities and critical infrastructure," Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said [8]. Senator Jerry McNerney said his bill "codifies one of the primary recommendations of the governor's blue-ribbon panel on AI by establishing independent, third-party evaluations of artificial intelligence" [7].
The pattern behind this is four years long. In 2023 Newsom issued an executive order directing the state to use AI safely and to identify risks to individuals, communities, state government and state workers [11]. In 2024 he signed a package covering deepfakes, AI watermarking, children and workers [12]. In 2025 he signed SB 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, which his office calls the nation's strongest AI safety law and which puts public obligations on frontier AI developers [13].
For a product team, sort your AI features on two axes. The first is whether an existing California statute already reaches the feature, which for most teams means the 2024 deepfake and watermarking rules rather than SB 53's frontier developer duties [12][13]. The second is whether the evidence behind your safety claims is produced automatically by your pipeline or assembled by hand.
Statute plus automatic evidence is a scheduling problem, and once the registry opens you hire from it. Statute plus hand-assembled evidence is an instrumentation project, and no amount of procurement fixes it. No statute but enterprise buyers asking means the registry gives you a name to put in a contract. That is the cheapest use of these laws available this year. No statute and no buyer asking means you wait. The cell worth funding first is the one where a rule already applies and the proof of compliance currently lives in old Slack threads.
What to watch
- Regulations or bill text naming which AI systems require an independent assessment, and on what schedule.
- The date California's auditor registry opens and how many organizations clear the independence standards.
- Federal action on Newsom's call for national AI rules, and whether it displaces the state framework.