Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi (born 1940) represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly four decades and twice served as Speaker of the House — the first woman to hold the office. In the AI debate she matters for a single, consequential intervention: in August 2024, as California’s SB 1047 frontier-model safety bill neared the governor’s desk, the speaker emerita issued a statement of opposition that reframed the fight.

Torpedoing SB 1047

The bill, authored by fellow San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, would have imposed safety-testing and liability requirements on the largest AI models. Pelosi called it well-intentioned but ill informed, cited AI “godmother” Fei-Fei Li and other researchers who feared it would harm open-source development and academic research, and argued California should protect consumers without stifling the ecosystem it leads. Her statement — echoing a letter from eight California House Democrats including Ro Khanna — gave Governor Newsom ample political cover for his September 2024 veto. Wiener publicly rebutted her, calling the opposition arguments inaccurate; skeptics noted her family’s sizable tech investments, a charge her office dismissed.

Pelosi is no blanket deregulator — she has backed AI transparency and deepfake measures and frames her position as wanting California “to lead in AI” responsibly. But when the highest-profile AI safety bill in America reached its decisive moment, the most powerful Democrat in California politics put her weight on the innovation side of the scale, and it stayed there.