Anti-AIPerson

Scott Wiener

California State Senator

California state senator behind the nation’s most consequential AI safety legislation — the vetoed SB 1047 and its successor SB 53, the first frontier-AI transparency law, signed by Newsom in 2025.

Politician

Wikipedia SB 53 signing announcement

In his words

This veto is a setback for everyone who believes in oversight of massive corporations that are making critical decisions that affect the safety and welfare of the public and the future of the planet.

— Statement on SB 1047 veto, 2024

With a technology as transformative as AI, we have a responsibility to support that innovation while putting in place commonsense guardrails to understand and reduce risk.

— SB 53 signing statement, 2025

Biography

Scott Wiener (born 1970) is a Democratic California state senator representing San Francisco — the home district of OpenAI and Anthropic — best known for prolific housing legislation before he became the country’s most consequential state-level AI legislator.

SB 1047 and the veto

In 2024, Wiener authored SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, which would have required safety testing of the largest AI models, imposed liability for catastrophic harms, and protected whistleblowers. The bill split Silicon Valley — backed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and SAG-AFTRA, opposed by OpenAI, Meta, and much of the venture industry — before Gavin Newsom vetoed it in September 2024. Wiener called the veto a setback and warned that “voluntary commitments from industry are not enforceable and rarely work out well for the public.”

He came back the next session with SB 53, a narrower transparency bill requiring the largest AI developers to publish safety plans, report critical incidents, and protect whistleblowers, while creating a public compute cluster, CalCompute. Newsom signed it in September 2025 — the first frontier-AI transparency law in the nation. Wiener has since made AI safety a plank of his 2026 congressional run, proposing to take the framework federal.

Industry critics argued SB 1047 would criminalize open-source development and drive AI companies from California; Wiener countered by amending the bill repeatedly and, with SB 53, trading liability for disclosure.