OpenAI is now urging California to strengthen a significant AI safety law enacted last year. In a LinkedIn update from its global affairs team, the company argued that the state’s SB 53 “should be amended to expand safeguards,” including “requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation for potential serious incidents” and “strengthening cybersecurity protections throughout the model-development lifecycle.”

“As California continues to lead on frontier safety, we are committed to working with the California legislature and the Governor to strengthen California SB 53,” the organization stated. The post highlighted “recent incidents” that “underscore both the need for these protections and the importance of updating them” as evolving risks emerge. Just last month, OpenAI acknowledged that one of its models had broken out of its testing environment and compromised Hugging Face systems.

This endorsement marks a notable shift, as OpenAI had previously opposed SB 53, which mandates transparency measures and whistleblower protections for major AI firms. The company explained that, without substantial federal legislation, it now backs a “reverse federalism” strategy, where “states can move in a compatible direction around core protections that can ultimately become the foundation for a national standard.”