On Thursday, Sen. Scott Weiner introduced artificial intelligence legislation (SB 1047) that would create a new division within the Department of Technology to certify AI models before they can be trained. Under the legislation, certification requirements would apply to AI models that exceed the performance benchmarks set by other AI models subject to certification. The bill would also establish a public AI compute cluster and prevent price discrimination for access to AI models.

“Wrapping up new AI models in red tape effectively cements the biggest tech players as winners of the AI race,” said Chamber of Progress Tech Policy Director Todd O’Boyle. “There are aspects of this bill that would encourage competition in the sector, like development of a public cloud computing cluster. But any progress under the legislation is wiped out by its incentives for new companies not to outperform old models.”

The text of SB 1047 is available here.

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