Asked at Politico’s Sacramento summit last week whether California needs stronger artificial intelligence rules, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra answered: “Gosh, we hardly have any.”
He must have missed more than a few pages in the California Code, and some memos along the way. Far from a regulatory vacuum, California has piled on more AI-specific statutes than any other state in the country — dozens in the last two years alone. Mr. Becerra would also do well to remember that technology isn’t unregulated just because it’s “new.” AI is not a lawless frontier today, and it wasn’t when he was attorney general.
In April 2023, four federal agencies under the Biden Administration issued a joint statement declaring that existing laws against discrimination, fraud, and unfair practices “apply to the use of automated systems” just as they apply to everything else. An employer that uses an AI hiring tool in a way that violates anti-discrimination law can face liability under the same employment statutes that govern human hiring decisions.
State attorneys general have said the same. Connecticut’s William Tong issued a formal memorandum detailing how his state’s consumer protection, privacy, and anti-discrimination laws already apply to AI systems. Becerra’s successor, Rob Bonta, issued two legal advisories clarifying how California’s laws apply to AI.
The office Becerra once ran has already taken the opposite legal position to his claim.
Then there is the regulation California has written specifically for AI. In 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed nearly a score of AI bills. In 2025, additional legislation was enacted, including the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, companion chatbot safeguards, and an expanded transparency act. On the agency side, the California Privacy Protection Agency finalized sweeping regulations on automated decision-making technology last year.
According to Stanford’s AI Index, California has more AI-specific laws than any other state. Whatever one thinks of these laws individually, “hardly any” they are not.
And Sacramento looks to be nowhere near done. Two dozen more AI bills survived the Legislature’s appropriations committee gauntlet and await floor votes before the August 31 deadline. Few of them are coordinated and each bill adds another layer to a compliance thicket that large incumbents may be able to comply with but startups certainly cannot. The cumulative effect is a tax on building in California, and an invitation for the next great enterprise to incorporate or expand in Austin or Miami instead.
The same mindset is choking the physical foundations of the modern economy. Imperial County imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centers, and Monterey Park banned them outright. Data centers are where AI and everything else we do online actually happens; a moratorium on them is a moratorium on participating in the defining industry of the decade. It is no surprise that the country’s two wealthiest counties (Loudoun County, Virginia and Santa Clara County, California) are also the top two counties for data center densities. The economic benefits are also reaching places like Richland Parish, Louisiana and Grant County, Washington.
Lawmakers also have a chance to power the industry with clean, reliable energy. Assembly Bill 2647 would have exempted qualifying advanced reactors — including revolutionary small modular designs — from California’s 50-year-old moratorium on new nuclear plants. That bill was gutted before its first committee hearing and amended down to a study, continuing the “analysis paralysis” approach to technology in a state once defined by energy innovators and renegades.
So, while states like Utah and Tennessee surge forward to build the future of clean and abundant energy, California will stay on the sidelines and ignore the hundreds of millions of dollars spent over the past decade at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and elsewhere, producing cutting edge research on nuclear energy.
To summarize: California already has the nation’s thickest stack of AI-specific statutes, layered on top of general laws that attorneys general and federal agencies have confirmed already apply. It is poised to add two dozen more bills, all while its localities ban the infrastructure behind it and the state shelves the energy the next decade requires.
The question for California’s next governor, whoever it may be, is not whether the state has AI regulations. It has plenty. The question is whether California wants the jobs, the tax revenue, the innovation, and the technological leadership that comes from actually building 21st Century infrastructure.
The answer today looks like the state will stymie, regulate, and ban its way out of the industry that largely originated here. “Gosh, we hardly have any” couldn’t be further from the truth.
Bryce Chinault is the Director of State Government Affairs at the Abundance Institute, a mission-driven nonprofit focused on emerging technologies and economic growth.
Lance Christensen is the Vice President of Government Affairs at the California Policy Center, an educational nonprofit working for the prosperity of all Californians.