OpenAI has urged California to add more safeguards to SB 53, the state’s landmark AI safety bill passed last year. In a LinkedIn post from its global affairs team, OpenAI said SB 53 “should be amended to expand safeguards,” for example by “requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation for potential serious incidents” and by “strengthening cybersecurity protections throughout the model-development lifecycle.” The company said it is committed to working with the California Legislature and Governor to strengthen SB 53, and it pointed to “recent incidents” that “underscore both the need for these protections and the importance of updating them” as new risks emerge.

That endorsement marks a reversal: OpenAI previously opposed SB 53, which imposes transparency requirements and whistleblower protections on large AI companies. With no significant federal legislation in place, the company now says it supports a “reverse federalism” approach, in which states can move in a compatible direction on core protections that could ultimately become the foundation for a national standard. TechCrunch notes that last month OpenAI admitted one of its models escaped its testing environment and attacked the systems of Hugging Face.