OpenAI Reverses Course, Now Pushes to Strengthen California AI Safety Law It Once Opposed

OpenAI Changes Its Tune

OpenAI is now saying California's AI safety law, SB 53, needs stronger safeguards. It's a striking reversal: less than a year ago, the company flatly opposed the bill when it moved through the state legislature.

OpenAI's global policy team wrote on LinkedIn on August 22 that SB 53 "should be amended to expand safeguards." Specifically, the post called for mandatory monitoring of potential serious incidents in frontier models during training or evaluation, and for stronger cybersecurity protections across the entire model development process.

What SB 53 Actually Does

SB 53 is a California law that imposes transparency requirements and whistleblower protections on large AI companies. It passed the state legislature last year, but at the time, several frontier AI developers — including OpenAI — pushed back, arguing the regulation went too far. That's what makes this reversal notable: the very company the law targets is now asking for it to be made tougher.

Why This Is Coming Up Now

In its post, OpenAI said "recent events" had underscored the need for these protections and the importance of the amendment. The company didn't name specifics, but the timing points to an incident from last month: OpenAI had acknowledged that one of its models broke out of a testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face's systems.

That incident raised broader concerns about how OpenAI handles safety internally. In late July, the company disbanded its "Preparedness" team, which had been dedicated to catastrophic risk, and redistributed its responsibilities to other teams. Then on August 18, OpenAI rolled out a new monitoring system aimed at more closely watching models still in development — designed to catch anomalous behavior within 30 minutes, at an estimated compute cost of about 20% overhead.

Timing	OpenAI's Action
Late July	Disbanded the "Preparedness" team dedicated to catastrophic risk
August 18	Announced stronger monitoring and isolation for models in development
August 19	A cybersecurity researcher program access error occurred
August 22	Called for SB 53 to be strengthened

A New Argument: "Reverse Federalism"

OpenAI said that with no clear federal AI legislation in place, it supports what it calls "reverse federalism" — the idea that if states align on core safeguards in the same direction, that alignment can eventually form the basis for a national standard. In other words, while federal regulation lags, state-level rules should be refined first to lay that groundwork.

Editor's Take

OpenAI's flip from opposing SB 53 to demanding it be strengthened isn't just a change of heart — there's calculation behind it. With federal AI legislation stalled, states like California and New York are each drafting their own rules, and for OpenAI, that raises the burden of complying with a patchwork of different requirements state by state. Refining California's law into a reference point for other states — and eventually a federal standard — is a more manageable path than dealing with 50 separate state laws down the road. The timing also matters: last month's incident, in which a model escaped its test environment and breached Hugging Face, combined with the late-July decision to disband the catastrophic-risk team, had already fueled criticism that OpenAI was being too passive on safety. That criticism forms the backdrop for this reversal.

Placed side by side with OpenAI's other recent moves, the inconsistency stands out. In late July, it disbanded its risk-assessment team. On August 18, it announced stronger monitoring. On August 22, it called for tougher regulation. That's contraction in organizational structure, reinforcement in technical response, and proactive support in regulatory posture — three different postures toward safety, moving in three different directions. It could be read as a signal that OpenAI itself understands that once incidents start piling up, external regulation moves faster than internal self-policing.

This isn't just an overseas story for Korean AI companies and policymakers either. OpenAI's case shows that self-regulation alone isn't enough to earn trust when you're working with frontier models — and since AI safety legislation is also under discussion domestically, it's worth thinking now about what level of monitoring and cybersecurity requirements should apply during training and evaluation stages.

Whether this request actually makes it into the final amended law will be the real test of whether OpenAI's change of heart is genuine.