California Is Already Ground Zero for the AI Fight Washington Just Made Official
California spent most of 2024 trying to pass the most ambitious artificial intelligence safety law in the country. Governor Gavin Newsom killed it. Now Washington is getting into the game, and the people who want to replace California's would-be rulebook with something friendlier to Silicon Valley are moving fast.
Related: POLE FIRE IN EAST LOS ANGELES REPORTED JUST AFTER 1 A.M. · Your Car Got Towed in California: How to Get It Back, What It'll Cost, and When You Can Fight It
President Trump announced this week he's creating a dedicated AI Force inside the federal government and appointing an artificial intelligence czar to run it. The White House framing is classic Trump: bold title, vague mandate, maximum headline. But underneath the branding exercise is a real policy fight, and California is right in the middle of it.
The question isn't whether AI gets regulated. It's who does it, and how. And right now, nobody seems to agree on anything except that California shouldn't be the one calling the shots.
The Czar and the Golden State
Trump's AI announcements landed the same week California's own gubernatorial candidates were dodging the exact same questions Newsom spent months wrestling with. According to reporting this week, neither Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra nor Republican Steve Hilton would commit to the AI safety guidelines Newsom laid out Friday. That's a remarkable level of bipartisan squirming on a state issue that directly affects millions of Californians whose jobs, data, and daily routines are already being reshaped by the technology.
Newsom has been trying to thread a needle that may not exist. He vetoed Senate Bill 1047 last year, the sweeping AI safety measure that had tech companies screaming. His reasoning: California shouldn't kneecap the very industry that drives its economy. The federal government will sort it out. Well. The federal government is now sorting it out, and the early signals aren't exactly a win for safety advocates.
A key House Democrat said publicly this week that Congress needs to "beat California on AI." Not match it. Beat it. The competitive framing tells you everything about where this is heading.
Drones, Police, and the Fear Nobody's Naming Out Loud
While the political class argues about frameworks and czars, law enforcement is raising alarms that are a lot more concrete. A national police group warned this week that the rise of AI is generating serious new threats specifically tied to drones. That's not an abstract problem in California. The state has some of the busiest airspace in the country, a sprawling tech industry developing autonomous systems, and a law enforcement community that is simultaneously buying AI tools and warning about them.
Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego have all been expanding drone programs in their police departments. The warnings from this week's law enforcement report land differently when you're in a state where the technology is already operational and the regulatory guardrails are still being drawn on a whiteboard.
Hollywood Gets Its Tax Credit Fixed
Meanwhile, Newsom did sign something this week. His pen went to a bill addressing a technical catch in the $750 million tax credit the state offers the film and television industry. Hollywood accounting is famously creative, but apparently even it runs into problems when the law has a loophole that works against the people it was supposed to help. The fix is real, if unglamorous.
The timing is interesting. The entertainment industry is under pressure from every direction right now, streaming cancellations are relentless, studio deals are getting picked apart by attorneys general from multiple states over the Warner Bros. situation, and the economic case for keeping production in California keeps needing to be reinforced with fresh incentives. A $750 million tax credit is not nothing. Getting the fine print right matters.
See also: California Just Passed a Law to Stop Tech Companies From Selling Your Kids' Data · VEHICLE FIRE BREAKS OUT ON EAST WASHINGTON BLVD IN LOS ANGELES
The Influencer Crackdown Nobody Saw Coming
California also moved this week to crack down on influencers running undisclosed political ads. This one flew under the radar, but it shouldn't. The state is now requiring social media creators to disclose when they're being paid to push political content, a rule that targets a genuinely murky space where campaign money has been flowing quietly for years.
California has more influencers, more political money, and more social media infrastructure than any other state. If the law has teeth, it could reshape how political campaigns operate online, at least in the nation's most populous state. If it doesn't, it joins a long list of California tech regulations that look bold on paper and dissolve on contact with reality.
The Bigger Picture
Strip away the noise from Washington this week and here's what you're actually looking at: a federal government sprinting to claim authority over an industry that California has been quietly running, funding, and occasionally threatening to regulate for the better part of two decades. The AI czar announcement, the drone warnings, the congressional pushback on California standards, all of it points in the same direction.
Sacramento built the industry. Washington wants the wheel. And the people actually building the systems are watching both governments argue while shipping products faster than either one can read a briefing document.
Newsom's next move on AI guidelines will tell you more about the state's future than almost anything else on the docket. So far, the answer from every major political figure in California this week has been some version of "ask me later." Later has a way of arriving without warning.