# Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (SB 53)

- **Jurisdiction:** California (US-CA)
- **Type:** Law · **Status:** In force · **Binding:** yes
- **Issued by:** California Legislature / Governor
- **Proposed:** — · **Adopted:** 29 Sep 2025 · **Effective:** 1 Jan 2026
- **Obligations:** Frontier model safety, Transparency to users, Incident reporting, Penalties
- **Sectors:** All sectors
- **Penalties:** Civil penalty up to $1,000,000 per violation, enforced by the California Attorney General

## Summary
Requires developers of frontier models (trained with more than 10^26 operations) to publish transparency reports at release, and 'large frontier developers' (over $500M annual revenue) to publish and follow a frontier AI framework on catastrophic risk and send quarterly risk summaries to Cal OES. Critical safety incidents must be reported to Cal OES within 15 days (24 hours if there is imminent risk of death or serious injury), and whistleblowers are protected.

## Why it matters
The first binding US frontier-model safety law; it is the template copied by New York's RAISE Act and Illinois SB 315 and a prime target of federal preemption efforts.

## Source
[Office of the Governor of California](https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/09/29/governor-newsom-signs-sb-53-advancing-californias-world-leading-artificial-intelligence-industry/) · [secondary](https://www.mofo.com/pdf/resources/insights/251001-california-enacts-ai-safety-transparency-regulation-tfaia-sb-53)
Checked against the source on 4 Oct 2026. Also sets up a consortium to design the 'CalCompute' public compute cluster.

## Cite
Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (SB 53). California Legislature / Governor. Status: In force. wheresthe.ai, https://wheresthe.ai/rule/us-ca-sb53-tfaia-2025/ (verified 4 Oct 2026).

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Canonical page: https://wheresthe.ai/rule/us-ca-sb53-tfaia-2025/ · Not legal advice.