Whistleblower Protections in SB 53: Strengths, Limitations, and Open Questions - Institute for Law & AI
SB 53 greatly improves the AI safety legislative landscape in California, but achieves only partial success in its whistleblowing protections. Its major success is that it significantly increases the number of safety-relevant issues that can be reported to authorities. In particular, employees can now blow the whistle when they believe frontier developers have not reported critical safety incidents or where large frontier developers have made materially false or misleading statements about, or are not complying with, their AI framework. Employees “responsible for assessing, managing, or addressing risk of critical safety incidents” will also be explicitly protected when blowing the whistle about catastrophic risks. SB 53 also requires large frontier developers to provide an anonymous internal reporting channel that a select group of employees can use to report catastrophic risks and that all employees can most likely1 use to report a violation of the law (including of SB 53 itself). L