Lab. Code, § 1107 · Chapter 5.1. Whistleblower Protections: Catastrophic Risks in AI Foundation Models
Lab. Code, § 1107
Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
For purposes of this chapter:
(a) (1) “Catastrophic risk” means a foreseeable and material risk that a frontier developer’s development, storage, use, or deployment of a foundation model will materially contribute to the death of, or serious injury to, more than 50 people or more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) in damage to, or loss of, property arising from a single incident involving a foundation model doing any of the following:
(A) Providing expert-level assistance in the creation or release of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon.
(B) Engaging in conduct with no meaningful human oversight, intervention, or supervision that is either a cyberattack or, if committed by a human, would constitute the crime of murder, assault, extortion, or theft, including theft by false pretense.
(C) Evading the control of its frontier developer or user.
(2) “Catastrophic risk” does not include a foreseeable and material risk from any of the following:
(A) Information that a foundation model outputs if the information is otherwise publicly accessible in a substantially similar form from a source other than a foundation model.
(B) Lawful activity of the federal government.
(C) Harm caused by a foundation model in combination with other software where the foundation model did not materially contribute to the harm.
(b) “Covered employee” means an employee responsible for assessing, managing, or addressing risk of critical safety incidents.
(c) “Critical safety incident” means any of the following:
(1) Unauthorized access to, modification of, or exfiltration of the model weights of a foundation model that results in death, bodily injury, or damage to, or loss of, property.
(2) Harm resulting from the materialization of a catastrophic risk.
(3) Loss of control of a foundation model causing death or bodily injury.
(4) A foundation model that uses deceptive techniques against the frontier developer to subvert the controls or monitoring of its frontier developer outside of the context of an evaluation designed to elicit this behavior and in a manner that demonstrates materially increased catastrophic risk.
(d) “Foundation model” has the meaning defined in Section 22757.11 of the Business and Professions Code.
(e) “Frontier developer” has the meaning defined in Section 22757.11 of the Business and Professions Code.
(f) “Large frontier developer” has the meaning defined in Section 22757.11 of the Business and Professions Code.
Notes and commentary — not statutory text
History
Added by Stats. 2025, Ch. 138, Sec. 4. (SB 53) Effective January 1, 2026.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
- Official file
- https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB§ionNum=1107.
- Text hash
- sha256 b538519838c52af4e44c625ba802c43dbdd73f8ae1706e19ccd8f5d0f688081b
- Composed by
- compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section
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Business and Professions Code
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