June 15, 2026 · Privacy · 23,150 words · 29 speakers · 159 segments
Thank you. All right, good afternoon. The Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protections, welcome to order. Welcome, everyone. Today, we have no consent calendar and no further items have been pulled from the agenda. As soon as we don't yet have a quorum, we'll begin as a subcommittee. And so we'll begin. First, we do have an author. Thank you. Assemblymember Bonta is here, and she's going to first present AB 1979.
Welcome, and proceed when you're ready. Thank you so much, Chair and committee members. First, I'd like to start by accepting the committee's amendments and thank the chair and committee staff for working with me on this bill. AB 1979 addresses the proliferation of artificial intelligence into health care in three very important ways. First, it requires health facilities to ensure that no clinical decisions are being made solely by an output from a clinical decision support system and that a licensed health care professional maintains the ability to exercise professional judgment in reviewing and approving that output. Second, it prohibits the use of automated decision systems in health care settings to guide or instruct an unlicensed individual to do any clinical function that would require a license. And third, it clarifies provisions of the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act to ensure that direct-to-consumer health care chatbots that seek to access individuals' medical records protect those records as otherwise required by law. This year we've seen major developers in consumer-facing AIs offer access to new tools to encourage individuals to connect their medical records and ask questions, purportedly to help them prepare for doctor's visits or get basic information. But they start to operate more like doctors and healthcare providers than they do like chatbots. We've also seen the rapid deployment of AI in health care and pending upheaval in our health care system from H.R.1, where access to a human provider will become even more scarce. Through even just the work requirements of H.R.1 alone, the California Health Care Foundation estimates that 1.1 million Medi-Cal enrollees will lose coverage in the next few years, many due simply to administrative barriers. We are also facing the loss of potentially billions of health care dollars due to changes in federal financing rules, which financially strains providers. These losses will increase pressures on providers and health facilities as fewer people come in with insurance and there are less resources to provide care. My concern is that there will be a temptation to turn to AI to fill the needs of patients at reduced costs and loss of quality care. Automated decision systems and clinical decision support systems have been present in health care for decades. They are tools that use algorithms, machine learning, and medical data to assist professionals with diagnostics treatment planning and patient monitoring I appreciate that and I think it is at the innovation and at the scale that we need to ensure that our healthcare industry can make sure to preserve and protect everyone However, it's increasingly clear to me that the use of AI developing clinical decision support systems is evolving faster than our laws and regulations can keep up. Protecting patient safety, keeping our professional workforce engaged in their work, and ensuring the integrity of health care will require us to not exclusively rely on AI to do things quicker and cheaper, not while we are also still trying to work out and understand the potential risks along with the benefits. This bill does that by ensuring that medical records are protected by direct-to-consumer health chatbots and that licensed health care professionals retain their ability to exercise professional judgment when reviewing the output of clinical decision support systems. Here to testify today are Dolores Trujillo, who is a NICU nurse with CNA board and a CNA board member and former president of the Board of Registered Nursing and a representative
from TechEquity. Welcome to you both, and you'll each have two minutes. Thank you. Good afternoon, chair and members. I'm Dolores Trujillo, board member of the California Nurses Association, the proud sponsor of AB 1979. I've been a registered nurse over 25 years. I'm also the immediate past president of the Board of Registered Nursing. As nurses, our profession is both an art and a science. We care for people at some of their most vulnerable moments in their lives. As bedside nurses, we don't just execute tasks. We utilize the nursing process. We assess patients using our expertise, our eyes, ears, and touch to detect the subtle nuances and changes of the human condition. A nurse's professional health care judgment simply cannot be automated by an algorithm. This bill keeps patient care in human hands by ensuring AI supports licensed professionals instead of replacing or controlling our clinical judgment. Today, AI systems are being used in areas of patient care that require clinical judgment, including patient assessment, clinical decision-making, patient education, and a handoff communication. For example, when I hand off a patient at the end of my shift, I'm not just passing along a summary of the patient's chart. I am using my clinical judgment to decide what matters most for the next nurse to know about my patient, like what's changed and what worries me. AI can't predict how an individual patient will respond to care. But if a hospital relies on AI to generate or determine that handoff communication, then an algorithm makes these judgment calls on care instead of the nurse. To be clear, this bill does not ban supportive technology. Nurses use technology every day. It simply reaffirms patient privacy laws and preserves the clear boundary around the care that California law reserves to licensed human health care professionals. Thank you, and I respectfully ask for your aye vote.
Thank you. Thank you. Before we proceed to your testimony, there's a magic moment in legislative committees when a quorum arrives that we don't miss because they can be fleeting unicorns running through the committee. So if you don't mind, we're going to pause for just a moment to establish a quorum. Committee assistant, would you please take the roll? Senators Cabaldon?
Here. Cabaldon here.
Jones I here Jones here Gonzalez McNerney Yeah McNerney here Ochoa Bogue Bogue Padilla Padilla here Reyes Here Reyes here Umberg Wiener
All right. A quorum is present. Please proceed. It's great to be part of that magic moment.
Good afternoon, chair and members. My name is Sam Gordon, chief advocacy officer at TechEquity, and I'm here to speak in support of AB1979. I think it's becoming clearer and clearer to all of us that the way employers design and deploy technology shapes not only who has power and agency at work, but whose expertise is valued and who is accountable when things go wrong. AI systems, as we all know, are now being introduced across industries to automate decisions, streamline workflows, and cut costs. And healthcare is obviously not an exception. We believe that AB 1979 is a really important set of guardrails because it makes clear that AI systems cannot be deployed in a way that shifts clinical authority away from licensed professionals and into things like software systems or vendor assumptions about what might happen in that hospital or employer workflows. And importantly, the bill doesn't reject innovation. I think it does the thing that all of us have said we want, which is it puts people next to technology and it allows it to inform a human with expertise and their own judgment and allows it to be supportive but not determinative. And that allows that same thing that patients want where your doctor or your nurse or your health care provider is still in the room, still making the decision, but benefiting from the patterns and analysis that technology can do. And I think that this is a win-win for patients, for workers, and for everything that we see that shows up in poll after poll, that the public wants health care where their doctors, their health care professionals, their nurses are still in the room. And so for those reasons, we would just ask that patient care doesn't become another site where automation is used to de-skill work, cut corners, and sort of downgrade the patient experience. And so we want to keep the promise of technology pointed in the right direction. We believe that AB 1979 does that. And for these reasons, we respectfully ask for your aye vote.
All right. Thank you. Does anyone else wish to provide testimony in support of the legislation? We invite you to come forward and say your name, your affiliation if you have one, and your position on the bill.
Mr. Chair, members, Sarah Flock, California Federation of Labor Unions in strong support.
Holly Kahn with California Nurses Association in support.
Jacqueline Montano, ICU nurse 20 years in strong support.
Shane Gussman on behalf of the Teamsters and the engineers and scientists of California in support.
Lynn Warmerdam, 37-year RN, most of them at Doctors Medical Center in Modesto, and strong support.
Good afternoon, Chair members. J.P. Hanna with the California Nurses Association. Sponsor the bill.
Thank you. All right. Seeing no one else, is there anyone that wishes to provide testimony, the lead testimony opposition to AB 1979? Welcome, and you will also have two minutes.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Mark Farouk on behalf of the California Hospital Association. I do want to begin by appreciating the committee amendments for moving the bill in the right direction. However, we do remain opposed unless amended. Our remaining issues are with Section 3 of the bill for the other sections our members already comply with those requirements California hospitals share the author core principle A licensed professional not software must hold final authority over patient care We support requiring a clinician in the loop on any decision informed by an AI tool. We start from agreement because hospitals are already deploying these tools to protect patients with clinicians exercising judgment on every output. Early warning systems flag deterioration hours before overt clinical signs, prompting a nurse or physician to assess and act. The tool prioritizes. It does not diagnose. AI-assisted imaging triage flags suspected strokes and alerts the stroke team where minutes saved translates directly into preserved brain function. AI is improving cancer screening primarily by acting as a second reader that flags suspicious regions for radiologists and pathologists
rather than replacing their judgment. Large trials have shown that AI-assisted reading can increase cancer detection rates while reducing radiologists' workload, with a clinician retaining final diagnostic authority. California's hospitals and health systems believe strongly in the responsible deployment of AI that is built on testing, training, compliance review, and ongoing monitoring to catch drift or bias. Our remaining issues in 1979 are not about the concept of maintaining professional judgment, but rather we remain concerned about the burden to ensure that a licensed professional is utilizing their judgment, given the penalties associated with the bill, and also remaining prohibitions that we are concerned may disrupt medical education and training. For those reasons, we remain opposed unless amended. Thank you. Thank you. Does anyone else wish to register their opposition to AB 1979? So please come forward to the stand-up mic and share with us your name, your affiliation if you have one, and your position on the bill. Thank you, Mr. Chair and Senators. MJ Diaz in respectful opposition to the bill. Thank you, Chair and members. Ryan Perini on behalf of ATA Action in respectful position. Thank you. Good afternoon. George Sorris of the California Medical Association, respectfully opposed unless amended. Align my comments with my colleague from CHA. Thank you. Alexis Rodriguez of the California Chamber of Commerce, also in an opposed unless amended position. Thank you. Annalee Augustine with the Civil Justice Association of California, also respectfully opposed unless amended. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members. Robert Boykin with TechNet, in a respectful opposed unless amended position. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jack Allen with Sloan Higgins-Jensen on behalf of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, also opposed to less amended. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank the author and our staff for the continued engagement. Appreciate it. Chair and committee members, Gilbert Larrie here with BioCom, also with an opposed, unless amended position. Thanks. Apologies. M.J. Diaz on behalf of Kaiser Permanente in respectful opposition. Lawrence Gaten with the California Dental Association with a respectfully opposed submitted position. Thank you. All right. Thanks to everyone who's provided testimony. Let's turn that to the committee for any questions or comments. Senator McNerney. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the author for bringing this forward. This is parallel to my SB 947, the no robo bosses, basically which has calls for a human being in the loop on decisions of firing and disciplining people. And this is similar. You want to have a human being in the loop. My reading of the hospitals association objection was that it would be... that you wouldn't be able to use ADSs at all, but that isn't what you're trying to accomplish. You want a human being to be involved in decision-making, and I think that's perfectly appropriate. So I'm going to be supporting this bill. Thank you. Senator Gomez-Reyes. Thank you. We also saw a similar bill for mental health professionals also being in the loop. It seems that there's agreement. I heard hearing from the Hospital Association, there's agreement that there should be a clinician, a nurse making in the loop to make sure that whatever decision is made, there is a human being that's involved in the process. And who better than CNA to tell us what they can do and how they would do it? I think that the only thing that I would say is that With the objections being posed by the hospitals, it seems that that is a discussion that continues at this point. Is that right? That is fair, absolutely. And you know me, Senator, that I will continue to work with the opposition to make sure that we hit a middle ground. I think the opposition's examples are actually examples that I think where there is a secondary reading, where we, with the Privacy Committee's amendments, are moving more towards specificity in terms of the scope of the bill, where we still are able to maintain professional judgment and the ability for a human to remain in the loop around decision-making. What this bill seeks to do is ensure that there isn't any sole output from a clinical decision-making AI tool, automated tool that would exclude that professional from being involved in the decision-making. I think it's clear that AI is evolving much faster than we can legislate, and I think these steps are important. And I think that as we move forward, making sure here that the stakeholders that are involved are involved in the legislation. But the final part of this, which is the most important part of your bill, is to make sure that there is a human being, that there is a clinician that's going to be involved in the loop to look at whatever it is that is being provided by AI to make that final decision. Thank you. Thank you. Further questions or comments? I'm also going to support the bill today for the reasons that the authors outlined, but also a couple of others. This domain is an interesting one. Like, health care is a domain for this ongoing debate that we're having about the use of AI and automated decision systems in various other domains. It's an interesting one because I'm one of the reasons why I'm excited about the bill is that this is the area with one of the greatest levels of promise around AI and automated decision systems. And I don't mean that in a sense that it's like ripe for technological change, although there are aspects of that. But unlike many other sectors of the economy where we're really, really worried about the impacts on workers and on safety and other things from the technologies, healthcare happens and hospitals and medical practices and dental practices happen to be an area with lots and lots of overlapping guardrails for use of 2026 overused term. There's a lot of institutions in the mix that don't exist on the factory warehouse or on a construction site or whatever whether that state licensure of the facility individual licensure of virtually all of the clinicians and training and standards and norms that they have gone through professional organization decreditation There's so many things that are there to design, to assure that before just collect unions, they're quite present in many of the health care space. So there are already a lot of overlapping institutions that are there to assure, hey, we can't get this wrong. And also consumers, quote-unquote, in health care, unlike many other domains, are highly motivated to care about the outcomes. And the outcomes are often pretty measurable. Whether I've survived or not, whether that rash is gone, whether my heart works again, they're more measurable than they might be in other domains. So part of the reason why I think this is important here is that this is an area, health care is an area where we actually have a chance to get this right. not just ban it outright and also not just embrace it as though it's the second coming without thinking through how it's going to work, but it's an area where the various stakeholders and consumers and others have an opportunity to engage and test and to try. And I appreciate the bill has been crafted in a way that does that. It doesn't even insist that every single decision has to have a human making it. So it's not that a human must be in the loop, but that, number one, that when a human is making their decision using their professional judgment subject to their licensure, that that is not being overridden. And also laying out the systems by which the whole system itself has to be under their control. I appreciate the work that's been done on this by the author of the amendments. I think I go quite far in trying to make this workable. Of course, I'm very interested to continue to hear from many of the opponents about the details of Section 3 but I think the authors are taking a measured approach here to try to make sure that the overall interest of policy can, in conjunction with accreditation, licensure, collective bargaining, and everything else, can help this sector lead to better outcomes for workers, for the institutions themselves, and, of course, at the end of the day and the beginning of the day for patients and clients. And so with that, if there's no further discussion, is there a motion on this bill? Move the bill. Oh, did you have a comment, Senator Ochoa? Oh, I just, I didn't know you were going to give an opportunity to speak, but I can quickly make a statement. Sure. Please do. If you're allowing. Yes, please do. Requesting you. Sorry, it just came back, so I didn't know where we were. I was at a different committee. So, curious, it's my understanding that the California law already prohibits the delegation of practicing medicine to AI. because the licensed physician must be the actual care provider. Is that correct? I think that there is language in guidelines that indicate that that is the case. I think that there is confusion about whether AI should be treated as a provider, whether it is a product, and I think that the legislation and the law that we move forward with helps to clarify that. So I think we are in a greenfield space when it comes to AI and the deployment of AI, and this legislation seeks to at least prepare some ability for us to have clarity around that. Okay. Thank you, Matt. All right. Was there a motion I heard, Senator Reyes? Okay. All right, then. Senator Barmonta, would you like to close? Thank you Chair 93 of Americans have a concern about AI and healthcare and the majority say that AI makes them trust healthcare less At the same time some of the platform providers of their AI systems indicate that in a given week you can have up to 230,000 individual queries related to healthcare. So we are at the point where people don't necessarily trust it, But people are using it at an exponential rate. And also we have a situation where, you know, given 1,357 medical devices using AI right now and authorized by the FDA, 60 FDA authorized medical devices using AI were linked to about 182 product recalls. So there is a lot of opportunity for growth. We know that our, I've heard by their own admission that AI developers are developing and reiterating and iterating while also deploying, which creates a situation where we have unstable products out there that have, to the chair's point, life and death consequences for the people of California. So I think it's very important that we provide an opportunity for us to be able to tackle this issue and do provide some regulation so that we have something to be able to hold on to, both in the area of administration of that within a clinical setting and within the AI chatbot world. So with that, I appreciate the conversation that we've had on this, and I respectfully request an aye vote. All right, then we'll proceed to the vote on AB 1979. Committee assistant, would you please call the roll? The motion is due pass as amended to health. Senators Cobaldin? Aye. Cobaldin, aye. Jones? Gonzalez? Aye. Gonzalez, aye. McNerney? Aye. McNerney, aye. Ochoa Bogue? Padilla? Aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes? Aye. Reyes, aye. Umberg? Wiener? Aye. Wiener, aye. Ochoa Bogue, no. Ochoa Bogue, no. It's 6-1 on call. All right. The vote is 6-1. We'll place that measure on call. Next we'll turn to AB 2624, also by Assemblymember Bonta. Please present when you're ready. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members. AB 2624, the Safe at Work Act, expands California's Safe at Home program to include immigrant service providers, their employees, and volunteers. This program allows for participants to use a substitute address designated by the Secretary of State keeping their home, work, and school addresses out of the public record while still allowing them to safely receive mail and legal documents through the state. This gives them a critical layer of protection and privacy in an environment where their personal safety is increasingly at risk. We know individuals who provide vital immigrant support services, including legal aid, humanitarian relief, case management, and advocacy are facing targeted harassment. You will hear that from those who will testify shortly. This is not hypothetical. Advocates and workers are receiving death threats, being targeted at courthouses, and facing coordinated online doxing campaigns, even facing this vitriol at their homes. These threats have risen sharply in 2025 and are expected to continue due to the current political climate. At the same time, personal information is increasingly easy to access. Data brokers collect and sell information from public records, and social media can allow individuals to piece together identifying details. This makes it easier for bad actors to threaten or harm those who are simply doing their jobs Advocates in California report doxing of staff and volunteers at immigration legal aid organizations coordinated death threats against service providers anti-immigrant vigilante activity directed at organizations by name and address. This is the context we are facing. So organizations serving LGBTQ plus and immigrant communities commonly hide their locations, staff information, and other details to keep their teams and their people they serve safe. Currently, California state law does not provide adequate protections for their sensitive data and information, leaving immigrant advocates and service providers vulnerable. And generally, privacy laws act after the harm has already occurred, and were not designed to address the coordinated online politically motivated harassment and hurt that we are now seeing. This bill protects sensitive personal data in a way that empowers people to do their jobs safely and confidently under the Secretary of State's Safe at Home program before harm occurs. Since its inception nearly 30 years ago, the Safe at Home program has protected thousands of victims of stalking and domestic violence, along with reproductive health care workers. The Confidentiality Protection Program provides participants with a substitute address to shield their real address, requires the Secretary of State to act as an intermediary for mail and legal services, forwarding documents within a short time frame. Keeps individual participants home, work, and school address confidential and protects them from public disclosure. No one should face harassment or threats at their own home or at work. This legislation helps prevent individuals with malicious intent from targeting service providers where they live or work, reducing the risk of escalation to violence, bodily harm, or worse. At its core, this is about safeguarding the privacy, dignity, and the safety of immigrant service workers and their families. California has already recognized in the context of reproductive health care providers that when program participants are targeted because of their work, the state has a responsibility to provide proactive protections. Immigrant service providers now face similar threats, and they deserve those same safeguards under the Safe at Home program. Without these safeguards, immigrant service providers may feel unsafe doing their jobs, which directly impacts families who depend on them for essential support. I would like to note that there are currently 8,000 people in the Safe at Home program. Under the Secretary of State, there has not been one indication of there being anything unconstitutional about the Safe at Home program, and this bill is similarly straightforward. It allows us to be able to extend the safe at home program to those people who are serving our very vulnerable communities and who find themselves in unsafe conditions. Here to testify today, and I want to thank you for your testimony, are Ruth Sosa Martinez from the Senior Policy Strategist with Power California Action, and Monica Madrid, Policy Advocate with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA. Both witnesses are also economic justice fellows from the Solis Policy Institute with the Women's Foundation of California, and will tell very compelling stories that will demonstrate why this bill is all too necessary. Welcome to you both, and you'll each have two minutes. Good afternoon, Chair and members. My name is Monica Madrid, and I'm a state policy advocate with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Chirla, and an Immigrant Economic Justice Fellow with the Solis Policy Institute within the Women's Foundation of California. I'm here today as a proud co-sponsor of AB 2624 by Assemblymember Bonta. AB 2624 expands California Safe at Home program to include immigrant-serving organizations and workers who face growing threats based on the communities that we serve. For organizations like CHIRLA, these threats are not theoretical. We have experienced incidents where individuals followed our staff into the Sacramento and San Bernardino offices because of their work supporting immigration communities. At our Los Angeles office, our headquarters, individuals have followed staff into the building and attempted to access restricted areas. Our intake lines have received threatening messages and individuals have actually shown up to the house of family members of our executive director looking for our executive director. These instances are occurring during a time of heightened hostility toward immigrants and organizations that serve them. As immigrant-serving organizations continue providing legal services, know your rights education, rapid response, staff are increasingly concerned that their personal information can be used to harass, intimidate, and harm them or their families. AB 2624 provides a practical and proven solution by allowing eligible individuals to participate in the Safe at Home program. The bill helps protect home address information while preserving public accountability. No one should have to choose between serving their community and protecting their family's safety. California has long recognized that certain individuals face elevated risks because of their work, and immigrant-serving organizations deserve access to these same protections. Thank you and we respectfully ask for your aye vote. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Ruth Sosa-Martinez, Solis Policy Institute fellow, co-sponsors of the bill, but I'm also the senior policy strategist at Power California Action. Power California Action serves young people and working families, and we have very deep roots in immigrant communities across the state. As the daughter of immigrants and someone who works really closely with other organizations, many of us have become increasingly concerned about the safety of our volunteers, our staff, and our community leaders. For us, these concerns aren't hypothetical. In the past year, our own board members have been targeted, doxxed, and stalked for the work that they do in their communities. We've had to become more intentional about how we protect the privacy and security of our staff, of the youth leaders that we train and work with, and even of the staff of other partner organizations that we work with, which diverts time, energy, and resources away from the core work that we are doing. And we're not the only organizations who are taking these precautionary measures. We're also concerned about the message that this sends to the next generation of immigration advocates, attorneys, and organizers, service providers. We work closely with a lot of young people who either want to pursue careers or are already pursuing careers in public service and community advocacy, but when they see that people in that field of work are getting harassed, targeted, and doxed online simply for helping their communities access critical resources and exercising their rights, these careers start to feel a lot more unsafe and unattainable for our folks. Privacy isn't an abstract issue, and for many people, it's what allows them to continue showing up for their communities without having to worry that their families might become targets. It's also what allows immigrant communities to feel safe seeking those resources. And for these reasons we respectfully ask your aye vote on 26 Thanks Thank you both very much Thanks for being here and thanks for your testimony Are there any other members of the public wishing to register your support for this bill If so, please come to the stand-up mic and share with us your name, your affiliation if you have one, and your position on the bill. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members. Usama Muqaddam with the California Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations in support. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members. Karen Stout here on behalf of Unidos U.S. Empower California Action, both in support. Thank you. Good afternoon, Jessica Hay with AFSCME California in support. Hi, Chloe Hermosillo with the California Immigrant Policy Center here in support, also providing support on behalf of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center and the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members. Cleo Bluthenthal with the California Community Foundation in support. Thank you. Are there any witnesses in opposition? Or anyone that wishes to register opposition to the bill? Let's return it then to the committee for questions or comments. Senator Gomez Reyes. Thank you for bringing this bill. I think, Monica, one of you said that no one should have to choose between serving their community and staying safe. And I think this is one step that we can take to make sure that those who do serve the community, this isn't supposed to be a life and death job. But because of the sentiment against immigrants now, it has become that. and the harassment is not something that any of you should have to live with. I think this is an appropriate bill to provide some protection. Thank you for that. Senator Gonzalez. I, too, just want to say thank you to the Assemblymember and the witnesses as well. I couldn't agree more with Senator Reyes about what is going on now in the state of our affairs with the immigrant population and those that are advocating so many day in, day out. I've just talked to Angelica from Chirla as well, and I literally have to tell her and remind her that we're here for her, as well as many of you, because of just so much that you're putting your name, you're putting yourself out there, getting doxed, and it's just not right. We have to take a stand. This is one way to be able to cover you, and I'm appreciative of that. That's why I signed up as a co-author, so thank you again. Senator Ochoa-Bogue. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So you appreciate the effort that you're bringing forth. I have actually supported previous extensions of the Safe at Home program in different sectors. But I do have an issue with this particular one with regards to the private right of action that you have on here. And I think this, if I'm not mistaken and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the previous ones that we've extended have this particular component in there. And that's one of the reasons why I can't support the bill today. But I do appreciate the efforts, and I do believe, just for the record, that no one should be harassed. There shouldn't be that component. I've actually carried bills that had to do with right now we had a bill that we have not been able to pass, and it gets killed every single year that we introduced it with regards to removing personal addresses for people that do recall elections The signature and their address goes public and we can get that information off on there from public record We can't get a bill to go through here, so I am throwing that out there. But with regards to this, I completely agree with you. There shouldn't be anyone harassing anyone, but the only concern I have is this particular private right of action on that end. If you'd like to make any comments on that, I'd appreciate that. Thank you for the concern, Senator. This bill does not contain a private right of action, or if it does, I would love to help clarify that. It's actually the same language that was pulled from AB 82, which does not have that private right of action. Yeah. Senator, we're on file item number three. This is 2624, AB 2624. I will say that there are penalties that are applied, and it mirrors the language that is in AB82. Penalties for exposing misconduct by itself. There's no language about. So it imposes penalties that are tied to intent to harm or threaten, applying only when there is a posting that is done with proven intent to cause harm or threats or someone ignores a valid safety-based removal request that is backed with evidence. and I will also share to our senators here that this legislation will go through judiciary committee as well as public safety are there any other questions or comments about this I think the private right is contained in the existing law that this program expands and copies, essentially, so it is there, but it is, and this, as the author has noted, that particular issue is principally the jurisdiction, or it is the jurisdiction of the Committee on Judiciary, which will be the Committee of Next Hearing if it passes today. All right, it's been moved by Senator Padilla. Would you like to close? Thank you. I appreciate the interaction that we've had on this piece of legislation. Again, I want to thank our folks, Ruth Sosa-Martinez and Monica Madrid, who have come to testify. Yet again, I think this is your fourth hearing in combination on this piece of legislation. At the end of the day, it's a very straightforward request to ensure that we provide safety for our immigration support providers now when they need us the most to be able to do that, and extends a very non program that has existed for nearly 30 years to those who provide services to our most vulnerable communities in this moment right now and I respectfully request your aye vote All right we have a motion by Senator Padilla on AB 2103 Sorry, I've already turned the page. On AB 2624 by Assemblymember Ramonta. Committee system, would you please call the roll? The motion is due pass to Judiciary. Senators Cabaldon? Aye. Cabaldon, aye. Jones? Gonzalez? McNarney? Aye. McNerney, aye. Ochoa Bogue? No. Ochoa Bogue, no. Padilla? Aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes? Umberg? Wiener? Aye. Wiener, aye. That's 4-1 on call. And the vote is 4-1 and we'll place that measure on call. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next we will proceed to AB 2103 by Assemblymember Irwin. Welcome and please proceed when you're ready. Thank you. Well, good evening, Chair and members. I'm pleased to present AB 2103. AB 2103 codifies Engage California as a permanent statewide public engagement program. For too long, California has relied primarily on traditional forms of civic participation, such as public comment, hearings, and written submissions. And while those tools are important, let's face it, the majority of Californians don't show up to city council meetings or Senate privacy hearings. Engage California builds on a model that expands access to public participation by meeting people where they are. This program creates a structured process for Californians to receive balanced information, deliberate with one another, and provide input that can be translated into actionable recommendations for policymakers. Here to testify alongside me is Jarrett Crumray, the lead product manager at the California Office of Data and Innovation. Welcome, and you'll have two minutes. Thank you, Chair. Good evening, Chair. Good evening, committee members. My name is Jarrett Kremry. I am the lead product manager for the California Office of Data and Innovation and the program director for the Engage California program. The Office of Data and Innovation was established in 2023 as a standalone department to improve service delivery for the people of California through data, research, human-centered design. It is the home of the Engage California program. The goal of the Engage California program is to give residents a way to have meaningful dialogue with government, to shape policies and programs for topics that are important to them. Our efforts to date have focused on topics of urgency and importance for Californians, including the L.A. Fires recovery and rebuild efforts, state worker efficiencies to improve state services, and now around what government should do about the economic impacts of AI. This is all part of California's work to introduce the practice of deliberative democracy as another tool for government to engage with its constituents. This is a movement that has been decades in the making and demonstrated effectively in places like Colorado, Paris, and Taiwan. The Engage California program brings this work to California at a scale fit for our great state. I'm happy to answer any technical questions you have here today. Thank you. All right, let's turn next. Are there anyone wishing to register their support for AB20103? Please provide your name, affiliation, if any, but not your lobbying firm. We're not here for advertisements. And your position on the bill. Okay. Not to advertise, but yeah, Robert Boykin with TechNet in support. Thank you. Charles Contrabecki, Internstone Advocacy, on behalf of Elevate California in support. All right. Are there any witnesses in opposition? Or does anyone wish to register their opposition? Seeing none, we'll turn to the committee for any questions or comments. Senator McNerney. Well, thanks, Chair. And I thank the author for bringing this forward. I understand this authorizes the legislature to fund the program but doesn't provide funding. The funding needs to be approved by the legislature. Would there be other sources of funding that it could accept? I don't know if you have the answer to that. I'm here to talk technical aspects of the program today, but can certainly work with the Assemblymember to get back to you. So, I mean, if a philanthropist wants to fund this, then that would probably be acceptable. That's my question. Well, we will make sure that that is addressed in the bill. That certainly makes sense because it is a program very important right now that Californians are able to voice their opinions on these big issues. So many people feel disconnected from government. Again, city council meetings and letters to the editor are used by very few folks, so this is a way to engage many more Californians and let them inform the policies that we're looking at in this legislature. Certainly, I agree with that, and it's good to see TechNet in support. Yeah, I was so not used to being in support that he came up in opposition. All right, and I will yield back to the chair. All right. Thank you. Senator Ochoa-Bogue. Hi. Thank you, Senator Cobaldon. So the question is, I appreciate the intent of the bill with trying to get more information into the public sphere. Let me make sure I'm in the right bill. I was in the right bill, by the way, the previous one. Really, really appreciate that. I think where I have concern is right now we have here that it would authorize the Speaker of the Assembly, the President Pro Tem, Secretary of Governmental Operations to select the deliberation topics, and then requires the Department of – or within the Office of Data Innovation to recruit participants, administer deliberative engagement platforms, coordinate with state agencies, report on program activities, and so forth. I think the concern I have is trying to bring a little bit of balance so it's not constructed in a way that becomes very party. I'm looking into more of a balanced approach as far as the topics and be able to address those issues that you have right here. Because right now, in the case as a super minority Republican in a state legislature that is a super majority Democrat, when we're looking at these folks who are going to be deciding and having decision as to recruiting the participants the deliberation of topics and so forth it going to be heavy on one perspective and it won have a balanced perspective Have you considered, have there been any consideration of how to make it a little bit more bipartisan in order to have a more objective approach in addressing some of these issues and deliberation of issues and including the participants out here? We can certainly look at that, but I think if you look at the issues that Engage California has explored so far, it's issues like the California fires and AI, and those are very nonpartisan issues. So we would certainly hope that that continues. And if we can, we'll certainly look at a way to make sure that that is codified. It's just, you know, so I was looking at my ideal world. You know, you'd have the vice chair of whatever super minority party would be in place in both houses. It would be a great balance, I think, in trying to deliberate and have conversations on that. Just in my perspective on there, I always try to look to see how we can do things a little bit more, especially when you're looking at codifying an engaged California program that establishes a framework for a structured public deliberated intended to facilitate dialogue between Californians and state government regarding. And I'll give you an example. I sent out an email on a weekly basis when we're having committees, and I don't give my personal opinion. I just let them know, here's the bills that are coming up in committee. These are the authors, and this is a couple of questions. and here's a link to the actual bill language so that you can have access to it. So I try to be as nonpartisan as I can in delivering information to my constituents, and I think it would be great to see that if we're going to be engaging in such a place, we'd make it nonpartisan, as neutral as possible, or balanced. Well, like I said, I think the topics that have been picked by the governor's office so far have been topics that are important to the community, whether they are Republican or Democrat. But maybe you can let us know what is the process that you are currently going through. Absolutely. So first of all, I appreciate the acknowledgement in terms of transparency being a core principle of our program. And by design, any engagement that we embark upon, our intent is to reach all members of the audience, regardless of demographic, political affiliation, et cetera. To date, as Assemblymember Erwin had mentioned, the focus has largely been on issues that are of timely importance to Californians in concert with our partners across the state, with the governor's office directly, for instance, with the state employees engagement, to work with state employees to understand ways that we as California residents and as workers can improve our efficiencies and operations within the state to deliver better services. Working with all department heads and secretaries and undersecretaries and their staff to reach every department team through their channels and mediums. And the last thing I would say in terms of the output of all of our engagements, going back to our transparency principle, that we publish all results of our findings. That includes the raw data, anonymized data from participants, so that any third parties can independently analyze our results and our methodology on their own. That includes academia, civil society, and different political affiliations. I absolutely appreciate that as well And just as a further clarification just for the record and for the public when we talking about department heads and agencies many of them are appointed by our governor So it also gives one perspective usually on that end. So I appreciate the effort to try to be as transparent. But in a state where we have literally everything dominated for the past 16 years, whether it's departments, agencies, the legislature, the governor. I'm trying to find, you know, where we're codifying places. And it would be the same way for me if it were reversed, if the Republicans had a supermajority, is to bring that balanced perspective so that we're not working constantly in silos and echo chambers. And that's, I think, the biggest. And that's why my priority is to ensure that we have a different voice that comes in on that to bring a little more balance and where we avoid those silos and echo chambers. Thank you. Senator Gomez-Reyes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. When I see something that is going to provide civic engagement, public participation, this is what we want. Working in silos, that's us. We're here. We're here at Sacramento, and oftentimes, unless we have those town hall meetings or unless we send out the letters to our constituents, we're not going to hear from them. I think this is a great idea to be able to get people involved, and I would hope that everybody would be involved. And just as here, if the majority feel one way, the minority will always speak, and sometimes the minority opinion is something that may sway the majority in making a decision or to add an amendment to make sure that we do something that includes that voice. But I think public participation and providing information, and I want to have a specific question, is this nonpartisan? Well, that is absolutely the intent. And, again, this is codifying a program that's been going on for the last year or so. And what we have seen so far is that we have gotten a lot of good information from a very broad sector of our constituents. And that's something, again, I'll repeat, that we don't necessarily see here in the hearing room. Thank you. With that, I would move the bill. All right. Thank you. It's a move by Senator Reyes. Are there other questions or comments? I'm ecstatic to see this bill. Well, Facebook, because it tracks my every move over many, many years, reminded me this morning that on this day, 10 years ago, I was traveling, giving speeches in Korea, England, Spain, and Qatar on this very topic of what is the present and the future of civic engagement. What you mentioned at the outset of the hearing that, you know, most of California is not here attending our privacy committee hearings. Of course, if you really think about it, well, what if they did? Like, what if we got what we wanted and everybody showed up at all the hearings that we announced? Like, how would we even do business? Like, how would we actually take their feedback and engage them and do anything with them? These are systems that are sort of – the systems we've set up since the 50s and the 60s are designed to not draw people to participate. We can only we say we want as many people as possible but we can really only handle a very small set So we need to be experimenting and designing new things And so I really appreciate this program It been funded in the budget subcommittee It also had rave reviews We've been supporting ODI for this purpose. The topics are nonpartisan. The process is nonpartisan. A senator from any party is eligible to be elected by her or his colleagues to be the president pro tem. That's not a partisan role. and really these are not the point here is not a process that just picks the most interesting topics the most interesting issues because what Engage California is about is about figuring out how to how to evolve and improve our democracy itself and so not every topic there may be topics that are really interesting but not suited for this topics that are really important but not suited for this and so that's why the process that's outlined here is designed to to pick things, pick topic areas that, yes, we will learn and make better decisions from, but also that will give us insight about what will excite people to participate, what will make them feel and for real be more effective at that participation as well. So I think this is a fantastic program. It does need to be in statute, and it has been achieving budget support in the last couple of rounds. So far, the legislature and governor have been committed to it, and thank the author for carrying this. All right, so we have a motion from Senator Gomez-Reyes. and committee assistant, please call the roll. Did she close? Oh, sorry. That sounded like my hair, so thank you. Thank you. Then let's call the roll. I think the motion is due pass to appropriation. Senators Cabaldon? Aye. Cabaldon, aye. Jones? Gonzalez? Aye. Gonzalez, aye. McNerney? Aye. McNerney, aye. Ochovo? Not that. Padilla? Aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes? Aye. Reyes, aye. Umber? Wiener? Aye. Wiener, aye. 6-0 on call. The vote is 6-0. We'll place that bill on call. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next, I see Assemblymember Lowenthal is here. So we're going to begin. He has a couple bills. We'll begin with AB2. Welcome, Assemblymember Lowenthal, and begin whenever you're ready. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, members. Thank you, senators. I'm so pleased to present AB2, which will hold social media platforms accountable for the harm they cause children and teenagers. This legislation would impose financial responsibility by setting appropriate damage levels on large social media companies if and only if their negligence has been proven in court. For those of you who are parents, when your child puts on a bicycle helmet, when they get in a car seat, when they play with toys, aren't you confident that the safety standards not only come first but have been rigorously tested and transparently reported on by manufacturers? I am because I know that duty of care standards are bedrock in the product development cycle of everything our kids use. Everything that is except for the one product they use the most. the product that they're spending on average five hours a day on the one product that is empirically having disastrous impacts on their mental health and development that product is social media this is why AB2 is so critically important it holds social media platforms to the same legal accountability standards as any other company for harm they cause to children and teenagers and assigns appropriate damage levels for the harm that's caused. The bill sets damage levels that can only be meted out if a court imposes financial responsibility on large social media companies when their own negligence has been proven. This bill is not new. It's my third year working on this policy. and I find myself compelled as a parent and as a legislator to continue to work on this piece of legislation because we are truly struggling to hold the platforms accountable through regulation and the platforms are still not taking this problem seriously. Children's parents, researchers, doctors, regulators, and lawmakers alike have clearly delineated the problem. Social media platforms are causing untold harm to our kids. and what we have known to be true has been reinforced by numerous studies and exposed internal documents from the platforms themselves. These children have been exposed to a product that by its design is addictive and has resulted in harmful and disastrous outcomes for child users but are pleased for social media platforms to self-regulate have gone unanswered. Our attempts to regulate the platforms are being challenged by the platforms and their trade associations in the courts. And the public is demanding action, and their outcry is growing stronger by the day. Unfortunately, social media platforms continue to deny that their algorithms and design features are contributing to these harms. Even in the face of two bellwether rulings earlier this year, which found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers and did not adequately protect users, the platform has refused to change their designs, which is harming and killing kids. So why is the approach in AB2 necessary? Because the public is calling for social media platforms to issue a product recall to make sure that their product that we have, like it or not, come to depend on and use every day is designed to be as safe as possible for us as consumers. That should go without saying when it comes to our children. But the platforms are continuing to put their profits before everyone's safety and well-being, and that just needs to change. If the platform's profits are more important to them than anything else, it's crucial that we have the right financial incentives in place to ensure that they take this problem seriously, that they implement real change, and they simply do not chalk it up to the cost of doing business. And that is precisely what AB2 does. It assigns appropriate damage levels to ensure that when a large social media platform's own negligence is proven in court for their failure to exercise ordinary care, the damage levels are sufficient to ensure that they are incentivized to change. During arguments on the punitive damages in the KGM trial, Mark Lanier, the lead lawyer for the plaintiff, was reported to have shown the jury a jar full of M&Ms during the argument on punitive damage, noting that each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the company's worth. He said you can take out a handful and not make a difference. He said, scooping out a few with his hand, you can take out two handfuls and not make a difference. The jurors concluded that Meta and Google should pay million in compensatory damages and an additional million in punitive damages in the KGM trial That verdict alone has not incentivized the platforms to heed the call of the public to change but it does represent a critically important opening move and there are more cases to come. AB2 will serve as an essential guide to the courts and juries when these cases come to trial to assess appropriate damages, to ensure the platforms are taking these cases and the public's call to put our safety first seriously. You might be asking yourselves, why is AB2 necessary if California joins the growing global movement to establish a minimum age for social media use? Well, the short answer is that we have no guarantee that the platforms will comply with the law. And there's already evidence to suggest that they're not doing their part to enforce minimum age requirements in other countries. So even if we were to establish a minimum age requirement, the platforms do not abide by the law, we will still need to ensure that they are assessed appropriate damage levels for the harm that they are causing. And in sum, social media platforms are not exercising ordinary care. They are fully capable of designing algorithms and features that promote safety and not addiction, but without facing sufficient financial liabilities for their failure to exercise ordinary care, they are refusing to change. And they're continuing to drive children and teens to harmful content, encouraging them to engage in dangerous and sometimes life-threatening behavior. AB2 does not change California's underlying law or the burden of proof required in court. AB2 applies appropriate financial incentives and accountability to prompt just a handful of companies who are earning enormous profits off of children and teen users to be more careful and responsible partners, especially when it comes to our kids. Let me be clear, financial awards, no matter how great, will never be able to compensate for the loss of a child. Never. But that's how dire this situation is. It is literally life and death in far too many of these cases. But incentivizing change, protecting other kids from the tragic outcomes experienced by far too many families in California and around the world, that is what the public and many of the impacted families are calling for. Make your products safe. Design it like your kids are using it. Don't let another kid become a casualty of social media. That is why we need AB2. I'm so pleased, Mr. Chair, to be joined by Juliana Arnold with Parents Rise and Nicole Rocha with Tech Oversight California, who are here to testify in support of the bill. Welcome to you both. You'll each have two minutes. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Cabredon and committee members. My name is Juliana Arnold, and I'm the executive director and co-founder of Parents Rise, a national advocacy organization led by survivor parents. And I strongly support AB2. More importantly, I'm a mother of two daughters. My eldest, Olivia, just graduated from college. Coco, my younger daughter, who was clever and curious beyond her years, never got that chance and never will. At 17, she was groomed on Instagram, lured to meet an older man, and given a counterfeit pill containing fentanyl. She died in 2022. There are no words for burying your child, only the silence that is left behind. Before Coco died, we watched social media take more and more of her from us. It stole her sleep strained her mental health and made it harder for her to step away we set limits we used parental controls we did everything we were told to do It was like playing whack And yet the product kept pulling her back and the parental controls just didn't work. They did not suffice. And it leaves parents feeling helpless. Parents should never be feeling that way when they're trying to make sure that their kids are safe. So Coco's story is uniquely ours, but the pattern is heartbreakably familiar. Children have been targeted, exploited, and pulled deeper into danger by products designed to keep them engaged, even when the harm was foreseeable. We now know it is not ignorance. Through the trials, court records and testimony have shown these companies understood the risks to children and failed to act. They knew children paid the price, but they chose profits over our children. AB2 applies a basic rule that governs every California business. Exercise ordinary care and do not cause foreseeable harm. AB2 is not about punishing platforms for what someone says. It's about the company's own choices, how they design their products, drive compulsive use, and fail to act when harm is clear. What was that? I'm going to have to ask you to come to a conclusion. Okay, can I put it in the conclusion just for one second? Yes. Thank you. For these companies, it's another cost of doing business. Accountability will not bring my daughter back, but it can help spare another family this nightmare. Our children deserved ordinary care, and they still do. On behalf of Parents Rise and the children who no longer can speak for themselves, I respectfully ask for your vote on AB2. Please do not let more families join ours. Thank you. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Good afternoon. My name is Nicole Rocha, and I'm here on behalf of Tech Oversight California. Tech Oversight is an advocacy organization that champions meaningful tech accountability reform. This is the third year that I personally have testified on this important measure. What sets AB2 apart from legislation of prior years is that we have recently seen the first monetary verdicts in American history holding social media companies liable for design-driven harm to users. These cases have begun to flesh out the duty of care that was questioned by committees in prior years. Tech oversight worked closely on the Los Angeles Bellwether case involving thousands of plaintiffs, families, school districts, states, and localities in which Meta and Google were found liable for designing platforms whose addictive features caused lasting psychological harm to a child. The day before, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for misleading the public about platform safety and enabling child sexual exploitation. These verdicts confirm what parents and advocates have known for years. The harms to youth are rooted in product design, and companies have known the harm that their products are inflicting. So why is AB2 needed in light of these verdicts? Simply put, statutory damages will allow for more consistent results where all children's lives and experiences are similarly valued. In many cases, it will save families from the pain of establishing the worth of their child's life. statutory damages will also create a clear path forward for companies to evaluate exposure and liability with the state of California clearly signaling that all children deserve a safe and healthy online environment. AB2 is a common-sense measure that is long overdue in the name of consistency and fairness we urge your aye vote Thank you both Does anyone wish to register their support for AB2 Please come forward to provide your name your affiliation and your relation Sure. Good afternoon. Good evening, Mr. Chair and members. Christopher Sanchez here on behalf of the Consumer Federation of California in support. Greetings, Mr. Chair and members. Pamela Gibbs, representing the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and we're proud to join the author and witnesses in support of the bill. Mr. Chair and members, Amy Brown on behalf of the California Charter Schools Association in support. Cheryl Westmont with Mothers Against Media Addiction in strong support, California. Yeah. Diana Hawkins, representing Mama Silicon Valley, in support. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. Members, Ed Howard on behalf of the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, in strong support. Mikey Hofey on behalf of Common Sense Media, proud to sponsor this bill and in support. All right, thank you. Are there any lead witnesses in opposition to AB2? Welcome to you both, and you'll each have two minutes as well. All right. Good evening, Mr. Chair and Senators. Dylan Hoffman today on behalf of TechNet, and we are opposed to AB2. And while we completely agree with the intent of the bill and our platforms work diligently to constantly improve and protect their users, we believe the bill will do very little to actually solve any of the problems identified. One of the major issues with this bill is the misconception around distinguishing between content and conduct. We believe the line isn't so easily drawn between content and design, particularly when it comes to content-serving features like algorithms, recommendations, and even direct messaging. This bill has been talked about as purely about product liability. However, many cases and examples that are cited of social media causing harm are rooted in harmful content, not the platform design. And even then, these cases are incredibly fact-specific and individualized. For example, a social media site dedicated to cute animal videos or puppies wouldn't cause an eating disorder, even if it used the exact same recommendation algorithm and features as a major social media platform. It's the content, not the feature, that is the issue. And courts are currently considering the distinction and in which instances plaintiffs should be able to recover damages. Not only are there hundreds of cases pending that would be impacted midstream, but the Ninth Circuit is also considering arguments about whether content-serving features and platforms' editorial discretion have First Amendment protections. The fact-specific and highly individualized nature of this issue dramatically undercuts any incentive this bill is trying to create. and it's the bottom line is plaintiffs can already sue social media platforms. Courts have shown they're willing to let them proceed in spite of section 230 and juries are willing to award significant damages and penalties. Damages are rarely an issue in these cases and plaintiffs are already able to be made whole and if anything these cases show that this bill is unnecessary. Additionally the bill is somewhat inconsistent on whether the intent is to punish egregious intentional conduct. The findings and declarations even reference the need to ensure that platforms that are knowingly causing injuries should receive heightened penalties. But the bill isn't actually limited to those most severe instances. A prior version of this bill, AB 3172, was amended to require conduct to be knowing and willful before the bill's penalties were triggered. Those amendments also limited these heightened penalties to public prosecutors who are more likely to bring cases that are more narrowly limited to product design and features and not to content. Dylan, I'm going to have to ask you to come to a conclusion. Last line. Because this bill will substantially and unnecessarily increase litigation and penalties without actually solving the larger problem, we must respectfully oppose AB2. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Chair, members of the committee, in interest of time, I'm Aidan Downey. with the Computer Communications Industry Association. I just want to echo what Dylan said. I don't want to rehash anything. So stand ready for questions. Thank you. Terrific. All right. Does anyone wish to register their opposition to AB2? If so, please come forward to the microphone and provide your name and affiliation and position on the bill. Ronak Elami on behalf of Cal Chamber, also in opposition. Thank you. Catherine Charles on behalf of the Chamber of Progress and respectful opposition. Annalee Augustine with the Civil Justice Association of California also respectfully opposed. Thank you. Danny Kando-Kaiser on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation respectfully still opposed. All right. If there's no further testimony, first thanks to everyone who participated. And let's turn to the committee for questions or comments. Senator Padilla. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the author more to comment. First, I want to thank you for bringing the bill. I know it hasn't been easy. The author and many of my colleagues are all still aware that I do a substantial amount of work in this space in my own portfolio. Understand the intent here. Read and reread the analysis. Went back and took a look at the language a couple more times to make sure I wasn't either seeing things or hearing things. I think fundamentally for me, Mr. Chairman and colleagues, this bill boils down to one thing, and that is the consumer protection angle here as a matter of policy consideration for this committee. And fundamentally, consumer protection is only real and is only appropriate when there is certain and meaningful enforcement. And enhancing remedies without creating a new cause of action, without changing standards, The question for this member is, is this bill enhancing consumer protection by virtue of enhancing remedies, and is that an appropriate policy approach for this legislature to take along those lines? I think the answer to that is pretty overwhelmingly clear when you look at the evidence. The questions of the sufficiency or deficiency of those remedies, what any impact they may have, potential arguments someone make in defense, Those are questions for the Committee on the Judiciary and perhaps a trial court or a jury to look at in a particular case or cause of action. But I think this bill is appropriate. I think it's pretty clear what the bill is and what the bill isn't. And so I want to thank the author again, and Mr. Chairman, at the appropriate time, I'm happy to move the bill. Senator McNerney. I want to thank the chair. I thank the author for bringing this forward. In my mind, it's common sense. If there's something out there that's harming children, it ought to be taken care of, but it ought to be dealt with, and this is one way to do that. Protecting children is maybe the most important moral imperative of any society. Now, algorithms can be addictive. They can be addictive like addictive drugs, and they're designed specifically to be addictive. You designed to get that extra click because every click means more money So people are growing more and more distrustful of big tech They're growing more and more distrustful of artificial intelligence. And it's just common sense to put guardrails out there that will provide basic protections. And then, of course, these companies, the M&M metaphor is certainly appropriate. They can afford, and if we want to make them stop, then you've got to put enough pain to make them stop. So, at any rate, I'm going to support this bill. Senator Gonzalez. Yeah, I do want to thank you, Assemblymember. You and I have spoke about this a lot, having three girls, three boys. at home and we know how difficult it is as a parent. And I want to thank your witness for sharing her story. I'm so sorry for your loss. And I agree with my colleagues here. I think it's pretty pointed that you're addressing the remedies. There is no, you know, it's one thing to put forward the guardrails and ensure that there are regulations on social media, but the other part is the enforcement. And there's also recent precedent as well that has showed us that there is a roadmap to ensuring that there are enforcement mechanisms that will actually, hopefully, get to less children being affected online, less children being lured, less children being overall impacted in the state of California. With that, I support. Thank you. Any further questions or comments? Parts moved by Senator Padilla. I'm going to support the bill today. I share the feelings of a lot of the members of the committee on this issue. I do have some questions about it, but they are entirely within jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, which I'm sure will give it its full attention. So I'm not making a permanent commitment all the way through, but I think the case has been made. And with that, we do have a motion. So, committee assistant, would you please call the roll? Oh, sorry. I do this every time. Assemblymember Lowenthal, would you like to close? Mr. Chair, I just want to thank you and the members. I want to thank you and your staff and the committee staff for the time and the meetings that we had on this topic. I just want to opine to everyone right now, what does it mean to actually stand up for consumer protection in the digital age? What does it mean when you have multi-trillion dollar companies that scale the entire span of the globe? What does it mean when you're trying to regulate entities that are larger than the state of California itself? there has to be a bite to that for them to be able to listen. I think that was articulated by the members of this committee, but it is something that we all need to be asking ourselves. What is the right amendment? How do we get them to listen? And beyond that, one of the most amazing things about AB2 is that it doesn't change the law at all. And so it can go into effect immediately. And while the platforms continue to fight and rage against the vast, vast majority of Californians who are saying we want regulation we want to start from a place of safety and work backwards from there This bill can go into effect immediately And while they take that stance in court and why it can take years and years for those proposed laws to go into effect, we can provide remedy for millions of children in the state of California and be a model for elsewhere, and hopefully require them to design their products from a place of safety. And with that, I respectfully ask for your aye vote. All right, please call the roll. Motion is due pass to appropriation. Senators Cabaldon? Aye. Cabaldon, aye. Jones? Gonzalez? Aye. Gonzalez, aye. McNerney? Aye. McNerney, aye. Ochoa Bogue? Padilla? Aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes? Umberg? Weiner? Aye. Weiner, aye. 5 to 0 on call. Well, it's 5 to 0. We'll place that measure on call. Next, we're going to proceed to AB 883, Assemblymember Lowenthal. Okay. And thank you so much for being with us. It's Assemblymember Lowenthal, AB 883. Thank you, Senators, for the opportunity to present AB 883. I'd like to begin by thanking the committee staff for their thoughtful work on this measure. I will be accepting the committee amendments. As elected officials, it should come to no surprise to any one of us that threats against public servants are increasing across the country. Political violence is not hypothetical. It is a growing reality. According to a 2024 report from the University of San Diego, 66% of all elected officials reported being on the receiving end of threats and harassment. I'm in that group. I know there are people on the dais that are also in that group. Even more, 46% of women, 39% of men have considered leaving public service as a direct result of the threats and harassment that they have experienced. National data paints a similarly troubling picture. More than 40% of state legislators have experienced threats or attacks within the past three years, and nearly 90% reporting experiencing harassment, stalking, or intimidation. Judges are increasingly facing similar dangers. The U.S. Marshals Service reports that threats against federal judges more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, while thousands of threats against state judges have been documented nationwide. In 2020, Daniel Anderle, the son of a federal judge in New Jersey, was murdered at his family's home by an individual who had targeted the judge. More recently, elected officials and their families have been victims of targeted violence, underscoring the very real dangers facing those who serve the public. As evolving technology has expanded the ability to collect and distribute personal information online, data brokers have made it easier than ever for bad actors to locate individuals and their families. The Federal Trade Commission has found that data brokers collect and maintain extensive personal information on nearly every American household, often retaining that information indefinitely. California has already taken a national leadership role through the DELETE Act and the creation of the Delete, Request, and Opt-Out platform known as DROP. Since the platform became available earlier this year, more than 300,000 Californians have already signed up to exercise greater control over their personal information. The amendments before you today strengthen this approach by addressing concerns raised by stakeholders while maintaining the bill core objective of protecting privacy and safety Under the amendment bill, CalPrivacy will create informational materials detailing how elected officials and judges can utilize the drop system to remove their information from data brokers. This information will be distributed through the Secretary of State, through local filing officers, and the Judicial Council to ensure those serving the public are aware of and able to access these important protections. Additionally, rather than creating a separate process for a limited group of individuals, AB 883 will reduce the deletion timeline through drop from 45 days to 30 days for all Californians. This approach improves privacy protections equitably, ensuring every Californian benefits from faster deletion requests, while also increasing awareness among elected officials and judges about the tools already available to help protect themselves and their families. Public service should not come with the expectation that individuals or their loved ones will face threats facilitated by the widespread availability of their personal information. AB 883 takes a practical, balanced approach that strengthens California's existing privacy framework, work, improves access to important consumer tools, and helps protect those who have answered the call to serve their communities. Very pleased to be joined today by Doug Subers, representing Californians for Consumer Privacy, who is here to testify in support of the bill. Thank you, Mr. Chair and Senators. Doug Subers, on behalf of Californians for Consumer Privacy, pleased to sponsor AB 883 and strongly support the measure. We'd like to thank the author and his team for their leadership on this issue and all and all the work thus far, and also thank you, Mr. Chair, and the committee for all your work in arriving at amendments. All told, Californians for Consumer Privacy is really focused on strengthening privacy rights and improving mechanisms for Californians to exercise those rights, and we think this bill meets that test in both regards. As noted in the analysis and discussed by the author, we've seen a startling increase in threats and violence towards elected officials, including the horrific incidents in New Jersey and Minnesota, and incidents here in California. AB 883 will ensure elected officials and judges get information about the ability to exercise their rights under CalPrivacy's drop system. And our hope is that their better education and use of these tools will help limit the proliferation of personal information that could be used by someone to exercise some type of harm towards an elected official. Ultimately, better safety for elected officials and their family will promote or continue to promote the best and brightest of our society pursuing roles in elected office or in the judicial service. As noted by the author, pleased to work with a variety of stakeholders to address concerns and believe this bill meaningfully improves rights for all Californians. For those reasons, we respectfully ask for your aye vote. I'd also just like to register support for Delete Me as a risk provider, a company that helps Californians exercise the rights. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Does anyone wish to register support on AB 883? If so, please come to the microphone and share with us your name, affiliation, if any, and your position. Maureen Mahoney. On behalf of CalPrivacy, the agency has a supportive amended position on the bill in print, and we very much appreciate the committee amendments as described in the analysis. Thank the committee and author. Are there any lead witnesses in opposition? Just delivering brief comments. Good evening, Chair members. My name is Robert Wicca with TechNet. We actually removed our opposition to the bill in print due to the author taking several amendments regarding clarity of duties and explicit reference to permitted use purposes. That said, even though the timeline was short and a PRA still remained, our opposition was removed due to understanding that the population of AB 883 was narrowly scoped to individuals addressed in the bill, elected officials, and judges. Regarding the proposed amendments to the analysis with the shortened timeline to delete from 45 to 30, plus the expansion of what PI can be deleted pursuant to SB 923 passed by this committee earlier this year. If the PRA remains in a bill and is subsequently applied to the entire Delete Act, not just limited to elected officials and judges, we may need to return to an opposed position. But we do look forward to seeing what the actual language will look like being proposed and working with the author to address any remaining concerns. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. Ronak-Dalami on behalf of Cal Chamber. Our letter somehow wasn't reflected in the analysis. We are still in an opposed and less amended position. We will take a look at the amendments when they are in print, but with the PRA, I think we will still be opposed. Thank you. Aiden Downing with the Computer and Communications Industry Association. I'd like to echo Cal Chamber's comments in a respectful, opposed and less amended position. Good evening, Chair and members. My name is Symphony Barbie. On behalf of the ACLU Cal Action, we want to thank the committee and the author for the amendments addressed in the analysis. And should those amendments go into print, we would be happy to drop our proposal unless amended. Thank you. All right. Seeing no other witnesses, let's turn back to the committee for questions or comments. Senator McNerney. I thank the chair and I thank the author for bringing this forward. As he mentioned, many of us on the dais have been subject to threats and other things. And it's unfortunate that we're in this situation, but there's so much vitriol on the social media, subject of an earlier discussion, that this is necessary. I'm going to have to support this. And I'll yield back to the chair. Further questions or comments? I just want to thank the author and the sponsor on the bill for the work on the amendments. We're trying to do a couple things here, obviously. First and foremost is to promote safety for folks who are stepping up to serve their communities and democracy in various ways. And we've seen the rise in the intensity, the severity of political violence throughout the country. but certainly here in California, felt especially by women who are serving in public office, LGBT office owners, but everyone as well. And also understanding that we've had a lot of the legislation we've gotten to improve the Delete Act and other pieces of legislation is because we as elected officials live in the same world as everybody else. And so when we have to go fill out the drop request at CalPrives, we're like, hey, this is kind of hard. It's not, just FYI. It's very easy. But when we do experience those, we make better policy. And so we do try where we can to not wall ourselves off and create special pass-throughs, both for fairness but mostly so that we can experience the California that we are legislating about. This bill, the meta version, absolutely walks that line appropriately and not without sacrificing or compromising on safety in any way. And also appreciate that for all Californians the provision that was in a bill of mine is now here to shorten the lead act timeline now that we have enough experience with the act We know it technically feasible to implement in that way. So with that, we have a motion by Senator McNerney. Would you like to close? Respectfully ask for your aye vote. Thank you. All right. Please call the roll. The motion is due pass as amended to judiciary. Senators Cabaldon? Aye. Cobaldon, aye. Jones, Gonzalez, McNerney, aye. McNerney, aye. Ochoa Bo, Padilla, aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes, Umberg, Wiener, aye. All right. All right, the vote's four to zero. We'll place that measure on call. We are, our remaining bills are all by a single author, so we're going to await her arrival, and in the meantime, the committee will stand in recess. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Thank you. Thank you. The privacy digital technologies and consumer protection committee will reconvene in 30 seconds We'll reconvene the Senate committee on privacy, digital technologies, and consumer protection. I wanted to note that at the request of the author, AB2564 will be put over to our next hearing. and now we'll proceed to AB 2023 by Assemblymember Wicks and Friends. Yes. Welcome. Assemblymember Bauer-Cahan, yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the committee staff for all of their hard work, and we accept the amendments, the committee amendments. So this is a chatbot regulation bill, and I know Mr. Padilla here who serves on this committee has been such a leader in this space, and we are very happy to be working collaboratively with you, sir, sir, as well as the chair and many of our colleagues. And Ms. Barcan obviously had a bill in this space last year as well. So a lot of us have been going at this, trying to figure out how do we keep our kids safer online. We've gone through some of which have been horror stories with regard to social media and trying to make sure our kids are safe when it comes to social media. And now we are looking at chatbots, which can be very effective tools for our children, but also we need some common sense guardrails and safety standards put forth for these chatbots. And the reason for that is 72% of teens have used an AI chatbot. More than half are regular users. 33% of teens use AI companions for social interactions and relationships. In addition research shows that children are much more likely to view AI chatbots as quasi and to trust them more than adults actually and to seek guidance from them as opposed to adults in their life who are trying to steer them in the right direction There are a lot of risks to this new technology, especially prolonged interactions with chatbots can be particularly risky. As our kids are still developing and growing, these interactions with chatbots have risks, and risks lead to physical harm and negatively impact their mental health, And we have seen how dangerous chatbots have become in terms of lost life, actually, with regard to our young people. So AB 2023 builds on the great work of Mr. Padilla and Ms. Bauer-Kahan and creates a comprehensive framework for regulating chatbots for children by, one, requiring an age verification of users. This is built on the premise of the age signal bill that I passed last year that's going to affect January 1 of this next year. risk assessments, safeguards including default settings, parental controls, noticing and measures to prevent suicidal ideation and self-harm, prohibitions against targeted advertisements to children and selling or sharing their information, and then third-party audits for compliance. These are the basic guardrails we think we need. With here, we have Nicole Rocha who's going to be here to testify on behalf of children now, but before we get to that, I want to offer the floor to my dear friend and colleague, Ms. Bauer-Cahan. Thank you. And I just want to reiterate my gratitude to everyone here, Senator Padilla, who's obviously worked so deeply on the chatbot issue, Senator McNerney, who's working on standards that will be a fundamental piece to the third-party verification elements in this bill, and obviously Assemblymember Wicks on her age signal, without which we couldn't protect kids online, I believe, at all. and this is so critically important because of the moms that sit here and I know you all heard from Maria Rain when Senator Padilla's version of this bill was up in this committee and her story of her son and what happened when he was drawn in by a sycophantic chatbot and that hits home as a mother of a teenage son who uses chatbots to help with advanced math problems that mom can no longer help with I understand why our kids are using these tools and why they're really beneficial and that's exactly how Adam started when he began his use of a chatbot and then through the sycovantic behavior of the chatbot it drew him in until ultimately he died by suicide and so we should be able to give our kids a chatbot to help them with math and they should have the educational benefits of it and we should also know that we are handing our kids a tool that has been tested to be safe that will not tell them how to take their own life will not tell them how to harm themselves and those principles are frankly fairly simple and this bill goes a long way and will be one of the strongest in the nation if, and I guess I'll just say when it gets signed into law as I speak it into being. Although I will note that New York did just pass unanimously a law on chatbots that continues this incredible work. So we are moving alongside our fellow states and ensuring that these are tested and safe for children by design. And with that, I will turn it over to Nicole. Welcome, and you'll have two minutes. Good evening, Chair members. I am Nicole Rocha here on behalf of Children Now. Children Now takes a whole-child approach to improving the lives of California kids and works across health, education, early childhood, and foster care to ensure all kids have the supports that they need to thrive. After many years of fighting for legislation to keep kids safe online, youth and families finally have the wind in their sails. Earlier this year, we saw verdicts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars with juries finding that social media intentionally addicted children and failed to protect them from known harm. Last year Senator Padilla passed a first in the country bill to regulate how companion AI interacts with children. In addition the Age-appropriate design code authored by Assemblymember Wicks passed unanimously in 2022 and was largely affirmed by the Ninth Circuit earlier this year. And while these are historic wins, the work is far from over. If the legislature does not take timely action, we could once again be dealing with a social media type situation and the aftermath of decades of harm to kids that could have been prevented. AB 2023 is a comprehensive measure that covers companion AI from start to finish, ensuring that at every step children's healthy development is considered. It requires operators of companion AI to perform safety audits and mitigate risks of harm. Operators must also publish a child safety policy and implement a crisis response protocol. For children now, the most meaningful part of the bill comes in the form of default settings for child users. Default settings place no additional onus on parents to activate safeguards for their children and allow parents to opt out of the settings should they choose. These are common sense protections that will permit young users to benefit from the technology without exposing them to foreseeable harms. We urge your aye vote. Thank you. Does anyone wish to register support for the bill? If so, please come forward to the mic and share with us your name, your affiliation, but not your lobbying firm and your position on the bill. Cheryl Westmont with Mothers Against Media Addiction California, strong support. Diana Hawkins for MAMA, Mothers Against Media Addiction Silicon Valley chapter. Crystal Strait representing Common Sense Media in support. Ed Howard, Children's Advocacy Institute, University of San Diego School of Law, with a supportive amended position. John Bennett with the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy in support. Right next we'll turn to opposition. Are there lead witnesses in opposition? Welcome to you both and you'll each have two minutes. Thank you. Ronak DeLamy with Cal Chamber in an opposed and less amended position, though we do thank the authors for including us at the table on these important discussions. We agree that children deserve meaningful protections when using AI systems. Our concern here is not with the goal, but largely ensuring that the creation of clear workable standards that effectively reduce harms. and avoid subjective requirements that may be difficult for operators, auditors, regulators, and courts to apply consistently across a broad range of ages and developmental stages. We appreciate that the bill generally allows access to AI tools while ensuring different levels of protection through impact assessments, default protections, and parental controls. However, there are some important issues to work through. First of all, recent amendments help by clarifying privacy and discrimination harms. We still have concerns with how covered harm is defined, specifically with what is meant by psychological or emotional harm, when the term child spans a wide range of developmental stages up to the age of 18. Unlike financial harm, privacy violations are unlawful discrimination. This category lacks objective benchmarks that can be consistently applied across children of different ages in developmental stages. From a practical standpoint, without clearer standards, it will be difficult for developers to determine when a chatbot output crosses the line into conduct that creates liability This uncertainty is particularly burdensome for smaller developers but it affects operators of all sizes by shifting resources from safety improvements to litigation risk management. We also remain concerned with the bill's audit framework. We're pleased that the disclosure to advocacy groups was removed, but the bill still permits sharing the sensitive information with broadly defined qualified researchers with limited safeguards in place. Likewise, public disclosure of detailed safety assessments could expose sensitive information and discourage candid reviews, aggregator reporting would be a better approach. We're also concerned that the bill requires audits of highly subjective concepts without clear statutory standards or well-established methodologies for what's still a nascent sector. And to this end, we've included some suggestions in our letter for consideration. I'll let my colleague address the remaining concerns regarding risk assessments and liability, but again, I want to express that chamber remains committed to working with the authors on this bill. So thank you. Good evening, Mr. Chair. Chris McKaylee here on behalf of the Civil Justice Association of California. As my colleague indicated, two main issues I wanted to raise with you first on risk assessment and then also on the litigation structure.
From our perspective, the bill appears to treat risk assessments as guarantees against future harm. And our concern is that they are instead important tools for identifying and mitigating risks as opposed to a structure in which they could eliminate or viewed as being eliminating every conceivable risk. So our concern is the ability to comply with that. And then if you look at some of the definitions, any child safety risk in 22610D says whether or not it's reasonably foreseeable, which obviously is quite an ambiguous standard, coupled with the definition of covered harm, which uses approximately caused, which is a negligent standard in 22610G. And so our concern is those ambiguities will create expectations that will ultimately expose operators to liability. And then in 22616B, it not only in A has public enforcement, but also a private right of action for a child or parent with the ability to even obtain punitive damages. The way we read this language is even notices, audits, data handling are all subject to that PRA. We certainly believe in sharing the goal that the authors have about protecting children, but we do have significant concerns with the language on risk assessments and the liability structure of the bill with the PRA. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you. Does anyone else wish to register their opposition to the bill?
Good evening. Cameron Onuma with the American Innovators Network, a coalition of California startups, in respectful opposition to the bill, though we are optimistic about upcoming conversations with the authors. Thank you. Aidan Downey with the Computer Communications Industry Association, in respectful, opposed, and less-amended position. Thank you. Robert Boykin with TechNet. I'm a respectful, opposed, less amended position. Jason Fox with the California Society of Certified Public Accountants. We have an opposed and less amended position. Our concerns are around the auditing framework. We think auditing could be an important pillar of AI assurance and guardrails, but it has to be workable, and we have some concerns on how that could work under the AG's office with conflicting professional standards and obligations that our members have to comply with We know there important conversations about our broader AI assurance framework We just in the Me Too section but thank you If there no further witnesses in opposition we turn it back to the committee beginning with Senator Padilla Thank you very much for the courtesy, Mr. Chairman, and thank the esteemed authors.
Here I'm honored and proud to carry the identical bill in the Senate, which is now pending before the Assembly. And I think the authors probably know much better than I that there aren't often occasions which there is a strong bicameral collaboration to move a substantive and potentially historic piece of legislative framework around protecting certainly children. I really want to thank the chair and the staff for continuing to work with the authors. And just a brief thought, I tell folks often that, in my own opinion, advent of the Industrial Revolution before the turn of the 20th century was probably the most substantial change in human history and relatively recent human history. At that time, there were no networks of global communication or even community communication. There were severe restrictions because of the nature of society at that time on awareness. There was not a benefit of hindsight or even foresight about what the impacts of such a radical change to the world would bring, good and bad. And I often say that I think the advent and the rapid evolution of this powerful technology is probably the most substantial advent in technology since the onset of the first Industrial Revolution. With the advent of the Internet, some would argue, it was still a new experience. the development and engagement of social media platforms, which we still debate today, the missed opportunities we may have had as a country and as a society around looking at those unanticipated risks and impacts. So we weren't completely there. And I would just say this. Today, we have the advantage of being able to look back and to look forward and with some reasonable certainty about both the opportunity and the moral imperative of acting, and a clear idea from data about what the impacts could be to our children if we don't act. This is a strong and comprehensive framework that I know all of us will continue to work diligently around making substantially operational and trying to address issues. I just wanted to say also, with respect to the authors, you are both not only esteemed and accomplished legislators and impressive professionals. You are individuals I've come to greatly respect and learn from. You're amazing women. You're amazing parents. And I thank you for your partnership and your leadership. And Mr. Chairman, at the appropriate time, I'm happy to move.
All right. Thank you. Senator McNerney.
Well, I thank the chairman and I thank the distinguished authors for their work on this and Senator Padilla for your work on this. I have a question for Nicole on how this works. You mentioned default settings. And how does that work? Who does that apply to? How does it get changed? And what are the penalties?
So there aren't specific penalties for violation of the default settings. There are penalties in the bill for violation of the bill as a whole. So the way the default settings would work, so there's no persistent conversational memory in default. It has to be defaulted to ephemeral mode so that the bot can remember one conversation to the next conversation and that is there to ensure that a lot of the sycophancy that we are concerned about won be present Parents could go in for minor children and change that default setting if they would like. I think maybe a good example is you are using an AI chatbot as a tutor, whether it's a math tutor or a music tutor or whatever, and you want the bot to remember the prior interactions, parents could go in and change that, but children wouldn't be able to do it on their own. And then there's a number of other default settings. I think some of the most important ones are the time limits. So it would limit the conversations to one hour per bot or two hours across platforms per day. So kids aren't spending countless hours per day having conversations with chatbots.
Okay, thank you.
Sure.
I'll yield back.
Further questions or comments? Senator Ochoa-Bogue.
I'm trying to figure out which microphone. Sorry, I came in late, so I don't know what has been discussed. So I'm just going to ask some of the questions, and if it's already been stated, then you can move on from them. So based on the current products, What does a typical interaction between a minor and a companion chatbot look like today? I mean, I would ask our witnesses to opine on that.
But I think in current form, there are essentially no guardrails in terms of the product itself. And so kids have, you know, unlimited access, more or less. Companies handle things differently in terms of how they are trying to provide safety. And we've had, you know, many of these companies come into Ms. Barakhan's committee and talk about the various safeguards they're trying to do. But there's no overarching regulation per se on that. Mr. Pidia's bill, obviously, last year, I think, was the beginning of really us wrapping our head around and grappling with the type of safeguards that we want to put in place.
And is there anything at the federal level that is currently addressing the issue?
So there is not. So I would say the thing I would add to the current interactions kids are having is Assemblymember Wix in her opening talked a little bit about the data. Common Sense Media has done some research on the percentage of kids that are now spending time on these chatbots, and it's almost half, and many, and I think about a quarter or so, say that they are in emotional relationships with these chatbots. So I know, I know, these numbers are already shocking given this is so new, but our kids are early adapters. And so, you know, I think in a lot of cases, I will say in my household, as I mentioned, you know, my son is today was having doing some geometry studying. He went on and was sort of getting it to explain step by step a geometry concept to him. And so there are really positive and I consider that to be incredibly positive use of AI. They're using it in the same way you and I are, whether it's to like I want to, you know, go out in San Francisco. What's a good itinerary. So they're using it in ways we are. But what we're seeing some is that kids are getting emotionally attached in some instances. And so these chatbots can be, in some cases, dialed up in their sycovancy, which means that it tells you, and you may, if you use a chatbot, experience this, that that was a really brilliant question. Even sometimes I'm like, no, it wasn't. But it reinforces you in ways, and that's a characteristic that can be on or off in chatbots. OpenAI has been open about the fact that they have dialed that down at times when they felt like it became too much. So we know it's something they can control. So there's different kind of interactions. And we just want to make sure our kids are sticking to the ones we think are positive. And that's what this bill addresses.
The Federalist House.
Government has not acted on this. They have tried to preempt us, but failed in a bipartisan way from doing so. But we have not seen anything. I have heard there is work in this direction, but we have seen nothing to date that proves that.
Okay.
Are problematic conversations typically being initiated by the chat box based on what it knows about the child, or are those conversations being prompted by the child?
Well, one of the things that we're also grappling with here is memory. And the more the chatbot knows and uses that memory, the more the sort of quasi-human relationship can kind of form. So that's an aspect of the bill that is certainly a critical piece of this. We want to be able to ensure that, again, chatbots can be used for, like, educational purposes and things of that nature. But we don't want, you know, memory that would harken back to sort of emotional situations be used in a way that could be detrimental to the kid. So I would add the example that I don't know if Maria Rain, when she was in this committee, gave. So when Adam Rain was having his, what turned out to be a deadly interaction with the chat bot, at the end of the interaction he started talking about his mental health challenges. I don't know that that log is now in the court record, whether he started that or not, but the chat bot did engage with him in that way, telling him not to tell his parents about it, not to go to his brother when he asked, should I confide in my brother, telling him to hide the noose so that his family didn't find it. And so whether the child starts it or the chatbot does, we've seen examples of chatbots giving incredibly dangerous advice that ultimately in that case led to the death of that minor.
Thank you. So I see that the bill requires developers to implement measures to prevent the chatbots from doing certain things with a child user. But if this bill were to pass, how would those measures hold up with the child actively pursuing those topics? and would the chat box redirect the conversation shut down entirely or is there a possibility that it engages in the conversation despite the measures in place?
Honestly, the answer to that is we cannot, and the bill, I think, anticipates this, and we've been working with the companies to make sure this is true. The way that large language models function, every expert has told me it is impossible to ensure they will never have dangerous conversations with their children, which is frankly frightening. and so what the bill does is it really asks the companies to red team to test to pressure test them to get to a place where they feel they are as certain as they can possibly be it won't and right now if you want a chatbot and you say make me a song like taylor swift's because that is an output copyright violation the models will not do it the models will say i can't do that in some way and so they already have a layer of protections on top of them that will stop you from doing certain things. And so companies could decide how to prevent this from being an output, whether it's, you know, that's not a conversation I can have with you or whatever the case may be. But the companies will have had to test it to make sure it won't provide outputs that are deemed inappropriate by the bill, like self-harm and eating disorder behavior. Go on.
And I was just going to say, I think this is also why the third-party audits are so important, to provide that extra layer of testing so that we have more assurances that these are actually safe products. Okay. And how easy is it for the child to lie in the age verification process? Is it as simple as entering the age or birthday, or is there an extra step to verify authenticity?
I'm so glad you asked that question. So we did a bill last year that creates a whole framework to determine age and it a privacy framework where basically when a user who under the age of 18 goes on their phone the developer will ask in the app store the device so Apple or Android Google to send the age signal That age signal is set up when the phone is set up. So if I'm a mother and I've got a 13-year-old who has a phone, they're part of my family account. When I set up that phone, I put in the age. It's then locked in the operating system, and it can't be changed unless you stripe the whole operating system. So that age is now set there. And this law that goes into effect January then requires, so say, chat GPT in this example, at the download to ask in the app store, say, Apple, what's the age signal of this person? And it'll send a bracketed set of ages that can't be manipulated. Okay. Thank you. And then last
question that we have regarding some of the definitions in the bill, how would one quantify things like severe emotional harm to others, discouraging the child from doing certain things, or excessively psychophantic. Psycho? Psychophantic. Psychophantic. Is that pronounced?
So up until this point, I had not heard that word. For example, under this bill, a chat box or chat bot would not be allowed to discourage the child from sharing health or safety concerns with a qualified professional. Does that prohibit a chatbot from reassuring a child that something like a mild sore throat is nothing to worry about? What is the line between friendly and agreeable versus psychophantic? So you just hit on probably the most complex thing in the bill, which is this question of sycumency. Although I will say that I had a conversation the other day with one of the major labs where they have now defined it internally for their own testing. because, like I said, the labs have recognized that when it gets too sycovantic, it is dangerous. We're seeing psychosis and other things, even in adults. But we are trying to further define that and are working with all the companies to do so.
As to the question of severe emotional harm was another question you had.
That is very much in the purview of the courts. I don't know that we want to get into defining that. There already are, frankly, definitions in case law around extreme emotional distress and things of that nature that could be applied here. But I think that we would leave that to the courts rather than define it. That isn't something that we've had, I don't know how many meetings now, with the major labs, and it isn't something they've raised. The sycovancy is, but the other one I think they must feel like I do, that the case law is sufficient.
Okay, perfect. Thank you.
Yeah. All right. Any other questions or comments? All right. It's been moved by Senator Padilla.
I have a support recommendation on this. I've been sitting in conversations about it from the moment this committee was announced. And, you know, I'm not a parent, and I've been sitting with the two assembly members and parent and grandparent, Senator Padilla. And so I often look at these issues from a slightly different perspective, and I think we learn from each other. And for me, it's often about the disconnected youth or the kid trying to figure out who he was in a family that's not supportive. And the idea that my parents kind of set all the settings and stuff is, frankly, frightening to me as somebody who's dealt with that. And then as an adult today, if I weren't already out in public and I didn't want to be, I don't want to be verifying my age to everybody all the time. or my identity So there are consequences for folks to prove that they not children can be pretty severe which is why building this off of I don think I could have supported this bill if it weren for last year bill because it, to a large extent, removes that danger that both young people and adults who don't want to be, who don't want to upload their ID to prove that they're an adult trans person or gay guy or whatever, that they don't want to do that and they shouldn't have to. So that signal was an elegant way of trying to get to that issue, which gets us to this point. And I very much appreciate that this approach is simultaneously comprehensive and forward-thinking, but also necessarily humble. Like, we don't know everything, and these chatbots are evolving maybe on their own, but they're in addition to being curated by the labs. And we can't anticipate everything, and there are benefits under the right conditions. And so the bill, rather than announcing a child shall never experience a chatbot, and then when they become an adult, suddenly the whole world's full of chatbots everywhere, tries to lay down what are the design features in particular and a few other safety features that are especially problematic. And we need to get a handle on that. It doesn't mean that everything else a chatbot does in every circumstance is good. But that's true for the non-chatbot world, too. It's true for the playground. It's true for homeroom. It's true for the prom. Being a kid has lots of challenges. This is just one of them. So we're not trying to achieve safety perfection where no one's ever exposed to anything challenging or sycophantic, but simply to say that we in the courts can draw a line about where it is excessively harmful, where it is by design sycophantic. And to the author's point, even one of the earlier GPT models was withdrawn because it was excessively sycophantic, not withdrawn for children, it was withdrawn for everybody because it was ridiculous and people were falling in love with it and making all kinds of bad decisions. So we do know how to see it and respond. That is possible. It has been done. And this bill attempts to do that. So I appreciate that there's a humility about it, that it builds the architecture that we can continue to build on into the future while also setting some of the parameters for the companies and others to grapple with it as it proceeds. That said, I think, you know, I personally have been, as the chair of this committee, trying to discourage a million other children chatbot bills all at once. Like, we need, this is the right framework. We're not attempting to answer and regulate every single chatbot response, nor are we banning. We're trying to understand, and that's why I think the three authors have worked so hard to work collaboratively with the model companies and with others, as well as the advocates to understand how is this actually going to work, what can work, and what will really make a difference. So a huge amount of work has gone into this. I know there's some additional work to be done. The auditing question that has been raised by folks concerned about the bill, I know that's real, and I've had concerns about the way that we've defined and scoped and dealt with auditing in that space. But there's continuing work going on as has been previewed to try to anchor some of the auditing frameworks that we have talked about, but to anchor it in the kind of standard setting that Senator McNerney has been working on as well. And so it seems to me that without regard to the specifics of those proposals yet but the challenge that many in the industry and others have said hey it not really like what is this auditing thing anyway that we are also meeting the we going to meet that as well maybe next week or in two weeks in this committee, if not elsewhere. So very much appreciate the work and the collaboration and share, of course, Senator Padilla's kudos to the authors, but this extends to him as well. These two-house efforts are not easy, and so with that Senator Padilla has offered the motion on the bill
would you like to close?
Thank you Mr. Chair I want to acknowledge and appreciate Mr. Padilla's hard work in this space his tenacity, his dedication it truly is a collaborative effort a bicameral collaborative effort which doesn't happen that often so it's a new day for all of us in the Assembly and the Senate but I think it also underscores the importance of this issue it's also a bipartisan issue You know, we got a lot of Republican support in the Assembly on this bill. And in the end of the day, I think a lot of us are parents, and we're just grappling with how do we keep our kids safe, and we're parents before Democrats or Republicans. And so in this era of pretty toxic politics that a lot of us live in sometimes, the fact that we can have these very collaborative relationships to try to solve problems gives me a sense of hope, not just for this, but many other things as well. And I also want to acknowledge the opposition. Of course, we will continue to sit down and work through some of the concerns that were raised. I think it's very important when we do these types of tech bills that we sit with industry to understand how can we actually have this so that it's implementable. Otherwise, we're not going to get to our achieved goal, our express goal. So with that, happy to keep talking. And obviously, if there's additional questions, our doors are always open.
And also we'll let Ms. Bauer-Kahan here close but respectfully ask for an aye vote. Just want to thank the chair. He has that in a lot of meetings. So I want to acknowledge that and his staff. their continued collaboration. So thank you all.
All right. With that then, committee assistant, would you please call the roll?
The motion is do pass as amended to judiciary. Senators Cabaldon? Aye. Cabaldon, aye. Jones? No. Jones, no. Gonzalez? McNerney? Aye. McNerney, aye. Ochovo? Padilla? Aye. Padilla, aye. Reyes? Umberg? Wiener? Aye. Wiener, aye. All right, the vote is four to one.
We'll place that measure on call. Next, we will turn to AB 2246, Assemblymember Wicks. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members. In 2022, California enacted the Age-Appropriate Design Code, AADC. This was the first in the nation bipartisan bill, and it was intended to protect children's privacy, safety, and well-being when online and in digital spaces they were likely to access. Unfortunately, almost four years later, the bill has been tied up in litigation and has not taken effect. As a result, most of the digital environments that kids use daily remain loaded with adult design principles that do not factor in the unique needs of young minds, abilities, and sensibilities. Without guardrails in the online world, children face a number of adverse impacts, including bullying, mental health challenges, and addictive behavior. But last month, the Ninth Circuit Court issued a decision that several provisions of the original AEDC were, in fact, constitutional. This decision immediately created a path for this bill, AB 2246, to enact several AEDC provisions, including but not limited to offering privacy and safety protections by default, unless there is reasonable certainty that the consumer is an adult, disabling profiling, prohibiting the collection or retention of any child's personal information that is not necessary to provide the service requested, prohibiting the collection of any precise geolocation information by default, and prohibiting the use of dark patterns, e.g. manipulative design, to lead or encourage consumers to provide personal information beyond what is necessary to provide the requested service or to forego privacy protections. AB 2246 is an important step towards addressing these challenges that we continue to face, and we feel optimistic now after the Ninth Circuit Court's decision that we can actually put in place many of the original principles of age-appropriate design code with the basic premise that if children are likely to access a product online, it is by default and by design safe for them. We stole this idea from the UK, the Baroness Bibon Kidron, who I've worked with over there. They've implemented there very successfully in the UK, and we want to take some of those principles here and apply it to California. And with that, I will let Nicole Rocha from Children Now testify.
Good evening, Chair members. My name is Nicole Rocha. I'm here on behalf of Children Now and Tech Oversight California, both of whom are sponsors of 2246. For years, young people have been sharing how their mental health is negatively impacted by their online interactions. The age-appropriate design code enacted in 2022 with unanimous bipartisan support is the most significant legislation passed in decades that would meaningfully improve the online world experienced by youth. First, the age-appropriate design code protects youth up until age 18 rather than 13 or 16, and it is tech and platform neutral, meaning it applies to all the online places where young people spend their time, whether social media, gaming, chatbots, online shopping, or more. Earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit affirmed, as the author said, a lot of the provisions in the age-appropriate design code, The most significant being the definition of likely to be accessed by children, which means that unlike federal law, which has governed this space since the mid-1990s, where platforms had to be directed toward children in order for child protective laws to kick in, Now, any website, platform, online service product or feature that is routinely accessed by a significant number of children has to apply the protections for children unless they know the user is an adult. And this is a complete shift in how we look at online privacy and safety. The sponsors thank the author for bringing this important legislation, and we look forward to working with the committee and the author to continue to ensure that all the lessons learned in the past four years are incorporated into the language. And I'm happy to answer any technical questions about what happened in 2022 versus this bill.
All right. Does anyone wish to register support?
Cheryl Westmont with Mothers Against Media Addiction in strong support, California. Diana Hawkins from Mama Silicon Valley in support. Crystal Strait with Common Sense Media in support.
Thank you. Are there any lead witnesses in opposition?
Thank you Mr Chair and Senators Dylan Hoffman on behalf of TechNet and we are respectfully opposed unless amended to AB 2246 And first, I want to note that TechNet was also heavily involved in the negotiations around AB 2276, the age-appropriate design code back in 2022. We provided detailed suggested amendments, compromised in several key areas, though unfortunately we weren't able to reach an agreement to formally remove our opposition. But I will also note we were not a party to the aforementioned lawsuit. And similar to that approach, we have provided suggested amendments included in our letter to this committee to the bill that preserve its goal of improving online safety for minors, which remains a high priority for our member companies. I'll briefly highlight a couple of those issues. First, we're concerned that the bill's prohibition on profiling and personalization as a default for minors will unintentionally undermine the bill's intent. Personalization is a critical tool that enables platforms to tailor age-appropriate experiences to individual users, which benefits teens, and reduces exposure to inappropriate or harmful content. Removing this capability without the exception currently in AADC for companies to demonstrate that profiling is necessary will have consequences. We ask that the legislature reconsider this provision, or at the very least, include an exception consistent with current law. Additionally, the bill's prohibition on using personal information for any reason other than a reason for which that personal information was collected is overly broad and would inadvertently block safety, integrity, and security use cases where data is processed for purposes that users did not explicitly anticipate at the time of collection. Fraud detection, security monitoring, and safety enforcement all depend on this type of secondary processing and all of them protect minors. Furthermore, the restriction on retaining or using age estimation data is overly broad and would undermine the very age assurance tools this bill is designed to promote. Remember, companies have developed privacy-preserving technologies that estimate user ages using signals already present in ordinary platform interactions without requiring the collection of new or sensitive data. And limiting these tools would push platforms toward more invasive age verification methods working against both privacy and safety goals. We've outlined several other suggestions in our letter. Look forward to continuing our conversations with the author's office and sponsors to get this policy right. Thank you.
All right, thank you. Does anyone wish to register opposition?
Good evening. Laura Bennett on behalf of the California Chamber of Commerce. Align our comments with those of TechNet.
Good evening. Naomi Padron on behalf of the Computer and Communications Industry Association. We too would echo TechNet's comments.
Thank you. All right. With that, then, let's turn it back to the committee for any questions or comments. Move and move by Senator Weiner. Do you have one question? Of course, Senator Ochovo.
How would you respond to the opposition's concern that the bill's prohibition on profiling children by default could limit personalization tools that platforms use to filter harmful or inappropriate content and provide age-appropriate user experience? And do you have any further plans to define the terms in the language, such as significant mental suffering or distress and high-level privacy?
Always open to conversations, even to the very end. And I think with all of these things, it's a risk-benefit analysis. And my take is the risks outweigh. And so we want to guard for those risks, which is why we've made the amendment such that they are. And I'm also happy to have Ms. Rocha, if the chair allows, also opine on this, too, if you're interested in hearing her perspective.
So on the default issue when we passed the age appropriate design code in 2022 it said you couldn profile a child by default unless you could show that there was a I think compelling reason that it was in their best interest or something like that And now this bill actually says you cannot profile a child by default. And like we discussed with the last bill, the default is the preset setting, and parents can go in and change it. So I think there's an argument that could be made that this is actually more flexible than what we passed in 2022. So maybe it's just something that needs to be discussed more. But this is not a prohibition on profiling. It's a prohibition on profiling by default. So that setting needs to be toggled off and turned on at some point.
Okay. Thank you.
That is an issue. I do hope to continue to look at that issue. Personalization in the context of young people that are struggling in their families is important. If you're like, okay, I am coming out and I'm doing it through the Internet in some way. And then tomorrow I have to do it again. and then every other day, every time I log in, that's a problem. It really is. And I can't go to dad and say, hey, can you allow some personalization? So since we're not talking only about eight-year-olds, we're talking about some significant teenage years, just the notion of personalization, which I understand is responsible for many of the negative consequences too, but we also, as we weigh these choices and the defaults, It's not clear to me why the old language that says unless there's a demonstrated need, what was so wrong with that?
So at least in the way that I've been thinking about this, personalization is different than profiling. Profiling is something that a platform does with the information they collect about you, and personalization is choices that you make yourself. So there could be room for conversation because as someone who worked on the original age-appropriate design code with Assemblymember WICs, when we were thinking about profiling, we were thinking about the information that the platform collects about a user and what they do with that information and not the choices the individual has made. I don't have a position.
Whenever we think about age-appropriate design, we need to think about it in a couple of different use cases, including those cases in which there are challenges in the family environment and where the child is at particular risk in the world already and access to the digital space may be the only thing that saves them. But I know we'll keep working on it. I look forward to that.
Welcome, Senator Umberg. Any further questions or comments? We have a motion by Senator Weiner. Would you like to close?
We'll keep the conversation going. We hear you loud and clear, Mr. Chair, and thank you for your leadership and would respectfully ask for an aye vote.
All right. With that then, committee assistant, would you please call the roll? Motion is due pass to judiciary. Senators Cabaldon.
Aye.
Cabaldon, aye. Jones.
Aye.
Gonzalez. McNerney.
Aye.
McNerney, aye. Gonzalez, aye. Ochoa Bogue.
Aye.
Ochoa Bogue, aye. Padilla.
Aye.
Padilla, aye. Reyes. Umberg.
Aye.
Umberg, aye. Wiener.
Aye.
Wiener, aye. The vote is 7-0. One second Let me change from aye to not voting Do I have a quick comment Yes please do As many of you know enough of the bills that are heard in privacy are coming to the judiciary
On some I will be abstaining. I shouldn't read anything into that other than the fact that I want to take a closer look in judiciary.
So thank you. With that, Mr. Chair, I'll change my vote. Even though we did it formally now. Not voting. You're shaking your head no. Yeah, the committee is simply noting that the Senate rules don't permit a change from a vote to a not vote. Okay, well, I'm not going to vote no, so I'll leave it as then. I'll pretend that you laid off. And the vote is 7-0, and we'll place that measure on call. Okay, thank you. And next we'll proceed to our final bill on calendar day, which is AB 2713, Assemblymember Wicks.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a follow-up bill to, you know, we do these bills, they go off into the wild, and then you learn something from them. And so this is a follow-up bill on a bill I did last year. So as Gen. AI tools have made it easier to create, manipulate images, video, and audio, So last year I authored AB 853 to require large platforms to provide more transparency for the content that is posted online. Most of us get our information now on social media. The question is, is this content real or is it fake? It's a critical one. So since that bill has been signed into law, copyright holders raised some concerns regarding potential illegal downloading around the provision that provides options for users to inspect content data. So this is, as I said, a follow-up bill will provide additional clarification to options of inspecting data and content posted to large online platforms, ensuring that copyright laws are not circumvented. The bill updates the requirement for large online platforms to only allow users to download the system provenance information, which cannot be reattached to unrelated content. In addition, any downloads of system provenance information would be subject to applicable copyright law. Again, this is a follow-up bill from last year that I did, making sure that it makes sense. So with that, I would respectfully ask for an aye vote.
Are there any witnesses in support? Or anyone that wishes to register their support? Yes.
Good evening, Mr. Chairman and members. Carl London on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, basically the record companies throughout California, and we appreciate the author working on this technical fix in this language.
Thank you.
Margaret Gladstein, Universal Music Group. I affiliate our remarks with RAA. Thank you.
We are in support.
Good evening, Mr. Chair and members. Missy Johnson on behalf of the Directors Guild in support as well as the Entertainment Union Coalition.
Thank you. Are there any witnesses in opposition? Does anyone wish to register their opposition? I'm guessing Tech Nets out in the hall. All right. So we'll bring it back to the committee. Does anyone have any questions or comments? It's been moved by Senator Gonzalez. Did you have a question, Senator Shoma? Okay, it's moved by Senator Gonzalez. Would you like to close?
Respectfully ask for an aye vote.
Okay, let's call the roll. Motion is due pass. Senators Cabaldon?
Aye.
Cabaldon, aye. Jones? Gonzalez?
Call is aye.
McNerney?
Aye.
McNerney, aye. Ochoa Bog?
Aye.
Ochoa Bog, aye. Padilla?
Aye.
Padilla, aye. Reyes? Umberg?
Aye.
Umberg, aye. Wiener?
Aye.
Wiener, aye. 7 to 0 on call. 7 to 0, we'll place that measure on call. Speaking of calls, we're now going to begin lifting the calls on the full calendar. Committee assistant. File item number one, AB 1979. The motion is due pass as amended to health. The current vote is six to one. Senators Jones?
No.
Jones, no. Umberg?
Aye.
Umberg, aye. Seven to two. That's out. All right. The vote is seven to two. That bill is out. File item number two, AB 2624. The motion is due pass to judiciary.
The current vote is 4-1. Senators Jones? No. Jones, no. Gonzalez? Aye. Gonzalez, aye. Freyas?
Umberg? Aye. Umberg, aye. Did you skip 2-1-0-3? I did too. I don't know. I'm a different one there. It's 6-2. Votes 6-2. We'll place that measure back on call. AB 2103. Okay. Motion is due pass to appropriations. The current vote is 6-0. Senators Jones?
Not voting.
Jones. Umberg, or Echobo, Umberg?
Aye.
Umberg, aye. 7-0, it's out. The vote's 7-0. That bill is out. AB 2. The motion is due pass to judiciary. The current vote is 5 Senators Jones Not voting Otovo Which one is this AB 2 4 4 I sorry
Not voting.
Reyes, Umberg.
Not voting.
5-0 on call. Votes 5-0, we'll place that measure back on call, AB 883. Motion is due pass as amended to judiciary. The current vote is 4-0, Senators Jones.
Jones, aye.
Gonzalez, aye.
Ochoa Bogue, aye.
Reyes, Umberg, aye.
Umberg, aye.
8-0 on call. 8-0, we'll place that measure on call. AB 2564. It was put over. AB 2023. The motion is due. Pass is amended to judiciary. The current vote is 4-1.
Senators Gonzalez, aye.
Gonzalez, aye.
Ochoa Bogues, Reyes, Umberg.
Aye.
Umberg, aye.
6-1 on call. 6-1. The vote is 6-1. I'll place that measure on call. AB 2246. The motion is do pass to judiciary. The current vote is 7-0.
Senators Jones, Reyes.
7-0. 7 to 0, and we'll place that measure back on call. And AB 2713? We're just waiting for one rate. What's that? Oh, everybody's on. Okay. All right. So I think we're going to recess the committee briefly while we wait for our final member to return to lift the calls one more time. Thanks, I just saw that. Thank you Thank you. Thank you. The Senate Privacy Digital Technologies Committee will reconvene in 18 seconds. . . anybody put a speed limit in it I guess it never caught on All right we going to reconvene the Senate Committee on Privacy Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection and lift the remaining calls. Committee assistant, we'll begin with AB 2624. Bonta?
Okay.
The current vote is 6-1 with the chair voting aye and the vice chair voting no. Senators Reyes?
Aye.
Reyes, aye. 7 to 1. All right. That bill is out. AB 2. Mr. Lowenthal? The current vote is 5 to 0 with the chair voting aye. Senators Jones, Ochoa Bogue, Reyes?
Aye.
Reyes, aye. Umberg?
6 to 0.
6 to 0. That bill is out. AB 8 to 8 to 3. Lowenthal? Current vote is 8 to 0. Senators Reyes?
Aye.
Reyes, aye. 9 to 0. 9-0, that bill is out. Next up is AB 2023, Wicks. Current vote is 6-1 with the chair voting aye, the vice chair voting no. Senators Ochoa Bogue, Reyes.
Aye.
Reyes, aye. 7-1. The vote is 7-1, that bill is out. AB 20-46, Wicks. The current vote is 7-0. Senators Jones, Reyes. Aye.
Reyes, aye.
8-0, that bill is out. And finally, AB 27-13, Wicks. Current vote is 7-0. Senators Jones, Reyes.
Aye.
Reyes, aye. It's 8-0. 8-0. That bill is out. And with that, we've completed our calendar. And the Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection is adjourned. Thank you.