The Brief

California Gov. Gavin Newsom Sunday vetoed the most ambitious — and contentious — bill approved by the Legislature this year to regulate artificial intelligence.

The legislation, Senate Bill 1047, would have required testing of AI models to determine whether they would likely lead to mass death, endanger public infrastructure or enable severe cyberattacks.

Newsom in his veto letter criticized the bill for potentially “curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.” He also said it would have needlessly regulated AI used in low-risk situations and that it was written without enough research.

“A California-only approach may well be warranted — especially absent federal action by Congress — but it must be based on empirical evidence and science,” he wrote.

About the bill

The bill applied only to the costliest AI models, needing $100 million or more to develop, and Newsom objected to that threshold, saying cheaper tech can still be harmful.

The governor wrote that he will work to “find the appropriate path forward, including legislation and regulation” to address AI risks.

Opponents argued that the bill would harm the state economy and AI industry. They included Google, Meta, OpenAI, and eight members of the California congressional delegation. The state Chamber of Commerce praised the veto , saying the legislation would put “California’s place as the global hub of innovation at tremendous risk.”

The bill’s sponsor, San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, called the veto “a missed opportunity for California to once again lead on innovative tech regulation” and protect public safety. His bill’s supporters include 59% of California voters, according to one poll, along with billionaire Elon Musk, the Screen Actors Guild, Service Employees International Union, the National Organization for Women, and whistleblowers who worked at companies that make AI.

One backer, Teri Olle of advocacy group Economic Security California, said a veto by the governor means “we forfeit the opportunity to lead.”

Governor did sign other AI bills

Newsom signed into law this month roughly a dozen other AI bills, including legislation to protect voters from deepfakes and creatives from unauthorized digital replicas of their likenesses. He also signed bills requiring businesses to share information about how they train generative AI models and to help users determine whether media was made by AI.

All told, California lawmakers passed more than 20 bills to regulate artificial intelligence this year.

Speaking in May at a generative AI symposium, Newsom said it’s important to respond to calls for oversight by some AI developers — but also warned that he didn’t want to overregulate an important industry. California is home to 35 of the top 50 AI companies, according to Forbes, and Silicon Valley-based companies receive more AI investment than those in any other region, according to Crunchbase.

Mixed feelings on rejected bill

People in the industry are not of one mind about SB 1047, with some startups like Anthropic joining whistleblowers in supporting it. That mirrors a debate this year about whether to prohibit the weaponization of robots. A bill to do so was co-sponsored by a leading robot maker, Boston Dynamics. Newsom vetoed the legislation despite that support, saying police needed an exemption.

Newsom’s veto of SB 1047 keeps California from aligning its AI regulation with that of the European Union. An EU representative told CalMatters earlier this year that the union’s AI Act, said to be the most comprehensive such regulation, could be mostly replicated in California if the state enacted SB 1047 as well as a bill that required watermarks on AI-generated imagery and another to protect people from automated discrimination. The latter two bills failed to pass the Legislature.

Regardless of the governor’s decision, the debate over Wiener’s bill got many people engaged with AI policy who are not normally part of that conversation, said Alondra Nelson, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Nelson was disappointed the bill didn’t address civil rights threats from AI or the need to protect people from AI in the workplace. But she liked its testing requirement, which matched a stipulation in the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which Nelson helped craft.

Nelson said she hopes that coalitions formed to support SB 1047 will help advance future AI legislation. San Ramon Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who worked with Nelson to draft an unsuccessful bill protecting against AI-fueled discrimination, said she plans to reintroduce a similar bill next year after an AI Civil Rights Act with similar provisions was introduced in Congress this week. She also hopes to see continued work to pass regulations like SB 1047.

“California has been one the of the few places in the U.S. where we are still demonstrating that we can and are willing to govern technology,” she said.

In a cozy dance studio in Garden Grove, dancers of all experience levels, ages and backgrounds flock to Queer Latin Dance OC to learn the steps to salsa, cumbia and bachata.

For many, the dance class is more than educational — it’s a place to get away from it all, to find community and to uplift one another through art.

When Rodrigo Marquez founded Queer Latin Dance OC at the beginning of this year, he said he was filling a gap in Orange County that often lacks safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.

“I wanted to make creative communities for us to learn in a safe environment,” Marquez said. “Everyone's here to learn, and I want the pressure of whatever's going on in the world, just to forget for the next hour.”

Queer Latin Dance OC meets three times a week to learn the steps to salsa, cumbia and bachata.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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What are the dance lessons like? 

When creating his teaching plan, Marquez said he considers the range of experience his students might have. Everybody starts somewhere, he added, and the hardest part is showing up.

“It is scary, but if you're already showing up, then just jump in and just forget about the world. It's a great distraction, and dancing makes you feel better,” Marquez said.

Philip Lee, an elementary school teacher from Tustin, took his first class with the group Monday night, trying the quick steps of salsa.

“I had a stressful day. … All my stress that I had in my neck and upper back just kind of went away,” Lee said, adding that the high energy in the room is infectious. “It was nice just laughing with people in the community and meeting new people.”

Lee said the dance lesson gave him a space to be with community.

“The queer community specifically, and just kind of let my guard down and just be free and laugh and enjoy being me and celebrated for a love for the arts,” Lee said. “That's not a space that is always safe.”

Before taking lessons at Queer Latin Dance OC, Melba Rivera said she came in with zero dance experience.

“You come as you are. No matter what level you're at or how you identify or what your experience is, everybody's here and everybody's learning,” Rivera said. “It's a very encouraging and motivating space.”

Salsa and bachata are social dances, Marquez said, but one thing that makes his class unique to many is that regardless of gender identity, anyone can follow or lead.

Typically, the lead falls to the male dancer, and women follow. Marquez said it was important that no one feels pressured to be one or the other.

“That's why I created this, so people like me can just come and learn, not be expected to be in a gender role based on how they look,” Marquez said. “They want to dance how they feel.”

Why it matters

Taryn Heiner said, especially in Orange County, it’s challenging to find spaces that are queer-friendly and queer-open.

“That's really what makes this space so kind and warm and welcoming,” Heiner said. “We have all that base understanding of respecting one another, no matter who they are, who they love and what they do.”

Growing up in Orange County, not every room you walk into is a safe space, Rivera added.

“So walking into a room like this, where everybody's friendly, everybody's learning, everybody's just here for the same purpose to get better, to support each other, is really important,” Rivera said. “Not just in the class, but [in] the friendships we make outside of the classroom.”

Outside of dance class, Marquez’s students meet up for monthly hikes and other get-togethers. Marquez said it is a privilege and an honor to bring people together through his love for dance.

“I've seen people become friends since January, and I see them practice outside of practice,” Marquez said. “I've always had a dream to do my own dance classes, but to do it in a way where people can connect and just be themselves. It's far greater than that.”

Queer Latin Dance OC offers lessons to dancers of all experience levels and has created a new community hub in Orange County.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Want to dance? 

Salsa, cumbia and bachata classes are held three nights a week on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Classes are $20 per session, but Marquez also offers a free beginner salsa class every Monday.

You can register for the class of your choice here. Payments are taken in person.

Border Patrol agents have been roving from city to city over the last 15 months, far from their home bases in California and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, engaged in an unprecedented mass deportation campaign.

A collaboration between CalMatters, Evident Media and Bellingcat has tracked these agents, documenting their tactics on the ground and through mountains of video footage, since their first proof-of-concept raid in Bakersfield in January 2025.

Exactly one year later, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, followed weeks later by the killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent.

Our investigation shows that beyond those two shootings, immigration agents engaged in a pattern of force and questionable detention, aggressive tactics that courts have said likely violated the Constitution, as they moved from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, and then Chicago and Minneapolis.

In each city, federal courts stepped in to restrain them from violating civil liberties in that jurisdiction. Agents later deployed to another city. The video evidence suggests agents’ tactics became more brazen with each stop.

Under President Donald Trump, immigration agents have operated without typical public accountability. Many agents wear masks. Incident reports are largely hidden from the public.

“We are in a completely uncharted world now with these masked agents,” said John Roth, who served as inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security under Presidents Barack Obama and Trump.

“The first thing that you do when you give an agent a gun and a badge and the authority over American people is to make sure that they follow the Constitution, period,” he said.

In this new film, we focus on the activity of five agents from the US-Mexico border whose identities we’ve been able to confirm.

Watch the documentary

We are not aware of any disciplinary action taken against these agents. DHS did not respond to requests for comment; the individual agents either declined to comment or didn’t respond to calls or emails.

We showed the incidents to Roth and Steve Bunnell, former DHS general counsel. Both have testified before Congress, raising the alarm about what they see as a dismantling of the department’s accountability and credibility. Roth called the incidents “difficult to watch.”

“There are sort of two essential components of DHS and law enforcement generally being effective, and that’s trust and credibility,” Bunnell said. “And they have lost those things to the extent they had them.”