State Sen. Scott Wiener has introduced Senate Bill (SB) 607, an effort to authorize one of the four California Institutes for Science and Innovation (Cal ISIs) to add artificial intelligence (AI) as a research concentration.
Camille Crittenden, executive director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, said she believes SB 607 is a continuation of Wiener’s interest in regulating AI use, including his earlier introduction of SB 53, which requires large-scale AI model developers to create and publicly disclose their safety protocols.
“This is continuing his interest in not just the promotion of the positive impacts of AI but also trying to put guardrails around its use,” she said.
Crittenden said that while artificial intelligence was not included in the institutes’ founding legislation more than 25 years ago, it is now embedded in the work of all of the Cal ISIs. She added that researchers across the Cal ISIs use both rule-based and generative AI in their research.
“We’re already doing a lot of research with artificial intelligence,” she said. “The nice thing about this amendment is that it will highlight the work that we are already doing.”