California bans employers from firing workers by AI decision alone

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of AI-related bills on Tuesday that collectively represent the most detailed state-level attempt yet to regulate how artificial intelligence touches employment, healthcare, and consumer protection. The centerpiece is SB 947, which prohibits employers from relying solely on an AI system to make disciplinary or termination decisions about an employee — a human has to be in the loop for the decision itself, not just rubber-stamping an AI recommendation after the fact.

A companion bill, SB 951, requires employers to formally disclose when mass layoffs or terminations result from AI systems, closing a gap where companies could cite “restructuring” or similar language without acknowledging that an algorithm drove the headcount decision. Two additional measures, AB 1331 and AB 1883, restrict workplace surveillance: the former bans surveillance tools in bathrooms outright, while the latter sets broader limits on AI-powered monitoring of employees, including the biometric-based emotional-state prediction that some workplace monitoring vendors have marketed as a productivity tool.

The legislation extends well beyond the workplace. AB 1979 and SB 503 require that physicians retain final professional judgment when AI clinical-decision tools are used in patient care, pushing back against the prospect of AI diagnostic recommendations becoming de facto binding on doctors. AB 2713 and SB 1000 strengthen California's existing AI Transparency Act, while SB 1111 specifically targets digital replicas and deepfakes. On the legal side, SB 574 bars attorneys from fully delegating core legal work to AI systems, and AB 1864 requires gene-synthesis companies to implement biosecurity safeguards — a provision aimed at preventing AI-assisted bioweapon design, the same risk category Anthropic and other AI labs have flagged in their own model safety testing this year.

Newsom paired the bill signings with an executive order requiring California state agencies to refer to the technology as “artificial intelligence” rather than adopting the term “superintelligence,” which President Trump had directed U.S. diplomats to use. At a press event accompanying the signings, Newsom criticized the Trump administration directly for not advancing comprehensive federal AI regulation, framing California's dozen new laws as filling a vacuum left by federal inaction rather than duplicating it.

“AI should expand opportunity — not come at the expense of workers and families,” Newsom said in a statement accompanying the signings. With no comprehensive federal AI employment law on the horizon, California's rules will likely function as a de facto national standard for any company employing workers in the state, which given California's size and the concentration of tech employers there, covers a meaningful share of the US AI industry's own workforce.