California lawmakers urge criminal penalties, emergency legislation to rein in unchecked AI

The top brass of the AI industry have spent years telling anyone with a microphone that their product might end civilisation, and California's elected representatives have finally responded with the ferocity such warnings demand: a press release. Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Ted Lieu are among those calling for emergency legislation and criminal penalties for the creators of 'rogue AI systems' — a phrase doing the sort of heavy lifting normally reserved for forklifts. The executive warnings we covered earlier have finally produced a legislative consequence, which is more than the warnings themselves have produced so far.

Note the precision on offer. Emergency legislation, because nothing focuses a drafting committee like a deadline, and criminal penalties for the 'creators' of rogue systems — creators, not deployers, not funders, not the board that signed off on the compute bill. Presumably the statute will be aimed at whoever is easiest to charge: the hobbyist with a rented GPU, while the labs that published 'we might kill everyone' blog posts get invited to testify as experts. It is a bit like responding to a bank robbery by criminalising the getaway bicycle. The bill is not yet a bill, the penalties are not yet numbers, and the definition is not yet anything at all.

And what, precisely, is a rogue AI system? The article does not say, because the lawmakers have not said. The whole architecture rests on a definition that will be written after an incident, retrospectively, by people who cannot currently describe what they are legislating against. Meanwhile the executives who publicly claimed their technology poses existential threats remain, in the eyes of Sacramento, the adults in the room. The penalties are for the rogue; the podium is for the labs; and the bill, somehow, is always emergency legislation and never emergency enforcement.