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SB 53

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California's frontier-AI transparency law (TFAIA), in force 1 Jan 2026, covering frontier developers training models above 10^26 FLOP: all of them publish transparency reports and report critical safety incidents, and large frontier developers also publish a safety framework 12.

Developed in
ch. 08, Frontier-developer laws
Chapters
ch. 08, Regulatory Map · ch. 21, AI Laws Worldwide
Source
2 numbered references, listed below

Where it is used

6 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Frontier model

    A general-purpose model at or near the capability frontier.

  • RAISE Act

    New York's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, a frontier-AI safety law binding large frontier developers to publish a safety framework and every…

  • Transparency

    In NIST's framing, how far information about an AI system and its outputs reaches the people who interact with it: what happened.

Sources

  1. [1] California SB 53 / TFAIA (models above 10^26 FLOP; transparency reports and incident reports by all frontier developers; frameworks by large frontier developers). Future of Privacy Forum. 2025-10-03. https://fpf.org/blog/californias-sb-53-the-first-frontier-ai-law-explained/ (verified: secondary)
  2. [2] SB 53, Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (Chapter 138, Statutes of 2025, approved and filed 29 Sep 2025; a regular-session statute, in force from 1 Jan 2026 under Cal. Const. art. IV, §8(c)(1); frontier model > 10^26 operations; large frontier developer > USD 500M revenue; frontier AI framework; transparency report; critical safety incidents to the Office of Emergency Services within 15 days). California Legislature. 2025-09-29. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). SB 53. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/sb-53. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026sb53,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{SB 53}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/sb-53}
}