On September 30, 2026, the final day of California’s bill-signing period, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of 13 bills on artificial intelligence and related technology. The worker bills are SB 947 (McNerney, automated decision systems in employment), SB 951 (Reyes, notice of technological displacement), AB 1331 (Elhawary, workplace surveillance) and AB 1883 (Bryan, workplace surveillance tools). According to the governor’s office, together they stop employers relying solely on AI for discipline or firing, require transparency when mass layoffs or terminations result from AI systems, and ban workplace surveillance in bathrooms.
The rest of the package covers health care (AB 1979 and SB 503: doctors keep independent professional judgment when AI tools are used, and clinical decision tool developers must work to reduce algorithmic bias), content authenticity (AB 2713 and SB 1000 amend the California AI Transparency Act on provenance data, and the governor’s office says the package prohibits deleting watermarks from AI-generated content), SB 1159 on AI transparency and governance, SB 574 (attorneys may not fully delegate core legal work to AI), SB 1111 on digital replicas and deepfake impersonation, AB 2392 on generative AI in public universities, and AB 1864, which requires gene synthesis providers to verify customer identity and track genetic material. The same day, Newsom signed an executive order declaring that the technology will be called “Artificial Intelligence” in California, a direct response to the federal order renaming it “Super Intelligence” the day before.
The AFL-CIO’s Lorena Gonzalez called the four worker bills “first-in-the-nation” guardrails on AI.
Why it matters: with the federal government betting on voluntary commitments, California is building AI rules sector by sector, and the workplace rules aim at the most common way people meet AI decisions: being hired, monitored or fired. AB 1864 is also one of the few state laws aimed at the AI-and-biology risk that frontier labs cite in their own safety frameworks. What it does not show: this entry is drawn from the governor’s announcement, not the chaptered bill texts, so effective dates, exemptions and penalties are not covered here, and how the laws are enforced in practice remains to be seen.