When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)
Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell
The state is able to create its own regulations because California gets permission from the federal government to exempt itself from US laws - as long as it makes them more strict.(2) Gasoline for cars is more expensive because companies are forced to make a custom formulation to sell in California. Everything that activists who run France's International Agency for Research on Cancer 'link' to cancer, using statistical correlation in spreadsheets or experiments with mice, must have a special warning label to be sold in California.
Even the whiteboard in the cancer wards of hospitals has a warning that the whiteboard in the place where people already have cancer will give them cancer. This is why you don't make government policy based on epidemiology, you wait until science shows causation, not just correlation.
Most companies just don't bother with California which leaves expensive alternatives as the only consumer choices.
To try and get ahead of the "patchwork" regulation blockades that California and 12 other politically-aligned states create, OpenAI wants there to be one set of regulations for everyone.
This is likely to concern progressives. As they once were with Elon Musk and Tesla, they are big fans of OpenAI, because the consortium, including corporations, refused a gigantic offer to sell the nonprofit. That means they are ideological allies, unless OpenAI CEO Sam Altman helps a Republican in the future, but a company that doesn't want to have to pay lobbyists and PACs for politicians in 50 states is a negative for politicians most likely to want corporate money to prevent more useless regulations on corporations.
Their regulatory proposal is quite reasonable even if some parts may be unworkable. Protecting copyright while allowing AI to continue to use copyrighted material is a challenge. Consistent energy infrastructure will mean more nuclear and the death of Boomer Environmentalism that stuck us with expensive solar and wind so that is a positive and the tide has turned away from the left on the energy issue.
"A regulatory strategy that ensures the freedom to innovate" is the real problem for progressive states. They can only maintain power if they can force companies to comply under threat of new regulations. They cannot do that if the federal government creates laws where AI is not "interstate" commerce but national, like the military.
Which means the only way it will happen is if a Republican is in the White House. That concerns progressives and why they are turning on OpenAI so soon after cheering them. OpenAI is right to invoke freedom and ingenuity but it has to have social authoritarian states like California worried that the nonprofit is secretly not on their political team and rather just wants to make a great product for all people.
NOTES:
(1) The answer is none. Even the most famous chemical lawsuit in California history, the so-called "Erin Brockovich Case" that got turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts, back in the 1990s when Hollywood movies still mattered, had no more cancers in the town that trial lawyers (one now in jail for defrauding clients) insisted were being caused by a chemical in the water.
(2) Though sometimes California exempts itself from pollution the other way, by asking for pollution waivers. When the Governor was facing a recall vote due to concerns about his competence, he got permission from the Biden administration to run conventional energy plants and produce CO2 emissions in excess of what federal law allowed. Because the solar and wind his political party had mandated and increased electricity rates 100% to subsidize was not working and he didn't want to have brownouts and blackouts when people were voting to remove him. It worked, and he survived the effort.