California’s Senate and Assembly appropriations committees cleared 24 of 29 active AI bills off the suspense file on Aug. 13, sending a compressed docket of chatbot, workplace, and copyright measures to floor votes before the legislature adjourns Aug. 31. Five bills were held without a recorded vote, the mechanism Sacramento uses to kill legislation quietly and let the fiscal committees carry the political freight.

Two bills are already on Gov. Newsom’s desk per the Transparency Coalition: AB 1651, which addresses AI in the state bar exam, and SB 928, which requires California State University instructors to be human, not AI.

The workplace bills form the spine of the surviving cohort. AB 1883, an algorithmic management measure, cleared committee 5-2 after passing the Assembly floor 52-12 on May 27. AB 2656 (7-0) requires public employers to give 45 days’ notice before deploying generative AI to replace work. SB 947, the companion successor to the vetoed SB 7 or “No Robo Bosses Act,” cleared the Senate 29-9. Newsom killed SB 7 in 2025, and the reintroduction tests whether a rebranded version survives the same desk.

AB 1609 (5-2) puts customer service chatbots under state oversight. AB 412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act, advanced despite the Software and Information Industry Association calling its training-data documentation requirements “technically infeasible.”

The federal backdrop matters. The DOJ’s AI Litigation Task Force intervened against Colorado’s algorithmic discrimination law in April on Commerce Clause grounds, and enforcement there remains stayed. Executive Order 14365 signals Washington’s appetite for the same fight in California. The suspense file thinned the field; Newsom decides which survivors become law, and the DOJ decides which laws it lets stand.

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