California signs 13 AI bills restricting workplace surveillance and automated firing

Governor Gavin Newsom signed 13 AI-related bills on September 30 -- California's deadline for acting on the roughly two dozen AI bills left on his desk after the legislature adjourned in August. The package's core worker-facing rules: employers can no longer rely solely on an automated system to fire or discipline someone, companies must give written notice when AI causes mass layoffs, and employers are barred from using biometric data to infer a worker's emotional state. A separate bill signed earlier in September already requires AI chatbot operators to run risk assessments before deployment.

Reaching past the workplace

The rest of the package spans healthcare (preserving physician judgment in AI-assisted patient care), higher education (AI procurement standards for Cal State), legal practice (barring attorneys from fully delegating core legal work to AI), and deepfake/digital-replica protections. "AI should expand opportunity -- not come at the expense of workers and families," Newsom said in the signing announcement.

A rebuttal dressed as a naming convention

Alongside the bills, Newsom signed an executive order requiring California state agencies to keep calling it "artificial intelligence" rather than "super intelligence" -- the term President Trump recently directed U.S. diplomats to use instead. It reads as a minor formality, but it's really a marker for the larger fight: Newsom has criticized the administration's preference for voluntary industry accords over binding federal rules, framing this package as California acting "in the absence of federal leadership." For any company watching which jurisdiction's AI rules actually bind, versus which ones are asking nicely, that's the more consequential signal here than the vocabulary note suggests.