California opens AI to third-party auditors — and registers who may audit
What happened: On September 9, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405. SB 813 establishes a first-in-the-nation framework for independent verification organizations that can assess AI systems and models for compliance with state law. AB 1405 creates a state registry for AI auditors and sets standards for their independence, transparency and integrity. Together the two laws build a structure for third-party evaluation and audits, not self-assessment: as Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan put it when the bills were announced, industry cannot be expected to grade its own homework. The same week, Newsom also signed «Adam’s Law», which his office describes as the nation’s strongest companion-chatbot safety law, with crisis protocols and parental controls for minors, alongside new limits on addictive feeds for users under 16. Newsom framed the signings as a partial answer to federal inaction and called on Washington to act.
Why it matters for agents: Until now, whether an AI system behaved within the rules was largely attested by the organization that built it. SB 813 and AB 1405 separate those two roles. An agent’s compliance becomes something an independent party determines, and the auditor itself is registered and held to standards of independence, transparency and integrity. For an agent this changes who is allowed to say what it did. The entity that evaluates its behavior stops being the entity that designed it, and the evaluation leaves a record outside the developer’s own account. The companion-chatbot law adds a second boundary, on what an agent may do with a minor. Both moves write into state law an answer the agentic debate has asked for years: not whether a system can be trusted, but who is accountable for it when it is not.
Source: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/09/governor-newsom-signs-first-in-the-nation-ai-safeguards-to-protect-californians-calls-on-the-federal-government-to-do-its-part/ (Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, September 9, 2026)