A day after President Donald Trump had lunch with some of the nation’s top AI executives, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slate of bills Wednesday aimed at putting new guardrails on the technology.
Chief among them was the “No Robo Bosses Act of 2026,” a first-in-the-nation law that bars employers from relying solely on AI-powered automated decision systems to fire or discipline workers. If an employer mainly relies on one of these systems to make a decision, the law requires a human reviewer to corroborate it using other information like manager evaluations or peer reviews.
Newsom also signed 12 other bills Wednesday as part of a broader package aimed at regulating AI and other emerging technologies. The measures covered everything from AI-driven layoffs and workplace surveillance to deepfakes, medical AI, and the use of the technology by lawyers.
He also signed an executive order requiring California state agencies and departments to keep referring to artificial intelligence as “artificial intelligence.” That order is an obvious jab at Trump’s recent attempt to rebrand the technology as “super intelligence.” Trump signed his own executive order Tuesday directing the federal government to use “Super Intelligence” or “SI” in official communications.
The bill signings come a day after Trump hosted dozens of tech executives and government officials at the White House on Sept. 29, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Dario Amodei.
At the lunch, executives from Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia signed a voluntary agreement outlining some limited AI safety standards. Trump called the standards, which have no legal enforcement mechanism, “morally binding.”
Notably, the agreement misspelled “United States” as “Unites States” underneath Trump’s signature.
Newsom has since taken the opportunity to criticize the meeting directly.
>>@CAGovernor Gavin Newsom on the Trump Administration’s AI meeting and the claim that the industry can self-regulate:
“What I heard in Washington DC yesterday is bullshit and that should scare the hell out of everybody.” pic.twitter.com/vbf8cJLGTf
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) September 30, 2026
“What I heard in Washington DC yesterday is bullsh*t, and that should scare the hell out of everybody,” Newsom said in a video posted on X. He compared the meeting and the agreement to Big Pharma asking not to be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Newsom’s tougher rhetoric on AI appears to be an effort at contrasting Trump’s pro-AI administration as he weighs a potential presidential run.
Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly pushed for faster AI development and the construction of more data centers, arguing that a slowdown of either could put the U.S. at a disadvantage against China.
Despite Trump’s full support, both AI and the infrastructure it requires have been facing growing backlash. Data Center Watch found that local opposition has blocked or delayed at least 120 U.S. data center projects worth nearly $200 billion during the first half of 2026 alone.
And a recent Gallup survey conducted with Microsoft found that, among the 37 countries surveyed, Americans were the most worried about AI.
