Senate Bill 813 would let private organizations develop voluntary assessments and safety standards for the technology. Université de Montréal’s Yoshua Bengio and the University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton and Ajay Agrawal all signed an open letter in support of the bill and organized by Fathom, a San Francisco-based non-profit. (The Logic)

Talking point: AI experts have argued that voluntary industry standards can help meet companies’ need for some certainty about the rules while policymakers figure out how to regulate the technology. Under SB 813, firms that follow the standards would get some legal protections. Hinton and Bengio previously backed a different California bill that would have imposed compulsory testing and auditing requirements on AI developers, but that proposal was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The signatories of Fathom’s open letter include tech figures who opposed that bill. The standards system, signatories say, would both meet society’s safety needs and give developers room to advance AI.