OpenAI Asks California to Strengthen SB 53 With Training-Phase Monitoring

OpenAI's Global Affairs team said on LinkedIn on August 21, 2026 that California's SB 53, which the company supports, should be amended to expand safeguards — requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation, and strengthening cybersecurity across the model-development lifecycle.

OpenAI’s Global Affairs team said in a LinkedIn post on August 21, 2026 that California’s SB 53, which the company supports, “should be amended to expand safeguards”¹.

It named two changes: requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation for conduct that could bypass a third party’s security controls and compromise that party’s confidential information, and strengthening cybersecurity protections throughout the model-development lifecycle¹. The company said “recent incidents” underscore both the need for these protections and the importance of updating them as new risks emerge, and that the goal is not to write rules for one particular incident but to build a framework helping developers detect problems earlier and share lessons across the industry¹. The post also restated the company’s “reverse federalism” approach, in which states move in a compatible direction while Congress continues to debate federal legislation¹. TechCrunch notes that the endorsement is striking given that OpenAI previously opposed SB 53².