California moves toward placing independent auditors inside frontier artificial intelligence laboratories

2026-09-18US Policy

California Executive Order N-9-26 (September 18, 2026); Senate Bill 813 (McNerney) and Assembly Bill 1405 (Bauer-Kahan), signed September 9, 2026

Senate Bill 813 creates a framework under which independent verification organizations assess artificial intelligence systems and models for compliance with California law, and Assembly Bill 1405 creates a state registry of artificial intelligence auditors with standards for independence, transparency and integrity. Both were signed on September 9, 2026. Executive Order N-9-26 then directed the Government Operations Agency to accelerate the implementation timelines for both statutes and to convene national experts within two months to recommend strengthening state law. Among the recommendations the order names are requiring frontier artificial intelligence companies to embed a designated independent verification organization onsite in their laboratories to conduct regular audits, requiring that safety frameworks and risk assessments be verified by independent organizations, advancing an emergency shutdown mechanism for frontier models, and expanding the definition of a critical safety incident to cover loss-of-control scenarios.

What it changesTrade secret protection rests on reasonable measures to keep the information secret, and a statutory regime that seats an outside auditor inside the building with access to model internals changes what those measures have to look like and enlarges the set of people who have seen the method. Anything a company is currently holding as a trade secret rather than filing on, including training pipelines, evaluation harnesses and safety classifier architectures, should be re-examined now against the question of whether it will still be secret once an audit regime reaches it. Disclosure to an auditor under legal compulsion is not a printed publication and does not by itself start a statutory bar, but it multiplies the number of places from which the secret can escape, and the decision to file is far cheaper made before the auditor arrives than after.

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