It also prevents AI-powered monitoring of employee bathrooms.
California has enacted new legislation to protect workers from AI-powered layoffs and surveillance, Governor Gavin Newsom announced. The new laws are mostly aimed at companies using AI to initiate job cuts or monitor employees, not about exploiting tech to replace workers. However, it is some of the first laws in the nation to give employees rights over how AI can be deployed in the workplace.
“AI should expand opportunity — not come at the expense of workers and families,” Newsom said in a statement. “As this technology reshapes the workplace, California is putting people at the center.” Newsom also called recent statements by the Trump administration that the AI industry can self-regulate “bull*it,” adding “we need to do a lot more in the absence of federal leadership.”
Split into several bills, the new law prohibits employers from relying solely on AI when making a disciplinary action or employment decision, and forces companies to provide transparency when a mass layoff, relocation or termination is caused by an AI system. It also protects against the use of surveillance tools on work floors and prohibits lawyers from “handing over all legal work” such as drafting briefs, to AI.
Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, also signed an executive order requiring state agencies to continue referring to the tech as “artificial intelligence” rather than “super intelligence” as Trump recently mandated for some federal officials. Newsom positions the state as a leader in AI regulation, comparing AI tech to the airline industry in terms of potential threats to the public.
California’s new laws may have been motivated in part by Meta employee complaints that the company used biased AI tools that “disproportionately selected” people who took medical leave as candidates to be fired. One in four managers use AI to help decide which employees to cut “frequently or all the time,” according to human resources site HR Dive.