State Legislation Update: March 2026

The standing committees of the IP Law Section are responsible for delivering programming on the designated subject matter of the committee, networking among members, building community, alerting Section members to hot topics and law updates, and increasing the opportunities for Section members to volunteer and become involved with the Section through committee activities.

As of March 19, 2026 the following state bills have been identified which may be of interest to the Section. The California legislature reconvened on January 5, 2026. As we are in the second year of the 2025-2026 Biennium, legislators may introduce new bills and/or try to progress bills, introduced during the first year, that had not made it to the Governor’s desk. As a practical matter, as more than two months have passed since the legislature reconvened, it is even less likely that a bill that stalled in 2025 will see any progression in 2026. As some may recall, SB 690 (An act to amend Sections 631, 632, 632.7, 637.2, and 638.50 of the Penal Code, relating to crimes), after passing the Senate, stalled in the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. SB 690 aims to de-conflict the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA. Discussions on said bill have not restarted. The current legislative session ends on August 31, 2026. The summary and status of bills are as follows:

AB 1542, Ward-D, An act to amend Sections 1798.100 and 1798.121 of the Civil Code, relating to privacy.

Status: Pending: Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection (2/2/26)

Summary: The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) grants a consumer various rights with respect to personal information, as defined, that is collected or sold by a business, as defined, including the right to direct a business that collects sensitive personal information, as defined, about the consumer to limit its use, as prescribed. The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, approved by the voters as Proposition 24 at the November 3, 2020, statewide general election, amended, added to, and reenacted the CCPA.

This bill would, under the CCPA, prohibit a business, service provider, or contractor from selling or sharing sensitive personal information to a third party.

This bill would declare that its provisions further the purposes and intent of the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020.

AB 1898, Schultz-D, Workplace Artificial Intelligence Tools

Status: Pending: Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment (3/16/26)

This bill would require an employer to provide a written notice to an employee that a workplace AI tool was used to assist the employer in making employment-related decisions or to surveil the workplace. The bill would require the notice to be given to a worker within a specified time and would require the notice to contain specified information, including the specific employment-related decisions potentially affected by the use of the workplace AI tool. The bill would require an employer to maintain an updated list of all workplace AI tools currently in use and to provide the list to workers annually. The bill would provide for enforcement by the Labor Commissioner or a public prosecutor, and alternatively would authorize any worker who has suffered damages, or their exclusive representative, to file a civil action for damages caused by the adverse action. The bill would establish remedies and penalties for violations, including a penalty of up to $500 per employee for each violation.

AB 2021, Schiavo-D, California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018: whistleblower complaints

Status: Pending: Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection and Judiciary (3/2/26)

This bill would authorize a person to submit to the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), a whistleblower complaint and would make the whistleblower eligible for an award if the CPPA designates a complaint for administrative enforcement and certain requirements are met. The bill would require an eligible whistleblower to receive at least 15% but not more than 33% of the fines collected through an administrative enforcement action or settlement, calculated after the allocation to Consumer Privacy Grant Subfund. The bill would require the CPPA to consider certain factors in determining the amount of the award. The bill would additionally authorize the CPPA to assess an administrative penalty against a person who violates the CCPA in an amount to cover the reasonable attorney’s fees of the whistleblower.

AB 2169, Lowenthal-D, Social media platforms: artificial intelligence models.

Status: Pending: Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection (3/16/26)

This bill, the Digital Choice Act, would require a social media company or a person that deploys an artificial intelligence model, defined as a model operator, to allow a consumer to request a copy of the consumer’s personal information, contextual data, and social graph and would require the social media company or model operator to respond to that request within five business days in a format that is, among other things, portable to the extent technically feasible. The bill would define “contextual data” to mean information provided by a user to an artificial intelligence model and any context or derivative data associated with the user’s interactions with the artificial intelligence model, as specified, and any model-generated or inferred data linked to or generated from those interactions. The bill would define “social graph” to mean data that represents a person’s connections and interactions within a social media platform, as specified.

This bill would require, among other things, a social media company to implement a transparent, third-party-accessible interperability interface that allows a user to choose to share covered user’s social graph or user-selected parts of the social graph to a social media platform designated by the user and enable a third party to, with the user’s permission, access a social graph created by the user and be notified when a new or updated social graph is available, as prescribed. The bill would require a model operator to implement a third-party- accessible interoperability interface to allow a user to share the user’s contextual data directly with other artificial intelligence models as the user designates and enable those artificial intelligence models to be notified when new or updated data is available, as prescribed.

SB 300, Padilla-D, Companion chatbots.

Status: Approved by the Senate, in Assembly: read the first time, held at desk (1/26/26)

Summary: Existing law requires that if a reasonable person interacting with a companion chatbot, as defined, would be misled to believe that the person is interacting with a human, an operator of a companion chatbot platform must issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the companion chatbot is artificially generated and not human. Existing law requires a chatbot operator to maintain a protocol for preventing the production of suicidal ideation, suicide, or self-harm content to the user, as specified, and would require an operator to publish details on that protocol on the operator’s internet website. Existing law requires an operator to take certain actions with respect to a user the operator knows is a minor, including instituting reasonable measures to prevent the companion chatbot from producing sexually explicit visual material or proposing sexually explicit conduct.

This bill would instead require a companion chatbot operator to take the above actions when it has constructive knowledge that a user is a minor. This bill would instead require an operator to prevent its companion chatbot from producing or facilitating the exchange of any sexually explicit material or proposing sexually explicit conduct.

SB 574, Umberg-D. Generative artificial intelligence: attorneys and arbitrators.

Status: Approved by Senate, in Assembly: read the first time, held at desk (1/29/26)

Summary: Existing law, the State Bar Act, provides for the licensure and regulation of attorneys by the State Bar of California, a public corporation. The act requires an attorney to strictly maintain client confidences and to preserve client secrets at their own peril.

This bill would obligate an attorney who uses generative artificial intelligence to practice law to ensure that confidential personal identifying, or other nonpublic information, is not entered into a public generative artificial intelligence system. The bill would also require an attorney to ensure that reasonable steps are taken to verify the accuracy of generative artificial intelligence material and to correct any erroneous or hallucinated output in any material used by the attorney.

Existing law requires every pleading, petition, written notice of motion, or other similar paper to be signed by the attorney of record, or if a party is unrepresented, by the party, thereby certifying to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief that it is not being presented primarily for an improper purpose and that the claims, defenses, and legal and factual contentions are warranted, as specified.

This bill would prohibit a brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court from containing any citations that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified, including any citation provided by generative artificial intelligence.

Existing law, the California Arbitration Act, provides a statutory framework for the enforcement of contractual arbitration under California law. The act establishes that a written agreement to submit a present or future controversy to arbitration is valid, enforceable, and irrevocable, except as specified. The act defines a neutral arbitrator as one who is selected jointly by the parties or by the parties’ arbitrators, or is appointed by the court if the parties or their arbitrators cannot jointly select an arbitrator. The act requires a person selected to serve as a neutral arbitrator to disclose all matters that could cause a person aware of the facts to reasonably entertain a doubt as to the proposed neutral arbitrator’s impartiality.

This bill would prohibit an arbitrator from delegating any part of their decision-making process to any generative artificial intelligence tool. The bill would prohibit an arbitrator from relying on information generated by generative artificial intelligence outside the record without making appropriate disclosures to the parties beforehand. The bill would require an arbitrator to assume responsibility for all aspects of an award, regardless of any use of generative artificial intelligence tools to assist with the decision-making process.

SB 867, Padilla-D, Toys: Companion Chatbots

Status: Pending: Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection (Scheduled hearing: April 6, 2026)

Summary: Existing law regulates the sale, manufacture, and exchange of toys in the state and prohibits the manufacture, sale, or exchange, possession with intent to sell or exchange, and exposition or offer for sale or exchange to a retailer a toy that is contaminated with a toxic substance, as provided. Violation of these provisions is punishable as a misdemeanor. Existing law requires an operator of a companion chatbot platform, as defined, to issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the companion chatbot is artificially generated and not human if a reasonable person interacting with a companion chatbot would be misled to believe that the person is interacting with a human. For these purposes, existing law defines a “companion chatbot” to mean an artificial intelligence system with a natural language interface that provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs and is capable of meeting a user’s social needs, including by exhibiting anthropomorphic features and being able to sustain a relationship across multiple interactions. Existing law also requires an operator to take certain actions with respect to a user the operator knows is a minor, including to disclose to the user that the user is interacting with artificial intelligence. Violation of these provisions is subject to civil liability.

This bill would, until January 1, 2031, prohibit the manufacture, sale, exchange, possession with intent to sell or exchange, and exposition or offer for sale or exchange to a retailer a toy, as defined, that includes a companion chatbot, and would make violations of the bill subject to the same civil liability as violations of the provisions applicable to operators of companion chatbots in the above-described paragraph.

SB 923, Becker-D, Consumer privacy requests: deletion request records and request submission methods.

Status: Pending: Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection (Scheduled hearing: April 6, 2026)

This bill would expand that right to include requesting the deletion of any personal information that the business has collected about the consumer (and not just from the consumer, as is the case under existing law). If the business did not obtain the personal information from the consumer, the bill would allow the business to retain a record of the deletion request and the minimum data necessary to ensure the consumer’s personal information remains deleted from its records and is not being used for any other purpose.

This bill would also require that a business that operates exclusively online and has a direct relationship with the consumer from whom it collects personal information to make an online method, such as a web form or online portal, available to consumers for submitting personal information requests, in addition to an email address (as required under current law).

SB 1000, Becker-D, California AI Transparency Act

Status: Pending: Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection (2/18/26)

Existing law, the California AI Transparency Act, beginning August 2, 2026, generally regulates provenance data disclosure in content generated by artificial intelligence (AI), including by requiring a covered provider to make available an AI detection tool at no cost to the user that meets certain criteria. Existing law requires a covered provider to offer the user the option to include a certain manifest disclosure in image, video, or audio content, or content that is any combination thereof, created or altered by the covered provider’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) system and requires a covered provider to include a certain latent disclosure in AI-generated image, video, or audio content, or content that is any combination thereof, created by the covered provider’s GenAI system. Existing law defines “covered provider” for these purposes to mean a person that creates, codes, or otherwise produces a generative AI system that has over 1,000,000 monthly visitors or users and is publicly accessible within the geographic boundaries of the state.

This bill would recast those provisions to, among other changes, delete the user threshold from the definition of “covered provider,” replace the term “AI detection tool” with “disclosure verification tool,” delete the above-described requirement of a covered provider to offer the user the option to include a manifest disclosure in content, and additionally require a covered provider to include in the above-described latent disclosure whether the content is generated or modified by artificial intelligence.

This bill would also exempt from those provisions a product, service, or application that is primarily marketed and intended to facilitate accessibility for disabled individuals and is designed to prevent content generated by the product, service, internet website, or application from being downloaded, stored, or otherwise appropriated, to the extent technically feasible.

SB 1104, Cabaldon-D, California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018: request submission methods

Status: Pending: Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection (Scheduled hearing: April 6, 2026)

Existing law requires a business that does not operate exclusively online to make available to consumers at least 2 methods for submitting personal information requests, including, at a minimum, a toll-free telephone number and, if the business maintains an internet website, a website address. This bill would require that a business that does not operate exclusively online make available to consumers an email address for submitting personal information requests.

SB 1142, Becker-D, Digital Dignity Act

Status: Pending: Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection (scheduled hearing: April 6, 2026)

This bill would clarify that false impersonation includes the use of a digital replica with the intent to impersonate another for purposes of prescribed criminal provisions. The act would subject a person who, by distributing content with actual knowledge that the content includes the use of a digital replica, violates the prescribed criminal provisions, is found liable for defamation in a civil action, or uses another’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness for commercial purposes to additional specified liability, as provided.

The Digital Dignity Act would require a product, service, internet website, or application that is both a generative AI tool and a large online platform that allows users to create a digital replica of other individuals to implement and maintain a mechanism by which users can revoke access to their digital replica created by other people using the large online platform’s generative AI tool at any time.

The act would authorize a city attorney or the Attorney General to bring a civil action to enforce these provisions and to seek a specified civil penalty and injunctive relief. The act would require a generative AI tool provider to maintain, for no less than 90 days, records sufficient to allow compliance with a court order issued pursuant to a civil action by the city attorney or Attorney General.