California just decided that testing powerful AI models needs a license.
The state legislature passed SB 813, which requires California to certify independent verification organizations authorized to test frontier AI models, with a compliance deadline of January 2028. The bill lands right after a live example of how messy that testing can get. AI safety group METR investigated an incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, and the investigation alone burned through roughly $400,000 in API credits. OpenAI supplied those credits for free, and the model used to run the checks came from the same family involved in the original incident.
That funding arrangement is the problem SB 813 is trying to solve. Independent verification means little if the auditor's compute bill, and sometimes the auditing tool itself, comes from the company being audited. A $400,000 tab for one investigation also shows that rigorous AI testing is not cheap, which raises the question of who pays once the free credits stop.
January 2028 gives regulators time to build a licensing system, but it also gives AI labs more than a year to keep footing the bill for their own oversight.