Friday, Gavin Newsom signed an executive order meant to “dramatically accelerate” the convening of “a group of world-leading experts” so that they can make a … guide … “for California to reinforce and strengthen its AI safety and security laws.”
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 24 September 2026
Newsom vetoed AI safety bill as innovation-killer, then ordered "world-leading experts" to write one anyway
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY
Gavin Newsom's certainty that California's AI industry needed less paperwork, dead at eleven months, of an executive order.…
…(cont) The certainty was born in October 2025, when the governor vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report their past and anticipated water use when applying for, or renewing, a business license. Newsom warned that the disclosure would strangle innovation and cost California its footing in an industry he wanted the state to lead. The bill died on his desk, and with it any public record of what those numbers might have shown.
The certainty is survived, awkwardly, by itself. On Friday, the same governor signed an executive order to "dramatically accelerate" the convening of a group he calls "world-leading experts," charged with producing a guide so California can "reinforce and strengthen" its AI safety and security laws. The order does not say what changed in eleven months. It says only that something did, and that fixing it now requires a panel rather than a form the industry was already asked, once, to fill out.
This is the shit an industry gets twice: deference when the rules are loosened, deference again when they're rewritten, and no bill presented for either. The innovation that could not survive a water-use disclosure in the fall of 2025 is, in the fall of 2026, apparently sturdy enough to survive a panel of experts writing new rules about it — provided the experts are the ones doing the writing, and not the legislature.
He is preceded in death by the water-use numbers themselves, which were never collected, because the veto made sure no one had to ask.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the "world-leading experts" be named in public, and their guide published in full, so the next veto can be checked against this one.
“They killed the form that would've told us how much water these AI farms are drinking, called it a job-killer, and twelve months later they need a task force to write the rules they just tore up. That's not innovation, that's amnesia with an expense account — and your water bill's the one covering it.”
“Look, the water-reporting bill was a paperwork nightmare that would've spooked every server farm out of the state — Newsom saved jobs, full stop. Now he's just getting ahead of the curve with an outside panel, which is basically nothing like the bill he vetoed, except for the part where it's about the exact same thing — did I say that? That's not what I meant.”
The receipts
Gavin Newsom has decided he’s skeptical of AI. It’s the exact opposite of the stance he took just one year ago. In October 2025, Newsom vetoed a bill that would require data centers to report their anticipated and past water use when applying for, and renewing their business licenses.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.