GitHub Joins Coalition Urging Amendments to California AI Transparency Law to Protect Open Source

GitHub has joined a coalition with Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, and Mozilla Corporation calling for targeted amendments to California's AI Transparency Act (SB 942 and SB 1000).

The problem with the current draft of the bill is that its license revocation provisions conflict with how actual open source licenses work. Open source licenses need to be permanent and irrevocable so that developers can trust, reuse, and share code, but the bill requires license revocation if downstream users fail to meet their obligations.

This approach could introduce uncertainty into the software supply chain, particularly for community-driven collaborative projects. The coalition proposes the following alternatives:

• Leverage existing legal protections: Developers who modify and distribute AI systems are already directly subject to current law, and enforcement mechanisms already exist.
• Adopt the EU approach: Simply notifying downstream users of documentation best practices should be sufficient, similar to the EU AI Act's Transparency Code of Practice, which recognizes the unique characteristics of the open source ecosystem.

GitHub emphasized that this amendment is essential to finding a balance that ensures AI accountability while not stifling open source-based innovation.