California Governor Gavin Newsom signed three laws on September 30 regulating employers’ use of automated systems in disciplinary decisions, technology-driven workforce reductions and workplace surveillance. The measures establish separate safeguards for employment decisions and employee privacy, with implementation beginning in January 2027.
SB 947, known as the No Robo Bosses Act, restricts automated discipline and termination decisions. SB 951 adds technology-displacement disclosures to California’s existing layoff notification law. AB 1883 bars specified forms of AI-enabled monitoring involving employees’ emotions and neural data. Together, the laws address both how employers act on automated information and what certain workplace monitoring systems may collect or infer.
The timetable is staggered. SB 951 and AB 1883 take effect January 1, 2027, while SB 947’s provisions become operative July 1, 2027. The laws are targeted restrictions rather than a general prohibition on using artificial intelligence at work, and their coverage differs depending on the technology and employment activity involved.
SB 947 applies to public and private employers and reaches beyond tools marketed as artificial intelligence. Its definition of an automated decision system includes computational processes based on machine learning, statistical modeling or data analytics that produce outputs such as scores, classifications or recommendations to assist or replace human judgment and materially affect people. Specified ordinary software and data tools, including spam filters, calculators and databases, are excluded.
The law prohibits discipline or termination based solely on automated output; primary reliance on that output requires human corroboration and triggers employee notice and data-description rights. It also restricts uses of automated systems that violate employment protections, infer protected status or predict and penalize workers’ exercise of legal rights. Specified collective-bargaining arrangements and federally required aerospace and defense uses are exempt.
SB 951 addresses a different question: whether automation is responsible for a covered workforce reduction. It adds disclosure obligations when AI or another automated technology causes all or a substantial part of a mass layoff, relocation or operational termination covered by the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The enacted measure preserves that law’s existing coverage and 60-day notice framework rather than establishing a separate notification system for every automation-related job loss.
AB 1883 focuses on surveillance capabilities rather than employment decisions. Beginning in January, public and private employers may not use AI-enabled workplace surveillance to recognize, infer or predict employees’ emotional states or collect their neural data, subject to exceptions. The restrictions do not amount to a blanket ban on workplace monitoring: safety exceptions and narrowly defined federal aerospace and defense exceptions remain.
These measures join an existing California workplace-AI framework that includes regulations from the California Civil Rights Department and the California Privacy Protection Agency. Automated employment tools also remain subject to underlying labor, privacy and civil rights obligations; the new statutes add requirements directed at particular uses of the technology rather than replacing those broader protections.
Implementation will extend beyond the first effective dates. Under SB 951, the Employment Development Department must publish technology-displacement summaries and report on AI’s effects on hiring by January 1, 2028. That reporting requirement adds a state-level information component to the new employer disclosures as California begins tracking the workforce changes covered by the law.
Sources: Morgan Lewis, National Law Review – AI, gov.ca.gov