California Is Asking Everyone What AI Rules Should Be, and the Answers Are In

Most artificial intelligence rules are written the same way. Lobbyists and lawyers draft them, a committee edits them, and the public meets them for the first time when they become law. As of October 2026, California is trying something different. On October 13, Governor Gavin Newsom announced the results of the first statewide run of Engaged California, the country's first state-level digital democracy platform, and released a report capturing what ordinary residents think AI policy should do. The headline message: Californians want a say not only in how they use AI, but in how companies build it and how the government regulates it.

This is an explainer, not legal advice. Nothing in the new report is law. The recommendations are public input, gathered through a state-run deliberation process, meant to guide policymakers. What follows is a map of what the platform is, what participants said, and where their input fits into California's existing AI rulebook.

A town hall that never closes

Engaged California launched in February 2025 with an unusual first assignment: helping Los Angeles recover from the Eaton and Palisades wildfires. More than 900 affected residents used the platform to share feedback on insurance coverage, building standards, and infrastructure, and the state says their input produced 19 recommendations for government action. The pilot was a public-private effort costing about $115,000, and it borrowed its playbook from Taiwan, where digital democracy tools have been used for years to turn large volumes of public comment into workable policy proposals.

The idea, as described by the state's Office of Data and Innovation, is a modern town hall: residents need only an email address to join, share their views through an online tool, and the platform uses AI to analyze the comments and prioritize government responses while protecting user privacy. In May 2026, the state launched the first statewide use of the platform, open to every California resident, with the topic shifting from wildfire recovery to the economic and labor impacts of AI. Participants are prompted to share the industry they work in, how they believe AI could affect their workplace, and what state lawmakers should do about it. The tool also collects demographic data, including age, gender, and race and ethnicity, and residents can join live virtual sessions to discuss their sentiments further and offer policy recommendations.

The effort is run by the Government Operations Agency and the Office of Data and Innovation in partnership with Carnegie California, the West Coast program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The design team also includes scholars and researchers from Stanford University's Deliberative Democracy Lab, UC Berkeley, Harvard University's Center for Internet and Society, the Berggruen Institute, the Kapor Center, the Project Liberty Institute, the American Public Trust, and the San Francisco Foundation.

Californians want to be in the loop on AI policy: not just how people use AI, but how companies build it and how the government regulates it.

What Californians actually said

According to the state's October 13 report, three themes came up the most often and drew the strongest support from participants.

First, accountability: hold AI companies responsible for the harm their products cause. Second, resources: protect people and the environment from the resource demands of AI, a category that covers the water, energy, and construction footprint of data centers. Third, boundaries: set clear rules for where and how AI can be used safely.

On workers and data centers, participants pushed for transparency around the building, construction, and implementation of new facilities, arguing that governments owe citizens visibility into how these projects come together. Others cautioned against overregulation of the industry, with one participant suggesting that requiring a model to pass bias testing before public release could be a proportionate middle ground. And several called for transparency from AI companies themselves, arguing the state should compel firms to open up their black boxes and support peer-reviewed studies of the claims they make about their systems, drawing an explicit parallel to the research on how social media affects people under 18. More studies, one participant said, are needed on how AI is changing people's ability to think critically.

Where this fits in California's AI rulebook

The report's recommendations are meant to feed future policy decisions, and they land on top of what the governor's office describes as the strongest state-level AI framework in the country. In 2025, Newsom signed SB 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, which requires frontier AI developers to publicly disclose their safety frameworks, report specified critical safety incidents to the state, and protect whistleblowers who report serious risks. In 2026, he signed SB 813, creating the first state framework for certifying independent verification organizations that can objectively assess AI systems for safety and risk, alongside AB 1405, which establishes a state registry for AI auditors with standards for their independence, transparency, and integrity.

The framework also reaches into specific harms. This year the state enacted Adam's Law, requiring safeguards around companion chatbots used by children, including suicide and self-harm crisis protocols, parental controls, and notifications when safety settings are disabled. (The stakes just got sharper: the biggest companion-chatbot platform filed for bankruptcy, and Disney is the lead bidder: the Character.ai bankruptcy and what it means for AI companionship.) It is the first law in the country to require independent child-safety audits and comprehensive risk assessments before such products are released. California has also banned toys containing AI companion chatbots for five years, prohibited the use of students' personal information to train AI models, and expanded protections against AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

Beyond that, the state has launched an AI Unemployment Tracker to follow the technology's labor effects, issued a first-in-the-nation executive order on AI's economic and labor impacts, and built out privacy protections through the Delete Act, which lets residents direct registered data brokers to delete their personal information through a single request platform. As of October 2026, the deliberative experiment is the newest layer on this stack: legislation sets the rules, and now the public gets a structured channel to say what the rules should cover next.

What happens next

The state says the recommendations will help guide policy decisions and inform an AI action plan for government leaders. The engagement itself is ongoing and remains open to all California residents. But as of October 2026, nothing in the report is binding, and the real test is whether legislators convert any of it into bills.

The bet behind Engaged California is that structured public input becomes a normal part of how technology policy gets made, rather than an occasional hearing or a comment period that few people find. The skeptical version is equally clear: participants self-select, comments get summarized by AI, and reports can gather dust. Watch the legislature. If the three themes, accountability, resource protections, and safe-use boundaries, start showing up in bill text, the experiment worked.