California will license the people who audit AI. Here is what a law firm buyer should do before 2029.

I spend a good part of my working life on the buying side of AI. Vendors arrive with a deck, a security questionnaire answered in the affirmative, and increasingly a letter saying an independent party has looked at their model and found it sound. My job is to decide whether any of that means what it appears to mean. So when California signed SB 813 and AB 1405 last week, I read them the way a buyer reads them, not the way a policy analyst does. The desk’s story on the two bills has the facts. This is what I think they are worth.

Start with what is good, because a lot of it is. AB 1405 means that from 2029 nobody can sell a covered AI audit in California without a registration number, a public record, independence rules and a misconduct channel that any member of the public can use. For the first time there will be a floor under the phrase “independent audit.” Today that phrase covers everything from a serious assurance engagement to a consultant who spent an afternoon with the product team and wrote a summary. The independence rules are specific in a way I did not expect: an auditor cannot be negotiating a job with the company it is auditing, and cannot have a financial or business interest that a reasonable person would think impairs objectivity. Those are the exact conflicts I have had to ask awkward questions about. Now the statute asks them for me.

SB 813 is the quieter bill and, for a buyer, the more useful one over time. It makes the state decide which organizations have shown they can actually assess an AI system, and it makes them say, in public and every year, what standards and methods they use and who funds them. When that list exists, the first question on my vendor questionnaire becomes simple: which designated organization assessed you, against which published standard, and when.

Now the three things I would not let anyone in a law firm forget.

First, a certificate is not a shield. Section 8898.4 says it plainly: an audit done to a recognized standard is relevant to, but not conclusive of, a claim that an AI system caused harm. The Legislature had the chance to write an affirmative defense and chose not to. So the vendor who tells you their audit means your risk is covered is telling you something the law does not say. It is evidence. It will help. It does not move liability off the firm that chose the tool.

Second, read what a covered audit is actually about. The statute defines it as an assessment of the controls, processes and systems needed for compliance with state law. That is a real thing and it is not the thing that keeps me up at night. Nothing in either bill audits whether a research tool cites cases that exist, whether a drafting assistant leaks one client’s language into another’s document, or whether a vendor’s retention policy matches the promises in its contract. Those remain our questions, and a registration number does not answer them. If anything, the danger is that a stamped audit makes people stop asking.

Third, the dates. The verification framework is due in January 2028 and the registry in January 2029. A firm that waits for those dates before changing how it buys is going to spend two years accepting audit letters from people who may or may not survive registration. My suggestion is to act as if the rules are in force now, because the good vendors will already be behaving as if they are. Three questions belong in every AI vendor questionnaire from this quarter on. Who assessed you, and would they meet the independence rules in AB 1405 today? What published standard did they assess you against, and can we see the scope? And, the one that separates serious vendors from the rest, what did the assessment find that you changed?

The governor used the signing to ask Washington for a national standard. I hope he gets one, because fifty registries would be worse than none. But the thing I noticed most is what California did not do. It did not require anyone to be audited. It regulated the auditors and left the decision to buy an audit, and to believe one, with people like me. That is the right allocation, and it is also a reminder. The state has done its part on the supply side. The demand side, the part where a firm decides what it will and will not put in front of a client, was always going to be ours.

The views here are my own and are not those of my employer or any client. The facts about both bills are in the desk’s story, linked above, and in the chaptered text on the Legislature’s site.