Sneha Revanur

speaker

393 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Sneha Revanur’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

Sacramento was already feeling some ambient anxiety about the release of reasoning models after SB 1047 was vetoed.

Governor Newsom convened a high-level commission of experts like Fei-Fei Li and Tino Cuellar that did great work and eventually put forward a report recommending transparency requirements and missile lower protections, and those ended up being the core bones of SB 53.

This wasn't like an against all odds victory.

And, you know, of course, there were aspects of the situation that, you know, ended up not working out in our favor.

You know, we had to negotiate away, for example, the third party auditing requirement that I think was very central to the bill originally.

But I also would make a few points to push back here.

I mean, first of all, we were also co-sponsors of SB 1047, right?

And that bill passed the legislature.

We did a lot of work

wrangling labor unions and Hollywood actors and coordinating these diverse letters of support.

And Elon Musk even tweeted about the bill, having that coalition muscle, priming the legislature, building up our working relationship with Senator Wiener's office, socializing the idea of frontier AI regulation in Sacramento, getting on Governor Newsom's radar to the extent that he said the bill

created its own weather system, and he ended up convening that commission that really paved the path for SE53.

These were all residual impacts for SB 1047 that made it much, much easier the second time around, such that a lot of things that we invested in early on just ended up paying off at a later date.

And so I would not really disentangle these two things as being entirely disconnected, because I think that in a lot of ways, things that we did during SB 1047 just had a delayed paid off.

And

You know, you can even make the argument that we actually needed 1047 to get 53 to pass in the way that it passed.

So that's one thing that I would say.

The second thing that I would say is that it's really important to have advocates in the room who have a lot of context on safety-specific things, right?

So for example, one win that we were super excited about when it came to the final version of SC53 was that we were able to actually get the bill to cover internal deployments of AI models, right?

And I think that, especially on the heels of mythos, a lot of people are especially concerned about

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