California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Senate Bill 574 on 30 September 2026, and the bill was filed with the Secretary of State the same day as Chapter 858 of the 2026 statutes. The measure is enacted law, not a proposal or a consultation. It carries no urgency clause, so it takes effect on 1 January 2027 under Article IV, Section 8(c) of the California Constitution.
Section 6068.1 of the Business and Professions Code, added by the Act, states that an attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence. An attorney who uses generative artificial intelligence to assist in the practice of law may not enter confidential, personal identifying or other nonpublic information into a system where access to that information is not restricted to the attorney and persons the attorney authorises under confidentiality obligations, and must take reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of outputs and to correct erroneous or hallucinated output. Section 1282.1 of the Code of Civil Procedure bars an arbitrator from delegating any part of the decisionmaking process to a generative artificial intelligence tool, and from relying on generative artificial intelligence output drawn from outside the record without disclosing that use to the parties beforehand and, as far as practical, allowing them to comment on it. The Act also amends Section 128.7 of the Code of Civil Procedure and Section 6173 of the Business and Professions Code, and adds Section 180 to the Code of Civil Procedure.
Attorneys licensed in California, in private firms and in-house legal departments, carry the verification duty personally, and it reaches every citation in a brief, pleading, motion or other paper filed in a California court. Vendors selling generative artificial intelligence research and drafting products to California firms now face buyers who must confirm that confidential and personal identifying inputs stay restricted to authorised users. Arbitrators and alternative resolution providers operating under the California Arbitration Act must keep the decisionmaking process in human hands and disclose outside-the-record artificial intelligence material before relying on it.
Section 6068.1 preserves the attorney's duty to exercise reasonable competence and diligence, and Section 1282.1 preserves the arbitrator's duty of neutrality alongside that duty of competence and diligence, so the new obligations sit on top of existing professional duties rather than replacing them. Both sections define generative artificial intelligence as a system that can generate derived synthetic content, including text, images, video and audio, that emulates the structure and characteristics of the training data. The Act permits using generative artificial intelligence to assist in the practice of law while prohibiting delegation of the practice of law to it, and does not fix where assistance ends. The Judicial Council is directed to publicly revisit a standard of judicial administration to reflect further development of generative artificial intelligence.
Licentium advises technology companies and regulated businesses on artificial intelligence and digital asset regulation across the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Work we undertake includes mapping state artificial intelligence statutes against product and professional use policies, drafting generative artificial intelligence use and verification procedures for legal and compliance teams, and reviewing vendor contracts for confidentiality and output accuracy terms.
Source: California Senate Bill 574, Chapter 858 (2026), California Legislative Information