The California Fair Employment and Housing Act establishes the Civil Rights Department within the Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency and requires the department to, among other things, bring civil actions to enforce the act.

Existing law requires, on or before September 1, 2024, the Department of Technology to conduct, in coordination with other interagency bodies as it deems appropriate, a comprehensive inventory of all high-risk automated decision systems that have been proposed for use, development, or procurement by, or are being used, developed, or procured by, any state agency.

This bill would generally regulate the development and deployment of an automated decision system (ADS) used to make consequential decisions, as defined. The bill would define “automated decision system” to mean a computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues simplified output, including a score, classification, or recommendation, that is designed or used to assist or replace human discretionary decisionmaking and materially impacts natural persons.

This bill would require a developer of a covered ADS, as defined, to take certain actions, including conduct impact assessments of the covered ADS and provide deployers to whom the developer transfers the covered ADS with certain information, including a high-level summary of the results of those impact assessments.

This bill would, beginning January 1, 2027, require a deployer of a covered ADS to take certain actions, including provide certain disclosures to a subject of a consequential decision made or facilitated by the covered ADS and provide the subject with an opportunity to appeal the outcome of the consequential decision, as prescribed.

This bill would require a developer, deployer, or auditor to, within 30 days of receiving a request from the Attorney General, provide an unredacted copy of the impact assessment prepared pursuant to the bill to the Attorney General and would exempt those records from the California Public Records Act.

This bill would authorize certain public entities, including the Attorney General, to bring a specified civil action for noncompliance.

Existing constitutional provisions require that a statute that limits the right of access to the meetings of public bodies or the writings of public officials and agencies be adopted with findings demonstrating the interest protected by the limitation and the need for protecting that interest.

This bill would make legislative findings to that effect.