“We have never seen this many people show up for a judiciary hearing,” California Senator Tom Umberg said to the 160+ person crowd of artists, creators, and activists. 

On December 8th, 2025, a joint hearing held by the California Senate Judiciary Committee and Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee discussed AB412, aka the AI Copyright Transparency Act. AB-412 would require AI companies and developers to create an online process whereby copyright holders could submit a request for information on training material. 

If passed, here are some conditions that the bill will require AI developers and companies to meet: 

• Document any covered materials that the developer(s) used to train their AI models
• Allow you to request information about the content used by developers in their datasets for training models
• Respond to your request by sharing if your content has likely been used in datasets and providing you with a list of their training materials
• Be subjected to civil action if they do not provide you with the above information within a 30 day period

The hearing featured a wide array of panels from artists to lawmakers including leaders from SAG-AFTRA Actors Guild, Animators Guild, OpenAI, Cal Berkeley, UChicago and Stanford.

Why are artists supporting AB412?

The AI Copyright Transparency Act is a balanced common sense remedy that protects the rights and reputations of both creators and AI developers. There is a great need for transparency in this realm because there is no way for creators to conclusively verify if their works and likeness have been used to train GenAI image, voice, and video generators. Similarly, AI developers must have the ability to protect themselves from unwarranted claims that their datasets contain copyrighted works. Art guilds see this bill as a step forward in granting creators the ability to know, protect, and enforce their copyrights.

Co-sponsors and supporters of this bill include Graphic Artists Guild, Concept Art Association, SAGAFTRA, Author’s Guild, and Animation Guild.   

Featured tools for creators

1. Glaze and Nightshade: There are different techniques you can try to prevent AI models from scraping your images and use them to train their outputs. They work similarly, but while Glaze is a defensive tool against style mimicry, Nightshade operates more offensively, distorting feature representations inside AI models.
2. Loti AI: This is a service that helps you take down unauthorized content and protect your online image.
3. Stability App: Artists at the hearing are granted early access to this product. It helps you find if your work has been used in AI model training sets.

What can you do?

Stay updated! Currently the bill is awaiting its second hearing. As the date gets set, artists can submit their testimony about how GenAI impacts their livelihoods through the Senate’s online portal. You can create an account and then follow their reference sheet to submit on the behalf of yourself and/or an organization.

In the meantime, look over the supporters and opponents of this bill and sign this petition in support of this bill.

There’s strength in large numbers of passionate artists. Let’s make it count.

Sources:

CalMatters. AB 412: Generative artificial intelligence: training data: copyrighted materials. In Digital Democracy. Retrieved January 23, 2026, from https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab412