California's "No Robo Bosses Act": First State Law Banning Fully AI-Driven Firings — Signed After Newsom Vetoed Its Predecessor
On September 30, 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the "No Robo Bosses Act" — per CNBC, the first law in the nation barring employers from relying solely on AI to fire or discipline workers. The law prevents businesses from exclusively using "automated decision-making systems" in discipline and termination decisions and restricts AI's use as a "principal tool" in them.
What it requires: employers that rely "primarily" on AI output for termination or disciplinary decisions must have a human reviewer corroborate the decision using additional information (managerial evaluations, peer reviews, personnel files), and affected employees must get written notice that AI was "primarily used," a description of the employee data the system used, and a human point of contact to explain the decision.
The politics are the story:
- Newsom vetoed the 2025 version despite overwhelming bipartisan passage, objecting to its unfocused pre-notification requirements — then signed this year's narrower bill (gig workers and pre-notification stripped out) as public distrust of workplace AI peaks. A July Gallup poll found 39% of Americans say AI does more harm than good (up 8 points); Pew found 71% think AI will take people's jobs.
- Bill author State Senator Jerry McNerney: "No worker should ever be fired or disciplined by a machine, AI or not... AI must remain a tool controlled by humans, not the other way around."
- Lorena Gonzalez, California Federation of Labor Unions president: "Today, California's workers and our unions have changed the national narrative on how Americans can fight back and win against AI taking over our jobs and workplaces."
- The GOP nominee for governor, Steve Hilton, backed the bill and called it not strong enough — a signal that workplace-AI limits are not a partisan issue heading into 2028, as Newsom weighs a presidential run.
- Business opposition continues (Chamber of Progress: the "primarily relies" trigger is undefined), and a federal Markey-Schatz companion died on arrival in Congress.
Why it matters: this is the AI-policy story moving from frontier-risk to kitchen-table regulation — the first outright prohibition on a category of AI decision-making, in the state that keeps writing the national template (cf. the Newsom kill-switch panel, California Operationalizes the Pacing Debate: Expert Panel Named for Newsom's AI Kill-Switch Order, and New York's AI data-center construction ban). It lands the same month Meta is being sued over AI-assisted layoffs, and it gives every other state a tested bill text.