California · Senate Bill 574 · 2025 to 2026 regular session
California SB 574
Attorneys, arbitrators, judicial officers and alternative dispute resolution providers · Senator Umberg, with Assemblymember Macedo as coauthor · enrolled 4 September 2026, presented to the Governor at 2 p.m. on 9 September 2026
Every other instrument in this record that puts a verification duty on an attorney is a court rule or a practice direction, binding only in the court that issued it. SB 574 would be a statute. If it is signed, a personal duty to verify citations and a duty to disclose AI use to the court would apply to every California attorney in every California court, and the citation-verification rule would sit inside Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7, the state’s analogue to Rule 11, with that section’s existing sanctions machinery behind it. It is not law today. If the Governor vetoes it, none of what follows happens.
Status, exactly
- Introduced20 February 2025
- AmendedIn the Senate, 24 March 2025 and 5 January 2026. In the Assembly, 22 June, 2 July, 13 August and 21 August 2026
- PassedThe Assembly, 31 August 2026
- Enrolled4 September 2026
- To the Governor“Enrolled and presented to the Governor at 2 p.m.” on 9 September 2026
- NowNot law. Not chaptered. Awaiting signature or veto
Two dates that are readings of the rules, not facts read from the bill, and are marked as such. Under article IV, section 10(b)(1) of the California Constitution, a bill passed before 1 September of the second year of the biennium and in the Governor’s possession on or after 1 September becomes a statute if it is not returned on or before 30 September. On that reading the Governor would have to act by 30 September 2026. A California statute with no urgency clause takes effect on 1 January following enactment, and no operative date appears in the text. Neither date was read from the bill, the Senate concurrence date has not been separately confirmed here, and this page will carry confirmed dates only once they are read at source.
What it would require, read from the enrolled text
The bill would amend section 6173 of, and add section 6068.1 to, the Business and Professions Code, and amend section 128.7 of, and add sections 180 and 1282.1 to, the Code of Civil Procedure. Both new provisions use one definition of generative artificial intelligence: “an artificial intelligence system that can generate derived synthetic content, including text, images, video, and audio that emulates the structure and characteristics of the system’s training data”.
New Business and Professions Code section 6068.1, on attorneys. An attorney:
- Delegation“shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence”
- Confidentialityshall not enter confidential, personal identifying or other nonpublic information into a generative AI system that lacks access restrictions. Personal identifying information is defined to include driving licences, social security numbers, medical records, account numbers, the addresses of parties, witnesses and court personnel, and anything under seal
- Verificationmust take reasonable steps to “verify the accuracy of generative artificial intelligence outputs, including ... all case and statutory citations”
- Correctionmust “correct any erroneous or hallucinated output in any material used by the attorney”
- Disclosuremust “disclose the use of generative artificial intelligence to the court for all documents submitted”
Amended Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7, new subdivision (b)(2)(A). “A brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court shall not contain any citations that an attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally verified, including any citation provided by generative artificial intelligence.” A breach would be sanctionable through the machinery section 128.7 already has.
New Code of Civil Procedure section 1282.1, on arbitrators. An arbitrator “shall not delegate any part of their decisionmaking process to any generative artificial intelligence tool”, and may not rely on information generated by AI outside the record without disclosing it to the parties beforehand and giving them an opportunity to comment on its use.
New Code of Civil Procedure section 180, on judicial officers. The Judicial Council would have to “publicly revisit, and revise as necessary, Standard 10.80 of the California Standards of Judicial Administration” to reflect the further development of generative AI.
Amended Business and Professions Code section 6173. The State Bar would have to establish procedures for receiving, investigating and resolving complaints that certified alternative dispute resolution firms failed to comply with applicable ethical standards, with those proceedings private and confidential and exempt from the California Public Records Act, and with power to disclose non-confidential information about violations and remedies after decision.
What to do about it now
Nothing is required of anyone by this bill today, and any vendor telling a California attorney otherwise is selling ahead of the record. What is worth noticing is the direction of travel, which does not depend on this bill at all: a federal judge in Falkenstein v. Niles asked what steps counsel took to verify, and a tribunal in SRA v Kumar struck a lawyer off after he could not show he had checked either his output or his tools. The duty described in this bill is already being applied, case by case, by courts that do not need a statute to ask the question.
This page will be rewritten on the day the Governor acts, in either direction, and the date of that rewrite will be stated on it.
Related
Status verified 11 September 2026 against the Legislature’s own bill text and status history. Pending, not law. Information, not legal advice.
Information, not legal advice. Every entry is verified against the court's own document or contemporaneous reporting; where a source is reporting rather than the document, we say so.
