California · Senate Bill 574 · 2025 to 2026 regular session
Attorneys, arbitrators, judicial officers and alternative dispute resolution providers · Senator Umberg, with Assemblymember Macedo as coauthor · enrolled 4 September 2026, presented to the Governor 9 September 2026, approved by the Governor 30 September 2026, Chapter 858, Statutes of 2026
SIGNED. Approved by the Governor on 30 September 2026 and chaptered by the Secretary of State the same day as Chapter 858, Statutes of 2026. Status read at the Legislature’s own site and in the Governor’s release on 1 October 2026. Bill text read at the Legislature’s own site on 11 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 is a statute. A personal duty to verify citations and a duty to disclose AI use to the court will apply to every California attorney in every California court, and the citation-verification rule sits inside Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7, the state’s analogue to Rule 11, with that section’s existing sanctions machinery behind it. The text states no operative date; on the ordinary rule for a California statute it takes effect on 1 January 2027.
Regulayer™: Human Control for AI. Regulayer™ sits next to an AI agent. Before the agent acts, it checks whether a named person still allows that action. If not, it stops it. Either way it keeps a record you can hand to an inspector.
SB 574 is here because of what it puts into law. The responsible attorney must verify what generative AI produced, must personally verify every citation before it is filed, and may not delegate the practice of law to the AI. Regulators, platforms and insurers all now require a human in control of AI. California has now written that requirement into a statute for an entire profession, and the question it leaves every responsible person is the one regulated AI already faces: who authorized this action, and can an outsider check it?
For a filing, the Regulayer™ Receipt creates checkable evidence of who approved exact words and when: which AI was used, what a named person reviewed, and the document it was sealed to, made at the time and verifiable free by the court without trusting the person who made it. It shows that the checking happened, and who stood behind it. Verify a sealed record free →
One date is a reading of the rules, not a fact read from the bill, and is marked as such. A California statute with no urgency clause takes effect on 1 January following enactment, and no operative date appears in the text. On that reading SB 574 takes effect on 1 January 2027. The approval and the chapter number were read at the Legislature’s own status history on 1 October 2026.
The Act amends section 6173 of, and adds section 6068.1 to, the Business and Professions Code, and amends section 128.7 of, and adds 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:
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 is 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 must “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 must 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.
On the ordinary rule nothing in the Act binds anyone before 1 January 2027, and the text sets no earlier date. What is worth noticing is that the duty is already being applied without it. Six days before the signature, the Supreme Court of California referred an AI-assisted misquotation of its own precedent to the State Bar in Cervantes v. Bianco. Elsewhere, 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.
Rewritten 1 October 2026, after the Governor signed the bill on 30 September 2026.
Status verified 1 October 2026 against the Legislature’s own status history and the Governor’s release of 30 September 2026; bill text read 11 September 2026. The 1 January 2027 date is a reading of the rules, not stated in the text. 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.
