Artists 4 Safe AI open letter to Governor Newsom urging signature of California SB 1047

The Artists 4 Safe AI open letter is a public letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom, released on 25 September 2024 and signed at launch by 125 Hollywood actors, directors, and producers — Jane Fonda, Mark Ruffalo, Shonda Rhimes, JJ Abrams, Pedro Pascal, Judd Apatow, Mark Hamill, Ava DuVernay, Mahershala Ali, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Cheadle, Jessica Chastain, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Rosie O'Donnell, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Allison Janney, Fran Drescher, Sean Astin, Janelle Monáe, Mariska Hargitay, Sophia Bush, Connie Britton, Alec Baldwin, Annaleigh Ashford, Alyssa Milano, Jessica Alba, Rosanna Arquette, John Cho, Jennifer Beals, and Tom Arnold among the named lead signatories — urging Newsom to sign California Senate Bill 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. The letter was organised under the Artists 4 Safe AI banner with a call-to-action directing readers to peopleovermachines.org; subsequent reporting on the campaign's broader veto-eve mobilization credits Encode Justice with coordinating the Hollywood track, and the People Over Machines site features prominent social and video messages from Adam Conover, Mark Ruffalo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Sean Astin tagging both @sagaftra and Encode Justice as named collaborators. By the time the artists4safeai.com landing page closed, the signatory roll had grown to 300+ individuals and bands.

The letter's central argument distinguishes SB 1047 from the two recently signed performer-protection bills — AB 1836 and AB 2602 — that Newsom had already signed into law earlier in September 2024 to protect actors' likenesses and digital rights, and reframes the SB 1047 question as the broader public-safety case. Its signature framing — "this bill is not about protecting artists — it's about protecting everyone" — is the rhetorical pivot the letter performs: thanking the governor for the sectoral artist-protection laws he had just signed, then asking him to act on a separate concern that the signatories articulate as the risk that "the most powerful AI models may soon pose severe risks, such as expanded access to biological weapons and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure." The letter notes that 77% of Californians supported the bill, that it had passed both legislative chambers with overwhelming majorities, and that SB 1047 would implement the safeguards that industry insiders themselves were asking for. It is the only major public artefact of the SB 1047 mobilization in which Hollywood public figures collectively endorsed the bill on frontier-AI-safety grounds rather than on entertainment-industry deepfake or likeness-protection grounds.

The letter sits inside the broader SB 1047 campaign co-sponsored by Encode Justice as one of three named letter tracks targeted at the governor's signing decision — alongside SAG-AFTRA general counsel Jeffrey Bennett's 9 September 2024 union letter to Newsom and the same-day public letter from more than 113 current and former employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI. Scott Alexander's retrospective account records that Encode "recruited more than one hundred members of the actors' union SAG-AFTRA to the cause" and that the Artists 4 Safe AI letter, distinct from the union-side SAG-AFTRA letter, "showed more specific interest in existential risks" from advanced AI. The letter's SAG-AFTRA cross-membership is visible on its own face: SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland both signed it, even as the union's institutional letter went out under separate cover. The letter campaign closed on 29 September 2024 with Newsom's veto, citing the bill's size-only threshold; the substantive provisions the letter championed were carried forward into the successor Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (SB 53), which Newsom signed exactly one year later.

Within the corpus, Artists 4 Safe AI is the first open-letter Publication and the first creative-industry / Hollywood-public-figure-anchored Publication, sitting at the intersection of two movement areas the corpus has otherwise approached through different artefacts. On the AI-safety / state-policy side it pairs naturally with A Narrow Path: both are veto-eve / inside-game civil-society interventions aimed at state-level or national-level frontier-AI safety legislation, but where A Narrow Path is a long-form policy plan addressed to elected officials and built to be picked up by legislators, the Artists 4 Safe AI letter is a short, signature-driven public artefact that mobilises mass-audience celebrity legitimacy at a single signing decision. On the creative-industry / worker-advocacy side it sits adjacent to but distinct from the visual-artist advocacy track that Karla Ortiz anchors in the corpus (the "Consent, Credit, Compensation, Transparency" framing, the Andersen v. Stability AI litigation, the Concept Art Association federal-policy programme) and the screenwriter / performer collective-bargaining track captured in the WGA / SAG-AFTRA 2023 strike-and-contract round: both of those tracks frame AI as a sectoral problem (training data, residuals, digital replicas) where the artists themselves are the protected class, while Artists 4 Safe AI deliberately performs the opposite move — Hollywood public figures lending their legitimacy to a bill that, in their own framing, "is not about protecting artists." The letter is the corpus's clearest example to date of celebrity legitimacy being routed away from the signatories' own sectoral interests and toward a frontier-AI-safety frame addressed to the wider public.