Jared Grusd

🚨 California's SB 53 “Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act” was officially signed into law yesterday by Gov. Newsom Who does it apply to? ✅ Large frontier developers: companies with > $500M in annual revenue that train/initiate the training of frontier models. ✅Frontier models: foundation models trained using ≥ 10²⁶ floating-point or integer operations. *These thresholds are intentionally high, but the bill's preamble notes that additional legislation could target smaller companies in the future. 📋 What does the law require? ✅ Risk frameworks: Companies must publish (on their websites) a “frontier AI framework” detailing how they assess and mitigate catastrophic risk, the cybersecurity practices leveraged, and the governance practices they put in place. ✅Transparency reports: Must be issued when deploying or substantially modifying a frontier model. ✅Reporting to state regulators: Summaries of risk assessments must be filed with California’s Office of Emergency Services, and critical safety incidents must be reported within 15 days (24 hours for imminent risks). ✅Whistleblower protections: Companies cannot prevent employees from reporting violations of the law or concerns that a developer's actions pose a danger to public health or safety. Penalties: Noncompliance can result in civil penalties of up to $1 million per violation, enforced by the Attorney General.

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Jeff Fischer has joined his father larry fischer as a Partner at GetYourDomain. The domain name advisory firm reportedly advised on more than $100 million in deals last year: https://lnkd.in/d9ZSndQN

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Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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As it did with data privacy, California making more moves to lead the way on AI regulation. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law several AI-related bills addressing transparency, consumer protection, and generative AI disclosures. He also vetoed three others. My Perkins Coie colleagues examine how these developments will shape the way companies build and deploy AI in the state. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AiLaw #CaliforniaLaw

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Working with NRF to pursue our patent strategy is an important step in recognizing that proprietary AI systems and workflows are becoming a new form of intellectual property for modern firms. Great to partner with George, John McBride, and the team at Norton Rose Fulbright as we work at the frontier of how AI can transform investment decision-making in venture capital. At Decasonic, we believe the next generation of companies will reinvent with AI workflows and systems how organizations operate, how leaders make decisions, and how teams collaborate with intelligent systems. In going through this streamlined process, it's clear to me that many more startups should clarify their IP strategy. Our internally developed AI platform, RLEN, reflects that philosophy. We are building AI not to automate tasks and flourish outcomes, in collaborative ways for human and AI teammates. This enables our investors to test ideas, explore alternative perspectives, and reach deeper insights faster when navigating uncertainty. More broadly, we are seeing trailblazing work across industries and cities as leaders experiment with how AI can reshape communities, companies, and countries. Leadership with AI forever transforms. We are still in the early innings. Appreciate the partnership and collaboration from the Norton Rose Fulbright team as we continue inventing and innovating. Special shoutout to my colleague Abdul Al Ali who's listed as a co-inventor.

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Random Sunday Thoughts #197: CEO edition 1. This week, I spoke with a Founder/CEO friend who runs one of the fastest growing companies in tech. We met when I oversaw the acquisition of his company's exact match .com domain. While I represented the seller, I worked with both sides to get to an outcome everyone was excited about. On our call, he emphatically said, "we were a very successful, profitable company before we acquired the domain, but within days of doing so, it became apparent to me that it is the arguably the most important strategic decision I have made since I founded the company over 4 years ago". He went on to recite the many reasons why, and most of all, he said his investors (tier 1 VCs) have applauded the decision (a mid 7 figure asset investment) more than anyone. It got me thinking... 2. Every scaling company eventually has the same conversation, usually in a board meeting, often later than they expected. It starts with a domain. Early on, nobody worries about it. There’s a workaround. A hyphen, an extra word like “join” or “hello" or "the", or god forbid a secondary TLD that seems serviceable as a compromise , at least for now.  At the start it works, as growth hides a lot of inefficiency. Then the company scales, and there’s real spending behind the brand. There are real enterprise decisions, customers, and investor conversations. This is when small things creep up and start getting expensive; traffic leaking to search and the exact match domain, branded keywords getting bid up, URLs that need explanation, and emails that go to the wrong place. Case studies show the costs massively exceed the cost of the exact match domain name asset. Users don’t remember modifiers, hyphens, and alternate extensions. They remember the brand, and they default to .com, which has been ingrained as part of the brand every single day across all mediums. A domain isn’t just a website. It is your brand, your signature, your email address. It’s spoken out loud. Every time someone asks “is there a dash in that"?, or "is that .io or .co", when they intuitively assume you mean and only hear .com”, creates friction, and friction compounds ,especially at scale. As Jeff Bezos says, "people default to .com because it's what they trust” and USV's Fred Wilson has noted, "every time you have to explain your domain, you're creating friction". 3. Last Saturday was the moving memorial service for Bobby Weir in SF. It was sad, inspirational, and touching. Highlights were Bob's daughter Chloe saying, "In 30 years, I hope a 60 year old says to a 20 year old, I saw them with Bobby",and John Mayer leading the crowd and family in a moving Ripple. John’s deference & appreciation for being chosen for Dead and Co is evident https://lnkd.in/eiSkxdxg 4. I had a blast on this week's Domain Sherpa. It was a pod worth watching, https://lnkd.in/ebTe6QGx 5. For all the category and exact match brand domains we own or rep, www.ATMHoldings.com Until Next Week #domainames

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Looking forward to presenting keynote remarks at the ACM Computer Science and Law Symposium this week at UC Berkeley. I'll be in a fireside chat with Daniel Weitzner on "The History and Future of Computer Science and Law Collaborations on Privacy Policy." This symposium presents such important opportunities to connect about cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research and see so many wonderful colleagues from both CS and law. "Computing, software, and the Internet now pervade all aspects of society. These systems raise deep and difficult technical questions in computer science, as well as deep and difficult doctrinal and policy questions in law. These two sets of questions are increasingly intertwined, creating a pressing need for research that combines legal and technical tools and that is sound from both a technical and a legal aspect...Central to the study of 'computer science and law' is the creation of a body of scholarship aimed towards the co-design of law and computing technology to promote social goals." Link to more information in the comments.

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California's new Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Law (SB 54/SB 164) took effect March 1 (link in comments), requiring every VC firm with a California nexus to register with DFPI and file annual demographic reports on the founding teams they fund. Penalties for non-compliance run up to $5,000/day. I got my first survey today... I live in Texas, my company is HQ'd in Texas, and California is still reaching into my inbox? The stated goal is transparency around who receives venture funding. The problem is the data will be fundamentally flawed from day one. Here's why: firms must send a standardized demographic survey to every founding team they invest in, but founders, no matter their location, fill it out voluntarily. Firms are explicitly prohibited from encouraging participation. So what happens? Founders and firms that want to signal their diversity will participate enthusiastically. Those that don't care, or don't want their data in a state-run public database (picture me with raised hand), will skip it. The resulting dataset will over-represent one group and under-represent another. That's a skewed dataset with a compliance apparatus bolted onto it. Skewed data gets treated as truth. Truth becomes the basis for the next bill. The next bill adds targets or conditions. The question isn't really whether the current version of the law picks winners and losers. It doesn't. The question is what happens in 2027 or 2028 when the first round of public data shows (predictably) that most VC dollars still go to the same demographic profiles they always have, and a Sacramento legislator introduces a bill saying "the data shows the market won't self-correct, so now we need targets." The entire apparatus to enforce those targets is already built and funded. I'm all for expanding access to capital for underrepresented founders. That's a real problem worth solving. But building a $5,000/day penalty regime around a voluntary survey that produces unreliable data isn't solving anything. It's creating political infrastructure disguised as market research. The irony is that this law will disproportionately burden smaller emerging fund managers, many of whom are themselves diverse GPs, with compliance costs and legal risk while the largest funds absorb it as overhead. If California actually wanted useful data on funding diversity, they'd fund an independent study with proper methodology instead of conscripting VCs into running a flawed survey on the state's behalf. cc PitchBook for the pic and article in comments

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