Neural Noise- California’s Senate passed Assembly Bill 1883 on August 28, 2026, by a 28–9 vote and returned it to the Assembly for concurrence in Senate amendments; if signed by the Governor, it would take effect January 1, 2027.1
- AB 1883, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Inglewood), amends the California Labor Code to prohibit employers from using AI-powered workplace surveillance tools for two specific purposes: collecting workers’ neural data (defined as information generated by measuring central or peripheral nervous system activity) and inferring or predicting workers’ emotional states.2
- The bill carries a broad safety exception — the prohibitions do not apply where the surveillance tool is used to ensure worker safety — and a narrower carve-out for tools required for federal aerospace, national security, military, or defense contracts.3
- Violations carry a civil penalty of up to $500 per violation, with enforcement by the California Labor Commissioner, public prosecutors, and private civil actions by affected workers or their representatives; given the per-worker penalty structure, an employer monitoring 200 workers with a prohibited tool faces up to $100,000 per violation event.3
- AB 1883 advances a parallel bill, AB 1542, which would amend California’s existing CCPA to prohibit the sale or sharing of neural data as sensitive personal information; both bills build on California’s 2024 classification of neural data as sensitive personal information under consumer privacy law.2
- The bill is the most specific state-level workplace neurotech restriction to date in the US, signaling that California’s regulatory lead on neural data privacy — already established through CCPA and 2024 amendments — is now extending downstream to AI-enabled inferences from body-worn and ambient sensors.2