California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law groundbreaking legislation requiring the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols and report critical incidents, state lawmakers announced Monday.

Senate Bill 53 marks California’s most significant move yet to regulate Silicon Valley’s rapidly advancing AI industry while also maintaining its position as a global tech hub.

“With a technology as transformative as AI, we have a responsibility to support that innovation while putting in place commonsense guardrails,” State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement.

The new law represents a successful second attempt by Wiener to establish AI safety regulations after Newsom vetoed his previous bill, SB 1047, after furious pushback from the tech industry.

It also comes after a failed attempt by the Trump administration to prevent states from enacting AI regulations, under the argument that they would create regulatory chaos and slow US-made innovation in a race with China.

The new law says major AI companies have to publicly disclose their safety and security protocols in redacted form to protect intellectual property.

They must also report critical safety incidents—including model-enabled weapons threats, major cyber-attacks, or loss of model control—within 15 days to state officials.

The legislation also establishes whistleblower protections for employees who reveal evidence of dangers or violations.

According to Wiener, California’s approach differs from the European Union’s landmark AI Act, which requires private disclosures to government agencies.

SB 53, meanwhile, mandates public disclosure to ensure greater accountability.

In what advocates describe as a world-first provision, the law requires companies to report instances where AI systems engage in dangerous deceptive behavior during testing.

For example, if an AI system lies about the effectiveness of controls designed to prevent it from assisting in bioweapon construction, developers must disclose the incident if it materially increases catastrophic harm risks.

The working group behind the law was led by prominent experts including Stanford University’s Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of AI.”

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The loss of soft-touch plastics may seem like a downgrade at first, but I vastly prefer uncoated plastics for long-term use: My MX Master 2S developed unsightly smooth spots on both mouse buttons where the soft-touch coating wore down, and other long-term users have reported the coatings becoming tacky over time.

The two primary mouse buttons and the scroll wheel are nearly dead-silent. Despite this, they still have clear feedback with a distinct bump and no mushy feeling. In the ratcheting mode, the mouse wheel has a noticeable bump between each scroll. In the smooth mode, the wheel has just enough resistance to be controlled easily, while still spinning freely.

The horizontal scroll wheel on the side permanently scrolls smoothly and has significantly more resistance than the primary scroll wheel. This allows for greater control of the wheel and helps protect against accidental scrolling when moving your thumb. Scrolling is incredibly smooth, without any catching or scratchiness, and the ridged texture of the aluminum wheel feels comfortable and easy to manipulate. Clicking the wheel is still fairly loud, like any mouse. The three side buttons and the top button have a muted click, and it’s not disruptive.

Despite weighing 150 grams, this mouse is easy to glide around a surface. The feet are smooth, sliding easily while still having enough friction for precise control, and the sculpted shape makes it easy to move and lift. While the high weight means it won’t be ideal for competitive, high-intensity gaming, the shape is preferable for longer sessions, whether you’re grinding out dungeons or slogging through spreadsheets.

The sensor is capable of up to 8,000 dots per inch, but most people will likely leave the sensitivity well below that. I didn’t have any issues with input registration, skipping, or shaking, and the sensor felt incredibly precise on all surfaces, even frosted and transparent glass.

Gesture Controls and Haptics

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The MX Master 4’s gesture controls are one of its most prominent features. These have been featured on every generation of the MX Master line, with only small changes across generations. The gesture control button was previously located on the bottom of the thumb rest, hidden underneath the rubber surface, but has now been moved to a standard button on the side, which I found more comfortable and natural to use.

A number of voices question when quantum computing technologies will deliver true business value, but IT and networking giant Cisco says that through new networking application demos for classical use cases, it has developed software that makes distributed quantum computing work.

The company’s Quantum Labs has launched what it claims is the industry’s first software stack designed to network quantum computers together. While today’s quantum machines are stuck at hundreds of qubits, most practical problems need millions, and so instead of waiting for a “perfect machine”, Cisco said it is scaling out by connecting the computers we have now in a move that it boasts will accelerate real-world quantum applications by as much as decades.

Cisco stressed that what makes its launch unique is that it accounts for quantum interconnect requirements between processors and supports distributed quantum error correction. Existing compilers only target circuits for single computers. The new one is said to compile circuits for network-connected computers, potentially made of heterogeneous quantum compute technologies, and can distribute that partitioned circuit across an entire datacentre of processors, all connected through a quantum network.

On a practical basis, this means that if a business is building scalable and operable quantum computing infrastructure, they need this capability to right-size and figure out how many quantum nodes they will need and what types of compute technologies work best for the various parts of their algorithm.

Looking at potential use cases, pharmaceutical companies could need this to run drug discovery algorithms that are too large or complex for single machines; financial firms for simulations that require different types of computational power and for scoping their infrastructure; and research institutions for innovating new quantum algorithms and compute types.

At the heart of the launch is a network-aware distributed quantum compiler built to be capable of running quantum algorithms across multiple processors while handling error correction across the network, making quantum networking real.

The teams at Cisco Quantum Labs and Outshift by Cisco, the company’s incubation engine, have built a software solution prototype designed for controlling, managing and monitoring entanglement-based quantum networks across applications, both in the quantum and the classical computing spaces. The Cisco team said its approach works with any quantum computing platform, whether superconducting, trapped ion, photonic or any other.

To advance its quantum networking strategy, the team has launched three research prototypes: Quantum Compiler, Quantum Alert and Quantum Sync. The former is claimed to be the industry’s first network-aware, distributed quantum compiler, enabling quantum algorithms to run across multiple networked processors. As part of this, Cisco has also launched a compiler supporting distributed quantum error correction.

Quantum Alert takes the form of an application demo for eavesdropper-proof security with, said Cisco, “guarantees from physics, not promises from classical software”. Quantum Sync is a decision coordination application demo that uses entanglement to enable correlated decision-making across distributed locations for classical use cases. All three applications run on a unified quantum networking software stack, which is the vital infrastructure that makes quantum computers work together instead of alone.

In building its quantum networking stack, Cisco said it is taking the same systems-level approach to quantum networking as it did for the classical internet. That is building a full networking stack from the ground up, including a quantum networking chip, control software, including protocols and controllers for managing the network, and quantum networking applications that solve problems in the quantum and classical worlds.

The new unified quantum networking software stack is said to have three layers of capabilities, encompassing applications, a control layer and a devices layer. Applications include quantum networking applications for quantum and classical use cases. Cisco has released code availability of a network-aware distributed quantum computing compiler that enables efficient execution of quantum algorithms in a networked quantum datacentre.

The control layer that contains quantum networking protocols and algorithms to both support the broad set of quantum networking applications and manage the wide set of devices – including hardware and software – that make up a quantum network through northbound and southbound application programming interfaces (APIs). The devices layer consists of a software development kit (SDK) and APIs to physical devices, as well as a library of emulated and simulated ones.