A California bill that would ban employers from using AI-powered workplace surveillance tools to read workers’ emotions or collect their neural data has cleared the legislature and is now enrolled and awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature or veto. Assembly Bill 1883, introduced by Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, passed its final concurrence vote in the Assembly on August 30 and was enrolled on September 3, according to the bill’s official status page on the California Legislative Information website.
AB 1883 would prohibit an employer, defined broadly to include private companies and government entities such as the University of California, from using a workplace surveillance tool that relies on artificial intelligence to recognize or infer an employee’s emotional state, or to collect “neural data,” defined as information generated by directly measuring activity of an employee’s central or peripheral nervous system rather than inferred from other signals. Violations would be enforced by the state Labor Commissioner or a public prosecutor, with civil penalties of up to $500 per violation. The bill carves out an exception for surveillance reasonably necessary to comply with federal contracts tied to aircraft development or national security work.
For HR leaders, the bill matters regardless of where a company is headquartered, since it applies to any employer with covered workers in California. It sits alongside a wider pattern of state and international rules narrowing what workplace AI is allowed to infer about people, following a similar prohibition on emotion recognition in the EU AI Act. The original insight for HR tech buyers is procurement-side: any vendor selling sentiment analysis, engagement monitoring, or “wellbeing” AI features built on biometric or emotional inference should be asked now, not after a signature, whether the underlying model would fall inside this bill’s definition of a banned workplace surveillance tool.
Read more: The Real Cost of Letting an Algorithm Fire Someone and Workplace Monitoring Software Is a Compliance Risk.
