Cal. CIV § 1714.46

This is the official text of Cal. CIV § 1714.46, part of California’s Civil Code — covers contracts, property ownership, personal rights, and other general civil obligations between private parties.

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Official statutory text

(a) “Artificial intelligence” means an engineered or machine-based system that varies in its level of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, infer from the input it receives how to generate outputs that can influence physical or virtual environments.

(b) In an action against a defendant who developed, modified, or used artificial intelligence that is alleged to have caused a harm to the plaintiff, it shall not be a defense, and the defendant may not assert, that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff.

(c) This section does not limit or preclude a defendant from presenting either of the following:

(1) Any other affirmative defense, including evidence relevant to causation or foreseeability.

(2) Other evidence relevant to the comparative fault of any other person or entity.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.