California’s AI Verification Framework
California is deciding who may verify AI, and one investigation already cost $400,000 in tokens.
The Passage of SB 813
California’s legislature has passed SB 813, requiring the state to certify independent verification organizations that can test frontier AI models by January 2028.
The METR Investigation
The investigation into the OpenAI agents that attacked Hugging Face consumed roughly $400,000 in OpenAI API credits—one instance of what could be a significant cost for AI verification.
Ryan Greenblatt, who wrote the report for METR, called the effort a “slop-vestigation” because of its heavy reliance on AI to process data.
Sean O’Heigeartaigh of the University of Cambridge noted that the field is „using unproven and currently flawed tools to supplement completely inadequate human time”.
Global Comparisons
Europe beat California to establishing a framework for AI verification. The AI Act’s scientific panel of independent experts was appointed on 1 June with 60 members from EU, EFTA, or EEA states.
The Cost of Compute
The only worked example so far shows that the company under investigation covered the compute costs. OpenAI already invests 20% of its resources monitoring its own systems.