California Is About To Put "Read The Case" In The Statute Book. It Was Already In The Rules.
SB 574 adds Business and Professions Code section 6068.1 and tells every California attorney to verify AI citations, correct hallucinated output, keep client data out of open systems, and disclose AI use to the court on every document. Most of that is already enforceable. One provision is not, and it reaches a group no sanctions order has touched yet.
Every sanctions order in this space ends the same way. The judge explains that a lawyer who signs a filing is certifying that the law in it is real, that this has been true since long before anyone had a chatbot, and that the tool is not the defendant here. Then the fine lands and the next one arrives a week later.
California has now decided to write it down anyway. SB 574 passed both chambers on August 31, 2026 and was enrolled on September 4. It is sitting with the governor as this is published.
It is worth reading closely, because most of it is a restatement and one piece of it is not.
What the bill actually does
SB 574 was authored by Senator Tom Umberg, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. It adds three new sections and amends two existing ones.
| Section | Action | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| Business and Professions Code 6068.1 | Added | Attorney use of generative AI |
| Code of Civil Procedure 180 | Added | Judicial Council review of AI standards |
| Code of Civil Procedure 1282.1 | Added | Arbitrator use of generative AI |
| Business and Professions Code 6173 | Amended | Alternative dispute resolution certification |
| Code of Civil Procedure 128.7 | Amended | Pleading verification |
The four duties
Section 6068.1(a)(3) is the heart of it. An attorney using generative AI has to take reasonable steps to do four things.
Keep client data out. Do "not enter confidential, personal identifying, and other nonpublic information into a generative artificial intelligence system" that lacks restricted access.
Verify the output. "Verify the accuracy of generative artificial intelligence outputs, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of all case and statutory citations."
Fix what is wrong. "Correct any erroneous or hallucinated output in any material used by the attorney."
Say you used it. "Disclose the use of generative artificial intelligence to the court for all documents submitted."
And then the flat prohibition: "An attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence."
Three of those were already true
This is the part the coverage keeps skipping, so here it is plainly.
Confidentiality is already an attorney's duty and has been for as long as there has been a State Bar. Verifying a citation is what Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7 has always required of a signature, which is precisely the provision courts have been using to sanction lawyers all year. Correcting a false statement to a tribunal is a standing obligation, not a new one.
Wayne Stacy of UC Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology called the measure "largely duplicative of existing ethics rules," and on those three points he is right.
Nothing in this bill would have changed a single sanctions order handed down in California this year. Every one of them was decided under authority that already existed, and every sanctioned lawyer was already obliged to read the cases they cited.
The disclosure duty is new, and it is broad
The fourth duty is different. Disclose the use of generative AI to the court for all documents submitted. Not documents containing AI generated citations. Not briefs. All documents.
No existing California rule says that. Individual judges have standing orders requiring AI disclosure, and they vary wildly from courtroom to courtroom, which is exactly the mess a statute is supposed to clean up. A statewide floor is a genuine change.
It is also going to be strange in practice. Read literally, a lawyer who asks a model to tighten a paragraph in a routine declaration has used generative AI in a submitted document. The question of what triggers disclosure and what does not is going to be answered by trial courts one at a time, and Code of Civil Procedure 180 hands the Judicial Council the job of reviewing standards, which is where that will eventually get sorted.
The clause nobody is talking about
Here is the provision that has no equivalent anywhere in the existing rules, and it is not aimed at lawyers at all.
New Code of Civil Procedure section 1282.1(b) says an arbitrator may not "delegate any part of their decisionmaking process to any generative artificial intelligence tool," and may not "rely on information generated by generative artificial intelligence outside the record without making appropriate disclosures to the parties beforehand."
Every sanctions story of the last two years has been about advocacy. A lawyer filed something false and a judge caught it, because a judge was reading it. Arbitration has no judge reading it. A private arbitrator writing an award has no opposing bench, usually no appeal on the merits, and in most cases no published decision anybody can check.
If an arbitrator had been running the analysis through a model, there is no existing mechanism that would surface it. This section creates the duty first and worries about detection later, which is unusual and probably correct.
What counts as generative AI
The bill defines it as "an artificial intelligence system that can generate derived synthetic content, including text, images, video, and audio that emulates the structure and characteristics of the system's training data."
That is wide. It covers the research assistants now built into every major legal database, which matters, because the recurring theme in this year's sanctions orders is lawyers who believed a tool inside a trusted product had already checked the citations for them. Under this definition that tool is squarely in scope and so is the duty to verify what comes out of it.
The enforcement already exists
The bill does not create a new penalty, and it does not need to. Under existing California law a sanction over 1,000 dollars triggers an automatic referral to the State Bar. This year's California AI citation sanctions have run in the 5,000 to 10,000 dollar range, well above that line, with direct referrals to the Office of Chief Trial Counsel.
So the machinery is in place. What SB 574 supplies is a statute to point at when a lawyer argues that nothing specifically told them to check.
What to watch
The signature. Enrolled September 4. It is with the governor now and there is nothing to report until he acts.
The first disclosure fight. Somebody will fail to disclose light AI assistance on a routine filing and an opponent will make an issue of it. That case decides how much this section really means.
The first arbitrator question. This is the one with no precedent at all, and the answer to how anybody would ever find out is currently nobody knows.
A law that mostly restates duties lawyers already had is not useless. It removes the excuse. But the reason to read this one is the arbitration section, which reaches a room that no sanctions order has ever been able to see into.