California push bill to exempt open-source projects from age verification law
California legislators have amended the Digital Age Assurance Act to exempt open-source projects from age verification requirements. The amendment clarifies definitions and narrows the scope of liable entities, addressing concerns from open-source advocates. The bill has passed committee votes and is moving towards a final assembly vote.
- ▪The amendment under AB-1856 gives open-source projects a free pass from age verification laws.
- ▪The original law required devices to collect age information during setup, creating a centralized tracking system.
- ▪Big Tech companies like Google and Apple are complying with the regulation by developing their own age verification solutions.
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| Original publisher | Neowin |
| Canonical URL | https://www.neowin.net/news/california-lawmakers-push-new-bill-to-exempt-open-source-projects-from-age-verification-law/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 22:56:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T23:07:55.120Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T23:07:59.009Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | umr0TweFau_j |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
California legislators have amended the state's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), introducing an amendment under AB-1856 that gives open-source projects, including Linux distros like Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, and Mint, a free pass. freestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ placementName: "neowin_incontent_all_devices", slotId: "neowin_incontent_all_devices" }); For context, AB 1043 is a law that legislators passed late last year to enforce age checks at the Operating System (OS) level. The law requires your device to collect your age during the initial device setup process, which then generates an "age bracket signal" that the device transmits to websites and applications.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Neowin.
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