California AI Transparency Act (SB 942)
The duties
What SB 942 requires
Six covered-provider duties, drawn from the enacted text and the AB 853 amendment.
A free public AI detection tool
The provider must run a tool, free to the public, that assesses whether a piece of content was created or altered by that provider's own generative AI system. The tool outputs system provenance data and must never output personal provenance data.
A latent disclosure in the content
AI-generated content must carry a latent disclosure: an embedded marker, detectable by the provider's tool and, to the extent technically feasible, permanent or hard to strip.
A manifest disclosure the user can see
The provider must offer users the option to include a manifest disclosure, a visible signal that the content was generated by AI.
A 96-hour license revocation duty
AB 853 added a licensing control. When a licensee strips or disables the disclosure capability, the provider must revoke that license within 96 hours of discovering the change.
Penalties of 5,000 dollars per violation, per day
The Act sets a civil penalty of 5,000 dollars for each violation. Each day a violation continues counts separately.
Operative August 2, 2026
AB 853 moved the operative date to August 2, 2026. The covered-provider duties apply now.
Scope
Who is covered
The Act binds covered providers. It does not bind their vendors.
Who is a covered provider
A covered provider creates a generative AI system with more than 1,000,000 monthly users that is publicly accessible in California. The threshold and the public-accessibility test are part of the rule, not footnotes.
Where Encypher sits
Encypher is not a covered provider. We do not run a generative AI system. Our customers, the AI platforms that do, carry the duties. Encypher supplies the detection, signing, and revocation infrastructure they use to meet them.
Mapping
How the duties map to provenance infrastructure
Each statutory duty has a concrete technical form in a content provenance stack.
Products
What Encypher provides
The infrastructure a covered provider needs, so its own product teams do not build it from scratch.
Hosted detection portal
A white-labeled verification portal, free to end users, that reads a provider's provenance and returns a verdict. Media provenance pages, engine-first verdicts, and a public content-hash lookup.
Signing and marking
C2PA manifests plus embedded markers for the latent disclosure, applied at generation so the record travels with the content.
Revocation infrastructure
Status lists and OCSP that record a revoked credential and publish the change, the machinery behind the 96-hour license revocation duty.
Open-source verifier
An Apache-2.0 verifier, the auditable engine anyone can inspect and run. It stays free.
FAQ
Common questions
Is Encypher a covered provider under SB 942?
No. Encypher does not run a generative AI system with more than 1,000,000 monthly users. The covered providers are our customers. Encypher supplies the detection, signing, and revocation infrastructure they use to meet the duties.
Can the required detection tool charge the people who use it?
No. The Act requires the public detection tool to be free to users. Providers pay their vendors. End users do not pay to check content.
Does the tool report who used the AI system?
No. The tool outputs system provenance data and must not output personal provenance data. The portal reports the system record, not the identity of any person.
Does AB 3211 change these duties?
AB 3211 is pending. It would add provenance standards, adversarial testing, and larger penalties, up to 1,000,000 dollars or 5 percent of global annual revenue. It does not replace the SB 942 duties that are operative today.
Sources
Primary references
Meet the SB 942 detection and disclosure duties
Read the API docs to wire in signing, hosted detection, and revocation, or talk to us about a white-labeled portal.
Talk to the team about a covered-provider deployment on the contact page. For the C2PA mapping in depth, see the California AI Transparency Act and C2PA guide, and the parallel EU AI Act guide.