The California A.B. 2027 legislation, which was opposed by the Insights Association, died on 14^th May 2026 when it was held under submission in the Assembly Appropriations Committee in the state capital, Sacramento.

The Insights Association had opposed the bill on the grounds that its prohibitions on AI training using personal data would have extended to research participants who receive incentives, designated as ‘workers’ in the proposed law, and would have applied to employers or their partners or vendors.

In this case, the Insights Association said that the use of a worker’s data “to replicate, automate, or replace a worker’s job” would have presumably included using a research subject’s data to create synthetic data or synthetic research subjects.

Violations of the law would have been punishable by the state attorney general, public prosecutors and private litigation in the US.

Howard Fienberg, senior vice-president advocacy at the Insights Association, said: “While we presume Sacramento didn’t intend to hurt our industry, this bill could have crippled development of AI in the insights industry, a potential benefit to productivity, efficiency and decision-making across all sectors (including the public sector) who rely upon our work.

“We will continue to reach out to the bill sponsor, should he wish to revive the bill next year, about the importance of a simple amendment to carve out research subjects participating in market research.”