San Jose, CA
AI governance in San Jose
Selling AI into regulated buyers
South Bay companies tend to sit one step upstream of the regulated organisation. You are not the covered entity — your customer is, and they are increasingly required to prove that their vendors are governed too.
We work on-site in San Jose. TrustEdge has no San Jose office — our engineers and assessors travel to you, and AI Academy and agent engagements are delivered nationally.
The pressure
What San Jose organisations are actually dealing with
That pushes AI assurance into the sales cycle. Answering it well is a competitive advantage; answering it badly stalls procurement. Large local employers also fall squarely inside California’s automated-decision rules for hiring, which reach any employer with five or more employees.
Sectors we serve here
- Enterprise software
- Hardware and semiconductors
- Health technology
Regulatory context
The California rules that reach San Jose buyers
California has more AI law in force than any other state. The rule most likely to reach you is not the frontier-AI headline act — it is an employment regulation that has bound every employer with five or more employees since October 1, 2025.
FEHA automated-decision-system regulations — the rule that reaches almost everyone
Effective October 1, 2025, the California Civil Rights Council's regulations apply the Fair Employment and Housing Act to automated-decision systems used in employment. FEHA covers employers with five or more employees, which makes this the California AI rule most likely to apply to you. An ADS is defined broadly: a computational process that makes a decision or facilitates human decision making regarding an employment benefit, whether derived from artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, statistics, or other data-processing techniques. Resume screening, interview scoring, trait and skill assessments, and promotion recommendations are all in scope. Use of an ADS can violate FEHA through intentional discrimination or through disparate impact, and running the tool does not satisfy an employer's individualized-assessment obligations.
Four-year retention, vendor liability, and the evidentiary weight of bias testing
The FEHA regulations require employers to retain automated-decision-system data for four years — ADS data created or received by the employer in connection with any employment practice affecting any employment benefit of any applicant or employee. That includes vendor scores and outputs, not only your internal records. Employers are responsible for the AI tools they use whether or not they built them, and the regulations extend aiding-and-abetting liability to third parties that design or implement those tools. Evidence of anti-bias testing is relevant to a discrimination claim, judged on its quality, recency, scope, and results. The absence of testing is relevant too. That is the practical reason to test and document now rather than after a complaint.
AB 2013 — training-data transparency, and it can catch fine-tuners
In effect since January 1, 2026. A developer of a generative AI system or service made publicly available to Californians on or after January 1, 2022 must post a high-level summary of the datasets used in training, across twelve enumerated categories: sources and owners of the datasets, how they further the intended purpose, the number of data points in ranges, whether the data includes copyrighted or licensed material, whether it includes personal information or aggregate consumer information, how it was cleaned or processed, collection and first-use timeframes, and whether synthetic data was used. The summary must be posted before public release and updated on substantial modification. The statute defines a developer as one who designs, codes, produces, or substantially modifies an AI system — so a materially retrained or fine-tuned model can bring you into scope even though you did not build the base model.
All California AI provisions, in full →
Reviewed against primary sources as of August 2, 2026.
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What we do in San Jose
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Talk to us about AI governance in San Jose
No pitch, no pressure. We will tell you what is actually in scope and what an assessor will accept.