California lawmakers look to curb use of ‘emotional AI’ at work

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Maybe your feelings can be facts…but should they?

California lawmakers are looking to ban one of the more controversial uses of AI technology at work: using software that can detect or infer how employees are feeling.

The state legislature in the Golden State approved Assembly Bill 1883 late August, which would ban employers from using AI-powered workplace surveillance tools that collect “neural data” and recognize or predict a worker’s emotional state. The bill awaits action at the governor’s desk.

The state defines “neural data” as any information generated by measuring an employee’s activity related to their central or peripheral nervous system—signals such as facial expressions, voice characteristics, or other behavioral information, which AI emotion-recognition systems claim to analyze and attempt to classify a person’s emotional state. Other surveillance tools were not barred by this measure, and the measure carved out exceptions related to work for or on behalf of the federal government and technology designed to “ensure safety.”

These types of systems do not actually understand emotions, but rather collect and interpret human emotional cues, like a facial expression, or tone of voice, or change in behavior, and process those cues as emotional data, according to researchers with the Institute for the Future of Work.

“The danger here is not just that machines fail to understand us. It’s that they may begin to discipline us—nudging our expressions, altering our behaviour, and shaping our emotional lives in invisible ways,” warned Emine Akar, a research fellow with the institute studying Emotional AI, AI ethics, data protection, and privacy law.

The bill, which was introduced by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan in February, comes as state governments and agencies look to regulate the burgeoning technology and rapidly changing workplace amid the AI transformation.

The move follows Gov. Gavin Newsom’s veto of the No Robo Bosses Act passed last session which would prevent employers from relying solely on automated decision-making systems when making “hiring, promotion, discipline, or termination decisions” without human oversight.

In his 2025 veto of that legislation, Newsom cautioned that the No Robo Bosses measure failed “to directly address incidents of misuse” and “imposes unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools.”