California Exempts Linux from Age Verification Law
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- California's legislature passed AB 1856 unanimously, with the Senate voting 39-0 on August 26 and the Assembly concurring the following day, sending the bill to Governor Gavin Newsom months ahead of the act's January 1, 2027 effective date.
- The exemption applies to any OS distributed under license terms permitting recipients to copy, redistribute, and modify the software — covering software under GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses and removing Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from age-data collection at account setup.
- Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who authored both the original Digital Age Assurance Act and AB 1856, introduced the exemption in February following criticism from Linux developers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- The amendments eliminate the original definition of "user" as "a child that is the primary user of a device," which had technically classified every California device owner as a minor and made adult age-flagging structurally impossible.
- A new provision prohibits anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law, while granting platforms a good-faith safe harbor against liability for erroneous age-gating signals.
- Two additional carve-outs spare libraries and dependencies distributed through package managers like apt and pacman, plus storefronts distributing browser extensions that run exclusively inside a host application.
- SteamOS sits in limbo because Valve distributes its Arch-based open-source components alongside the proprietary Steam client, while MIT- and Apache-licensed GrapheneOS — which vowed noncompliance in March — now falls entirely outside the law.
Why it matters: The unanimous 39-0 Senate vote on a bill written by the act's own author, Buffy Wicks, draws an explicit line between open-source and proprietary platforms: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family escape age collection entirely, while Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain covered from January 1, 2027. Buried in the amendments is a quiet admission that the original statute had defined every California device owner as a child, a defect that would have blocked the law's own adult-verification pathway.
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