SB 942 at $5,000 a day: what an API user should keep

Secondary sources say California SB 942 became operative on August 2, 2026, with a penalty of $5,000 per violation per day; the bill text is on California Legislative Information. This is not legal advice, and this post does not summarize the statute's requirements. It covers what record Sume gives you for each generated asset, so your own compliance team has something to work from.

Records Sume produces

Every generation is a durable job. Store the ids and responses as they arrive:

One limit to know

With model: "sume/auto", the job reports sume/auto and Sume does not disclose which family ran. If your records must name the model, pin a catalog id such as seedance-2.5 in the request.

Capture it at completion

Verify the signed webhook, then write the job id, event, artifact URLs and your own request metadata to storage you control. Keep polling as a backup for deliveries that never arrive. Whether a particular label or disclosure is legally required, and how long to retain records, are questions for counsel; the Sume docs do not state a retention period.

# fetch and save the full timeline for one job
curl https://api.sume.com/v1/jobs/job_123/events \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" > job_123.events.json
curl https://api.sume.com/v1/jobs/job_123/result \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" > job_123.result.json