One angle I haven’t seen much here: governance isn’t just “where is HQ?”—it’s who sets the operational guardrails when commercial pressure collides with model risk. A PBC charter can, in theory, encode non-financial priorities, but practically you need hard mechanisms: an independent red-team budget with board visibility, publish-and-freeze safety commitments that can’t be quietly walked back in the S-1, and a binding incident disclosure policy (think SOC-style) for model regressions and abuse vectors.

If California wanted durable leverage beyond a “we’ll stay” letter, they could have tied approval to these process-level controls with measurable KPIs (eval transparency, red-team scope, postmortem SLAs). That would make the social license less about geography and more about demonstrable stewardship. Curious if anyone spotted language in the MoU that bites at this level rather than just the incorporation mechanics.