The California DMV has told 11,000 drivers to retake their knowledge tests within 30 days or lose their licenses, citing vague "anomalies" in results — while explicitly ruling out AI, its former proctoring vendor, and internal technical problems as causes, and offering nothing in their place.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has notified approximately 11,000 drivers they must retake their knowledge tests within 30 days or face license cancellation — the result, the agency says, of unspecified "anomalies" indicating "non-compliance with the driver testing criteria required by the California Vehicle Code," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Ian Welliver, a 16-year-old from Burlingame, had earned his standard driver's license in December and his motorcycle license in February. A letter arrived anyway. "It says in bold letters 'Notice of intent to cancel driver's license,'" Welliver told ABC7 News, reading it aloud. The notice identified neither which license was flagged nor what triggered the review. "Based on a review of your record, the DMV has identified irregularities in the knowledge test results" — that was the complete explanation. Welliver returned to a DMV office the next day, retested, and passed. He and his mother still don't know why they had to. "The questions just keep growing," his mother Kristina Karandy-Welliver told ABC7. "Even the DMV management didn't know what was happening."

The agency's sole public voice on the matter has been spokesperson Jonathan Groveman, whose statements amount to a sequence of denials rather than an affirmative explanation. "This has been a California DMV-led effort and is part of our regular internal monitoring process," Groveman told KCRA News. "We can confirm that this is not AI related nor is it related to internal technical problems." In statements to Newsweek, Groveman also explicitly ruled out Proctortrack — the company whose technology powered MVProctor, California's former remote knowledge-testing platform.

That denial is odd on its face. California ended online knowledge testing in January 2025. Every one of the 11,000 flagged tests falls within the July 2025–April 2026 window — a period when in-person testing was the only option available. Ruling out a vendor whose platform had been offline for months before the affected window even opened reads less like factual clarification and more like preemptive damage control. The question the denial invites — what is the cause, if not AI, not the former proctoring software, and not internal technical problems? — remains officially unanswered.

Eleven thousand Californians received letters threatening license cancellation, naming no cause, carrying a 30-day clock, and — per the Welliver family's account — not adequately explained even by staff at the field-office level. DMV Director Seham Abla has issued no public statement on the matter. No California legislators have issued statements about the program's transparency. ABC7 reported it had sought further clarification from the DMV and received no response as of Wednesday.

A "regular internal monitoring process" has produced a mass action affecting residents' ability to legally drive, and the public record of that process currently begins and ends with one word: "anomalies."

What to watch: any regulatory filing or public-records disclosure naming the actual source of the irregularities; whether specific DMV offices or test-date clusters are disproportionately represented among the 11,000; and whether the explicit denial of Proctortrack prompts any public response from the company itself.