It never fails: Whenever one group of innovators develops a profitable way to bypass regulations, regulators figure out new ways to impose rules and restrictions on them.

The latest case involves the ever expanding California bureaucracy and firms offering innovative tech training.

A new type of educational provider has quietly sprung up in San Francisco and several other major cities, providing specialized training in computer coding and other skills that are in great demand from technology companies and other entrepreneurs.

And, a bit belatedly, government regulators are noticing, agitating some of the providers and highlighting anew the tension between educational innovation and government regulation aimed at protecting consumers and ensuring quality.

The issue flared last week in California, where the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education — which licenses educational entities to operate, as part of the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs — sent letters warning as many as eight “coding academies” and other training providers that they were operating in violation of state law and threatening fines and potential shutdown if they do not apply for state recognition.

Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the bureau, said that in the agency’s continuing hunt for “unlicensed activity” by providers that “don’t have good intentions for students,” one of its enforcement specialists — in a bit of “serendipity” — recently came across an article about the coding academies, which began popping up two years ago to feed the explosive appetite of technology companies here and in some other high-tech corridors around the country.

The startups — which include places like App Academy, Dev Bootcamp, General Assembly, Hack Reactor, Hackbright Academy, and Zipfian Academy — offer intensive, full-time, short-term training programs in computer languages and other programming skills designed to lead directly to jobs. The fees are often steep — typically between $8,000 and $12,000 for a six- to 10-week course — and are paid directly by the students, since the classes and programs (which do not award degrees) do not qualify for federal or state financial aid.

Heimerich said it was clear to agency officials that the startups qualify as educational providers under the state’s law, because they are “offering an educational course of instruction for which they are charging students,” he said.

The letters warned the providers that they needed to cease operations immediately and faced fines of $50,000 if they continued to operate without being licensed.

Despite the missive’s threatening language, Heimerich insisted that bureau officials neither “believe these schools are unscrupulous” nor aim to run them out of business.

“If you’re making a good-faith effort to come into compliance, it’s not like we’re going to move to shut you down,” he said. “If you’re coming into compliance, you’re not the type of bad player that we’re worried about.”