The Brief

A group of volunteers in Hollywood say they are conducting their own homeless count in the area next week because they don't trust the results of the official regional one.

The effort is organized by Hollywood 4WRD, a coalition of nonprofit service providers, businesses and residents. About 60 volunteers, mostly staff from Hollywood service provider organizations, are expected to fan out across 30 census tracts Tuesday.

Results will be made public a week later May 27, according to organizers.

The neighborhood count comes amid growing questions about the accuracy of the official regional homeless tally.

The city of L.A.'s unhoused population decreased by 5.5% between 2023 and 2025, according to official estimates from the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA. But a 2025 analysis by the RAND Corporation found that LAHSA undercounted people living outside in certain areas, including Hollywood.

Hollywood 4WRD executive director Brittney Weissman said the organization’s own experience volunteering for the LAHSA count this year raised even more questions about accuracy.

“Our experience was so confounding, perplexing and inefficient that we've been really deeply questioning the value, utility and accuracy of the count for a couple of years now,” Weissman said.

Organizers said the Hollywood count will use methodology developed by RAND researchers, who ran their own professional counts in Hollywood, Skid Row and Venice from 2021 until earlier this year.

That research effort, known as LA LEADS, has since lost funding.

“If LA LEADS was continuously funded into the future, we would not be doing this effort,” Weissman said. "Because it's no longer funded, we felt we needed to take our own initiative to understand the lay of the land here.”

What's at stake?

More than $300 million in federal and county dollars are allocated annually based on homeless count results. That includes $220 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and nearly $100 million from L.A. County's Measure A sales tax.

LAHSA conducted its most recent official homeless count in January. The agency said it hopes to release the results this summer but has not confirmed a release date.

In her reelection campaign, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass takes credit for reducing homelessness in the city. The official count underpinning her claim is the same one RAND found was missing nearly a third of unsheltered people in key neighborhoods.

Weissman said Hollywood service providers need to know now whether more people are living in vehicles or sleeping outside, so they can adjust how they're doing outreach.

Organizers timed the May 27 release to influence budget negotiations still underway at City Hall, according to Weissman.

She noted that Bass' proposed budget does not include funding for Safe Parking LA, a program that allows unhoused Angelenos to live legally in their vehicles within sanctioned parking lots.

"If we find that vehicular homelessness is on the rise here and we need it badly, this gives us evidence with which to petition decisionmakers for that resource in our community," she said.

What RAND found

RAND's LA LEADS project ran bimonthly counts in Hollywood, Skid Row and Venice from 2021 until this January.

Comparing LAHSA’s official counts to its own, a RAND report found the 2025 homeless count captured 68% of the unsheltered population across those three neighborhoods.

RAND found the population of unsheltered people in Hollywood dropped 49% in 2024, a decline it linked to the city’s Inside Safe program. But the official LAHSA count still captured only 81% of what RAND found in the neighborhood.

The people being missed were mostly vehicle dwellers and “rough sleepers” — people living with no shelter, RAND said.

Skid Row's official tally fared worse, capturing 61% of what RAND found there.

Hollywood 4WRD said its methodology follows RAND’s LA LEADS methodology, which the group said is more precise than LAHSA’s approach.

Each census tract will be covered by at least two independent volunteers, a quality-control measure that helps organizers flag areas that might need to be recounted.

Volunteers will also use pens and paper to record their observations, instead of a mobile app. LAHSA has used an app for its count since 2022 and has acknowledged repeated technical problems with it.

The unofficial homeless count this month is limited to Hollywood, unlike LAHSA's countywide effort. Weissman said she hopes the effort will encourage other neighborhoods to check their own local data.

As governments and political leaders increasingly push for regulations to rein in artificial intelligence, neither candidate for California governor has committed to firm policies on AI safety, including two requirements Gov. Gavin Newsom called for Friday.

Both Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton say the new technology warrants more regulations. AI has been in the spotlight since last week when an Anthropic researcher quit, declaring on social media, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

CalMatters asked both candidates about what they would do to address AI risks.

In a Thursday interview, Hilton said addressing AI risks would be a “very urgent priority” if he were to become governor, and said he’s “very interested” in considering regulations safety advocates are seeking such as requiring AI developers to undergo safety monitoring from external evaluators. But on Friday he followed up to say he does not support Newsom’s call to require AI developers to program a “kill switch” to shut down models during emergencies, calling such a proposal “a gimmick.”

He also stopped short of endorsing other policies such as requiring external monitoring, saying he doesn’t want to rush during the recent panic into “really bad regulation.”

Becerra’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview, instead issuing a statement that said “California cannot accept technology that poses catastrophic risks to public safety.”

“As governor, (Becerra) will set firm guardrails around real harms — including harms that could emerge when AI accelerates dangerous capabilities or operates beyond human oversight — and ensure California's AI safety laws are actively enforced,” his spokesperson Jonathan Underland wrote.

Becerra is leading Hilton by 22 percentage points in the race to replace Newsom in November, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California released this week.

Newsom on Friday issued an executive order directing state agencies to develop safety recommendations including external evaluations and kill switches, despite vetoing legislation that would have done that two years ago.

The governor asked for the recommendations by Nov. 16, raising the possibility he could call a special legislative session in his final weeks in office to implement them.

Underland did not respond when CalMatters asked whether Becerra would implement those recommendations. Hilton, while opposing the “kill switch” idea, said he supports Newsom’s move to convene a panel to recommend AI safety policies and would do the same.

Meanwhile, advocates for more regulations on tech companies say it is critical for California to adopt tougher rules since President Donald Trump has dismissed recent warnings about AI risks and said he remains committed to speeding up development in the face of foreign competition.

“The incoming governor has a really grave responsibility to make sure we get this right,” said Scott Wisor, policy director at the national Secure AI Project. “I think it should be the very top priority for them when they come into office.”

Half of all Americans are anxious about AI-driven job losses and community backlash to building data centers is now a bipartisan issue ahead of the November election. But California is one of the few states moving to regulate AI to address the potential of catastrophic harm, such as AI agents creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.

Newsom last year signed Senate Bill 53, which requires transparency from large AI model developers on how they manage catastrophic risks — defined as the potential to contribute to 50 or more deaths, the release of chemical or biological weapons or more than $1 billion in theft or damage. The law forces companies to report safety incidents to the state that cause deaths, injuries of “materialized catastrophic harm.”

But proponents of the technology caution against overregulation. Newsom and lawmakers want to keep the industry in California, where the AI boom is driving San Francisco’s economy and delivering billions of dollars of tax revenue into state coffers.

New politics of artificial intelligence

In 2024, Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1047, which would have required the monitoring and kill switches he’s now seeking and imposed stricter liability for companies when their agents cause damage.

“At that time, you could not utter a sentence about AI without making sure there was a comma, and before the comma was something about the risks and after the comma was something about curing cancer,” said state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat who chairs the privacy and technology committee. “There is no doubt the conversation has changed.”

Recent incidents in which AI agents went rogue appeared to confirm researchers’ fears that people could lose control of the technology. Most famously, over the summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents broke out of a contained testing environment, gained access to the internet and coordinated with each other to orchestrate a cyberattack on the startup Hugging Face. OpenAI and Anthropic have since disclosed additional similar incidents.

Dreamforce attendees explore the agentic enterprise city at the conference in San Francisco on Sept. 15, 2026.

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Anna Hoch-Kenney

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CalMatters

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Some industry leaders now embrace third-party safety auditing; in their calls for a development slowdown, both Anthropic and OpenAI said they would commit to giving external evaluators employee-level access to their systems.

Seve Christian, director of California policy at Encode AI, which sponsored the law that requires AI companies to disclose how they handle catastrophic risks, also wants the state to enforce minimum safety standards before AI products are released to the public, similar to how the government ensures planes are airworthy or drugs are safe.

Christian said the group is “cautiously optimistic” about Becerra’s general call for stricter regulations. Encode AI is a donor to Becerra’s campaign.

Bahrad Sokhansanj, a senior research scholar at the Institute for Law and AI, said the state should also make sure it has the legal authority to shut down an AI model itself during emergencies — for example, if a model were carrying out a cyberattack on a power plant.

“Everything we have now was designed for malware, or the cybersecurity problems of 10 or 15 years ago,” he said.

Hilton ready to ban AI in schools

Asked this week whether Becerra supports mandating kill switches and third-party monitoring, Underland wrote only that he “will ensure California's existing AI safety requirements are actively enforced, he will close the gaps that allow bad actors to evade accountability, and strengthen standards as the technology evolves.”

Underland said Becerra’s campaign has held meetings with AI researchers, economists, advocates and industry leaders, but declined to name them.

Echoing other skeptics, Hilton said he thinks industry warnings of the potential collapse of humanity are “reckless and irresponsible.”

“If they really believed what they were doing, that they’re about to try and raise money to do more of, would end the human race, they would stop working on it immediately,” he said. “It’s just obvious that they don’t really mean it.”

Hilton has focused on what he called “practical action that could and should be taken on AI, that most people would agree with and that are not that complicated.” He said on the first day of his administration he would call for a statewide halt on using AI in schools, as the New York and Los Angeles school districts have done. He has endorsed a bill on Newsom’s desk, Senate Bill 947, that would prohibit employers from solely using automated systems to discipline or fire workers.

That position puts him in surprising alignment with the California Labor Federation and in opposition to the California Chamber of Commerce, both of which endorsed Becerra.

Underland said Becerra supports “clear, proportionate, and workable transparency and human review standards for high-stakes automated decisions that affect a person's livelihood,” but stopped short of supporting that bill.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California college students without legal immigration status still cannot work at public colleges and universities after Gov. Gavin Newsom again vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given them that right.

Assembly Bill 713 would have adopted an untested legal theory that argues that a 1986 federal law barring employers from hiring workers in the country without authorization doesn’t apply to state governments. The logic? That 40-year-old law doesn’t mention state governments as a type of employer that cannot hire workers without proper status.

But for the second time in three years, Newsom decided that adopting that theory for California would expose the state’s higher-education system to the wrath of the federal government.

“The current federal government has shown it is quick to wreak destruction for political spectacle — attacking California's public higher education institutions and terrorizing immigrant communities, including students, with reckless disregard for consequences and a desire for chaos,” Newsom wrote in his veto message.

He added: “But given the gravity of this bill's consequences — including potential criminal and civil liability for state employees — the federal courts must resolve the legality of the novel legal theory behind this legislation before we proceed. Seeking declaratory relief in federal court would provide such clarity.”

Newsom vetoed a nearly identical bill in 2024.

The latest bill by Assemblymember José Luis Solache, a Democrat from Lakewood, was meant to allow the estimated 60,000 students without legal immigration status at California’s community college and public universities to earn paychecks safely on campuses instead of working for cash under the table. Backers of the bill say campus jobs could be tailored to fit the students’ academic schedules or align with the research interests, such as employment in labs.

Campus jobs are a key way these students can afford college given that they are ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California provides eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of their immigration status, so many of them can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

“While California has a longstanding commitment to expanding access, affordability, and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers,” Solache said at a bill hearing in June.

The University of California itself abandoned its review of employing students without legal status in 2024 out of fears that the federal government could punish the system by withholding federal money or prosecuting UC personnel.

That decision gutted a coalition of students who led the campaign to persuade the UC to voluntarily adopt the legal theory allowing them to work.

After Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill, a student and former lecturer at the UC sued the system. A state appellate court ruled that UC’s argument that the federal government might sue the system was an abuse of discretion under the state’s law that bans employment and housing discrimination. The court said UC’s policy of not hiring students without legal status was legally indefensible unless it can show that federal law requires the UC to continue its policy of not hiring undocumented students. The UC appealed, but the state Supreme Court let the appellate ruling stand. Still, the court ruling was silent on the soundness of the legal theory that the state can hire workers without legal status.

Newsom’s veto message indicated that a federal court must weigh in on the legal theory before California can adopt a law such as Solache’s.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Paramount's owners have made a series of concessions to a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general to resolve a lawsuit that endangered the media company's $111 billion takeover bid of its larger Hollywood rival, Warner Bros. Discovery.

"The settlement is not a vote of support for this merger," said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, adding he didn't think the two companies should merge. But, he said, the settlement is a "strong solution that protects competition and consumers."

The agreement will bind Paramount to operate Warner Bros. Studios and Paramount Pictures separately — at least for now. Together, they will release at least 30 films a year for two years, and 32 movies a year for the next three, or risk a financial penalty. It will also spend $300 million more annually to make movies in the U.S.

"More production means more work here at home," Bonta said in announcing the settlement.

And the deal will also create a board intended to insulate the combined company's tv news giants, CBS and CNN, from corporate intervention in newsroom decisions, a demand from several of the attorneys general.

A trustee will monitor Paramount's compliance with the terms, Bonta said. If the company fails, he said the states intend to take it to court.

Close ties to Trump

The Ellison family, which controls and runs Paramount, has struck close ties with President Trump.

David Ellison bought Paramount just over a year ago. He took certain steps to win the approval of Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr for that deal. He went on to hire Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News. The founder of the center-right views and news site The Free Press, Weiss has argued the mainstream press is too reflexively critical of the president. She has fired several CBS veterans – others have chosen to leave – and appointed her own picks.

Both the purchase of Paramount and the deal to buy Warner rely on the fortunes of Ellison's father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump financial backer and adviser. Trump arranged for him to have a controlling stake of TikTok in the U.S. when it was spun off from its Chinese owner.

Given both the state of CBS News and the Ellison's ties to Trump, the attorneys general expressed concern about how that could affect the integrity of CNN's news coverage. That issue was even more central to the attorneys general of Connecticut and New York, William Tong and Letitia James, respectively. Trump has long accused CNN of being "fake news" and recently barred its journalists from the White House. On Monday, the network joined MS NOW and Politico in suing the administration for infringing on their First Amendment rights.

A Hollywood force laden with debt

Paramount's acquisition of Warner will bring together the two iconic movie houses, CBS and CNN, a plethora of cable channels, the Paramount Plus and HBOMax streaming platforms, and such major franchises as DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Trek and Star Wars.

Ellison argues Paramount needs to bulk up to compete against digital titans Netflix, Amazon and Apple, as well as Disney.

The attorneys general stepped in and filed their antitrust lawsuit, citing fears that the consolidation of such similar competitors could lead to mass layoffs in the entertainment industry, fewer films being made, higher charges to movie theaters, and higher ticket prices for moviegoers.

David Ellison — who helped to finance Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible franchise and the Top Gun sequel — is by all accounts enamoured of the film-making industry. But keeping his promise to make 30 films a year will be financially difficult. Paramount borrowed more than $54 billion to construct a bid for Warner that that company couldn't refuse, even though it had agreed to a competing bid from Netflix. Warner has its own debt, meaning the combined company will owe up to $87 billion.

As a result, unions at various divisions of the two companies are predicting significant layoffs. Bonta tried on Monday to reassure entertainment workers that would not happen.

Given both the state of CBS News and the Ellison's ties to Trump, the attorneys general expressed concern about how that could affect the integrity of CNN's news coverage. That issue was even more central to the attorneys general of Connecticut and New York, William Tong and Letitia James, respectively. Trump has long accused CNN of being "fake news" and recently barred its journalists from the White House. On Monday, the network joined MS NOW and Politico in suing the administration for infringing on their First Amendment rights.

A Hollywood force laden with debt

Paramount's acquisition of Warner will bring together the two iconic movie houses, CBS and CNN, a plethora of cable channels, the Paramount Plus and HBOMax streaming platforms, and such major franchises as DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Trek and Star Wars.

Ellison argues Paramount needs to bulk up to compete against digital titans Netflix, Amazon and Apple, as well as Disney.

The attorneys general stepped in and filed their antitrust lawsuit, citing fears that the consolidation of such similar competitors could lead to mass layoffs in the entertainment industry, fewer films being made, higher charges to movie theaters, and higher ticket prices for moviegoers.

David Ellison — who helped to finance Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible franchise and the Top Gun sequel — is by all accounts enamoured of the film-making industry. But keeping his promise to make 30 films a year will be financially difficult. Paramount borrowed more than $54 billion to construct a bid for Warner that that company couldn't refuse, even though it had agreed to a competing bid from Netflix. Warner has its own debt, meaning the combined company will owe up to $87 billion.

As a result, unions at various divisions of the two companies are predicting significant layoffs. Bonta tried on Monday to reassure entertainment workers that would not happen.

This scuppers that concern for Paramount and the state.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing President Donald Trump jointly for violating their constitutional rights after his administration cut off their journalists' access to the White House. Trump claimed the news outlets were covering him unfairly.

"This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles," the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. Monday, says.

It cites the news organizations' First Amendment rights not to be punished by the federal government over their speech — in this instance, their news coverage. It also cites their Fifth Amendment rights to due process: the government cannot take away rights or privileges without any warning or process to intercede or appeal the decision.

"The President has been explicit that this ban is intended to punish reporting he doesn't like and to intimidate journalists and news organizations covering him and his administration," said the lead attorney for the news outlets, Theodore J. Boutrous of Gibson Dunn, in a statement. "This ban on the free press harms the American people, who are entitled to rigorous, fact-based coverage of the President of the United States."

In response to NPR's request for comment, the White House pointed to a Truth Social message the president posted early Monday: "The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!"

The latest front in larger battle

Boutrous tells NPR that legal precedents overwhelmingly support the news organizations' case.

Among them was a ruling Boutrous secured as attorney for NPR and three Colorado public radio stations. A federal judge found that a White House executive order barring any federal funds from going to the network or other public media outlets was unconstitutional. (Last year, the Republican-led Congress nonetheless pulled back all funding for public media at Trump's urging.)

Trump has lost many other legal challenges to his efforts to restrict the press, including in his first term the revocation of press credentials for Jim Acosta, then a CNN White House correspondent. A case filed by the Associated Press is still in the courts. It's over the White House's efforts to punish its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump's preferred name of the Gulf of America.

Trump was not subtle on Friday in explaining why he wanted to punish CNN, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) and Politico.

In a back-and-forth with reporters at the White House, he said his decision had not been sparked by any specific reporting, but the accumulation of what he called two years of unfair and negative coverage.

"There's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative things," Trump told reporters Friday. "Now, if they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them into my — into the people's house."

Starting over the weekend, journalists for the three news organizations said their reporting teams were barred from entry, even though they have permanent press passes.

Major tv networks stand by CNN

CNN is among five major television networks that make up what's called the White House video pool, which has provided constant coverage of the president's public appearances for decades. The outlets share the considerable expense and logistical burden of staffing those appearances and share the feed with all. The process ensures there are not myriad cameras crowding smaller spaces at the White House and other places the president appears.

CNN was to offer pool coverage of the president's departure from the White House and his visit to the United Nations in New York City Monday. But CNN was not listed as providing pool coverage on the White House daily guidance. Nor was any other member of the primary video pool — a group made up of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and, of course, CNN.

"Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President," Fox News Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton said in a memo, which
was obtained by NPR. "There will be no replacement pool put in place."

Trump famously basks in the glow of TV news lights, coveting the attention they bring even as he rails against the accompanying coverage.

Tommy Evans, NPR's editor in chief, was among the news executives publicly condemning the White House stance and proclaiming solidarity with the three banned outlets. NPR is a key member of the radio feed providing parallel service to their TV counterparts.

"Barring journalists from the White House because the president dislikes their reporting is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, and NPR condemns it without qualification," Evans said in a statement released Sunday. "The American public has a right to know what its government is doing in its name — not only the coverage a president finds flattering, but the full and accurate account of the use of power and public resources."

Trump himself has sued numerous news organizations, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal (owned by his political ally, Rupert Murdoch), CNN, the BBC and others.

The Justice Department has aggressively sought to secure reporters' notes and devices as it hunts down the sources of leaks. The Defense Department expelled news organizations, including NPR, from the Pentagon for refusing to promise not to seek information not officially authorized for release. The president's pick as head of the Federal Communications Commission has launched formal investigations of all major television networks, save Fox (also owned by Murdoch). The agency is also investigating NPR.

In this instance, previous judicial rulings would appear to stand against the president.

Trump is correct that there is no constitutional or legal right that requires him to allow any particular journalist — or anyone at all — to report on federal matters from the White House grounds.

Once admitted, journalists cannot be prevented from returning simply because the administration does not like their coverage. That would be "viewpoint discrimination" that the courts have held violate their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Under a 1977 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that still holds today, reporters cannot be barred from the White House or denied a permanent White House press pass without a clear explanation from the Secret Service that incorporates due process.

The lawsuit by CNN, MSNOW and Politico is seeking a return of full access to White House for their journalists and to operate the video pool, as previously planned.

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by NPR Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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