The Brief

Though lawmakers and advocates proposed dozens of bills to regulate artificial intelligence in California this year, none have attracted more disdain from big tech companies, startup founders, and investors than the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.

In letters to lawmakers, Meta said the legislation, Senate Bill 1047, will “deter AI innovation in California at a time where we should be promoting it,” while Google claimed the bill will make “California one of the world’s least favorable jurisdictions for AI development and deployment.” A letter signed by more than 130 startup founders and incubator Y Combinator goes even further, claiming that “vague language” could “kill California tech.”

Prominent AI researchers are also taking sides. Last week, Yoshua Bengio and former Google AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, who are sometimes called the “godfathers of AI,” came out in support of the bill. Stanford professor and former Google Cloud chief AI scientist Fei-Fei Li, who is often called the “godmother of AI” came out against SB 1047.

The bill, approved 32-1 by the state Senate in May, must survive the Assembly Appropriations suspense file on Thursday and win final approval by Aug. 31 to reach Gov. Gavin Newsom this year.

The bill, introduced by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener in February, is sprawling. It would:

• Require developers of the most costly and powerful AI tools to test whether they can enable attacks on public infrastructure, highly damaging cyber attacks, or mass casualty events; or can help create chemical, biological, radioactive, or nuclear weapons. 
• Establish CalCompute, a public “cloud” of shared computers that could be used to help build and host AI tools, to offer an alternative to the small handful of big tech companies offering cloud computing services, to conduct research into what the bill calls “the safe and secure deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence models,” and to foster the equitable development of technology.
• Protect whistleblowers at companies that are building advanced forms of AI and contractors to those companies.

The latter protections are among the reasons whistleblower and former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo supports SB 1047, he told CalMatters. He also likes that it takes steps toward more transparency and democratic governance around artificial intelligence, a technology he describes as “completely unregulated.”

Kokotajlo earlier this year quit his job as a governance researcher at OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company behind the popular ChatGPT tool. Shortly thereafter he went public with allegations that he witnessed a violation of internal safety protocols at the company. OpenAI was “recklessly racing” toward its stated goal of creating artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, Koktajlo told the New York Times. Kokotajlo also believes that advanced AI could contribute to the extinction of humanity — and that employees developing that technology are in the best position to guard against this.

In June, Kokotajlo joined more than a dozen current and former employees of OpenAI and Google in calling for enhanced protections for AI whistleblowers. Those workers were not the first to do so; Google employees spoke out in 2021 after co-leads of the Ethical AI team were fired. That same year, Ifeyoma Ozoma, the author of a tech whistleblower handbook and a former Instagram employee, cosponsored California’s Silenced No More Act, a state law passed in 2022 to give workers the right to talk about discrimination and harassment even if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Kokotaljo said he believes that, had SB 1047 been in effect, it would have either prevented, or led an employee to promptly report, the safety violation he said he witnessed in 2022, involving an early deployment of an OpenAI model by Microsoft to a few thousand users in India without approval.

“I think that when push comes to shove, and a lot of money and power and reputation is on the line, things are moving very quickly with powerful new models,” he told CalMatters. “I don’t think the company should be trusted to follow their own procedures appropriately.”

When asked about Kokotajlo’s comments and OpenAI’s treatment of whistleblowers, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said company policy protects employees’ rights to raise issues.

Existing law primarily protects whistleblowers from retaliation in cases involving violation of state law, but SB 1047 would protect employees like Kokotajlo by giving them the right to report to the attorney general or labor commissioner any AI model that is capable of causing critical harm. The bill also prevents employers from blocking the disclosure of related information.

Whistleblower protections in SB 1047 were expanded following a recommendation by the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection committee in June. That recommendation came shortly after the letter from workers at Google and OpenAI, after OpenAI disbanded a safety and security committee, and after Vox reported that OpenAI forced people leaving the company to sign nondisparagement agreements or forfeit stock options worth up to millions of dollars. The protections address a concern from the letter that existing whistleblower protections are insufficient “because they focus on illegal activity, whereas many of the risks we are concerned about are not yet regulated.”

OpenAI spokesperson Hannah Wong said the company removed nondisparagement terms affecting departing employees. Despite these changes, last month a group of former OpenAI employees urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate nondisclosure agreements at the company as possible violations of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden last year to reduce risks posed by artificial intelligence.

Bay Area Democrat Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who leads the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, said she helped add the whistleblower protections to SB 1047 because industry insiders have reported feeling muzzled by punitive non-disclosure agreements, even as more of them speak out about problems with AI.

“If Californians are going to feel comfortable engaging with these novel technologies, employees must be able to report dangerous practices without fear of retaliation,” she said in a written statement. “The protections the government provides should not be limited to the known risks of advanced AI, as these systems may be capable of causing harms that we cannot yet predict.”

Industry says bill imperils open source, startups

As vocal as they’ve been in opposing SB 1047, tech giants have said little about the bill’s whistleblower protections, including in lengthy letters that Meta, Microsoft, and Google sent to lawmakers. Google declined to comment about those provisions, while Meta declined to make California public policy lead Kevin McKinley available for comment. OpenAI pointed to a previous comment by Bourgeois that stated, “We believe rigorous debate about this technology is essential. OpenAI’s whistleblower policy protects employees’ rights to raise issues, including to any national, federal, state, or local government agency.”

Instead, opponents have highlighted the bill’s AI testing requirements and other safety provisions, saying compliance costs could kneecap startups and other small businesses. This would hurt the state economy, they add, since California is a center of the AI industry. The bill, however,  limits its AI restrictions to systems that cost more than $100 million, or require more than a certain quantity of computing power to train. Supporters say the vast majority of startups won’t be covered by the bill.

Opponents counter that small businesses would still suffer because SB 1047 would have a chilling effect on individuals and groups that release AI models and tools free to the public as open source software. Such software is widely used by startups, holding down costs and providing them a basis on which to build new tools. Meta has argued that developers of AI software will be less likely to release it as open source out of fear they will be held responsible for all the ways their code might be used by others.

Open source software has a long history in California and has played a central role in the development of AI. In 2018, Google released as open source its influential “BERT,” an AI model that laid the groundwork for large language models such as the one behind ChatGPT and that sparked an AI arms race between companies including Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Other open source software tools have also played important roles in the spread of AI, including Apache Spark, which helps distribute computing tasks across multiple machines, and Google’s TensorFlow and Meta’s PyTorch, both of which allow developers to incorporate machine learning techniques into their software.

Meta has gone farther than its competitors in releasing the source code to its own large language model, Llama, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times. In a letter sent to Wiener in June, Meta deputy chief privacy officer Rob Sherman argued that the bill would “deter AI innovation in California at a time when we should be promoting it” and discourage release of open source models like Llama.

Ion Stoica is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and cofounder of Databricks, an AI company built on Apache Spark. If SB 1047 passes, he predicts that within a year open source models from overseas, likely China, will overtake those made in the United States. Three of the top six top open source models available today come from China, according to the Chatbot Arena evaluation method Stoica helped devise.

Open source defenders also voiced opposition to SB 1047 at a town hall hosted with Wiener at GitHub, an open source repository owned by Microsoft, and a generative AI symposium held in May.

Newsom, who has not taken a position on the legislation, told the audience it’s important to respond to AI inventors like Geoffrey Hinton who insist on the need for regulation , but also said he wants California to remain an AI leader and advised lawmakers against overreach. “If we over regulate, if we over indulge and chase a shiny object, we can put ourselves in a perilous position,” the governor said. “At the same time we have an obligation to lead.”

Aiming to protect tech workers and society

Sunny Gandhi, vice president of government affairs at Encode Justice, a nonprofit focused on bringing young people into the fight against AI harms and a cosponsor of the bill, said it has sparked a backlash because tech firms are not used to being held responsible for the effects of their products.

“It’s very different and terrifying for them that they are now being held to the same standards that pretty much all other products are in America,” Ghandi said.” There are liability provisions in there, and liability is alien to tech. That’s what they’re worried about.”

Wiener has disputed some criticisms of his bill, including a claim, in a letter circulated by startup incubator Y Combinator and signed by more than 130 startup founders, that the legislation could end up sending software developers “to jail simply for failing to anticipate misuse of their software.” That assertion arose from the fact that the bill requires builders of sufficiently large language models to submit their test results to the state and makes them guilty of perjury if they lie about the design or testing of an AI model.

Wiener said his office started listening to members of the tech community last fall before the bill was introduced and made a number of amendments to ensure the law only applies to major AI labs. Now is the time to act, he told startup founders, “because I don’t have any confidence the federal government is going to act” to regulate AI.

Within the past year, major AI labs signed on to testing and safety commitments with the White House and at international gatherings in the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea, but those agreements are voluntary. President Biden has called on Congress to regulate artificial intelligence but it has yet to do so.

Wiener also said the bill is important because the Republican Party vowed, in the platform it adopted last month, to repeal Biden’s executive order, arguing that the order stifles innovation.

In legislative hearings, Wiener has said it’s important to require compliance because “we don’t know who will run these companies in a year or five years and what kind of profit pressures those companies will face at that time.”

AI company Anthropic, which is based in San Francisco, came out in support of the bill if a number of amendments are made, including doing away with a government entity called the Frontier Models Division. That division, which would review certifications from developers, establish an accreditation process for those who audit AI, and issue guidance on how to limit harms from advanced AI. Wiener told the Y Combinator audience he’d be open to doing away with the division.

Kokotajlo, the whistleblower, calls SB 1047 both a step in the right direction and not enough to prevent the potential harms of AI. He and the other signatories of the June letter have called on companies that are developing AI to create their own processes whereby current and former employees could anonymously report concerns to independent organizations with the expertise to verify whether concern is called for or not.

“Sometimes the people who are worried will turn out to be wrong, and sometimes, I think the people who are worried will turn out to be right,” he said.

In remarks at Y Combinator last month, Wiener thanked members of open source and AI communities for sharing critiques of the bill that led to amendments, but he also urged people to remember what happened when California passed privacy law in 2018 following years of inaction by the federal government.

“A lot of folks in the tech world were opposed to that bill and told us that everyone was going to leave California if we passed it. We passed it. That did not happen, and we set a standard that I think was a really powerful one.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Rabbi Amy Bernstein says the wind-whipped fire in January 2025 that scorched much of the Pacific Palisades, destroying her home and damaging her synagogue, “blew everything open” for the community’s faith leaders.

“If our hearts must break, let them break open,” said the rabbi, who leads Kehillat Israel where 300 families out of 900 lost their homes. “This tragedy has really pushed us closer to one another. We’re working to change the things we need changed.”

Faith leaders both in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena and Pasadena — devastated by the pair of fires that tore across Southern California — have relied on interfaith and community partnerships to rally congregants who are picking up the pieces 16 months later.

They’ve had to learn on the fly about insurance coverage and local land use regulations while still trying to keep their scattered flock together and raising money for basic needs. Pastors in Altadena have had to fight to protect the rights of Black people who decades ago found pathways to home ownership in that community despite redlining — but now risk losing their land to outside developers who sense an investment opportunity.

And throughout this span, faith leaders have had to cater to the emotional and spiritual needs of their communities and think about how they want to rebuild their sanctuaries that were lost or damaged in the fire. More than a dozen houses of worship burned to the ground or were damaged.

Interfaith relationships have become stronger after the fires

This would have been difficult for faith leaders to handle but for the interfaith relationships that became closer and stronger after the fires, said the Rev. Grace Park, associate pastor at Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, which burned down.

Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews and yogis have not just found common ground in human suffering and loss, but have learned how to lean on one another in a time of dire need, she said.

“It’s a sense of mutual affection and respect, learning from each other and leaning on one another,” Park said. “We’re sharing the joys and the deep valleys of what it means to lead through a time of tragedy.”

Brother Satyananda, a senior monk at the Self Realization Fellowship, lost his living quarters and belongings in the fire. Much of the campus, started by Paramahamsa Yogananda who brought ancient spiritual practices from India to the West, fortunately survived the fire.

Satyananda recalls one day when Bernstein picked up on his sadness and offered him “motherly compassion.”

“We share the same profession where we’re tuned to people in need,” he said. “Now, our relationship has changed because we’re tuning into each other. There’s a greater level of trust.”

Pastor BJ King, who leads LoveLand LifeCenter, worked with the late Rev. Cecil B. Murray to heal communities and build interfaith coalitions after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

“Back then, there was a choice whether or not to get involved,” he said. “But with these fires, there is no choice. It has affected everybody.”

Pastors have had to acquire new skills

King’s congregation has switched to online services after their leased church building in Altadena suffered smoke damage. Twelve families lost their homes. In addition to helping meet people’s basic needs, King has created a program organizing gatherings to connect therapists with those in need of mental health.

“Many people didn’t even know they needed that,” he said.

One of the most powerful roles faith leaders have played after the fire is to “continue to talk with power, people in charge,” said Pastor Jonathan DeCuir, who leads Victory Bible Church in Pasadena. He and others in the region have continued to meet with local officials and even conferred with Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep things moving for their communities.

DeCuir chairs the board of a nonprofit called Legacy Land Project, which provides financial aid, legal support and guidance on building contractors, as well as medical care to those affected by the fires.

The disaster has brought a level of camaraderie that DeCuir says he has never seen among the region’s clergy.

“Denominational lines have been crossed,” he said. “Even if we have different theological stances or approaches to ministry, we are all now looking at how to care for our people and community. If we don’t come together, Altadena will never ever be the same. The people won’t be there anymore. That, to me, is terrifying.”

While a church is more than a building, physical churches do appear as “beacons of hope” in traumatized communities, said Pastor Mayra Macedo-Nolan, executive director of Clergy Community Coalition in Pasadena. Her group has lobbied for houses of worship to be prioritized on the same footing as businesses in the rebuilding plan.

“When people start seeing churches rebuilding in Altadena, they’re going to feel like it’s going to be OK because the churches are coming back,” she said.

Reimagining a purposeful future

Pastor Jonathan Lewis, fourth from right, holds a groundbreaking service at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church to mark the beginning of its rebuilding in Altadena, Calif., April 26, 2026.

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Members of the congregation join in prayer during the groundbreaking ceremony at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church, marking the beginning of its rebuilding, April 26, 2026, in Altadena, Calif.

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Pastor Jonathan Lewis poses for a photo with his congregation during a groundbreaking service at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church, marking the beginning of its rebuilding, April 26, 2026, in Altadena, Calif.

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On April 26, the Altadena Fountain of Life Church broke ground to build a new sanctuary after their house of worship, which had stood for over three decades, was destroyed in the fire. Pastor Jonathan Lewis, who ministers to about 75, hopes the church will be ready in time for Easter next year.

“It’ll be a Resurrection Sunday for our church, too,” he said.

Alexis Duncan, who grew up in Altadena attending that church, came to the groundbreaking with her 6-year-old daughter. She lost both her home and her church building.

“It means everything to me that they’re rebuilding because I want the church to be there for my daughter as she grows up,” she said. “This new beginning gives me and my family hope and the encouragement to come back.”

Some churches like Altadena Community Church, a United Church of Christ congregation, are pausing to rethink their future purpose. The Rev. Michael Lewis, who took over in February after the previous pastor retired, said the congregation is looking into several possibilities for the one-acre lot, including affordable housing.

“We know that a church is not intended to be a landlord and the pastor is no property manager,” he said. “But, we’re also thinking about who is able to return to Altadena? How will this rich, economically diverse community that was scattered by the fire come back?”

The church has been around since the 1940s. A haven for actors, poets and musicians, the former sanctuary also served as a vibrant performance space. Lewis said they hope to incorporate a performance stage into the new facility.

“It’ll look different from what we had before,” he said. “Once we figure out how to build community, we can decide what physical structures will help us support that community.”

As for Kehillat Israel, on May 15, members will carry their Torah scrolls back to their sanctuary, marking one of the first returns by a house of worship to the Palisades since the disaster.

Judaism has had “a long history of starting over,” Bernstein said.

“It’s encoded in our cultural approach to the world, that there are things that can always be taken away from you,” she said. “But what you become can never get taken away.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he has requested a yearlong extension of FEMA funding for L.A. fire survivors. Without the extension, the money will run out July 9.

Now the decision on FEMA support lies with the federal government.

The funds have allowed many survivors to afford temporary housing and other daily needs. Most have yet to return home — 2 in 3 survivors who were living in Altadena or Pacific Palisades at the time of the fires are still displaced, according to the latest survey of more than 2,100 survivors by the nonprofit Department of Angels. Nearly 40% of respondents reported they will either soon run out of temporary housing insurance coverage or have already.

The situation is particularly dire for low-income households: Nearly 80% of respondents making $50,000 or less said they didn’t think they could afford housing for three months once coverage ended.

“The data is clear: This recovery is not over,” said Angela Giacchetti of the Department of Angels at a news conference organized by the Eaton Fire Collaborative in Altadena on Thursday. “If you are a survivor, you know this in your bones. For many families, it has barely begun. People have just begun to stabilize. We need federal support that reflects the scale of this disaster and systems that survivors can actually navigate and access over time.”

FEMA assistance isn’t reaching most survivors

The FEMA Individuals and Households Program can provide funding for survivors of disasters to pay for temporary housing, repair their homes, and respond to other challenges that insurance may not cover. It can also help cover costs if a survivor has no insurance.

Gil Barel has been relying on FEMA funds to pay rent on a small back house for herself and her son for the last year. She said they still haven’t been able to return to their rent-controlled Pasadena apartment because of smoke damage, though she still has to pay the rent for it.

Gil Barel is paying rent on a smoke-damaged apartment in Pasadena while FEMA funds have helped her cut the cost of temporary housing.

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Barel doesn’t know what they’ll do if the FEMA funding runs out.

“ I'm really stressed out,” she said. “I think I'm just kind of trying to put that thought aside and hope for the best.”

But in the 15 months since the fires, most survivors have not accessed FEMA funding. About 60% have received no FEMA assistance beyond the initial $770 payments dispersed in the immediate aftermath of the fires, according to the Department of Angels survey.

Many have faced denials, according to disaster case manager workers with Catholic Charities of L.A. and lawyers with Legal Aid Foundation of L.A.

That’s the situation for Gayle Nicholls-Ali and her husband, Rasheed, who lost their Altadena home of 15 years in the Eaton Fire. They’ve relied on their insurance to pay for a rental in Montrose, but that’s rapidly running out. And because they have that insurance, FEMA has denied further support.

Gayle Nicholls-Ali and her husband, Rasheed, lost their home in the Eaton Fire. They plan to rebuild, but the cost is a major hurdle.

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“A lot of our ALE [Additional Living Expenses insurance] is going to run out before we even are able to get into a house,” Nicholls-Ali said.

Without FEMA or insurance support, they’ll have to find a way to pay rent on top of a mortgage. They also face a big gap in the cost of their rebuild versus how much their insurance covers. Nicholls-Ali said without the help of FEMA and other sources of funding, recovering feels further out of reach.

Funds for long-term recovery still in limbo

FEMA funding extensions have been routine in past disasters, including the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii and after devastating flooding in North Carolina in 2024.

But the agency has faced significant cuts during the second Trump administration, and there are indications that disaster aid is becoming increasingly political. For example, President Donald Trump has approved aid for just 23% of requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, compared to 89% for states that with Republican governors and senators, according to an analysis by Politico.

The state has also not received more than $33 billion for long-term recovery, which can help pay for infrastructure upgrades and repairs, as well as help rebuild schools, parks and homes. That money was requested by state and local leaders shortly after the January 2025 fires and hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.

An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.

The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.

Here's how authorities are using the practice of contact tracing to contain the outbreak and keep the hantavirus from spreading.

Contact tracing 101

The concept of modern contact tracing dates to the 1930s and was part of an effort to stop the spread of syphilis. It involves locating the close contacts of anyone who may have been infected. "By identifying people who are at risk of infection," says Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan, "you try to get ahead when people don't have symptoms yet with the goal of preventing the infection from continuing to propagate."

This is a well-tested approach for containing an infectious disease. "It's the oldest tool in the epidemiologic toolbox," explains Malani. "We thought about this a lot early in the pandemic with COVID. But we also do contact tracing for sexually transmitted infections, for things like meningitis and even measles."

Malani likens contact tracing to monitoring ripples in a pond, "trying to prevent those outer rings from propagating by isolating individuals and by identifying individuals who might be at risk of infection."

The idea that "there's a time period where people don't have symptoms but could be harboring the virus, that's what contact tracing helps identify," says Malani.

It starts by pinpointing someone with an infection or suspected infection of the disease in question — in this case, hantavirus. Epidemiologists then look to see with whom they've recently had close contact since these individuals are more likely to have been infected.

This hunt for those with the greatest probability of infection is important. "Otherwise, it becomes an impossible web to contain because everyone is connected to everyone," says Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor at Emory University. "So you have to stratify by high, intermediate and low-risk contacts."

The next step involves public health agencies ordering precautions for those who are infected or who may be infected but aren't showing symptoms yet. Such measures may include quarantine, so that an individual doesn't come into contact with even more people — who may then become infected.

One challenge that hantavirus presents is that its incubation period can last up to several weeks. In other words, "people take a long time to become symptomatic after they've been exposed," says Titanji. "Some of these primary contacts would have to be monitoring themselves for symptoms for up to 45 days to be at the tail end of that very long incubation period."

Aboard and ashore

The work isn't high-tech but it is painstaking, requiring officials to reconstruct the many interactions someone may have had over days or weeks.

Onboard the cruise ship, "you might have an individual who is a source of an infection," says Titanji, laying out a hypothetical example. "And then they were sitting at a dinner table with one individual who then goes back to their cabin and shares a bed with their partner who has a conversation with someone else on the deck."

Once someone disembarks the ship, the number of potential interactions can grow quite quickly. This is why officials were concerned when a KLM flight attendant fell ill after being aboard a flight with one of the infected cruise ship passengers. Fortunately, the flight attendant ultimately tested negative for hantavirus.

Titanji is heartened by what she's seen playing out so far. "It seems like the international collaborative effort has been really robust and the mechanisms for containment are in place and underway," she says.

Public health officials argue that contact tracing is a powerful approach that will reduce further spread. "We can break this chain of transmission," said Abdi Mahmoud, the director of the World Health Organization's health emergency alert and response efforts, at a press conference on Thursday.

He has good reason to be confident. Contact tracing was vital during the fight against COVID-19 and helped end the Ebola crisis in Liberia, containing the epidemic there more than a decade ago. Some of the contact tracing even involved hours-long hikes through the jungle to a remote village.

Authorities are hoping for similar success with this hantavirus outbreak.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The sky above Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown will be dotted with color Saturday with the annual Kite Festival.

The festival had its beginnings as a joyful protest in 2021, back when a proposal for a Dodger Stadium gondola included cutting through the airspace above the park. Organizers say last year’s Kite Festival drew a crowd of about 7,000.

“The Kite Festival, [for] some people, it’s their favorite day in Los Angeles,” said Sue Bell Yank, executive director of Clockshop, the nonprofit arts org that runs the festival. “It’s the time when they really feel connected to their city. More so than any other time.”

This year’s programming includes a kite-making station where you can build your own flying art for a donation of $5, along with art workshops and the unveiling of a large floating, inflatable sculpture by Guatemalan kite artist Francisco Ramos.