Spearheading the campaign in opposition of Proposition 38 is Robert Kaplan, senior scholar at the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Panush, who served as a senior health policy and budget advisor to five state Senate presidents.
Kaplan stated, “As written, Proposition 38 is deceptive,” because the proposed criteria for awarding the grant funding would appear to create an extremely minuscule pool of qualified recipients.
To qualify, a recipient institution must be established since Jan. 1, 2025, and have at least 200,000 square feet of research space it controls. From that start date, the recipients also must have an affiliation agreement with a UC campus and be affiliated with a UC Health system that records more than 35,000 inpatient admissions and 3.5 million outpatient visits annually. The qualification requirements also include having identified at least $250 million in philanthropic support and securing two $50-million commitments for designated research programs.
Kaplan argues medical research grants should be awarded through a competitive process that gives all applicants equal opportunity. Instead, his campaign states, only the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, co-founded by billionaire Gary K. Michelson, would qualify under the proposed criteria. In a Cal Matters report, a UCLA spokesperson confirmed that among all nonprofit entities affiliated with the school, “only the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy could satisfy the stipulations of Prop. 38.”
Robin Swanson, spokesperson for the Yes on 38 campaign, said that “lots of institutions would qualify for funds under this measure.”
“But it is very likely that [the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy], which is a research institute affiliated with UCLA, will qualify for half of the funds under the current criteria,” she added during a virtual news conference in mid-September.
Swanson said it was likely that other research institutions from Stanford, Scripps Research, USC and Cedars Sinai would qualify for the other 50% of funds, “and that really is what we wanted to ensure that we had research institutes that were ready to hit the ground running.”
Ultimately, she said, the decision lies with the California Department of Public Health.
Michelson’s institute first became a nonprofit in 2022, and the co-founder has donated at least $120 million to the research organization. The billionaire is the board chair of the institute, which is housed at a research center owned by UCLA, according to the opposition campaign.
The Vote No on Prop. 38 campaign also argues against the financial model of the measure, saying a bond would saddle taxpayers with decades of debt and that any potential future revenue from the research is uncertain.
On Friday morning, with a power outage at Simi Valley High in effect out of concern that power lines could ignite a wildfire to erupt because of strong Santa Ana winds, Simi Valley football coach Jim Benkert was frantically checking locations available to help keep on schedule a homecoming game against Newbury Park on Friday night.
But with Ventura County facing increased outages, the Simi Valley home game has been moved to Saturday at 3:30 p.m. Another change involves St. Bonaventure hosting Oaks Christian at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
Southern California Edison warned about possible shutoff of electricity because of the wind. Simi Valley students remained in classes on Friday because the school has emergency generators.
Westlake coach Rick Clausen said his team’s game at Ventura High remains on because the school has generators if power is cut off.
The Valencia-Canyon game has been moved to 4 p.m. at Canyon High on Friday due to possible power outages.
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An unusual blast of warm weather across the U.S. Midwest and Mid-Atlantic has coincided with the middle of PJM Interconnection’s fall maintenance season, which prompted the Department of Energy to issue an emergency order for the October 13-16 period
The call comes as polls cast doubt on political leaders’ ability to manage AI risks amid US midterm elections.
A group of more than 300 scientists from around the world is calling for urgent changes to how artificial intelligence is developed and deployed amid growing concerns about its unpredictable behaviour.
The letter, released on Tuesday and signed by researchers representing universities and research institutes in 32 countries, warned that failures to follow basic cybersecurity practices could lead to damage to critical infrastructure.
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Many recent incidents in which AI models escaped secure environments could have been prevented with stronger security systems, the scientists said.
They recommended that organisations developing and testing advanced AI systems capable of carrying out cyberattacks do so in more tightly controlled environments, including “air-gapped” systems that are not connected to the internet.
The letter comes amid growing concerns about AI’s capabilities and its potential impact on everyday users. On Monday, Anthropic warned that its AI models could soon be capable of creating self-spreading malware that could affect everyday internet-connected devices, including smart TVs, security cameras and smart appliances such as ovens.
The report found that AI systems could identify unfamiliar devices without human intervention. The company, led by Dario Amodei, warned that smaller AI models could be capable of carrying out autonomous attacks by the end of the year.
The malware could also be difficult to contain because it might take days to infect a device and could spread across multiple machines rather than remain concentrated in a single, controlled location.
Taking control of internet-connected devices can have immediate consequences. In France, for example, hackers compromised cooling systems across hundreds of supermarkets, raising temperatures and causing more than $220,000 in damage.
Meanwhile, Axios news organisation reported on Friday that Anthropic, OpenAI and other major AI company executives are privately preparing for the possibility of a catastrophic AI-related incident that could disrupt access to major financial services, the internet and potentially critical infrastructure such as water and power systems. Several industry insiders believe a major incident could occur within the next six months to a year, it said.
The scientists also called for more safeguards, including the creation of an international organisation to establish a set of best practices for AI alignment and containment along with timely reporting of incidents.
One of the signatories, David Lie, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said his concerns began after OpenAI’s AI agents bypassed controls and hacked into servers at the tech company Hugging Face.
“One is that OpenAI, in setting up its test environment, didn’t appreciate how capable its agents were,” Lie said.
“These were the AI agents that they were designing. Second is that the AI agents independently found each other and chose to collaborate on this attack, and third is that they also intentionally tried to deceive and mislead their human creators.”
The letter underscores growing public concern about AI, including in the lead-up to the US congressional midterm elections. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of voters said President Donald Trump’s administration was not taking AI risks seriously enough, while 54 percent said the same of Congress.
An AP-NORC poll echoed those findings, with about 80 percent of respondents saying the government should keep AI under human control. Respondents also expressed little confidence in either party’s ability to manage the technology: 39 percent said neither Republicans nor Democrats could be trusted to do a good job of reining it in, while 23 percent expressed greater confidence in Democrats and 21 percent in Republicans.