By Bo Tefu, California Black Media

California has launched AskCA, a new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot designed to help residents find and navigate state and local government services through a single online platform.

Developed by the state’s Office of Data and Innovation, AskCA is designed around major life events rather than individual government agencies. Californians can use the tool to find information about finding a job, starting a business, accessing family services and recovering from disasters.

Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced the prototype as part of the state’s broader effort to use artificial intelligence to make government services easier to access. The launch follows his March 2026 executive order directing state agencies to responsibly implement generative AI while protecting privacy, security and civil liberties.

“When a Californian needs help, they shouldn’t have to become an expert in government to find it,” said Newsom. “We’re using the best technology California has to offer to make the government more efficient, effective, and more engaged.”

The state is now seeking Californians age 18 and older to participate in the pilot and help test and refine AskCA’s responses. Officials said subject matter experts across state governments are helping inform the chatbot’s answers, which are designed to draw from verified government sources and provide actionable information.

The prototype grew out of California’s response to the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Early testing included more than 140 fire recovery leaders and Altadena wildfire survivors, a dozen job seekers and more than 100 general users.

Jeffery Marino, director of the Office of Data and Innovation, said the tool is intended to remove the need for residents to understand how government agencies are organized before they can get help.

“Californians should not have to understand how the government is organized just to get basic help,” Marino said.

AskCA’s technology will also be used in a new job-skills matching feature that the California Department of Human Resources plans to launch Sept. 30 on CalCareers. Job seekers will be able to upload a resume and receive potential matches to state job classifications.

The state said the CalCareers pilot will not store personal information or require users to have a CalCareers account. California plans to continue testing AskCA as officials evaluate its accuracy, performance and usefulness before expanding the system.

By Emil Amok Guillermo

I was quiet about 9/11 until this week, when terrorism got an upgrade.

Artificial intelligence.

I have taken 9/11 seriously every year. Twenty-five years later, I was all “feeled out.”

I’ve gone to Ground Zero. I’ve written about the dead, the survivors, the first responders and those who survived that day only to become sick years later.

But this isn’t another column about where we were.

It’s about what America became.

For me, September 11, 2001, marks the beginning of a New America. Not the diverse, multicultural America I hoped was emerging.

This is the America that fear built.

I was 3,000 miles away in the Bay Area watching CNBC.

Then the planes hit.

The markets shut down.

And something else opened.

Fear.

At first, fear brought us together. We had a common enemy and, briefly, rediscovered a common good.

But fear is a terrible foundation for democracy.

The person we feared was initially the terrorist.

Then the Muslim.

Then the Arab.

Then the Sikh mistaken for an Arab.

Then the immigrant. The undocumented. The person at the border.

The category continues to expand.

Maybe that’s the real 25-year story of 9/11.

We went from finding common ground to looking for flaws that prove somebody doesn’t belong.

The terrorists didn’t invent American racism, xenophobia or political paranoia. We shouldn’t give 19 hijackers that much credit.

But after 9/11, America built an enormous security structure around fear.

Surveillance expanded. Wars followed. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security. TSA transformed airports. Immigration enforcement was reorganized and ICE was created.

Temporary emergency became permanent infrastructure.

Recently, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job and warned that people building advanced AI genuinely believe it could kill humanity by the end of this decade.

He walked away two months before his Anthropic equity vested.

That’s credibility.

President Trump has taken a different view. On Sept. 14 he called fears of AI destroying humanity a “HOAX” and declared, “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” He said the only guardrail AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

We have built the threat.

We finance it. We feed it our words, photographs, voices, art and knowledge. We invite it into our homes and carry it in our pockets.

Americans are confronting something genuinely frightening.

AI could eliminate or transform jobs. And its increasingly powerful systems raise questions even some of their creators say they cannot fully answer.

So, the question what do we do with fear without surrendering our common humanity.

That requires real leadership and oversight from Congress, if not the president.

Trump insists Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. But on AI, his emphasis is winning the race, especially against China.

That’s the trap.

Fear of China becomes the argument for going full speed ahead.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, we have another chance to get fear right.

Be smart enough to know what to be afraid of.

And make sure we stay in control of the tech.

We’ve got to be smarter than the machines.

About the Author

Emil Amok Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator and comic monologist. He hosts a micro-talk show on YouTube. See him at Comedy Day at Robin Williams Meadow in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, on Sept. 20, around 2:45 p.m. Free.

By Rebecca Kaplan Special to The Post

On Tuesday, the City of Oakland launched Aerbits, an innovative new program that deploys AI-assisted aerial imaging technology to proactively detect and report abandoned trash on streets and sidewalks – to support timely and effective removal of illegal dumping.

By shifting from a reactive, complaint-based system to data-driven proactive detection, the City can deploy cleanup resources faster, more efficiently, and more equitably to the areas in greatest need. 

Approved by both the Privacy Advisory Commission and the Oakland City Council, Aerbits is the latest addition to Oakland’s comprehensive strategy to eliminate illegal dumping from the Town.

“Oakland residents and businesses deserve clean streets and today we are one step closer to a safer, cleaner, and greener Oakland,” said Mayor Barbara Lee. “Our strategy strengthens eradication, education, and enforcement efforts across every neighborhood.

“Aerbits, which was approved by the Privacy Advisory Commission, uses modern technology and best practices to help our crews clear trash faster and more efficiently, while our targeted outreach and enforcement strategies address the root causes of dumping. Together, we are going to get the job done.”

The impacts of illegal dumping on Oakland are profound, disproportionately burdening historically disinvested communities while threatening public health, safety, and economic vitality.

The City is united in taking action to remedy it – with the mayor, Council, administration, Public Works Department, community groups and more coming together to make change.

In May, the City Council approved the Illegal Dumping Expenditures Action Plan, which approves and funds multiple actions – including Aerbits – to help remedy illegal dumping.

This past June, Oakland secured $9.2 million from the Crankstart Foundation to scale up operations like Aerbits and break the cycle of illegal dumping across Oakland.

The Aerbits aerial imaging system photographs public rights-of-way to pinpoint exact locations, estimate waste volumes, and classify types of debris. This enables City dispatchers to understand the problem and efficiently deploy the appropriate crew and equipment to each site.

Built with privacy at its core, the technology contains no facial recognition, no license plate readers, and uses no personally identifying information. Aerbits takes pictures of trash – not of people.

“I founded Aerbits because I saw a major gap in the data that was available to City crews on the streets, and I wanted our children to have a cleaner environment” said Aerbits Founder Brian Johnson.

“Aerbits enables cleanups to be timelier, more effective, and more equitable. By providing real-time comprehensive data, automating the creation of work orders, and improving closure of cleared tickets, we are removing the problems that occur when relying primarily on a complaint-based system,” he said.

Aerbits is the latest milestone in the series of actions the City is taking to implement the City Council-approved Illegal Dumping Expenditures Action Plan. Recent actions taken by the City include:

• Stricter Enforcement: Enacted a new Illegal Dumping Enforcement Ordinance increasing penalties and holding vehicle owners responsible; hired additional Environmental Enforcement Officers equipped with updated citation technology; and worked alongside State Senator Jesse Arreguin on legislation that allows the City to boot vehicles tied to repeat dumping offences. 
• Community Resources: Reinstated the popular “Bulky Block Parties” offering residents free, convenient ways to get rid of bulky waste, alongside expanded public education campaigns.  
• Expanded Fleet Equipment: Obtained new heavy-duty Lightning Loader trucks that allow us to clean up more volumes of debris faster than ever before. 

Rebecca Kaplan is a former City Councilmember-at-large for the City of Oakland.

I hope on Labor Day you honored the value of a good day’s work–and reflected on the thing that could eliminate a lot of jobs.

Artificial intelligence.

Your replacement is in the break room.

Except it doesn’t take breaks.

It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t demand health insurance. It doesn’t complain. It doesn’t need Social Security. And it can produce in seconds what might take you or me hours.

And when they can mass-produce AI faster than we can reproduce humans, there may eventually be more artificial workers than actual ones.

The racists who came up with “replacement theory” worried about the wrong replacements.

It wasn’t immigrants.

It was software.

We can rail against the data centers sucking up electricity and water.

Rail against the billionaires getting richer while telling the rest of us how wonderful the future will be.

But which billionaire?

Jensen Huang of Nvidia? He literally has all the chips?

Sam Altman of OpenAI?

Dario Amodei at Anthropic?

Or Bill Gates?

Gates recently said AI could become the “greatest equalizer ever invented” or the “worst source of injustice.”

I want to believe him. But he’s the guy who forced us all to use Explorer.

Maybe Gates is just Control-Z-ing his life.

Undo. Undo. Undo.

STAYING HUMAN

The other day, I started texting with my AI chatbot.

I’d used AI before, of course. Spellcheck. Grammar. Transcription. Research assistance. The mechanical stuff.

This time, we talked.

Or, rather, I started talking.

At one point the chatbot said something that sounded strangely personal. So, I reminded it that IT wasn’t a person.

“You’re not human,” I said. “I’m basically talking to myself.”

It disagreed.

It said, I should think of it as working with an instrument that talks back.

This is where the danger begins.

The machine talks back.

I tried another analogy.

You’re a tool, I said. Like a cane.

The chatbot liked that better.

Then it tagged my line and said it was my “cognitive cane.”

I laughed.

Then, I realized the damn machine used my analogy to make a joke.

That’s where the real problem lurks.

AI is software running on computers. However startling the conversation may feel, the machine does not have my childhood, my mother, my father, my mistakes, my embarrassments, my loves, my grudges, my Filipino American history, my aging body or my accumulated sense of what matters and what doesn’t.

It can process those things after I tell it about them.

It can mimic thoughts.

But it did not live them.

That is the boundary we humans cannot surrender.

I’m not ready to make peace with the AI industry. Not with its enormous data centers, its environmental costs, its concentration of wealth and power, or the possibility that companies will use AI primarily as a wonderfully efficient machine for converting human paychecks into corporate profits.

And I certainly don’t trust the billionaires to decide by themselves what happens to the rest of us.

But I may be making peace with the tool.

Because a tool is something we use.

A cognitive cane.

But do the walking yourself.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator, and comic monologist. He plays a robot in an upcoming Ishmael Reed play, “King Ludd’s Revenge,” coming in December. See his micro-talk show on YouTube.com/@emilamok1

By Rev. Al Sharpton

Through a new National Action Network initiative, artificial intelligence is framed as a practical tool for industry preparedness.

We are at the forefront of a fundamental shift of access and opportunity. When new technology emerges, marginalized communities are often told to catch up to systems we did not design, and adjust to landscapes that would sooner leave us behind than include us in their architecture. Often during these shifts, our communities become the least resourced, and must navigate industries whose rate of change outpaces their rate of exposure. To combat this, these communities must develop emerging systems of knowledge through internal networks of education, skill-exchange, and entrepreneurship. This is a civil rights issue.

Now, at the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, the same systems our communities have always built for ourselves must rise again. We have had to teach one another how to navigate every new language of power, often because nobody was coming to teach us. AI cannot be different.

If Black and Brown communities are going to compete at the highest levels of industry, then practical AI training cannot be reserved for Silicon Valley boardrooms, elite universities, or people who already have a seat at the table. It has to reach our residents, our clergy, our organizers, our entrepreneurs, our young people, and our families.

For this reason, National Action Network is putting AI education directly in the hands of the community with a new initiative led by AI fluency strategist Susan Hearn. The AI Fluency Initiative’s premise combines the doctrines of racial equity with technology and culture, elevating how access makes AI such a consequential force in determining who gets to shape the next era of American life.

Too often, our communities are spoken for as populations that technology is happening to, rather than working for. We hear about the jobs AI might eliminate, the algorithms that discriminate, and the industries being disrupted. Those concerns are real, but that cannot be where the conversation ends.

We must proactively shift this narrative. We are not just workers to be displaced and demographics to be reached after AI has already disrupted the landscape. We are purveyors and engineers of this technology and should be considered active participants in its use.

Our initiative seeks to interrupt that sequence, refusing to let us become passive figures in a shift that should be empowering us.

For over three-decades, NAN has understood that civil rights advocacy must be practiced wherever inequality shows up. Technology education is included in this conversation because of what it bestows on the communities it reaches. It is one component of a broader commitment, ensuring that communities historically excluded from emerging industries have the tools to participate fully in the economic and cultural shifts of our future. Economic self-determination is just as much a pillar of equity as it is a part of voting rights and equal legal protections.

For us, access is not meaningful if it arrives after everyone else has already learned the rules. So, we start with the fundamentals. The AI Fluency Initiative is designed as a repeated working session to meet people where they are. Students are introduced to the technology across various use cases, then sent home with usable skills based on the work produced during the session.

NAN has always fought to ensure that no community is locked out of the economy. From the fight for fair employment and access to capital to the push for equity in education and homeownership, we have consistently been at the forefront of keeping the doors of opportunity open to all. This fight is no different.

AI is the next gate through which the mechanisms of opportunity will pass through. It is quickly becoming part of how people apply for jobs, build businesses, and articulate themselves. The use cases are vast and the adoption has been swift. If these tools are becoming part of everyday life, then access to understanding them must become an element of everyday empowerment. It is paramount to us that Black communities are not only exposed, but at the helm.

We know that progress does not always distribute evenly. Communities have to demand access and request inclusion in the infrastructure of change. This self-advocacy is often the only way to ensure that hegemony does not continue to inflict exclusion and disenfranchisement on those who could most benefit from seismic shifts in industry. We must refuse to be told to wait our turn, and instead harness the tools of self-education and empowerment.

To be serious about the wealth gap means confronting the technologies reshaping work culture. Amending the academic achievement gap requires us to refuse a literacy discrepancy from arising in the first place. Equity requires preparation, and we are in the unique position to harness these emerging tools so that it is our voices that are heard, our perspectives that are amplified, and our communities that are enfranchised.

The AI Fluency Initiative is an access measure addressing an economic gap.

The upcoming race for the Texas Attorney General seat in the midterm elections will be slightly different from previous election cycles. For nearly three decades, Republicans have controlled the attorney general’s office. And for the first time in more than a decade, Texans will elect an attorney general who is not Ken Paxton.

The role comes with a salary of $153,750.

Paxton, who has held the office since 2015 and was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 on corruption-related charges before being acquitted in a Senate trial, is not seeking reelection, leaving an open seat that pits Republican State Senator Mayes Middleton against Democratic State Senator Nathan Johnson. Libertarian Tom Oxford and Omer Khwaja (independent) are also running.

In a sit-down interview with the Defender, Johnson explained his campaign priorities. Middleton’s campaign team did not respond to the Defender’s request for an interview for this article.

Q & A with Johnson

Middleton casts himself as the natural successor to a conservative office, while Johnson argues that the office itself has been eroded and needs to be restored, regardless of who wins in November.

“The office has lost the trust of the people,” Johnson said in an interview. “It’s partly due to recent scandals with Ken Paxton…it’s been a systematic loss of trust dating back probably before Ken Paxton… People expect the Attorney General’s office to be a productive place. It’s there to protect them from federal overreach, corruption in politics, and abuse in the commercial sector. All of those things have been sidelined.”

Johnson has represented Senate District 16 since 2019. A lawyer with a physics degree from the University of Arizona and a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin, he has worked as a litigator and mediator.

The Democratic nominee argues his legal background shapes how he views the attorney general’s job. His career choices have spanned the Texas Capitol and music studios. The lawmaker’s résumé also includes composing music for “Dragon Ball Z.”

What are his plans?

Stating plans for the office if elected, Johnson said he expects to sue federal government agencies if they violate the Administrative Procedure Act or overstep constitutional bounds, citing, as one example, the administration’s withholding of federal education funding appropriated for Texas schools, which other states’ Democratic attorneys general have already challenged in court.

Asked to back up his campaign priorities in healthcare and the electric grid, Johnson pointed to Senate Bill 1296, a 2021 measure Johnson authored. It asked for a review of the insurance plans offered to Texans through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace to reduce net premiums and make health insurance more affordable for uninsured residents.

Having served on the Business and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC), Johnson has filed legislation on the electrical grid load growth. Pointing to the grid, he noted a dearth of steel and transformers needed to keep it running.

He also plans to review the Texas consumer-protection law for gaps related to AI-driven scams and data privacy, if elected.

Johnson’s stated priorities include suing sanctuary cities, aggressively enforcing federal deportation orders, defending the state’s abortion restrictions, opposing transgender participation in women’s sports, cracking down on what he calls “rogue” district attorneys, enforcing Texas voter ID laws, and pursuing a “DOGE Texas” initiative aimed at rooting out government waste. Notably, Middleton voted to acquit Paxton during his 2023 impeachment trial in the Senate.

Election history in Texas points to a trend that favors Middleton.

The #1 law my Democrat opponent says he will not enforce is the Women’s Privacy Act I passed.

It’s common sense that men should not be in girl’s restrooms and locker rooms. As Attorney General, I will fight to enforce this law and make sure Texas is the best and safest state… https://t.co/tSWGu0AGqw

— Mayes Middleton (@mayes_middleton) August 27, 2026

An uphill statewide race

No Democrat has won a statewide contest in Texas since 1994, and the attorney general’s office in particular has been in Republican hands since Democrat Dan Morales left office in the late 1990s. John Cornyn flipped the seat for the GOP in 1998, defeating Democrat Jim Mattox, and it has stayed red through Greg Abbott’s tenure and Paxton’s three terms. Both campaigns are treating the election history as something to either defend or break.

The 2026 election will test whether the streak of Republican candidate wins continues.

Johnson, however, said in the interview that he has heard similar arguments about political odds before.

When he first ran for the Texas Senate in 2018, Johnson challenged Republican incumbent Don Huffines in a district Johnson said was expected to favor Republicans by 12 points.

“I had no connections. I didn’t have money, name ID, wasn’t famous,” Johnson said. “But I felt like I could beat him.”

The race was “written off until very, very late in the cycle” before he won by eight points, he added, “And I aim to pull off a similar result this time around on a statewide basis.”

What do Black voters think of Johnson?

A new poll by Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, which surveyed more than 500 Black Texans, 20% of those surveyed favor Johnson, and 8% do not, while an overwhelming majority of 72% do not know enough about him.

Johnson says he is looking to change that by visiting historic Black communities in Houston.

“I’m visiting and engaging with communities right now, particularly in the Black community, where there’s no one on the statewide system,” Johnson told the Defender. “It’s very important for Black voters to feel like there’s someone who listens to them, who talks to them, and who understands what’s happening, who directs their interest.”

Based on reporting by Houston Defender.