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U.S. Representative (D) for California's 17th district, covering Silicon Valley, known for engaging on technology and AI policy issues in Congress.
Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed Prop. 42, which voids the Prop. 40 billionaire tax if both pass and Prop. 42 gets more yes votes. SFGATE reports polls consistently lean toward Prop. 42, so a Prop. 40 majority would not settle the question.
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Rep. Ro Khanna's Free Child Care for America Act would cost $80 billion a year and Project 2029's similar plan about $200 billion, Vox reports. Employers have a stake in the design, since Vox says reliable care affects whom they can hire and keep.
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California's Prop 40 would levy a one-time 5% tax on the assets of residents worth over $1 billion, raising $100 billion by its union backer's estimate. Its lasting effect on a top-heavy, market-sensitive budget turns on repetition, the very spread opponents predict when they call it a Trojan horse.
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Opponents of California's one-time 5% billionaire tax have raised more than $300 million, about ten times what its backers have. For the few hundred people in scope, residency was fixed on Jan. 1, 2026, so payment and a rival nullifying measure are what remain open.
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Trump's White House Accord on Super Intelligence asks six AI companies to police themselves through four layers of control, with no penalties for breaking it. Until Congress writes binding rules, Trump and adviser David Sacks say the Justice Department and securities law already supply the enforcement.
Perspective Coverage
19 publishersReality
California voters will decide in November on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state's 250 billionaires, who hold $2.3 trillion. Whether any of them pays turns on a three-way vote count, since two rival amendments on the same ballot can undo it.
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OpenAI and DeepMind researchers warned in videos given to Reuters that labs are rushing self-improving AI, one putting the odds of extinction at 10% or higher. Their own chief executives already back a slowdown in public, so the testimony mostly weakens the labs' claim that they can slow down only if everyone does.
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Rep. Ro Khanna asked DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI if they would be prepared for an incident like this summer's OpenAI-agent hack of Hugging Face. The letters target frontier labs, but the incident they cite is one any team shipping agents has to plan for.
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Rep. Ro Khanna's Human Control Over AI Act puts frontier model training and deployment under federal license, with agency auditors inside every lab. Safety work would become a legal condition of building models, though no House bill is expected to get a vote before the midterms.
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Five lawmakers announced two bills putting biotech and genomic data under CISA's infrastructure planning, with no new sector. If enacted, DHS would contact key biotech firms and fold their input into the National Infrastructure Protection Plan this year.
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Sunday's talks in New York put an AI dialogue next to the tariff agenda before Thursday's White House summit. The concrete piece Treasury described is a channel for flagging national security AI incidents, plus a promise to meet again.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The Nvidia chief executive told Bloomberg Television he is fine with owing about $8bn under California's proposed one-time 5% levy. The measure's $100bn target implies roughly $2trn of net worth across about 200 residents.
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A letter from six Nobel economists asks Californians to treat Proposition 40 as the start of a movement other states, Washington and other countries copy. The vote is in November, and the state's own pollster has supporters behind.
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Eric Xu told a Shanghai press conference that Chinese model providers should speed up until they hit the safety problems American labs keep disclosing, on the same day a US congressman asked those labs to help pace the frontier.
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Two California congressmen want emergency federal guardrails after Anthropic's chief executive wrote that the industry must slow the pace. Nobody has written a bill yet, and the House Speaker has already turned down the session.
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Senate negotiators want catastrophic-risk prevention written into law for the most advanced models, with the government able to stop a release. The reporting names three American developers inside that perimeter.
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Texas has stopped new data center construction pending an audit of grid connections. The pause is expected to run through November, which lifts capacity planning out of the permitting queue and into a campaign.
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More than 100 jurisdictions have cancelled Flock contracts and Texas has blocked state purchases, yet opposition to plate readers in one's own community still polls at 46%, and some councils simply switch vendors.
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The San Francisco Democratic Party broke with its state party 17-4 to oppose Prop 40, but the six billionaires who have already ended their California residency are the only votes on this measure that are already counted.
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Proposition 40 would take 5% once from anyone worth over $1 billion. August polling puts it at 48% among likely voters and 75% among 18-to-29s. The composition of the November electorate is the only number that decides it.
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Invest · August 17, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers