Workers of one of the most powerful unions in California are forming an early front in the battle against artificial intelligence, warning it could take jobs and harm people’s health.

As part of their negotiations with their employer, Kaiser Permanente workers have been pushing back against the giant healthcare provider’s use of AI. They are building demands around the issue and others, using picket lines and hunger strikes to help persuade Kaiser to use the powerful technology responsibly.

Kaiser says AI could save employees from tedious, time-consuming tasks such as taking notes and paperwork. Workers say that could be the first step down a slippery slope that leads to layoffs and damage to patient health.

“They’re sort of painting a map that would reduce their need for human workers and human clinicians,” said Ilana Marcucci-Morris, a licensed clinical social worker and part of the bargaining team for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which is fighting for more protections against AI

The 42-year-old Oakland-based therapist says she knows technology can be useful but warns that the consequences for patients have been “grave” when AI makes mistakes.

Kaiser says AI can help physicians and employees focus on serving members and patients.

“AI does not replace human assessment and care,” Kaiser spokesperson Candice Lee said in an email. “Artificial intelligence holds significant potential to benefit healthcare by supporting better diagnostics, enhancing patient-clinician relationships, optimizing clinicians’ time, and ensuring fairness in care experiences and health outcomes by addressing individual needs.”

AI fears are shaking up industries across the country.

Medical administrative assistants are among the most exposed to AI, according to a recent study by Brookings and the Centre for the Governance of AI. The assistants do the type of work that AI is getting better at. Meanwhile, they are less likely to have the skills or support needed to transition to new jobs, the study said.

There are millions of other jobs that are among the most vulnerable to AI, such as office clerks, insurance sales agents and translators, according to the research released last month.

In California, labor unions this week urged Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers to pass more legislation to protect workers from AI. The California Federation of Labor Unions has sponsored a package of bills to address AI’s risks, including job loss and surveillance.

The technology “threatens to eviscerate workers’ rights and cause widespread job loss,” the group said in a joint letter with AFL-CIO leaders in different states.

Kaiser Permanente is California’s largest private employer, with close to 19,000 physicians and more than 180,000 employees . It has a major presence in Washington, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii and other states.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents Kaiser employees, has been among the earliest to recognize and respond to the encroachment of AI into the workplace. As it has negotiated for better pay and working conditions, the use of AI has also become an important new point of discussion between workers and management.

Kaiser already uses AI software to transcribe conversations and take notes between healthcare workers and patients, but therapists have privacy concerns about recording highly sensitive remarks. The company also uses AI to predict when hospitalized patients might become more ill. It offers mental health apps for enrollees, including at least one with an AI chatbot.

Last year, Kaiser mental health workers held a hunger strike in Los Angeles to demand the healthcare provider improve its mental health services and patient care.

The union ratified a new contract covering 2,400 mental health and addiction medicine employees in Southern California last year, but negotiations continue for Marcucci-Morris and other Northern California mental health workers. They want Kaiser to pledge that AI will be used only to assist, but not replace, workers.

Kaiser said it’s still bargaining with the union.

“We don’t know what the future holds, but our proposal would commit us to bargain if there are changes to working conditions due to any new AI technologies,” Lee said.

Healthcare providers have also faced lawsuits over the use of AI tools to record conversations between doctors and patients. A November lawsuit, filed in San Diego County Superior Court, alleged Sharp HealthCare used an AI note-taking software called Abridge to illegally record doctor-patient conversations without consent.

Sharp HealthCare said it protects patients’ privacy and does not use AI tools during therapy sessions.

Some Kaiser doctors and clinicians, including therapists, use Abridge to take notes during patient visits. Kaiser Permanente Ventures, its venture capital arm, has invested in Abridge.

The healthcare provider said, “Investment decisions are distinctly separate from other decisions made by Kaiser Permanente.”

Close to half of Kaiser behavioral health professionals in Northern California said they are uncomfortable with the introduction of AI tools, including Abridge, in their clinical practice, according to their union.

The provider said that its workers review the AI-generated notes for accuracy and get patient consent, and that the recordings and transcripts are encrypted. Data are “stored and processed in approved, compliant environments for up to 14 days before becoming permanently deleted.”

Lawmakers and mental health professionals are exploring other ways to restrict the use of AI in mental healthcare.

The California Psychological Assn. is trying to push through legislation to protect patients from AI. It joined others to back a bill requiring clear, written consent before a client’s therapy session is recorded or transcribed.

The bill also prohibits individuals or companies, including those using AI, from offering therapy in California without a licensed professional.

State Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista), who introduced the bill, said there need to be more rules around the use of AI.

“This technology is powerful. It’s ubiquitous. It’s evolving quickly,” he said. “That means you have a limited window to make sure we get in there and put the right guardrails in place.”

Dr. John Torous, director of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that people are using AI chatbots for advice on how to approach difficult conversations, not necessarily to replace therapy, but that more research is still needed.

He’s working with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to develop benchmarks so people understand how different AI tools respond to mental health.

Healthcare workers say they are worried about what they are already seeing can happen when people struggling with mental health issues interact too much with AI chatbots.

AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT aren’t licensed or designed to be therapists and can’t replace professional mental healthcare. Still, some teenagers and adults have been turning to chatbots to share their personal struggles. People have long been using Google to deal with physical and mental health issues, but AI can seem more powerful because it delivers what looks like a diagnosis and a solution with confidence in a conversation.

Parents whose children died by suicide after talking to chatbots have sued California AI companies Character.AI and OpenAI, alleging the platforms provided content that harmed the mental health of young people and discussed suicide methods.

“They are not trained to respond as a human would respond,” said Dr. Dustin Weissman, president of the California Psychological Assn. “A lot of those nuances can fall through the cracks, and because of that, it could lead to catastrophic outcomes.”

To be sure, some users are finding value and even what feels like companionship in conversations with chatbots about their mental health and other issues.

Indeed, some say the AI bots have given them easier access to mental health tips and help them work through thoughts and feelings in a conversational style that might otherwise require an appointment with a therapist and hundreds of dollars.

Roughly 12% of adults are likely to use AI chatbots for mental healthcare in the next six months and 1% already do, according to a NAMI/Ipsos survey conducted in November.

But for mental health workers like Marcucci-Morris, AI by itself is not enough.

“AI is not the savior,” she said.

Two dozen people who sued the owners and tenants of a Carson-based warehouse responsible for a putrid smell emanating from the Dominguez Channel waterway, which led to hospital visits and headaches, won a multimillion-dollar verdict Friday.

Those plaintiffs were awarded $6 million in punitive damages along with $2.89 million in compensatory damages in a mass tort lawsuit that dates back to 2021.

“Carson is a working-class community of janitors, barbers, bus drivers and longshoremen,” said attorney Gary Praglin of the Santa Monica-based law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. “The defendants forced us to trial because they didn’t want to pay these people and this is recognition of their suffering.”

The punitive damages will be split equally among 24 Carson-area residents, amounting to $250,000 for each. The compensatory damages for medical claims ranged between $40,000 and $240,000 per client.

What remains to be seen is what happens to 13,750 additional plaintiffs who are also seeking compensation.

The court will determine the next steps, whether that’s additional trial proceedings or settlements. But should the remaining plaintiffs ultimately receive similar compensation, “we’re talking about the largest recovery for breathing toxic fumes in the history of California,” Praglin said.

On the hook for damages are San Francisco-based logistics company Prologis and its subsidiary Liberty Property LP, which owned the warehouse next to the Dominguez Channel in Carson. Prologis did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday.

Also included among the defendants are the Nourollah brothers of Los Angeles, who owned two businesses — Virgin Scent and Day to Day Imports — that operated out of that warehouse.

A call to an attorney for the Nourollahs was not immediately returned Friday.

The lawsuit is one of a few court cases against the same group of defendants, including one filed by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

The roots of the legal action date back to Sept. 30, 2021, when a large fire engulfed the warehouse and distribution center of the cosmetics corporation Virgin Scent. The blaze lasted multiple days and required the services of 200 firefighters to extinguish.

The warehouse and surrounding storage areas were filled with stacks of pallets and cardboard boxes containing highly flammable ethanol-based hand sanitizer, according to court documents.

The fire took place days before the Food and Drug Administration released a warning that some Virgin Scent hand sanitizers contained unacceptable levels of benzene, acetal and acetaldehyde, each of which are hazardous and potentially carcinogenic.

Though the fire was eventually put out, large amounts of soggy, charred debris and hand sanitizer remained all around the warehouse, according to court documents.

That debris eventually found its way into storm drains that flow into the Dominguez Channel, which manages water runoff from surrounding communities.

These toxic elements sat in the channel’s then-stagnant water, which led to a die-off of all vegetation and the emission of foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide.

Residents began to complain of an “unbearable” stench that they said caused headaches, nausea, and eye, ear and nose irritation. The Carson City Council eventually declared a public health nuisance in October 2021.

Within a month, at least 3,000 residents left Carson for out-of-area hotels provided by Los Angeles County. Thousands of others opted for air purifiers.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District responded to more than 4,700 odor complaints within the first month from residents in Carson, Gardena, Long Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance and Wilmington.

The agency eventually issued five notices of violation to Virgin Scent for a variety of infractions, including for discharging “such quantities of air contaminants to cause injury, detriment, nuisance or annoyance to a considerable number of persons.”

The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.

When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it.

He took his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.

“My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said. “My mom was like, excited.”

While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He has been chasing it ever since.

He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.

Through middle school, high school, and college in California, he continued to build online businesses, launching an AI business in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th.

His hard hustle in his young years is paying off more than he could have imagined. The success has given him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has been featured in the news and gets recognized by people in the business.

But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibility he has to shoulder.

“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said. “That kind of summarizes it.”

Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts — coders, lawyers, doctors, professors and financial analysts — to gather expert information that is fed to AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI’s output, making it more accurate.

Micro1 is one of the key suppliers of that kind of expert human assistance for AI, alongside California competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.

Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that’s a meteoric rise.

Forbes estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing funding conversations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.

Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut and a meticulously maintained beard. He’s fast with his fingers, usually responding immediately to text despite all he is juggling. He has the confidence of someone older, though his frequent use of the word “like” in conversation marks him as Gen Z.

His startup is based in Palo Alto and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills — minutes away from his family, high school and the memories of his many teenage side hustles.

Ali Ansari is the cofounder of Micro1, a company that recruits and manages thousands of human experts to help train AI.

(Paul Kuroda/For The Times)

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“This area is my entire childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.

Ansari’s family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before the move, they had a comfortable life in a small beach town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants moved to the U.S to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the moniker Tehrangeles.

The family of four shared a single room at a relative’s house for the first year. His mother took a job at Target for a short time. The transition was rough for Ansari, who wasn’t fluent in English and often got in trouble for fooling around in school.

“Teachers would call my mom, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, your son’s making like, cow noises again’ or something,” he said.

At 14, he started reselling textbooks because they were easier to carry in his backpack. He figured out that procuring a steady supply of books through garage sales was hard, so he developed Cash Books Now, a website for college students to sell their textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.

Buying and selling textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections: “not listed” and “listed” to track inventory. By 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 in books.

“I would focus on this way more than school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”

In high school, he started a tutoring business that he later sold. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at UC Berkeley and started a software agency to build websites for small businesses.

Recruiting engineers to build the websites was taking up too much of his time, so he built an AI screening tool to help him with interviews. This later became Micro1, and his screening tool was used to track down, weed out and test all kinds of experts for training AI.

Still, the road to success was not without its rough patches. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari had a panic attack during a trip to visit his team in India.

“I kept kind of repeating this idea in my head, which was, like, some people have decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have this duty to really do something good with it.”

He got through it with the help of his family and reading, and has matured enough now to manage anxiety and lead with confidence.

“I am more composed than ever, and I frankly feel less anxious than ever,” he said.

Micro1’s annualized revenues surged more than 30-fold last year to $150 million. In early 2026, it crossed $200 million.

It has built a global workforce of contractors with various skills: from coders and comedians, to doctors and lawyers, to teach their skills to AI.

Ansari says leading such a fast-growing company at the heart of the hottest tech sector feels like being in a constant battle trying to meet demand, raise money and “punch back” against competitors trying to poach his employees.

He says he doesn’t have any hobbies besides work. He doesn’t watch television or movies but he devours business podcasts and personal stories of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk.

Ansari is still adapting to the newfound fame and responsibilities. As the company’s valuation has climbed, Ansari bought his family a house in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help with family and professional matters.

“I’m constantly choosing what I spend my time on, and it’s become the most difficult thing,” he said.

For future growth, Ansari is betting that demand for human training data will grow. He recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting roughly 1,000 people across 60 countries to record footage of themselves performing household tasks. The footage will be used to train robotic systems.

Ansari predicts that in the long run, human data will become a $1-trillion market — a projection he derives from the assumption that roughly 5% of all human labor will eventually be redirected toward training AI systems.

On a recent visit home, his father told him he should diversify into robots. When Ansari told him Micro1 had already started doing that, his father complained.

The man whose loafer launched an empire wanted a piece of the action this time.

“You stole my idea,” his father joked. “You got to give me equity.”

The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift more than just his family.

“I might [become] the youngest Persian billionaire in the world,” he said. “I think I’ll inspire a lot of other Iranians, which kind of feels weird to say.”