Northern California hospital officials told a 31-year-old woman’s family that she had checked out — when the patient had actually died and her body kept in cold storage for a year, loved ones said in a civil lawsuit.

Jessie Marie Peterson had been suffering from Type 1 diabetes when she was admitted to Mercy San Juan Medical Center on April 6 last year, according to allegations made in a Sacramento County Superior Court lawsuit filed earlier this month by the patient’s family.

Days after she was admitted, Peterson’s mother Ginger Congi called Mercy San Juan to check on her daughter was told the patient had been discharged, according to the complaint.

The family filed a missing person’s report with the county sheriff’s department, posted notices around town and even interviewed local homeless people in hopes someone had seen Peterson.

“The family searched and searched for Jessie. It was not until April 12, 2024, that the Sacramento County Detective’s Office notified Jessie’s family that she was found deceased at Mercy San Juan hospital,” according to the lawsuit filed by the plaintiffs’ attorney Marc Greenberg.

“At this point, Jessie’s body was so decomposed that an open casket funeral was not feasible, and Jessie’s fingerprints were not even obtainable for any keepsake.”

The decomposition also made it impossible for an autopsy to determine “whether medical malpractice played any role” in Peterson’s death, the lawsuit said.

The family eventually found out Peterson died on April 8 last year, but it took until April 4 of this year for a death certificate to be signed by Dr. Nadeem Mukhtar.

For almost all this time, Peterson’s body had been kept shelf No. Red 22A in an off-site cold storage unit, according to hospital records obtained by the family.

The family is asking for $25 million for the hospital’s alleged negligence.

A representative for Dignity Health, the corporate umbrella for the hospital, could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.

“Mercy San Juan hospital advertises that ‘at our care facilities, we take pride in treating all people with dignity and respect.’ In this case, there was no dignity and no respect,” Greenberg said.

“Mercy San Juan hospital failed in its most fundamental duty to notify Jessie’s family of her death. Mercy San Juan stored Jessie in an off-site warehouse and she was left to decompose for nearly a year while her family relentlessly inquired about her whereabouts.”

• OpenAI opposes California’s AI bill, arguing that it could drive companies out of the state.

• The bill requires strict safety protocols for AI models, including a “kill switch.”

• Despite industry opposition, the bill will be voted on in the California Assembly at the end of the month.

OpenAI is joining Silicon Valley’s tech titans in the fight against California’s landmark artificial intelligence regulation bill, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

SB 1047, introduced by California State Sen. Scott Wiener in February, seeks to establish “common sense safety standards” for AI systems that cost over $100 million to develop, Business Insider reported on Monday.

The bill mandates that companies implement protocols to prevent their AI models from causing “critical harms,” such as being used in cyberattacks or leading to the development of weapons of mass destruction.

The bill also specified the provision of a “full shutdown,” which functions as a kill switch for AI systems.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, warned that the bill could stifle progress and drive companies out of California, in a letter addressed to Wiener on Wednesday.

Kwon also wrote that regulation of AI concerning national security is “best managed at the federal level” rather than through a “patchwork of state laws.”

Silicon Valley tech heavyweights like Meta and Anthropic have been lobbying against the bill, too.

Meta warned that the bill might discourage the open-source movement by exposing developers to significant legal liabilities, wrote Rob Sherman, vice president of policy and deputy chief privacy officer at Meta, in a letter in June. Sherman wrote that regulation could hamper the broader tech ecosystem because smaller businesses rely on these freely available models to innovate.

Anthropic also resisted the bill’s stringent preemptive regulations, advocating instead for a more balanced approach that wouldn’t stymie progress, BI reported on Monday.

OpenAI previously lobbied against similar legislation by the European Union. The company sought to ease the regulatory requirements on general-purpose AI systems like GPT-3, Time reported last year.

The EU had since altered its final draft of the AI Act to exclude language that would classify general-purpose AI as high risk, instead focusing on “foundation models” with more limited requirements, according to Time.

Despite the industry opposition, Sen. Wiener argued that it is a “highly reasonable bill that asks large AI labs to do what they’ve already committed to doing,” the senator wrote in response to OpenAI’s letter on Wednesday.

The bill had passed a vote in the state Senate and is set for a final vote in the California Assembly at the end of the month.

OpenAI and Sen. Weiner didn’t respond to a request for comment sent outside standard business hours.

Read the original article on Business Insider

But Glazer was less conciliatory. “This agreement, unfortunately, seriously undercuts our work toward a long term solution to rescue independent journalism,” he wrote in a statement. “There is a stark absence in this announcement of any support for journalism from Meta and Amazon. These platforms have captured the intimate data from Californians without paying for it. Their use of that data in advertising is the harm to news outlets that this agreement should mitigate.”

The “News Transformation Fund” established by the deal will be administered by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, which would distribute funding to California-based state and local news organizations, particularly those serving “news deserts” and underserved and underrepresented communities. “The University and specifically the UC Berkeley School of Journalism stand ready to support this endeavor,” UC President Michael V. Drake said.

In the first year, Google will deposit $15 million a year into the new journalism fund, $5 million into the AI accelerator and $10 million toward existing journalism grants.

In a statement, Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer for Alphabet, the umbrella company that owns Google, wrote, “California lawmakers have worked with the tech and news sectors to develop a collaborative framework to accelerate AI innovation and support local and national businesses and nonprofit organizations.”

Google ran an aggressive lobbying campaign against both bills in Sacramento and even temporarily removed news links from its search engine in California in reaction to AB 886.

The company made similar threats in both Canada and Australia before coming to agreements to contribute to news organizations in both countries.

Meta followed through on threats to remove news links in both Australia and Canada in response to specific legislative actions in order to influence the terms of legislation. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The agreement has the support of the California News Publishers Association, which represents 700-plus member newsrooms. “This is a first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term, and we will push to see it grow in future years,” CEO Chuck Champion and Board Chair Julie Makinen wrote.

But the deal has critics, including Free Press Action Co-CEO Jessica J. Gonzàlez, who wrote: “We are disappointed in this outcome and this process. Good policy is made out in the open, where people can see and participate in the democratic process.” The group said the agreement fails to address the harms Silicon Valley has done to journalism in California, noting that “Since 2004, the state has lost 25 percent of its newspapers, total news circulation has plummeted more than 50 percent, and many ethnic media outlets and nonprofit newsrooms have struggled to survive.”

Work will begin immediately to set up the AI accelerator and the UC Berkeley-administered fund, with plans to go live in 2025.