A woman walks past tents for the homeless lining a street in Los Angeles, Calif. on Feb. 1, 2021.
FREDERIC J. BROWN | AFP | Getty Images
In December of last year, single mom Courtney Peterson was laid off from her job working for a now-shuttered inpatient transitional living program. Aside from the flexibility it allowed her to sometimes bring her seven-year-old son to work, it paid enough to cover rent in a studio apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in Los Angeles, where they had lived for a year and a half.
Peterson said she began to research potential avenues for help, immediately concerned about making January’s rent. When her son was an infant, they lived in a travel trailer, she said, a situation she did not want to return to.
“I started to reach out to local churches or places that said they offered rent assistance,” Peterson told CNBC. “But a lot of them wanted me to have active eviction notices in order to give me assistance. I felt like I was running out of options. I’d reached out to pretty much everyone I could possibly think of with no luck.”
Instead of an eviction notice, Peterson received a letter from Homelessness Prevention Unit within the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, offering a lifeline. The pilot program uses predictive artificial intelligence to identify individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, offering aid to help them stabilize and remain housed.
In 2023, California had more than 181,000 homeless individuals, up more than 30 percent since 2007, according to data from the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development. A report from the Auditor of the State of California found the state spent $24 billion on homelessness from 2018 through 2023.
Launched in 2021, the technology has helped the department serve nearly 800 individuals and families at risk of becoming homeless, with 86 percent of participants retaining permanent housing when they leave the program, according to Dana Vanderford, associate director of homelessness prevention at the county’s Department of Health Services.
Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, she said, with the majority of the funding for the program coming from the American Rescue Plan Act. Tracking down individuals to help and convincing them that the offer is real and not a scam can be a challenge, but once contact is established, aid is quickly put into motion.
“We often meet our clients within days of a loss of housing, or days after they’ve had a medical emergency. The timing with which we meet people feels critical,” Vanderford said. “Our ability to appear out of nowhere, cold-call a person, provide them with resources and prevent that imminent loss of housing for 86 percent of the people that we’ve worked with feels remarkable.”
Peterson said she and her son received some $8,000 to cover rent, utilities and basic needs, allowing her to stay put in her apartment while she looks for a new job. The program works with clients for four months and then follows up with them at the six-month mark and the 12-month mark, as well as 18 months after discharge. Case workers like Amber Lung, who helped Peterson, say they can see how important preventative work is firsthand.
“Once folks do lose that housing, it feels like there’s so many more hurdles to get back to [being] housed, and so if we can fill in just a little bit of a gap there might be to help them retain that housing, I think it’s much easier to stabilize things than if folks end up in a shelter or on the streets to get them back into that position,” Lung said.
Predicting Risk
The AI model was developed by the California Policy Lab at UCLA over the course of several years, using data provided by Los Angeles County’s Chief Information Office. The CIO integrated data from seven different county departments, de-identified for privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care, and large public benefits programs from food stamps to income support and homeless services, according to Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab. The program also pulled data from the criminal justice system.
Those data, linked together over many years, are what would be used to make predictions about who would go on to experience homelessness, developed during a period of time when the policy lab had the outcome to test the model’s accuracy.
Once the model identified patterns in who experienced homelessness, the lab used it to attempt to make predictions about the future, creating an anonymized list of individuals ranked from highest risk to lowest. The lab provided the list to the county so it could reach out to people who may be at risk of losing housing before it happened.
However, past research has found that anonymized data can be traced back to individuals based on demographic information. A sweeping study on data privacy, based on 1990 U.S. Census data found 87% of Americans could be identified by using ZIP code, birth date and gender.
“We have a deep, multi-decade long housing shortage in California, and the cost of housing is going up, increasingly, and that is the cause of our people experiencing homelessness,” Rountree said. “The biggest misperception is that homelessness is caused by individual risk factors, when in fact it’s very clear that the root cause of this is a structural economic issue.”
The Policy Lab provided the software to the county for free, Rountree said, and does not plan to monetize it. Using AI in close partnership with people who have relevant subject matter expertise from teachers to social workers can help to promote positive social outcomes, she said.
“I just want to emphasize how important it is for every community experiencing homelessness, to test and innovate around prevention,” she said. ” It’s a relatively new strategy in the lifespan of homeless services. We need more evidence. We need to do more experiments around how to find people at risk. I think this is just one way to do that.”
The National Alliance to End Homelessness found in 2017 a chronically homeless person costs the taxpayer an average of $35,578 per year, and those costs are reduced by an average of nearly half when they are placed in supportive housing.
Los Angeles County has had initial conversations with Santa Clara County about the program, and San Diego County is also exploring a similar approach, Vanderford said.
Government Use of Artificial Intelligence
AI in the hands of government agencies has faced scrutiny due to potential outcomes. Police reliance on AI technology has led to wrongful arrests, and in California, voters rejected a plan to repeal the state’s bail system in 2020 and replace it with an algorithm to determine individual risk, over concerns it would increase bias in the justice system.
Broadly speaking, Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, said ethics around the government use of AI hinge on context of use and safety of identifiable information, even if anonymized. Mitchell also points to how important it is to receive informed consent from people seeking help from government programs.
“Are the people aware of all the signals that are being collected and the risk of it being associated to them and then the dual use concerns for malicious use against them?” Mitchell said. “There’s also the issue of how long this data is being kept and who might eventually see it.”
While the technology aims to provide aid to those in need before their housing is lost in Los Angeles County, which Mitchell said is a positive thing to do from a “virtue ethics” perspective, there are broader questions from a utilitarian viewpoint.
“Those would be concerns like, ‘What is the cost to the taxpayer and how likely is this system to actually avoid houselessness?'” she said.
As for Peterson, she’s in the process of looking for work, hoping for a remote position that will allow her flexibility. Down the road, she’s hoping to obtain her licensed vocational nursing certification and one day buy a home where her son has his own room.
“It has meant a lot just because you know my son hasn’t always had that stability. I haven’t always had that stability,” she said of the aid from the program. “To be able to call this place home and know that I’m not going to have to move out tomorrow, my son’s not going to have to find new friends right away… It’s meant a lot to both me and my son.”
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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