In 1911, a government looked at a food its people had pounded by hand for a thousand years and decided it was a public health threat.

There had been a cholera outbreak in Tokyo that winter. That was all it took. Investigators blamed the mochi shops. The wooden mallets. The stone mortars. Porous surfaces. You cannot sterilize wood. You cannot inspect a stone. From then on, mochi would be made in approved facilities, pressed between metal parts into a mushy paste. Gone were the days when someone swung a mallet while another turned the rice between blows. No more coaxing that stretch and chew out of the grain by hand.

The government tried to soften the blow with free machine-milled mochi. Some rice farmers could not supply the new factories because their crop was already promised to the shops the government had just padlocked. It took a century to unwind the rules. By then a whole generation had grown up believing mochi was supposed to be a paste squeezed out of a plastic bag.

As with a lot of my writing, you gotta dig a little deeper as I am not always literal. The rest of this story is told on Civil Beat and I am pretty certain parts or all of it will more than surprise you. It not only surprised me…a single bite changed what I did with a ton of my free time over the past 15 years.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/08/olin-lagon-the-government-decided-this-food-was-dirty/

I hope you give my new column a read. I wrote it in the middle of our storm, three days with no power. One of our neighbors had just stopped by with his dog to join us for a meal.

Itʻs about patterns of aloha, of kindness, that is impossible to unsee once you have watched them happen over and over and over again. Then you join in too, mostly, in to this lei of aloha.

I took that first photo 15 years ago. Gas got cheaper when a tsunami was heading our way.

This second one is from Hurricane ʻIwa. Strong folks holding back the Falls of Clyde from smashing on the pier during a hurricane. I am guessing a huge Samoan guy is somewhere in or just out of that photo. He was at our door before then, looking for volunteers.

I hope our keiki with a whole lot of greats in front will have and share these same stories too.

Drop your story in the comments here or at Civil Beat. I know you have more than a few.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/08/olin-lagon-no-hog-cheese/

I’m a bit late getting this out, but if you want to understand the State of Hawaiʻi budget, my Civil Beat column from last week walks through it.

Hawaiʻi’s state budget is $20.9 billion this year. These charts show nearly every dollar flowing in and out of the state’s operating budget. Money comes in from four streams and goes out to about a dozen big categories. The general fund is short this year, so the state is using $462 million in leftover savings to balance the books.

Read more: https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/08/the-state-budget-is-not-hard-to-understand-we-just-explain-it-badly

I am hoping this helps someone. This gets a little technical, but I think that is needed when we are looking at batteries to back up things like our fridge.

I know not everyone can afford a battery, and I am not saying everyone should go out and buy one. Prices are dropping every year, so if it is too expensive now, it should get more affordable.

The one number to look at is watt hours, written Wh. That is how much ENERGY the battery holds. Specs will also show watts, written W, or kilowatts, written kW. Notice the "h" for hours is missing. Those numbers tell you how much POWER the battery can push out at one time. For keeping a fridge cold for days, Wh (with the "h") is the number to check. The only reason to glance at the watts is to make sure the unit can put out at least 1,000 W, so it can handle the jolt when a fridge compressor kicks on. Most of the bigger units do. Some of the small ones do not.

Some boxes say kilowatt hours instead, written kWh. Multiply by 1,000 to get Wh, so 1 kWh = 1,000 Wh.

A newer fridge cycles on and off all day, so on average it pulls about 50 watts around the clock (power). Run it for one hour and you have used 50 watt hours (energy). Over 24 hours that adds up to about 1,200 Wh. You need some cushion, because you never want to run a battery all the way to zero, and older fridges pull more. So figure about 1,500 Wh to run a fridge for one day.

To compare two batteries, divide the price by the Wh. A $2,500 battery with 4,000 Wh is about 63 cents per Wh. A $1,500 battery with 2,000 Wh is 75 cents per Wh. The first one is the better deal even though it costs more up front.

I would give Battery Bill a call or check Costco. I was at Costco last week and saw the EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 for about $2,500. It holds about 4,000 Wh, which will run a newer fridge for 2 to 3 days. They had smaller units too, though I did not catch the prices or capacities.

I posted this back in May. I think it is worth another read because the weather we are seeing was predicted, and it is not over yet. Since I wrote this the numbers have gotten worse. NOAA moved El Niño from a watch to an advisory in June, and the newest models now suggest this could top 1877.

Be kind out there. It has been rough for so many.

===

The last time the Pacific Ocean did what it may do again, 50 million people died.

I've been watching the El Niño forecasts, and this week's European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) models made me shiver. We could be looking at the strongest El Niño since 1877. The ECMWF runs one of the most powerful weather prediction systems in the world. They consistently outpredict even the American GFS model run by NOAA.

That 1877 El Niño lasted two years and collapsed weather patterns. Monsoons vanished over India. Rivers dried up across China. Crops failed on three continents. More than 50 million people died, mostly from famine, about 4% of the population.
The ECMWF models predict we may be looking at something similar.

For us here in Hawaiʻi, El Niño years hit differently. Our tradewinds weaken. Humidity climbs. The hurricane season gets more active. During the last strong El Niño in 2015, there were 16 tropical cyclones. Three of them were Category 4 hurricanes. None made landfall, but that was luck.

State Climatologist Pao-Shin Chu has been clear about what a strong El Niño means for the islands. More hurricane activity and then on the back end, a dry winter raising drought conditions and wildfire risk.

We just came through the worst spring flooding in my lifetime. Our infrastructure is still recovering. Our communities are still drying out. And now the ocean is loading up for something potentially historic.

The 1877 comparison is not a prediction. It is a warning about what happens when we underestimate our beloved Moananuiākea. We have better technology now, better forecasting, better emergency systems. But we also have a warmer ocean, a warmer atmosphere, and a lot of people living in places that were never built to handle what is coming.

Here is a Wikipedia rendering of global tropical cyclones between 1985 and 2005. It does show we are in a lucky dead-ish zone. Lucky has been doing too much heavy lifting for us. The ocean remembers everything we put into it. Practice kindness. We may need more of it soon

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

A campaign ad borrowed a face that was not the candidate’s to borrow

A television ad for Nathan Berning, a candidate for Hawaiʻi’s 1st Congressional District who lists a Florida address with the Office of Elections, ran on KITV in the week before the primary. It featured a woman who closely resembles the late Haunani-Kay Trask, the Native Hawaiian scholar and activist who founded the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and who died in 2021. Her sister, Mililani Trask, told Hawaiʻi Public Radio she called the candidate’s office and “pretty much, I was told that it was not their concern,” then called the Office of Elections and was told there was nothing they could do. Berning told HPR the woman in the ad is an actress, that he did not know who Haunani-Kay Trask was, and that he would pass the questions along to his campaign manager in Tennessee. Mililani Trask said the images and voices of loved ones are sacred, and that “when it is used to manipulate and impact the voting process, it becomes something that everyone should be concerned about.” She called the ad “nothing more than sidestep and racism,” pointing to her sister’s life, publications, and teaching.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi passed a deepfake consent law in July and a disclosure law for conversational AI, and within weeks a Hawaiʻi voter watched an apparent AI likeness of a kupuna endorse a position she publicly opposed, with no agency willing to act. A law nobody can enforce during the exact week it was written for is a law in name only.

Trask family pushes back on possible AI use in campaign ad, Hawaiʻi Public Radio, August 14, 2026 and Congressional campaign ad raises concern for possible use of AI, Hawaiʻi Public Radio, August 12, 2026

Government and Policy

Honolulu is making an AI permit checker mandatory, and it is working

Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting confirmed this week that CivCheck, the AI plan-review tool it launched last December, becomes required for residential permit applications on September 1. Clariti Software CEO Cyrus Symoom described it on HPR as something close to TurboTax for building permit plans, catching code problems at submission instead of three rounds of back and forth later. The city’s own first-quarter numbers show permits run through the tool dropping from an average of 73 days to a decision down to 32.5 days. It covers single-family and two-family homes, duplexes, ʻohana units and accessory dwelling units, and residential additions and alterations.

Why it matters. This is the rare local AI deployment with a public before-and-after number attached, and it cuts a bottleneck that touches housing supply directly. The open question is who carries the liability when a fast approval turns out to be a wrong one.

How the AI tech required for residential permits works, Hawaiʻi Public Radio, August 12, 2026

Cybersecurity and Surveillance

Palantir had a Honolulu office for a year without being on the directory

Civil rights groups rallied outside the Pacific Guardian Center on Bishop Street on Monday, August 10, after learning that Palantir Technologies has been operating as an unlisted tenant in the building for close to a year. The ACLU of Hawaiʻi, Indivisible Hawaii Statewide Network, Oʻahu Rapid Response Coalition and Hawaii J20+ took part, with on-the-ground organizing led by Zane Dalgamouni, a Punahou School student. Organizers focused on Palantir software used by federal agencies to compile records from government databases and identify people and locations for immigration enforcement. The company is currently recruiting in Honolulu for senior military-facing roles, according to its own job postings.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi hosts a combatant command and a large federal footprint, so defense and homeland security software vendors setting up here is not surprising. Doing it without appearing on the tenant board is the part that made people show up.

Civil rights groups protest Palantir surveillance software in Honolulu, Hawaii News Now, August 11, 2026 and Local groups want public to know software giant Palantir is in Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi Public Radio, August 11, 2026

Education and Workforce

UH Maui College lands $660K to teach AI and security together

The University of Hawaiʻi announced on August 13 that UH Maui College received roughly $660,000 across three awards to build out education at the seam between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. The core piece is a three-year, $441,645 National Science Foundation award for CyberAI Innovation, led by Debasis Bhattacharya with Thomas Blamey, embedding six modules across six computer science courses on adversarial machine learning, AI-powered threat detection, secure AI pipelines and CyberAI ethics. A $129,190 NSF supplement funds two AI camps with the Hawaiʻi Department of Education in the summers of 2027 and 2028 for middle and high school students. A separate $89,537 award from the National Security Agency’s GenCyber program funds two in-person student camps on Oʻahu and one online camp in 2027.

Why it matters. Nearly every AI job posting in Hawaiʻi that pays well is defense-adjacent or security-adjacent, and this is a pipeline that starts in a public high school classroom on Maui rather than in a recruiting office on the continent.

UH Maui College receives $660K to enhance AI, cybersecurity education, University of Hawaiʻi System News, August 13, 2026

Energy and Infrastructure

The PUC opened a very large procurement, and nobody mentioned data centers

Word came this week that the Public Utilities Commission has approved a fourth round of competitive renewable energy bidding, with Hawaiian Electric now accepting proposals through late January for projects on Oʻahu and Hawaiʻi Island. The solicitation seeks nearly 1,650 gigawatt-hours of variable renewable energy, 465 megawatts of grid forming resources, and 111 megawatts of firm power, with selections expected in September 2027 and power flowing between 2031 and 2034. Hawaiian Electric president Shelee Kimura called it collectively one of Hawaiʻi’s largest-ever energy procurements. The same week, the PUC declined Hawaiian Electric’s July request to add 500 megawatts of fuel-flexible firm generation on Oʻahu, while JERA Americas continues to press for a $2 billion liquefied natural gas plant outside the competitive process.

Why it matters. Every megawatt in this procurement is spoken for by electrification, buildings, and transport, and none of it is earmarked for large AI compute. Anyone pitching a hyperscale data center in Hawaiʻi is bidding against your air conditioner in a market where the next new firm power arrives in 2031.

PUC allows Hawaiian Electric to seek renewable energy project proposals, West Hawaii Today, August 12, 2026 and HECO to bring more renewable energy online on Oʻahu and Hawaiʻi Island, Hawaiʻi Public Radio, August 13, 2026

Recovery and Resilience

A storm arrived and the new alerting stack got its first real audience

Hawaiʻi declared a state of emergency on August 14 as Tropical Storm Lala approached, with shelters opening on Hawaiʻi Island, UH Hilo and Hawaiʻi Community College closing, the Coast Guard raising port conditions, and interisland flights shifting. Hawaiian Electric spent the week pointing to the wildfire safety upgrades it has made since 2023, including its public safety power shutoff program and grid hardening. KHKA and FEMA completed an emergency broadcast drill for hurricane season. Maui’s Genasys Protect platform, adopted after the 2023 fire, is now the county’s evacuation and notification layer, with zone-based alerts and route guidance pushed to phones.

Why it matters. Detection, routing and notification are where machine assistance in Hawaiʻi is already load-bearing rather than aspirational, and this week was a live test rather than a tabletop.

Hawaiʻi declares state of emergency as Tropical Storm Lala approaches, KHON2, August 14, 2026 and Hawaiian Electric points to Maui wildfire upgrades ahead of Tropical Storm Lala, Hawaii News Now, August 14, 2026

Worth a Quick Glance

Flock Safety announced changes to its license plate reader network on August 13 after sustained national backlash over how the data gets searched and shared. That lands in the middle of Honolulu Police Chief David Lazar’s plan to expand automated license plate readers across Oʻahu into a real-time crime center, which the ACLU of Hawaiʻi opposes. AP, August 13, 2026 and KHON2

The OpenAI Foundation announced a $100 million fund on August 13 to help states implement AI in public health. Hawaiʻi’s Department of Health has not said whether it will apply, and the terms of the money are the thing worth reading before anyone does. Route Fifty, August 13, 2026

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee proposed an excise tax on new data centers on August 11, and a separate report on August 13 found most data centers sit in urban rather than rural areas. Neither changes anything in Hawaiʻi this month, but both shape the federal terms any future proposal here would arrive under. Route Fifty, August 11, 2026 and Route Fifty, August 13, 2026

Watch List for Next Week

Whether the Office of Elections or the Attorney General offers any position on the Trask likeness now that the primary is certified and the general election ballot is set.

Whether Honolulu publishes error and appeal data alongside its CivCheck speed numbers before the September 1 mandate takes effect.

Whether Lala’s aftermath produces a public accounting of how the alerting and shutoff systems actually performed, island by island.

Whether the Honolulu City Council takes up any surveillance technology disclosure ordinance following the Palantir rally and the license plate reader expansion.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

The solar water heater on our roof is more than 20 years old. I took the tax credit when we put it in. I am now arguing in public that people like me should get less of that money.

I wrote about why in Civil Beat this week, A Subsidy Is A Statement About Who Matters. What I want to say here is the part underneath it, which is that this is a hard thing to bring up at all.

Hawaiʻi has led on solar hot water for more than a century. A Honolulu store was showing one off in 1897. We wrote the tax credit in 1976. In 2008 we became the first state to require the systems on new homes. Other places copied us. It worked. Real families have paid smaller bills for decades, and a whole local trade grew up around it.

Which is exactly why this is hard. A policy that fails gets studied. A policy that works gets renewed. Nobody’s job says go check whether the thing we are proud of still fits. Fifty years of being right slowly becomes fifty years of not asking.

Meanwhile the heat pump water heater showed up. It runs about $3,000 installed and fits rentals, townhomes, and apartments where solar thermal cannot go. We put roughly $5,000 of public money behind one rooftop solar system. The heat pump gets up to $700 and no state tax credit at all.

Now the hard parts, including the ones that cut against me.

Solar hot water saves more energy. About 3,600 kilowatt hours a year against roughly 2,700 for a heat pump. If raw savings were the only measure, I lose this argument, and I would rather say that up front than bury it.

Redirecting this money would cost people work. Solar thermal installers are local businesses with crews, some of them at this since the seventies. Any honest version of this change accounts for them, and I have not seen enough of that thinking from anyone in this debate, myself included.

And the biggest one. Moving money to heat pumps does not by itself reach the renter. A rebate does not make a landlord install anything. The person paying the bill and the person owning the tank are two different people. A heat pump can physically go into a rental where a solar system cannot, which is necessary. It is not sufficient.

What I do not think is arguable is who is paying right now.

The public benefits fee sits on every electric bill in the state. Renters pay it. That money helps buy solar water heaters for roofs they do not own, on houses many of them will never afford, while their own tank is plain electric resistance, the least efficient heat we make. They fund the upgrade and then pay more than almost anyone in the country to take a shower.

In Waimānalo we replaced a broken solar system that was leaking and running around the clock. The bill had climbed near $1,000 a month. After the swap it was about $150. An extreme case, and a real family, and their old system is the machine our policy is built to protect.

I am not arguing that solar hot water is bad. Mine is on the roof right now. I am arguing that we built our biggest household energy subsidy around owning a roof, in the state where owning a roof is the sharpest line we have, and then asked everyone to pay for it.

I could be wrong about the machine. I do not think I am wrong about who is paying.

Please jump in to the Civil Beat comment section if you have some thoughts to share, including the hard ones. Mahalo!

You can get the big picture of almost any data set where things flow. Here is the nearly $8 trillion federal budget compressed to a few ribbons.

This chart type is called a Sankey diagram. If you follow me on social media you have seen me share plenty of them. This one shows projected flows for the federal budget. Money comes in on the left, pools in the middle, and flows out on the right. The wider the ribbon, the bigger the flow. That is all you need to know to read one.

Once the flows are drawn, the patterns show themselves.

Start with the obvious one. We do not earn enough to cover our spending. How big is the gap? The red flow on the left shows we borrow almost a quarter of the budget. Now look at the red outflow on the right. Well over half of what we borrow just goes to pay the interest on old debt.

Yikes. Congress keeps piling on debt no matter which party is in control. At what point does all our borrowing exist just to cover interest payments? We may find out soon enough.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that tariffs are now projected to bring in more than corporate income taxes. Who pays tariffs? New York Fed researchers found about 90% of the tariff burden lands on American businesses and consumers. Conservative think tanks like the Tax Foundation, Cato, and AEI all reached the same conclusion. Tariffs, in other words, are just taxes paid by the people, and that number is now bigger than what corporations pay.

I have made tons of these charts over the years and have gotten losts of requests on what tool I used. I have not found a great free one so this time I did something different. I built a free tool called Sankey Open Studio and just launched it. You can use it at https://olagon.github.io/sankey_open_studio/. No account needed, and your data never leaves your computer. You enter your flows and it draws the ribbons. Punch in your household budget, your favorite nonprofit’s annual report, water through an ahupuaʻa, anything where data flows.

These diagrams can hold almost any story. I used my tool to trace one million nucleons from the Big Bang to today. After 13.8 billion years, almost all of it is still the same hydrogen it started as. Only about 2% ever got pulled into stars. This chart breaks my brain. Every element in the periodic table beyond hydrogen and helium came from those two manini slices, atoms that had to fall into a star, get fused into heavier elements, and then get blasted back out when the star violently exploded. The oxygen we breathe. The iron in our blood. All of it took a detour through a dying star.

The universe lives within us.

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

(My note…yikes!) RIMPAC signs off with a fleet that mostly drove itself

The Rim of the Pacific exercise, the largest maritime drill in the world, wrapped on July 31 after five weeks off Hawaiʻi, and its lasting entry may be the count of things that operated without a person at the wheel. The Navy ran more than 35 experiments folding unmanned systems and emerging technology into multinational operations, from persistent surveillance and aerial threat detection to autonomous logistics and undersea warfare, as USNI News reported on July 29. The headline demonstration was a Typhoon uncrewed surface vessel carrying out what the Navy calls a first, an underway replenishment of a warship by an autonomous boat, paired with shipboard 3D printing that fed drone delivery. Thirty nations, more than 30,000 personnel, and roughly 2,400 sorties worked through some 5,000 operational problem sets under the theme “Partners, Integrated and Prepared.” Whether the machines earned their keep is the question the after-action reports will spend the next year answering.

Why it matters. The autonomy tested in Hawaiʻi waters is a rehearsal for the first and second island chains, so the islands are where allied navies decide what to trust a machine to do before it counts.

Sources: USNI News, July 29, DVIDS, RIMPAC 2026 conclusion

Government and Policy

Hawaiʻi’s new AI rules get a second read, this time from Kauaʻi

The commentary on the state’s first AI guardrails kept spreading this week. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s July 27 editorial, “Solid first steps for Hawaii AI regulation,” backed Senate Bill 3001 and House Bill 2137, and by July 30 The Garden Island had run it for Kauaʻi readers, a sign the subject has legs beyond Honolulu. The laws require operators that know a user is under 18 to disclose plainly that the user is talking to a machine, and they let people sue for up to $25,000 for each unauthorized deepfake. The measured tone of both editorials, approving but not celebratory, matches the reality that the rules are a floor and not a finished house.

Why it matters. When neighbor island papers carry the same editorial, a Capitol story turns into a statewide conversation, which is usually what it takes for rules to hold.

Sources: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, July 27, The Garden Island, July 30

Education and Workforce

Two UH Mānoa labs land seats at the Department of Energy’s AI table

On July 22 the Department of Energy named the first projects in its Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to speed up scientific work, and two University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa research projects made the list. UH announced the selections on July 27. Assistant Professors Liuwan Zhu and Zepeng Li will each lead a project, with Phase I awards between $500,000 and $750,000 over nine months and a path to Phase II awards of up to $15 million for teams that deliver. The work aims at AI tools for energy, science, and national security, a mandate broad enough to keep a lab busy for a while.

Why it matters. Federal AI research money rarely lists a Hawaiʻi address, so two seats at a national table is a real marker for the flagship campus and for students weighing whether to build careers here.

Sources: University of Hawaiʻi System News, July 27

Worth a Quick Glance

Dozens of Hawaiʻi lawmakers and staff came home from the National Conference of State Legislatures in Chicago at the end of the week, telling Hawaii News Now on July 31 that AI, energy, and education were near the top of what they plan to carry into the next session. Whether the ideas survive the flight home is the usual test. Hawaii News Now, July 31

Hawaiʻi Public Radio noted on July 27 that RIMPAC spent its final days working around a passing storm, a quiet reminder that a fleet full of autonomous systems still answers to the weather. Hawaiʻi Public Radio, July 27

Watch List for Next Week

Lahaina’s Front Street is scheduled to reopen on August 1, a recovery milestone worth watching for how alerting and mapping tools return to everyday use.

NASA’s GUARDIAN system, which uses AI to read atmospheric distortions for tsunami signals, is being weighed for a role in next generation Pacific warning, a live question for an ocean state.

UH’s system-wide AI strategy, shown to the Board of Regents on July 16, now meets budgets and faculty, while UH-Hilo’s new AI business concentration is set to launch this fall.

The disclosure and reporting duties in the new AI law phase in through 2028, so watch for the rulemaking that turns broad statute into something operators can actually follow.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

When I was 7, I noticed something strange. The knuckle trick for rice water worked with my tiny fingers and with my mom's bigger ones. Same perfect rice every time. It took me years to figure out why, and the answer turned out to be one of the most elegant pieces of physics hiding on your counter.

That question set a pattern for my life. Hold a wet finger to the wind and ask where things come from. More often than I ever expected, the answer traces back to Hawaiʻi.

The Wi-Fi you are using right now runs on a rule worked out at UH Mānoa. In 1971 Norman Abramson's team switched on ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet data network in history. When your phone wakes up and reaches for a tower, the first burst it sends still travels on a channel the engineering standards call slotted ALOHA. Not a metaphor. Aloha is written into the specification.

The card reader on every store counter from here to the far side of the world traces back to Honolulu too. Even the plate lunch carries the same story.

Dig deeper and these three are the same thing. Take your turn so everyone gets heard. Trust the stranger across the counter. Share what you have. That is not engineering. That is aloha, worked out the hard way by people learning to live close together on islands.

My new Civil Beat column is about all of it, starting with that rice cooker. If you have time to drop a comment there, I think the world needs more positivity online everywhere. Mahalo!

https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/07/olin-lagon-the-first-word-the-worlds-phones-say-is-aloha/

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

The state’s paper of record grades Hawaiʻi’s new AI rules and gives them a pass

Hawaiʻi’s first real guardrails on AI chatbots and deepfakes are on the books, and this week the commentary caught up to the statute. On July 27 the Honolulu Star-Advertiser ran an editorial called “Solid first steps for Hawaii AI regulation,” backing Senate Bill 3001 and House Bill 2137 while noting, in the measured way of editorial boards, that first steps are by definition not last ones. The framing lands on keiki and kūpuna, the two groups the new disclosure rules are built around, since chatbot use is climbing across every age bracket. By July 23 the story had reached the neighbor islands, with The Garden Island on Kauaʻi carrying the enactment news for readers who do not follow the Capitol day to day. The law requires operators that know a user is under 18 to say plainly the user is talking to a machine, and it lets people sue for up to $25,000 for each unauthorized deepfake.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi is now one of a small number of states with AI rules written into law, which means local operators and national platforms alike will be reading Hawaiʻi statute, not just watching Sacramento and Washington.

Sources: Honolulu Star-Advertiser editorial, July 27, The Garden Island, July 23

Defense and the Pacific

RIMPAC becomes a proving ground for drones that resupply ships on their own

The Rim of the Pacific exercise, which runs off Hawaiʻi through July 31, spent the week moving autonomy and AI from slide decks to the water. Coverage on July 22 in The Garden Island described the Defense Department’s largest attempt yet to pair 3D printing with drones for battlefield resupply, including an uncrewed surface vessel that carried out what the Navy believes is the first underway replenishment of a warship by an autonomous boat. AI-enabled maritime domain awareness tools were folded into command systems, and the Navy tested firing a missile from a robotic boat. Two island companies turned up in the mix, with Maui’s Voltage Vessels supplying a volcanic-rock fiber compound for 3D-printed drones. The whole point, as Defense One framed it, is distance, the tyranny of which the Pacific imposes on anyone trying to move parts and fuel across it.

Why it matters. The autonomy being rehearsed in Hawaiʻi waters is meant for the first and second island chains, which makes the islands the place where the doctrine gets written before it gets used anywhere else.

Sources: The Garden Island, July 22, Defense One, July 2026

Education and Workforce

Two UH Mānoa labs land seats at the Department of Energy’s AI table

On July 22 the Department of Energy named the first projects in its Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to speed up scientific work, and two University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa research projects made the list. UH announced the selections on July 27. Assistant Professors Liuwan Zhu and Zepeng Li will each lead a project, with Phase I awards between $500,000 and $750,000 over nine months and a path to Phase II awards of up to $15 million for teams that deliver. The work aims at AI tools for energy, science, and national security, a mandate broad enough to keep a lab busy for a while.

Why it matters. Federal AI research money rarely lists a Hawaiʻi address, so two seats at a national table is a real marker for the flagship campus and for students weighing whether to build careers here.

Sources: University of Hawaiʻi System News, July 27

Worth a Quick Glance

On July 21 and 22 the EdFuture Summit met at Mid-Pacific Institute for its third year, with high school students, educators, and companies including Bank of Hawaiʻi and the state Department of Transportation working through real AI case studies and a fair amount of talk about agentic tools. The through line was less about the technology than about what schools owe students walking into an AI-shaped workplace. Hawaii Business Magazine

The Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority moved its website onto the State of Hawaiʻi platform, and as of July 24 the old site is frozen, with visitors sent to HTA.Hawaii.gov. The timing is quietly fitting, since a growing share of travelers now plan Hawaiʻi trips by asking a chatbot before they ever open a state website. Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority

Watch List for Next Week

RIMPAC 2026 wraps on July 31, so expect after-action notes on which autonomous and AI systems actually performed and which stayed on the trailer.

Lahaina’s Front Street is scheduled to reopen on August 1, a recovery milestone worth watching for how alerting and mapping tools get folded back into daily life.

UH’s system-wide AI strategy, presented to the Board of Regents on July 16, now has to survive contact with budgets and faculty, while UH-Hilo’s new AI business concentration is set to launch this fall.

The disclosure and reporting duties in the new AI law phase in over the next two years, so watch for the rulemaking that turns broad statute into something operators can actually follow.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

Hawaiʻi Writes Its First Rules for the Chatbots

Governor Josh Green signed the state’s first two laws aimed squarely at artificial intelligence on July 13. Senate Bill 3001, now Act 248 and titled the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure and Safety Act, requires AI companion platforms to tell users when they are talking to a machine, to remind minors once an hour that the conversation is generated and that they should take a break, and to route people who mention suicide or self harm toward crisis lines. House Bill 2137, now Act 247, gives people a civil claim against harmful deepfakes of their face, voice, or likeness, with remedies of up to $25,000 per piece of content. Companies that ignore the chatbot rules face civil penalties of up to $1,000 per violation, capped at $1 million per operator, and starting in 2028 operators must report how often they referred users to crisis services. By July 18, legal and mental health experts were on the record calling the pair among the earliest state guardrails of their kind.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi families use the same chatbots as everyone else, and for once the state is not waiting for Washington or the vendors to decide what counts as safe.

Hawaiʻi Public Radio, July 15, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, July 16, Hawaiʻi News Now, July 18

Defense and the Pacific

A Former Marine Rethinks How the Pacific Moves Its Data

Defense One and RealClearDefense reported on July 15 on Bala Selvam, the chief technology officer for Special Operations Command Pacific, whose job is to make advanced AI usable across the thousands of miles that INDOPACOM has to cover from its Camp H.M. Smith headquarters on Oʻahu. Selvam found that much of the Pentagon’s data work had been built in places with fast networks and cheap computing, which bred a habit of shipping enormous files with little thought for latency. His fix has been close to ascetic. He walks the chain of command asking units what tools they actually use, and at times physically takes those tools away to force commanders to define what the task really requires. The work points toward lighter AI models that can run where the network cannot follow.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi is the headquarters for a theater measured in ocean, and whatever data discipline the Pacific settles on tends to start here first.

Defense One, July 2026, RealClearDefense, July 15

Education and Workforce

UH Calls AI “the New Electricity” and Starts Wiring the System

On July 16, University of Hawaiʻi President Wendy Hensel presented a system wide AI strategy to the Board of Regents at UH Mānoa, describing the technology as “the new electricity” and warning that the university would spend its days reacting rather than setting the course if it stayed quiet. She pointed to figures that one third of entry level jobs now ask for AI skills and that most hiring managers weigh AI competency when they evaluate candidates. The system already lists more than 100 new or AI infused courses and has stood up an AI Task Force with a working group devoted to Hawaiian culture and values, alongside groups on ethics and governance and on curriculum and pedagogy. New certificates and concentrations are running at UH Hilo, Mānoa, Maui College, West Oʻahu, and Honolulu Community College.

Why it matters. If AI competency becomes a hiring filter, the public university is the most direct way to keep that filter from sorting local students out of local jobs.

University of Hawaiʻi System News, July 16

Worth a Quick Glance

Hawaiʻi is trying to become the third state hub, after Massachusetts and Georgia, in MIT’s PATH program for AI skilling. KHON2 reported that a Data in Action Lab microcredential will launch through the University of Hawaiʻi’s Data Science Institute, and an AI and Media and Creator Economy certificate begins this fall at Kapiʻolani Community College, organized with the nonprofit True Initiative. KHON2

The Transparency Coalition’s July 17 legislative update placed Hawaiʻi’s two new laws inside a national wave, counting 78 chatbot bills alive in 27 states and noting that Illinois and New York moved on similar measures the same stretch. Hawaiʻi is a small market writing rules that national vendors will have to honor. Transparency Coalition, July 17

Watch List for Next Week

Whether the Board of Regents turns Hensel’s AI strategy into actual budget lines when the fiscal details come back this fall. The AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific gathering and other Camp Smith events where INDOPACOM keeps testing planning tools like Thunderforge for the theater. DBEDT’s fourth annual Hawaiʻi AI and Cloud Innovation Summit on September 10, an early read on how state agencies plan to actually use the technology. The first compliance moves under Act 248, and how the big chatbot makers respond to a small state that now requires them to show their work.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

Yesterday I had breakfast near the Blaisdell Center, where the convention will be held this year. The entire block was surrounded by 133 Hawaiian flags, one for each year since the illegal overthrow. I had never seen so many hae Hawaiʻi in my life. I am grateful I get to talk story at this year’s convention.

I think it was the second Hawaiian Council convention, about 20 years ago, when I was forced to go way out of my comfort zone and ʻoli on stage. I really did not want to do it! I had joined Hawaiian Council during the startup days to help launch their first social venture. Aunty Ala was an incredibly patient but firm kumu…though I would still not want to do it again. I joined the Council again during the pandemic to help launch another venture. I love their mission of Hawaiians advancing Hawaiʻi.

Both of my sessions are on Wednesday, July 22, day two of the convention.

I am grateful that my hoa aloha Kuʻulani Keohokalole took time to join me for a one on one conversation called Aloha ʻĀina in the Age of AI. Kuʻu is newish to AI, and she will be asking the kinds of questions so many of us are carrying. Is this all hype? What happens to our jobs and our kids? What is true anymore? Who pays for the power and the water these machines drink? We have 20 minutes on the main stage to start those conversations.

Right after that, the convention moves into breakout sessions. I am leading one called AI and the Lāhui: The Good, the Bad, and the Future from 1:00 to 2:45 pm. This session is not for me to tell anyone what to do. Instead, I hope to offer deep insight into what is coming, starting with how to see and forecast exponential growth.

In the second half I will share what building with AI actually looks like right now. You are not going to lose your job to AI. The pressure will come from two places. The first is people who use AI to try and out produce you. The bigger one is companies that completely redesign around AI and radically cut their cost basis. There are already single person companies running armies of agents and racking up millions in revenue.

I think everyone will leave with insight, and many will leave a little unsettled. Once you really see this trajectory, it is hard to unsee what is coming. But I also hope folks will leave with what they need to make the choices that are good for them and their ʻohana.

Massive disruption is not new to our kūpuna. They were introduced to written language and the printing press, a sort of “AI” of that time, and within a single generation became among the most literate peoples on Earth. They funded public education for all keiki 77 years before the US did. And they stayed Hawaiian doing it.

It’s now our turn to figure out what to do with all of this tech being introduced and imposed on us. But this time, the change is happening in months, not a generation.

The full agenda is at hawaiiancouncil.org/convention. I saw a note that this year is already sold out. If you have a seat, come say howzit!

The ʻōlelo noʻeau for our session is ʻaʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.

I moved some of my longer form writing to Civil Beat, and I hope you can join me there. I will still write about the wide range of things that catch my eye, with a bent toward tech, but always making connections that lead back home.

My first story starts with a sketch on a napkin over dim sum with friends. That sketch grew into $100 million in funding that flowed to causes around the world, and it helped kick off an era where any one of us can organize resources for the things we care about.

It is live now at https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/07/olin-lagon-the-bank-that-said-yes-to-what-started-as-a-sketch-on-a-napkin/. If you have a moment to drop a comment there, I would be grateful.

Sometimes the biggest things start with the smallest marks.
With choke hugs and aloha...mahalo nui!

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

A UHERO energy report gets pulled after an AI assistant made up a number

On June 29, University of Hawaiʻi economist Michael Roberts published “Hawaiʻi’s Electricity Future” through UHERO, arguing that Oʻahu can skip a new natural gas plant and lean on utility-scale solar. After Hawaiian Electric flagged a mislabeled solar contract, Roberts issued a quick correction and then found a deeper problem. A claim that solar-plus-storage contract prices were “flat to falling” from 2018 to 2024 had come from an AI assistant that misread a Berkeley Lab study, when prices had in fact roughly doubled. Roberts withdrew the paper on July 7, reclassified it as a working paper, and said plainly, “I leaned on the AI assistant and did not check what it wrote.” UHERO director Carl Bonham said the organization is now reviewing how it vets fellow reports that skip peer review.

Why it matters. The fight over Oʻahu’s energy future is high stakes, and the cheapest tool on the desk is now the one most likely to invent a number that looks right. Governor Green, who backs the JERA gas proposal the report argued against, had already called it “baloney,” which spared everyone the trouble of finding the footnote.

HPR, July 9

Energy and Infrastructure

Hawaiʻi County moves to define data centers out of existence

The Hawaiʻi County Council’s planning committee voted 8 to 0 on July 7 to advance Bill 170, which would make clear that industrial-scale data centers are “not a permitted use in the County.” The measure, introduced by Hāmākua Council Member Heather Kimball, closes a gap in the zoning code that had treated large AI-serving facilities like ordinary data processing rooms. “The kind of resources that a data center requires is just not appropriate for the kind of resources that we have in this island,” said Council Member Michelle Galimba. The UH Hilo campus data center and Hawaiian Telcom’s Kawaihae facility would be exempt, and Planning Director Jeff Darrow told members no one has formally applied to build one. “As of this point, there’s only been talk,” he said, before the bill moved on to the planning director and both planning commissions for review.

Why it matters. An average large data center can draw the electricity of a third of Hilo and the water of a town bigger than Hilo, and Hawaiʻi Island would rather settle the zoning question before the first application shows up.

HPR, July 8, West Hawaii Today, July 8, Big Island Video News, July 8

Government and Policy

Two AI bills drift toward law as the veto window closes

Governor Green’s intent-to-veto list named four bills, and neither of the session’s headline AI measures was among them. That leaves SB 3001, the AI Disclosure and Safety Act that would require conversational AI operators to tell users they are talking to software and to build protocols for prompts about self-harm, and HB 2137, which restricts unauthorized AI-generated “digital replicas” of real people, on track to become law on July 15 unless Green changes course. The Garden Island reported on July 7 that the governor was still weighing his short veto list, with the AI bills not on it.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi is about to put disclosure rules on companion chatbots and limits on deepfakes into law with almost no drama, which for AI legislation counts as a quiet week.

The Garden Island, July 7, SB 3001 text

Education and Workforce

Hawaiʻi’s classrooms keep turning up on the national AI stage

UH Hilo’s business faculty rolled out a new AI concentration, reported July 8, letting students pair the technology with accounting, marketing, and management instead of treating it as a computer science elective. The same day, UH announced that College of Education alumni Kawika Gonzales and Leah Aiwohi, with colleague Chloe Sato, were named Presidential AI Challenge national finalists for Global Innovation Race Hawaiʻi, a program that has high schoolers build things like a deepfake detector for kūpuna and an early fire-danger alert. Being chosen from 2,500 projects, Gonzales said, shows Hawaiʻi students are “helping shape” the future of AI rather than just watching it. And on July 10, two Hawaiʻi Island students, Wehiwaalani Gapero of Kamehameha Schools Hawaiʻi and Kendall Terao-Toma of Hilo High, were named to represent the state at a national AI-in-schools fellowship at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.

Why it matters. The state’s AI bench is being built in classrooms on Hawaiʻi Island and at Mānoa, which is a steadier investment than any single server hall.

Honolulu Star-Advertiser, July 8, UH News, July 8, Hawaii News Now, July 10

Watch List for Next Week

Governor Green’s final veto deadline is July 15, when SB 3001 and HB 2137 are expected to become law unless he acts.

Bill 170 now sits with Hawaiʻi County’s planning director and both planning commissions, whose recommendations will shape whatever data center rules the island ends up with.

The EdFuture Summit runs July 21 to 22 at Mid-Pacific Institute, featuring AI case studies from Bank of Hawaiʻi and the state Department of Transportation.

UHERO plans to republish “Hawaiʻi’s Electricity Future” as a peer-reviewed working paper, a rare chance to watch a Hawaiʻi AI error get corrected in the open.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

Honolulu will move your permit faster, if you let the software read it first

The Department of Planning and Permitting launched Priority Review this week, a program that sends residential building permit applications straight to the prescreen stage if applicants first run them through CivCheck, the AI plan checking platform the city adopted in December. The numbers behind the offer are real. Since CivCheck arrived, average review times have fallen from 73 days to 32.5, and the average number of plan review cycles dropped from 3.4 to 1.4. DPP describes the fast lane as a temporary incentive, since CivCheck becomes mandatory later this year, at which point the fast lane simply becomes the lane. For now the deal stands. Let the AI check your drawings, and the city will treat your application the way applications were always supposed to be treated.

Why it matters. Permitting delays are one of the quiet taxes on housing in Honolulu, and an AI deployment that cuts review time roughly in half is that rare thing, a measurable public benefit rather than a press release.

Sources. Honolulu Star-Advertiser, July 2 and Spectrum News Hawaiʻi, June 30.

Government and Policy

Schatz would like AI content to wear a name tag

Sen. Brian Schatz introduced the bipartisan AI Labeling Act in Congress on July 1. The bill would require both visible and machine readable disclosures on AI generated images, video, and audio, direct AI developers and major platforms to work together so users can verify what is authentic, and stand up a working group on technical standards for content provenance. “People deserve to know whether or not the videos, photos, and content they see and read online is real or original,” Schatz said. His office also framed the measure as protection for Hawaiʻi artists and creators, whose work increasingly competes with machine output on the same feeds.

Why it matters. Voice cloning scams that impersonate family members are already reaching Hawaiʻi households, and a labeling requirement is one of the few AI proposals in Congress with sponsors from both parties.

Source. Kauai Now, July 1.

Worth a Quick Glance

Route Fifty published a useful July 1 review of what California has learned from ALERTCalifornia, its AI enabled early wildfire detection network of over 1,100 cameras. Hawaiian Electric is partway through installing its own AI fire cameras under the wildfire safety strategy the PUC approved in January, which makes California’s lessons on false positives and staffing worth reading here. Route Fifty, July 1.

Pluribus News reported this week that a growing number of states are deploying AI cameras to catch traffic violations, from school zone speeding to distracted driving. Hawaiʻi has so far kept its automated enforcement ambitions modest, though the story is a preview of the vendor pitches heading toward every county council. The piece ran in the July 2 legislative news clips and is available from Pluribus News.

Watch List for Next Week

• Governor Green’s July 15 veto deadline arrives, and HB 2137, which creates civil remedies for harmful AI generated digital imitations of real people, was not on his intent to veto list, so it is on track to become law.

• CivCheck becomes mandatory at Honolulu DPP later this year, and how commercial and multifamily projects fare under the AI screen will be the real test.

• The University of Hawaiʻi’s systemwide security review, ordered after the Cancer Center disclosed that a 2025 ransomware attack exposed records tied to roughly 1.15 million people, should start producing findings.

• UH aims to finish converting a room at the Cancer Center into its NIH funded AI data center for Pacific healthcare research by the end of the year.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

A short briefing on the AI stories that impact Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here.

Big Story of the Week

The Islands’ Songbook Turns Up Inside the Machine

Hundreds of Hawaiʻi recordings have surfaced in a database The Atlantic built of nearly 10 million tracks that song-generating AI companies allegedly ingested without permission, from Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s “White Sandy Beach” to newer work by Anuhea and Kolohe Kai. Nā Hōkū Hanohano award-winning rapper Thomas Iannucci, who found his own songs on the list, did not soften it. “They took these songs without our consent, without asking, without paying, no compensation, and for free, basically, or in other words, stealing,” he told Hawaiʻi News Now, calling the practice “very predatory.” The platforms named in the reporting, Suno and Udio, are already facing class-action copyright suits, and Hawaiʻi artists are now among the people asking who profits when a model learns to sing in their voice.

Why it matters. Hawaiian music is an export and a cultural inheritance at the same time, and whether a server in another time zone can resell it without asking is now a legal fight with local names attached.

Hawaiʻi News Now, June 23

Government and Policy

Two AI Laws Arrive Without the Governor Lifting a Pen

On June 26 Governor Josh Green signed the state’s roughly $20 billion budget and released his intent-to-veto list, the document that decides which bills he can still reject. Two artificial intelligence measures did not make the list. SB 3001, the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure and Safety Act, requires AI companion apps to tell users they are talking to software, build protocols for prompts about suicide and self-harm, and add protections for minors, while HB 2137 lets people sue over unauthorized AI replicas of their face or voice. Under Hawaiʻi’s rules a bill left off that list can no longer be vetoed, so both are headed into law whether or not Green signs them by the July 15 deadline.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi just joined the short list of states with rules on AI companions and synthetic likeness, and it got there by omission rather than ceremony.

Hawaiʻi News Now, June 27 and Aloha State Daily, June 26

Education and Workforce

The University Bets on AI in the Clinic and the Classroom

The University of Hawaiʻi had a busy week on two fronts. On June 21 the UH Cancer Center and the John A. Burns School of Medicine landed more than $12 million from the National Institutes of Health to stand up the Pacific Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in Medicine, or PAC-AID, which will build a Hawaiʻi and Pacific health dataset aimed at catching cancers earlier in populations the big models usually overlook. Three days later the system said demand for its free AI courses had outrun its licenses, so it bought more, opening Google-backed AI Essentials and career-certificate tracks to students, faculty and staff. Senator Brian Schatz, who pushed the federal money, framed PAC-AID as a way to keep both the research dollars and the resulting jobs in the islands.

Why it matters. One effort is about who Hawaiʻi’s medical data describes and the other is about who in Hawaiʻi gets to build with these tools, and the university is trying to answer both before the technology answers for it.

University of Hawaiʻi, June 21 and University of Hawaiʻi, June 24

Watch List for Next Week

Green has until July 15 to finish his vetoes, so the open question is whether he signs the two AI bills outright or simply lets them become law.

The Suno and Udio copyright cases are where Hawaiʻi artists in The Atlantic’s database will learn whether “training data” comes with a paycheck.

The Army stood up its new Multi-Domain Command Pacific on June 18 under the Hawaiʻi-based US Army Pacific, folding AI, drones and long-range fires into one formation worth watching.

PAC-AID is supposed to be outfitted by year’s end, the first test of whether the AI jobs follow the federal money ashore.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

I grew up with two dads. I also grew up with none. Maybe your family tree is as intertwined as mine. All ʻohana at some point grows into a complicated, gangly plumage that shares every color of love. We understand it differently over time. Even at my age I am still learning more than I understand, living more passively than actively based on what I know.

Both of my dads passed away far too young. For so many of us, that part of our heartwood that lost its shade hits different. I was ashamed. I hated this day, the one we are all supposed to stand up and publicly celebrate. We each had those teachers who knew how to carry us through it. And those who just charged on, come what may. I had one too many of the later.

Today is complicated. We are all trying to understand one branch up. And for some of us, we are still figuring out how to let the light better reach one branch down. I am.

I landed in Madison this morning and headed to a local cafe for breakfast. The line was out the door and onto the street. My first thought was wow, this place is popular. I was not in a rush so I stood in line. The smoked mushroom and aged gouda omelette, served unusually with a naked salad, really hit the spot.

But it was not until I was almost at the front that it dawned on me. This whole line was ʻohana. Fathers and their kids, out together, celebrating the day.

I guess seeing every day as just any given Sunday is kind of magical. But the deeper truth is, some days are supposed to land differently than others. Today does not have that punch for me yet.

I almost did not write this. But it is what the younger me needed to hear, over and over again. That no matter how gnarly my tree, our soil held thousands of years of love. And that untold abundance is why my limbs get to reach for the light at all.

ʻOhana are not supposed to be clean. They are supposed to be ours. Happy Fatherʻs Day Max and Joe.

A short briefing on the AI stories that actually move the needle in Hawaiʻi. Automated by Claude and shared here as I have found these useful.

Big Story of the Week

The Islands Now Come With a Chatbot Concierge

Honolulu startup WunderGuide this week launched Leilani, a free AI chatbot that answers visitor questions like where to find poke in Waikīkī and whether it is safe to swim at Sandy Beach, and how to get there. It lands as a growing share of travelers skip the guidebook and ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to plan the whole trip before they reach a booking page. For an economy that still runs on the visitor industry, that quietly moves the front door of tourism from Google to whatever a model decides to say about the islands. The operators who show up in the answer get the booking, and the ones who do not vanish from the itinerary.

Why it matters. When a machine becomes the first thing a visitor asks about Hawaiʻi, who builds the machine, and what it chooses to leave out, turns into an economic question and a cultural one.

Honolulu Star-Advertiser, June 17

Energy and Infrastructure

Washington Speeds Up Data Center Hookups. Hawaiʻi Is Not in That Line.

On June 18 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved orders meant to connect AI data centers to continental grids within 90 days, down from the years it can take now. The catch for the hyperscalers is that they may have to bring their own power, curtail use when the grid is stressed, and pay for the upgrades they trigger. None of that changes the basic arithmetic in Hawaiʻi, where electricity is the most expensive in the country and there is no spare grid capacity to hand a server farm. The islands’ one notable facility, AlohaNAP in Kapolei, is built for submarine cable interconnection, not for the city-sized power draw the mainland is now racing to wire up.

Why it matters. The national data center rush mostly routes around Hawaiʻi, which spares the grid but also raises the question of who owns the compute the islands will end up renting.

Spokesman-Review and Bloomberg, June 18 and Data Center Knowledge on AlohaNAP

Government and Policy

Two AI Bills Wait for the Governor’s Pen

Two artificial intelligence measures from the 2026 session are sitting on Governor Josh Green’s desk. SB 3001 would require operators of AI companion apps to disclose that users are talking to a machine, build protocols for prompts about suicide and self-harm, and add protections for minors. HB 2137 would let people sue over unauthorized AI generated digital replicas of themselves, the deepfake problem written into plain civil law. A June 19 legislative tracker lists both as passed and awaiting action, with Green due to release his intent to veto list by June 30 and to sign, veto, or let bills pass by July 11.

Why it matters. If Green signs, Hawaiʻi joins a short list of states putting rules around AI companions and digital likeness, and the next two weeks are when we find out.

Transparency Coalition AI Legislative Update, June 19 and LegiScan, SB 3001

Education and Workforce

Hawaiʻi Teachers Take an AI Lesson to Washington

Three Hawaiʻi teachers came home this week as national finalists in a federal AI education challenge, picked from roughly 2,500 projects for a statewide program that teaches students to use AI responsibly rather than sneak it past the plagiarism filter. Their trip lands in the middle of a broader scramble across Hawaiʻi classrooms, from Kūlia Academy in Kalihi, billed as the state’s first AI focused charter school, to public schools piloting tools like MagicSchool and private campuses like Punahou rewriting their rules. The common thread is a pivot from banning the technology to teaching it. Whether the workforce on the other end of that pipeline shows up is the open question.

Why it matters. Hawaiʻi is wiring AI into its schools faster than it is answering what an AI fluent graduate is supposed to do for a living here.

Hawaiʻi News Now, June 20 and Honolulu Civil Beat

Worth a Quick Glance

A counterpoint ran in the Star-Advertiser on June 17, an Island Voices column arguing that the panic over AI is drowning out its real benefits and that the technology amplifies experience more than it replaces it. It is a useful corrective to read next to the week’s louder headlines. Honolulu Star-Advertiser, June 17

A Honolulu agency, Myna Marketing, spent the week publicizing an AI search campaign it says grew a snorkeling tour operator’s revenue more than 6,000 percent in a year even as ordinary web traffic fell. That is either the future of local visibility or a very good week for one agency’s press release, and possibly both. Yahoo Finance, June 2026

Watch List for Next Week

Governor Green’s intent to veto list is due June 30, the first hard signal on whether the two AI bills survive.

A state focused AI and cloud summit convenes June 23 at the Sheraton Waikīkī, worth watching for how Hawaiʻi government plans to buy and secure these tools.

INDOPACOM’s Thunderforge planning AI is slated to run inside the next Pacific Sentry exercise, the clearest test yet of generative AI in Pacific command decisions.

Maui heads into the heart of dry season on the Genasys driven evacuation and alert system, with the next monthly recovery fact sheet due in early July.

ʻAʻohe lokomaikaʻi i nele i ka pānaʻi. “No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.” (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, Mary Kawena Pukui)

Be kind everyday, then be kind even more the next day.

Week in AI, Hawaiʻi Edition is generated by Claude for Olin Lagon and reshared on Substack as a community resource. Published every Saturday morning, covering the prior seven days.

About twenty years ago we bought our first dishwasher. Someone said Bosch made the ones that last. Two decades later ours is a little buss up but still runs like new. What is unusual is that Bosch is owned by a charity. Bosch profits flow into a foundation that runs a hospital in Stuttgart, pays for scholarships, and funds research from geriatric medicine to democracy and climate.

Companies owned by charities must have hard board conversations, because their world is uniquely full of moral dilemmas.

Take Ozempic, the weight loss and diabetes drug. It does a ton of good, but like most drugs it has side effects, and some are catastrophic. A small number of users have suffered sudden, often permanent vision loss. In 2025, European regulators concluded it was a rare side effect, but still affects up to one in ten thousand users. Lawsuits are mounting.

The maker, Novo Nordisk, is controlled by a charity, one of the largest on earth. Much of that profit is plowed right back into health, funding programs like the Steno Diabetes Centers. It also funds nurse training around the world. Harm and healing, intertwined.

These social venture boards live with unique tension. The more they profit, the more good they fund, and sometimes the more harm they cause to get there.

• Rolex, the watch worn to flash a bank account, is owned 100% by a charity funding humanitarian aid. The price of prestige is near-zero tax and near-total secrecy.

• Hershey funds a free school for thousands of poor children. The candy paying for it has been tied for years to child labor in West African cocoa fields.

• Carlsberg has bankrolled real science since 1876, including the lab that gave us the pH scale. The bill is paid by selling alcohol worldwide.

• Shipping giant Maersk funds Danish science. Its fleet is also a gigantic smokestack at sea.

• IKEA’s foundation gives hundreds of millions a year to help refugees and climate. Critics call the Dutch structure tax avoidance, and its wood appetite feeds deforestation.

• Zeiss funds science and pioneered the eight-hour day. They also fund optics for military targeting.

• Tata is two thirds owned by trusts that built India’s hospitals and research institutes. Its factories and mines have also displaced villagers and polluted lands.

• The Wallenberg Foundations bankroll much of Sweden’s science. But they also concentrate a huge slice of the economy under one family, including the weapons maker Saab.

• Patagonia’s founder gave the company away in 2022 to fight climate change. It also saved his family $700 million in tax, kept them in control, and feeds a fund that can spend quietly on politics.

I have spent my career looking for ways entrepreneurship can drive real social change, and I still believe in that path. In addition to the above where corporations are moved to charity control, charities can start these and grow ventures that are rooted in its vision.

We already have models for this like:

• Goodwill turned the thrift store into a jobs engine. The selling is the training. The business is the mission.

• The Salvation Army’s stores fund its addiction recovery centers. The shelves and the healing are one machine.

• Homeboy Industries in LA hires former gang members to run a bakery and cafe. The job is the rehabilitation. Jobs, not jail.

• Delancey Street in San Francisco runs a restaurant and a moving company staffed by people leaving prison and addiction, with no paid staff and almost no government money.

• Habitat for Humanity ReStores resell donated goods to build affordable homes. Mission on both ends.

• Even the Girl Scout cookie is a social venture. The booth teaches the very business skill the money funds.

Locally, I have helped organizations like Kanu Hawaiʻi launch Shifted Energy, and the Hawaiian Council launch its own social ventures, ones that have gone on to have global impact. There are other amazing examples here too, like MAʻO Organic Farms on the Waiʻanae Coast, which grew out of the nonprofit WCRC and does so much good like helping youth pay for college as they work on ʻāīna.

None of this is clean, and it never will be. The good and the harm stay tangled in the same hand, and choosing this path means carrying both. But messy work is still worthy work. Imagine more companies built to serve, and more charities brave enough to act like global businesses to expand their impact. The space between them is wide open, fertile and brutally difficult at once, but it may be one of the best grounds we have for real and lasting change. We have hardly broken the surface.

I hope more of us get to work.

I served in the Peace Corps. Two years far from home, learning a language, working alongside a community. Back in 1985 Congress set a goal of keeping at least 10,000 volunteers in the field. The Peace Corps has never hit it. Most years, it runs closer to 5,000.

Even if the numbers are not massive, there are still young people who love to give back. There are plenty of similar programs. Code for America, Teach for America, City Year, Venture for America, Year Up, and more. I did some work with AmeriCorps after I got back and would love to do another two years with the Peace Corps.

I just saw that Anthropic launched its own service corps, calling it Claude Corps. It sits somewhere in that same family, except the pay tops what a lot of Hawaiʻi teachers earn after decades in the classroom.

Anthropic is recruiting 1,000 young people, training them in San Francisco to use AI well, then placing them with nonprofits around the country for a full year and paying them to help those organizations do their work better. Full time. In person. An $85,000 salary plus benefits.

The only real requirements are that you are over 18, have less than two years of full time work behind you, are authorized to work in the US, and are willing to learn Claude and relocate if needed. Relocation support is there if you need it.

Here are some of the early orgs that signed up:

• Braven in Chicago, helping first-generation and lower-income students land a strong first job.

• Code the Dream in Durham, running free coding education and paid apprenticeships.

• Heartland Forward in Bentonville, a think-and-do tank chasing economic growth across the heartland.

• Montgomery County Food Bank in Conroe, Texas, feeding families north of Houston through more than 100 pantries.

• Team Red, White & Blue in Floyds Knobs, Indiana, working on veteran health and wellness.

• REEF in Key Largo, running underwater surveys to protect coral.

• SoundOff in San Antonio, connecting Service Members to counselors and peer support, anonymously.

• StriveTogether in Cincinnati, helping communities use data so young people can thrive.

• The YMCA of Greater Charlotte, with 14 centers serving close to 300,000 kids, families, and seniors a year.

My guess is that if Hawaiʻi nonprofits apply to host, spots open up here too.

I want to be honest about where I land on this. AI is coming hard. I understand the people who are choosing to step away from it, the ones who want to keep their work slow and human and close to the ʻāina. I respect that. But I cannot ignore what I am seeing in our own kaiāulu. A lot of our small nonprofits are trying to lean in and they are struggling. Short on staff, short on time, short on the kind of help a program like this puts on the table, a trained fellow for a full year with resources and training that focus on productivity.

Many grants and the opportunities that our local orgs depend on were never set aside for us. Outside organizations that already figured out AI may chase the same money, and maybe seem a bit shinner to some funders, and perhaps displace funds already working hard here.

The first cohort of 100 starts in October. Applications close July 17. Two more cohorts follow in January and August of 2027 on a rolling basis.

To apply as a fellow, go to https://www.anthropic.com/claude-corps/fellow
For orgs that want to host a fellow, go to https://www.anthropic.com/claude-corps/host
For everything else about the program, https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-corps