State briefed on middle‑mile broadband backstop and seeks $1M to scale Poppy GenAI assistant

Mark Monroe, deputy director for the Middle Mile Broadband Initiative, told the Senate subcommittee that the state is building an 8,000+ mile network and expects the first operational segment — about 1,300 miles — to come online in July. He said the project expects roughly $30 million in near‑term revenues from the third‑party administrator Golden State Net (GSN), but requested provisional authority as a backstop if revenues do not materialize on the expected timetable as some miles slip into 2027.

Xin Ma of the Legislative Analyst’s Office reiterated oversight concerns, recommending stronger reporting requirements and a legislative review period before contingency funds are augmented.

On GenAI, Myles Burnett, chief administrative officer for the California Department of Technology, described Poppy as “a secure, centrally managed gen AI service provided by CDT to support state of California employees.” Deputy State CTO Shani Umnavan told the committee the compute will run in a state‑built cloud environment that is hosted in vendor environments but under state control and with guardrails. She added that Poppy is designed so data sent for a query is not used to train vendor models and that models are quarantined and reviewed for bias before use.

Committee members asked about vendor dependency, scaling to local governments, data privacy, and safeguards against misuse; the department said the system will be elastic and designed to create instances for different entities and that data loss prevention tools and quarantine reviews would be used to limit bias and data exfiltration.

The subcommittee held both items open pending follow‑up and additional oversight language.