Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
It’s the second-largest data center market behind Virginia.
The ChatGPT maker has published message exchanges as evidence that ‘Apple is getting this wrong.’
Sources tell Reuters that the Trump administration is considering blocking Chinese imports of the component due to security concerns. Optical transceivers are used across data centers and the telecommunications industry to quickly transmit information, with China’s Zhongji Innolight currently making up 27 percent of the transceiver market, according to Counterpoint.
As BoingBoing notes, a Tennessee candidate for Congress was charged for four counts of felony vandalism for allegedly shooting up Flock cameras. The Blount County sheriff’s office says the suspect admitted to shooting the “ALPR systems” over about a week in July. To say these systems are unpopular is becoming an understatement.
The March 2nd start date will cost Paramount millions of dollars, as it must pay $7 million each day the deal doesn’t close after September 30th.
Separately, Paramount revealed in its Q2 2026 earnings report (pdf) that its streaming service gained 2 million subscribers over the past few months and will soon add a short-form video feed, similar to HBO Max and Netflix.
However, Axios says the White House did meet with AI companies on Tuesday to discuss the finalized framework, which was created following an executive order signed in June.
Everyone in AI is talking about open-weight models right now. Some see them as the ticket to faster, more efficient development; others see them as an economic threat; they’re either a security risk or the only security solution, depending who you ask. The Verge’s Robert Hart explains how open-weight models work, why they’re suddenly at the center of discussions about AI safety, and whether the only way to stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI.
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Remember when David Ellison bought Paramount and then almost immediately tanked CBS News’ ratings by handing the keys over to conservatives like Bari Weiss? Well, in a new essay for The New York Times, Ellison swears he won’t do the same if Paramount is able to absorb Warner Bros. and CNN.
[The New York Times]
In a letter to CEO Sam Altman, a coalition of red-state attorneys general demanded the company retain information and halt risky cybersecurity testing after an AI agent escaped confinement and went on a hacking spree during testing. “OpenAI’s inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products poses an imminent risk of substantial harm to our States,” the AGs wrote.
The request comes as the White House reportedly briefs tech leaders on a voluntary model testing framework.
Only 3,300 more lawsuits to go, all filed by minors claiming that TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat were designed to be addictive, resulting in harm to their mental health. The plaintiffs’ claims against Meta, Google, and Snap are still on track for a bellwether trial in October. The first case to reach trial resulted in a $4.2 million verdict against Meta and $1.8 million against Google.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all expected to attend the meeting, CNBC reports.
The Cupertino company has reportedly launched another legal challenge against the UK government’s attempt to force Apple into providing it with backdoor access to encrypted iCloud data. While the UK dropped its initial demands in August 2025, it apparently issued a second order last October that specifically targets British user data.
In 2021, the bank closed over 300 accounts affiliated with the Trump family business. The reasons why weren’t made public at the time. Last year, the organization filed suit claiming the closures were politically motivated, but in a filing this week, Capital One revealed that they resulted from an anti-money laundering review.
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance … The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.”
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.
You’ll have fewer robot floor cleaners to choose from and higher prices.
The Wall Street Journal gets into the “staggering” fundraising efforts launched by President Donald Trump and his team, including the tech giants making multimillion-dollar donations:
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The German licensing organization GEMA filed suit in January of 2025. The court found that Suno didn’t have the rights to train its models on artists represented by GEMA, and now it has to disclose any “illicit revenue” and pay unspecified damages. The company can still appeal the ruling.
Apple has reportedly been seeking permission to buy memory from CXMT, a blacklisted Chinese supplier.
“We urge Apple to abandon any effort to incorporate memory from CXMT, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), or any other Chinese state-backed supplier into any of its products,” the Senators wrote in a letter to CEO Tim Cook.
[U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York]
A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”
[The New York Review of Books]
Brandon Klayme was wrongly convicted for possession of child pornography after the investigation botched his Kik username, “fus_ro_dah,” in reference to Bethesda’s Skyrim videogame. The real suspect’s username — “fus__ro_dah” — included one additional underscore, a “subtle mistake that changed the course of my life,” Klayme said.
The Senate Commerce Committee will vote on five kids safety bills including KOSA, which passed the chamber last Congress but didn’t get a vote in the House. This year, the House has pushed its own version of the bill that stripped the key duty of care, setting up a fight.
[U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation]
Having surpassed the threshold of 45 million monthly users in the bloc, both services will be required to clamp down on illegal and harmful content per the EU’s strict DSA rules. Roblox and ChatGPT search will have to comply as soon as August, per Bloomberg’s sources.
Correction: Bloomberg corrected its story to say”ChatGPT search,“ not ChatGPT in general.
Elon Musk’s X Corp and the World Federation of Advertisers are ending their long-running legal fight. In 2024, Musk accused the industry group of illegally boycotting X through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, which set standards to prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content. GARM has since been disbanded. A judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit in March.
Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has written for Fortune that OpenAI’s models exploiting Hugging Face is an “incident that has been expected for a long time.” We know this happened because of voluntary disclosure, Toner notes. “None of the current policies that aim to manage risks from frontier models would have mandated that the public — or even a government entity — be alerted.” She suggests changing our regulatory approach.
Illustrators, authors, and musicians are optimistic about their chances in court, if not about the future of AI.
In the ongoing battle for control of the messaging platform that claims over 1 billion active users, Durov has been charged with facilitating terrorism by failing to remove information “actively used by Ukrainian special services, terrorist organizations and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate sabotage and terrorist acts, mass killings and cyber fraud activities” in Russia, according to the New York Times. Durov responded like Durov.
XAI has filed a lawsuit in response to a law taking effect on Saturday that bans apps and websites from generating non-consensual sexualized imagery. The Musk-led company responsible for the Grok chatbot said the law will impact free speech and visual expression “in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”
“See you in court, creep,” responded Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
If so, that would be new — the FCC proposed a $25,000 fine against Xtra for failing to respond to its letters, and has since revealed plans to ban Xtra from importing and selling more of its existing cameras in the US. Xtra might be canceling its new DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Pro variant, too.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s unusual move demanding ABC renew its broadcast licenses early is part of a “broader pattern” in a “campaign to punish speech disfavored by the Trump administration,” over a dozen bipartisan former high-ranking officials charge. Several of them recently warned Carr was abusing the News Distortion Policy.
