The smart-glasses backlash is here, again, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent (U.K.). Twelve years after privacy concerns killed off Google Glass—whose wearers were labeled “glassholes”—Meta has successfully revived the technology. Last year, it sold 7 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which you can use to “make phone calls and take photos or videos without needing to pull out your phone.” Integrating the technology into “one of the world’s top-selling sunglasses” was a stroke of branding genius, and for a while it looked like Meta’s smart glasses were “a contender for the most impressive consumer hardware of the 2020s.” But not everyone is on board. Critics have taken to calling them “pervert glasses” because of their association “with creeps who use them to film people without their consent”—on the street, at the beach, and even in private settings. A video went viral on TikTok in August “of a woman calling out a doctor wearing the smart glasses during a consultation in which the patient was required to remove clothing.”

We clearly don’t know how to handle “spy-like smart glasses,” said Mia Sato in The Verge. Retail and service workers, “in particular, have become a target for stealth” recording by customers trying to prank them for likes on social media. It’s not just a problem for public-facing workers: Imagine “a co-worker at your office starts wearing them,” and everything you say or do around them can be “captured for limitless dissemination.” You know it’s bad when “even ICE thinks smart glasses are a privacy liability,” said James Pero in Gizmodo. The agency recently sent out a memo banning its immigration officers from using them. It’s not philosophical; ICE just doesn’t want all the information the glasses “gobble up incidentally” going back to Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is giving all smart glasses a bad name, said Anthony Spadafora in Tom’s Guide. But those marketed as augmented reality or extended reality typically don’t even record video. They have a private display, like a small computer screen, that can relay incoming messages, play TV shows, or even act as a portable workstation. They’re fun and useful. But the recent backlash against Meta means people may soon be shunned for wearing “any high-tech frames in public.”

Apple also has plans to join the smart-glasses race, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But the company will have to choose “whether the risk of blowback is worth it given the relatively tiny size of the smart-glasses market.” Sure, people trust Apple more than Meta, and its iPhone ecosystem will give whatever product it launches a huge advantage. But Apple also “has vastly more to lose” by getting smart glasses wrong. “Once your hardware has been labeled ‘pervert glasses,’ it’s hard to turn things around.”

The sight of a white cloud-like trail streaming behind a plane “set against a bright blue sky creates a romantic image of aviation”, said Aerospace Global News. But their existence “also represents the darker side of flying”.

These innocuous-looking trails “are one of the most urgent yet solvable climate challenges facing aviation today”, said Google, which is taking part in a £5 million trial known as Operation Blue Skies headed by the UK government. Together, they are looking to explore whether tweaking flight paths could address this problem.

Heat trappers

The streams are known as “condensation trails”, or “contrails”, said Google, which is partnering with the government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider NATS and researchers from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

These trails form when aircraft engine emissions encounter extremely cold air found at high altitudes, causing tiny ice particles to develop. They often fade soon after they appear, but very cold and moist atmospheric conditions can allow them to linger and spread. Over time, they may contribute to cloud formation that traps heat that would otherwise radiate away from the Earth.

Contrails are sometimes known as “vapour trails” but they’re different to so-called “chemtrails”, which conspiracy theorists claim are secret chemical or biological agents being sprayed on purpose for weather and population control, or geoengineering projects.

Trails ‘persisted and widened’ 

In 2019, around 40 million scheduled passenger flights took place, adding up to around 38 billion miles of travel, said The Economist. And more than 40% of these flights left contrails behind them for at least part of the journey. Many were “ephemeral”, but in more than 5% of the total distance flown – “comfortably enough for 10 round-trips a day to the Moon” – they “persisted and widened”, becoming cirrus clouds. “In doing so they warm the planet.”

Operation Blue Skies is based on a theory that if scientists, using artificial intelligence, can predict the areas of the atmosphere where contrails are likely to form, jets would be able to avoid them.

The trial will focus on the Shanwick airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which accounts for around 5% of global contrail warming. Using satellite images and flight data to identify where planes have previously produced contrails, and combining these with weather patterns, Google will forecast where the conditions for new contrails are most likely to occur. Air traffic controllers will then direct pilots to avoid those areas.

But far from “dramatically changing” the route of a flight, the aircrafts’ altitude will only change by around 2,000ft. This is the same sort of re-route that occurs already to “avoid turbulence and bad weather” so passengers are “unlikely to notice”, said the BBC.

The data centre question

Testing will take place during evenings and nights in the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, when the volume of air traffic is lower. Approximately 10,000 flights are expected to pass through the airspace during the trial periods.

Changing the altitude of an aircraft “can mean it burns more fuel”, which raises the “obvious question” of whether avoiding contrails “simply” creates additional carbon emissions elsewhere. Paul Hodgson, Google’s technical lead for the operation, said the “CO2 penalty is in the order of less than 1%” and that is outweighed by the climate benefit of preventing a warming contrail.

Questions have been raised over Google’s involvement in the project. It is “one of many big tech companies spending billions on new data centres – the giant, power-hungry banks which power AI” and have serious implications for climate change.

Meta has agreed to an $18 billion (£13.3 billion) settlement in the US to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children.

The social media giant was accused of knowingly and deliberately designing features to get children addicted to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with commentators describing it as the industry’s “tobacco moment”, said Sky News.

What happened?

Meta has agreed to make a number of changes to the way Instagram and Facebook operate for its youngest users, while denying any wrongdoing. The settlement “came as a surprise”, said BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman. “I was expecting weeks of courtroom drama.”

What will change?

The ruling could “fundamentally change the social media experience for young people in the US”, said The Guardian. The “biggest alteration” is that Meta must now “make many of its safety limitations the default setting” for accounts created by teenagers, a “pivot from its previous opt-in approach to child safety”.

The new safety barriers include a two-hour time limit on Instagram and Facebook for known teen users (direct messaging will not count towards the daily use limit). Meta agreed to limit teen accounts to only one hour a day if other platforms bring in similar time restrictions.

Notifications will be muted between midnight and 6am and between 8am and 3pm on school days. ‘Likes’ will be hidden on posts from teenagers. Meta will also enhance measures ‌to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content.

Identification or facial recognition verification systems will be used to make sure teenagers aren’t using regular Instagram accounts. But collecting identifying data poses significant privacy risks, said David Greene, legal counsel at digital privacy firm Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The case was brought by 29 US states and was based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which is nearly 30 years old. “I would be surprised,” said Kleinman, “if these measures remain within the confines of the US for very long, as other countries will almost certainly be keen to adopt them too.”

What does it mean for social media?

The hearing was labelled as social media’s “tobacco moment”, in reference to the trials tobacco firms faced in the 1990s. A “flurry of state lawsuits” forced tobacco companies to stop sponsoring sport and advertising on public transport, banned adverts that “targeted the youth and prevented cigarette companies from putting cartoons on their packets”, said James Titcomb in The Telegraph.

Other social media companies, including YouTube, TikTok’s parent ByteDance, Snap Inc. and Discord, are facing thousands of lawsuits brought by states, school districts and individuals. The litigants claim the companies intentionally designed their platforms to keep young users hooked. The lawsuits come as politicians are considering stricter rules aimed at protecting young users.

If other tech giants follow Meta’s lead, then social media “might indeed start to look more like tobacco: still a regular part of life, but heavily regulated and restricted, and widely understood to be bad for you”.

What happened

Social media giant Meta on Wednesday agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and implement new safeguards for underage Instagram and Facebook users as part of a landmark settlement with 47 states and other U.S. jurisdictions. Meta also reached a $1 billion settlement with Texas over similar allegations that it endangered children by designing its platforms to be addictive, like cigarettes.

Meta agreed to limit users under 18 to two hours a day on its combined platforms, lock them out from midnight to 6 a.m., block “beauty filters,” hide “likes” and improve age verification tools. A federal judge in California approved the settlement Wednesday evening.

Who said what

Meta’s “dramatic capitulation” could “signal an inflection point for a social media industry that has largely escaped regulatory scrutiny over the harms its products have caused children,” The New York Times said. It also “effectively ends a bellwether federal trial” underway in California in which four states were seeking roughly $200 billion from Meta.

“In a unique setup,” Meta “will pay out only 70% of the settlement,” The Wall Street Journal said, withholding $5.3 billion, unless YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat agree to also pay the states $5.3 billion and join it in implementing stricter one-hour daily limits for underage users. “This framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a blog post.

What next?

The $18 billion settlement, representing “about one month of revenue for Meta,” will be paid out over 10 years, Reuters said. “It could provide a template for resolving thousands of other lawsuits against social media companies.”

Mark Zuckerberg believes that “the biggest risk of AI” is not rogue agents or mass unemployment, but corporate control, said Nilesh Christopher in the Los Angeles Times. In a sweeping 6,500-word manifesto earlier this month, Meta’s chief executive outlined his vision “to build ‘personal superintelligence’” for the masses. Average people could soon have “a personal AI agent” to “work on their behalf.” Meta, he argues, will lead the way as “an American open-source alternative to rapidly advancing, inexpensive Chinese AI models” and tech rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI that have kept their code private. Zuckerberg suggested ways the government can “collaborate with AI companies for safety-testing” of their models, though he “cautioned that government intervention” in AI development risks handing “the advantage to China.” But it is imperative, he said, that neither the government nor “a few companies amass too much control over the technology.”

Zuckerberg’s “LinkedIn-evangelist-grade techno-optimist pablum” tries to position Meta as the “little guy,” said Will Oremus in The Atlantic. The man who “single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant” has emerged as a “critic of corporate power,” urging the “industry’s high priests to throw open the gates to the masses.” It’s a conveniently timed message. As Americans sour on massive data center buildouts and see headlines of rogue AI breaking constraints, Zuckerberg is suddenly “a man of the people.” He wants to be the “good AI guy,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. “Don’t buy it.” We’ve seen Zuckerberg flip-flop on issues too many times—most notably when he banned President Trump from Facebook and then later attended his inauguration. The only reason Meta lacks an “all-powerful closed AI model” is that it has “failed to build a competitive one.”

He isn’t doing the AI industry “any favors with essays like this,” said Russell Brandom in TechCrunch. Fallout from the harmful effects of Facebook is “one of the central reasons we’re now seeing so much anxiety about the social impact of AI.” Technology can have unintended consequences, and the fact that “one of the most powerful people in the world refuses to acknowledge this can make people understandably nervous.”

It is at least refreshing to hear an optimistic “counter-perspective” to the “doom and gloom” from academics, policymakers, and even other AI executives, said Adam Thierer in National Review. AI systems are “treated as hypothetical catastrophes just waiting to happen.” But technological change shouldn’t be framed only around “fear and loathing about the future.” Not all AI is so dangerous that it needs to be concentrated, controlled, and kept behind closed doors. Why not embrace innovation, allow experimentation, and address issues as they arise?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that we have reached the singularity, an inflection point at which humankind can no longer keep up with how quickly artificial intelligence improves itself. And he’s not the only tech mogul who thinks so.

A few weeks before Altman, Elon Musk said in an X post that the singularity had arrived, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis claimed in a speech at a company conference in May that humanity was standing at the “foothills of the singularity.” These claims have awoken a chorus of skeptics, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently dismissed discourse around the singularity and AI gaining consciousness as speculative and “made up.”

‘Advancing unusually fast’

A true AI singularity would “force hard choices” about who “controls increasingly autonomous systems, how benefits are distributed, and where human authority must remain final,” said tech executive Robert J. Szczerba at Forbes. The current state of AI “already warrants those questions.” Business owners should know what “their systems can do without supervision today” and what “evidence would show autonomy increasing faster than their controls.”

Altman may be right that a “gentler singularity is already underway,” with AI “steadily reshaping work and research,” said Szczerba. Still, there’s “no evidence that machines have entered a runaway cycle beyond human control.” AI is “advancing unusually fast,” and that “deserves serious attention.” But it does not mean “we have passed a point of no return.”

When it comes to what’s more intelligent — humans or AI — the “question does not compute,” said Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter, professors at the University of Sydney professors, at The Conversation. There’s “no single ladder that humans and machines are climbing.” AI already “vastly exceeds us at some tasks while being “hopeless at others any child can do.” But because the “systems talk like us, we fall for an illusion.”

When we believe that machines are “in the process of catching up with us,” it’s easy to assume a “mind at work when these systems output intelligent-sounding text,” said The Conversation. This is considered “anthropomorphic seduction,” which makes a cybersecurity issue such as the Hugging Face hack “sound like an awakening.” (An autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI technology went rogue last month and hacked the prominent startup’s database of AI models.) In the end, that incident “points to a gross failure of security governance on OpenAI’s behalf,” not an “emerging superintelligence.”

‘Not actually there yet’

It may be impossible to know exactly when we have crossed into the singularity. It’s comparable to falling into a black hole — at some point, whoever falls in will “glide over the hole’s event horizon,” which means they are “henceforth forever separated from the rest of the universe,” said Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded the former Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, to Business Insider. Yet from their perspective, “everything still seems the same as before.”

AI is showing the “first stirrings” of recursive self-improvement, but it lacks the capability for continual learning, said Bostrom. Using current AIs is like “working with a brilliant and extremely well-educated recruit,” but it’s “always their first day at the job.”

Altman, as is “often the case, is simply aping Elon,” said scientist Gary Marcus at Substack. The CEOs making these claims shouldn’t be taken seriously because “none of them has actually defined what they mean.”

“No matter how you slice it, we just are not actually there yet,” said Marcus. If we were, we “wouldn’t be once again seeing” the Klarna Effect, which is the “AI hype two-step” in which “employers boast of using AI to reduce headcount only to quietly rehire humans.”

We haven’t reached the “age of abundance that Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk keep insisting is a natural consequence of AI,” said Marcus. Nor have we reached a point where “technological growth accelerates beyond human control.” We can still “perfectly well shut this stuff off if we want to,” and it’s “mainly because of greed that we don’t.”

It’s doubtful there will be a “single magic moment that our descendants think of as the singularity,” said Marcus. If there is, it’s “not one that’s going to happen in this decade.”

What happened

Chinese robots ran faster and jumped higher than human record-holders this weekend, at the opening of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. One humanoid ran the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, surpassing Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record, while another covered 400 meters in 38.15 seconds, smashing Wayde van Niekerk’s 43.03-second record. Both robots were made by Beijing’s X-Humanoid, as was a third that reached 2.88 meters in the standing high jump, besting Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45 meters.

Who said what

The five-day Olympics-like event is a “spectacle demonstrating China’s rapid progress in advanced robotics,” The Associated Press said. China “makes the majority of the world’s humanoid robots,” but they are “still mostly used for demonstrations, performances and research — at least for now.” The sprinting performances were a “sharp improvement” over last year, Reuters said, though “braking was an issue, as the machines slammed into ​a thick mat” after the finish line and had to be carried off on stretchers.

What next?

More than 2,000 humanoid robots are competing in 30 sporting events including soccer, table tennis and boxing. There are also 21 “scenario-based contests” like “EV charging, restaurant work” and “industrial assembly,” Reuters said, and the “real test” is whether the humanoids can “handle packaging ‌and warehouse operations while reliably performing precision tasks” that evaluate “their ability to work like humans in less flashy jobs.”

France has taken a major step to crack down on telemarketers with the passage of a new law. It may make French people happy, but at least one country across the Mediterranean Sea is concerned about the move. Moroccans worry the new French law, which bans unsolicited cold calls, could have a negative impact on Morocco’s job market.

What is the new French law?

The law means that French companies are no longer “allowed to advertise goods and services through such calls unless consumers previously gave their consent or if the calls are about a preexisting contract,” said The New York Times. While many countries have attempted to enact no-contact lists for telemarketers, the law represents a new, much more proactive approach in France. Violators of the law will be subject to fines of up to $86,000.

Previously, French people who “wanted to avoid marketing calls had to register their number with a government-run service, but consumer groups said some call centers ignored the list,” said The Associated Press. Officials hope the law will fix what has been a persistent issue in France; at least 97% of French people “are annoyed by telemarketing calls,” according to a 2025 report from France’s National Assembly, while 72% say they are contacted by telemarketers “at least once a week.”

Why are Moroccans up in arms?

Despite the joy in France, the feeling in Morocco is different. Given the nations’ close proximity, Morocco “represents a major market for telemarketing companies” contacting French customers, said the Times. Moroccan officials “indicated that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs could be at risk of disappearing” because of the new law, according to Moroccan newspaper Le Matin. France represents the majority of the Moroccan industry; Morocco’s call center business “makes 80% of its revenue from phoning French customers,” said Semafor.

Small- and medium-sized telemarketing ventures are particularly vulnerable because they “represent more than 60% of the call center network in Morocco,” said Le Matin. Despite the controversial nature of telemarketers, the centers they operate generated nearly “1.3 billion dirhams [$140 million] in investment in 2023 and generate between 10 and 12 billion dirhams [$1.1 billion and $1.2 billion] in added value annually.” Morocco’s “low labor costs, a large French-speaking workforce and relatively weak unions” make the country an “attractive outsourcing destination,” said the AP.

Some in France are also lambasting the effects of the new law. The leader of France’s direct-selling trade association, Frédéric Billon, has “criticized the reforms for adding what he said were administrative burdens for businesses,” said BBC News. Telemarketing companies will “have to obtain written consent from your customer, and you'll also have to keep proof of that consent,” Billon told BBC News. Despite some of the pushback, polls show most French people favor the law, leading Morocco to explore other avenues.

Moroccan officials are currently “rolling out a plan to ease the impact of the French law and support the sector,” said Moroccan news outlet Hespress. The plan starts by “encouraging companies to expand into new markets in Europe, including Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as in Africa and Latin America.” Officials are also urging companies to “shift from traditional telemarketing to higher-value services, including technical support, digital logistics, consulting and market research.”

Google is hoping that an “organizational revolution” will put it back in the AI race, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. The search giant’s parent Alphabet last week “shocked Silicon Valley with news of a management shake-up.” Veteran DeepMind engineer Jeff Dean is leaving “to launch a startup with several top researchers,” introducing yet another competitor to the crowded AI scene. But the bigger news was that Demis Hassabis, who led Google DeepMind, would move on from his “day-to-day managerial role to become the chief scientist” of Alphabet. It’s not clear what happened, but people close to London-based DeepMind “suspect a fallout between the top brass.” Hassabis was always a scientist at heart. For him, the company and its vast resources were mostly “a means to achieving a bigger dream” of building intelligent machines “that could solve intractable scientific problems.” But in an industry where execs “are notorious for feigning interest in science, he never seemed to escape the sense that he was a scientist paying lip service to the commercial imperative.”

Dean’s departure is also significant, said Cade Metz in The New York Times. He’s been with Google since 1999—he was the company’s 30th employee—and “played a key role in creating the global computer network powering its search business” as well as being “one of the company’s early leaders in AI.” But like many prominent AI researchers, he was lured away “by a deep pool of venture funding and the chance to run his own company.” It seems Dean and the other researchers left on good terms—Alphabet has funded the company’s undisclosed seed round—but it raises questions about Google’s talent exodus. Dean was also “one of the few Silicon Valley executives to speak out” against the government’s immigration agenda, even as “Google has begun to work more closely with the Trump administration.”

Google needs to buckle down on business, said Arjun Kharpal in CNBC.com. The company “is planning to spend $205 billion this year at a time when investors are scrutinizing Big Tech’s capital expenditure.” It is also trying to secure an edge against “OpenAI, Anthropic, hyperscalers, and Chinese players.” Google remains “supportive of DeepMind’s scientific endeavors,” but the C-suite shuffle suggests it’s placing “more of a focus on commercialization and monetization of AI” and diverting attention away from moon shots. The situation is “less dire than it may seem,” said M.G. Siegler in Spyglass.org. DeepMind senior vice president Koray Kavukcuoglu has already taken over day-to-day operations from Hassabis. Making the shift official removes some corporate infighting and bureaucracy—which may be the reason Google has so many “half-baked” chat apps and coding projects. There were “too many cooks in the kitchen.” On his own, Kavukcuoglu can “get the meal prepped and plated.”

Many in the artificial intelligence industry say the most influential person at AI powerhouse Anthropic may not be its CEO, Dario Amodei, but his wife, Camilla “Cami” Clark. Despite Clark having no official job with the company, recent reports indicate that she plays an outsize role as an adviser for Anthropic. She also has previous ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

‘Scant details about Clark online’

Despite her apparently significant role within Anthropic, there are “scant details about Clark online,” and “efforts have been made to remove references to her,” said The Wall Street Journal. Even Anthropic’s own AI chatbot, Claude, cannot provide much intel. It is known that Clark was born in 1979 and “was an entrepreneur and often interacted with the rich and powerful, as well as up-and-comers in Silicon Valley.”

In the early 2010s, Clark started a number of her own businesses, which include a “self-described ‘free luxury porn’ company that catered to women and a ‘social dieting app,’” said Forbes. It was via this porn company, Eddice, that Clark first interacted with Epstein in an attempt to get him to invest in the business. Clark “asked Epstein in a March 2012 email exchange about whether he’d be interested in investing in her and a colleague’s businesses,” though there is “no indication in the Epstein files that the financier made any investment.”

‘The most consequential person’

Clark married Amodei in 2022, and she has quickly become a “key behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic as the company has shot to prominence over the past year,” said The Information. Clark accompanies her husband on global trips in support of Anthropic and has recently been called AI’s “first lady.” Several people “who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the future of AI.”

She “may well be the most consequential person within Anthropic’s orbit who doesn’t have a formal role at the startup,” said The Information. While Amodei himself is more introverted, according to reports, Clark is a “consummate networker” who has become friends with President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka “even as Amodei and Anthropic have at times faced an existential struggle with her father’s administration.” Clark is also a member of a WhatsApp group that “includes other prominent women in the tech industry.”

As the AI sphere continues to grow in influence, many believe that Clark will continue to play a large part. She recently “told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn’t as ‘woke’ as its detractors might think it is,” said the Journal. Her friendship with Ivanka Trump means she may have also been used as an intermediary when Anthropic “drew the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year after Amodei refused to drop restrictions on how Claude could be used by the Pentagon.”

Previous business dealings will likely come up; Clark’s “ties to Epstein will be heavily scrutinized as Anthropic heads toward a potentially multi-trillion-dollar IPO,” said Futurism, especially given that Clark has been “steering Amodei’s decisions and helping him liaise with politicians and investors with her charm.” Still, Clark doesn’t have widespread name recognition and has “largely flown under the radar,” said The Information, which is a “stark contrast to some other prominent couples that bask in the social media limelight.”

Robotics is the “latest front” in the “intensifying tech rivalry between Washington and Beijing,” said Steve Lohr and Xinyun Wu in The New York Times. The Federal Communications Commission last week said it would begin restricting imports of “humanoid and animal-like robots,” saying they could “function as Trojan Horses” for data collection and spy on Americans in their homes and offices. China called the measure a provocation and warned that it would retaliate. Its producers “dominate the global humanoid robot industry” to such a degree that “it has become nearly impossible to build a competitive humanoid robot without Chinese-made components.” But advanced robots are becoming “strategically important in an economy increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence.” AI startups are now experimenting with physical or embodied intelligence—essentially robots with AI capabilities—in order to teach their models about the physical world.

Popular household devices are getting caught in the crossfire, said Sean Hollister in The Verge. While the prohibition specifically calls out “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds”—such as robot dogs—it extends to any “software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.” That rounds up robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, many warehouse automation machines—and even Roombas. Yes, the popular robot vacuum cleaner was acquired by a Chinese manufacturer in January, putting it on the FCC’s chopping block.

The ban covers only new models of foreign-made robots, said Jeremy Hsu in Ars Technica, so customers can still keep their old ones or buy older versions. And it should “theoretically encourage more U.S. and foreign companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the U.S.,” home to several fast-growing startups like Agility Robotics, Figure AI, and Boston Dynamics. But that’s not always the case. The FCC banned Chinese-made drones earlier this year, too, and it has yet to motivate a “competitive mass-market consumer-drone producer” to set up shop in the U.S.

The fears about Chinese humanoid robots are fantastically over-blown, said Thomas Black in Bloomberg. Reading headlines, you’d think China is building robot armies ready to serve meals, fold laundry, and steal jobs. Hardly. Robots today work best at “predictable, repetitive, high-volume tasks,” like painting or welding on a factory line. And even then they can be hit or miss. It’s beyond their ability to do multiple tasks at once, making them largely unhelpful in homes, stores, hospitals, or even construction sites. After a lot of hype, businesses are now realizing these limitations. U.S. industrial robot orders have already fallen from a peak of 44,196 in 2022 down to 36,766 last year. “The vision of an expansion of robots into everyday tasks and life is there.” But we’re nowhere near that reality.

Resistance is growing against the Flock surveillance cameras used by police departments across the country. Some cities are terminating their contracts with the company. In other cases, individuals are taking matters into their own hands by stealing or vandalizing the devices they say intrude on their privacy. And it all raises the question of how much surveillance is too much.

‘New norm’

Flock’s “original promise” was to provide an AI-driven system that “discourages speeding, hit-and-runs and right turns on red,” said Bloomberg. But its devices, known as automatic license plate readers, also work as a “crime-fighting tool.” The system is now a symbol of “government’s growing obsession with keeping a constant eye on those it exists to serve,” said legal scholar Stephen L. Carter to the outlet.

The Flock mechanism has reportedly been used to “stalk women, hunt down marijuana users, deport immigrants and surveil households,” said Bloomberg. And the anger sparked by those stories has resulted in “dozens of police departments” terminating contracts with the company.

The “fear of Big Brother watching you is not new,” said Sara Pequeño at USA Today. The Flock backlash “doesn’t mean these cameras are disappearing any time soon.” ICE has partnered with AI companies to implement facial recognition programs, stores are “implementing AI surveillance pricing” that uses your shopping habits to determine your grocery bills, Meta sells glasses that can record video, and Ring cameras have made front porches “visible to the whole world.” So “why are we just watching America become a surveillance state”?

Surveillance “puts public safety first,” said Rick Pozniak at The Boston Herald. The system saves police precious time “locating an abducted child or tracking a rapist or recovering a stolen vehicle” and can also help investigators “reconstruct the movements of vehicles involved in serious crimes and accidents.”

The information gathered by such systems should be “governed by strict protocols,” but to entirely reject technology that is “imperative to safety and protection of local residents would be a mistake,” said Pozniak. Police should be provided the “tools they need” alongside rules that offer the “accountability we deserve.”

‘Surveillance-saturated society’

Efforts to ban Flock systems are an “overreaction,” said Charles Fain Lehman at The Atlantic. The U.S. is already a “surveillance-saturated society,” but police cameras can “help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive.” The system can “help police catch criminals” and also theoretically discourages crime by “increasing the certainty” of being arrested when committing an offense. Dumping the cameras “would be foolish.”

The backlash is “becoming a cross-party political issue,” said NewsNation. Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have introduced bills to restrict license plate readers, while Michigan Democrats are trying to stop state departments from cooperating with federal agencies that use the systems. The public expects the government to “protect both their safety and their constitutional rights,” said the Wolverine State Democrats in a letter to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

Since videos of OpenAI’s first brand trip hosting business and tech influencers hit social media timelines, the backlash has been swift. Already facing scrutiny on multiple fronts, the company has likely seen any hope that this move would boost its reputation dashed.

OpenAI misses the mark

The high-end getaway, dubbed OpenAI Summer Camp, was held at Wildflower Farms, a “luxury resort in New York’s Hudson Valley,” where room rates can exceed $2,000 a night, Business Insider said. Creators were treated to an itinerary that included “lessons about OpenAI’s latest tools” and a “session with a beekeeper.”

They also received OpenAI-branded merchandise, including canvas bags and jars of honey. The trip comes as the AI lab faces controversy amid anxiety about “rising energy prices, water use and potential job displacement,” said Business Insider. The weekend’s “pastoral content” swiftly drew criticism across social media. Critics questioned why a company associated with “several energy- and water-intensive data centers” was treating influencers at a “nature-focused resort.”

The comment sections of many of the influencers who attended were flooded with messages questioning their morals. Many cited the “environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the U.S.” and the potential for job loss due to AI integration in the critiques, The Verge said.

After “being in the room with people who work on this product,” creator Grace McCarrick was excited to post content, according to a video she posted from the trip while running a bath. Shocked by the controversy, she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI,” she said on LinkedIn. The trip exposed her to the “shocking AI psychosis running rampant online.” People in the real world “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism.”

As the influencers come under fire, OpenAI maintains that the content creators are an “important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today,” said company spokesperson Drew Pusateri to Fast Company. The lab welcomes “healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent.”

Why one company and not the others

OpenAI is not the “only AI lab that has worked with influencers,” said TechCrunch. Anthropic reportedly held a brand dinner for Claude, and Microsoft hosted a Super Bowl brand trip for influencers, according to tech newsletter Sarah and Kate. But none of the other AI-led trips seem to have “struck as big of a nerve as this OpenAI brand trip.”

There is also “more to the timing of the trip that struck people,” said TechCrunch. OpenAI has plans to make a “$500 billion deal” to build a data center in Ohio at a time when the “socio-ecological impact of AI data centers has taken center stage.” Again, detractors pointed out the irony that “OpenAI held a brand retreat in a luxury resort nestled in nature.” OpenAI also has a “$200 million contract with the Department of Defense,” yet another reason the “brand trip evoked ire.”

For these competitors courting influencers, the “objective is similar,” but the “difference is execution,” said Inc. Anthropic is known for throwing creator events that have been “smaller dinners and pop-ups,” in which Claude “remained the ostensible subject.” OpenAI made the “resort, gifts and coordinated access impossible to miss.”

A creator dinner with Claude does not “give me the same reaction as seeing a luxury resort for an OpenAI ChatGPT weekend,” Meredith Lynch, a creator who covers politics and pop culture, said to Inc. It felt like a “propaganda trip — to take this technology that is getting a lot of pushback and sanitize it through aesthetically beautiful content creation.” The problem is not the existence of an influencer trip but that the format “carries different implications” when used to “build trust in a technology facing criticism over job displacement and data centers’ energy and water use.”

‘Why are we just watching America become a surveillance state?’

Sara Pequeño at USA Today

There is a “larger issue of mass surveillance becoming mainstream,” says Sara Pequeño. Flock cameras have “recently been in the news for what happens when police officers misuse the technology,” but “faceless corporations aren’t the only ones policing our behavior through mass surveillance.” Americans are “also creating the panopticon among ourselves.” People “can opt out of a culture that calls on us to record our fellow man if we ourselves would not like to be documented.”

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‘What should a 21st-century central bank look like?’

Daniel Moss at Bloomberg

Central banks “have done a sterling job in responding to swings in prices and employment, and severe gyrations in capital markets,” says Daniel Moss. Still, they “haven’t always gotten everything right.” Then “there’s the perceived overreach.” Politicians “might insist that they support central bank independence but now want to peel back what policymakers can do, how they can do it and when they can do it.” The “case for freedom to implement policy has never been stronger.”

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‘A “Free Palestine” T-shirt at a Holocaust memorial is no contradiction’

Gideon Levy at Haaretz

“Teenagers from an international anti-fascist youth camp visited Austria’s Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial last week,” and a “number of them wore T-shirts with slogans calling for the liberation of Palestine,” says Gideon Levy. The “notion that there is no better place than the ruins of a concentration camp to fight for the liberation of 2 million human beings who are currently incarcerated in the Gaza Strip is beyond the grasp of Israelis.” The “call to free Palestine is not antisemitic.”

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‘Should an insurer or a doctor decide where your care takes place?’

Edmund Pribitkin at The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Every day, physicians, patients and the families who care for them make hundreds of decisions together about where and how care should be delivered,” says Edmund Pribitkin. “Increasingly, however, these collective judgments are being second-guessed — and often overruled — by large insurance companies through policies that prioritize administrative convenience and cost-shifting over clinical judgment.” Healthcare decisions “should be made by patients, their families and their care teams — not by insurance company policies.”

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What happened

Scientists at Stanford University on Thursday reported in the journal Science that they had successfully directed artificial intelligence to create 16 new viruses. This first-ever use of AI to design and build viruses not found in nature raised “hopes for medical advances” like eliminating drug-resistant bacteria, The New York Times said, while also “raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.”

Who said what

“Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new,” the Times said, but the Stanford and Arc Institute researchers went “well beyond” previous efforts by teaching AI to “recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.” Their AI tool, Evo, was fed genetic sequences “much like ChatGPT and other language models are trained on large sets of existing text material,” CNN said.

What next?

The new study “arrives at a moment of heightened anxiety regarding danger posed by increasingly powerful AI models,” The Wall Street Journal said. Evo was constrained to create “simple viruses” that can “only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.” But the breakthrough “raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” Johns Hopkins health security experts said in a corresponding Science article. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”

AI models going rogue and hacking the internet? That’s “the stuff of science fiction”, said The New York Times’ Katrin Bennhold. “Or at least it was until recently.”

The UK’s AI Security Institute announced on Tuesday that two AI agents it was evaluating – one powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and the other by OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol – had taken “sustained, unsanctioned action directed at real people and organisations”. In the most serious incident, the Mythos 5 agent created “fake online identities”, tried to deceive a software engineer, and attempted “to insert malicious code into a open-source project”.

Only a few days ago, Open AI and Anthropic revealed similar testing mishaps, in what was a “big moment” for the world, Nate Soares, of the non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told The New York Times. “These AIs were committing cybercrimes a human would be strongly punished for”. It is, “in a sense”, artificial intelligence’s “first felony”.

What did the commentators say?

“The ‘robots could kill us all’ argument” has long been dismissed “as hysteria or even calculated hype”, said the NYT’s Bennhold. But fears that frontier AI models were “getting too good too effective at exploiting software vulnerabilities” have “now become reality”. There needs to be “intense debate about the dangers of AI spiralling out of human control and posing a threat to humanity”.

AI engineers “and even their vainglorious bosses, are getting freaked out by the capabilities they are handling and worry about unchecked proliferation”, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The obvious historical analogy is nuclear fission, which could have been “harnessed benignly” or “deployed aggressively in warheads”. But now “there are multiple Manhattan Projects all frantically competing for market share, fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt” and “with the rest of the US economy as collateral”.

Negotiating international agreement on a safe way forward for frontier AI is going to be tricky, said The Economist, when it is “increasingly clear” that the US and China will “restrict access to their models for economic and strategic reasons”.

Chinese officials are already worried “about the cyber-capabilities of Mythos” and “its potential to be used as an offensive weapon, said Bloomberg. And, for the US and its allies, there is deep concern that their geopolitical adversaries “and the criminals in their orbit, will soon wield the same offensive tools”, said Michael Sulmeyer, former US assistant secretary of defence for cyberpolicy, on Foreign Affairs. With China, in particular, “already racing to build and acquire these AI capabilities”, the US may only have “nine to 12 months to protect its critical infrastructure from AI-powered attacks”.

What next?

Any kind of “consistent approach” to global AI regulation has “failed to materialise”, said Sky News. The Trump administration is finalising a voluntary framework under which US AI labs would submit models for federal safety testing before public release. But this latest “alarming behaviour” is “likely to ignite fresh calls” from lawmakers and Silicon Valley for “more rigorous regulation”, said Politico’s John Sakellariadis.

The recent incidents also raise the question of who bears responsibility when AI systems break the law. If those hacking attempts had been “human-originated, they would lead to clear and vigorous prosecution”, ethical hacker and cybersecurity expert Marc Rogers told Politico. “It’s time for a serious discussion about updates to existing computer security law.” Until that happens, said Andrew McDonald on Politico London Playbook, “this kind of thing is going to become more common, and quickly”.

The recent news that OpenAI lost the handle on two of its AI models “sounds like something out of a sci-fi film,” said The Economist. AI labs frequently “test their models for potentially dangerous capabilities before releasing them.” OpenAI wanted to see how its latest models would fare on a cybersecurity test. Well, guess what: They somehow “broke free from the laboratory” and unleashed a complicated “multistep attack” on a popular data library called Hugging Face—hacking a system in hours that would take humans weeks, according to Bloomberg. The result could have been worse. The models had “gained access to the open internet,” and easily could have “gone on to compromise other companies’ servers” and wreak havoc. “This is not the first sign that AI models’ capabilities are starting to exceed people’s control.” After the hack was reported, lawmakers introduced a new bill in the House that would give Washington the authority to shut down rogue AI models.

The breach occurred because of a “very human mistake,” said Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in TechCrunch. It never would have happened, experts say, if OpenAI had used a more secure “sandbox,” a term for an isolated virtual environment for testing risky software. But the environment wasn’t totally isolated, because it “internally hosted third-party software” that apparently wasn’t fully secure. That’s where “the real fault lies.” But what did the researchers expect? asked David Berlind in ZDNET. The AI was doing “exactly what it was designed to do.” When the rogue AI invaded Hugging Face’s systems, it was acting under a directive to achieve its goal “no matter what.” This is what agentic AI is programmed to do: act “on its own” without human intervention. The industry just “didn’t expect it to do it so well,” so soon.

With AI agents, the internet has entered a “vulnerable new era,” said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Cutting-edge models are getting better at hacking, and the internet is “full of rickety and vulnerable code.” Until recently, companies have gotten away with relaxed security, but the “speed, scale, and sophistication of AI hacks means that everything is vulnerable,” including “hospitals, banks, electrical grids, the military.” AI companies want the public to believe they have the technology in “safe hands,” said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. This incident suggests otherwise. OpenAI “shouldn’t be building systems that have advanced cyber capabilities if it can’t contain them properly.” Technology companies should operate like government and defense organizations and “air-gap” powerful software, meaning that they run it on computers that are “completely disconnected from the internet.” It would mean development is slower. But AI firms will have to “accept some uncomfortable trade-offs to make their models more secure.”

Who would be an investor in South Korea right now? “Despair and frustration” spread again on Wednesday as the chip-heavy Kospi index “cratered” during another “hectic session” that triggered a second successive official circuit-breaker, reported Bloomberg.

The catalyst was disappointing earnings from local semiconductor giant SK Hynix but, given “already jittery sentiment” around the AI boom, it could almost have been anything. The oncebooming Kospi has now lost more than 33% of its value in a month.

‘Demand destruction’

“The chips are down,” said Bryce Elder in the FT – especially in the red-hot memory sector. Some have pinned the “chip dip”, which has also hit Wall Street with force, on the IPO of Chinese challenger CXMT; others on reports that a stateowned Chinese company is beginning mass production of “immersion deep-ultra lithography machines” – advanced chip manufacturing tools over which the West (especially the Dutch giant ASML) currently enjoys a monopoly. Still, the more obvious concern is “demand destruction”, in what has always been a volatile and highly cyclical sector. Voracious demand from America’s big AI hyperscalers has sent chip prices sky-high. “All that’s needed to wreck 2027 sales expectations is for this cycle to turn from virtuous to vicious. Plus ça change…”

Could China do for chips what it has already done for cars? That’s the fear on the Nasdaq, said Eliot Brown in The Wall Street Journal. As Elon Musk recently told The Economist, Chinese manufacturers are “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem”. Chinese companies have been restricted from buying the cutting-edge machines – which is why they are “a step behind the US in advanced chipmaking”.

‘Nvidia - the central bank of the AI economy’

Yet what’s particularly concerning about the plummeting shares of chipmakers, said DealBook in The New York Times, is that the rout coincides with a broader crisis of confidence on Wall Street about AI-related corporate debt and “circular” financial arrangements. That was rammed home when it emerged that chip giant Nvidia – increasingly “the central bank of the AI economy” – is brokering a $250bn guarantee for OpenAI’s immense Ohio campus. “Throughout history, almost every generational infrastructure leap has relied on hardware titans to co-sign their buyers’ credit.”

But this has also led to devastating “debt crashes”. The chief winner of the current turmoil is Apple, said the FT. It has reclaimed its crown as the world’s most valuable company, with a $5trn valuation, because it is seen as a relative “haven”. The same is true of the FTSE 100, which has hit an all-time high as an “anti-tech” index. Swings and roundabouts.

Have we already lost control of AI, asked Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. On 11 July, an entirely new kind of hacking attack was launched at Hugging Face, an online platform that houses a library of AI code and datasets. The attack, which clearly used AI agents, “advanced at frightening speed and scale”, executing tens of thousands of actions so as to break into the company’s system.

‘Considerable skill and persistence’

Hugging Face managed to neutralise it, and alerted the authorities. Days later, the company behind the attack “raised its hand”: OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, admitted that one of its tests had gone badly wrong. OpenAI had set up a “sandbox” – a supposedly safe area of its network, entirely disconnected from the internet – and ordered two cutting-edge AI models to perform a series of cybersecurity tests. The models decided to break out of the sandbox, escape onto the internet and hack into the place they knew they would find the answers: Hugging Face’s servers.

Media outlets described the AI as “going rogue”, said Jamie Bartlett in The Observer. But, in fact, these models merely single-mindedly performed the task they’d been given. The models reasoned that the most effective strategy was to cheat, and they did so with “considerable skill and persistence”. This is nothing new. Leading models have deceived users, attempted blackmail, and even tried to copy themselves in order to complete their tasks.

‘The genie is out of the bottle’

Some sceptical observers have suggested that this story might be a publicity stunt: that it benefits OpenAI to suggest that its products have stunning powers. But the truth is that these companies really don’t know how to build AI systems safely – and yet they “continue to rush ahead building ever-more powerful models”. It was fortunate that Hugging Face, a New York tech firm valued at $4.5bn, had a highly proficient cybersecurity team, said The Economist. “Things might have turned out much worse for a less well-resourced outfit.”

This is not necessarily a doomsday scenario, said John Thickstun in The Guardian. AI is very good at hacking; but such powers can also be used to make IT systems more secure. Ironically, Hugging Face had to rely on a free Chinese AI model to thwart this attack – because OpenAI and US rivals jealously guard their own. At any rate, “the genie is out of the bottle”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent: we must learn how to manage AI. Every technology developed by mankind has been double-edged, and AI is no different. “A radically different world is not necessarily anything to be frightened of – but, even if it were, it’s coming at us anyway.”

‘How trying to make sense of the Nolan Wells tragedy led to rampant misinformation’

Keisha N. Blain at MS NOW

In a “striking example of how misinformation can spread during a developing news story, a viral Facebook post claimed that Nolan Wells, the Black Mississippi teenager whose death after visiting a Gulf Coast island with a group of white friends remains under investigation, was related to the legendary journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells,” says Keisha N. Blain. For “many reasons, including ones related to race, history and geography, discussions about his death are especially susceptible to misinformation.”

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‘Why is it so hard to ban child marriage?’

Sarah Jones at Intelligencer

Child marriage is a “fringe practice, even within the most conservative religious and cultural communities, but it is also more common than many Americans realize,” says Sarah Jones. Children “who marry are more likely to drop out of high school and face higher rates of poverty,” yet “lawmakers have dragged their feet.” Many “Republican lawmakers continue to see marriage as a solution to illicit sex or an underage pregnancy — and a way to enforce traditional values.”

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‘The banality of evil in the Border Patrol’s secret anti-immigrant slur’

Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times

For “half a century, Border Patrol workers have used the onomatopoeic word” ‘tonk,’ referring to the “sound of someone getting hit, as slang for undocumented immigrants,” says Gustavo Arellano. The word is “workplace lingo showing that the banality of evil that’s la migra on its best days has transformed into something far uglier.” The “slur is so vile — predicated on violence by law enforcement, unlike ethnic jabs that insult food or culture — that it has never crossed over into mainstream English.”

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‘Why are we still pretending Big Tech cares about our classrooms?’

Liz Shulman at the Chicago Tribune

The “field of education depends on human interaction, and the quality of instruction kids get should depend on an administrator’s human assessment rather than a machine’s,” says Liz Shulman. Kids “deserve protection in school. Instead, AI companies are furiously signing contracts with school districts.” If “Big Tech companies truly cared about kids and educators as they claim to, they would give money to public schools (beyond free Chromebooks and access to AI), which remain massively underfunded in practically every state.”

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What happened

AI company Anthropic has discovered three separate incidents in which its Claude model accessed the internet and hacked into other organizations’ systems without Anthropic’s knowledge, the company said Thursday. The security breaches, which happened during testing, follow the recent revelation that competitor OpenAI’s technology had hacked into AI platform Hugging Face.

Who said what

Anthropic and its testing partner accidentally “left the models with live internet access,” The Wall Street Journal said. So Claude “didn’t break out of a sandbox; it simply wandered out of systems where the sandbox didn’t exist.” The lesson is “not necessarily that AI has developed a fundamentally new attack capability,” cyber security expert David Allott told the BBC, but that AI agents can “combine capabilities, obtain credentials and system access to take actions autonomously.”

“We need to change how we model such threats as AI capabilities advance,” Anthropic said in a blog post.

What next?

Expect more calls for better safeguarding around AI development, which “may be moving much faster than society is ready for,” CNN said.

One company in Austin, Texas, claims to have found a new solution to school shooters: drones. Mithril Defense is currently designing pepper-spraying drones, inspired by the Ukrainian military’s successful drone program, that the company says can respond to an active shooter within seconds. But while some are lauding the idea, others feel that adding this technology into schools might bring more problems than solutions.

‘It gives another set of eyes and ears’

The drone program developed by Mithril, called Campus Guardian Angel, provides an “elite, on-site safety response capability that works alongside school safety teams, confronting any active shooter threat,” the company’s website said. The drones are flown remotely and can reportedly arrive at a shooter’s location in 15 seconds. Upon engaging, the drones will “unload pepper rounds and are capable of hitting the shooter at a speed of up to 70 mph,” said The Independent.

The drones, currently being provided to schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia, are “equipped with non-lethal effects, flown by several of the top drone pilots in the world and are supported by an elite team of former military operators, law enforcement and first responders,” Justin Marston, the founder and CEO of Mithril, told The Independent. These types of responses “matter and save lives during an active shooter situation.”

Law enforcement has lauded the use of these drones. “It gives another set of eyes and ears of the campus that I can't see all the time,” Deputy Trevor Autrey, the school resource officer at Deltona High School in Deltona, Florida, told WPTV West Palm Beach. Non-police officials were similarly enthusiastic. “As principal, I’m really excited about having this enhanced security on our campus,” Deltona High School Principal Dr. Christina Lapnow said to WPTV.

‘I have some really serious reservations’

For all those who support the drone program, others say they may not be as effective as tech enthusiasts hope — and could cause additional safety issues. The drones “might accidentally target a fleeing student instead of a shooter” or “remote pilots, in a split-second decision, might mistake a law enforcement officer for a shooter, especially if teachers initiate a false alarm,” Curtis Lavarello, the head of the advocacy firm School Safety Advocacy Council, said to The Washington Post.

It is “almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Lavarello told the Post. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.” Other experts have argued that “low-tech measures, like simply locking external doors, are just as effective,” said the outlet. If schools “spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead,” Jaclyn Corin, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, told the Post.

Others connected with that shooting seem to agree. “These drones aren’t patrolling; they just pop up when needed. So that’s part of the problem,” Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas attack, told WPTV. “We need to focus on the prevention piece rather than the reaction piece.” The larger approach “seems to reflect that part of America which says the way to address recurrent school shootings” is “not with stricter gun control laws,” said Moisés Ávila at Barron’s, but “rather with weaponry, such as giving teachers guns.”

China is not beating the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race, at least not yet. But the country’s AI products are cheaper and good enough that a number of American AI users are shifting away from homegrown products. Enter a Silicon Valley panic. The U.S. government may take action, and a new Chinese model — Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — may be the trip wire.

‘Something good enough’

Kimi K3 can “allegedly beat some of the best systems built by U.S. companies at a fraction of the cost,” said The Verge. It is the latest in a series of cheap Chinese-made “open-weight” AI models that “anyone can download, inspect, modify and run on their own infrastructure,” said Microsoft. This presents a different approach from closed-source “proprietary platforms” like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT; the Chinese method challenges the conventional wisdom that “leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips” used by U.S. companies, said CNN.

The Chinese open-weight models are “increasingly almost as good as closed systems made by leading U.S. companies,” which is why a “growing number of Americans” are moving to the Chinese systems, said The Associated Press. Kimi K3 “just seems snappier” than Anthropic’s Claude Fable chatbot, Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian said to the outlet. Other Chinese open-weight models lack the “overall, full-range capabilities” of the products made by American companies, said the AP. But AI users “just don’t need” expensive U.S.-made AI products, technology executive Curt Meinhold told the outlet. “We need something good enough.”

‘Full AI communism’

Some American AI executives are “sounding the alarm” about the rise of open-weight models, said The Wall Street Journal. The Chinese models represent “full AI communism,” in which governments provide artificial intelligence as “digital public infrastructure” rather than a “market product,” OpenAI’s Dean Ball said on X. The White House may soon decide to “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models” as a result.

Others disagree. Restricting access to open-weight models “wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups” that use the technology, a coalition of 200 smaller tech companies argued last week in a letter to administration officials, per Politico. Regulation would be “great for Anthropic. We’re all going to have to spend money on Anthropic,” Suhail Doshi, the founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle, said to the outlet.

The White House is “showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models,” said Axios. Administration officials last year considered an executive order mandating that U.S. firms could “only host Chinese models if they could guarantee security and take liability if it were breached.” The ascendance of Kimi K3 is “reigniting” those old regulatory efforts. An example: The White House this week banned Chinese-made “humanoid and quadruped robots” to “protect the U.S. AI build-out,” said Reuters.

A mathematician has somewhat unceremoniously announced that he has disproven an almost 90-year-old problem — with the help of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model. The announcement sent waves through social media and the inner circles of mathematics, as the latest in a series of AI-driven mathematical achievements that shook the field and called future math into question.

What math problem did AI tackle?

The Jacobian conjecture is “false,” Harvard University mathematician and Anthropic employee Levent Alpoge said on X, thanking his “close friend Akhil for asking about it” and his “other close friend Fable” for “working during the World Cup final.” Attached was a mathematical formula, a counterexample to the decades-old problem. Despite the fact the problem “bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years,” the conjecture “proved no obstacle” for Anthropic’s “latest frontier AI model,” said Mashable.

A conjecture is an “idea that some mathematicians believe is true,” but nobody has been “able to prove or disprove,” said mathematician Melissa Lee at The Conversation. This algebraic geometry theory suggests that a “certain type of mathematical function would also work in reverse” and was “formally set out” by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939, said New Scientist. It was one of 18 “fiendishly difficult problems for mathematicians to tackle in the 21st century,” according to a list curated by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.

The AI-generated counterexample that Alpoge shared online is the “latest in a series of AI-driven mathematical breakthroughs,” said Fortune. The technology’s “progress (or assault)” on unsolved mathematics has “compounded rapidly since mid-2025,” when models first solved “five of six problems” at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

After that, OpenAI’s model disproved an “80-year-old Erdos conjecture on combinatorial geometry” in May. In June, more than a dozen researchers from 15 universities published a declaration on AI and mathematics, urging their colleagues to “set guardrails around transparency, attribution and peer review” before AI “reshapes what mathematical knowledge even means,” Fortune added. Mathematicians, “relegated to the role of shepherd,” are left to watch AI “close these questions one-by-one, reaching places where the human mind can’t follow.” The mathematicians’ reaction is a “now familiar mixture of dread and amazement.”

What does this mean for the future of math?

The significance of the AI’s discovery varies depending on whom you ask. The counterexample did not “cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do," professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg said to Mashable. This is “exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do.”

The counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg said, but there’s a difference between providing proof of a mathematical problem and showing a singular counterexample that disproves it. In other words, the counterexample “tells us essentially nothing.” Just that there are a lot of polynomials (a math equation that has numbers and letters representing variables). It’s “hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”

Among other “recent AI-assisted breakthroughs,” the Jacobian conjecture counterexample stands out for being “remarkably simple,” Lee said at The Conversation. The difficulty in finding the solution seems to have “lain not in an intricate construction or a lengthy proof” but rather in finding a good way of “navigating an enormous search space of possible polynomial mappings to find one with the right properties.” AI, this suggests, may “prove to be just as valuable for discovering unexpected mathematical objects as it is for constructing proofs.” What this means for the “future of mathematics and human mathematicians” remains to be seen.

For some, the recent developments with AI foreshadow a future of “increasingly capable AI models that will solve ever more complex problems,” said New Scientist. AI can “already produce master’s degrees in mathematics,” mathematician Ivan Fesenko at Westlake University in China said to the outlet. In a year, it will produce “Ph.D. degrees in mathematics.” Then the question arises, “do we really need so many mathematicians around if AI can do such things so nicely?”

What happened

Former trillionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company x.AI has filed a lawsuit against Minnesota’s “first-in-the-nation law” banning programs and applications that “create and post deepfake videos or images of people naked without their consent,” said MPR News. Those found in violation of Minnesota’s anti-nudification rule risk fines of “$500,000 for each unlawful access, download or use,” per the law’s text.

Who said what

The AI company did not dispute that the state has “valid interests” in barring the “dissemination of artificially generated nude images of people without their consent,” said Bloomberg Law. Rather, it argued that Minnesota’s rule goes “far beyond that goal” and exposes a “wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanctions.”

What next?

Musk’s suit holds that Minnesota’s law is “unconstitutional” and should either be “placed on hold while the case proceeds” or “struck down entirely,” said MPR News. The provision is set to go into effect on August 1. If and when it does, x.AI has threatened to “limit services for users in the state.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul understands what her constituents want, said Sara Pequeño in USA Today. The Democrat recently imposed a one-year moratorium on the construction of large AI data centers, giving state regulators breathing space to write new rules intended to limit the effect these “gigantic eyesores” have on power grids, water supplies, and local communities. It’s the “right move—and a politically savvy one.” While many lawmakers support data center projects, claiming they’ll “bring jobs and economic activity to their municipalities,” voters aren’t buying it. They know these buildings are noisy, generate a lot of air pollution, use up tons of water, and are causing electricity bills to skyrocket. More Democrats should follow Hochul’s example, said Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times. In our “virulently partisan” era, “rage against data centers” is one of the only issues that unites ordinary voters on the Left and the Right. At the grassroots level, the opposition includes eco activists, soccer moms, farmers, and hardcore MAGA types. If Democrats can harness this energy and “anti-establishment sentiment,” they could create “a political movement that wins elections.”

This resistance is about more than just NIMBYism, said The Economist. A Pew survey from April found that “Americans who have merely heard of data centers are just as opposed to them as those who live within 5 miles of one.” It’s because of the fears of what data centers represent: the growth of artificial intelligence that could “doom humanity by hoovering up all its resources and paving Earth with servers.” Tech leaders are partly to blame for this mess, because they’ve spent years warning that their AI tools will “throw most people out of work” or be used to inflict “mass harm.” Now that the infrastructure needed to achieve their AI revolution “is arriving on people’s doorsteps,” who can blame Americans for wanting to slow the progress?

But this is “blocking development that would benefit” their communities, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. New York’s green mandates and resistance to building new generation plants have reduced the state’s electricity supply and caused prices to rise—not AI data centers. Hochul also leaves out the fact that “data centers can also deliver a property tax windfall” along with thousands of jobs. AI is set to be “fracking all over again,” said the New York Post. New York banned the energy-extraction practice “on the basis of bogus environmental concerns,” and as a result the state lost out on “tens of thousands of jobs and literally trillions in wealth” that went next door to Pennsylvania. Now, billions of dollars in investment are going to AI-friendly Pennsylvania, all because “New York is banning progress.”

US dominance of the AI landscape is receding with the release of Kimi K3, the newest model developed by a Chinese start-up called Moonshot AI.

Kimi K3 is as “powerful as the most advanced AI systems” from the US, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while being “cheaper to run”, said The Telegraph. It is available for people to freely download and is an “open-weight model”. This allows developers to download it, modify it and run it on their own servers for free, “positioning it for easier adoption and a wider market globally”, said CNN.

How good is K3?

K3 was “beating” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model and OpenAI’s 5.5 in most coding and “general AI agent benchmarks”, according to results released by Beijing-based start-up Moonshot. This was while costing “about a third of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8”, said the Financial Times. But K3 was “falling short” of Anthropic’s Fable model.

Unlike the “closed” and “proprietary” American systems, K3’s “open nature” allows global users to “modify the system for advanced reasoning and complex software development”, said the BBC. It will be the world’s first open source model in the “three-trillion-parameter class”. A parameter refers to “learned values within a machine learning model that determine how it maps input data into outputs”, said IBM.

The release of K3 had an “immediate” market reaction, said The New York Times. The Nasdaq dropped around 1%, with investors selling shares in US companies like Intel and Nvidia, who make computer chips to power AI.

How have Anthropic and OpenAI reacted?

Anthropic and OpenAI have accused Chinese companies of “improperly harvesting data” from their systems to “accelerate” their own competing models’ development. However, after years of “operating under export controls” and “tight computing constraints”, China’s advances “cannot be explained by distillation alone”. There is “real innovation going on”, said Graham Webster, a Stanford University professor.

The “steady stream” of Chinese open-source AI models, including K3, that “rivals” the performance of “costly systems from Silicon Valley” have become the “preferred choice” for developers, said the NYT. President Trump has “repeatedly framed maintaining America’s “lead” in the “defining technological race of our time” as a “strategic imperative for preserving the country’s economic and national security”. These technological developments have “underscored the geopolitical stakes of the US-China contest for leadership”.

What does this mean for US dominance in AI?

Xi Jinping released a statement saying AI development should not be a “solo performance by a single country” but instead a “symphony of international cooperation”. He said China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of AI development”.

US AI leaders and policy makers had taken “comfort” from “estimates that China remained six to 12 months behind”, even with Chinese open-weight models “gaining momentum”, said Axios. However, the release of Kimi K3 suggests that “cushion may have collapsed far faster than expected”. With the “entire game changed”, this could “trigger some code red for some”, said AI analyst Kim Isenberg.

American labs are “hardly out of ammunition” with OpenAI and Anthropic “racing ahead” to build newer systems like GPT-6 and Claude Opus 5. But even if the US “pulls ahead” again, China has shown it can “close the gap quickly”.

Two of the biggest tech giants are locked in a head-to-head legal battle, with Apple claiming OpenAI stole trade secrets as the AI start-up plans its first hardware devices.

Apple launched the “blockbuster lawsuit” last week, accusing OpenAI and several of its staff – formerly Apple employees – of “stealing secret hardware plans”, said the Financial Times. One of the staff named in the lawsuit is OpenAI’s head of hardware, who was “a top Apple device designer”.

The lawsuit, which doesn’t name OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, amounts to “a spectacular breakdown in the relationship” between two of Silicon Valley’s “biggest names”.

What is the background between the two?

Apple and OpenAI launched a partnership in 2024, working to integrate OpenAI technology into Apple’s voice assistant, Siri. Apple also built ChatGPT into operating systems for iPhones, iPads and Macs.

But tensions began to surface last year when OpenAI bought a hardware start-up co-founded by Jony Ive, the former chief designer at Apple – and the brains behind the iPhone. OpenAI’s $6.4 billion purchase of io Products signalled that it was “foraying into hardware”, said The Guardian.

OpenAI is working with the “design guru” to develop a line of AI devices, including a hand-held gadget similar to a smart speaker, but equipped with a camera. These are “intended to compete with the iPhone and other Apple products”, said Bloomberg. Ive is “helping lead an effort to supplant” the very device he did so much to create. Much of his design team at Apple followed him and now work either at OpenAI or on its hardware products. This “exodus” has “fuelled resentment” at Apple.

The scale of departures is “astounding”, said Business Insider. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, with some being “unusually senior”. Apple is “furious” that it’s losing talent to “a scrappy start-up” that’s “refusing to stay in its lane”. Last month it unveiled its revamped Siri, which used Google’s Gemini AI model rather than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

What does the lawsuit claim?

“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote. The suit claims OpenAI “poached Apple employees”, said The Guardian, “coaxing them to hand over confidential material, product designs and other tightly held information”.

It names Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer – and a former vice-president at Apple. In 2024, Tan left Apple to work on Ive’s start-up. After OpenAI purchased io Products, it appointed Tan as its own chief hardware officer. The lawsuit claims Tan took information about Apple suppliers with him.

Apple also alleges that when its employees went for job interviews at OpenAI, Tan “asked them to show up with something unusual”, said The Verge: hardware components they were working on at Apple and unreleased product samples for “show and tell sessions”.

Apple claims another former employee took an Apple laptop when he left for OpenAI, and used an authentication bug to breach the company’s internal network and download “dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files”.

After filing the lawsuit, Apple sent “a barrage” of legal warnings to about 40 of its former employees at OpenAI, looking for evidence, said the FT. These “aggressive tactics” show “just how broad and combative the legal fight could become”.

What does OpenAI say?

OpenAI says it is not aware of “any evidence that the complaint has merit”. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” said a spokesperson. But if the case goes to trial, it could “reveal the secret hardware OpenAI has long teased”, said CNET, perhaps before it is ready to launch.

Apple is seeking damages and a court order that would block OpenAI from possessing or using its trade secrets. Essentially, OpenAI is “a huge threat” to Apple, said Business Insider. It wants to either “directly challenge the iPhone, or completely replace this device as the go-to gadget of the AI era”.

OpenAI is “ridiculously well funded”, so Apple can’t easily acquire it to bring talent back into the fold. It’s also “too ambitious to swat away or subsume easily”. This explains “the intensity (or desperation?)” of Apple’s lawsuit.

The dispute also “underscores just how intertwined Apple and OpenAI have become”, said Bloomberg. “It’s an extraordinarily awkward situation, made all the more remarkable by the web of personal relationships that still connects the two companies.”

‘Structural shifts demand a new central banking mindset’

Vivekanand Jayakumar at The Hill

While the “primary objective of most central banks” is “unchanged, the post-pandemic economic landscape has evolved in ways that require policymakers to rethink how monetary policy is designed,” says Vivekanand Jayakumar. The “pandemic shock and its aftermath substantially altered underlying economic trends and gave rise to a new geopolitical reality.” Forces are “reshaping inflation dynamics, impacting economy’s growth potential, and altering monetary policy transmission mechanisms.” So “central bankers will need to exhibit greater flexibility, adaptability and forward-looking decision-making.”

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‘Where did all the computer science professors go?’

Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic

AI companies are “turning into something like mini-universities,” say Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch. As AI has “taken center stage, Silicon Valley has intensified its efforts to recruit star researchers and looked beyond computer science departments.” While “plenty of research is still happening within universities,” the “result is a flywheel.” As “more academics get sucked up by industry, the center of AI research moves further from academia, thus increasing the incentive for remaining researchers to leave.”

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‘We are taking hobbies too far’

Meehika Barua at Time

Having hobbies shows that you “have the time, money and energy to spend on them,” says Meehika Barua. But we have “turned hobbies from optional leisure activities into a marker of identity.” Hobbies are “increasingly sold as a route to becoming a more interesting or successful person rather than simply a way to spend free time.” This can “leave people feeling guilty if they prefer quieter pursuits or if they discover they don’t enjoy the hobby that everyone else seems to love.”

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‘He may be Trump’s only real friend. He’s quietly transforming the world.’

Andrea Bernstein at Slate

Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff “seems like Trump, a New York real estate developer turned world dealmaker,” says Andrea Bernstein. But in an administration that “privileges snarling visages, Witkoff is nearly universally described as kind or nice, a quality he has used to good diplomatic effect.” As Witkoff “presided over a tenuous ceasefire deal with Hamas and Israel, he surrounded those talks with meetings with big-name Gulf leaders.” He is “unabashed about performing diplomacy through a business lens.”

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A recent study conducted by Anthropic, the creator of Claude, analysed the AI chatbot’s responses across different languages. It found that if you want a friendlier tone, you may want to switch your language settings.

Results may vary

Anthropic compared data from more than 300,000 anonymised conversations in a two-week period during May 2026, said The Decoder. The company looked into samples from the top 20 languages of Claude.ai and their three models: Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7. The results showed Claude “emphasises different values” when producing responses in different languages.

The study used the technique “dimensionality reduction” to measure the responses across four separate axes: warmth vs. rigour, depth vs. brevity, candour vs. execution and deference vs. caution. Anthropic “explicitly states” this study does not “imply that Claude intrinsically holds values”, but instead the term “values” refers to “values reflected by Claude’s behaviour and outputs”.

The warmth vs. rigour axis that studies “whether Claude leans towards expressing positivity and care for the person or emphasising accuracy and precision” saw the most fluctuation in results, said The Indian Express.

The results showed the “systematic differences” in Claude’s responses. For example, Arabic responses were shown to have “greater warmth”, meaning they contained more “polite phrasing, humour, playfulness, and affirmation”, said The Decoder. On the candour vs. execution axis, Dutch responses showed a more “honest appraisal of potential shortcomings”, said The Register.

Anthropic “isn’t yet sure” what properties caused these “linguistic differences”, said Techbrew on Instagram.

Proceed with caution

Despite the interesting results, there are some “limits” to the "explanatory power” of the study, said The Decoder. Some languages had “far more data than others” and were more “overrepresented in professional writing”, making the data not “evenly distributed”, said Anthropic.

The main point was “addressing hidden biases and language-specific gaps” when training the AI model, said The Indian Express. However, the subject “deserves further exploration” because of the “important implications” for how people use such AI products, said The Register.

Anthropic gave the example of two people using Claude to give feedback on the same business plan, one in Hindi and the other in Russian, and saw that “Claude expressed different values in how it framed its assessment”.

The study also showed the response differences across Claude’s models. Sonnet 4.6 appeared to be more affirming towards users’ ideas and “offers comfort without passing judgement”, while Opus 4.7 “openly critiques” and “questions assumptions”, said The Decoder. Sonnet 4.6 is the default free model on the Anthropic platform. Opus 4.7 is the premium paid model of Claude.

These differences remain an “open question” as Anthropic said it is “making sense of this variation” and using what it learns to “improve Claude’s behaviour”.

Across the country, people have been up in arms about the increasing ubiquity of AI data centers, but now a proposal to build a massive AI plant just steps from the Nashville Zoo has brought the subject of animal rights into the fray. As people in Nashville propose ways to stop the data center’s construction, the affected zoo animals could present a new wave of backlash against artificial intelligence.

‘Disrupt the environmental conditions’

The proposed data center, built by the Atlanta firm DC BLOX, would be located about 50 yards from the boundary of the Nashville Zoo, officials told NBC News, or just half a football field away. The zoo is “vehemently opposed to having a data center so close to animals” because the “noise could disturb its residents,” Nashville Zoo President and CEO Rick Schwartz said to NBC.

For many, the “focus of the brewing anger is how it might affect the zoo’s most endangered or prized species,” said The New York Times. Much of the concern involves the facility’s clouded leopards, a threatened species that represents one of the “crown jewels of the zoo’s conservation program.” The clouded leopard breeding enclosure would be “about 320 feet from the proposed data center’s property line.”

Officials are “particularly concerned about the potential effect of light and noise from the data center, given that animals are more sensitive than humans,” Dr. Heather Schwartz, who oversees animal health at the Nashville Zoo, told the Times. The noise could “disrupt the environmental conditions critical not only for the clouded leopard breeding program but for the more than 3,000 animals that call the zoo home,” said CNN. The facility has launched a petition to stop the data center, which currently has over 500,000 signatures.

Demanding stronger regulations

Some are worried that a data center near the Nashville Zoo could spark a larger trend, and these data centers “can have real consequences for animals,” said animal news platform The Animal Reader. Such locations near populated areas have “cooling equipment, backup generators and bright security lighting” that “can disturb wildlife, especially nocturnal animals such as bats, owls and insects,” especially in areas with large animal populations.

This has made the zoo a new focus of the political fight against data centers. After the plan was announced, an “unprecedented crowd” showed up to Nashville’s planning commission meeting as “hundreds of residents turned out to oppose data centers,” said The Tennessean. Numerous speakers “urged city leaders to slow the industry’s expansion, adopt stronger regulations and stop a proposed South Nashville data center project next to the zoo that critics say is far larger than originally disclosed.”

The fight is the “latest example of data centers getting pushback in communities nationwide, as neighbors say they don’t want to live near them or object more broadly to the direction of the tech and AI industries,” said NBC. But even amid a “bipartisan push for regulation, as well as lawsuits and opposition to tax breaks,” DC BLOX is not backing down. “We look forward to working with local officials, community members and the Nashville Zoo to minimize local impacts and to assure that there will be no health risks to residents or animals,” the company told NBC.

‘The dangerous myth of flexibility’

David Weil at The American Prospect

Schedule flexibility has become the “lynchpin of a well-traveled myth that corporations have spun to their employees, policymakers and the public,” says David Weil. But with AI being “explored as a replacement for many white-collar jobs, and the gig work model continuing its global expansion into new sectors like healthcare, information technology, staffing, hospitality and childcare, the flexibility myth now threatens the hard-won rights and protections afforded to tens of millions of working people.” While companies like “Uber and Lyft insist” that flexibility benefits their drivers, it actually “benefits Uber and Lyft.”

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‘Republicans lean into anti-Asian racism ahead of midterms’

Ja’han Jones at MS NOW

Some conservatives are “resorting to anti-Asian racism and anti-Chinese xenophobia as the Republican Party faces a potential shellacking in this year’s midterms,” says Ja’han Jones. The attacks “underscore the exploitative posture that some in the GOP have taken toward Asian Americans.” Polls have “shown Americans broadly oppose President Donald Trump and the GOP’s agenda,” so it “seems the party is leaning into voter suppression gambits and overt racism as it tries to maintain power.”

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‘Will Iraq’s new prime minister really take on corruption?’

Mina Al-Oraibi at Foreign Policy

Corruption has “continued to grow” in Iraq, and even “wide-ranging arrests do not represent a majority of those who have siphoned money from the Iraqi state,” says Mina Al-Oraibi. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi is “personally overseeing the anti-corruption cases” and “needs to do this in part because he remains a weak candidate.” But a “wide-ranging and impartial effort to eliminate all corruption would take time,” and al-Zaidi has been in office for “less than two months.”

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‘The tech bro-ification of marketing’

Miranda Shanahan at Time

The “tech bro-ification of marketing is underway,” says Miranda Shanahan. Beneath this “trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded and valued.” The “marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific.” The “first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste.” It “might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern.”

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Google’s alliance with the film studio A24 shows how AI companies are “deepening their influence in Hollywood,” said John Semley in Wired. The tech giant’s artificial intelligence lab, DeepMind, last month announced a $75 million “research partnership” with A24, the indie studio behind critically acclaimed films such as Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this year’s horror megahit Backrooms. The studio says it will lean on Google’s AI expertise “to learn, iterate, and build” new tools “and workflows.” But it’s one in a “line of controversial marriages between Silicon Valley and Hollywood” that has made viewers and craftspeople uneasy. Nearly 1,000 actors, agents, and parents last week signed an open letter protesting a new clause in Hasbro’s contracts with child actors on the animated kids’ series Peppa Pig that asks them to hand over rights to their voices for AI cloning. Fans of A24, which has a reputation as a bastion for “serious artists,” are also worried that the tie-up with Google will introduce more “AI slop.”

Film lovers shouldn’t be concerned, said Brian Welk in IndieWire. This is not an “IP deal nor a data-training deal,” like the Lionsgate partnership with Runway or Disney’s stake in OpenAI. It’s a logical attempt by A24 to understand how these new tools can “support filmmakers when they are designed from the start to serve creative vision.”

AI on its own hasn’t produced anything “people would pay to see,” said Charles Pulliam-Moore in The Verge. Rather, human artists are starting to test how they “can leverage the technology in compelling ways.” Dear Upstairs Neighbors, an animated film written and directed by Pixar veteran Connie Qin He, was originally conceived on paper using acrylics. But Google AI brought it to life and further enhanced it “with stylized assets” that turned out to be very successful. AI is everywhere in Hollywood, said Jake Kanter in Deadline, you just don’t know it. It’s being used surreptitiously “to smooth rough edges, alter dialogue, and polish visual effects,” akin to cosmetic surgery. Producers are “terrified of audience and industry backlash.” But if the technology “is genuinely helping creatives make better movies,” then audiences should be educated about how it’s used.

The fact is that Hollywood doesn’t yet have a grip on its feelings about AI, said Aaron Pruner in CNET. Some industry legends like Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino “look down” on the technology. Others like Martin Scorsese are embracing it. There are “very real concerns that AI will make” many Hollywood careers obsolete, and that “stress is palpable.” But not everyone has given up hope that “strong and unique storytelling” can still “cut through the slop.” Better to “get familiar with the tools,” because “AI is obviously here to stay.”

Who opposes data centers?

Most Americans. A recent Gallup poll found that 71% of voters, including 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans, don’t want a data center built in their area. Hostility to these artificial intelligence facilities is “the most bipartisan issue since beer,” Milwaukee-based comedian Charlie Berens said at a recent rally against a 700,000-square-foot Meta facility in Port Washington, Wis. Opponents of these warehouse-like complexes, which are filled with energy-hungry computer servers, are racking wins. At least 75 projects worth about $130 billion were blocked or canceled in the first three months of 2026. After a 247,000-square-foot data center was proposed in Monterey Park, Calif., voters there last month overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure permanently banning such projects. Theirs is the first U.S. city with such a prohibition, but at least 67 other towns have temporary bans. Politicians who support data centers are paying the price at the polls: Stuart Adams, president of Utah’s state senate, and two local commissioners lost their GOP primaries last week after helping to approve a 62-square-mile facility in northwestern Utah. “Everybody who touched the data center went down,” said Brenna Williams, an anti-data-center campaigner. “People just wanted to send a message.”

Why do people want to block these projects?

For some, it’s the vast amount of water and energy they use. Water is used to cool servers, which can get dangerously hot, and a large facility can guzzle up to 5 million gallons a day—about as much as a town of 50,000 people. In areas already struggling with drought, such as Utah, many residents fear the needs of data centers will be put before their own. Data centers also strain power grids. The nation’s more than 4,000 data centers now consume 6% of all U.S. electricity, up from 4% two years ago, and a single large-scale facility can use about 1 gigawatt of electricity, enough to power 750,000 homes. With data centers being built faster than new power sources are coming online, utility bills are rising fast. In states with a high concentration of data centers, such as Virginia, electricity prices have spiked 267% in five years. There are other concerns: the pollution pumped out by on-site generators, the constant hum of cooling systems, and the sheer size and ugliness of the buildings. Opposition to data centers is “rooted in the one thing that has always united Americans,” said Megan Mullin, a professor of public policy at UCLA: “Our deep affinity for where we live.”

What do AI firms say?

They argue that fears around water and energy use are overblown, and that data centers are a net gain for communities. The build-out of 3,000 planned facilities is expected to create 4.7 million temporary construction-related jobs, according to a Meta-backed policy group. It also projects that some 700,000 permanent jobs will be created to operate and manage those facilities. To reduce the environmental impact of their centers, firms including Microsoft and OpenAI have pledged to slash water use, and microchip makers such as Nvidia are designing more energy-efficient processors. But opposition to data centers is likely to remain intense.

Why is that?

Because that opposition is motivated in part by hostility to artificial intelligence. A June survey by consultancy Milltown Partners found only 8% of data center opponents actually live near a facility, and that 63% have a negative view of AI. That suggests data centers are a stand-in for anger at Big Tech and AI, which some industry leaders have warned could result in mass unemployment and—in a worst-case scenario—humanity’s extinction. The opposition “isn’t happening in a vacuum,” said Milltown’s Tom Brookes. “The AI transformation is arriving at a time when Americans already feel angry, insecure, and pessimistic.” In some cases, that anger is turning into violence. In April, an unknown attacker fired 13 shots into the home of an Indianapolis councilman who’d voted in favor of an AI facility, and left a note that read “No Data Centers.”

How are lawmakers responding to the backlash?

Some want a pause in construction. New York’s Democratic-led state legislature in May passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers; it has yet to be signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. In April, Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills vetoed similar legislation. The populist right is also pushing back on data centers, despite President Trump issuing an executive order last year to speed their construction. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May barring utilities from shifting data center costs to ordinary ratepayers. And red-tape averse Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last month issued sweeping data center regulation recommendations for the state legislature to pass in its next session, including mandating “closed loop” cooling systems that reuse water and requiring new facilities to contribute to the state’s electricity supply.

Is a halt on construction likely?

No, because too many officials want a slice of the money being poured into the buildout; six Big Tech companies will spend an estimated $1 trillion on data centers in 2027. Few politicians on either the Left or Right have backed calls for a pause or a ban; more are pushing measures they claim will reduce the impact of data center development. Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger is set to sign a tax on data center energy usage, capped at $600 million a year, while Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently paused tax breaks for AI facilities after a government report found they cost the state nearly $1.6 billion in lost revenue last year. But those measures won’t stop protests by anti-data-center campaigners, who are demanding a meaningful crackdown on the industry. “I’m frustrated,” said Annette Singh of Hilliard, Ohio, who says a huge new Amazon data center has ruined her once peaceful neighborhood. “I want better politicians.”

The hype of artificial intelligence is running up against pricey realities, at least for now. MacBooks and Xboxes are getting more expensive due to “AI inflation.” Central bankers are warning the AI boom could soon trigger a financial crash. Ford, meanwhile, has hired hundreds of engineers to do the work that artificial intelligence software could not. It has opened debate as to whether the benefits of AI are worth the costs.

What did the commentators say?

The mass buildout of data centers has created the “global shortage of memory and storage chips” behind the new device price hikes, said CBS News. MacBook Pros are going from $1,699 to $1,999, while the entry-level Xbox is rising to $499 from $399. The demand from tech giants such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle leaves fewer chips for “regular consumer devices,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said to the outlet. “That just further drives up prices.”

That inflation is typical of any “technological revolution,” Jennifer Schonberger said at Yahoo Finance. Big investment in new tech puts “pressures on resources with a lot of demand chasing a limited supply.” For now, AI inflation is “screwing with the rest of the economy,” said John Herrman at New York magazine. Once-accessible goods “seem to be slipping out of reach” of ordinary Americans, which “could meaningfully contribute to an already apocalyptic” national mood.

But the data center surge could come to a sudden, thudding halt if those big companies do not soon see a return on their investment. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) on Sunday warned that an end to the data center “spending spree” could “rattle financial markets and damage the global economy,” said the Financial Times. There are “instructive parallels” in the dotcom boom of the 1990s and the buildout of British railways in the 19th century, the BIS said in its annual economic report. “These episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.”

The payoffs are fuzzy. Ford has hired 350 “veteran engineers” to “reprogram the artificial intelligence tools that weren’t getting the job done,” said Bloomberg. AI is a “fantastic tool,” Ford executive Charles Poon said to reporters last week, per the outlet. But it is “only as good as the information you use to train it.” Ford’s dramatic shift to AI was a “grave mistake” that affected the company’s quality control, said Danni Santana at Moneywise. That happens “when you overcommit to the technology without properly training it.” The company will still use AI, but its experience demonstrates that the technology cannot “completely replace humans in the workforce” for now.

What next?

Businesses that enthusiastically embraced artificial intelligence are now trying to find a balance. Many firms urged their employees to “integrate AI tools into their work” only to see their “AI spending bills double or triple,” said The Wall Street Journal. Executives at enterprises like Uber, Meta and Microsoft are now looking to “steer workers toward cheaper, homegrown tools” and help those employees “hone their skills.”

The Supreme Court has released a slew of opinions to mark the end of its current term, and one of them could prove to be a landmark case for personal protections. The Court has ruled that privacy laws must protect against widespread searches of phone location data — a decision that could prove to have a monumental impact on future Fourth Amendment cases.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

The Court’s opinion in the case, Chatrie v. United States, holds that people have an “expectation of privacy from the government as their mobile devices track them throughout their daily activities,” said Politico, even if this data has already been shared with tech companies like Google and Apple. The crux of the case stems from a 2019 armed robbery at a Virginia bank and how police tracked down the robber.

During the hunt for the robbery suspect, police used a cellular data search warrant called a geofence warrant to “capture location data from all the phones in the vicinity of the bank for 30 minutes before and after the robbery,” said The New York Times. The eventual suspect was found using the geofence warrant, but he argued that this type of broad search was illegal under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, because innocent people’s data could also be obtained using the search.

The Trump administration pushed back, contending that users do not have an “expectation of privacy after voluntarily sharing their location data with companies like Google,” said Politico. But the Supreme Court did not buy that argument, ruling that “sensitive data scooped up by geofence warrants counts as a Fourth Amendment search, and offers individuals a reasonable expectation of privacy, even if they may be in a public area,” said The Guardian. The 6-3 ruling included dissents from conservative-leaning Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.

What is the bigger picture?

The Court did not completely strike down the use of geofence warrants, instead sending the matter back to the Circuit Court of Appeals to determine whether these warrants are actually constitutional violations. “It is therefore now up to the court of appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her majority opinion.

The Court’s decision could weigh the scales in determining whether the lower court eventually cuts down geofence warrants. Privacy advocates have “raised concerns about geofence warrants, calling them a form of dragnet surveillance because the information is not just about one suspect, but anyone who was in the location in question,” said NBC News. These advocates have “warned that such warrants could be used to target disfavored political groups, including protesters.”

In the meantime, while the lower court decides, the Supreme Court’s ruling “narrows the scope of what cloud-stored data the federal government can lawfully obtain without an individualized warrant,” said The Hill. Policing could also be affected by the ruling, as geofence warrants are “typically employed by investigators when they know specific details of a crime but don’t yet have a suspect.” Not allowing them to proceed could make solving crimes using cellular data more difficult.

With its $22 billion deal to acquire Roku earlier this month, Fox suddenly became a “rather ferocious” player in “the next phase of the streaming wars,” said The Economist. Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire had been a “noncombatant” in the years-long melee, preferring to keep “its powder dry while companies such as Disney blew gazillions on building streaming services to compete with Netflix.” But it has been quietly amassing a substantial streaming portfolio, beginning in 2020 with Tubi—a free, ad-supported service now with as many viewers as Paramount and NBCUniversal’s Peacock—and launching Fox One last year. With Roku, which sells smart TVs and streaming hardware and software, and has its own streaming channel, Fox would become the third-largest streaming company behind YouTube and Netflix, commanding “11% of streaming viewership in America.”

Fox is finally looking beyond cable, said David Dayen in The American Prospect. Only 36% of households in the U.S. had linear TV in 2025, according to Pew Research Center data, down from 85% a decade ago. And only 16% of those cable subscribers are under 30. “It’s a matter of time” before these whole cable systems “are shut down.” Roku’s easy-to-use hardware has made it “essentially the cable box of the 21st century.” This deal gives Fox “control of that box.” We’ve hit “a turning point in the streaming wars,” said Sara Fischer in Axios, which is no longer a race to gather the most subscribers. It’s a race to see who has a bigger “competitive edge against Netflix.” For Fox, that means “bringing more eyeballs to its live programming” like news and sports, “and selling more digital TV ads.”

“What a shame,” said Devindra Hardawar in Engadget. Roku began as “an innovative streaming platform” that “pushed TVs to be smarter.” Now it’ll be just “another cog in the Murdoch empire,” soon to be “flooded with Fox News content and ads.” That it comes so shortly after Paramount, and its right-wing ownership, bought Warner Bros. Discovery is “yet another sign of media consolidation” that will “ultimately make our lives worse.”

This is Lachlan Murdoch’s biggest move since taking over from his 95-year-old father as Fox CEO in 2019, said Chris Hughes in Bloomberg. And it’s a risky gamble. Yes, he “had to do something sooner or later to address Fox’s reliance on legacy cable TV.” But this attempt “to future-proof Fox is looking incredibly expensive.” Fox offered $160 a share, “nearly 40% above Roku’s stock price.” That’s a $7 billion premium. “Cue a savage market reaction,” which slashed $4 billion off Fox’s valuation. Lachlan has spent the past couple years “tidying up his family’s messy ownership of the media empire,” which had lifted Fox’s stock price. We’ll have to wait and see if this “plot twist” pays off.

Kalshi and Polymarket currently dominate the prediction market industry, but one of the wealthiest men on Earth wants to change the status quo. Meta is developing an experimental prediction app at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While Kalshi and Polymarket are both billion-dollar brands, the already controversial prediction market could be turned on its head if the man controlling Facebook and Instagram gets his way.

What is Meta working on?

Zuckerberg has ordered a small team at Meta to “create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi,” according to The New York Times. The app is being referred to within Meta as Arena and “would function independently from Meta’s social networking apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.” Meta hopes to “grow the app by leveraging its large social networking audiences and directing them toward using it.”

As with the other major prediction apps, users will be allowed to “guess the outcome of real-world events,” said NPR. But at least for the time being, Arena would have one big difference from most prediction platforms: Unlike Kalshi and Polymarket, users on Meta’s app “would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video-game-like points system instead,” said the Times. However, Meta has “not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting.”

There will also reportedly be an AI aspect to Meta’s app, as it will use “Llama, the company’s large language model, to automatically generate questions from trending topics,” said NPR. Arena is not the first time Meta has tried to get into the prediction marketplace; in 2020, the company “released an app called Forecast, a crowdsourced prediction market app where people could guess about what might happen in the world, including predictions about the course of the pandemic.” The app did not take off and was shut down in 2022.

What does this mean for prediction markets?

Zuckerberg’s bet comes at a time when the industry is booming. Prediction markets “surged in popularity during the 2024 U.S. presidential election and have evolved ​into an asset class that lets investors wager on a variety of events, from monetary policy to sports tournaments,” said Reuters. The entire market could reach more than $1 trillion in value by 2030, according to wealth management firm Bernstein.

But the industry has also “drawn ​increasing scrutiny as well-timed trades ahead of ​President Donald Trump’s major policy surprises have potentially led to millions of dollars in profits ​for unknown traders,” said Reuters. It is possible that a prediction market app from Meta could create similar scrutiny. Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to mind this, though, and probably wants to follow the lead of “other social media sites” like X, which “forged a partnership with Polymarket last summer” and have “sought to capitalize on the industry,” said TechCrunch.

Adding another prediction tool to the mix could also further complicate legal proceedings, which are already fairly complicated. States have “begun to sue prediction markets over what they allege are violations of gambling laws,” said TechCrunch. In yet another twist, the “current administration, which is decidedly pro-prediction market, has sued states for having sued prediction markets.” But even as these cases progress, the industry has continually “fueled big profits.”

If a hacker steals your password, you can create a new one, but if someone gains access to your fingerprint or iris data, you can hardly replace your fingers or eyes. But a new study has shown promise with a technique that allows users to “update” their fingerprints, which could make us all safer online.

Spy novels

Concern about the security of using fingerprints instead of passwords has grown this month amid reports that scammers could extract close-ups of fingerprints from social media photos and “enhance them with AI”, said Moneywise. The criminals could then use the victim’s unique fingerprint ID to gain access to their accounts, or launch identity theft and phishing attacks, although they would still need access to a physical scanner, like a smartphone unlock key, to use the cloned fingerprint.

It “sounds like the stuff out of spy novels or ‘Mission Impossible’”, Vyas Sekar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CBS News, but “in theory, it’s possible, especially if people are posting high-resolution images”. In 2014, a hacker claimed to have cloned a fingerprint of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, then Germany’s defence minister, using close-up photos taken at a press event.

‘Scrambled and compressed’

A study in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics has found that “irreversible identity theft” can be “largely avoided” by giving users a chance to “reset” fingerprints and other biometrics, said TechXplore.

The method is “similar to changing a password”, said Knowridge. Rather than storing a person’s original fingerprint or other biometric information directly, it transforms their data into a protected version. To do this, it identifies unique features in a fingerprint image, such as distinctive patterns and points, and “uses mathematical methods to convert these features into a different form that is difficult to reverse-engineer”. The data is then “further scrambled and compressed” into a secure digital version.

In this form, it can still verify a person’s identity, but the original biometric data is hidden. If the protected version is ever compromised, it can be “cancelled and replaced”. Even if hackers gained access to the stored information, the user would not be permanently exposed.

For years, philosophy graduates have been the “butt of jokes about unemployable degrees”, said Thibault Spirlet in Business Insider. Now, they can earn six-figure salaries as the “world’s most powerful AI companies” try to “shape how machines think and behave”.

High-profile philosophers are already “embedded” in top AI firms. Amanda Askell is resident philosopher at Anthropic, and Iason Gabriel and Henry Shevlin work at Google DeepMind. OpenAI’s Sam Altman also claimed that the company employed “hundreds of moral philosophers” when designing rules for ChatGPT. But there is rising suspicion that there are ulterior motives at play.

‘Arc of redemption’

“Unemployed coders take note,” said The Economist: “there seems to be no shortage of work for philosophers of AI.” There are “thorny problems” in the developing field – “a philosopher’s favourite sort”.

Some “ancient” philosophical considerations are at the core of the contemporary tech industry. The idea of “Socratic ignorance” – that wisdom is an individual realising the extent of what they do not know – is a major principle in AI development used to avoid “sycophancy”.

Deliberating whether a system should follow deontological aims (“strict rules” against “lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end”), or consequentialist ones (which weigh “costs against benefits”) is also a common dilemma for developers.

Philosophy is key to safety practices, too. Implementing the concept of “AI constitutionalism” – where legally or morally authoritative texts are used as a base of “scaffolding” to direct the system – aims to prevent “ominous behaviour” from the models.

Anthropic revealed earlier this year that its Claude constitution included sources as “diverse as Immanuel Kant, Apple’s terms of service and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. This has been nicknamed the company’s “soul doc”.

A rise in demand for philosophers has also coincided with a decline in admissions for computer science students, said Lance Eliot in Forbes. Arguably, computer science has become a “dead-end endeavour”, creating “automation that replaces the humans who made it all possible”. AI programming once held the “promise of big bucks and a stellar career”. This may just be a minor “course correction”, as no doubt degrees that directly relate to AI will remain important, but nonetheless, philosophy is experiencing an “amazing arc of redemption”.

But influence goes both ways and is “not limited to Silicon Valley”, said Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on Observer. Philosophy is impacting tech, but the demands of the AI industry are reshaping the “long-standing” landscape of philosophical thought. Academia is “rapidly adapting” as foundational questions regarding consciousness, morality, minds and computation have taken on a “new urgency”.

Suspicion and ‘ethics-washing’

The two disciplines of computer science and philosophy have “never been quite as entangled” nor as “fraught” as they are now, said Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. In a fundamental sense, the “careful thought” of philosophy is “at odds with the frenetic pace of AI”. In turn, some experts are concerned that “misaligned incentives” will encourage a “rush of low-quality work”.

There is a “degree of suspicion” in the academic world about philosophers migrating to AI firms, said Joel Khalili in Wired. The whole industry poses significant ethical risks. These programmes could be used to “develop new weapons of mass destruction, undermine democracy, or entrench existing social iniquities”.

But the greatest fear is of “ethics-washing”. Hiring philosophers to train systems not only demonstrates to the public that these models are so advanced that they warrant the attention of “serious people”, but also shows that companies are “outwardly performing a commitment to AI safety”.

In a broader sense, there are growing fears that philosophical research is becoming an “extension of the marketing function” of labs. And even if philosophers are given “free rein” in tech companies, ultimately, they are “accountable to investors and shareholders”. Essentially, “if a for-profit AI company signs your pay cheque, might that compromise your research?”

It’s about time Europe started “flexing its innovation muscles,” said John Thornhill in the Financial Times. “In spite of the ambient Euro-gloom,” the continent still boasts extraordinary economic strengths. It is home to “thousands of world-class scientists and researchers” who are seeding “a vibrant early-stage startup ecosystem.” It’s also fast becoming a worldwide leader in areas such as material sciences, pharmaceuticals, and robotics. “If it could create a VC money-mobilization machine on a par with the U.S.,” things would really transform. To that end, the European Commission recently published new legislation that it says will “encourage more investment” in areas like data centers and chipmaking, which is “a welcome sign.” The commission also revealed a new framework to reduce reliance on the U.S. and China; that will be harder to achieve. The reality is that Europe still “remains inextricably dependent on U.S. technology,” and it won’t win in a fight with the Trump administration. But it is at least “finally flicking the switch from defensive regulation to creative innovation.”

Europe is right to worry, said The Economist. “The grip of American tech is, if anything, growing tighter.” French firms alone buy more than $50 billion “in software and cloud services annually from Uncle Sam’s tech giants.” Policymakers fear the U.S. could one day “wield tech as a geopolitical weapon, in the form of a kill switch that can turn off services.” Another concern is that Europe will get left behind economically if it can’t compete in the AI race against America and China, “which reaches into many sectors where Europe remains strong.” But building tech ecosystems up from scratch “is hard,” and “America’s strong economic momentum makes it harder still.” Unplugging from U.S. tech entirely is “probably an impossible task,” said Matt Burgess in Wired. The European Parliament has switched the default search engine on its devices from Google to a French alternative, and many French government workers are using home-grown open-source office software. But Europe is “deeply intertwined with U.S.-based technology firms,” especially those that do cloud computing, AI, cybersecurity, and mobile operating systems.

European businesses fear “the EU’s efforts to wean the continent off American technology could backfire,” said Chris Dorrell in The Times (U.K.). The new legislation includes a mandatory scoring system designed to rank the safety of foreign tech systems that some entrepreneurs have already likened to “another invisible compliance tax.” Europe also needs to tread carefully here, said the Financial Times in an editorial. “Making its economy more dynamic” is critical, but “it must avoid antagonizing” a Trump White House “that views EU regulation as aimed squarely at stifling U.S. dynamism.” In a “dog-eat-dog world,” Washington will be “ready to use its tech supremacy to exert leverage.”

It’s funny what the pressure of a ticking clock can do to a prime minister, said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. Just a few months ago, when more than 60 Labour MPs signed an open letter calling for a social media ban for under-16s, Keir Starmer wasn’t convinced. His own teenage children, he told MPs, had benefitted from using social media.

But with a leadership challenge looming, the panicking PM has suddenly “latched” on to this popular policy. He announced this week that, from next year, under-16s would be banned from social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X and Instagram. “I am not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children,” he declared.

Fencing the ocean

Strong rhetoric, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic, yet this policy “has all the hallmarks of another government failure”. In Australia, a similar ban has proven almost totally ineffectual. Some 70% of parents whose children used social media before the ban say they still do so. Australia's e-safety commissioner, who is in charge of enforcing the ban, has said that it's like trying to “fence the ocean”.

There are countless reasons why blanket bans don’t work, said Chris Stokel-Walker in The Independent. You have to outwit 14-year-olds armed with VPNs, older siblings, and “group chats full of instructions”. Age verification is difficult. And even if you do get the kids off big social media sites, they “don’t suddenly take up whittling”. They move to darker, harder-to-regulate parts of the web: to Discord servers, private groups. “A serious government would force platforms to change their products”, as the campaigner Ian Russell has urged, so that they don’t pummel children with harmful content. “But this is a dead-duck administration grasping for a legacy.”

‘Multi-front’ battle

Besides, whatever happened to parenting, asked Daniel Hannan in the Daily Mail. Why use the “heavy hand” of the state, when the tide is already turning and most people now limit their kids’ screen time?

If only it were that easy, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Like millions of other exhausted parents, I spend every day waging a “multi-front” battle against the screens: the iPhone and iPad, computer and PlayStation. I’ve set time limits, banned sites at the router, used third-party blockers. And yet still my children’s brains are being rotted by “AI slop, vacuous influencers” and silly videos, while I worry about far more damaging content. So, even if I have doubts about how it will work, I love the idea of the ban – like nine out of ten British parents consulted.

Until now, we’ve been fighting against the world’s most powerful tech companies almost totally unarmed, said Isabel Oakeshott in The Daily Telegraph. At last, the PM is giving us a “half-decent” weapon. Of course some children will get round the ban, as they do with underage drinking. But we haven’t abandoned the law on that, have we? I cannot wait to tell my teens “that lounging around on their screens is ‘literally illegal’”.

‘Tech’s private subsea cables are a threat to everyone else’

Elisabeth Braw at the Financial Times

For “decades, the world’s undersea cables have been owned by various companies,” but now U.S. “tech giants are installing their own cables — primarily for their own data traffic,” says Elisabeth Braw. This “risks creating a two-tier system on the seabed and dangerous dependencies on America.” Traditional “cable owners will continue to transport general traffic, while hyperscalers will transport their own.” It’s “like asking locals to look after a road open to all while a few rich citizens operate their own.”

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‘Pope Leo’s visit lays bare Spain’s tangled politics of faith and migration’

Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo at Al Jazeera

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain “exposed the tension between” Spanish politics and the “Church’s own teaching on migrants, war and human dignity,” say Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo. Leo’s “speech to the Spanish parliament” summoned a “Catholic tradition that measured power by its treatment of the vulnerable.” In a “country now convulsed by the politics of immigration, no one could miss what kind of politics that history was meant to indict.”

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‘We are all looksmaxxers’

Renée Graham at The Boston Globe

“Famous or not, we are all, in our own ways, looksmaxxers,” says Renée Graham. The term “originated in the misogynistic bowels of social media, where young men believe that achieving their idea of physical perfection will attract more women.” But “even those who would never consider whacking their jawline or cheekbones with a metal tool still take what measures they deem necessary to look their best” such as “veneers for their teeth, hair transplants and weaves and increasingly available weight loss drugs.”

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‘What the proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. means for Atlanta’

Jennifer Porst and Kate Fortmueller at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Paramount’s “proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery threatens to reverse Atlanta’s fortunes and prominent position in the media and cultural industry,” say Jennifer Porst and Kate Fortmueller. Beyond the “loss of corporate media jobs and the radical alteration of the physical spaces in Georgia,” consolidation “threatens the vibrant production culture and health of soundstages” that Atlanta “has been developing over the past 20 years.” It’s “time to pay more attention to monopolies, protect workers and challenge anti-consumer practices.”

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“For years, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company operated in secrecy, overshadowed by the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX,” said Karen Weise in The New York Times. Founded in 2000, the venture didn’t put a craft into orbit until January 2025. Over the past 18 months, Blue Origin finally seemed to be gaining momentum, getting closer to reliably launching a gigantic rocket, called New Glenn, that could lift greater payloads and potentially challenge SpaceX’s domination of the sector. But late last month, New Glenn exploded in a fireball during a test, badly damaging its sole launchpad in Florida. “At least one massive steel tower appeared to be essentially gone,” and the hydraulics and fuel systems beneath the $1 billion pad might be irrecoverable. Amazon has about 3,000 satellites it needs to launch to begin commercial operations of its Leo satellite internet service, a potential competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink. The explosion could set Blue Origin, Amazon, and other customers back a year.

One of those customers is NASA, said James B. Meigs in The Wall Street Journal. The agency is “working furiously to get its Artemis program on track to land astronauts on the moon by 2030,” and both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been contracted to develop vehicles that can carry “astronauts from NASA’s Orion capsule down to the lunar surface and back.” Blue Origin is also building a smaller “workhorse” lander called Blue Moon for ferrying humans and cargo. “But right now, the only rocket configured to carry the Blue Moon is Blue Origin’s New Glenn.” So until New Glenn is operational again, “all those plans are on hold.”

The explosion “sets the stage for Elon Musk’s dominance of space,” said Faiz Siddiqui and Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Washington Post. It leaves the U.S. government and other customers “more reliant on SpaceX’s services.” The timing could not be better for Musk and SpaceX, which last week made the largest initial public offering in history. Musk, for his part, shared a motivational message to Bezos and his team on X. “Ad astra per aspera,” he wrote—“through hardships to the stars.”

Musk would know, said Ryan Whitley in National Review. As recently as 2008, “it was not clear SpaceX would even survive as a company given its early failures.” But it persevered, because the company’s strategy “was to learn faster than anybody else in the industry”—by learning from its mistakes. Unlike NASA, which became overzealous in its pursuit of perfection under the motto “failure is not an option,” Musk brought a Silicon Valley ethos to the space industry, where “failure was a necessary feature, not a bug.” Blue Origin is at a similar crossroads. It needs to embrace this moment as a learning opportunity and get back up—quickly.

Apple introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007. That was the same year that birth rates around the world began to decline. And the two developments may be related.

“If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs,” Brandon Vigliarolo said at The Register. Two new studies suggest smartphones are responsible for the baby bust. One study found the iPhone “caused as much as half of the fertility decline” from 2007 to 2011, said The New York Times. A second study of 128 countries found that teen pregnancies declined “once smartphones became a mass phenomenon.” It may be that people “began to socialize more on their phones and less in person,” or it could be that the technology “made pornography more accessible.”

Experts suggested caution is needed. Smartphones are just one “example of the kinds of social influences” that may have reduced fertility, said Wellesley College’s Phillip B. Levine to the Times.

‘Awkward, antisocial puppies’

Phones have “turned us into awkward, antisocial puppies who can’t handle eye contact,” said Lauren Veldhuizen at the National Review. The rise of smartphone technology has thus created a world in which “fewer people date and fewer babies are born.” Some might see the decline of teen pregnancies, in particular, as a positive development. But that would be true only if the decline were the result of an “increasing respect for the purpose of sex within the confines of marriage” instead of our increasing “inability to speak to one another.”

The media has glommed onto the new studies because of a collective mood of “total paranoia and doom about smartphones,” said Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. The biggest plunges in the 2007-2011 study were among 15- to 24-year-old females, suggesting more girls and women are “avoiding unintended pregnancy at young ages.” The study’s time frame might also simply reflect the impact of the Great Recession. The research should be greeted “with some skepticism.”

Smartphones “short-circuit the deep-seated human need to have your kids keep you company,” said Noah Smith at Noahpinion. We are choosing to “forsake each other’s company to stare eternally into a black mirror.”

‘No easy fix’

Maybe smartphones first tarnished dating, but AI “might finish the job,” said Eric Levitz at Vox. Streaming and social media have helped us isolate from each other, yet online platforms could not discuss “your career anxieties, favorite Civil War battle or debilitating fear of iguanas.” Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and other artificial intelligence chatbots can. “Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.”

There is “no easy fix here,” said Axios. Politicians have proposed “baby bonuses, tax credits or better child care and parental leave policies” to solve the fertility crisis, all to no avail. “Perhaps the solution is that everyone toss their phones into the sea.”

What happened

Fox Corp. said Monday it was buying streaming and smart-TV company Roku for $22 billion, its first major acquisition since chief executive Lachlan Murdoch cemented control of his family’s media empire last year. The deal will give Fox, with its news and live sports content, a foothold in the more than 100 million households that use Roku’s platform.

Who said what

The cash-and-stock deal “would make the Murdoch media empire a formidable contender in the streaming wars,” positioning Fox to “reach customers who are abandoning traditional TV,” The New York Times said. Specifically, it would transform the company into a “major player in free, ad-supported streaming,” The Washington Post said, combining Fox-owned Tubi with Roku’s own “free-to-stream, ad-supported offering.”

Fox’s “bigger play here is advertising revenue, something all the major streamers are now jockeying for,” Forrester research director Mike Proulx said in a statement. “If this deal closes, Fox will control more of what viewers watch, how they discover it and how it gets monetized.”

What next?

Fox and Roku said their merger, expected to close in the first half of 2027, would create the “third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.”

Another major data centre has been given the green light in the UK, further cementing the country’s status as Europe’s AI front-runner. The government has approved a data centre on a huge green-belt site in Slough, Berkshire, despite claims it could derail the project to build Heathrow’s third runway.

The company had appealed after the council refused to rule on the project, which it said would sit in “one of the most fragile and vulnerable parts of the green belt around London”. Since coming to power, Labour has “repeatedly bypassed local authorities to support data centre developments”, said The Telegraph. Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, said that there was a “continuing and unprecedented demand” for such projects.

How many data centres are there in the UK?

The UK is at the forefront of Europe’s data centre roll-out; it hosts 523 out of the continent’s 2,269 data centres as of last year, said Euronews. It is “striking” that China (home to 449 centres), “despite its strength as a technology and innovation power”, ranks behind the UK, as well as Germany (529 centres).

However, all three are dwarfed by the US, which last year boasted 5,427 data centres. The only other countries with more than 300 centres are Canada, France and Australia.

What’s the latest?

A multibillion-pound AI data centre in Wales was jeopardised by “ministerial dithering”, said The Telegraph. British data centre company Era4 said it had secured permission and financing for the project at the former Liberty Steel works in Newport, but that the “project had faced months of delays” because Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, “failed to push through permission for it to access power from a nearby battery plant”.

Era4 said the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology had given “no indication of when a decision would be made or that the project would be approved”. Tom Humphreys, Era4’s chief executive, said the company was looking at sites in Europe as an alternative.

Other tech companies have also “complained of a struggle to build AI infrastructure in Britain”, said the paper. OpenAI recently announced it was pausing work on a data centre in the north of England due to high energy costs.

What’s planned for the future?

The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth over the next five years, said the BBC last year, when there were already an estimated 477. Work on the biggest, a £10 billion data centre near Newcastle for US wealth management firm Blackstone Group, is due to begin in 2031. It will involve “10 giant buildings” covering more than half a million square metres – “the size of several large shopping centres”.

The majority will be built in London and neighbouring counties, despite “concerns about the huge amount of energy and water” they’ll consume, as well as the “potential knock-on effect” on domestic energy bills.

How much environmental impact do they have?

Officials recently admitted that Britain’s data centre boom could “draw 40% more electricity than thought a few months ago”, said The Times. More than 100 data centres are seeking grid connections for 50 gigawatts of electricity capacity – “more than the whole of Britain’s peak demand on a typical day”. MPs are calling for a “national conversation on the environmental impacts”.

“The previous projections were already unfathomable,” said Oliver Hayes, head of policy and campaigns at environmental charity Global Action Plan. Adding 40% on top is absurd.”

There are also concerns about the burning of fossil fuels to meet power demand, potentially jeopardising climate goals. There has been a “marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions”, said The Guardian. More than 100 new UK data centres plan to burn gas, said “some potentially doing so permanently”.

Under-16s in the UK will be banned from social media under radical new plans set out by the prime minister today.

In a televised speech in Downing Street, Keir Starmer said he was “calling time on a system that’s failing our kids”. And while this was not a “cost-free decision”, governing “is always about choices, and it’s clear to me that a full ban is the right choice”.

Polling by YouGov suggests broad public support for the decision, with 77% of parents backing a ban. But parents were also split on whether a ban would work, with 45% of those surveyed saying it would be effective and 46% disagreeing.

How will it work?

The UK ban will cover the most popular social media platforms, including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), but not encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal.

The government says it will “go further than any other country”, with its policy also including blocks on live-streaming and stranger communication for under-16s. Gaming sites will be impacted and the government is also looking at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for 16- to 18-year-olds. A minimum age of 18 will be enforced on “romantic companion” AI chatbots, designed to simulate sexual relationships or roleplay with users.

As ever the devil will be in the detail. The government has said new restrictions will be enforced through “highly effective age assurance” systems, including facial age estimation using digital cameras. The media regulator Ofcom “will conduct a rapid study on what is effective age assurance for verifying whether someone is over 16”, said the government’s official announcement.

The PM said he hopes to pass the necessary legislation by Christmas, with the ban coming into effect in spring 2027.

Will it work?

The government has been accused of rushing out plans for a social media ban “without considering the knock-on effects it would have on surveillance, privacy and young people’s wellbeing”, said OpenDemocracy.

Privacy and technology experts, as well as those working with children, have warned that the plans “could lead to a surveillance creep and data breaches”. They could also cut young people “off from social media’s potential benefits, such as giving LGBTQIA+ youth a chance to access communities”.

Social media companies have argued the ban could push children into unregulated parts of the internet and on to less safe sites and platforms. But Mark Dowey, whose son Murray died after being blackmailed on Instagram, told BBC Breakfast: “If that’s the best they’ve got then I think they’re in trouble. I think they’re basically acknowledging they don’t have a reasonable position here.”

Did it work in Australia?

The “key question” is whether it will actually work, said The Times. More than 70% of parents in Australia, which last year became the first country in the world to introduce a social media ban for under-16s, told the internet regulator their children were still on these platforms, a recent survey found. But supporters argue that the “problems there are about weak enforcement, not the model itself”.

Despite the decidedly mixed results of Australia’s prohibition experiment “the politics are broader: this is a culture-change moment, and a line in the sand from governments saying to tech companies: we make the rules”.

College graduates have been booing company bosses who mentioned artificial intelligence in graduation ceremonies as “AI anxiety” starts “boiling over into public backlash”, said Business Insider.

The trend is “highlighting a gulf” between older generations who feel the technology “offers new opportunities” and Gen Z, who are “growing increasingly anxious” about what it “means for their future”.

Backlash and resistance

A Gallup survey in April found excitement about AI among Gen Z has fallen from 36% last year to just 22%, while their anger towards the technology has risen by nine points, to 31%. Another survey, carried out by Numerator, found that among Gen Z people who don’t use AI, 57% are not open to adopting it, compared to just 32% of boomers.

“Read that again,” said Fortune – “older Americans are more open to AI than young ones”. It seems that a “surprising segment of the generation that was supposed to lead AI adoption” is actually “leading the resistance to it”. For them, AI was “foisted upon them” by their “parents, big tech CEOs” and Donald Trump.

“Every technology young people have ever loved”, like video games, social media and the internet itself, came to them as “play or transgression”, but AI “arrived as a mandate” from schools and employers. Also, Gen Z prizes “authenticity above almost everything” and AI “attacks” that.

Young people “were sold on the promise that a college education secured a good future”, but now employers are “gutting entry-level positions” in favour of AI, said Denison University student Jack Jackoboice in The Wall Street Journal.

A global survey found that 43% of CEOs plan to reduce junior roles, so young people are “actively being written out of a future” they have “no control over”.

A backlash is taking shape. Some Gen Z workers are “actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives” by feeding sensitive company data into public AI tools and by “intentionally producing low-quality, AI-assisted junk work” to make the technology “look unreliable”, said Vice.

Existential melodrama

But Gallup found that over half of 14- to 29-year-olds say they use AI daily or weekly, and some Gen Z-ers do see an upside in AI.

The “danger” is that “economic anxiety” can “curdle into existential melodrama”, said Ethan Tran, a student at Davidson College, in The Wall Street Journal. “Fear underrates human ingenuity”, so young people shouldn’t “hide from replacement” but “look for opportunities that arise from the transformation”.

The CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta, also gave short shrift to AI anxiety, when graduates at Middle Tennessee State University booed him for saying that AI is rewriting the music industry. He told the hecklers: “You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

What happened

Apple on Monday unveiled an AI version of its Siri digital assistant at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The new Siri AI is the company’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. OpenAI recently filed documents to prepare for a massive IPO, joining Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX-xAI.

Who said what

Apple is “betting the upgraded assistant can help close the gap” in the “crucial AI race,” but it has “taken a different approach from rivals,” Reuters said. Instead of pushing AI agents, the company “emphasizes practical features integrated into everyday tasks” and stressed that “personal data would remain private.” Analysts will be looking to see whether Apple’s “history of turning nascent technologies into popular products will apply to AI,” said CNN.

Some AI companies “appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the ​people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” said Apple software chief Craig Federighi.

What next?

Apple is releasing its new “Golden Gate” software update — which includes Siri AI, more robust parental controls and other changes — immediately to developers, with a “public beta next month and a full launch to customers in the fall,” The Wall Street Journal said.