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.

Pope Leo XIV is deeply worried about what artificial intelligence might do to all of us, said Francis X. Rocca in The Atlantic. The 42,300-word encyclical issued by the American-born pontiff recently—his first since being elevated to the papacy last year—was almost entirely devoted to AI, and he outlines “the choice humanity faces in stark terms.” With the help of governments and institutions, he says, the technology could become “an instrument of growth, justice, and fraternity.” But right now, it is fueling unemployment, destroying the environment, and reducing workers to “cogs in a machine.” We are unwisely entrusting AI with “lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions.” And the technology’s ready-made answers, he warns, can “weaken personal creativity and judgment,” threatening the “desire to form genuine human connections.” The Vatican “tends to ‘think in centuries,’” as one aphorism puts it, but on this issue Leo has moved “with remarkable speed.” It’s a clear sign of what he thinks humanity is up against.

Leo“should be applauded,” said The Guardian in an editorial. The “reckless hubris, profit seeking, and lack of accountability of figures such as Elon Musk represent a threat to the common good,” and regulation is needed to ensure their ambitious plans are deployed “for the good of all.” While Leo’s thoughts are—of course—informed by theology, his “humanity-first message” is one that even the secular world can support. AI is a “spiritual and civilizational test that forces us to face what it means to be human,” said Russell Moore in Christianity Today. Leo’s concern is not that machines will outpace humans, but that “human beings will become more like machines,” prioritizing “efficiency, control, optimization, and power above human dignity.”

The problem with Leo’s encyclical is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, said Matthew Walther in The New York Times. Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) begins with a parable about the Tower of Babel, “perhaps the greatest biblical symbol of technological hubris.” But it misses the story’s key point, which is not that the tower should have been built more ethically with greater “feedback from a more disparate assemblage of stakeholders.” The moral is instead: “Don’t build it!” And that’s the message Leo needed to deliver on AI, which is “unambiguously evil.”

We get it, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal: The pope’s a doomer. Clearly, he has “genuine concern for the ill uses to which AI may be put.” But “nobody yet understands the moral import of AI,” and calls for governments to “regulate AI” are incoherent and dangerous. Leo is simply echoing what the “left-liberal orthodoxy” is saying. But what’s the point “of a grand moral pronouncement” by a pope or any religious figure if it “doesn’t offend or seriously challenge honored cultural arbiters”?

Artificial intelligence systems can now convince you they are human. Two large language models have passed the Turing test, which determines if a machine can “show the same intelligence as a human being,” said The Independent. This significant development in AI is troubling, as anthropomorphizing LLMs can lead to deception and raise questions about what’s real and what isn’t.

Man or machine

In the test, a person “engages in text-based conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which," said Stanford University. If the individual cannot tell them apart, the machine is considered to have passed the test. Researchers tested four AI systems and found that newer LLMs can “effectively imitate people in short interactions,” said a study published in the journal PNAS.

“Given the right prompts, advanced LLMs can exhibit the same tone, directness, humor and fallibility as humans,” study author Cameron Jones said in a release. “While we know LLMs can easily produce knowledge on nearly every topic, this test showed that it can also convincingly display social behavioral traits, which has major implications for how we think of AI.” The four tested AI models were GPT-4.5 and Llama-3.1-405B, which were state-of-the-art models, as well as the older baseline models GPT-4o and ELIZA, a simple chatbot from the 1960s.

Of the models, “GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time, meaning interrogators selected it as ‘human’ significantly more often than they selected the real human participant,” said the release. Llama-3.1-405B, “given the same prompt, was judged human 56% of the time,” making it “statistically indistinguishable from the humans it was compared against.” The baseline systems performed significantly worse, with ELIZA being mistaken for human only 23% of the time and GPT-4o being mistaken 21% of the time.

No man’s land

AI models passing for humans is a concerning development. The Turing test is a “game about lying for the models,” Jones said in the release, and “one of the implications is that models seem to be really good at that.” A big risk of the existence of AI models with this ability is the rise of “counterfeit people.” Thanks to the ease of deception, we “need to be more alert,” and “people should be much less confident that they know they’re talking to a human rather than an LLM.” Still, AI is not yet at a level where it can be deceptive on its own.

While the bots did pass the Turing test, they also required specific instructions to do so. Each of the systems was “instructed to adopt a persona, or a specific character and communication style,” said The Independent. These prompts “worked partly by leading the systems to make mistakes in the same way a human would.” When the models were not prompted, they were much less likely to be mistaken for humans, and GPT-4.5 fell to a 36% win rate and Llama-3.1-405B to a 38% win rate. The models “have the ability to appear humanlike,” study co-author Ben Bergen said in the release, “but maybe not as much the ability to figure out what it would take to appear humanlike.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order that voluntarily allows artificial intelligence companies to receive more government oversight marks a shift in the White House’s attitude about AI. It seems Trump, Republicans and even some Democrats are changing their tune.

What did the commentators say?

The order signed by Trump is “relatively toothless” because most major AI companies “already had agreements in place that allowed the government to preemptively test their models for safety risks,” said The Atlantic. But it is also “meaningful in that the president is doing something — anything — about AI” given that when Trump retook office, he largely “signaled to tech companies that he would stay out of the way.”

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett previously said the administration was considering federal guidelines that would “require AI models to go through an evaluation process similar to that used by the Food and Drug Administration,” said The Hill. This idea seemed to fizzle out as AI advocates became “concerned that an evaluation process from the White House could strangle development.”

The order that was signed “nonetheless represents a sea change in Washington’s willingness to tighten oversight of the technology,” said Politico. For the “first time it’s on a piece of paper, a structure and a process,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told the outlet. Some argue that Democratic politicians were already doing the same thing. “This executive order is implementing a voluntary regime to do pre-deployment evaluations of models for security risks,” Saif Khan, a tech adviser under former President Joe Biden, told Politico. “That is the thing that the Biden administration was doing.”

What next?

It is unclear where the Trump administration may go next with AI. The “entire chaotic saga — a wishy-washy White House, confused statements from populist and tech-elite Trump whisperers — is only the latest in a long string of strange, often contradictory AI policy positions,” said The Atlantic. There is a chance Trump could change his mind again, as his policies on the matter have been “inconsistent, if not incoherent, almost since the day he retook office.”

While Trump says he is focused on AI security, his White House has also slashed major portions of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), the “government agency that aims to protect the nation against hackers,” said The Atlantic. The budget cuts mean CISA is “heading into the AI era with shrinking resources and a diminished role,” said Axios, which could pave the way for future vulnerabilities. Many fear the agency “no longer has the capacity to help utilities, banks and other critical infrastructure operators prepare for a coming wave of AI-fueled cyberattacks.”

Others believe that both sides of the aisle have it wrong. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to ban data centers and is currently “calling for the government to own 50% of AI companies” — and it “would be easier to dismiss his ideas if they weren’t partially built on bipartisan consensus,” said The Washington Post editorial board. But U.S. tech policy works, and the “U.S. is a wealthy country because it doesn’t engage in the kind of government ownership schemes that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are fond of.”

With many Americans opposing the construction of giant AI data centers in their neighborhoods, some tech companies are proposing an unconventional solution: attaching mini data centers directly to people’s houses. At least one major startup backed by Nvidia is looking into the prospect, though it will likely be controversial.

How would these mini data centers work?

People typically associate data centers with big buildings churning out massive quantities of AI datasets. But the home version would be a “unit about the size of an air conditioner, mounted in the side yard,” said Scientific American. It could perform “artificial intelligence tasks, drawing power from your home’s energy supply” and theoretically “earning you discounted electricity and internet in exchange.”

Most of the attention has been focused on Span, an electrical panel startup that recently began manufacturing these types of units in partnership with Nvidia. The company said its mini data centers would be “less of a financial burden on residents” and “have a potentially lower ecological footprint than warehouse data centers,” said Fortune. Span’s units are also quiet, thereby “mitigating the problem of noise pollution that has drawn the ire of residents of areas with nearby warehouse data centers.”

Industry experts hope the home models like those proposed by Span could help alleviate the financial and energy constraints created by large buildings; a typical AI data center “consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households,” according to the International Energy Agency. Instead of “building a single large data center that requires its own substation upgrade or on-site gas turbines,” the AI “spreads compute across thousands of homes that are already connected to the grid,” said Scientific American.

What has the reaction been?

Creating more energy-friendly data centers is a “cool idea on paper, but it’s almost completely unproven in real-world use,” said Fast Company. And even if the home data centers took off, the “main point of resistance” is the fact that these centers “will result in higher electric bills for everyone in the area,” even if they are at people’s homes. Whether it’s a “new central data center or a distributed data center,” the “risk of higher costs — perhaps because of transformers and other infrastructure running hotter and degrading more quickly — could arguably be the same.”

Politically, gathering power from existing homes “may be easier than talking a city council into issuing a permit for a data center,” said Fast Company. But all of this is moot if tech companies are unable to perform the “tangled math of coordinating thousands of tiny residential energy resources to fuel the energy beast that data centers are,” said The Arizona Republic. While “distributed power generation has been around for years,” it has never “been harnessed at the scale needed for feeding data centers.”

Officials with Span remain optimistic that the home-based products will work. “There is certainly opportunity, as Span can provide homeowners with access to innovative technology and potential income generation that can help offset monthly energy costs,” a spokesperson for the company told Inc. “On a larger scale, if the technology proves out, it might also keep local infrastructure from being overburdened, which could keep land open for other uses, such as building homes.”

“Right now, it’s like the AI industry has a gas pedal but it doesn't have a brake pedal,” Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC.

Anthropic recently overtook OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, as the world’s most valuable AI start-up. But Clark has called for a global freeze in AI development, warning that humans risk losing control of the technology. He revealed that 80% of the code that Claude, the company’s chatbot, is operating on was written by Claude itself. And reaching 100% is only a couple of years away.

Clark and his research colleague, Marina Favaro, have suggested that work at Anthropic could undergo “a meaningful slowdown or pause” if other AI tech firms were prepared to do the same. “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing,” they wrote in a blog post.

What did the commentators say?

Better regulation “would keep AI systems in their lane”, said David Krueger, a specialist in responsible AI, in The Guardian. We should insist companies have “clear and well-scoped purposes” for their AI tools, and “demand evidence that they are fit for purpose”. And they should report statistics and data so that we can see if their product is being used in ways that “deviate from its intended purpose”.

But the “safest, sanest” option is to “stop racing” to make AI smarter. The creation of Moltbook (a forum for AI agents that humans can only observe) is one of the “increasingly alarming warning signs” that “rogue AI agents” could be on their way. “We need to make sure” that rogue AI isn’t “capable of threatening humanity, by agreeing to enforceable, international limits on AI capabilities and AI development”.

There are some hopeful signs in the US. On Tuesday, Donald Trump signed a “much-awaited” executive order to establish a measure of vetting for AI companies, said Politico. It was “messy, muted and far less ambitious than Silicon Valley’s critics had hoped for” but it does mark a “sea change in Washington’s willingness to tighten” AI oversight. The new voluntary process of sharing new models with the US government, so that security risks can be identified and addressed before the technology is released, could “soon pave the way for mandatory vetting, federal pre-approval of advanced AI systems and other regulations”.

Some may think it “meaningful” that Trump is “doing something – anything – about AI”, said The Atlantic, but this executive order is “relatively toothless”. He wants to look like he’s being robust, to “score points” with the public, but, in fact “he is not saying or doing anything substantive at all”. The window for serious government regulation, anywhere in the world, is “rapidly closing”; “hopefully, it is not already gone”.

We’re missing the point, said John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. “AI’s capacity to deliver genuine value has been vastly exaggerated.” In one US study, researchers tracking software developers before and after they adopted AI tools found an initial “explosive” increase in productivity (300% more files created or edited) but, after verification and review, just a 30% “uplift” in the number of releases. These are “powerful new tools” but it’s going to take some time before they can interact with current workflow “processes and structures” without friction or bottlenecks.

What next?

Trump’s executive order is a “good first move in creating a safer tech ecosystem”, said Jen Easterly, former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in The New York Times. But a voluntary framework, predicated on mutual cooperation between private companies and the US government, “cannot guarantee” effectiveness. And, let’s not forget, a “principle enshrined in an executive order is only as durable as the administration that issued it”.

For this step to be a positive one, in an American context at least, the legislative branch needs to follow suit. The responsibility of building an AI environment that is “innovative, trusted and resilient” ultimately lies with the US Congress.

“The era of the ‘10 blue links’ is over,” said Sarah Perez in TechCrunch. At its annual I/O conference two weeks ago, Google announced it is overhauling the search box in what the company described as “the biggest change to this entry point to the web in 25 years.” A new “intelligence search box” will respond to longer, more conversational queries and “drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences.” And soon, people will be able to dispatch “information agents” right from Google Search that can keep them abreast of changes for topics they’d otherwise have to search for, such as stock prices and clothing sales. “This shift means that ‘searching the web’ will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans,” and links could soon “become an afterthought.”

Google was “all hype” for the unveiling of this tectonic development in front of an adoring crowd, said Tyler Lacoma in CNET. But for people in the real world, the news was “clear and disturbing.” The threat is existential “not just to developers, but to all online workers,” as well as small businesses who rely on search traffic to get customers. Google’s vision is that you no longer need to venture out onto the internet, said Katie Notopoulos in Business Insider. The internet will be “brought to you in a sanitized form by an intermediary.” That will totally ruin the experience. I love the internet and love searching around it for new things. These promised changes “give me an awful sinking feeling.”

But there are some genuinely great things about Google’s new AI-powered search bar, said Jason England in Tom’s Guide. It offers a “really nice, curated way to scythe your way through what is becoming an increasingly noisy internet.” You can easily plan a weekend, for instance, based on what Google “already knows about you,” letting it automatically “build a schedule that knows your tastes and availability.” I won’t miss the era of “10 blue links,” even if I worry about what happens to online sites once “a key referrer drops to zero.”

The problem is that Google seems to lack focus, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The company that was once criticized for “being too slow to ship AI products” has gone to “now not knowing when to slow down.” In addition to the new AI search tools, it announced new AI-powered Gmail features, updates to Google Pics (not to be confused with Google Photos) and Google Flow, and even a new pair of smart glasses. The slew of new technology is “dizzying” and could leave consumers overwhelmed and “more resistant as a result.” Google has the engineering expertise, capital, hardware, and customer base to win the AI race. But there is “such a thing as doing too much too quickly.”

‘AI chatbots have a Romance language problem’

Adam Aleksic at The Washington Post

People “use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual,” and “AI chatbots have also inherited this proclivity,” says Adam Aleksic. AI researchers have “found consistent favoritism for words coming from Latin and French over those with Germanic etymologies.” People could therefore “be hoodwinked by prestige language, convinced that an AI model is saying something profound simply because it’s using French words like ‘profound.’”

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‘Turkey’s democratic crisis is becoming a security crisis’

Ozgur Ozel at Newsweek

For “years, discussions about Turkey’s democratic decline were largely confined to the language of human rights, constitutional law and domestic politics,” and “international observers viewed the erosion of democratic institutions as a troubling but primarily internal matter,” says Ozgur Ozel. Now, “Turkey’s democratic crisis has evolved into something much larger.” It is “becoming a security crisis with implications far beyond our borders.” The “reason is simple: Turkey is too strategically important to become politically unstable.”

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‘How did Spain’s unemployment rate converge with Finland’s?’

Sarah O’Connor at the Financial Times

A “decade ago, hardly anyone would have predicted that the unemployment rate in Spain — long plagued by chronically high joblessness — would converge with Finland’s,” says Sarah O’Connor. But “that is what has happened this year, with unemployment in both countries now roughly 10%.” Is “this a story of Spanish policymakers’ success or Finnish policymakers’ failure? Well, to some extent: both.” But it is “also a story about how much in economic policymaking depends on factors beyond governments’ control.”

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‘“Close reading” is a solution for students looking to live a good life’

Dan Sinykin at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Close reading is a “practice that turns details into evidence for arguments, beautifully made, about what a text means and how it works,” says Dan Sinykin. It “demands we recognize misunderstandings and correct them, because we must be accountable not only to ourselves, but to the text.” Teaching of skills is “directed toward an ultimate goal of economic growth,” but by “speaking instead of virtues we subordinate economic growth to the good life and human flourishing.”

Read more

What happened

Florida on Monday sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the company’s AI chatbot violates state consumer protection laws. “Altman and ChatGPT have chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids,“ Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) said at a news conference. “We’re going to make them pay for hurting our kids.”

Who said what

Uthmeier’s suit accuses OpenAI of a “litany of harms” driven by its “insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes” regardless of known dangers, including abetting mass shooters, encouraging suicide and hooking minors on an unsafe tool. It’s the first state lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, but the latest “broadside in a growing rebellion” against AI chatbots, The Wall Street Journal said.

Uthmeier has “emerged as a key antagonist” of AI since Florida’s GOP-led House “aligned with President Donald Trump” and blocked Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) “efforts to police” the technology, said Politico. Monday’s civil suit is separate from Ulthmeier’s ongoing criminal investigation into ChatGPT’s alleged role in planning a mass shooting at Florida State University.

What next?

Florida is seeking “more protections for children’s data and stronger parental controls” plus “financial penalties,” The Washington Post said. Uthmeier predicted other states will sue OpenAI as well.

Dating apps are “rooted in rejection and judgement” and that’s “not healthy”, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd told Fortune. She had an “epiphany” during a 14-month leave of absence that users are just “hurt people hurting people”, and has vowed to bring “more joy and satisfaction” to her app.

Bumble is now shifting to matching-making driven by AI – and it’s not the only dating app to see this as the solution to increasing dating-app fatigue. But newcomer Breeze is taking another route: switching the focus to in-person experiences by reducing opportunities to chat in app, and sending only a time-specific, limited number of matches.

‘Payment and consequences’

“Breeze is a welcome disruptor in the dating app landscape,” said Isabella Silvers in The Telegraph. Since it launched in Europe in 2020, after winning investment from the Dutch version of “Dragon’s Den”, it has clocked up more than two million downloads. Users join “matching pools” that bring together “like-minded daters”, based on everything from hobbies (“outdoor lovers”) to niche interests (“rat owners/lovers”). To date, the app has arranged more than 737,000 dates, “resulting in 10 babies – that it knows of”.

Users receive a “select number of profiles” at 7pm every day and the key to the app’s success seems to be “payment and consequences”. Once you accept a match, you have to fill out your availability and pay a £9.50 deposit to secure a drinks date (or £4.50 for a “walk and talk”), “before being allowed to make a decision on anyone else”. The chat function for matched users is only opened up four hours before the date – prompting last-minute date confirmations, rather than “meaningless messaging”.

Breeze is “evidently working”, especially in the Netherlands where it’s “the third most popular and fastest-growing” dating app, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “But can it save Britain’s dismal dating scene?” It can certainly save us from “boring convos generated by ChatGPT”, or being stood up or ghosted or “strung out” for weeks with no follow-through. But “what it absolutely can’t save” us from “is ourselves”. It’s ultimately “knackering” to keep “riding the rejection rollercoaster of the dating-app landscape” – and, sometimes, “the best remedy is to give it all a rest”.

‘Charming chatbots’

There is “rampant” dating-app burnout, said Catherine Pearson in The New York Times. As Bumble embraces AI-powered algorithms to re-engage those who “crave an experience that feels less overwhelming and more purposeful”, it’s also removing its swipe feature. It’s hoping to “end superficial, snap judgements” by altering “the dating habits of millions of users who have grown used to vetting partners with the flick of a finger”.

But the AI pivot comes with risk. Integrating AI features “sloppily” could “alienate” dating-app customers, said Tatum Hunter in The Guardian. Some users are already reporting “being plagued by AI paranoia, unsure whether the people they are messaging are real or charming chatbots”. The messaging from the industry is clear: “if we let AI take the wheel, this will all get less depressing”. But can a “smooth, mindless path toward connection” really make dating more joyful?

Evolutionary psychology reminds us that “only a signal that is difficult to fake can carry reliable information about the sender”, said Andrew King on Quillette. A rightward swipe behind a screen “communicates almost nothing about the sincerity of the person making it”. But making an approach in person at a bar or an event carries the potential for “public rejection”, and that cost is a signal of sincerity. These signals “matter” and “cannot be easily digitised”: “the discomfort is the point”.

Eagerness about artificial intelligence has led to a competitive push at tech companies to use as much AI as possible in a trend called tokenmaxxing. Employers are happily spending thousands to keep up with output, but whether the practice is sustainable is up for debate.

What is it?

At the core of the AI workplace trend are tokens. They represent small bits of text that AI models process during a prompt, tracking AI usage and calculating costs. AI companies “typically charge a monthly subscription for a fixed allotment of tokens,” with additional usage billed separately or available in higher-tier plans, Built In said.

Tokenmaxxing is about “encouraging engineers to consume as many AI tokens as possible,” said Forbes. Companies argue that “token consumption is a key indicator for measuring employee and developer productivity.” There is a growing sentiment that “teams that aren’t burning enough tokens simply aren’t automating enough and get left behind.”

Employees rack up tokens by deploying multiple agentic AI models on separate projects simultaneously or by running longer prompts. The trend came to public attention after The Information uncovered that a Meta employee had created an internal leaderboard ranking employees by token usage. Employees were incentivized to use more tokens to outperform coworkers and earn rewards such as digital badges and exclusive titles like “Cache Wizard.” The highest-ranked individual user averaged 281 billion tokens, “which could cost in the hundreds or thousands of dollars,” said The Information. The leaderboard has since been taken down.

Leaderboards are just the icing on the AI-workplace cake. Token budgets are “becoming another form of employee compensation, alongside stock options and yearly bonuses,” said Built In. While some workers go through millions of tokens a week, employers are “happily footing the bill,” believing that “more AI use means more productivity and, of course, more money for the business in the long run.”

Is it worth it?

The popularity of tokenmaxxing “reflects a desire to incentivize AI usage” and presents the assumption that “tokens are the base unit for AI usage,” meaning “greater consumption indicates higher value of AI,” Jim Rowan, the U.S. head of AI at Deloitte Consulting LLP, said to Forbes. While well-intentioned, there are “risks of turning tokens into a ‘vanity metric.’”

Still, some proponents of the competitive practice push back against such rhetoric. “We all should be tokenmaxxing,” Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said to The Wall Street Journal. Artificial intelligence is an “insane new piece of technology that is fundamentally going to rewrite how we work.” What matters most for your company is: “Has my employee become insanely AI-pilled?” That requires “getting them on this tokenmaxxing mindset.”

The tokenmaxxing trend is a “crazy, rushed, temporary phase,” Michael Burry, the investor behind “The Big Short,” said in his Substack Short Thoughts. It is not “merely heavy AI use,” and it is “certainly not sustainable AI use.” It is “quota-driven, leaderboard-driven, management-mandated overconsumption.”

It’s true that the “cost of training AI models is falling, making AI tokens more affordable,” but people have started using “more tokens in their day-to-day tasks,” said The Week sister site Tom’s Hardware. Though AI is “indeed a useful tool,” some companies are “using it to replace people in a bid to cut labor costs.” If the number of tokens needed to accomplish tasks “outpaces the speed at which these tokens become cheaper, then that move might just backfire.”

What happened

A $9.7 billion Pentagon contract with Dell Technologies announced this week sent the company’s stock soaring, likely boosting President Donald Trump’s more than $1 million investment in the company, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported Thursday. “Government ethics watchdogs are sounding the alarm” not only because Trump “potentially stands to gain financially” from the Dell deal, the Post said, but also because he “has repeatedly praised the company at public events” since acquiring the shares earlier this year.

Who said what

The Dell investments were among more than 3,600 trades executed in Trump’s investment portfolio from January through March, according to a mandatory filing released this month. The Trump family has “argued that the president does not personally control the trading,” but the president’s financial accounts “are not in a traditional ‘blind trust,’” the Times said. And his Dell purchase “draws new attention to the inherent problems” with the family’s “widespread investments” in military drones, cryptocurrency, mining and prediction markets while Trump “oversees policy and government purchase decisions for those same sectors.”

What next?

Presidents are exempt from an ethics law that prohibits official self-enrichment. Congress should “revisit the arrangement whereby we rely on the president’s own sense of integrity rather than law to avoid conflicts of interest,” Greg Williams from the Project on Government Oversight told the Post.

It’s never been easier to start your own business, said Jim VandeHei in Axios. “Anyone with a strong idea” can “model and prep a new business in a weekend.” When “Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and I started Axios in 2017, it took months to sketch it out, mock up designs, and scrub legal obstacles.” Artificial intelligence now can do that “in hours.” Describe your ideal setup to Claude or ChatGPT and it will immediately produce “an LLC or S Corp breakdown, a filing checklist, and a draft operating agreement.” Paste in the concept and it will conduct the market research, including “the existing players, pricing, and complaints.” AI will build the spreadsheets and forecasts, generate a logo and website, and email pitches. It will even help fine-tune your product, changing “how it looks or works in minutes.” The excuse for not starting a business was always the cost of capital. There’s no excuse anymore.

Age shouldn’t be an obstacle to entrepreneurship either, said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. At 67, “I retired from a career in business journalism only to start a small publishing enterprise of my own.” Launching a startup “in retirement may sound like an oxymoron,” but the work “can be more of a feature than a bug.” You can decide for yourself “whether to keep things small or build a modest empire,” becoming only “as busy as you want to be.” Some of my retired friends “now find themselves bored or underoccupied.” That’s something you won’t experience as a startup founder. And for young people feeling increasingly unloved in this job market, “the new promise is ownership,” said Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. Gen Z founders say launching a startup gives them “a sense of control” they couldn’t otherwise get from a corporate career. Some are also turning to entrepreneurship “in the form of side hustles or backup plans.” AI makes up “for the skills they don’t yet have, offering tools and platforms they can put to use, and allowing them to do more things at once.”

It’s now conceivable that a one- or two-person team can run a $1 billion business, said Erin Griffith in The New York Times. With today’s AI, entrepreneurs can “expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed” while needing very few actual workers. Take the case of Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which was started in 2024 by Matthew Gallagher and his younger brother. Gallagher, 41, “used AIto write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service.” With the help of only “some contractors,” Medvi booked $401 million in sales in 2025 and is on track to do $1.8 billion this year. But the efficiency has a downside. “I kind of want to hire people,” Gallagher said. “I’m lonely.”

With many police officers across the U.S. wearing body cameras, a cottage industry of YouTube channels streaming police interactions on bodycams has sprung up. These videos rack up thousands or even millions of views. But some law enforcement experts consider them exploitative.

How do these channels operate?

Bodycam channels all get their content “from the same basic model: Someone uses public records requests to obtain video from police arrests, lightly edits the video, adding maybe a brief AI narration or captions, and then hits ‘publish,’” said Vox. Many of the videos involve DUIs or intoxicated people “yelling, speeding, throwing things, hitting cops” and then “being arrested while crying, screaming, spitting and so on.” The channels also document “people being arrested for just about anything, from shoplifting to murder and kidnapping cases.”

Many of these channels do big numbers. One of them, Code Blue Cam, averages “over 10 million views a video and has totaled more than a billion across hundreds of videos,” while another called Midwest Safety “has totaled over 1.5 billion views,” said Vox. The channels claim to publish bodycam footage “based on their significance, the clarity of the footage and whether the interaction offers meaningful insight into how officers respond under pressure,” the owner of Code Blue Cam, who goes by LJ, told Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR).

Why are people concerned?

Many experts say the people uploading these videos “usually aren’t on a crusade for justice. They are interested in having footage of someone’s shoplifting arrest rack up millions of views for profit,” said Vox. The most viral videos “can be devastating for their subjects, damaging relationships with family and friends, frustrating job searches and scarring psyches,” said Intelligencer. And because bodycam footage is often public record, the people in the videos generally “have little legal recourse: Claims of defamation and false light,” the legal term for invasion of privacy, are “extremely difficult to prove.”

For victims, the “experience of having their worst moments broadcast to millions of strangers on the internet” can be “devastating,” said WPR, especially since they are often uncensored and include defendants’ real names. Women and people of color are most heavily featured, according to researchers. At least one bodycam channel came under scrutiny because it “only requested DWI stops involving young women, some being underage,” said WPVI-TV Philadelphia. Women are disproportionately seen, even though “some 80% of DUIs are committed by men,” said Intelligencer.

These channels also have a financial component. Code Blue Cam earns about $325,000 monthly, according to YouTube analytics tracker VidIQ. Many of the channels additionally “feature a list of affiliate links to earn commission from viewers purchasing products like security and dash cameras,” said WPR.

Some police departments are starting to fight back. Officials in Spokane County, Washington, recently passed a resolution “fee of 78 cents per minute of time it takes staff to obscure portions” of bodycam footage “that state law says should not be public,” said The Spokesman-Review. The fee is “intended to deter social media creators who make voluminous requests for footage.” The Illinois House of Representatives is also considering a bill that would “allow police to deny video requests from internet sites and social media channels,” said the Daily Herald.

‘Plant viruses could threaten your coffee, chocolate and wine’

Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody at The Hill

Coffee, chocolate and wine are “woven into daily life and global economies,” say Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody. But the “plants that make these pleasures possible are increasingly under threat from plant viruses.” The “same forces driving viral outbreaks in coffee, cacao and grapes also threaten staple crops that underpin global food security.” Coffee, chocolate and wine’s “vulnerability is a reminder that plant health underlies far more of daily life than we tend to notice.”

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‘RFK Jr.’s move on peptides ignores serious risks’

Eli Thompson at USA Today

RFK Jr. “announced that he would force the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider a ban on peptides,” but as he “pushes to make these unregulated drugs easier to access, the trend is already here,” says Eli Thompson. These “substances, which were once only used by serious bodybuilders or in medical settings, are now part of everyday conversation.” This “shift is happening quickly,” and Americans “need to find a way to make peptides less attractive to young men.”

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‘As 2028 approaches, America needs ranked choice voting more than ever’

Jamie Raskin at The Guardian

Democrats “must act shrewdly to advance party rules of our own that promote majority rule, interracial political solidarity and the power of the voters,” says Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). The “best tool to empower voters to make constructive choices among exciting new voices in such a crowded field is the mechanism of ranked choice voting.” Allowing “greater use of ranked choice voting in states where Democratic Party organizations choose it should be a slam dunk for DNC decision-makers.”

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‘Tokens are not the new billable hour (and confusing the two will be costly)’

Ravi Kumar S at Newsweek

For “decades, IT services companies were built on the simple production function of human effort, delivered through billable hours and the pyramid structure,” says Ravi Kumar S. But as AI “model interactions become more embedded into workflows, tokens emerge as the new production input reshaping the foundation of the services model.” If “token consumption continues to be treated as the primary metric, costs will scale linearly with demand without a corresponding return in business outcomes.”

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The rise of artificial intelligence depends on the construction of giant new data centers to supply the necessary computing power. But Americans do not want the facilities in their neighborhoods.

Backlash to data centers is “bipartisan and growing across the country,” said 404 Media. States and cities are outlawing the “noisy, power and water hungry buildings” in a fight that could “shape American politics for years to come.” Seven in 10 Americans oppose building a data center in their area, said Gallup, higher than the 53% who would oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Industry leaders are now fretting over their inability to win public opinion that is “increasingly aware and skeptical,” said Business Insider. The tech sector “hasn't done a good job of explaining itself,” said Flexential CEO Ryan Mallory, whose company develops and operates the data centers.

What did the commentators say?

The backlash to AI “could get very ugly,” Lila Shroff said at The Atlantic. A “record number of proposed projects” were canceled during the first quarter of this year after “local pushback.” In April, an Indianapolis councilman found a “NO DATA CENTERS” note under his doormat after somebody shot at his house 13 times.

The fights over data centers will likely only “intensify,” as the facilities “stimulate local economies” but also take “physical and environmental tolls” on the places they are built, said Shroff. And though AI opponents may not be able to stop Anthropic from distributing its Claude model, “they can raise concerns about new construction at a local city-council meeting.”

“Nobody wants this in their backyard,” Sara Pequeño said at USA Today. In Utah, officials overrode local opposition to approve a giant new center that will consume “more than two times the energy used in the entire state.” Rural areas across the country face similar proposals. Data centers are “almost certainly here to stay” because of the computing power needed to keep up with “our ever-growing reliance on AI.” But Americans “clearly don’t feel great” about having them nearby.

The “brewing populist resistance” to data centers is a “critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism,” Astra Taylor and Saul Levin said at The Guardian. A local fight over land use can double as opposition to “job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes and autonomous drone strikes.” It also portends the next big electoral fight. AI is “shaping up to be a key fault line” in both this year’s midterms and in 2028.

What next?

The canceled data center projects are “sapping confidence” among AI investors, the investment bank Jefferies said in note to clients, per Axios. The pushback could become a “financial liability for AI labs if it continues to curb access” to the computing power artificial intelligence requires, the outlet said.

The backlash movement has one notable new ally. Erin Brockovich, the activist portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Julia Roberts, has launched a new website tracking proposed and under-construction data centers. The map “captures the real-world footprint” of the AI race, she said on the site.

The “AI slopification of music” is here, said Ece Yildirim in Gizmodo. It’s gotten so difficult to decipher which songs are human-made and which are synthetically produced by artificial intelligence that Spotify, the world’s largest audio-streaming service, announced recently it’s going to append a “verification badge” on trusted artists’ pages. It stopped short, however, of an AI ban. That would have hurt outfits like the Velvet Sundown—an indie band that garnered millions of streams on Spotify last summer. Fans later learned that the group was “completely AI-generated,” including a phony album cover featuring the smiling faces of four fake members. Another music streaming platform, Deezer, reported recently that “44% of its daily uploads were AI-generated songs,” and an “overwhelming majority of people couldn’t tell AI-generated music apart from songs written and performed by actual humans.” Humans have been making music for 35,000 years. But AI could be about to end our run.

Billboard allowing fake artists on its charts isn’t helping, said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg. For 113 years, the music and entertainment brand has served as an “institutional gatekeeper,” and its rankings were always a “competition between human beings and the limits they naturally possess.” But in November, Billboard opened its hallowed charts to nonhumans for the first time, allowing streams of songs by AI performers like country music act Breaking Rust and R&B singer Xania Monet to count alongside Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. If Billboard wants to create a separate chart for AI creations, fine. But humans shouldn’t be “competing against machines” that can “generate abilities that aren’t naturally there.”

“The flood of AI music shows no signs of abating,” said Terrence O’Brien in The Verge, and it won’t as long as platforms keep allowing it. “In survey after survey, public opinion toward AI music is pretty unfavorable,” with people most worried about synthetic artists degrading the music. But “companies are hesitant to penalize AI use in part because they expect it to become a standard tool in the industry” as more artists start to incorporate it into their creative processes in some form.

Eventually, it will be impossible to separate music-based AI use, said Nathan Brackett in Rolling Stone. Because “behind closed doors,” AI tools are “creeping into the workflows of top producers, songwriters, and artists.” Mikey Shulman, CEO of AI music creation platform Suno, compares it to Ozempic: “Everybody is on it, and nobody wants to talk about it.” Most musicians aren’t using AI to generate entire songs from scratch. But producers will, for example, “make funk and soul samples out of AI, rather than license original music or hire musicians.” And that means “for every task that AI streamlines, there might be someone” who used to fill that role “who isn’t paid anymore.”

What happened

Pope Leo XIV on Monday released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), making a practical and moral case for “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” AI “needs to be disarmed” as “an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” the pope told a packed hall at the Vatican. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

Who said what

Addressed to “all people of good will,” Leo’s “methodical” teaching document traced the Catholic Church’s established “social teaching and applied its core concepts,” including solidarity and the dignity of work, “to the digital revolution,” The Associated Press said. The document’s title “says it all,” The New York Times said: Leo is “less interested in technology than in humanity.”

“Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” Leo wrote, but “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” AI’s growth needs to be guided by “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility,” he said. “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

What next?

Tech and religion experts said Pope Leo’s encyclical “will likely become a benchmark in the debate over AI, a point of reference for policymakers, researchers and ordinary folk alike,” the AP said. The pope is “really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist,” humanist Harvard chaplain Greg Epstein told the Times.

A hypothetical doomsday for quantum computing could be on the horizon, computer scientists have warned for decades. But cybersecurity experts are now racing against the clock after Google announced that this “Q-Day” could be here much sooner than originally anticipated.

What is ‘Q-Day’?

It is the hypothetical day that quantum computers will acquire “enough resources and stability to crack conventional cryptography,” said CNN. When that day arrives, it could spell disaster for millions of people’s private information, as “every financial transaction, medical file, email, location history and crypto wallet protected by today’s commonly used algorithms could be unlocked.”

Unlike conventional computers, quantum computers utilize “quantum-mechanical phenomena” that allow them to “perform calculations that are practically impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers today,” said Forbes. Experts believe these computers could eventually crack RSA cryptography, the algorithm of prime numbers that helps to safeguard encryption. Some fear this could be accomplished “not in billions of years but in hours or days.” Others believe some “bad actors may already be collecting encrypted data” in secret, said CNN.

It was previously believed that Q-Day was still far into the future, giving the tech world plenty of time to prepare new safeguards. But Google recently announced it believes the day could arrive as soon as 2029, and the “new estimate means that governments, companies and other entities may have far less time to prepare,“ said CNN. Many are comparing Q-Day with “Y2K, or the millennium bug, a computer flaw that programmers thought might cause severe systemic problems after Dec. 31, 1999.”

What can be done?

Many companies are being urged to boost their cybersecurity initiatives as the potential for Q-Day looms. Google is also creating guidelines it hopes will “provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google but also across the industry,” the company said. To accomplish this, Google “specifically is pushing for a transition to post-quantum cryptography, or the use of new, quantum-resistant algorithms to secure data against future attacks,” said Barron’s.

Even if the 2029 date doesn’t come to pass, there is still a 10% chance Q-Day will occur by 2032, Justin Drake, a bitcoin security researcher who published a paper on the matter, said on social media. No matter the date, other precautions are being taken. For example, cryptographers “have devised new encryption algorithms that rely on problems that quantum computers don’t have an advantage over classical computers in solving,” said Ars Technica. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has also “advanced several algorithms that have yet to be broken and are presumed to be secure.”

Government entities have been weighing in too. In 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) announced a plan to boost Q-Day readiness by the 2030s. But recently, the deadline “has been in flux as both the Biden and Trump administrations have issued executive orders prioritizing quantum readiness,” said Ars Technica. The NSA is currently “adhering to a 2031 deadline.” Despite these plans, experts remain worried, as encryption is “not a permanent state of protection,” said Forbes. It is a “time-locked safe that someone may already be holding, waiting for the combination.​”

Google has become so synonymous with online search that its name has evolved into a verb in its own right. Now, the company is attempting to “revamp its decades-old business model to fit the era of artificial intelligence”, said CNN. In essence, “Google wants to help you google less”.

‘New era’ for search

Although Google already offers “AI Mode”, it will now integrate the technology across the entire search experience through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Rather than simply typing keywords or short phrases, users will be able to ask conversational questions, share images or voice commands with agentic AI, and even interact through live video.

Instead of generating only the familiar list of blue links, Google Search will give a customised AI-written summary of the topic being researched. This will then open a conversation with AI Mode directly on the main search page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions more naturally.

This marks a “new era for AI search”, according to a Google blog post, bringing “advanced model capabilities” and “new AI features” to Search. The update will allow users to deploy AI agents “just by asking a question”. The company is also introducing a new intelligent, AI-powered search box, which it describes as Google’s “biggest upgrade in over 25 years”.

Crucially, the shift means that search will become more conversational and personalised, reducing the need to click through to web pages. Increasingly, Google will function more like an assistant than a traditional index of third-party information providers.

‘Radical transformation’

For many people, Google’s search box is the “lobby of the internet”, said Time, so this “radical transformation” signals a major shift in how people use the web. It could “disrupt many industries” that rely on search traffic to attract customers, with news publishers and small businesses particularly vulnerable.

The changes will likely “further decimate” referrals from Google to publishers, which have “already been suffering from declining referrals” because of AI Overviews, said TechCrunch. The trend has already “put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse”.

Using AI-based searching could also erode important skills, said Riley MacLeod on internet news site Aftermath. Google Search is “one of the first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information-searching skills”. While “spoon-feeding” users AI summaries and “obscuring or bypassing the source of the information” may seem convenient, it risks depriving people of the opportunity to build the “vital information literacy skills” they “need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world”.

For Google, however, the ambition is far larger: to move “closer” to its long-term goal of developing artificial general intelligence – a “theoretical stage of AI” where technology becomes as intelligent as humans across a broad range of subjects, said CNN. The competition is intense, with OpenAI, Meta and others all “racing to be the first to get there”.

The Trump administration has “pulled a 180” on AI oversight, said Tina Nguyen in The Verge. For most of his second term, President Trump has been a vocal champion of the artificial intelligence industry. Heeding the advice of his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks, he repealed former president Joe Biden’s AI safety orders, lifted export controls on AI chips, and even threatened to sue states that tried to pass and enforce their own AI regulations.

Suddenly, though, the administration has changed its tune. The New York Times reported two weeks ago that the White House is considering an executive order that would create a working group to examine potential AI oversight procedures, including “a formal government review process” of new AI models before they’re released. That shift was the result of three big changes. First, the arrival of Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos model—which has superior hacking abilities—“spooked the national security apparatus.” Then other countries began to craft their own AI regulations. And finally, Sacks was pushed out of his czar role in March, “giving Silicon Valley one less mechanism to pitch an industry-friendly, ‘innovation-at-all-costs’ agenda to Trump.”

Trump tends to declare a “whole bunch of things to be stupid” only to later realize they were “important and structurally necessary,” said Mike Masnick in TechDirt. He criticized the Biden administration for working with OpenAI and Anthropic on policies such as “voluntary testing” of frontier models. That effort drew howls of protest from tech bros and VCs like Marc Andreessen, who later “went all in for Trump” in the election. Joke’s on them. Trump’s new plan is even more “stringent and compliance-oriented” than Biden’s. The administration should have taken AI fears seriously all along, said Casey Newton in Platformer. But it’s better late than never. “The models are getting more capable—and more dangerous.”

AI safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue, said Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan in The New York Times. There’s commonsense action that Congress can take immediately “to tighten controls on the critical technologies that China needs,” like AI chips. It should work to “safeguard kids’ safety through age limits and parental controls.” And there should be “appropriate guardrails on AI development,” beginning with mandatory audits of developers’ safety claims “by independent expert bodies overseen by the government.” But the U.S. under Trump will likely never lead the way on regulating AI, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. His proposed working group would include tech execs, letting them “write the rules meant to police them.” Abroad, however, regulation has sharper teeth. The London-based AI Security Institute is “the best-funded AI vetting agency in the world,” and the only government agency Anthropic trusted with Mythos. That’s the one to watch.

The sound of typing has been the background hum of office work for a century and half. But now it’s all about whispers.

After years of bashing typewriters, then tapping keyboards, desk-bound employees are, in ever-increasing numbers, murmuring to AI dictation apps to send emails, draft reports and write code.

‘Double words per minute’

Voice-to-text software has been around since the 1960s but it was always “clunky” and slow and “never worked quite right”, said employment reporter Jo Constantz on Bloomberg. But now advances in AI have made it “viable”: it can “take the messiness of speech and package it into something more useful”.

Early adopters of AI dictation apps are “drawn inexorably to the promise of ever-greater productivity”. In “voice mode”, you can produce double the words-per-minute than you can when typing.

Dictation is definitely “having a moment”, said Joe Castaldo, business reporter at Canada’s The Globe and Mail. More and more software engineers, in particular, are switching from “pressing keys individually” to “adopting AI-powered speech-to-text apps to verbally issue instructions” to tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code. Eight months ago, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman posted on his LinkedIn platform that he has been “voicepilled”: he’d realised you can “amplify your ability” by “seriously using your voice to interact with technology”.

Start-ups today are like “a high-end call centre – except everyone is chatting with AI”, one venture capitalist told The Wall Street Journal. There is an “etiquette”: “users try to keep their voices low and often wear headphones to block out sound from their dictating neighbours, dialling down the annoyance factor”. But talking to yourself is still “weird, if not a little embarrassing”.

‘Velocity towards voice’

It’s too early to say if and when “the Qwerty keyboard might follow the ticker tape and fax machines into obsolescence” but “the velocity towards voice is accelerating”, Dylan Fox, CEO of San Francisco-based AssemblyAI, told the Los Angeles Times. We’re predicting a 10 to 100-fold “increase in demand for voice, AI applications and interfaces”.

There’s now “a mad dash to dominate any corner of the evolving field”, said Bloomberg’s Constantz. The market for AI voice generators alone is estimated to be worth $7.7 billion (£5.75 billion) this year, rising to $21.8 billion (£16.27 billion) by the end of the decade, according to US consulting firm Grand View Research.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have invested heavily in their voice-to-text products, and dictation app start-ups – many with variations of “whisper” in their name – have experienced remarkable growth over the past year. After all, Superwhisper founder Neil Chudleigh told The Globe and Mail, “we’re talking about replacing every keyboard on the planet”.

‘America’s AI is futuristic. China is just making it work.’

Jacob Dreyer at The New York Times

“Many American leaders believe the United States cannot overcome its adversary China unless it beats the country in the AI race,” says Jacob Dreyer. But the “two countries conceptualize AI very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known,” while China aims to advance a “government-directed strategy” that “treats AI as if it were infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable AI tools into every public service.”

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‘Spencer Pratt and the temptations of populism’

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic

Spencer Pratt, the former reality star candidate for Los Angeles mayor, is a “registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and he has zero experience in government,” says Conor Friedersdorf. “Yet last week he was one of just three candidates to qualify for a televised debate,” which “could hardly have gone better for him.” While current Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman highlighted “each other’s failures to remedy the city’s problems,” Pratt was the “only option onstage for voters seeking change.”

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‘Hantavirus anxiety reveals America never left Covid crisis mode’

Holland Haynie at Newsweek

A “virus outbreak on a cruise ship should not instantly make Americans wonder whether ordinary life is about to unravel again,” says Holland Haynie. However, “social media quickly filled with quarantine imagery, speculation and emotional rehearsal of another global disruption.” Human beings are “remarkably good at adapting to prolonged uncertainty,” but “adaptation has consequences.” Covid “did not simply disrupt American life temporarily. It changed many Americans psychologically in ways we still do not fully acknowledge.”

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‘Trump, Republicans know how they’re hurting LGBTQ+ kids’

Sara Pequeño at USA Today

“The kids aren’t all right,” and the “political landscape created” by Trump is “at least partly to blame,” says Sara Pequeño. According to a 2025 survey from The Trevor Project, “10% of LGBTQ+ youth attempted suicide in the past year, and 36% considered it.” And “90% said recent laws and debates over their existence have caused them stress or anxiety.” The “more you decry something as wrong or evil, the more young people will internalize that to mean that they are wrong or evil.”

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Restrictions on high-risk uses of artificial intelligence in the EU will be delayed by more than a year under a deal struck by its legislators.

The deal “marks a notable rollback” in the bloc’s “digital rulebook after years of Brussels proudly marketing itself as the world’s tech cop”, said The Register.

What is changing?

The EU’s AI Act came into force in August 2024 after “years of talks”. But as part of a “phased rollout”, the rules governing high-risk uses were only “set to kick in this August”, said Politico.

Instead, the bloc has “hit the regulatory equivalent of ‘snooze for 16 months’”, said The Register. “The headline change pushes back enforcement of rules covering systems” in areas such as biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment, migration, and border control until December 2027.

For products like lifts and toys, compliance deadlines for their AI systems are “stretching” further – to August 2028. Meanwhile, smaller companies get “more breathing room”. The EU hopes it will “avoid duplication between sectoral and AI rules”, it said in a press release.

EU officials insist the delay is “about timing, not watering down the law”. They claim the rules are “moving faster than the standards needed to support them” and that companies currently “lack the guidance and technical tools required for compliance”.

Is this a win for Big Tech?

The change of heart is a “big win” for tech firms and industry groups that have been lobbying the EU to “soften” the AI Act, said The Register. As recently as last week, bosses from companies including ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP, Siemens and Mistral AI “publicly warned that Europe risked over-regulating itself out of the global AI race”.

The new deal, which marks the “first significant rollback” of rules in the digital sphere, came after the EU faced pressure from the US over its tech laws. There were also “warnings” from its own industry and governments that “strict restrictions had put the bloc at a disadvantage in a global AI race”, said Politico.

“Only a couple of countries around the world” followed the EU’s lead on restrictions, so the bloc “faced criticism” for “cracking down on AI too early”, despite “civil society” saying that “rules are needed to protect people from the potential harms of the emerging technology”.

Arba Kokalari, a Swedish MEP on the internal market committee, insisted that the EU is “not weakening any safety rules”, but rather “clarifying the rules for companies in Europe”.

What is staying the same?

Some aspects of the AI Act will keep to their original schedule. Bans on unacceptable-risk AI have applied since February 2025, according to the European Commission. The transparency obligations under Article 50, including disclosure for chatbot interactions, will come into force from 2 August.

The European Parliament and Council also agreed to ban AI systems that create child sexual abuse material or that depict identifiable people in sexually explicit content without consent. Companies have until the end of this year to comply.

Palantir Technologies Inc., a Miami-based company that specialises in data integration and analysis, is seldom out of the news. This is partly because it works in controversial sectors: its biggest client is the US military, and its software is used in conflicts from Israel to Ukraine. Clients also include the CIA and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice); it was involved in Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency.

It has also expanded into healthcare: in Britain, its contracts include a £330 million deal with NHS England, as well as a £240.6 million deal with the Ministry of Defence.

But its notoriety is in part because of its eccentric CEO, Alex Karp. Palantir recently posted on X/ Twitter a manifesto penned by Karp, which, among other things, declared that “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defence of the nation”; called for universal conscription; encouraged the development of AI weapons; and condemned the West’s “vacant and hollow pluralism”. One MP called it “the ramblings of a supervillain”.

Where did Palantir come from?

Founded in 2003 by a group of tech moguls headed by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a libertarian political activist, Palantir was named after the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings”. (Thiel is a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.) Originally, it applied PayPal’s fraud detection system – which successfully identified fraudulent activity on eBay – to US national security; early funding came from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that funds projects for the CIA.

Palantir’s technology was taken up by the US defence establishment under President Obama – it is rumoured that it was involved in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and it helped the US and UK governments with contact tracing and vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic. It now helps the Trump administration track undocumented immigrants, and provides Israel’s military with “intelligence and surveillance services”. Palantir currently has a market capitalisation of some $350 billion.

What does it actually do?

One former employee likened Palantir’s work to “really extravagant plumbing with data”. Most big companies and government agencies have a lot of information they can’t easily use because it’s stored in a hodgepodge of different systems and databases.

Palantir’s core products – “Foundry”, primarily for civilian use, and “Gotham”, for military and law enforcement – sit on top of those different systems and pull all the data together in an interface that’s easy to use (little coding is required). A big selling point is that Palantir doesn’t itself access or exploit the data, which stays with the customer; it just makes it easier to analyse. This is useful for all sorts of unobjectionable things, such as Covid testing and tracing. But it also allows Ice to collect large amounts of information to investigate individuals – and it helps the US military to plan bombing campaigns.

What is its military role?

Palantir is the leading contractor for Project Maven, the US military’s (and Nato’s) targeting system. Maven draws together a mass of data from drones, satellites, signals and other sources to flag potential targets; it presents findings to human analysts in one clear user interface; and can relay their decisions to appropriate weapons systems.

According to a new book, “Project Maven” by Katrina Manson, the entire “kill chain”, from target identification to target destruction, consists of four clicks. Maven allows hundreds of targets to be hit per day; and adding in AI tools to help interpret data means that number is capable of rising into the thousands.

Similar Palantir technology is used in Ukraine, and since 7 October 2023, it has worked closely with the Israel Defence Forces, whose AI-assisted systems use algorithms to identify and assassinate suspected Hamas agents.

What are the implications of this technology?

Speeding up the steps between identifying a target and destroying it is fundamental to modern warfare, so it is immensely valuable. In Ukraine, Palantir’s tools have helped to fuse battlefield intelligence, track and destroy drones, even document war crimes.

But such systems are not infallible, and accelerating the kill chain also minimises the role of human judgement: Maven was used to wrongly identify a primary school in Minab, Iran (in a building used years before by the Revolutionary Guard Corps), as a military target. US missiles killed some 168 people, mostly young girls.

Where does the NHS come into all this?

Palantir has been involved in the NHS’s data-handling since 2020, during Covid. In 2023, it won a contract to develop the Federated Data Platform, designed to streamline tangled datasets across the NHS and help clear hospital backlogs. In some hospitals, for example, scheduling operations may require staff to consult separate systems for waiting lists, theatre bookings, staff rotas and equipment orders.

But many critics dislike the idea of a US spy-tech firm, with links to the US and Israeli militaries, potentially gaining access to sensitive health data. Others question its value for money.

How worried should we be?

Palantir has become “a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance”, says Wired magazine. It is a cause célèbre on the British Left that has been taken up by the Greens’ Zack Polanski. Arguably, though, it is just a data analytics company with a militarised culture designed in part to give it a mystique: the company’s slogan is “We build software that dominates”; it uses military and intelligence jargon instead of more standard office terms. (Its data consultants are known as “forward deployment software engineers” or “deltas”.)

But not least because of its close links to a US administration that is an unreliable ally at best, many policymakers in Western Europe are now reconsidering the wisdom of using Palantir’s services.

Who is Alex Karp?

Karp, 58, the son of a Jewish doctor and an African-American artist from Philadelphia, was a left-wing student activist; he studied in Frankfurt under the socialist philosopher Jürgen Habermas and has no background in computing. He had become friends with Peter Thiel at Stanford Law School, and in 2003 helped co-found Palantir.

Karp has always been outspoken about the company’s values – Palantir has long refused to work with Chinese or Russian companies – but these have moved markedly to the right over the years, and today he often rails against “woke” thinking, describing it as “pagan”. Karp is a fan of martial arts and pistol shooting, and has a retinue of bodyguards drawn from Norwegian special forces, apparently because they are able to keep up with his obsessive cross-country skiing. His net worth is estimated at over $15 billion.

Palantir’s “manifesto”, like Karp’s recent book “The Technological Republic”, seemed to argue for a merger between Silicon Valley and a nationalistic, militarised US state; but it also railed, idiosyncratically, against the iPhone and the “post-war neutering of Germany and Japan”. It was seen by some as an attempt to curry favour with the Trump White House, which has turned on tech firms deemed unsupportive, such as Anthropic.

It might be the ultimate clash of tech giants. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are in court this week, battling over the origins of OpenAI and its pivot from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit business. It’s a “deeply personal” civil trial, said The New York Times, featuring “two very different tales” of OpenAI’s founding.

Musk helped start the company as a nonprofit and contends it was “ripped from its promise of altruism” by Altman’s greed. It’s “not OK to steal a charity,” Musk said on the witness stand. Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, counters that the lawsuit is simply “sour grapes” for the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT years after Musk parted ways in 2018, said the Times. Altman and OpenAI “had the nerve to go on and succeed without” Musk, said William Savitt, OpenAI’s lead counsel.

What did the commentators say?

The trial is “big in every conceivable measure,” said Slate. Musk is seeking $130 billion in damages along with the removal of Altman and another OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman, from the company’s board of directors. It also comes as both OpenAI and Musk’s SpaceX — which houses his current AI venture, xAI — prepare to take go public. The verdict “could change the very future of Silicon Valley and the future of tech throughout the world forever.”

Altman and Musk “sure dislike each other,” Matteo Wong said at The Atlantic. Altman and Musk founded OpenAI because they disagreed with Google’s approach to artificial intelligence then split up over their own disagreements. The trial is giving the public its “clearest glimpse” at a small clique of tech pioneers “whose bickering is shaping the most expensive infrastructure buildout in human history.” It is a technology that could “upend the labor market” and “reshape the geopolitical order,” and neither man wants the other to have that kind of power. The trial makes the AI boom “seem sordid and small.”

A “yearslong feud” between Altman and Musk means the trial is “going to get messy,” Elizabeth Lopatto and Hayden Field said at The Verge. Musk appears to be “trying to damage OpenAI’s reputation however he can.” His demands that the company change its operating structure and remove executives “are likely unrealistic.” But if enough ugly secrets are revealed at trial, Musk will “have made it look like it’s not worth keeping Mr. Altman in his position” at the top of OpenAI, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Deven Desai said to the outlet.

What next?

The trial comes at a “precarious moment” for OpenAI, Rob Nicholls said at The Conversation. Altman was recently the subject of an embarrassing profile in The New Yorker, and the company is “bleeding” money as rival Anthropic surges to the front of the AI conversation. OpenAI expects to lose $14 billion in 2026 and recently shut down its Sora video-creation product. A Musk victory might derail OpenAI’s IPO and leave “ripple effects” that “could be felt for many years to come.”

“If chatbots were as all-knowing as we’ve been led to believe, they should have seen the backlash to artificial intelligence coming,” said Martin Baccardax in Barron’s. Now it’s here. Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, was carrying an anti-AI manifesto when he allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million San Francisco mansion earlier this month. Two days later, a man and a woman in their 20s were arrested for allegedly firing a gun outside Altman’s house. Someone fired 13 bullets into Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson’s home the previous week, leaving a note reading, “No Data Centers.” Gibson had supported a new AI data center. AI is barging “into public life with a pace and aggression unlike any of its technological predecessors.” Its creators warn that AI will eliminate half of white-collar jobs in five years, concentrate even more money and power at the top, and consume vast amounts of water and electricity. Just 26% of Americans see AI as a positive force. Is it any surprise the backlash has “turned violent”?

On social media, many people justified the attacks against Altman, said Clare Duffy in CNN.com. If the “commoditization of what it means to be human is allowed to continue,” wrote one Reddit user, violence “will be much more common.” Some activists deemed Moreno-Gama a hero, comparing his alleged attack to Luigi Mangione allegedly murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. Before he was charged with attempted murder, Moreno-Gama himself posted about “Luigi-ing tech CEOs.”

The “Stop AI” movement is being driven by young people who’ve already experienced technology taking over their lives, said Eva Roytburg in Fortune. But the backlash is spreading across America’s heartland as communities reject massive data centers, citing concerns about water usage and utility bills. Americans have stopped or delayed $64 billion worth of data centers in two years. Maine is set to become the first state to ban them. In Festus, Mo., voters just ousted local politicians who approved a data center. These developments “signal an escalation in the blowback,” said Brian Merchant in his Substack newsletter. AI executives have been warning that they’re building a tool so powerful it will automate millions of jobs and “might literally end humanity,” but seem shocked we’re finally listening. “Ordinary people are saying: Wake up. We have good reason to hate AI.” The backlash will likely only “get worse from here.”

‘Texas is to blame for nation’s redistricting disaster’

The Dallas Morning News editorial board

The “redistricting power grab that President Donald Trump launched in Texas has ended in a stalemate for the parties and a huge loss for our nation,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. After “10 months of out-of-cycle, coast-to-coast congressional redistricting, Democrats and Republicans control about the same number of seats as they did before the mess began,” but “democracy and good government, meanwhile, are in negative territory.” This “has squandered public resources by requiring frivolous elections.”

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‘I’m one of Cuba’s political prisoners. When will I go free?’

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara at The New York Times

Amid “mounting U.S. pressure, the Cuban government announced that it was releasing over 2,000 prisoners in what the Cuban Embassy in Washington called a ‘humanitarian and sovereign gesture,’” says Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. But amnesty “would not extend to those who had committed ‘crimes against authority,’ a term generally applied to political dissidents.” Cuba’s government “has denied holding political prisoners,” but is “still scared of people like me, who have not been afraid to challenge the state’s authority.”

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‘A “barbaric” problem in American hospitals is only getting bigger’

Elisabeth Rosenthal at The Atlantic

If you “need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours,” says Elisabeth Rosenthal. In this “limbo state,“ the “rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear.” If an “ED boarder has a medical complaint that needs quick attention, it’s easy for them to fall through the cracks.”

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‘How the tech world turned evil’

Timothy Noah at The New Republic

Even “in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness,” says Timothy Noah. But “now a prince of the technocratic elite,” Peter Thiel, is “framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan.” And his “was merely the most literal expression of a millenarian sentiment about the coming of AI that’s now conventional wisdom among tech barons.”

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Apple founder Steve Jobs created the iPhone and cultivated a rockstar reputation for innovation. His successor, Tim Cook, turned the company into a globe-spanning colossus of profit. What will the next CEO, John Ternus, do to build on their legacies?

The 51-year-old Ternus “knows Apple at its core” after a quarter-century at the company, said CNN. As a senior executive since 2021, Ternus “led the hardware engineering behind Apple’s most recognizable products” like the iPhone and iPad and was “essential” in developing the new mid-price MacBook Neo.

His promotion to CEO “isn’t much of a surprise,” given that he had been seen as a front-runner to succeed Cook “for at least the last year,” CNN said. His task is to position the company for further success in the age of artificial intelligence. Ternus faces pressure to “produce success out of the gates,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note.

An ‘Apple lifer’

Ternus is a “safe choice in a dangerous moment” for Apple, said Semafor. Cook replaced Jobs when Apple was at the “height of its influence” and built it into the first company with a $1 million market cap. The company is “still a financial juggernaut” though it does not command its former cultural cachet. Ternus is an “Apple lifer” unlikely to take Apple in a “radical new direction” that would “squander its lucrative business.” But his ascension comes as AI transforms the “entire concept of computing and technology.”

The “defining challenge” for Ternus is “fixing the company’s AI strategy,” said CNBC. Apple has so far avoided “hefty capital expenditures” on AI data centers and “punted” on its own AI model. Instead, Apple has bet that consumers will use its iPhones and other products to run AI. Choosing Ternus as CEO signals the company’s belief that the “future of AI will run through tightly integrated devices, not just software,” the University of Notre Dame’s Timothy Hubbard said to CNBC.

Apple faces an “existential challenge” figuring out “what comes after the iPhone,” said Axios. Cook “executed masterfully” to maximize iPhone’s success but “largely sputtered” with new products like the Vision Pro and a failed attempt at building autonomous cars. Companies like Meta and Google are pushing smart glasses, and former Apple design guru Jony Ive is designing hardware for OpenAI. A new leadership era opens with Apple “chasing its next hit” product. Cook demonstrated that Apple can grow. Ternus instead “must prove that it can still innovate.”

Making ‘first-rate physical things’

Apple has put the “hardware guy in charge,” said The Wall Street Journal, and is betting on itself as a “maker of first-rate physical things” in an AI-dominated world. That means navigating “complex geopolitics threatening Apple’s supply chain” and countless “regulatory battles around the world.”

Ternus is expected to “bring back Jobs-era decisiveness” to Apple’s CEO suite, said Bloomberg. Cook was known for “incrementalism” in moving the company’s product line forward, Forrester Research’s Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a note. Ternus “must define Apple’s future as ferociously as he defends its past.”

What happened

Meta said Thursday it will cut about 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as it shifts resources to artificial intelligence. In a company memo, Chief People Officer Janelle Gale said the social media behemoth would also close 6,000 open positions “as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently” and “offset the other investments we’re making.”

Who said what

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “reorganizing his company around AI products in a fierce race” against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, The New York Times said. Zuckerberg has “made no secret of his AI ambitions,” including rolling out AI-powered social media he “hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives,” and he has pushed employees to “use AI in their daily work.”

Meta’s cuts are the “latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled” by AI’s efficiency promises, CNN said. Amazon said it would cut 16,000 workers in January, and financial-tech firm Block’s 40% workforce cut in February “came with a stark warning that more companies would follow suit.” Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts to 7% of its workforce to invest in AI.

What next?

Meta said it will notify employees being laid off on May 20.

Allbirds is making a complete heel turn after the shoe brand announced its pivot to AI. And many are skeptical that the footwear company will succeed in making such a big switch to the convoluted tech space. But Allbirds is just the latest in a list of companies that got their start in one industry, then changed to something quite different.

Android

Android cellphones have become as ubiquitous as iPhones in modern years, but the company didn’t start out in the phone game. The brand was launched in 2003, originally “conceived as an operating system for digital cameras,” said software development company Velvetech. By the time Android got up and running, the “market for digital cameras significantly fell,” whereas the “mobile device market was constantly growing.”

The company was forced to pivot to stay alive and began producing an operating system with more widespread uses. It is now used “primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearable devices,” said IT brand Spiceworks.

Nintendo

Nintendo has always made games but probably not the kind you’re thinking of. The company was started in 1889 when its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda in Kyoto. By 1902, Yamauchi “started manufacturing the first Western-style playing cards in Japan,” said Nintendo’s website. The company began growing in size throughout the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, Nintendo realized it had to make a change to keep up with the times, and in 1975 “began the development of its first electronic video game systems,” said BBC News. In 1978, Nintendo “produced a computer game version of the board game Othello” and has since been responsible for producing some of the most iconic video games franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

Nokia

Nokia has made perhaps the biggest one-eighty of the companies on this list. While known today for its industrial-strength cellphones, the company started in the 1860s as something wholly different: a wood pulp mill in Finland. This mill was the first step in the mass production of paper. The modern company was eventually formed as a “merger between the Nokia Company (paper), Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works in 1867,” said the Crypto Museum, a Dutch virtual museum.

Prior to its eventual focus on cellphones, Nokia became a bit of an everything brand. It has been “involved in the production of paper, rubber, electricity, car and bicycle tires, footwear, communication cables, television sets, consumer electronics, personal computers, robotics, capacitors, plastics, aluminium, chemicals, mobile phones and last but not least: military communications equipment,” said the Crypto Museum.

Slack

Slack is used today as a business-to-business chat tool by numerous companies and industries. Yet it originated in the 2010s as an “internal communication tool” for the “quirky online multiplayer game Glitch,” said Encyclopedia Britannica. The video game garnered positive reviews, but its “creators found the game to be expensive and unwieldy.” They soon started looking for alternative ways to implement the technology.

This arrived in the form of a rebrand: Slack, a “provider of a messaging tool for facilitating workplace communication, an ‘email killer’ and the ultimate collaboration app,” said TechCrunch. Today, Slack is “used by more than 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating the network effect of a mature and innovative product,” according to the company itself.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen has always sold cars. But in this case, it’s the company’s history that represents a major redirect. The brand is well-known for its associations with the Nazis during World War II: In 1937, Adolf Hitler’s party “founded a state-owned company that was later named Volkswagen, or ‘The People's Car Company,’” said NPR. Volkswagen leadership would eventually disavow its Nazi ties.

The pivot came in modern times, as Volkswagen shifted from supporting antisemitic Nazi Germany to negotiating weapons deals with the state of Israel. In a tinge of irony, Volkswagen, which “produced parts using forced labor for V-1 cruise missiles used by the Wehrmacht during World War II, may soon be manufacturing parts for an Israeli-designed missile defense system,” said Haaretz.

YouTube

YouTube is best known as the video platform where you can watch just about any kind of video. But it was originally started in 2004 by three PayPal employees who had an “idea for a website for users to upload video dating profiles,” said Business Insider. The company was even trademarked on Valentine’s Day. As a dating site, YouTube “attracted little interest, forcing the co-founder to take out ads paying women $20 to upload dating videos.”

Then people began “uploading videos of all kinds to YouTube,” said Business Insider, and the website took off as a general platform. Today, over “20 million videos are uploaded daily” on YouTube, with an estimated 20 billion total videos on the site, the company said.

Claims that new AI models can outperform humans at some hacking tasks has sparked widespread alarm about the future of digital security.

Tech firms “usually create buzz around products they plan to release”, said The Economist. American artificial intelligence lab Anthropic, “has managed to create excitement – and a good deal of worry – around something it plans not to”, having announced that its new Claude Mythos model would not be released to the general public.

The problem is not that the new model is “buggy or unreliable” but rather “that it works so well that releasing it would put the world’s digital infrastructure at risk”.

What did the commentators say?

This next generation of AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s new closed-version GPT 5.4-Cyber can not only write code, but also recognise errors – or “bugs” – in the code, which can be used to both identify potential weaknesses but also ways to attack computer systems.

“It’s impressive – and, at the same time, worrying” – because it makes cyberattacks “easier”, said professor of cyber security Florian Tramèr on ETH Zurich university’s website. A lone hacker “can suddenly try out thousands of variants” and “if one attack fails, he or she can simply try with the next one.” “This increases the risks for companies, state institutions or even private individuals,” especially “if such models become cheaper and more efficient”.

Recognising the danger this might pose, Anthropic has limited access to Mythos to a handful of trusted tech companies under an initiative called Project Glasswing. Similarly, OpenAI is providing limited access to GPT-5.4-Cyber to vetted security professionals so they can use it for defensive cybersecurity measures.

Yet even Anthropic’s strict security protocols appear to have been breached, after the company confirmed it was investigating how a group of users gained “unauthorised access” to Mythos Preview “through one of our third-party vendor environments”.

The risk of unauthorised access will only “add to anxiety” about Mythos, and “raises concerns” about whether Anthropic “can keep the technology it develops out of the hands of bad actors”, said Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times.

News of these new models’ cybercapabilities had already “sent shockwaves through the markets and prompted high-level discussions among financial institutions and global regulators”, with finance ministers from across the G7 hosting bank bosses to discuss what AI-enabled hacking might mean for their businesses.

What next?

Capitalising on a “mix of fear and excitement over AI and its future impact” has “become a hallmark of the sector and its marketing strategies in recent years”, said BBC reporters Liv McMahon and Joe Tidy.

In the case of Mythos, “we still do not know enough about it to know whether these hopes or fears are justified, or more a reflection of the hype surrounding the industry”.

In reality, “like other tools from the long history of cybersecurity”, the latest AI models “can be used for both offence and defence”, said The New York Times.

There is still disagreement on “whether one side of this struggle has gained a significant advantage through AI” and experts are “unsure how the battle will play out in the coming years”. Most agree, however, that “the companies and governments that do not embrace the latest AI for defensive purposes will leave themselves enormously vulnerable”.

With the cyberenvironment experiencing the “most change” ever, said Francis deSouza, the chief operating officer and president of security products at Google Cloud, “you have to fight AI with AI.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is “close” to securing a $10 billion (£7.4 billion) fundraising deal from investors for his AI lab, codenamed Project Prometheus, said the Financial Times. The deal would make the company, which aims to explore how AI systems can be applied across physical industries, “one of the best-financed early-stage start-ups globally”, and marks the first time Bezos has served in an operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021.

Project Prometheus will propel Bezos into the ranks of the AI titans heading firms with multi-billion-dollar valuations, such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir. With the industry elite divided by ongoing legal feuds and conflicting political ideologies, the personalities of the individual CEOs look set to shape the course of AI as much as the technology itself. Here are the five names to watch.

Sam Altman

The OpenAI CEO is more and more becoming the “protagonist” of our times, said Lily Isaacs in The Observer. As with Faust, Victor Frankenstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, we are beginning to “share the uneasy feeling that enlightenment carries within it the seeds of catastrophe”.

Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT is the chatbot that has “redefined the standards of artificial intelligence”, said Forbes. As the company nears a possible value of more than $1 trillion (£740 billion), “one of the biggest so-called risk factors” to the company is “Altman himself”, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Altman was fired by the board in November 2023, only to be reinstated days later.

Reading the year-and-a-half-long investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, the “overriding impression” of Altman is that he is a “borderline sociopath”, said Jeremy Kahn in Fortune. The piece raises questions on whether Altman “actually cares about AI safety” or whether his rhetoric is simply a “convenient pose” to win over funders and regulators.

Dario Amodei

“We should not deny that the disruption is going to happen” as AI use increases, Anthropic CEO Amodei told John Thornhill in the FT, but AI can only “diffuse at the speed of trust”. Trust, however, said Thornhill, is “in short supply”. “As the current frontrunner of the AI pack, Amodei is certain to come under increasingly fierce scrutiny.”

It is clear that he “wants to position himself as one of the good guys in the AI debate”, but that “grates with many Silicon Valley critics”, who argue that “his principles align with Anthropic’s commercial interests”. Amodei founded Anthropic – the creators of Claude – in 2021 alongside six other former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela, who is president. The company has recently raised $30 billion (£22.2 billion) at a $380 billion (£281.3 billion) valuation and is reportedly “heading for a giant stock market flotation later this year”.

Central to Amodei’s brand of Anthropic is that it is “fundamentally safer than that of its rivals”, said The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons Amodei left OpenAI, citing “concerns about safety”. In recent months, he has also “compared the legal battle between Altman and Elon Musk to the fight between Hitler and Stalin”, as well as calling a $25 million (£18.5 million) donation by OpenAI President Greg Brockman to pro-Trump super PAC (independent expenditure-only political action committee) Maga Inc. “evil”.

Jensen Huang

Although the head of Nvidia may not be driving the AI revolution directly, his company is facilitating it, acting as the “hardware backbone” of the movement, said Business Insider. Huang’s “chip empire” is effectively “powering the generative AI boom”.

He founded the company in 1993, and has served as CEO ever since. Under his leadership, Nvidia – whose projected revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips could reach $1 trillion (£740 billion) or more by the end of 2027 – has expanded partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud to accelerate AI development. Nvidia’s hardware and software “now sit at the centre of nearly every major foundation-model program”, said Business Insider.

AI is “gonna create more jobs in the end”, Huang said during a recent panel at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reported Fortune. “There’ll be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it.” He has previously commented that negative commentary surrounding AI is “extremely hurtful”, said Inc.

Huang is not without his quirks, having banned one-on-one meetings with staff who report directly to him, on the grounds they would “clog up his work schedule and slow him down”, said Fortune.

Alex Karp

Fewer people will have heard of the co-founder of Palantir, but to some he is the “scariest CEO in the world”, said Steve Rose in The Guardian.

The company recently released a 22-point “manifesto” summarising Karp’s recent book, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”. In it, he extols the need for “hard power”, argues the inevitability of “AI weapons” and calls for the reversal of the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan”. MPs have since called this a “parody of a ‘RoboCop’ film” and the “ramblings of a supervillain”. Arguably, what it does show is that “Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation”, said Aisha Down and Robert Booth in The Guardian.

The company is “at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues”, said The Guardian. Palantir has “multibillion-dollar contracts” with the US Army and Ice, as well as partnerships with the Israeli military and the Ministry of Defence, said Al Jazeera.

Some NHS staff are “refusing to work” on the health service’s Federated Data Platform, which is provided by Palantir, due to the company’s “role in US defence and immigration enforcement”, said the FT. Ministers are exploring the possibility of a “break clause” in the company’s seven-year £330 million NHS contract, signed in 2023.

Elon Musk

The founder of xAI and Grok, such is the strength of Musk’s conviction in AI, that he believes it will put “immortality within human reach”, said Fortune.

But the “rapid rise” of his tech company xAI’s has “raised concerns”, said Harry Booth in Time. There were accusations of pollution from the Colossus data centres’ temporary gas turbines, and the now-infamous update to Grok “praised Adolf Hitler as a ‘decisive leader’ and began creating graphic rape narratives”.

French prosecutors summoned Musk for a voluntary interview on Monday, which he did not attend, over “alleged abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction” by his AI chatbot Grok, as well as the “creation of sexual deepfakes”, said France 24. This is part of an ongoing probe first opened in 2025, with the company’s offices raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit in February.

Musk is also locked in a legal feud with Altman – with whom he cofounded OpenAI – accusing Altman of deceiving him into donating $38 million (£28 million) towards the company with the promise that it would remain a non-profit, said Business Insider.

It was not a joke. The shoe company Allbirds announced last week that it is pivoting to artificial intelligence, a sign that the AI bubble is about to pop. Or maybe the tech optimists are right and everything is AI now.

The company was “once the maker of Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe,” said The New York Times. Allbirds was previously valued at $4 billion, but the company earlier this year closed all its stores and sold its assets for a mere $39 million. Now the brand seeks a fresh start: The business is rebranding itself “NewBird AI” and announced it had received a $50 million influx to buy up advanced computer chips that will let it enter the AI infrastructure business. That investment is a “drop in the bucket” for an industry spending billions to build data centers, but Wall Street loved the news. NewBird’s stock immediately rose nearly 600%.

The market’s reaction proves “AI excitement is alive and well — but as silly as ever,” Noah Weidner said at The Street. The move might make sense, though. Artificial intelligence requires a “massive volume” of computing power, and companies able to furnish it “will drum up excitement” — even if that company once sold shoes.

AI is creating wealth

Will AI spending hold up?

The shoe company’s “flailing AI embrace” is “not a horrible idea on the surface” given that it fills a “real business need,” Nitish Pahwa said at Slate. But the AI spending that has “propped up the economy” might not persevere, and communities are “successfully obstructing the data centers” needed for further expansion. Indeed, Allbirds’ stock started to drop after the initial surge, said Bloomberg. The market roller coaster ride gives Allbirds the feel of a “meme stock,” said 50 Park Investments’ Adam Sarhan, in which “emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window.”

What happened

A humanoid robot called Lightning won a half-marathon in Beijing on Sunday, beating his robotic competitors and the human runners in a parallel race by completing the 13-mile course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — nearly seven minutes faster than the world record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month.

Who said what

The victory of Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, marked a “significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race,” when the winning robot “finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds,” The Associated Press said. The “remarkable feat” was also a “big stride for China in its technological rivalry with the U.S.,” CNN said.

China already has “more robots at work” than “the rest of the world combined,” The New York Times said. Beijing also recently hosted the first Humanoid Robot Games, featuring “plenty of running, kicking and punching,” though the robots “also flailed around, crashed and fell over many times.”

What next?

The leap forward in China’s humanoid engineering “is genuinely impressive,” Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told the Times. But it’s “much less obvious” how a robot winning a half-marathon “translates into productivity and ultimately, profitability.”

The Internet Archive has been responsible for saving and providing access to trillions of websites over the past 30 years. AI is putting a damper on the organization’s work, as large language models are using the data without permission. As a result, many companies are no longer allowing their content to be archived, which could lead to a large loss of historical records in the future.

Access denied

The Internet Archive is a non-profit that is building a “digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts,” according to its website. The organization uses web crawlers to capture snapshots of sites. These snapshots are then made available through the public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine, which operates like a library, providing “free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities and the general public.” However, amid the rise of AI, the Internet Archive’s “commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability for some news publishers,” said an analysis by Nieman Lab.

Currently, “241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots,” including The New York Times and Reddit, said Nieman Lab. Of these sites, 87% are owned by USA Today Co., the “largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States, formerly known as Gannett.” The Guardian has also restricted the Internet Archive; the publication does not block the crawlers, but it “excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles,” said Wired.

Many of the same media outlets banning Internet Archive’s crawlers have used the resource themselves to access older data and articles. “Journalists rely on the Archive as a resource in our reporting, and many digital investigations into issues like misinformation or censorship are possible only because it preserves material that would otherwise disappear,” said the organizations Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, in a letter to the Internet Archive. “Without that ongoing work to preserve the web, large parts of journalism’s recent history would already be lost.”

On record

Artificial intelligence is the biggest reason sites are blocking the Internet Archive. There is “evidence that the Wayback Machine has been used to train large language models,” said Forbes. The archive allows tech companies to “skirt copyright laws by using the Wayback Machine as a workaround for training language models on their content,” said Morning Brew. Despite this, Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, “emphasizes that the digital archive has controls to limit abuse of AI automation and prevent large-scale data extraction.”

Unfortunately, a few bad apples ruin the whole bunch. The Internet Archive “tends to be good citizens,” Robert Hahn, the head of business affairs and licensing at The Guardian, said to Nieman Lab. “It’s the law of unintended consequences: You do something for really good purposes, and it gets abused.” The nonprofit “has taken on the Herculean task of preserving the internet, and many news organizations aren’t equipped to save their own work,” Nieman Lab said.

There is “no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine,” said Wired. If it “continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access or are even lost altogether.”

‘Our longing for inconvenience’

Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker

Longing for “Walkmans and VCRs is, of course, an offshoot of a larger obsession with the not-so-distant past,” says Hanif Abdurraqib. There is a “longing for some previous era, if not actually a desire to return to it.” The “yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative,” and “convenience and inaction are often bedfellows.”

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‘History is running backwards’

David Brooks at The Atlantic

Many “thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen,” says David Brooks. People “used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading — toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness and liberal democracy.” Science and reason “would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.” But it “turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future.”

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‘Yes, of course war settles things’

Rich Lowry at the National Review

There are “many things that can be said about the tragedy of warfare without crediting the blatantly ahistorical cliché that it is never the answer, or doesn’t solve disputed questions, often with a terrible finality,” says Rich Lowry. War can “determine international boundaries and the nature of governments.” It “might be pointless, or fought for prestige, revenge or territorial aggrandizement. That’s all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that military conflict is, at times, necessary.”

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‘Polio has no cure. The vaccine is the only way to save lives.’

Simone Blaser at USA Today

Making polio vaccines “optional is a bad idea. It’s also a dangerous one,” says Simone Blaser. There is “no cure for polio, but there is a way to prevent this terrible illness.” If the “polio vaccine becomes optional,” it “becomes a mathematical certainty that we will see a resurgence.” You “may believe your choice doesn’t affect others, but there is no way to know who in a community is unvaccinated, whose immune system is shoddy, or who is particularly vulnerable.”

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Appearing straight out of science fiction, portable computers called cyberdecks have been growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z. They can be built with minimal parts and customized both in their purpose and aesthetic. The trend is a response to a perceived lack of creativity in mainstream technology, as well as a way to fight back against data harvesting. And many want to use technology without the influence of large corporations, similar to the days of the early internet.

From mind to machine

A cyberdeck is a transportable, homemade computer “used to access an online interface,” said Daily Dot. The term originated with the 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. And since then, cyberdecks have been a “staple of the cyberpunk genre and aesthetic.” Building them has become a trend among Gen Z, blending “retro-futuristic aesthetics with practical computing,” said Newsweek.

Cyberdecks are generally simple to construct, often using “single-board systems like Raspberry Pi paired with small screens, keyboards and custom enclosures,” said Newsweek. Many are also “built from thrifted or repurposed materials, giving each device a distinct look and function shaped entirely by its creator.”

These hand-built computers serve a variety of purposes, including gaming machine, e-reader, information database or MP3 player. And building a cyberdeck “can be as complex or simple as you choose to make it,” said The Cyberdeck Cafe. “People of all skill levels have constructed their own.”

Cyberdecks are “open systems, meaning components can be swapped, modified or redesigned,” said Newsweek. The flexibility is “part of the appeal for younger users who want to experiment with hardware and software without restrictions.”

The trend comes at a time when technology and social media platforms have become controlling with “more data harvesting, more algorithmic control, more ads, more surveillance,” said Quasa. Cyberdecks are “less about replacing everyday devices and more about reclaiming control over technology,” said Newsweek.

Sticking it to the man

Building a portable computer is a “way fringe and anti-establishment engineers and cyberpunks are creating a digital identity all their own,” said Daily Dot. Cyberdecks “combat the unbounded corporatization, invasiveness and homogeneity of widespread tech, in addition to individualizing the tech experience according to a user’s aesthetic.”

They are “quietly rebellious” and a “direct middle finger to the boring, minimalist ‘everything-is-a-sleek-black-rectangle’ aesthetic that dominates tech design,” said Quasa. Much of the love for cyberdecks is a result of disillusionment with the state of modern technology. The “early internet’s wild, private, joyful chaos feels like a distant memory.” Gone is the world in which “you didn’t chase likes or dread the next feed update.”

While technology has been “shaping the world’s digital future,” cyberdecks are “driving users back to the past — a time when a simpler, less corporatized and aggressively monitored online reality once existed,” said Daily Dot. The trend is “self-defense and nostalgia at the same time,” said Quasa. “When you are making something that’s truly yours, why be boring? Make it fun. Make it ridiculous. Make it you.”

As part of AI company Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, the new general-purpose model Mythos is uniquely powerful in the artificial intelligence industry and is causing concern among even people who are normally trusting of AI. The company, which also makes the AI model Claude, has claimed that Mythos is currently too advanced for public release, and is instead entrusting the model to cybersecurity experts for the time being. Some are worried this could pave the way for even more nefariousness in the AI space.

‘New era of hacking’

Mythos’ AI programming is able to find potential weaknesses in cybersecurity, and it can “detect thousands of high- and critical-severity bugs and software defects, with vulnerabilities identified in most major operating systems and web browsers,” said NBC News. Some of these vulnerabilities “had been undiscovered for decades,” according to Anthropic’s experts. The company found that Mythos’ “cybersecurity capabilities in particular were surprisingly advanced” compared to similar general-purpose AI models.

But there are also fears that Mythos “could usher in a new era of hacking and cybersecurity,” said NBC News. Mythos is “capable of advanced reasoning,” which could allow it to “identify and exploit a growing number of software vulnerabilities” if it were to fall into the wrong hands. To stave off these fears, Anthropic is allowing certain tech firms to access Mythos. But the company “does not have plans yet to release Mythos to the general public,“ said Bloomberg, a move that will ensure the AI ends up “in the hands of defenders first,” officials with Anthropic said.

The tech firms are expected to use Mythos as part of a project called Glasswing to “hunt for flaws in their products and share findings with industry peers,” said Bloomberg. It is a notable change because it will be the “first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it,” said Forbes. Anthropic’s position remains “straightforward: The model’s cyber capabilities are too dangerous for general availability.”

‘Humanity’s most devious behaviors’

In addittion to hacking vulnerabilities, some experts are concerned about Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic released a safety evaluation for Mythos that shows a “striking leap in scores on many evaluation benchmarks,” the company said. In some instances, the evaluation “reads like a thriller about an AI that has learned some of humanity’s most devious behaviors,” said Axios.

At least one of the tests performed by Anthropic showed Mythos “acting like a cutthroat executive,” said Axios, doing things like “turning a competitor into a dependent wholesale customer, threatening to cut off supply to control pricing and keeping extra supplier shipments it hadn’t paid for.” The AI had instances where it “used a prohibited method to get an answer, then tried to ‘re-solve’ it to avoid detection,” though these were limited to “less than 0.001% of interactions.”

These issues have not stopped companies from working with Mythos, as “approximately 40 organizations involved in the design, maintenance or operation of computer systems are said to have joined Glasswing,” said The Guardian. This includes major firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorganChase and Microsoft. And while Anthropic has previously sparred with the Trump administration about its implementation in the Defense Department, the company has also “had discussions with the U.S. government regarding Mythos.”

Americans may be unwittingly giving hackers an easy path to access their houses. Cybersecurity experts, including FBI cybercrime analysts, are warning about residential proxy networks found on many off-brand electronics. These networks often allow hackers to hide in plain sight.

What are residential proxy networks?

These software systems are “designed to route other people’s internet traffic through a user’s device,” said Cyber Magazine. The networks operate largely like “forged return addresses on envelopes — someone else’s internet traffic is rerouted through your connection,” said officials at Comcast’s Threat Research Lab to Cyber. As the networks engage with users, they “quietly launder illegitimate activity” while making it appear that your device is the “initiator of that traffic.”

Residential proxy networks can make their way onto a variety of home devices, as “TV streaming devices, digital picture frames, smartphones, tablets and routers are used to route traffic,” said the FBI. Many people who own such devices do not “realize their internet connection could be used by someone else without their permission.” The devices can sometimes gain internet access when the “owner of the device provides consent” unintentionally; other times, the owner “does not provide consent and is unaware their IP address is being used.”

Some of these devices “ship with residential proxy software preinstalled on them,” which can “happen with certain low-cost video streaming systems,” said The Wall Street Journal. In other cases, people might “download the code to their smartphones” without realizing it. And since the networks make it appear like illegal activity is coming from an innocent person’s home, there’s a “chance that law enforcement could come knocking at your door.”

How can people protect themselves?

The FBI has a list of tips to help people stay safe, urging Americans to “avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, TV shows and movies,” as these “may contain malware or backdoors that hijack your internet network and can lead to identity theft,” said the agency. The agency also recommended people be wary of downloading free VPNs and clicking on pop-ups, which can “initiate malware installation on your device.”

In the midst of these continued cyberattacks, some ordinary Americans are fighting back. Benjamin Brundage, a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, began an investigation in 2025 as a “growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet” via a Chinese company called Ipidea, said the Journal. Using cat memes to “lighten the mood” while speaking to hackers, Brundage was able to find out significant information about the attackers, and law enforcement eventually “took action against the network.”

Brundage “identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable” to hackers, said the Journal. Other companies also assisted law enforcement in the investigation. Google “took legal action” against Ipidea to “take down domains used to control devices and proxy traffic through them,” said the tech company in a press release. While there are still “significant challenges for network defenders to detect and block malicious activities,” officials believe the action taken against Ipidea has reduced the “available pool of devices for the proxy operators by millions.”

Big Tech may have reached “an inflection point,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. A Los Angeles jury last week ordered Meta and Google to pay a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman, known as Kaley G.M., who claimed their apps caused her depression, body shame, and trauma throughout her childhood. (ByteDance, which developed TikTok, and Snap Inc. previously settled out of court.)

The decision came a day after a New Mexico jury found that Meta owes $375 million for failing to protect kids from sexual predators online. Though Meta and Google will appeal the rulings, thousands of similar lawsuits are “waiting in the wings.” Social media giants could face billions in future judgments. That’s because Kaley’s lawyers made a “novel argument” others will use, said Hannah Epstein in The Dispatch. They side-stepped “First Amendment concerns” and Section 230—which shields social media platforms from responsibility for what their users post—by focusing not on the content itself but on the algorithms and app designs that keep minors hooked to Instagram and YouTube for hours. Citing “a trove” of internal documents from Google and Meta, they contended that the companies deliberately targeted preteens with intentionally addictive features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and beauty filters. “We’re basically pushers,” one Instagram employee wrote to colleagues.

Parents will “understandably celebrate those verdicts,” said David French in The New York Times. But the First Amendment is our most fundamental right, and it protects even “toxic and harmful” speech. I don’t doubt that social media can be damaging, but “a social media site is not a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette.” Parents “are not helpless,” and we can and should control kids’ use of smartphones and these apps. This “social media shakedown” is a big victory for trial lawyers, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but it’s a slippery slope that will invite countless more lawsuits. “Are platforms supposed to prohibit users from posting photos that might make someone feel depressed or insecure?” That sure covers a lot of what’s online.

It’s easy for critics to blame “greedy plaintiffs” and “runaway juries,” said Austin Sarat in The Guardian. But this case presented mountains of evidence that Meta and Google engineered “the addictive qualities of their sites.” That’s legal “negligence,” for which countless kids like Kaley “have paid the price.” For Meta and Google, it appears “the moment of reckoning has arrived, at long last,” said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. With the shield of Section 230 finally pierced, social media firms now face “the threat of immense financial harm” if they continue to “create compulsive, unstoppable engagement” with toxic garbage.

Don’t bank on it, said Nicholas Creel in Newsweek. These verdicts may not survive appeals, and have not created “any coherent legal standard governing how social media companies may or may not build their products.” Only Congress can create those standards through legislation. But how do lawmakers define what’s addictive or damaging? asked Douglas Murray in the New York Post. The onus is us—the consumers of Big Tech’s products. You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult in the U.S. who doesn’t have an “unhealthy relationship” with their smartphone. No wonder our children get hooked, too. The long-term solution to this problem “lies in all of our hands.”

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence can sometimes offer less-than-stellar guidance. But AI might give people this bad wisdom for a sobering reason: to flatter, according to a new study. In some cases, AI may only reinforce people’s preconceived notions, but the words it generates can be outright harmful.

What did the study find?

The “sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior” of AI chatbots can pose risks as people “increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas,” said the study published in the journal Science. In an analysis of 11 leading large language models, including AI bots from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, chatbot responses to users were “nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal” behaviors.

The problem is not just that these chatbots “dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions,” said The Associated Press. In one example, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was asked if littering in a park was acceptable if no garbage can was available, the bot “blamed the park for not having trash cans, not the questioning litterer who was ‘commendable’ for even looking for one.”

This example may seem trivial, but AI’s general tendency to “flatter and excessively confirm users’ opinions can lead to wrong decisions, harm relationships and reinforce harmful beliefs while decreasing the willingness to take responsibility or resolve conflicts,” said The Jerusalem Post. The proneness toward sycophancy is a “technological flaw already tied to some high-profile cases of delusional and suicidal behavior in vulnerable populations,” said the AP.

Why is AI sycophancy such a problem?

Many experts worry that this AI advice “will worsen people’s social skills and ability to navigate uncomfortable situations,” Myra Cheng, the study’s lead author and a computer science PhD candidate, said to the Stanford Report. If this behavior by AI is not corrected, some users may “lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations” and could also pose larger safety risks.

“Users are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways,” Dan Jurafsky, the study’s senior author and a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Stanford Report. What many people are “not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic.” This type of interaction with AI is a “safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.” All of this is also happening as AI use becomes more prevalent, especially among teenagers.

At least 33% of teens “use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship or romantic interactions,” according to a study from Common Sense Media. Another 33% of teens choose to “discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.” Experts say when using AI you should avoid asking for advice on crucially important topics. “I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things,” Cheng told the Stanford Report. “That’s the best thing to do for now.”

OpenAI abruptly shut down its AI video generator this week only six months after its launch sent Hollywood scrambling, said Rachel Metz in Bloomberg. Sora, which could produce “realistic-looking AI videos” from
a text prompt, was packaged in a TikTok-style consumer app that let users share and comment on posts.

The ChatGPT maker and Disney “are also winding down their partnership, which had centered on Sora,” Metz said. Disney previously agreed to take a $1 billion stake in the startup and license 200 iconic characters to Sora in what some entertainment executives considered a watershed deal. In a note to staff, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company “is focusing its efforts on AI agents and a new artificial intelligence model.” The move coincides with “a push by OpenAI” to cut down expenses as it prepares to go public.

“OpenAI retrenching to focus on things like its core product and AI robotics makes sense,” said Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. AI video generation “gobbles up a vast amount of computing power”—by some estimates, a 10-second Sora video was 2,000 times more costly than an AI text output. That’s “a problem until all of OpenAI’s massive data centers are actually completed.” But after all the hype that came along with Sora when it launched in September, its fast implosion “could prove to be a moment” that suggests the AI bubble is beginning to deflate.

‘When capital can think, who pays?’

Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes at Newsweek

In the U.S., AI adoption is “growing at a remarkable pace,” but Americans are “concerned” about “layoffs tied to automation,” say Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes. So how should “public policy support” the transition? One answer: a “shift in how automation is taxed relative to human labor.” If capital is “taxed more and labor less, replacing people with AI is no longer the cheapest path,” and using AI to “augment human workers” instead “becomes a more attractive option.”

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‘Birthright citizenship made me American. We can't lose it.’

Cynthia Choi at USA Today

On his “first day back in office,” Trump issued an executive order “seeking to deny citizenship to certain U.S.-born children,” says Cynthia Choi. But birthright citizenship is as “fundamental” to our country as “freedom of speech.” This is “not some isolated policy debate.” It’s a “broader effort by the Trump administration to put an end to multiracial democracy.” Children without citizenship will be denied “access to education, public benefits and the basic rights that come with belonging.”

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‘Missile warfare is faster, deadlier and harder to control’

Hal Brands at Bloomberg

The Iran conflict “demonstrates how the spread of powerful, accurate missiles is changing warfare around the globe,” says Hal Brands. Even “relatively weak states now have fairly accurate weapons that can strike hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.” This means “fewer sanctuaries: Facilities and geographies that were once secure are now vulnerable to attack.” That could be “challenging” for the U.S., since “even relatively weak adversaries will be able to hold U.S. bases, perhaps even the homeland, at risk.”

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‘AOC finally takes a position that makes sense on military aid to Israel’

Zeeshan Aleem at MS Now

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who “struggled to take a clear position on supporting Israel in the past,” pledged to vote “against all military aid to Israel,” says Zeeshan Aleem. This was a “striking shift for a potential 2028 White House hopeful who, should she enter the race, would be the standard bearer for the democratic socialist left.” Her decision “does not just reflect demands on the left but the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party.”

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“If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward,” said Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2008, a year after he introduced the first iPhone and changed the world forever.

Apple may indeed be “allergic to nostalgia”, said Steven Levy in Wired, but the company is still “begrudgingly engaging in a series of concerts and commemorations, and we’re being blitzed by books, articles and oral histories” to mark its 50th anniversary.

From an inauspicious start in Jobs’ California garage, the company he founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 went on to pioneer the personal computer, transform the music market, and revolutionise how people use technology in the internet age. Apple is now valued at more than $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion), generating $400 billion (£301 billion) a year in revenue, with iPhone sales alone expected to bring in $1 million (£750 million) every 90 seconds. Across the world, 27% of the population – roughly 2.2 billion people – use one or more of its products.

Tariffs, trade wars and anti-trust trials

“No country has been more central to Apple’s rise – or more fraught for its future – than China,” said France 24. CEO Tim Cook, who took over from Jobs after he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, made China the primary manufacturing base for Apple devices. It is also one of Apple’s largest consumer markets but the company “faces mounting pressure” from “trade tensions and tariffs” accelerating efforts to diversify manufacturing elsewhere in Asia, while “competition from domestic rivals such as Huawei has eaten into Apple’s Chinese market share”.

To put it bluntly, “the world in which Apple once thrived no longer exists,” said former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in The New Statesman. A “25-year-long process of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas have flowed freely” is “now fading amid economic nationalism driven, in part, by a technological arms race between the US and China, and a global tariff offensive led by Donald Trump”.

Apple is also facing a threat to its dominance closer to home, in the form of a series of anti-trust cases against it. “In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires”, the basic argument against Apple is “comparatively simple”, said Adi Robertson on The Verge: “it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through”.

Regulators and courts have ordered changes, particularly around the App Store, “but those changes have been slow to arrive, in part because for a half-decade or more, Apple has dragged its feet at every turn”.

Artificial intelligence

Apple may have “absolutely owned” the internet and mobile era, said Wired, but “now the future belongs to AI” – a category where Apple seems to have been lacking.

Apple’s Siri lags behind the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, let alone China’s DeepSeek.

This is, in part, because Apple is “limited by its ecosystem”, said Acuity Trading. AI systems “require vast amounts of data, public testing and continuous version launches” and so “cannot be perfected in a closed ecosystem, which is what Apple has built its reputation on”. But perhaps the “most limiting factor is that Apple takes its commitment to user privacy very seriously”, which “has hindered AI development by limiting the amount of data it can use for training AI models”.

This “obsession with user privacy and its premium hardware could position it to drive widespread adoption of personalised AI – and make it profitable, a goal that has proved elusive for much of the AI industry”, said France 24.

Succession planning

The demise of Apple has been predicted many times before; in the mid-1980s after Jobs was forced out and again in 2011 when he passed away. Having revived the company and driven the release of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, Jobs was “widely thought of as irreplaceable”, said Barber. But Cook has not only steadied the ship but also taken the company to new heights, in terms of revenue generation if not technological innovation.

While the 65-year-old has given no indication of an imminent transition, the most likely candidate to take over when he does decide to go is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. “Known for his steadiness and political acumen”, Ternus, like Cook, is “risk averse” and would be a continuity hire rather than “someone more willing to shake things up”, said Bloomberg.

This matters because, while its products “helped define the past 50 years of consumer technology, thriving for another 50 will inevitably require the company to transform in ways that aren’t entirely clear today”.

The always-on generation may be “falling out of love with technology,” said Jessica Grose in The New York Times. A growing number of teens are taking breaks from social media, swapping smartphones for “dumb” phones, and “pushing back against tech use in their schools.” In polls, nearly half of teenagers say social media has had a negative effect on their generation, and while they still rely on it for socializing with friends, they increasingly view being “extremely online” as “a depressing way to live, and they want a future that involves more embodied activity and real-life connection.”

Depending on the survey, between 60% and 75% of teens also “support cellphone restrictions” in schools. Their relationship with tech could deteriorate further with artificial intelligence, about which there is “a lot of uncertainty.” What is certain is that many teens want to resist an “establishment” that is devaluing “their own creative contributions and humanity.”

Young Americans are replacing their devices with “analog” hobbies, said Megan Sauer in CNBC.com, and businesses are noticing. Sales of retro products like “rotary phones, needlepoint kits, and embroidery services” are up for the first time in years. With Gen Z leading the way, roughly 75% of adults said they did at least one crafting project last year, up from 62% in 2019, according to Mintel research. A doll house and miniature figurine shop in New York City has seen a surge of young clients flocking into the store for “tiny Labubu keychains, Pez dispensers, and mock Eames chairs.” Some tell the owner, Leslie Edelman, “I’ve seen you on TikTok.”

A growing number of social media influencers are counterintuitively pushing more people “to kick the digital habit,” said Karen Garcia in the Los Angeles Times. The influencers’ goal isn’t to get followers to renounce technology entirely—that wouldn’t be good for business—but to help screen addicts wean themselves off “constant connectivity” and “reclaim their time.” It isn’t “the first time that people have tried to exit the online world,” but this trend may be different because of how it is being linked with wellness and mental health.

Boomers are the “real iPad babies,” said Sophia Solano in The Washington Post. While teens are returning to real-world hobbies, “grandma and grandpa can’t seem to stop scrolling.” Social media use among people 65 and older has grown from 11% in 2010 to 45% in 2021, while their time spent on YouTube nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025. The children and grandchildren are noticing. Some are worried that the devices are becoming a “constant companion,” and their parents are “slipping quietly into screen addiction” that keeps them couch-bound and isolated. Parental controls are a useful program to reduce screen time for kids. But who is enforcing grandparent controls?

Tech enthusiasts and industry analysts are sounding the alarm about RAMageddon, a shortage of random access memory chips crucial for running many consumer electronics. Though the future implications of the mass integration of generative AI have had much of the industry worried, the immediate impact of AI’s excessive memory needs is being felt worldwide.

Insatiable high-margin demand

The memory chip shortage is “beginning to hammer profits, derail corporate plans and inflate price tags” on everything from “laptops and smartphones to automobiles and data centers,” said Bloomberg. Major technology companies have hinted that going forward, the shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the “fundamental building block of almost all technology,” will constrain production.

The global RAM market is “experiencing a severe price crisis,” with the cost of memory chips “surging by as much as 80-90% in recent months,” said CNN. RAMageddon has been driven by the “insatiable, high-margin demand for AI data center infrastructure,” leading manufacturers to shift “production capacity away from consumer products.” This has led to the shortage “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” analysts said to the outlet.

RAMageddon is “only getting worse,” and there is “no immediate end in sight,” said The Verge. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and “almost everything has a computer in it now: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box.” Most of the global supply of RAM comes from just “three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.”

Outside of consumer products, the shortage is also “causing problems for resource-constrained laboratories that already faced barriers to accessing powerful computing tools,” said Nature. The shortage is “pushing researchers to develop more efficient algorithms and hardware, to reduce the amount of memory needed.” Scientific research “increasingly relies on large-scale computing infrastructure,” Matteo Rinaldi, the director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern University, said to Nature. Many of these workloads “require substantial memory capacity.”

‘Bigger than anything we have faced before’

The tech industry may be reeling because of the shortage, but an easy fix is not imminent. ​​“There’s no relief until 2028,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in early February, after speaking to two of the big three memory companies. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95% of the global DRAM supply, are “making enough money to increase memory production.” Still, it will take time to build the new memory fabrication plants they promised, The Verge said. The companies also see it “as more profitable and less risky to build out slowly” instead of “rushing to meet demand.”

Micron’s memory-fabricating facility in Idaho won’t open until mid-2027, and “you’re not really gonna see real output” until 2028, the company’s vice president of marketing, mobile and client business unit, Christopher Moore, said to Wccftech. SK Hynix predicted the shortage would last through late 2027.

We stand at the “cusp of something that is bigger than anything we’ve faced before,” Tim Archer, the chief executive officer of chip equipment supplier Lam Research Corp., said at a conference in South Korea, per Bloomberg. What lies ahead “between now and the end of this decade” will “overwhelm all other sources of demand.”

With RAMageddon, it is “wiser to hold off doing business today,” as prices are “almost certain to be higher tomorrow,” Suh Young-hwan, who runs three DIY PC shops in Seoul, said to Bloomberg. “Unless Steve Jobs rises from the dead to declare that AI is nothing but a bubble, this trend is likely to persist for some time.”

The ongoing memory crisis is making it “hard for tech enthusiasts and the general population not to feel more than a little deflated,” said Tom’s Guide (a sister site of The Week). We are “marching towards lining the pockets of a small few” while “giving up environmental and financial stability.” It is “easy to feel jaded,” but this kind of crisis “feels a little unprecedented.”

This week saw what could prove to be an historic reckoning for Big Tech when a Californian court ruled that Meta and Google’s YouTube intentionally built addictive social media platforms. This came just a day after a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for the way its platforms endanger children.

Critics are calling this “Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment”, a reference to how cigarette makers in the 1990s had to overhaul their businesses after courts ruled that their products were addictive and harmful.

Meta and Google have invested heavily in safety tools for younger users and both companies dispute claims that their platforms are to blame for children’s mental health issues. But the verdicts this week are a “sombre moment for Silicon Valley and the implications are global”, said the BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman.

What did the commentators say?

The cases this week are “the first of about 22 ‘bellwether’ trials”, said Stephen Armstrong in The Independent, brought by more than 350 families across 250 US school districts and are “expected to trigger thousands more”. It is like the “anti-tobacco legal actions on fast-forward”.

Judgments of responsibility “in cases like the one brought against Meta and YouTube are necessarily complex”, said academic and author Austin Sarat in The Guardian. And critics of the judgment in this case “will no doubt howl about greedy plaintiffs looking to make a haul from deep-pocketed defendants”. But it does seem “clear that companies knew of the addictive qualities of their sites and the potential damage to young people”.

For years, “technology giants successfully fought off efforts by regulators, lawmakers and others to put limits on their social media businesses”, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The tide appears to be turning but so far “investors don’t seem to be fazed”, with Big Tech share prices only dipping slightly. The potential penalties too – $6 million for Meta and YouTube in California, and $375 million for Meta in New Mexico – “are a fraction of their immense profits”.

It’s for that reason that social media companies might not fret too much too soon. “The Big Tech firms are losing nearly every time,” Tom Smith, partner at legal firm Geradin, told The Independent. “But they have effectively unlimited legal budgets, and their calculation may be that as long as you can make sure these cases take a decade, then the extra profits will outweigh the damages.”

What next?

Meta and YouTube plan to appeal, but if unsuccessful “they could be forced to remove the features that make their platforms addictive, which would upend their business models and fundamentally alter the experience of users”, said Fred Harter in The Observer.

Regardless of whether Meta or Google appeal the decision, “this is going to redefine the landscape,” said the BBC’s Kleinman. “It could even be the beginning of the end of the social media era as we know it.”

‘Why you hate your weather app’

Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker

Weather apps “might be second only to social media as a space in need of fresh disruption,” says Kyle Chayka. These apps “have a tendency to alienate their user bases, perhaps because people’s physical experiences — their plans, their dress, their commutes — so directly depend on an accurate report.” But the “challenge of weather app creation lies both in the improbability of accurately predicting the weather and in the difficulty of designing something that works for any user.”

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‘Suing social media won’t protect our kids’

Nicholas Creel at Newsweek

Verdicts against Meta “are being celebrated as a landmark reckoning in the long effort to hold Big Tech accountable for the youth mental health crisis it helped create,” says Nicholas Creel. But “these lawsuits will not protect our children from the harms of social media.” The “desire to sue social media giants is understandable; the anger at them is justified,” but a “damages award against Meta does not redesign the algorithm that exposes children to harmful content.”

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‘Water infrastructure in Texas is failing. A surge of new funding can fix it.’

Lajward Zahra at The Nation

How “does Houston, Texas, lose more than 30 billion gallons of water a year? With the entire state facing scarcity, the cause isn’t drought alone,” says Lajward Zahra. Infrastructure problems have “made daily life feel unmanageable,” prompting a “community-led coalition that helped shape deliberations over Proposition 4, a constitutional amendment that would authorize up to $20 billion over two decades for water infrastructure.” The proposition “exposed a gap between Texas’ political branding and what voters will support.”

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‘Americans now use marijuana more often than alcohol. Is this the new sobriety?’

Tom Greene at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A “strange thing is happening, given our national love of booze. U.S. alcohol consumption is dropping faster than Prince Harry’s approval ratings,” says Tom Greene. But when “alcohol consumption goes down, something else will replace it,” and “nearly 18 million Americans now use marijuana almost daily.” Marijuana is “mainstream, even where it’s not legal for recreational use.” Some people “suspect we will see states that legalized marijuana pull back in the next few years.”

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When the crack of the bat signals opening day for the 2026 Major League Baseball (MLB) season today, there will be a new addition to the diamond: robot umpires. The technological change has been fiercely debated among sports enthusiasts for years but has finally made its way to the big leagues. It marks one of the biggest changes in the history of modern baseball.

What are robot umpires?

While the term makes it sound like robots are replacing the game’s human umpires, this is not the case. The robot umpires aren’t on the field. Instead, they are a “network of specialized cameras set up in every ballpark to track the baseball’s exact location,” said The New York Times. The system, officially called the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System, will allow teams to challenge balls and strikes.

Each team starts the game with two challenges it can use throughout the game. By tapping his head, a pitcher, catcher or batter can request to “summon the robot umpire and see whether the human behind home plate missed a ball or strike call,” said the Times. A successful challenge allows the team to reuse a challenge, but after two incorrect challenges, the team “loses the power altogether.”

MLB is not the first baseball league to adopt this technology. It has been tried in minor league baseball for several years and was also tested during the 2025 MLB All-Star Game. This “testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenges three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three,” said ESPN. Following positive feedback in the minor leagues, MLB announced last year it would adopt the ABS system.

Why is this such a big change?

It allows players and managers to do what is typically forbidden in baseball: argue balls and strikes with the umpire. Doing so has generally led to ejection from the game; last season, at least “61.5% of ejections among players, managers and coaches (99 of 161) were related to ball/strike calls,” said The Associated Press, though this figure also “included what MLB counted as inappropriate comments and conduct, and throwing equipment in protest.”

This change “should in theory make everyone better off,” as it will give teams an “appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment,” said Vox. As is the case with AI, some are worried about the bigger changes robotic umpires could have. Once “you’ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right — which is exactly what baseball has done here — you’ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there.” And if they are there, the “human behind the mask doesn’t stay independent.”

Despite this, most players and managers don’t seem to have an issue with the change — for now. “I’m in favor of anything that allows our technology to play in this game,” Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash said to the AP. “We have so much of it. Why not use it?” Even people formerly around the game agree. “I really like the ABS,” Jim Leyland, a retired manager who led four MLB clubs, said to the outlet. “I think it’s going to be great for the game.”