A bipartisan group of attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders that passing the House’s KIDS Act — which includes a weakened version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — would preempt state laws and “insulate Big Tech from appropriate oversight and accountability and imperil the young people it purports to protect.”
[Tennessee Attorney General’s Office]
A document posted to the federal register shows the administration is considering a new non-disclosure agreement barring government workers from sharing confidential information. It’s unclear what it would actually change, and agencies would have discretion to adopt it. If you’re a federal worker who wants to chat anonymously, I’m on Signal at laurenfeiner.64.
[The Washington Post]
An amendment to California’s AB 1856 would change the definition of an “operating system provider” to exclude open-source software from California’s age verification law, mirroring a similar exemption in Colorado. If the bill passes, it could resolve an issue that has caused chaos for Linux developers around the world.
[California Legislative Information]
Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon highlights the risks of autonomous warfare — but obscures just how close it is.
AI-assisted lawsuits are flooding the legal system. Good news for the people able to file without costly lawyers — and bad news for the already overwhelmed court system. Interesting read from the NYT here, though the issue has been simmering away for a while now. Maybe it’s time for AI judges?
Variety reports on why early uploads of Stephen Colbert’s post-The Late Show endeavor were pulled, citing copyright complaints from Paramount/CBS. A statement from the company says it was because it financed and produced the episode with Colbert, which was eventually published on his YouTube channel, but it has now “decided to waive further enforcement of this standard industry practice until additional review.”
The New York Times reports the CIA and the NSA lack the computing capacity to run the latest AI models. The White House has approved a request for $9 billion to buy cutting-edge chips and build infrastructure to support Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell superchip. But Congress needs to approve the funds.
Trump has already dug such a deep hole with his conduct that he’s invented new bolgias even Dante couldn’t have imagined. His latest posting crime is this AI-generated video which shows him throwing Stephen Colbert in a dumpster. The First Amendment is hanging on by a thread thanks to this administration, and, yes, Brendan Carr remains a dummy.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the new policy in a post on X. Per the Daily Caller, people applying for permanent residency will soon be required to leave the US and apply for immigrant visas through the Department of State, rather than applying for a change of status from inside the country.
While the administration’s announcement focused on asylum seekers, this change will likely also affect H-1B holders who apply for permanent residency.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has been known for banning “visible homelessness” — moving tents off the street and dropping more people in jail since he hasn’t expanded the homeless shelters like he promised he would in his campaign. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that his brother is a real estate broker who services the tech elite, and that their home valuations are skyrocketing. Alexander “Lurie estimates that by the end of May, he’ll have sold more than $100 million worth of real estate, about his entire total for all of 2025, which was, to be clear, a very good year itself.“
[The Information]
Paxton alleges that Meta can access WhatsApp messages despite Meta’s claims that they are end-to-end encrypted. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says that WhatsApp “cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
It’s been a busy couple days for Paxton; my colleague Lauren Feiner just posted about a lawsuit he filed against Discord.
Republican Ken Paxton is seeking to require Discord to implement age verification, maximum default safety settings, and pay penalties for allegedly designing its platform in a way that facilitated teen exploitation. It echoes lawsuits against major social media platforms that have gone to trial this year. “The lawsuit’s characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety,” Discord spokesperson Michelle Kramer said in a statement.
Update: Added statement from Discord.
The Director of National Intelligence confirmed her resignation on X Friday afternoon, saying, “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.” Trump announced Aaron Lukas will take over as Acting Director.
Gabbard, a former US Representative who reversed her previous stand against warrantless wiretapping before taking the post, was reportedly “largely sidelined” from national security operations in Venezuela and Iran, while Reuters reports a source claiming the White House forced her to resign.
