The July Digital Markets Act ruling required Google to share search data with rival search engines by January 2027, and give third-party AI assistants equal access to Android by that July. Google’s Oliver Bethell told Bloomberg that sharing user search data “would cause irreversible harm to user privacy.”
Is Valve suing gamers!? Not exactly:
Donald Trump reportedly hosted the Anthropic CEO at the White House for a private dinner on Sunday evening, after Amodei was notably not included among the Silicon Valley bigwigs at the state dinner for Xi Jinping. This is seemingly the first one-on-one meeting between Trump and Amodei, suggesting that their ongoing beef may finally be settling.
It would be easier to name the tech CEOs who didn’t show up to the state dinner being held for China’s president this week. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and AMD’s Lisa Su. Also in attendance, but not pictured below, were reportedly Satya Nadella, Michael Dell, Zoom’s Eric Yuan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, and, of course, David Ellison.
On Friday, OpenAI said its “misaligned models” review after the Hugging Face hack would take months, but has mostly found mundane research activity. Then it mentioned 53 incidents of the bots uploading “user-provided” images (anonymized content from personal accounts that haven’t opted out or organizations that opt in) to image-hosting sites.
Now the New York Times confirms that other unusual behavior found includes pulling public data from the Census Bureau and the SEC, while with the Education Department, it “tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed.”
That revamped Trump admin app (now offering access to Trump TV) apparently bounced up to the top of the News list this week.
You might think that securing access to the Strait of Hormuz or really anything else would be the federal government’s focus, but hey, it had the number one app in a category, and as David Pierce wrote in February, the very best thing about that is “being able to tell people you were number one.” The app has since slipped to #2 in news behind X, and to #96 overall.
It’s reportedly testing an alternative to Windows based on the Dutch Linux distro NixOS, according to Tweakers. It’s part of DAWO, a program aimed at reducing the Dutch government’s reliance on non-European tech, including things like office and collaboration apps. Earlier this year, France’s government also announced a switch to Linux.
NBC News released this clip from a Meet the Press interview with Gates that will air on Sunday, where he said, “No one thinks self-regulation is enough” around AI.
Saying that AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” he suggested, “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like… And that has to be a required thing. And it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.” Everyone agrees someone should do it, but who, and how?
This time the finding is in connection to Meta’s claims about privacy, and enforcement of its misinformation policies. The case stems from a 2021 lawsuit brought by the state’s attorney general at the time, over claims related to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The judge will determine penalties next.
I chatted with Charlie Warzel over at The Atlantic to try to untangle this moment of massive outrage over smart glasses and Flock cameras. In August I reported on the service workers who encounter Meta glasses at their jobs, and the harassment — and social media clout — that sometimes follows.
If you want to know where the power in tech currently lies, you only need to look at this photo of the head table at Donald Trump’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. I see Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, Apple’s Tim Cook, and SpaceXaiTesla’s Elon Musk seated by the leaders of the world’s two superpowers. The CEOs and / or founders of Alphabet (Google), OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Qualcomm, Micron, Dell, and… Zoom, were also in attendance.
