Policy

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

The deal will pay some workers in Samsung’s highly profitable memory chip unit around $416,000 this year, while employees in other chip units will receive less, and those in its consumer electronics divisions are ‌set ⁠to receive very little by comparison. Payouts are pegged to Samsung hitting profit milestones through 2028.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.“

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.”

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.

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.

YouTuber Coffeezilla first reported the leak of customer details, now apparently fixed. Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien has now confirmed to The Verge there was a breach, which he blames on “a third-party platform provider.”

The company asked the judge to rule that, as a matter of law, it could not be found an illegal monopolist, despite the jury issuing a verdict against it. If that fails, it’s asked the court to grant it a new trial altogether.

As Politico reports, Trump postponed signing an executive order on government oversight and access to AI at the last minute on Thursday, saying it “could have been a blocker” for the jobs and “tremendous good” he claims AI is creating. Trump also said China was a factor:

Hijacked accounts include those of people who are “influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous,” like journalists and professors, according to The New York Times.

But the nonprofit Public Knowledge argues its changes could make the National Broadband Map less effective. Public Knowledge broadband policy director Alisa Valentin:

A judge awarded Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and other major publishers with the judgment after Anna’s Archive — an open-source library and pirate activist group — didn’t respond to their copyright lawsuit.

A Brooklyn courthouse unsealed criminal complaints against two men who allegedly posted “thousands” of nonconsensual intimate AI deepfakes, according to the US Attorney’s Office. The Take It Down Act’s criminal prohibitions have been in place for a year, but platforms’ obligation to remove such deepfakes just came into force yesterday.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects: