Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order as part of the publications’ lawsuit against the Trump administration, filed after their press credentials were revoked. It orders the admin to restore the credentials, but only lasts for 14 days while the lawsuit rumbles on.
The Theranos founder convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years behind bars will be transferred from a minimum-security federal prison next year, according to a letter sent to victims of her crime. After several reductions to her sentence, her scheduled release remains February 22nd, 2030, but prisoners typically only spend a short time in halfway houses. Last year, she requested to have her sentence commuted by the Department of Justice.
[The New York Times]
There’s still a standby line to get into the Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee’s hearing about “Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) invited the CEOs of Flock and its peers, Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada, but said they declined.
Ofcom is taking a deeper look at Pornhub provider Aylo’s compliance with online safety rules. The media watchdog’s enforcement director George Lusty says, “We expect tech firms to ensure age checks are highly effective before introducing them.” Aylo relies on Apple’s age verification system, which is not being scrutinized under the investigation.
“We are concerned that Aylo may not have conducted sufficient due diligence and testing before implementing its new age assurance process. As a result, we are concerned that Aylo’s process may not be highly effective at preventing children from seeing pornography.”
Over the weekend, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will penalize creators for failing to disclose paid political content, with fines reaching up to $5,000 per violation, The New York Times reports.
Though the FTC requires influencers to disclose product advertisements, it doesn’t have the same rules for paid political content, which has become widespread in recent campaigns.
[The New York Times]
Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop granting permits to data centers while the state finishes an audit of the facilities that want to connect to its electric grid. Last week, Abbott also told state regulators to “impose legal consequences” on data centers that don’t disclose information about water usage.
404 Media reports, with Reuters corroborating in part, that hackers from ShinyHunters claim to have obtained information on “all FBI employees and applicants.” The data reportedly includes phone numbers, home addresses, dates of birth, and “in some cases” details on spouses. The group also reportedly defaced the FBI jobs page earlier today, which is currently displaying a “system unavailable” banner.
20 countries — including Canada, Germany, UAE and Singapore — endorsed stronger checks on advanced models. The European Commission also signed.
The UN, whose leader backs the push, is maneuvering for a bigger role in global AI governance, but without Washington or Beijing, its influence will be limited. The two nations are expected to meet this week.
According to Reuters, the settlement with California and 11 other states “includes the creation of independent editorial boards for CNN and CBS” as well as “a $30 million penalty per film for any shortfall against Paramount’s pledge to release 30 movies annually.”
Update: Paramount and the state AGs have officially announced a settlement.
They said Monday that they plan to challenge the White House’s move to revoke their journalists’ press credentials:
Features like Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy were found to violate GDPR privacy rules in Europe from 2018 to 2020.
“As a result of Google’s failures, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data,” DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement. “The retention of users’ location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control.”
It’s unclear what military advantage there would be to storing “large quantities of sniper ammunition” and “large numbers of drones” in the DC arch. The area already has a significant military presence. But this is the same tactic Trump used to argue for his ballroom, which suddenly became a national security issue when it faced legal challenges.
First, it was the Gulf of Mexico. Then the Kennedy Center. Then Lake Ontario. And let’s not forget about the Department of Defense. Now the president is trying to leave his mark on artificial intelligence. The only real surprise is that American Intelligence wasn’t on his short list.
Former DOJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter on AI slowdowns, competition, and cartels.
It’s AI CEO against AI CEO, and things are changing by the day.
According to CNN, the US military had planes in the air and armed personnel ready to board a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring because of an intelligence report saying it carried parts for a nuclear weapons program. The only problem? Their sources say that report was an AI-bot-generated hallucination:
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.
Separately, Bloomberg reports a Pentagon investigation into the deadly February 28th missile attack on an Iranian school has identified failures that include “overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology.”
Trump has once again escalated his capricious assault on journalism. The president said today that “effective immediately” he is banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House, and threatened for “other fake news media outlets to follow.” In 2025, he banned the Associated Press during a temper tantrum over its refusal to go along with his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not clear what set the president off this time.
They’ve opened “at least one criminal probe” following complaints about the glasses being used to film women on the street in public without their consent, Reuters reports. France’s data protection authority also says businesses are “increasingly” asking if they can ban smart glasses at work, similar to a ban under consideration in Australia.
In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
The Orlando Sentinel, which is also part of the suit, reports a Microsoft filing “framed Hecht as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian.”
He joined growing calls for more safety measures around AI at a gathering of AI leaders on Thursday, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sarah Friar, and Anthropic’s Tino Cuéllar.
The three CEOs have apparently have been encouraging him to be hands-off with his approach to AI and “successfully stalled” a plan for an industry-funded AI regulator pitched by Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump also likes to call Huang while he’s onstage.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Don’t hold your breath, but the government may effectively reverse course on killing a Biden-admin program that helped people file their taxes for free without having to use infamous third parties like TurboTax. (Democrats have wanted to bring it back, which could make this a little awkward for Trump.)
The Washington Sun reports this could be part of a broader “America.gov” effort that may also let people renew passports and conduct business through an AI agent. It sounds good until you learn that a bunch of former DOGE folks are working on it. Yes, that includes “Big Balls.”
[The Washington Sun]
