Politics

After Ukraine said a Starshield slowdown had interrupted its military operations, Elon Musk claimed any limits “are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Then the president told reporters, “It wasn’t me... and I don’t think it was Elon.”

After 15 years at Meta, the George W. Bush White House alum is exiting, Axios reports, amid a midterm election where Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington. Kaplan will stay through 2027 to help with the transition, though, which will include bipartisan external affairs executives.

The Department of Homeland Security ordered the agencies to remove any technology created by the Chinese AI company over concerns that its models may transfer “​sensitive data to the PRC,” according to Reuters. The ban also prevents civilian agencies from using third-party services that integrate DeepSeek’s AI models.

A massive review of local contracts by NBC News found 55 places where Flock entered no-bid contracts that escaped public scrutiny by claiming its products couldn’t be compared to others on the market. Another 11 were priced just below thresholds that would have required local council votes.

The request from political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was never fulfilled, ProPublica found, but staffers were shocked at the directive not to report flaws back to the voting machine company. It demonstrates why state officials’ trust in CISA has eroded.

A spokesperson told MS Now that Meta pulled the organization’s account and locked out its admins during today’s protests. The profile page is back up, but the organization says it still doesn’t have access to the account. Neither Meta nor No Kings immediately responded to a request for comment.

The midterms edition of No Kings is underway, primarily focused on boosting early voting turnout rather than flooding the streets. If you want to keep up with all the news about the latest day of action as it’s happening, follow along at the States Newsroom live blog.

The latest day of action for the protest movement is today, but unlike previous rallies, this one is focused on increasing early voting turnout ahead of the November elections. Thousands of events are planned or already underway; as usual, there’s a map available on the site.

According to The Guardian, the campaign they’re funding is spending over $1 million per day trying to defeat Proposition 40, which would enact a one-time 5 percent tax on California’s billionaires. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is reportedly the biggest donor, contributing at least $102 million, alongside other tech executives:

According to the NYT’s sources, White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is out after just five days in the role, or, by our count, less than half of a Scaramucci. Her time in the role included prediction market intrigue and claims she may have misrepresented herself as an attorney despite failing the bar exam.

Beijing is reportedly considering adding 23 AI technologies to its export-control list, including chip designs, agents, model weights, and source code. China has been steadily gaining on the US with recent releases like Kimi K3, and has been the target of Western AI-related export controls amid growing competition to maintain control over the strategic technology.

The law prevents kids under 14 from creating an account on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, while requiring parental permission for teens aged 14 or 15. The tech trade group NetChoice won an injunction blocking the law in 2025, but a judge later paused the injunction during the appeals process, as reported by NBC 6 South Florida.

In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.

The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.

County election officials claim they largely cleared the backlog by Wednesday, but the incident still raised alarms and prompted a lawsuit from voting rights groups. According to the New York Times:

A Ukranian official tells Axios that Starshield — SpaceX’s government-focused internet service that runs on Starlink satellites — has been “restored to full capacity.” Sudden restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield services disrupted the military’s drone operations, officials said on Wednesday.

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:

District Judge Timothy Kelly extended his 14-day restraining order to last the duration of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MS Now, and Politico against Donald Trump’s White House after their press access was revoked. Kelly said the publications are “likely to succeed not only on their due process claim, but also on their two First Amendment claims.”

Following Trump’s attempt to rename AI, which Silicon Valley is falling in line with, si.gov is the “official home of America’s work to lead the world in Super Intelligence.” It has a lot of Fancy Web Design animations that are honestly really distracting.

Hackers are increasingly using vulnerable civilian cameras to track, surveil, and aid attacks on opposing military operations, with an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras impacted globally. That ranges from Iran watching through chicken coop cameras in Israel, Ukraine monitoring Russian submarines via external building surveillance, and corporate teleconferencing devices being hacked through unsecured apps.

The state just released the complete version of a redacted suit first filed in January, with specifics on harmful conversations including encouraging one user to starve themselves. Character.AI has faced repeated lawsuits over the issue, some of which it has settled, and added restrictions on teen usage. State AG Russell Coleman told The Verge:

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.

Trump today announced that Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator, will be his new press secretary, and three small bets were placed yesterday and today about her appointment, according to The Wall Street Journal.