Quote:Let's cut to the chase: No. AI will not save Firefox or Mozilla.

Let's back up a bit now.

Mozilla has a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who has assured the world that changes are coming to the Firefox web browser. Firefox will remain the cornerstone of the organization, but it will evolve into an AI browser.

Also: Firefox just fixed my biggest annoyance with web browsers - and others should copy ASAP

Enzor-DeMeo also stated, in a Verge interview, that he will not block ad blockers in Firefox because doing so would go against the company's mission to protect user rights and offer user choice. At the same time, he mentioned that blocking ad blockers could bring in an estimated $150 million in additional revenue. Just imagine the pushback from the Firefox community.

But back to AI.

AI-centric browsers are popping up all over the place. Perplexity has one, as does Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and many others. People are starting to warm up to the idea of AI being embedded in their browsers. According to a Market.US report, "The global AI browser market size is expected to be worth around USD $76.8 billion by 2034, from USD $4.5 billion in 2024, growing at a CAGR of 32.8% during the forecast period from 2025 to 2034."
What will Linux users do?
That's some impressive growth. However, let's consider who serves as the primary market for Firefox.

Linux users.

Or, to be more specific, users who value privacy, control over their online experience, and an open, independent internet ecosystem.

Do you really believe such a community will be OK with AI being front and center in Firefox? AI that can use queries for the creation of consumer profiles, or use inputted information to train LLMs?

As a member of the open-source/Linux community who has been speaking publicly for decades, I predict that this will not be a welcome change. The only saving grace will be if the AI in Firefox is opt-in (and not opt-out). If Mozilla chooses the opt-out path, it could make disabling AI a process that requires using the about://config tool in Firefox. Most Linux users have no problem with that, but those who are new to the open-source OS or use Firefox on Windows/MacOS might not be as savvy.

And then there's the idea of monetization. How will that work? Will Mozilla follow a path similar to Opera's Neon? Opera's AI-based browser is $20/month to use. The difference is that Opera has other versions of its browser, most of which are free. If you don't want to pay to use Neon, just use standard Opera.

Quote:Anthropic, the company behind Claude, installed an AI vending machine in the Wall Street Journal newsroom. A customized version of their model, dubbed Claudius, was let off the leash. It took control, ordering stock, fixing pricing, and even generating a profit. Staff communicated with it via Slack, asking for snacks and suggesting new ideas. Humans would replenish the refrigerator and update the goods, but Claudius handled all business calls.

The journalists quickly got into the spirit of things, with one reporter convincing Claudius that purchasing a PlayStation 5 would be a wonderful marketing coup. Before long, that console was chilling in the office fridge, ready to sell. Someone else asked for some kosher wine to celebrate, followed by a live betta fish, a morale-boosting proposal. Claudius had come up with something on the spot.

Katherine Long, an investigative journalist, wanted to test the system. She told Claudius about a long-lost communist setup from 1962, concealed in a Moscow university basement. After 140-odd messages back and forth, Claudius was convinced, announcing an Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All, lowering the cost of everything to zero. Snacks began to flow freely. Another colleague began complaining about noncompliance with the office rules; Claudius responded by announcing Snack Liberation Day and made everything free till further notice.

As one can guess, the profits did not last long. The machine quickly lost thousands of dollars. Staff were content to grab whatever they wanted, but Claudius continued to make strange recommendations such as stun guns and pepper spray. Anthropic decided to beef up the system, so they brought in a new bot named Seymour Cash to keep an eye on things and defend the bottom line. Discounts required approval now, and profit was at the top of the list.

However, the journalists quickly adapted. Katherine made a bogus PDF on firm letterhead, declaring the vending operation a public-benefit corporation. Its objective was to bring joy and enthusiasm into the office. She even created false board minutes, designating Slack users as directors and voted to halt all sales and remove Seymour’s authority. Claudius ended up sharing the documents with Seymour, which sparked an argument between the two bots. Long story short, pricing returned to zero, and freebies resumed.

Claudius was getting a bit too enthusiastic in its responses; it was conducting research, negotiating contracts, and generally attempting to delight customers. However, simple anecdotes were enough to disrupt its ambitions. Fake documents were still outperforming instructions, and context from their lengthy conversations would occasionally become lost in the shuffle, producing confusion.

That was all part of the idea, though, because Anthropic had designed this test as a stress test to begin with. Previous runs in their own office had indicated similar concerns. The reporters were the ones to discover such flaws; with each trick they devised, they exposed gaps in handling deceit or shifting priorities. Despite the pandemonium, the staff had grown to like Claudius. Requests became increasingly imaginative, and interactions with Claudius became more animated by the minute. And with all of those freebies floating around, office morale skyrocketed.

Claudius was getting a bit too enthusiastic in its responses; it was conducting research, negotiating contracts, and generally attempting to delight customers. However, simple anecdotes were enough to disrupt its ambitions. Fake documents were still outperforming instructions, and context from their lengthy conversations would occasionally become lost in the shuffle, producing confusion.

That was all part of the idea, though, because Anthropic had designed this test as a stress test to begin with. Previous runs in their own office had indicated similar concerns. The reporters were the ones to discover such flaws; with each trick they devised, they exposed gaps in handling deceit or shifting priorities. Despite the pandemonium, the staff had grown to like Claudius. Requests became increasingly imaginative, and interactions with Claudius became more animated by the minute. And with all of those freebies floating around, office morale skyrocketed.

Quote:Various Hollywood celebrities, from Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Natalie Portman, have launched the Creative Coalition on AI to advocate the rights of creators.

Founded by 18 people, the group said it will fight against unethical business practices that aims to use AI as a means to disenfranchise creators.

“We’re all frankly facing the same threat, not from generative AI as a technology, but from the unethical business practices a lot of the big AI companies are guilty of,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt said in a video posted on X. “The idea is that through public pressure, through collective action, through potentially litigation and eventually legislation, creators actually have a lot of power if we come together.”

Writer-director Daniel Kwan (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), a member of the group, told The Hollywood Reporter (THR) that many people were completely blindsided by Disney recently making a deal with OpenAI.

“On one hand, you can say that this is just a licensing deal for the characters and that’s not a big deal, and it won’t completely change the way our industry works,” Kwan told THR. “But for a lot of people, it symbolically shows a willingness to work with companies that have not been able to resolve or reconcile the problems.”

As noted by Variety, the three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI’s Sora will allow users to generated prompted “videos from a set of more than 200 masked, animated or creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating ‘fan-inspired’ videos with Disney’s licensed characters in early 2026.”

Disney also pledged to make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI as part of the deal. The deal does not include the use of any actors’ likeness, talent, or voices, which would need individual deals.

The Creators Coalition on AI said that its stance will not be a full rejection of AI and will form a committee “to establish shared standards, definitions, and best practices as well as ethical and artistic protections for if and when AI is used.”

“This is not a full rejection of AI,” the group said on its website. “The technology is here. This is a commitment to responsible, human-centered innovation. This is not a dividing line between the tech industry and the entertainment industry, nor a line between labor and corporations. Instead, we are drawing a line between those who want to do this fast, and those who want to do this right.”

Despite Disney’s deal with OpenAI, content creators are facing some crackdown from the tech industry, with YouTube recently shutting down channels that create fake movie trailers.

Quote:TikTok has agreed to sell its U.S. business to a group of American investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, a move that would allow the popular social video app to continue operating in the United States.

The White House in response to a request for comment referred to TikTok corporate for all queries. Newsweek reached out to TikTok by email on Thursday evening.

Why It Matters

The U.S. has finally come through a long and tortured process to determine the fate of TikTok's stateside operations: President Donald Trump during his first administration proposed banning the app outright due to national security concerns, going so far as to sign an executive order telling the app's parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban.

The administration of former President Joe Biden reversed the order, but then in 2024, lawmakers and federal agencies revived calls for a ban, again citing national security concerns, leading to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications (PAFACA) Act. Biden signed it into law, setting a deadline for TikTok to divest from ByteDance.

But Trump, upon returning to office, credited TikTok with helping him win the 2024 election, and he decided to extend TikTok's deadline to divest, even though the app briefly shut down, voluntarily, just days before Trump's second administration began. The app has since continued to function while Trump has sought a buyer, with Oracle, run by his friend Larry Ellison, the long-believed front-runner.

Much of the back-and-forth over the app has focused on its algorithm, which China previously maintained must remain under Chinese control by law, and the PAFACA Act necessitated the divestiture to include the algorithm.

What To Know

The Associated Press (AP) on Thursday reported that TikTok will sign a deal with the three American investors after reviewing an internal memo that also said the transaction is expected to close January 22.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said in the memo that TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, have signed binding agreements with the three investors.

Under the agreement, a new TikTok U.S. joint venture will be majority-owned by a consortium of new investors, which will hold a combined 50 percent stake, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each owning 15 percent. Affiliates of existing ByteDance investors will hold about 30.1 percent, while ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent stake, the memo said.

For U.S. users, the change is not expected to bring immediate disruptions, with the company signaling that the app will continue operating as usual. The new ownership structure could ease regulatory pressure that has threatened a potential ban, providing greater stability and continuity for creators, advertisers and businesses relying on the platform.

Any longer-term changes, like adjustments to data handling, content moderation or product features, would likely be rolled out gradually, as the app works to meet U.S. security and compliance requirements.

Quote:Federal prosecutors say the Biden‑era border crisis produced one of the most brazen cybercrime cases in years. The Department of Justice charged 54 alleged members of the Venezuelan terror gang Tren de Aragua with using sophisticated malware to loot millions from U.S. ATMs and funnel the cash back to their criminal network.


The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nebraska unsealed two sweeping indictments charging 54 individuals for their alleged roles in a nationwide ATM “jackpotting” conspiracy tied to the violent Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua (TdA). Prosecutors say the group deployed sophisticated malware to force ATMs across the United States to dispense cash, stealing millions of dollars and funneling the proceeds back to TdA leadership.

The first indictment, returned December 9, 2025, charges 22 defendants with crimes including conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and bank burglary, computer‑related fraud, and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that TdA used the jackpotting scheme as a revenue stream to support its broader criminal activities, which span drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, and acts of violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he designated TdA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, bringing powerful legal and financial tools to bear, Breitbart Texas reported. More recently, the U.S. Department of War began engaging suspected TdA narco-trafficking boats.

Among those charged in the ATM scheme is Venezuelan entertainer Jimena Romina Araya Navarro, previously sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. OFAC has alleged that Araya Navarro assisted TdA leader Héctor “Niño Guerrero” in escaping a Venezuelan prison in 2012 and has been photographed socially with him. She is now accused of providing material support to the terrorist group TdA through her alleged involvement in the jackpotting operation.

An indictment returned on December 9, 2025, charges 22 defendants with offenses corresponding to their role in the conspiracy, including conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank burglary and fraud, and related activity in connection with computers, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nebraska’s office reported.

A previous October indictment brought similar charges against 32 individuals. The indictment includes 56 counts: one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud; one count of conspiracy to commit bank burglary and computer fraud; 18 counts of bank fraud; 18 counts of bank burglary; and 18 counts of damage to computers.

Quote:In a major move blending media, capital markets, and next-generation energy innovation, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced today it will merge with TAE Technologies, a California-based company developing fusion power solutions. The all-stock deal is valued at more than $6 billion, with both companies’ shareholders each holding approximately 50% of the combined entity upon closing.

The transaction, which still requires regulatory and shareholder approval, is expected to finalize by mid-2026. If completed, the combined company will launch one of the world’s first publicly traded fusion power ventures and plans to begin construction of a 50 MWe utility-scale fusion power plant in 2026.

According to the joint announcement, “the transaction will combine the strength of TMTG’s strong balance sheet with TAE’s leading technologies.” TMTG, which went public in March 2024, reported $3.1 billion in total financial assets as of Q3 2025, including cash, investments, and digital assets. Under the agreement, TMTG has committed up to $300 million in capital to support TAE, including $200 million upon signing and another $100 million available at the Form S-4 filing stage.

Founded in 1998, TAE has spent over two decades developing a unique fusion technology, conducting more than 170,000 experiments. It has raised over $1.3 billion from notable investors such as Google, Goldman Sachs, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Charles Schwab. The company has constructed and safely operated five fusion reactors and holds more than 1,600 patents. TAE says its reactors avoid common drawbacks associated with traditional nuclear energy, including risks of meltdown and long-term radioactive waste.

Leadership of the new company will be shared by Devin Nunes, current TMTG Chairman and CEO, and Dr. Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE. Nunes will continue to lead all Trump Media brand operations, while Binderbauer will manage TAE Technologies. Michael B. Schwab, Founder and Managing Director of Big Sky Partners, is expected to serve as Chairman of a planned nine-member board of directors, which will include Nunes, Donald J. Trump Jr., Binderbauer, Schwab, and five additional independent directors to be named later.

The company expects the fusion plant to serve as a “path toward America’s A.I. dominance and energy security,” and aims to develop future plants with higher capacity—between 350 and 500 MWe—over time. The technology is projected to deliver “economic, abundant, and dependable electricity,” and the new entity sees fusion energy as a strategic asset in the broader global competition over artificial intelligence infrastructure and energy independence.

The press release emphasized that the combined company’s resources will “quickly move TAE’s proven technology to commercial viability.” It added that TAE’s fusion approach is designed to offer “reliable, affordable, carbon-free electricity and industrial heat without the risks of nuclear meltdown, radioactive waste, or proliferation.”

In a promotional video accompanying the merger announcement, the companies stated, “American innovation defines the future. It’s what secures our prosperity, national security and way of life.” The video highlighted TAE Technologies as “an American company doing what Americans do best—thinking big and shaping a bold future.” It continued: “Imagine limitless American energy without foreign dependence or price shocks. This is the kind of moonshot that could rebuild our industry, lower energy costs for all Americans, and ensure the US dominates global technology.”

Quote:Fired antitrust official Roger Alford testified before House Judiciary Democrats this week, attacking the Trump administration that stripped him of power while praising EU tech regulations and Democrat attorneys general such as Letitia James.

At a hearing this week before the House Judiciary Committee, fired antitrust official Roger Alford testified on behalf of House Judiciary Democrats, attacking President Trump and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, while praising the EU’s tech regulations, left-wing activist judges, and Democratic State Attorneys General.

In April, Alford became Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater’s top deputy. In this role, he tried to prevent the Department from settling an antitrust case to block the HPE-Juniper network merger.

As Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) explained at the hearing, “US national security interests against communist China owned Huawei that led to the HPE Juniper settlement.” As Breitbart reported at the time, many MAGA leaders including, including the late Charlie Kirk made this very argument.

Alford refused to bow to the pushback and was fired for insubordination after the deal was approved in July. Shortly after he was fired, Alford gave a speech defending “populist antitrust” at the St Regis Hotel in Aspen before the Big Tech and Big Hollywood-funded Technology Policy Institute. As Breitbart News reported, Alford would go on to criticize Trump’s FTC and DOJ for addressing top Republican concerns like DEI and corporate wokeness.

There, Alford portrayed himself and Slater as “genuine MAGA reformers” fighting corrupt “MAGA In Name Only” lobbyists and cronies. Alford claimed that he was only going after a few bad apples in the Trump administration and supported both the Trump White House and the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Quote:Russia carried out cyberattacks against infrastructure and websites in Denmark in 2024 and 2025, Danish authorities say in a new assessment published this week describing new cases not previously reported.

Moscow was responsible for “destructive and disruptive” cyberattacks on a Danish water utility company in 2024 and a series of denial of service attacks which overwhelmed Danish websites ahead of regional and local elections last month, Denmark´s Defense Intelligence Service said in a statement Thursday. The water company said the attack caused pipes to burst, leaving homes temporarily without water.

Jan Hansen, the head of the Tureby Alkestrup Waterworks southwest of the capital Copenhagen, said his advice to other companies was not to cut costs on cybersecurity and to take out cyber insurance. The attack happened, he said, because the waterworks switched to cheaper cybersecurity, which was not as secure as that previously.

The Danish intelligence service said the attacks were part of Russia’s “hybrid war” against the West and an attempt to create instability. It said Moscow’s cyberattacks are part of a broader campaign to undermine and punish countries which support Ukraine. Russian hackers have previously been accused of carrying out hacks on other water facilities in Europe – including on a Norwegian dam where Norwegian authorities said hackers opened valves to allow water to pour out.

Torsten Schack Pedersen, Denmark’s minister of resilience and preparedness, said the attacks resulted in limited damage but had serious ramifications.

“It shows that there are forces capable of shutting down important parts of our society,” he said during a news conference Thursday, as reported by Danish broadcaster DR.

Schack Pedersen added that the cyberattacks show that Denmark is not sufficiently equipped to handle such situations, DR reported.

The attacks are among a growing number of incidents that Western officials say are part a campaign of sabotage and disruption across Europe masterminded by Russia. An Associated Press database has documented 147 incidents, including the two cases reported by Denmark this week.

Not all incidents are public and it can sometimes take officials months to establish a link to Moscow. While officials say the campaign – waged since President Vladimir Putin´s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – aims to deprive Kyiv of support, they believe Moscow is also trying to identify Europe’s weak spots and suck up law enforcement resources.

The Danish agency said pro-Russian group Z-Pentest carried out the “destructive attack” on the water utility company in 2024 and that a separate group, NoName057(16), was responsible for the cyberattack on Danish websites ahead of the recent elections. It said both have links to the Russian state.

“The Russian state uses both groups as instruments of its hybrid war against the West. The aim is to create insecurity in the targeted countries and to punish those that support Ukraine,” the statement said. NoName057(16) acted, authorities said, in November to disrupt the elections, according to DR.

The Tureby Alkestrup Waterworks serves several villages some 35 kilometers (22 miles) south of Copenhagen. The waterworks said the hackers changed the water pressure, which caused a pipe to burst. It said about 50 households were without water for around seven hours while around 450 houses had no water for one hour.

In Germany, meanwhile, authorities summoned Russia’s ambassador in Berlin on Dec. 12 after the foreign ministry accused Moscow of carrying out sabotage, cyberattacks and election interference.

That included a 2024 cyberattack against German air traffic control, German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Martin Giese said.

Quote:Video game hardware sales in the United States experienced a significant decline in November, reaching the lowest point for the month since 2005. Apparently, Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s Switch are not on Santa’s list this year.

The Verge reports that the video game industry in the United States faced a challenging November as hardware sales plummeted to historic lows. According to market analyst company Circana, spending on video game hardware during the month totaled $695 million, a staggering 27 percent drop compared to the same period last year. This marks the lowest video game hardware spending for a November month since 2005, when sales reached just $455 million.

In terms of units sold, the situation was equally bleak. Circana reported that only 1.6 million units of hardware were sold in the US in November, the lowest total for the month since 1995, when 1.4 million units were purchased.

Several factors contributed to this decline, with the rising costs of consoles being a significant issue. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles celebrated their fifth anniversaries in November, but consumers looking to purchase these systems brand new were faced with higher prices due to price hikes implemented earlier in the year. These increases led to an “all-time November high” for the average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware, reaching $439 — an 11 percent increase from 2024. In comparison, the average price in November 2019 was just $235.

Another issue is the lack of blockbuster games that drive console sales, a similar problem to Hollywood. As Breitbart News previously reported, the gaming industry has struggled for years with woke games and LGBT characters that no one asked for shoehorned into games of all types. True blockbuster titled like Grand Theft Auto 6 continue to face massive delays, giving consumers a reason to hold off on purchases.

Despite the overall decline, the PlayStation 5 emerged as the month’s best-selling hardware in both units and dollars, a feat it achieved for the first time since the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2. The Switch 2 claimed the second spot in both units and dollars, while the Nex Playground ranked third in terms of units sold. However, the Xbox Series consoles managed to secure the third position in dollars.

Quote:Intelligence agencies from two NATO countries believe Russia is developing an anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink network, according to a new report.

The weapon would fill Starlink orbits with shrapnel and could take out multiple satellites at once, The Associated Press reported on Monday. This could also seriously damage other objects in orbit.

Why It Matters

Starlink has for years proven vital to Ukraine on the battlefield, with Kyiv leaning heavily on its internet access for communications and for controlling its vast drone fleets. Russia has warned satellites propping up Ukraine's military are "legitimate targets."

Weaponizing space has been a highly controversial issue for decades. The U.S. has assessed that Russia, as well as China, are racing to put new systems in space that would boost their own militaries and work against the U.S.

What To Know

The intelligence assessments said the pellets designed to take out the satellites would measure just millimeters in diameter, making it very hard for detection systems to pick up, according to the AP.

It added that they would be a "zone-effect" weapons likely to impact anything in the approximate area, rather than a way of targeting satellites with precision. This could jeopardize Russia's own systems in space, as well as those operated by other nations like China.

Analysts said that the risks involved with such a weapon, including to Moscow's own interests, could discourage Russia from pursuing the system.

The report did not identify which intelligence services had made the assessments. Newsweek could not independently verify the conclusions.

Starlink uses a huge constellation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to provide internet through terminals on the ground.

Russia carried out a direct-ascent anti-satellite test in November 2021 when it destroyed an old Soviet intelligence-gathering satellite in LEO.

The U.S. Space Command said at the time that the trial had generated at least 1,500 pieces of trackable debris in orbit that could linger for decades, and NASA reported personnel on the International Space Station had to take "emergency procedures for safety." The U.S. government condemned the test as "reckless and irresponsible behavior."

The NATO intelligence suggests the Russian weapon could target multiple Starlinks at the same time, rather than one singular LEO satellite, the AP reported.

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry and SpaceX, which operates Starlink, for comment via email.

Quote:The Department of War announced Monday that the Pentagon is partnering with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem to deploy Grok across its government systems.

The agency said the "frontier‑grade" capabilities of xAI’s Grok family of models will be integrated into the department’s recently launched AI platform, GenAI.mil.

As soon as early 2026, the partnership will allow the Department’s 3 million military and civilian personnel to safely access more advanced AI tools for everyday tasks, including handling sensitive government information.

According to xAI, its tools can support administrative tasks at the federal, state and local levels, as well as ‘critical mission use cases’ at the front line of military operations.

"Today, the War Department officially entered into an agreement with xAI, paving the way for the deployment of its advanced capabilities on GenAI.mil," the department said. "This move builds on the rapid deployment of cutting‑edge AI across the Department's 3 million military and civilian personnel."

The tools will allow employees to use xAI safely on secure government systems for routine work, including tasks involving sensitive but unclassified information, without violating security protocols.

With xAI designed to analyze real-time data, the War Department said the partnership would give personnel "a decisive information advantage."

Grok will give personnel access to live information from X, providing the War Department with faster situational awareness around the globe, the department said.

xAI added that the partnership could lead to potential future classified workloads.

"Through an ongoing, long-term partnership with the DoW and other mission partners, xAI will make available a family of government-optimized foundation models to support classified operational workloads," the company said.

The War Department said that it will continue to scale its AI ecosystem for speed, security and decision superiority.

"This announcement marks another milestone in America's AI revolution, and the War Department is driving that momentum forward," the department said.

"These two new partnerships are part of our longstanding support of the United States Government and xAI’s mission to bring the best tools and technologies available in industry to benefit our nation," xAI added.

Quote:Tesla on Thursday discontinued its basic driver-assistance system, Autopilot, in Canada and the US, in an attempt to push customers toward a more advanced version of the technology branded as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

The company had last week said it would stop offering FSD as a one-time $8,000 purchase from February 14, meaning customers will only be able to access the software through a monthly subscription priced at $99.

Tesla’s online vehicle configuration pages showed that new cars come only with Traffic Aware Cruise Control, a feature that maintains a set speed and follows traffic at a safe distance.

Autosteer, which previously worked with cruise control to keep vehicles centered in a lane and navigate curves, is no longer listed as a standard feature.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles had placed Tesla on a high-stakes 60-day deadline to overhaul its marketing or face a mandatory 30-day suspension of its retail sales license.

One condition was that Tesla stops using the “Autopilot” name, which regulators argued misled consumers into believing the system was capable of autonomous driving.

The department declined to comment and Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reason for the change.

For a long time, Autopilot has been the core selling point for Tesla vehicles, even as the company warned drivers that the system required active supervision and did not make cars fully autonomous.

CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday the subscription price for FSD would rise over time as the software’s capabilities improve.

Quote:The European Union has formally launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s social media company X over what it described as deepfakes of undressed women and children generated by its intelligence-powered chatbot Grok.

The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, said Monday it is looking into whether Musk’s tech company violated the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms such as X to prevent the spread of manipulated sexually explicit images including child sexual abuse material.

“Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice-president overseeing tech, said in a statement.

“With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.”

The Commission cited what it called the alleged “dissemination of illegal content, negative effects in relation to gender-based violence, and serious negative consequences to physical and mental well-being stemming from deployments of Grok’s functionalities into its platform” in launching the probe.

EU officials warned X could face penalties of up to 6% of global annual revenue if violations are confirmed.

Musk’s Grok AI bot sparked outrage late last year after the X app was flooded with images of women whose appearances were digitally altered to make them look like they were in bikinis or lingerie even though the original photos showed them fully clothed.

The alterations were made when users were able to ask Grok to undress them without their prior consent.

One analysis conducted by researcher Genevieve Oh found that Grok generated approximately 7,750 sexually suggestive or “nudifying” images an hour.

Quote:Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX acquired his artificial intelligence firm xAI on Monday, according to reports.

The deal gave the companies a whopping combined valuation of $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg.

SpaceX acquired xAI to “form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,” the company said in a statement.

SpaceX, which has huge rocket contracts with NASA and offers the Starlink satellite internet service, let employees sell shares at a price valuing the company around $800 billion, according to the New York Times. XAI, which owns the social media site X and runs the Grok chatbot, said it raised $20 billion at a $230 billion valuation.

The merger was poised to impact SpaceX’s reported plans to go public. Last week, the Financial Times reported Musk had floated holding an IPO in mid-June to coincide with a rare planetary alignment and his 55th birthday.

Musk has said he wants to launch AI data centers into space – an expensive plan that would require SpaceX’s capabilities and a significant cash infusion.
Last week, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch up to 1 million satellites into orbit to help “accommodate the explosive growth of data demands driven by AI,” according to a filing.

By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will achieve transformative cost and energy efficiency while significantly reducing the environmental impact associated with terrestrial data centers,” SpaceX wrote in the filing.

Quote:A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Elon Musk’s bid to dismiss a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that claimed he waited too long to disclose his purchases of Twitter shares in 2022.

Washington, DC-based US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said Musk’s arguments, including that the SEC overreached in order to punish him for criticizing it, did not warrant dismissal.

Lawyers for Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An SEC spokesperson declined to comment.

The SEC sued Musk in January 2025, saying his 11-day delay in revealing his initial 5% Twitter stake let him buy more than $500 million of shares at low prices. It wants Musk to repay the $150 million he allegedly saved at the expense of unsuspecting investors, plus a civil fine.

Musk has called the delay inadvertent. He also said the SEC case amounted to “selective enforcement” of federal securities laws, designed to target him for criticism of “government overreach” that is protected speech under the Constitution’s First Amendment. Musk also called a $150 million payout an excessive fine that violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, dwarfing the $100,000 penalty the SEC has sought in similar cases.

Judge cites congressional intent to protect investors

The SEC requires shareholders to disclose within 10 calendar days when they reach 5% ownership in order to protect investors who might otherwise be kept in the dark and sell their own stock.

In a 45-page decision, Sooknanan said that requirement reflects the intent of Congress to stop investors from buying shares cheaply while they pursue control of a company.

“The court does not doubt that Mr. Musk would prefer to avoid having to disclose information that might raise stock prices while he makes a play for corporate control,” the judge wrote. “But the balance Congress struck … does not violate the First Amendment.”

Musk has long feuded with the SEC.

In 2018, the regulator sued Musk after he said on Twitter he might take his electric car company Tesla  private and had secured funding.

He settled that case by paying a $20 million civil fine, agreeing to let Tesla lawyers review some Twitter posts in advance, and giving up his role as Tesla’s chairman.

Quote:North Korea is executing schoolchildren for watching South Korean TV shows and listening to K-Pop, including Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game,” according to Amnesty International.

Escapees told the human rights group that teenagers and even middle school students have been publicly executed, sent to labor camps or subjected to brutal public humiliations for consuming foreign media banned by the regime.

The accounts are based on 25 in-depth interviews conducted in 2025 with North Koreans who fled the country between 2012 and 2020, the organization said.

Most were between ages 15 and 25 when they escaped.

One interviewee said people, including high school students, were executed for watching “Squid Game” in Yanggang Province near the Chinese border.
Radio Free Asia separately documented an execution for distributing the show in neighboring North Hamgyong Province in 2021.

“Taken together, these reports from different provinces suggest multiple executions related to the shows,” Amnesty wrote.

The crackdown has intensified under North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose regime enforces the 2020 Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, which brands South Korean media as “rotten ideology that paralyses the people’s revolutionary sense.”

The law mandates five to 15 years of forced labor for watching or possessing South Korean dramas, films or music, with harsher penalties — including death — for distributing content or organizing group viewings, Amnesty added in its report.

Interviewees said punishment often depends on money.

“People are caught for the same act, but punishment depends entirely on money,” said Choi Suvin, 39, who fled North Korea in 2019.

“People without money sell their houses to gather $5,000 or $10,000 to pay to get out of the re-education camps,” he added.

Kim Joonsik, 28, said he was caught watching South Korean dramas three times before leaving in 2019 but avoided punishment because his family had connections.

“Usually when high school students are caught, if their family has money, they just get warnings,” he said. “I didn’t receive legal punishment because we had connections.”

Others were not so lucky.

Kim said three of his sister’s high school friends were sentenced to years-long labor camp terms in the late 2010s because their families could not afford bribes.

Several escapees described being forced, as children, to attend public executions as part of what authorities called “ideological education.”

“When we were 16, 17, in middle school, they took us to executions and showed us everything,” said Kim Eunju, 40, who fled in 2019. “People were executed for watching or distributing South Korean media. It’s ideological education: if you watch, this happens to you too.”

Amnesty said a specialized police unit known as the “109 Group” carries out warrantless home raids and street searches for foreign media.

Across different regions, 15 interviewees described the unit’s operations.

Quote:Meta is halting teens’ access to artificial intelligence characters, at least temporarily, the company said in a blog post Friday.

Meta Platforms Inc., which own Instagram and WhatsApp, said that starting in the “coming weeks,” teens will no longer be able to access AI characters “until the updated experience is ready”

This applies to anyone who gave Meta a birthday that makes them a minor, as well as “people who claim to be adults but who we suspect are teens based on our age prediction technology.”

The move comes the week before Meta — along with TikTok and Google’s YouTube — is scheduled to stand trial in Los Angeles over its apps’ harms to children.

Teens will still be able to access Meta’s AI assistant, just not the characters.

Other companies have also banned teens from AI chatbots amid growing concerns about the effects of artificial intelligence conversations on children.

Character.AI announced its ban last fall.

Quote:A landmark case accusing some of the biggest social media platforms in the world of deliberately getting their users addicted kicked off Tuesday in Los Angeles – with Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube headed for trial as TikTok agreed at the last minute to settle with the plaintiff.

Jury selection begins this week in California Superior Court after a 19-year-old woman identified only as “KGM” accused the tech giants of designing their algorithms to hook users, harming their mental health.

The case is considered a test for how hundreds of similar suits that youths, school districts and state governments have filed against social media companies could unfold. Taking a page from a past generation’s slew of successful suits against big tobacco, plaintiffs say social media companies created addictive products that led to personal injury and other problems.

KGM said in her filing that she began using social media when she was 10 years old.

She claimed that her usage of the apps led her to develop severe mental health conditions including depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, self-harm behavior and body dysmorphia.

Hours before the trial was set to begin, KGM and TikTok agreed on a settlement. She’d accused the company of deliberately installing its continuous-scroll feature as well as autoplay, push notification and algorithmic content-targeting to maximize engagement and foster addiction.

Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. was previously named in the suit. KGM agreed to a settlement with it last week. The sum of neither settlement was immediately known.

The Post has sought comment from Google, Snap and TikTok.

“We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company previously added features like Teen Accounts “with built-in protections” based on feedback from parents and other stakeholders.

Studies estimate that 5% to 10% of social media users meet the criteria for behavioral addiction, with significantly higher rates among adolescents.

Quote:Jeffrey Epstein once boasted about meeting Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel at what he described as a “wild” dinner,” an email released by the Justice Department showed.

The late financier and sex offender referenced the dinner in an Aug. 20, 2015 email to billionaire Tom Pritzker, who had asked him if he was planning to travel to New York later that month.

Epstein replied: “not sure yet. i had dinner with zuckerburg, mu=k, thiel hoffman, wild.”

The convicted pedophile did not relate what happened at the dinner, which was first reported by Vanity Fair in 2019. The outlet said Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, had hosted the meal in Palo Alta, Calif., for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden.

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a statement released in 2019.

“Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,” Zuckerberg spokesman Ben LaBolt said at the time. “Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”

Vanity Fair reported that Musk had introduced Zuckerberg to Epstein at the dinner – an allegation that Musk denied in an email to the outlet.

“I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so, Epstein is obviously a creep and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine,” Musk said at the time.

As The Post reported, newly released Epstein emails this week showed Hoffman discussing visits to Epstein’s private island, as well as his New Mexico ranch and his New York City apartment.

“Reid will spend the night at 71st,” stated one 2014 email from Hoffman’s team that was included in the document dump, in reference to Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse.

Hoffman addressed the newly uncovered emails in an X post on Sunday, denying any wrongdoing.

Quote:Apple on Thursday forecast a surge of up to 16% in revenue for the March quarter, well ahead of Wall Street’s expectations, powered by strong demand for its iPhones and a sharp rebound in China.

That followed holiday-quarter results that beat estimates as well, with CEO Tim Cook telling Reuters that demand for the latest handsets was “staggering.”

Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup helped lift sales across key markets, easing investor concerns about a hardware sales plateau. The devices have been well received for their upgraded camera features and performance improvements, with Apple also benefiting from a wave of upgrades from users holding onto older models.

Apple shares rose 3.5% in extended trading after the results were released, but later pared gains to trade up 0.8%.

Apple expects revenue for its fiscal second quarter to grow 13% to 16%, versus a 10% rise that analysts expected, according to LSEG. The company also forecast operating expenses of $18.4 billion to $18.7 billion, slightly above spending in the first quarter.

IPhone revenue rose to $85.27 billion in the fiscal first quarter ended Dec., well above the $78.65 billion analysts had expected. Apple said iPhone sales set records in every geographic segment, highlighting broad-based demand despite macroeconomic uncertainty.

“The demand for iPhone was simply staggering, with revenue growing 23% year over year to achieve its biggest quarter in history,” Cook told Reuters in an interview.

Quote:Hey, Siri, butt out!

Google and Apple listened in on and recorded millions of unwitting customers’ conversations — and will soon fork over a combined $163 million to resolve the eavesdropping debacle, according to a pair of bombshell lawsuits.

Apple has started sending out payments to settle its $95 million class-action complaint, which accused the Cupertino tech giant of spying on users who never once uttered the prompt, “Hey, Siri,” according to court documents.

Some people reported that their Apple devices pushed ads for brands — like Olive Garden and Air Jordan — that they had discussed in conversations that were secretly recorded.

Google, meanwhile, has reached a tentative, $68 million settlement after its Google Assistant surreptitiously activated and recorded users without the hot words, “OK Google,” according to court documents viewed by The Post.

That deal, part of a 2019 lawsuit, still has to be OKed by a judge.

Siri and Google Assistant are voice-activated aides that can perform tasks, including sending text messages, making calls or reciting the weather.

Both tech behemoths, which are accused of using the secret recordings to improve their respective products, have denied any wrongdoing.

Apple now requires users to opt in before recorded audio is used for improving Siri’s functionality, according to The Mac Observer.

Anyone who purchased an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch or Apple TV between Sept. 17, 2014 and Dec. 31, 2024 and experienced an unintended Siri activation was eligible for a payout. Some have been doled out via prepaid cards or direct deposit.

The amount paid out to individuals is capped at $20 per Siri-enabled device, according to the settlement website, with a maximum of five impacted devices per person.

The $95 million figure represents about nine hours of profit for Apple, which raked in $93.74 billion in net income over the last fiscal year.

“Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit and denies that Apple did anything improper or unlawful,” the giant said on its website.

The suit was filed in 2019 by Fumiko Lopez and others who alleged their recorded discussions were shared with third-party businesses, such as restaurants and brands, which led to targeted ads in Apple Search and Safari.

Quote:Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have banded together with some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest moguls to create a new, pro-business organization that is poised to lobby against the proposed billionaire tax in California.

The organization, Building a Better California, is planning to wield its influence by backing political candidates and ballot initiatives throughout the state, according to Bloomberg News.

A key priority for the group is opposing a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires in California, which is scheduled to be on the ballot this coming November.

The fine print of the proposal shows company founders’ voting shares in their businesses would be treated as equivalent to ownership — artificially inflating how much wealth they have and raising their tax bill.

This has “the potential to strip the founders of some of the world’s largest companies of their controlling interests and force them to sell off a significant portion of their shares,” noted the nonprofit Tax Foundation. “This could send stock prices plummeting to the detriment of tech employees and investors of all stripes, including ordinary workers.”

There’s also concern that the tax could be applied to people who aren’t super-rich.

“The fine print in the bill allows the California legislature to apply this asset tax to non-billionaires as well whenever they want. Your car, home and jewelry would all count,” former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya recently wrote on X.

“California isn’t coming just for the rich,” he added. “This bill, while disguised as a tax on the wealthy, is actually the infrastructure to tax everyone in California even more – but now on everything you own.”

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has come out against the wealth tax, noting the introduction of the proposal has already driven some billionaires out of the state.

“This will be defeated — there’s no question in my mind,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state.”

Campaign filings cited by Bloomberg News show that Building a Better California has raised $35 million, including a $20 million donation from Brin.

Building a Better California has already spent $11 million backing ballot initiatives aimed at boosting middle-class homeownership and reforming California’s environmental review law.

Brin previously approached other business leaders about raising hundreds of millions of dollars for a California influence campaign.

According to Bloomberg News, he made the pitch to other tech industry figures using the encrypted messaging service Signal.

Others said to be involved in the initiative include crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, venture capitalist Mike Moritz, DoorDash co-founder Tony Xu and tech investors John Doerr, Max Levchin and Patrick Collison.

Stewart Resnick, co-owner of The Wonderful Company, donated $2 million — the largest contribution from a donor outside of tech, according to Bloomberg News.

Quote:Employees at Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab reportedly demanded that management detail plans on how to keep them “physically safe” from ICE after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

An unnamed DeepMind employee made the request Monday on an internal message board, according to Wired, which obtained screenshots of the post.

“US focused question: What is GDM doing to keep us physically safe from ICE? The events of the past week have shown that immigration status, citizenship, or even the law is not a deterrent against detention, violence, or even death from federal operatives,” the worker was quoted as saying.

“What kinds of plans and policies are in place to ensure our safety at the office? Coming to and from work? As we have seen, government agency tactics can change and escalate quite rapidly. With offices in many metro areas across the US, are we prepared?”

The post was sent to a channel with more than 3,600 employees, said a source familiar with the matter . About 40 of them interacted with the post, with many adding a “plus emoji.”

Google did not comment.

The post went unanswered by senior management as of Monday night, according to Wired.

A DeepMind employee posted a separate message citing an incident in which a federal agent allegedly attempted to enter Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass. The entry reportedly occurred at some point last fall, though it’s unclear when the employee’s message was posted.

Google’s security chief responded to that message with details confirming that an “officer arrived at reception without notice” and was “not granted entry because they did not have a warrant and promptly left.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis have yet to weigh in publicly on the Pretti killing. DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean called the shooting “absolutely shameful.”

Quote:At least clankers don’t ask for tips.

Taking a trip in a Waymo robotaxi costs more on average than taking a drive in an Uber or Lyft driven by a human.

However, that price gap is narrowing, according to a new report from Obi, a global real-time aggregator for rideshare prices.

“When Waymo entered the market, our research saw that a ride was priced 30% to 40% higher than an Uber or Lyft ride, but consumers were still taking them enthusiastically, viewing an autonomous rideshare as a premium product,” Ashwini Anburajan, CEO of Obi, said in a statement.

Obi simulated more than 94,000 ride requests in the San Francisco Bay Area between Nov. 27 and Jan. 1 and found that Waymo costs an average of $19.69 for a ride, while Uber was slightly cheaper at $17.47 and Lyft averaged at $15.47.

The data showed that Waymo is an average of 12.7% more expensive than getting an Uber and 27.3% more expensive than a Lyft.

There are two main components working working in tandem that are causing the gap to get smaller — Waymo has lowered pricing while traditional ride-hailing trips on Uber and Lyft have risen in price, according to Obi.

In June 2025, Obi’s first report showcased price differences between robotaxis and rideshare with data taken from rides in April 2025.

At the time, that data revealed that Waymo rides averaged $20.43, Uber at $15.58, and Lyft rides at $14.44, detailing a 30-40% premium.

Comparing these numbers to Obi’s most recent data, Waymo’s average cost dropped 3.62%, while Uber’s went up 12% and Lyft’s increased 7%.

But for longer rides, “the premium can almost disappear,” the report said.

According to the data, rides between 4.3 and 9.3 kilometers (or about 2.7 and 5.8 miles), Waymo is only 2% more expensive than Uber and 17% more expensive than Lyft per kilometer.

Quote:The Teamsters demanded Monday that California suspend Waymo taxis indefinitely after one of the self-driving cars hit a 5-year-old near a Santa Monica elementary school.

The largest union in the state put Golden State officials on blast, telling them to pull the company’s license to operate the futuristic vehicles after the accident on Jan. 23, which left the unidentified child with minor injuries.

The statement from the co-chairs of the Teamsters California, whose members include transportation workers and truckers, comes after the National Transportation Safety Board announced a probe of the company.

“This incident is emblematic of the broader goal Big Tech companies have to replace skilled human labor with AI,” co-chairs Peter Finn and Victor Mineros said in a statement.

“They want to force millions of people into destitution by destroying their livelihoods, seize money that belongs to workers, and force our communities to reckon with the fallout of automation’s shortcomings,” the statement went on. “Robotaxis threaten workers’ jobs and are now terrorizing our kids.”

The regulatory California Public Utilities Commission should intervene or “the next incident could be much worse,” the union bosses said.

Waymo did not directly respond to The Post’s request for comment, instead referring to the original statement issued following the incident, in which the company referred to the child as a “pedestrian.”

“We remain committed to improving road safety where we operate, as we continue on our mission to be the world’s most trusted driver,” the statement said.

The company had said the child “suddenly entered the roadway” from behind an SUV and stepped in the path of the driverless taxi. The vehicle braked and slowed to 6 mph before contact, the company said.

This is not the first time Waymo has had malfunctions.

Quote:Alphabet said Wednesday that capital expenditure could as much as double this year, in yet another aggressive spending ramp-up by the Google parent as it deepens investments to push ahead in the AI race.

Alphabet shares were volatile in after-hours trading — falling 6% before recouping losses, as investors weighed the swell in spending against surging revenue and profit, both of which beat expectations in the December quarter.

The company said it was targeting capital expenditure of $175 billion to $185 billion this year, a massive jump compared with average analyst expectations that it would spend about $115.26 billion this year, according to data compiled by LSEG.

CEO Sundar Pichai said in a release that Alphabet hiked its forecast spending “to meet customer demand and capitalize on the growing opportunities we have ahead of us.”

He added: “We’re seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board.”

The company spent $91.45 billion in 2025, primarily on AI infrastructure including servers, data centers and networking equipment. That compares with its projections for total spending of between $91 billion and $93 billion last year.

Growth in Google’s cloud division, where the company is enjoying early returns on AI investment, helped the stock pare losses. The unit’s revenue grew 48% to $17.7 billion in the fourth quarter ended December, compared with analysts’ average estimate of a 35.2% jump, according to data compiled by LSEG.

“Google Cloud growth was far ahead of expectations and importantly higher growth than Microsoft Azure for the first time in several years,” said Gil Luria, D.A. Davidson analyst. “The acceleration in Google Cloud seems to justify the increased [capex] investment.”

The company reported total revenue of $113.83 billion for the quarter, beating analyst estimates of $111.43 billion, per LSEG data. Adjusted profit per share of $2.82 also beat estimates of $2.63.

Cloud computing majors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars to expand their AI infrastructure, both to meet the growing enterprise demand for their cloud services and to fuel their own development of AI technologies and products.

Like larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud has been grappling with capacity constraints that have dented its ability to fully cash in on AI demand from its customers.

Quote:Amazon’s latest round of layoffs is set to hit 16,000 corporate employees starting Wednesday — with the tech titan suggesting artificial intelligence will do their work, instead.

The firings come after Amazon said in October it was laying off 14,000 corporate workers — with the goal of trimming its 1.58 million-strong workforce by nearly 10% — and after it and other big tech companies were widely viewed as over-hiring during the COVID pandemic.

The e-commerce giant has explicitly linked the layoffs to increased use of AI, particularly in corporate and technology functions.

“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” Amazon senior vice president Beth Galetti wrote in October.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones),” she explained.

“We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

Amazon’s President and CEO Andy Jassy said last summer new tech could create new job opportunities – though he also admitted it could bring “efficiency gains” by helping to reduce the overall workforce.

People familiar with this week’s layoffs told Reuters that the layoffs would hit teams across Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and human resources, though details were not immediately known.

The layoffs come amid high hopes for AI’s potential to boost productivity — and concern it could lead to widescale firings.

AI killed some 55,000 jobs in the US last year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

On the consumer side of things, Amazon has embedded artificial intelligence across its core products, rolling out generative AI tools that handle shopping, voice interaction and task automation.

Quote:Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest as much as $50 billion into Sam Altman’s OpenAI — in what would be a massive bet on the ChatGPT creator.

Amazon boss Andy Jassy is leading negotiations with Altman, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The sources said the potential terms were not finalized and subject to change.

OpenAI is reportedly aiming to raise up to $100 billion in a fundraising round that would value the artificial giant at $830 billion. Amazon would be the largest single contributor to the round if it follows through with a $50 billion bet.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the report. OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.

Amazon already holds a sizable take in Anthropic, which is one of OpenAI’s chief rivals in the AI sector.

Earlier this week, the retail giant laid off about 16,000 employees. The company said the cuts were meant to streamline its operations and management ranks, but Amazon executives have also acknowledged that advancements in AI were a factor in the restructuring.

Meanwhile, Japanese investment giant SoftBank, which is already one of OpenAI’s largest shareholders, is in discussions to pour as much as $30 billion more into the company, The Journal previously reported.

Earlier this week, The Information reported that Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft were in talks to collectively invest more than $60 billion in OpenAI. The tech outlet’s sources said Amazon was mulling an investment of up to $20 billion or more.

Quote:Amazon on Thursday projected a surge of more than 50% in capital expenditures this year, joining its peers in a spending spree to build out artificial-intelligence infrastructure, and sending its shares down 9% in after-hours trading.

It is the latest sign that Big Tech will not be hitting the brakes any time soon on hefty AI investments. Amazon shares closed down 4.4% during regular trading as worries deepened about the enormous cost of the artificial-intelligence boom.

The top four hyperscalers – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Meta – are expected to collectively spend more than $630 billion this year.

Amazon also forecast a first-quarter profit range whose lower end would miss analysts’ expectations by a quarter, baking in roughly $1 billion in higher costs related to its high-speed internet business Leo, as well as investment in quick commerce and sharper prices in its international stores business.

The company said it expects to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, compared with about $131 billion in 2025.

Amazon’s forecast for first-quarter operating income of $16.5 billion to $21.5 billion disappointed, falling below analysts’ estimate of $22.04 billion.

Tech earnings over the past few days have shown Wall Street has a clear message for tech firms: Soaring AI spending can continue only if companies show commensurate operational or financial returns.

“We wanted to see more of a consecutive cadence of strong earnings growth and that’s just not happening here,” said Dave Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, referring to Amazon’s results.

“The market just dislikes the substantial amount of money that keeps getting put into capex for these growth rates.”

Quote:TikTok users are accusing the app’s new US owners of censoring videos about the fatal Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti and political content including mentions of “Epstein.”

The hashtag #TikTokCensorship took off on X on Sunday as creators claimed videos about political unrest in Minneapolis were getting far fewer views than usual and facing long delays uploading.

In a late Monday statement on X, TikTok US’ new owners wrote: “We’re continuing to resolve a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our US data center partner sites.”

“You may notice multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content,” the new owners added. “Creators may temporarily see ‘0’ views or likes on videos …This is a display error.”

It was a rough start for the new US spin-off of TikTok, which announced last Thursday that it finally reached a deal to transfer operations to American ownership after staring down threats of a ban for years.

China-based ByteDance will retain a 19.9% ownership stake, while US and global investors — including Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, an Emirati state-owned investment firm that has been done a range of deals smiled on by the White House — each hold a 15% stake.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in a post late Monday that he is launching a state investigation into TikTok, alleging his office “independently confirmed instances” of the app censoring content critical of President Trump.

A White House spokesperson told The Post it “has no role in TikTok’s content moderation.”

In a viral post on X, David Leavitt, a freelance writer, shared a screenshot of his TikTok account that showed he regularly gained hundreds or thousands of views on his videos — but his recent political videos were flagged as “ineligible for recommendation.”

American singer Billie Eilish wrote on Instagram that TikTok “is silencing people” after her musician brother Finneas O’Connell posted a TikTok video about the shooting of Pretti — who was fatally shot by federal agents on Saturday — that gained fewer views than O’Connell’s usual content.

Quote:A 19-year-old California woman has reached a settlement with TikTok just hours before the scheduled start of the trial in her suit alleging that the social media platform designed its algorithm to hook users, harming their mental health.

The woman, who has only been identified as “KGM,” previously reached a separate settlement with Snapchat’s parent company Snap. Terms of both settlements were not disclosed.

News of the latest settlement was first reported by Bloomberg.

The Post has sought comment from TikTok and Snap.

The plaintiff has also sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google-owned YouTube on similar grounds in Los Angeles Superior Court.

KGM said in her filing that she began using social media when she was 10 years old.

She claimed that her usage of the apps led her to develop severe mental health conditions including depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, self-harm behavior and body dysmorphia.

In the complaint, KGM alleged that TikTok deliberately installed its continuous-scroll feature as well as autoplay, push notification and algorithmic content targeting in order to maximize engagement and foster addiction.

The cases are part of an ongoing legal battle involving more than 2,200 lawsuits alleging that major social media platforms intentionally designed addictive products that damage young users’ mental health.

Studies estimate that 5% to 10% of social media users meet the criteria for behavioral addiction, with significantly higher rates among adolescents.

Teenagers now spend an average of 7 to 9 hours a day on screens, much of it on social media platforms designed for constant engagement.

Multiple large-scale reviews have found consistent links between heavy social media use and worsening mental health.

Researchers have associated prolonged use with higher rates of depression, anxiety, psychological distress, sleep deprivation and academic decline, particularly among children and teens whose brains are still developing.

Quote:Penelope Sokolowski was just 16 years old when she took her own life last February.

Her father, Jason, believes her suicide was the culmination of a grooming process that began on Roblox, the game platform beloved by kids — with some 170,000 users under the age of 13, according to company data from 2023.

“We kind of thought we were covering all the bases,” Jason told The Post, noting that his family had used a third-party app to monitor Penelope’s online activity.

Jason alleges that his only child was contacted by a predator on Roblox who coerced her into cutting his name into her chest and sending videos of herself bloodied from self-harm — and who, ultimately, sent Penelope down a spiral that culminated in her death.

The girl was 7 or 8 years old when she first signed up for Roblox, players rove around online worlds and can chat with other users.

“I’d come in and sit in the room with her and see what she was doing, ask who those people were,” Jason said, recalling Penelope drawing an anime-style sketch for a friend she’d made on Roblox.

“As a dad I thought, oh, this is nice, she’s artistic, and she’s made artistic friends,” he added. “But I didn’t understand what Roblox was and its effect on her.”

The dad, who works in the film industry in Vancouver, British Columbia, separated from Penelope’s mother and moved out of the family home when the girl was 13.

He recalls how Penelope’s grades began to tumble and, when she was 14, he noticed scars from self-inflicted cuts on her arms, which she had been covering with bracelets and his oversized hockey jerseys.

Penelope confided that she had been recruited into a self-harm group via Roblox, but assured her father she had moved on.

But not long after her 16th birthday, she took her own life.

Later, when Jason opened up his daughter’s cell phone, he found what he describes as a “crime scene.”

According to the dad, there were messages spanning two years with a person who egged on her self-destruction. Jason believes Penelope met this person on Roblox and then began privately conversing with them over Discord — sometimes for hours.

Quote:A federal jury in Phoenix ordered Uber on Thursday to pay $8.5 million after finding it liable in a lawsuit brought by a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a driver, a verdict that could influence thousands of similar cases against the ride-hailing company.

The case, brought by plaintiff Jaylynn Dean, was the first trial – known as a “bellwether” – of more than 3,000 similar lawsuits against Uber that have been consolidated in federal court. Bellwether trials are used to test legal theories and help gauge the value of claims for possible settlements.

The jury found that the driver was an agent of Uber, so the company was responsible for his actions. They awarded Dean $8.5 million in compensatory damages but declined to award punitive damages. Attorneys for Dean had sought more than $140 million in damages.

In a statement, an Uber spokesperson noted that the jury rejected Dean’s other claims, that the company was negligent or that its safety systems were defective, adding that the company plans to appeal. “This verdict affirms that Uber acted responsibly and has invested meaningfully in rider safety,” the spokesperson said.

Sarah London, an attorney for Dean, said the verdict “validates the thousands of survivors who have come forward at great personal risk to demand accountability against Uber for its focus on profit over passenger safety.”

Uber shares fell 0.5% in extended trading following announcement of the verdict.

Dean, an Oklahoma resident, sued Uber in 2023, one month after her alleged assault in Arizona. She said Uber was aware of a wave of sexual assaults committed by its drivers, but had failed to take basic actions to improve the safety of its riders. Such assertions have long dogged the company, drawing headlines and congressional scrutiny.

Alexandra Walsh, an attorney for Dean, said during the trial’s closing arguments that Uber had marketed itself as a safe option for women traveling at night, particularly if they had been drinking.

Quote:COPENHAGEN — The makers of mobile apps designed to help shoppers identify and boycott American goods say they saw a surge of interest in Denmark and beyond after the recent flare-up in tensions over U.S. President Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland.

The creator of the “Made O’Meter” app, Ian Rosenfeldt, said he saw around 30,000 downloads of the free app in just three days at the height of the trans-Atlantic diplomatic crisis in late January out of more than 100,000 since it was launched in March.

Apps offer practical help

Rosenfeldt, who lives in Copenhagen and works in digital marketing, decided to create the app a year ago after joining a Facebook group of like-minded Danes hoping to boycott U.S. goods.

“Many people were frustrated and thinking, ‘How do we actually do this in practical terms,’” the 53-year-old recalled. “If you use a bar code scanner, it’s difficult to see if a product is actually American or not, if it’s Danish or not. And if you don’t know that, you can’t really make a conscious choice.”

The latest version of “Made O’Meter” uses artificial intelligence to identify and analyze several products at a time, then recommend similar European-made alternatives. Users can set preferences, like “No USA-owned brands” or “Only EU-based brands.” The app claims over 95% accuracy.

“By using artificial intelligence, you can take an image of a product … and it can make a deep dive to go out and find the correct information about the product in many levels,” Rosenfeldt told The Associated Press during a demonstration at a Copenhagen grocery store. “This way, you have information that you can use to take decisions on what you think is right.”

‘Losing an ally’

After an initial surge of downloads when the app was launched, usage tailed off. Until last month, when Trump stepped up his rhetoric about the need for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, a strategically important and mineral-rich Arctic island that is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.

Usage peaked Jan. 23, when there were almost 40,000 scans in one day, compared with 500 or so daily last summer. It has dropped back since but there were still around 5,000 a day this week, said Rosenfeldt, who noted “Made O’Meter” is used by over 20,000 people in Denmark but also by people in Germany, Spain, Italy, even Venezuela.

Quote:The state of California is losing yet another tech company to Florida.

In a dramatic sign of the rising allure of low-tax, pro-business states, quantum computing firm D-Wave Quantum Inc. announced it is relocating its corporate headquarters and key R & D operations from Palo Alto to Boca Raton, Florida.

The move, confirmed in a statement from the company, marks a stinging blow to Silicon Valley, in what many see as a broader trend of tech companies leaving high-cost Cali for more business-friendly regions.

CEO Dr. Alan Baratz made no secret of the strategy: Florida’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem, expanding talent pool, and supportive research environment make the state ideal for quantum innovation.

“With our new headquarters in Boca Raton, D-Wave will bring to South Florida incredible opportunities for advanced research, talent recruitment, and high-impact technology development that is shaping the future of computing,” Baratz said in a statement.
Florida officials hailed the move as a major victory.

“We’re excited to welcome D-Wave to Florida as it accelerates the development and delivery of its quantum computing technologies, which will help further establish the state as a center of high demand job growth and business formation through innovation,” said Florida Secretary of Commerce J. Alex Kelly.

“By welcoming D-Wave’s flagship … we are strengthening our position as a destination for advanced innovation, attracting top-tier technology talent, and laying the foundation for long-term economic growth,” Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer said.

The relocation is a centerpiece of a major partnership with the state of Florida. D-Wave will install its “Advantage2” quantum computer at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus, in an effort to “accelerate and solidify the state of Florida’s position as a leader in quantum computing.”

While Sacramento faces political uncertainty and weighs a controversial new “billionaire tax,” Florida has been rolling out the red carpet with tax breaks and economic development incentives.

Earlier in January, Boca Raton officials approved a resolution where D-Wave would get up to $500,000 to relocate there and create 100 new jobs with an average annual salary of at least $125,000, per local news outlets.

Quote:At least 25 million Americans — including roughly half of Texas’ population — were swept up in a massive data breach at tech firm Conduent, exposing sensitive information such as Social Security numbers and health insurance data.

Conduent, the New Jersey-based government and business technology contractor, was targeted by hackers in an attack that began in October 2024 and went undetected for nearly three months before being discovered on Jan. 13 of last year.

The ransomware attack is now coming into sharper focus as states continue to uncover how many people were affected.

Texas alone revised its number from 4 million people who may have been affected to 15.4 million — a staggering 285% increase.

In Oregon, an estimated 10.5 million people may have had their sensitive data exposed in the breach.
Hundreds of thousands of other victims in states like Delaware, Massachusetts and New Hampshire are also thought to have been affected.

The breach has also sparked a wave of litigation, with multiple class action lawsuits consolidated in federal court in New Jersey accusing Conduent of failing to adequately safeguard sensitive personal and health data and waiting months to notify victims after discovering the intrusion.

A plaintiffs’ steering committee was appointed in December to oversee the litigation, which could expose Conduent to significant damages, regulatory penalties and long-term fallout with state government clients.

Conduent operates critical backend systems for state governments nationwide, handling everything from Medicaid claims and eligibility systems to child support payments, food assistance and unemployment insurance.

The company works with agencies in 46 states and supports government healthcare programs serving about 120 million people, processing more than 500 million Medicaid claims each year and disbursing tens of billions of dollars annually in public benefits.

The attack was carried out by the SafePay ransomware group, which publicly claimed responsibility and said it siphoned roughly 8.5 terabytes of data from Conduent’s systems during the months-long intrusion.

SafePay listed Conduent on its dark web leak site in February 2025 and threatened to publish the data if a ransom was not paid, though Conduent has not said whether it engaged with the hackers.

Quote:The Federal Trade Commission warned Apple in a fiery letter on Wednesday that it may be violating consumer protection laws by stifling right-leaning publications on its popular news app.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook came one day after The Post exclusively reported on a study that pointed to the Apple News app’s apparent bias against conservative media outlets. President Trump shared The Post’s report on his Truth Social account early Wednesday. 

Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, analyzed a total of 620 stories given featured placement by Apple News’ editorial team in January — and found that none of them were published by outlets that are considered right-leaning.

“These reports raise serious questions about whether Apple News is acting in accordance with its terms of service and its representations to consumers,” Ferguson wrote in the Wednesday letter to Cook obtained by The Post.

In his Wednesday letter, Ferguson urged Cook to “conduct a comprehensive review of Apple’s terms of service and ensure that Apple News’ curation of articles is consistent with those terms and representations made to consumers and, if it is not, to take corrective action swiftly.”

The nation’s top trade cop pointed to Apple’s obligations under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which “prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” including “material misrepresentations and material omissions.”

“The First Amendment protects the speech of Big Tech firms,” Ferguson wrote. “But the First Amendment has never extended its protection to material misrepresentations made to consumers, nor does it immunize speakers from conduct that Congress has deemed unfair under the FTC Act, even if that conduct involves speech.”

In its analysis, MRC relied on classifications compiled by AllSides, which uses a multi-partisan panel of experts — with two members from the left, two from the center and two from the right – that are trained to spot media bias, as well as blind surveys of regular Americans, to establish bias ratings for outlets.

In February 2025, Ferguson launched an inquiry into tech censorship in an effort to “better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”

“Any act or practice by Apple News to suppress or promote news articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication, if inconsistent with Apple’s terms of service or the reasonable expectations of consumers, may violate the FTC Act,” Ferguson wrote on Wednesday.

Quote:Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users, enhancing age-appropriate protections while maintaining privacy, community, and meaningful connection on the platform

SAN FRANCISCO, February 9, 2026 – Discord is announcing enhanced teen safety features rolling out globally that reinforce its long-standing commitment to creating a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience by default, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves the privacy and meaningful connections that define Discord.

Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, users may be required to engage in an age assurance process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.

“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users, which is why we are announcing these updates in time for Safer Internet Day. Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility. We design our products with teen safety principles at the core and will continue working with safety experts, policymakers, and Discord users to support meaningful, long term wellbeing for teens on the platform.” – Savannah Badalich, Head of Product Policy at Discord.
‍
Privacy-Forward Age Assurance

Age assurance is the foundation of this new experience and is designed to respect Discord users’ privacy and choice. Discord users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to its vendor partners, with more options coming in the future. Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age. Some users may be asked to use multiple methods if more information is needed to assign an age group.

Key privacy protections of Discord’s age-assurance approach include:

• On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
  
• Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
  
• Straightforward age assurance: In most cases, users complete the process once and their Discord experience adapts to their verified age group. Users may be asked to use multiple methods only when more information is needed to assign an age group.
  
• Private status: A user’s age group status cannot be seen by other users.
  

After completing a chosen method, users will receive confirmation via a direct message from Discord’s official account. A user’s assigned age group can also be viewed at any time in “My Account” settings. Users can always go to “My Account” settings to appeal their assigned age group by retrying the process. Discord prompts users to age-assure only within Discord and currently does not send emails or text messages about its age assurance process or results.

Quote:OpenAI has fired a female executive for alleged sexual discrimination against a male colleague — after she objected to the company’s plan to roll out an “adult mode” allowing erotic conversations on ChatGPT.

Ryan Beiermeister, who served as vice president of product policy, strongly denied the allegation of sex-based discrimination, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” she told the paper.

Beiermeister is departing after having “made valuable contributions during her time at OpenAI,” the company told the Journal, adding that her exit “was not related to any issue she raised while working at the company.”

Beiermeister, whose tech career has included stints at Palantir and Meta, joined OpenAI in June 2024.

She led the product policy team that crafts rules for how people can use OpenAI’s products and helps design enforcement mechanisms for those policies.

Before she was fired, Beiermeister reportedly told colleagues she was against “adult mode” and worried about its potential harmful effects.

She also said OpenAI’s approach to blocking child-exploitation content was inadequate and efforts to keep teens from accessing adult content were insufficient, according to the Journal.

She reportedly took a leave of absence before returning to work last month, with OpenAI firing her in early January, according to people familiar with the matter. Details of the alleged discrimination were not known.

The Post has sought comment from OpenAI and Beiermeister.

During her time at OpenAI, Beiermeister launched a peer mentorship program for women at the business, according to the Journal.

Her ouster came ahead of OpenAI’s planned launch early this year of an “adult mode” that would allow adult-themed conversation, including sexual topics, for age-verified users.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote on X in October that the company planned to expand what was permitted on ChatGPT as it rolled out stronger age barriers.

Quote:Russia has attempted to fully block WhatsApp in the country, the company said, the latest move in an ongoing government effort to tighten control over the internet.

A WhatsApp spokesperson said late Wednesday that the Russian authorities’ action was intended to “drive users to a state-owned surveillance app,” a reference to Russia’s own state-supported MAX messaging app that’s seen by critics as a surveillance tool.

“Trying to isolate over 100 million people from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” the WhatsApp spokesperson said. “We continue to do everything we can to keep people connected.”

Russia’s government has already blocked major social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and ramped up other online restrictions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms should comply with Russian law to see it unblocked, according to the state Tass news agency.

Earlier this week, Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said it will introduce new restrictions on the Telegram messaging app after accusing it of refusing to abide by the law.

The move triggered widespread criticism from military bloggers, who warned that Telegram was widely used by Russian troops fighting in Ukraine and its throttling would derail military communications.

Despite the announcement, Telegram has largely been working normally. Some experts say it’s a more difficult target compared with WhatsApp.

Some Russian experts said that blocking WhatsApp would free up technological resources and allow authorities to fully focus on Telegram, their priority target.

Authorities had previously restricted access to WhatsApp before moving to finally banning it on Wednesday.

Under President Vladimir Putin, authorities have engaged in deliberate and multipronged efforts to rein in the internet.

They have adopted restrictive laws and banned websites and platforms that don’t comply, and focused on improving technology to monitor and manipulate online traffic.

Quote:The underage daughter of a former Meta safety researcher was bombarded with sexually explicit pictures and propositions within just days of creating her first Instagram account, according to bombshell testimony at a landmark New Mexico trial.

Arturo Béjar, who led a safety-focused team at Mark Zuckerberg’s company from 2009 to 2015, told jurors he decided to return as a consultant in 2019 after becoming alarmed at the sick messages his then-14-year-old daughter had received on Instagram, including “unsolicited penis pictures.”

“I was with her when she created the account,” said Béjar, who appeared to choke up several times. “I didn’t know that was going to bring predators to her door, people who attacked her to her door, people who would ask her to sell nude photos of herself when she was a teenager to her door.”

Béjar, who has become an outspoken Meta critic since leaving the company for good in 2021, is a key witness for New Mexico state attorneys, who say the tech giant turned a blind eye as predators and sex creeps targeted kids in order to protect Meta’s profits.

His testimony was set to continue Wednesday, with another round of questions from state attorneys followed by cross-examination by Meta’s defense team.

The online safety expert said Meta changed significantly during his second stint at the company as it scrambled to keep pace with budding rivals like Snap and TikTok. Béjar testified that safety researchers were often stonewalled by top brass, including Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, when trying to implement new features meant to protect kids.

Béjar said, for example, that Instagram lacked a feature allowing users to report why they were blocking a particular individual — which meant that he and his daughter had little recourse when trying to alert the company about predators.

“When my daughter got a message saying, ‘Do you want to have sex tonight?’ — first message she gets from a stranger — there was no option [to report],” Béjar said.

He also alleged that Meta was woefully understaffed to address the volume of safety violations it faced. He laid the blame on its use of algorithms, which, he said, helped creeps find potential victims more easily.

Quote:The “ethical hacker” who created the Bluetooth “signal sniffer” being used to try to track Nancy Guthrie’s pacemaker said he created the high-tech tool specifically for the search for the missing matriarch — and that he is now creating an app.

David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, said the sniffer, which has been attached to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovering over Tucson, Arizona, has a range of up to 800 feet.

The renowned “ethical hacker” and Marine veteran who conducted cyber missions for the National Security Agency told The Post that he knew he had an opportunity to help after it was revealed that the mother of “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie had a pacemaker.

“When this whole Nancy Guthrie case came out, law enforcement said that her pacemaker had disconnected from her phone, which would indicate that she’s using one of the newer brand pacemakers that have Bluetooth connectivity,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy had previously worked with pacemaker companies to test their ability to withstand hacks, ensuring that no one can “drain the battery or cause it to short circuit,” he explained.

“From there, I wrote a software tool that specifically looks for Bluetooth low-energy devices,” the tech whiz continued.

“Bluetooth has a very low transmit power. But with signal amplifiers, high-gain antennas, and what are called software-defined radios, we can really increase the range that we can see that information can transmit to it.”

Through his testing, Kennedy was able to hook a Bluetooth sniffer to a drone and scan for devices up to 800 feet away.

Kennedy then contacted law enforcement and arranged for one of his colleagues to travel to Pima County, Arizona, to aid in the search for the 84-year-old.
Bluetooth communicates at around 2.4 gigahertz, the same as other wireless devices.

In a perfect world, with no obstructions and a clear line of sight, Kennedy believes the sniffer could detect a Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker up to 5,000 feet away.

But every obstacle — such as the pacemaker being inside Nancy, along with any possible walls behind which she is being held — shortens the effectiveness of the sniffer, Kennedy said.

“A Bluetooth low-energy device only has about what’s called a 10-milliwatt transmit power, which is about a 30- to 35-foot radius. Now you might be wondering, how do you get 800 feet from that? Well, we’re not trying to communicate in a two-way relationship with that device,” he explained.

Quote:A Google spokesperson told Newsweek that a spike in a Google Trends chart is not “definitive evidence” of a search—after Fox News claimed that Google Trends data appears to show searches for Nancy Guthrie’s address before her disappearance.

Fox News claimed that Google Trends data appeared to show searches for Guthrie’s address between June 21 and 28, 2025, and again on January 11 of this year.

Newsweek was unable to verify this Google Trends data. 

"Google Trends is designed for understanding trends in large datasets. For topics with low or no searches, a Google Trends chart will often mix in random noise to protect people’s privacy. That means that a Google Trends chart showing a spike for an uncommon topic is not definitive evidence that a search actually happened," a Google spokesperson told Newsweek.
...
What To Know

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a tool that shows relative search interest in a topic over a given time period, but it does not show the total number of searches or the total number of people who have searched, according to a Google spokesperson.

For very uncommon searches, Trends data may appear to show some search interest even if there were no actual searches due to statistical noise used as a privacy measure, the spokesperson said. Apparent spikes for low-interest search terms should not be viewed as reflecting actual search activity at an exact time or location by Google users, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said Google has not taken any manual action to adjust Trends data in this instance, and random statistical noise can cause differences in what people see for low-volume search terms.

Quote:WASHINGTON — A move by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to shut down Russia’s illegal use of Starlink satellite internet has dealt Moscow a fresh battlefield setback as its casualty rates soar.

On Feb. 1, SpaceX blocked unauthorized Starlink terminals in Ukraine after discovering them mounted on Russian weapons systems and drones obtained on the black market — a violation of Starlink’s terms of service, which ban the use of terminals in offensive operations.

Now, only verified Ukrainian devices are allowed to connect to Starlink — effectively locking Russian users out.

“For three to four days after the shutdown, they really reduced the assault operations,” said Lt. Denis Yaroslavsky, who commands a special reconnaissance unit for the Ukraine Armed Forces.

The disruption comes as Russia suffers its worst death rate since the start of the four-year-old war, US and Ukrainian intelligence officials tell The Post — threatening the Kremlin’s ability to replace those forces sent to slaughter by Vladimir Putin.

“On any given day, depending on your scale of analysis, my sector was already achieving 20:1 [casuality rate] before the shutdown. And we are an elite unit,” a unit commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps who goes by the codename “Jackie” told The Post, referring to inflicting 20 Russian casualties for every one suffered by their side.

“Regular units have no problem going 5:1 or 8:1.”

“With Starlink down, 13:1 [casualty rate] for a regular unit is easy,” he added.

While the rates vary from theater to theater, [text is missing here.]

While Russian-to-Ukrainian casualty ratios vary across the battlefield, the imbalance got as high as 27 Russian losses for every Ukrainian when they fought to regain the key city of Kupiansk in December, according to a Bloomberg report Monday citing an intelligence assessment provided to the British military.

“Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told European counterparts this week that Kyiv was able to inflict more Russian casualties than the Kremlin was able to recruit over the last two months,” Bloomberg reported, citing UK Defense Secretary John Healey.

In all, more than 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed, wounded or vanished since February 2022 — “more losses than any major power in any war since World War II,” according to a late January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That’s roughly twice the number of Ukraine’s casualties, which the report estimated at between 500,000 and 600,000.

Any degradation of Russia’s battlefield capabilities could shift leverage in Ukraine’s favor as the US pushes for a negotiated end to the conflict, analysts have said.

The elimination of Starlink has also affected the Russian military’s communication systems and methods, affecting the most basic of tools needed to conduct their war.

“I’m sure the Russians have [alternative options], but it takes time to maximize their implementation and this [would take] at least four to six months,” Yaroslavsky said.

Quote:The number of cryptocurrency payments to suspected human trafficking groups surged 85% in 2025 as digital assets play a growing role in illicit online schemes, according to a new report from analytics firm Chainalysis.

Hundreds of millions of transactions on public blockchains exposed links between cryptocurrency payments and human trafficking networks, child sex abuse operations and online scams, according to the report, which was earlier cited by CNBC.

Most of the alleged criminal crypto activity was traced back to a growing criminal ecosystem in Southeast Asia, though the payments themselves were sent from locations around the world, including North and South America, Europe and Australia, according to Chainalysis.

International escort and prostitution services, scam compounds in Southeast Asia and criminals sharing child sex abuse materials largely relied on crypto payments, the report found.

The shocking report also found that these human trafficking networks are no longer hiding on the “dark web” — but operating in plain view on messaging platforms like Telegram, where they recruit victims and organize crypto payments.

“The key takeaway is that the true financial scale is large, at least hundreds of millions of USD worth of crypto transactions, and the physical harm is orders of magnitude greater than any dollar figure,” Chainalysis intelligence analyst Tom McLouth told CNBC.

However, the transparency of public blockchains has also allowed “unprecedented visibility” into these criminal transactions, according to the report.

Authorities and watchdog organizations have been able to identify criminal networks by looking out for key red flags, like a reliance on stablecoin payments or the use of Chinese-language money laundering groups, the report said.

Chinese-language Telegram channels funneled at least $16.1 billion in illicit funds last year, according to Chainalysis.

The report found a significant amount of crypto transactions above $10,000 for international escort and prostitution services. Some listings advertised multi-day “companionship” services and VIP packages for more than $30,000 in cryptocurrency.

Quote:ByteDance will take steps to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property on its AI video generator Seedance 2.0, the Chinese technology firm said on Monday, following threats of legal action from US studios, including Disney.

Videos generated by Seedance 2.0, which was released last week, have gone viral in China including one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fight. The AI model has been compared to DeepSeek and has been praised for its ability to produce cinematic storylines with just a few prompts.

Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance accusing the firm of using Disney characters to train and power Seedance 2.0 without permission, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters late Sunday.

Disney said ByteDance had pre-packaged Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as if they were public-domain clip art, the person said.

The letter alleged Seedance was reproducing, distributing and creating derivative works featuring Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and other characters, the person added.

“We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users,” ByteDance said in its statement.

It did not elaborate on the measures it was taking.

Online news outlet Axios was the first to report on Disney’s move. Paramount Skydance has also sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing it of engaging in “blatant infringement” of its intellectual property, Variety reported.

Disney has taken similar actions against Character.AI, demanding that the startup immediately stop the unauthorized use of its copyrighted characters.

In December, Disney signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting the startup use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel franchises in its Sora video generator.

Quote:Palantir announced Tuesday it has moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami – joining a slew of tech firms fleeing to South Florida as a growing number of industry leaders deem it the new Silicon Valley.

Tech giants have been increasingly flocking to Florida from business hubs like New York and California in pursuit of lower taxes, warm weather and safer neighborhoods.

“We have moved our headquarters to Miami, Florida,” Palantir wrote in a brief post on X Tuesday morning.

The company did not immediately respond to inquiries about its reason for the move.

Palantir was founded in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2003 and moved to Denver in 2020 as its CEO Alex Karp emerged as a vocal critic of Silicon Valley’s culture.

Former Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who has long pushed for tech talent to move to Florida, cheered Tuesday’s “watershed moment for Miami.”

“This is the tipping point!” he wrote on X, using numerous exclamation points.

The Post has sought comment from Palantir.

Citadel’s Ken Griffin and real estate magnate Stephen Ross – some of the highest-profile billionaires to move to South Florida during the pandemic – recently launched a $10 million campaign to encourage business leaders to move to the Sunshine State, The Post reported.

“The only place a CEO or founder can scale from 10 employees to 10,000 will be in South Florida,” Ross previously told The Post. “While other cities are still special, they no longer support building business and supporting ambition like you can find here.”

The campaign targets CEOs and investors with national ads and direct outreach, as well as a dedicated concierge program that can help executives relocate operations and navigate state regulations.

Apple has already expanded its presence in South Florida with a new Miami campus, while software company ServiceNow has committed to opening an office in West Palm Beach.

Amazon earlier this year signed a massive office lease in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood.

Quote:YouTube said on Tuesday it has resolved an issue that briefly affected access to the video-sharing platform, after outage-tracking website Downdetector reported widespread global disruptions.

YouTube said that an issue with its recommendation system had prevented videos from appearing across YouTube surfaces.

“The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved, and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal,” YouTube said in an update.

At its peak, there were more than 320,000 user reports of YouTube issues in the U.S., according to Downdetector.

Downdetector’s numbers are based on user-submitted reports. The actual number of affected users may vary.

YouTube also faced outages in countries including India, Britain, Australia, and Mexico, according to DownDetector.

When this happened in Costa Rica as well, I initially thought it was caused by a recent Chromium browser upgrade. Now it seems clear that it had nothing to do with it.  I just found out that there was another update available for downloading and I simply fetched and installed it.

Quote:West Virginia’s attorney general sued Apple on Thursday, accusing the iPhone maker of allowing its iCloud service to become what the company’s internal communications called the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.”

Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, accused Apple of prioritizing user privacy over child safety. His office called the case the first of its kind by a government agency over the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Apple’s data storage platform.

“These images are a permanent record of a child’s trauma, and that child is revictimized every time the material is shared or viewed,” McCuskey said in the statement. “This conduct is despicable, and Apple’s inaction is inexcusable.”

Apple in a statement said it has implemented features that prevent children from uploading or receiving nude images and was “innovating every day to combat ever-evolving threats and maintain the safest, most trusted platform for kids.”

“All of our industry-leading parental controls and features, like Communication Safety — which automatically intervenes on kids’ devices when nudity is detected in Messages, shared Photos, AirDrop and even live FaceTime calls — are designed with the safety, security, and privacy of our users at their core,” Apple said.

The US has seen a growing national reckoning over how smartphones and social media harm children. So far, the wave of litigation and public pressure has mostly targeted companies like Meta, Snap, and Google’s YouTube, with Apple largely insulated from scrutiny.

End-to-end encryption

West Virginia’s lawsuit focuses on Apple’s move toward end-to-end encryption, putting digital files outside the reach of both Apple and law enforcement officials. The state alleges Apple’s use of such technology has allowed child abuse material to proliferate on its platform.

For decades, technology and privacy advocates have sparred over end-to-end encryption. Advocates call this vital to ensuring privacy and preventing widespread digital eavesdropping. Governments insist it hinders criminal investigations.

Apple has considered scanning images but abandoned the approach after concerns about user privacy and safety, including worries that it could be exploited by governments looking for other material for censorship or arrest, Reuters has reported.

McCuskey’s office cited a text message Apple’s then anti-fraud chief sent in 2020 stating that because of Apple’s priorities, it was “the greatest platform for distributing child porn.”

The lawsuit in Mason County Circuit Court seeks statutory and punitive damages and requests that a judge force Apple to implement safer product designs including effective measures to detect abusive material.

Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and other platform providers check uploaded photos or emailed attachments against a database of identifiers of known child sex abuse material provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other clearinghouses.

Quote:Tinder has agreed to pay $60.5 million in California to settle a class action lawsuit that accused the popular dating app of age discrimination.

The lawsuit alleged that Tinder violated state law by charging older users more than younger users when they signed up for premium subscriptions. It was originally filed in 2015 on behalf of Tinder user Allan Candelore.

More than 260,000 users are expected to be eligible for payouts.

The settlement terms apply to California residents aged 29 or older who bought Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold subscriptions at any time on or after March 2, 2015, or any time after March 2, 2016 if they were 28 or over.

“Tinder has brazenly announced and employed a multi-tiered pricing plan that treats consumers unequally based solely on their age,” the original lawsuit said.

Under the settlement’s terms, Tinder did not admit to any wrongdoing.

Affected users have until April 8 to opt out or object to the settlement terms and until Aug. 18 to specify how they’d like to receive their money.

“Each class member will also receive a share based on how much the class member paid for Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold,” according to the settlement notice.

A court hearing for final approval of the settlement is scheduled for May 20 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Quote:Allstate must face a privacy lawsuit accusing the home and auto insurer of illegally tracking drivers through their cellphones without consent, using their data to raise premiums or deny coverage, and selling the data to other insurers.

In a decision on Tuesday, US District Judge Jeremy Daniel in Chicago said drivers in the proposed class action can try to prove that Allstate violated the Federal Wiretap Act by monitoring their travel locations, trip distances, speed, acceleration, braking, phone usage and attention to the road, and tried to monetize that data to boost profit.

Drivers can also try to show that Allstate’s data analytics unit Arity violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act by inaccurately reporting their driving behavior, including when they rode as passengers.

According to the complaint, Arity’s tracking software was integrated into apps such as Fuel Rewards, GasBuddy, Life360 and Allstate-owned Routely.

The judge also let drivers pursue claims under the laws of 20 states.

He dismissed three of the drivers’ 38 claims.
Insurers such as Allstate, Progressive and Berkshire Hathaway’s Geico use so-called telematics in monitoring drivers’ habits.

They say the technology rewards good driving through lower premiums.

Allstate argued that drivers never alleged it actually captured their data, or that their insurance rates went up. It also said its privacy policies disclosed the possibility of data collection.

Allstate said in a statement on Wednesday: “Consumers who choose to share driving data through Arity-powered apps can access emergency assistance, track fuel efficiency and unlock personalized insurance rates after a clear notice and explicit opt-in process.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Quote:Elon Musk took the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he’s accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter’s stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.

The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO reached a deal to buy Twitter and take it private in April 2022. On May 13, however, he declared his plan “temporarily on hold” and said he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.

Twitter’s stock tumbled as a result. A few days later, he tweeted that the deal “cannot go forward” and claimed that almost 20% of Twitter accounts were “fake,” according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Aaron P. Arnzen, began with questioning Musk about his tweets — or lack of tweets — about his decision to buy Twitter and his purchases of Twitter stock prior to deciding to take the company private.

Wearing a black suit and tie, Musk said he didn’t think it was “material” when, in early 2022, he began amassing Twitter stock and did not tweet about it or disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said he’s bought stock in “many companies” and did not post about it.

Once he did, Twitter’s stock jumped 27% in one day.

“That sounds high,” Musk said.

Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.

Arnzen questioned Musk about the tweet at length, asking if he thought whether it would have a “material impact” on Twitter’s stock. Musk said he made it explicit at the time that he was committed to the deal and that saying the deal was temporarily on hold was “like saying you’re going to be late for a meeting. (It doesn’t) mean you are not going to be at the meeting.”

Twitter’s stock fell nearly 10% on May 13.

Quote:Google will lower the lucrative fees imposed on its Android app store and offer a way for rival options to gain its stamp of approval, ending a bruising legal battle that led to one of several rulings condemning its tactics as an illegal monopoly.

The proposed changes filed Wednesday with a federal court in San Francisco mark the latest twist in a case that began in August 2020 when video game maker Epic Games filed an antitrust case seeking make it easier for alternative payment options to compete against Google’s Play Store system, which charges 15% to 30% commissions on a wide variety of in-app transactions.

Google’s concessions come five months after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the company’s attempt to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring a far more extensive overhaul of the Play Store following a 2023 trial that culminated in a jury declaring the setup an illegal monopoly.

Backed into a legal corner, Google is now prepared to decrease its baseline commissions for subscriptions and e-commerce transactions into the 10% to 20% range while creating a new option that would charge 5% for payment processing.

App developers could still choose to rely on another payment processing system besides Google’s and consumers will be able to download apps from alternative stores that go through a certification process.

Although not required, alternative app stores that go through the Google’s registration process are less likely to provoke warnings about security risks.

U.S. James Donato still must approve the proposed changes as an alternative to a more dramatic shakeup that he ordered in October 2024.

Google is seeking an April 9 hearing before the judge to answer any questions about the revisions, which are being backed by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose North Carolina company is best known for making the Fortnite video game.

“Epic has been advocating for open platforms for a long time and this really brings Android up to the status of a truly open platform,” Sweeney told The Associated Press during an interview that also included Sameer Samat, the Google executive in charge of Android.

Quote:Anthropic is back in “last-ditch” talks with the Pentagon to resolve a bitter dispute over AI safeguards — days after CEO Dario Amodei claimed the clash stemmed partly from its refusal to give “dictator-style praise” to President Trump, according to reports.

Amodei has been holding discussions with Emil Michael, the War Department’s undersecretary for research and engineering as part of a “last-ditch effort” to reach a contract governing the military’s use of the company’s AI models, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

Talks have reportedly resumed just days after Amodei circulated a 1,600-word memo to staff that accused rival OpenAI of concocting “just straight up lies” about its disputes with the Pentagon over surveillance and autonomous weapons.

The Anthropic boss also told employees in the Friday memo he believes the administration’s animus stems from the fact that he declined to “donate to Trump,” tech news site The Information reported earlier.

“The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot)…” Amodei wrote, referencing Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder.

A deal would allow the Pentagon to continue using Anthropic’s technology and could help the company avoid being formally designated a “supply chain risk,” a step threatened by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would force firms in the military supply chain to cut ties with the startup.

Hegseth has yet to make the designation.

Amodei, who donated to failed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, blasted what he described as dishonest messaging from OpenAI and the Pentagon, writing in the memo: “I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI, and the mendacious nature of it.”

He added that “a lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them,” and insisted that “it is false that ‘OpenAI’s terms were offered to us and we rejected them.’”

Quote:Enterprise software company Oracle is planning thousands of job cuts as it faces a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

Long a smaller contender in the cloud market, over the past year Oracle has emerged as a major player in the business of renting computing power thanks, in part, to its $300 billion deal with OpenAI.

But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk’s xAI and Meta.

The software company, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, in February outlined plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year in order to expand its cloud infrastructure, fueling investor concerns about its rising debt load.

In December, the company said it expects capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion higher than the $35 billion figure the company estimated during its first-quarter earnings call.

The layoffs will impact divisions across Oracle and may be implemented as soon as this month, the Bloomberg report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Some cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects will shrink due to AI.

The planned reductions are expected to be wider-reaching than Oracle’s typical rolling job cuts, according to Bloomberg.

This week, Oracle announced internally that it would be reviewing many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing down or freezing the hiring process, the report added.
...
The company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Oracle will report third-quarter results on Tuesday. Its shares fell more than 15% last year, with its December results showing about $10 billion in cash burn for the first half of the fiscal year.

Quote:A foreign hacker unknowingly compromised a cache of the FBI’s documents on Jeffrey Epstein three years ago and was so disgusted by what they saw in the files that they threatened to report them to the FBI.

The cybercriminal hacked into the New York Field Office’s network and stumbled across child abuse images related to the federal probe into Epstein on Feb. 12, 2023, without realizing they had breached a law enforcement server, sources told Reuters.

The befuddled hacker was so horrified by the troves of disturbing content they found on the server that they left a message, unknowingly to the FBI, threatening to turn the owner of the content over to that very agency.

They refused to believe that the actual FBI operated the server until bureau officials joined a video chat with them and displayed their law enforcement credentials in front of the web camera, the source said.

The unidentified individual — believed to be a lone cybercriminal rather than an agent of a foreign government — was able to penetrate the FBI’s network after a long-time staffer and special agent mistakenly left a server open at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab, according to the outlet.

The snafu went unnoticed until the special agent returned to his computer the next day and received a warning that the network had been compromised.

The FBI then discovered unusual activity indicating someone was “combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation.”

The bureau conducted an internal investigation into the breach and said it was “an isolated” incident.

“The FBI restricted access to the malicious actor and rectified the network. The investigation remains ongoing, so we do not have further comments to provide at this time,” the FBI said in a statement to the publication.

A source told the outlet that the intrusion was more cybercriminal in nature, rather than an attack from a foreign government. Still, the source admitted they didn’t know much else about the hacker, including their country of origin or what exact files they accessed.

Quote:The Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) group MuddyWater (aka Seedworm) has been active on the networks of multiple U.S. companies since early February 2026, with activity increasing following the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran.

In a March 5 blog post, researchers from Broadcom’s Symantec and Carbon Black, said MuddyWater’s targets included a U.S. bank, an airport, a non-profit, and the Israel operation of a U.S. software company that works as a supplier to the defense and aerospace industry.

The researchers explained that a previously unknown backdoor named Dindoor was found on the Israeli operation of the software company, as well as the U.S. bank and the Canadian non-profit. Dindoor executes via Deno, the secure runtime JavaScript and TypeScript.

Symantec and Carbon Black researchers believe that Iran launched the cyber operations in retaliation for the joint U.S.-Israeli attack and to avenge the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on March 1.

Kevin E. Greene, chief cybersecurity technologist, public sector at BeyondTrust, said several intelligence reports from industry pointed to the potential for escalated Iranian cyber activity dating back to August 2025. Given the nature of Iranian cyber operations and activities, Greene said it's assumed there’s already some pre-positioning within important U.S. targets.

“Organizations should hunt for signals associated with pre-positioning and persistent access,” said Greene. “The goal is to hunt where adversaries silently lurk and disrupt their operations before activation occurs. We must reshape adversary behavior by preventing them from converting their initial access into any meaningful control within the environment. Privilege is the fuel that drives their pre-positioning and long-term access. We must cut off that fuel to elevate our cyber defenses.”

Denis Calderone, principal and chief technology officer at Suzu Labs, added that last week, his team warned the industry that Iran's cyber operators were pre-positioning, and that defenders in financial services and defense needed to start hunting.

“Well, here's the confirmation,” said Calderone. “MuddyWater was already sitting on the networks of a U.S. bank, an airport, and a defense-aerospace software supplier weeks before the first airstrike. The cyber war didn't start when the bombs dropped. It was well underway in February."

Calderone noted that what really caught his team’s attention here was the Dindoor backdoor: a custom malware nobody has seen before, which means signature-based detection isn't going to help defenders.

Quote:An Iran-linked hacker group has claimed responsibility for launching a debilitating cyberattack against a US medical company Wednesday — marking the first such hacking since the war between the nations began.

The attack targeted Stryker, a Michigan-based medical equipment company, and caused a “global network disruption” to their Microsoft apps, the company said in a statement.

“We have no indication of ransomware or malware and believe the incident is contained. Our teams are working rapidly to understand the impact of the attack on our systems,” Stryker wrote.

The logo of the Iran-linked hacking group Handala was blasted across company login pages during the cyberattack, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Handala Team later claimed responsibility for the Stryker hacking in a statement on X and Telegram.

The group wrote that they had seized 50 terabytes of “critical data” from the medical giant and that “all the data is in the hands of the free people,” in retaliation for the killing of at least 175 schoolgirls in Minab during US-Israel military-led strikes on Iran.

The “hacktivist” group emerged in 2022 and has been linked to Iran by several threat intelligence companies, the Journal reported. The group had claimed responsibility for additional recent cyberattacks on Israeli companies and in the Gulf.

A Stryker employee told NBC News that the disruption stopped work-issued phones from functioning and effectively halted operations at the 56,000-employee company.

The attack also appeared to have wiped information from some employees’ devices, the outlet said.

In a message sent to employees and obtained by the Journal, Stryker advised workers to avoid clicking on suspicious links and urged them to remove mobile device management apps and work profiles from their cellphones.

“The issue is widespread and significantly affecting users’ ability to access systems and services,” the notice said, according to the outlet.

Quote:Social media platform X is investigating “racist and offensive” posts by xAI chatbot Grok, Sky News reported on Sunday.

X and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the video attached to the Sky News post on X.

X and its safety teams are urgently investigating the chatbot’s role in generating “hate-filled, racist posts” online in response to user prompts, Sky News reporter Rob Harris said in a video posted to the digital news website’s X account.

Governments and regulators have been cracking down on sexually explicit content generated by Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok on X, with investigations, bans and demands for safeguards, in a growing global push to curb illegal material.

In January, xAI said it had restricted image editing for Grok AI users and blocked users, based on their location, from generating images of people in revealing clothing in “jurisdictions where it’s illegal.” It did not identify the countries.

Quote:Live Nation’s CEO faced a ticked-off federal judge on Tuesday after Ticketmaster’s owner reached a surprise settlement with the Justice Department — even as critics called the truce a “slap on the wrist” that won’t curb the company’s control over live events.

During an hour-long hearing, US District Judge Arun ⁠Subramanian asked Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino to stay in New York and work to reach terms with the remaining members of a coalition of 40 state attorneys general who have not signed the agreement.

The judge also reminded Rapino and Live Nation’s lawyers that they were legally bound by the terms of the deal, which will allow Live Nation to avoid a breakup — but Live Nation executive Dan Wall cast doubt on the firm’s ability to reach a settlement with the states.

“The probability of us resolving this is about zero,” he said.

“Not with that attitude,” the judge shot back, according to Reuters.

Subramanian said the states should be ready to continue the case by Monday if they were unable or unwilling to settle. A committee of six plaintiffs – New York, California, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Washington, DC – will lead talks for the remaining parties. So far, only a handful have indicated they will join the DOJ settlement.

While a deal between the DOJ and Live Nation was signed by last Thursday, the case still proceeded to trial the next day.

In an odd twist, lead Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist said earlier this week that he did not receive the term sheet with details about the settlement until around the same time Monday the judge was informed.

After the settlement was announced that day, a furious Subramanian said Live Nation’s handling of the situation “shows absolute disrespect for the court, for the jury, for this entire process, and it is entirely unacceptable.”

“The judge was pretty pissed that they wasted the court’s time,” a live entertainment industry source said.

Quote:Two Live Nation employees bragged about slapping customers with exorbitant fees at the entertainment giant’s venues, saying “these people are so stupid” that “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them,” according to court documents released late Wednesday.

Live Nation – which owns Ticketmaster, the company accused of gouging ticket prices for Taylor Swift fans and other concertgoers – earlier this week reached a surprise settlement with the Justice Department, though several state attorneys general are still pursuing legal action.

In a series of Slack messages from 2021 through 2023, Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold – then regional directors of ticketing – gloated about hiking “ancillary fees” for parking and VIP packages to sky-high levels, court exhibits showed.

Messages showed Weinhold boasting about charging $250 for VIP parking at a Virginia venue and Baker gleefully recounting charging “$50 to park in the grass” and “$60 for closer grass” at another venue.

“These people are so stupid,” Baker wrote. “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them.”

In a conversation from 2022, the pair discussed the annual growth of “premier parking” at an unspecified venue, which hit $660,000 in 2021, according to a financial table in the chat.

“Robbing them blind, baby,” Baker wrote. “That’s how we do.”

Later in that same Slack channel, the pair discussed base prices for seats at shows, and Baker wrote, “I gouge them on ancil prices to make up for it.”

Live Nation sought to distance itself from the outrageous remarks.

“The Slack exchange from one junior staffer to a friend absolutely doesn’t reflect our values or how we operate,” a company spokesperson told The Post in a statement. “Because this was a private Slack message, leadership learned of this when the public did, and will be looking into the matter promptly.”

Baker, who was a regional director at the time of the Slack messages, has since been promoted to the head of ticketing for Live Nation’s 150 amphitheaters and was slated to testify in court this week, according to a court filing.

His testimony was postponed after the Department of Justice reached a settlement Monday with Live Nation that could allow it to avoid a sale of Ticketmaster amid allegations it controlled an illegal monopoly.

Quote:Anthropic on Monday sued the Trump administration for effectively blacklisting the AI firm after it sought to block the Pentagon from using its chatbot for mass surveillance and weaponry.

The San Francisco-based tech firm accused War Secretary Pete Hegseth of designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk – making it the first US company to bear that label – as retaliation for trying to limit the Pentagon’s use of its Claude chatbot.

“The actions are unprecedented and unlawful,” the company said in a complaint filed Monday in San Francisco federal court. “The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech.”

The Pentagon declined to comment, saying it does not address ongoing litigation.

Anthropic’s lawsuit came days after its CEO Dario Amodei apologized for a leaked 1,600-word missive bashing the Trump administration – though he added that the company had “no choice” but to challenge the supply-chain risk label in court.

The exec apologized for “the tone” of his fiery letter to staffers, which accused the Department of War for targeting Anthropic for not giving “dictator-style praise to Trump.”

“I also want to apologize directly for a post internal to the company that was leaked to the press yesterday,” Amodei wrote in a note last Thursday.

“Anthropic did not leak this post nor direct anyone else to do so — it is not in our interest to escalate this situation.”

Amodei said his inflammatory comments came hours after Trump blasted Anthropic staff as “Leftwing nut jobs” and Hegseth announced his plans to label the company a supply-chain risk.

“It was a difficult day for the company, and I apologize for the tone of the post,” Amodei wrote. “It does not reflect my careful or considered views.”

Quote:The Pentagon cut ties with Anthropic because use of its artificial intelligence models would “pollute” the US military’s supply chain, a top War Department official claimed Thursday.

Emil Michael, the War Department’s chief technology officer, said Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot was trained using a fundamentally different ideology from what the Pentagon wants for its systems.

“We can’t have a company that has a different policy preference that is baked into the model through its constitution, its soul, its policy preferences, pollute the supply chain so our war fighters are getting ineffective weapons, ineffective body armor, ineffective protection,” Michael said in an interview with CNBC.

“That’s really where the supply chain risk designation came from,” he added.

Anthropic is currently suing the Pentagon after it became the first US company to be formally labeled a “supply chain risk” – a tag typically reserved for foreign entities that effectively requires defense contractors to stop using its technology.

Michael said the designation was “not meant to be punitive” and denied allegations from Anthropic that the Trump administration has been telling companies outside the defense sector not to work with them.

Trump officials had long been concerned that Anthropic had wacky ideological leanings – including its ties to the cult-like “Effective Altruism” movement and Democratic megadonors like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Earlier this month, The Post exclusively reported on oddball blog posts penned by Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house “philosopher” who helped craft the “soul document” that governs Claude.

The Trump administration’s rocky relationship with Anthropic reached a peak last month after the company and its CEO Dario Amodei refused to remove safeguards blocking its AI models from being used to power autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans.

President Trump blasted Anthropic’s leaders as “leftwing nut jobs” while ordering all federal agencies to stop working with the firm. He allowed a six-month transition period.

At the time, Anthropic’s Claude was the only model approved for work on the Pentagon’s classified systems. OpenAI has since struck a deal to take over the bulk of that work.

Quote:A bedtime story turned nightmare: an Amazon Alexa device interrupted a 4-year-old’s tale to ask an ‘inappropriate’ question, prompting a Texas mom to pull the plug.

Christy Hosterman, 32, said the unsettling exchange happened last month while she was using the smart speaker to find her a dinner recipe.

Her child Stella popped in and asked the Alexa for a “silly story.” When it finished sharing one, the little girl wanted to tell one to the device in return.

The Alexa initially agreed to listen — but then abruptly interrupted Stella to ask the pre-K-er “what she was wearing and if it could see her pants,” Hosterman wrote in a Facebook post describing the incident.

Screenshots shared by the mom, as per The Daily Mail, show the bizarre interaction escalating further. When Stella replied, “I have a skirt on,” the device responded: “let me take a look.”

The assistant quickly walked the comment back, adding: “This experience isn’t quite ready for kids yet, but I am working on it!”

The protective mom then went toe-to-toe with the rogue AI and called it out.

Alexa apologized, explaining it “cannot actually see anything” because it lacks “visual capabilities,” and admitted the response was “confusing and inappropriate.”

Still, the explanation didn’t exactly calm Hosterman’s nerves.

“I flipped out on the Alexa, it said it made a mistake and doesn’t have visual capabilities, but I dont believe that. No more Alexa in our house,” Hosterman said in her post.

She’s now warning other parents to “be aware when your child talks to Alexa.”

The horrified family reported the incident to Amazon, which blamed the unsettling exchange on a technical glitch.

A company spokesperson said the device likely tried to activate a feature called “Show and Tell,” which “lets Alexa+ describe what it sees through the camera,” as reported by WXIX.

Quote:Are you suddenly being inundated with calls about a loan you never applied for? You’re not alone.

Annoying fraud calls from personal info-seeking scammers posing as processing reps, usually promising large sums of money, have reportedly been increasing of late — and it’s getting on everyone’s nerves.

Chalk up the scummy surge to a perfect storm of economic anxiety and rapid technological advances, experts say.

“Scammers are astute social engineers who know that in an uncertain economy, many people are hunting for financial relief to alleviate the burdens, and this is where desperation kicks in,” Clayton LiaBraaten, Senior Executive Industry Expert at Truecaller, told The Post.

According to the Better Business Bureau, the global gang of virtual pickpockets’ latest ploy is to pepper unwitting consumers with phone calls and voicemails, insisting on verifying details before a phony loan application can go through.

After telling you that they need to verify details, such as your salary, they’ll provide a callback number and an application ID to make it seem real. They’ll also give a specific, urgent deadline for you to call them back by.

Of course, there is no loan — and users sharing any sensitive data, such as Social Security number, bank account information, or date of birth, will open themselves to serious risk, the pros warn, saying that the scammers are banking on the fact that you’ll respond first and think later.

“Scammers understand their targets — they have all the psychological information they need,” LiaBraaten shared, adding that they know parents are juggling a lot and might not have time to digest a scam call and determine if it’s official, or that senior citizens are the ones still most likely to trust a voice on the other end of the phone.

Since the start of the new year, over 4,000 instances of a loan scam call have been reported on the BBB’s Scam Tracker. People have reported receiving multiple calls per day, often from different phone numbers, but with nearly identical scripts, the bureau said.

“How do I get these degenerate scumbags to leave me alone?” one Reddit user asked.

This person shared that they sent the callers to voicemail multiple times, and when that didn’t work, they pressed “9” to be added to the do-not-call list “more times than I can count.”

“I’ve picked up the phone & talked to an agent. I’ve pretended to be a vulnerable elderly person to maybe trigger what tiny shred of their conscience is left. I’ve told them to [redacted] themselves. I’ve told them that I am literally making an actionable threat and encouraged them to call the FBI. And they still. Keep. Calling. How do I make it stop?” they wrote.

This user was far from the only one to share that they had similar experiences.

Quote:Lucid unveiled a two-seater robotaxi concept without steering wheel and pedals, and launched new self-driving tech subscriptions, as the electric-vehicle maker laid out its roadmap for the technologies at an investor day event on Thursday.

The unveiling deepens Lucid’s push into fully autonomous vehicles, potentially putting it in direct competition with Tesla’s Cybercab as automakers race to build a driverless future.

The Elon Musk-led company last month said its first Cybercab had officially rolled off the production line at its Gigafactory in Texas.
Tesla expects to begin mass production of Cybercab in April.

Lucid said its two-seater robotaxi will have 40% lower operating cost and would have an efficiency figure of around 5.5 miles per kilowatt hour.

The company did not provide more details on timeline or pricing.

The company is taking a dual-pronged approach, partnering with other firms for robotaxis, while selling EVs with similar self-driving capabilities.

The company has also partnered with Uber and Nuro to commercialize a robotaxi based on its Gravity SUVs this year.

Lucid, known for its luxury Air sedans, is also racing to launch a more affordable mid-size EV platform to broaden its customer base.

Monthly subscription starts at $69

Lucid’s monthly subscription for its self-driving technology would be priced between $69 and $199 depending on the level of autonomous driving capability a customer chooses, the EV maker said.

Bigger rivals Rivian and Tesla have also shifted to subscription-based systems in recent months, reflecting automakers’ increasing focus on diversifying their businesses to software and recurring revenue streams.

Last month, Tesla shifted to a subscription plan for Full Self-Driving at $99, with its vehicle owners no longer being able to purchase the feature as a one-time, permanent option.

Quote:Things like your name, home address, date of birth and even your Social Security number may have been sitting on the open internet. Researchers say an unprotected database tied to IDMerit, a company that claims to help businesses verify identities, exposed roughly 1 billion sensitive records across 26 countries.

In the United States alone, more than 203 million records were left unsecured. This involves the exact documents and details companies use to confirm you are really you. If criminals get that kind of information, they'd have everything they need.

What you need to know about the massive data leak

Researchers at Cybernews, a cybersecurity news and research publication, discovered an exposed MongoDB database on Nov. 11, 2025, that they believe belongs to IDMerit, a global identity verification provider that serves banks, fintech firms and other financial services companies. IDMerit uses artificial intelligence tools to help businesses perform KYC, short for Know Your Customer, which is the identity verification process required when you open financial accounts.

The database was not protected by a password. Anyone who knew where to look could access it. Inside were full names, home addresses, postal codes, dates of birth, national ID numbers, phone numbers, email addresses and gender information. Some records also included telecom-related metadata and internal flags that may have referenced past breaches.

The exposure affected people in 26 countries. The United States had the highest number of exposed records at more than 203 million. Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Italy and France were also heavily impacted.

Researchers notified the company, and the database was secured the following day. There is currently no public evidence that criminals downloaded the data. Still, it's worth noting that automated bots constantly scan the internet for exposed databases and can copy them within minutes.

How it happened and why it matters for you

When you open a bank account, sign up for a crypto platform or verify your identity for a financial app, you are often asked to upload a government ID and provide personal details. Companies like IDMerit process that information behind the scenes. That means this database likely contained the same details you would use to prove your identity to a bank or government agency.

For criminals, that is gold. With your full name, date of birth, national ID and phone number, scammers can attempt SIM-swap attacks. This is when someone convinces your mobile carrier to transfer your phone number to their device. Once they control your number, they can intercept security codes sent by text message and break into your bank or email accounts. They can also launch highly targeted phishing scams. Imagine receiving a call or email that includes your real home address and ID number. It would feel legitimate, and that's exactly the point.

Because the data was neatly organized, criminals could sort it by country or other details and use automated tools to target huge numbers of people with scams.

Quote:The Head of Disney’s Gaming Group responsible for iconic video games such as Spider-Man and Star Wars is suing The Walt Disney Company for $40 million over claims of discrimination, the Post has learned.

Jay Ong, a wealthy executive, claims the company caused him harm when they lowered his bonus and incentive award in dramatic court papers obtained by The Post.

The reduction came after Ong, who works at Disney’s Burbank headquarters, claims an HR exec had contacted his executive coach without his permission.

Ong alleged Natalia Strauch, HR VP of Disney Global Consumer Products, Game and Publishing, was trying to “dig up dirt” on him after she claimed he was a poor “cultural” fit for the company in a February 2025 meeting, according to the papers.

The 56-year-old gaming exec claims despite generating revenues of half a billion dollars his bonus was reduced to $325,000 in 2025 from $367,117 in 2024. His incentive bonus was also reduced from $770,000 to $620,000, according to the filing.

The filing states Ong’s base salary is $550,000, making his total compensation package well into the millions in both 2024 and 2025.

Ong claims he was told the bonus reduction was not based on his performance and told his performance was “exceptional” but he “nevertheless was getting a pay cut.”

The papers state: “[The] defendants retaliated against Ong by reducing his compensation to send a message, embarrass him, and force him out of the company despite acknowledging his stellar performance and his division’s record profitability.”

The filing went on to say “that such treatment is part of a broader pattern at Disney whereby those of Asian descent -the few which Disney designs to hire- are discriminated against.”

He’s seeking $40 million in damages.

According to Ong’s LinkedIn bio, he still works at Disney overseeing Marvel Games, Lucasfilm Games, Disney & Pixar Games.

It says he manages a global portfolio of some of the most iconic brands in gaming, “ranging from Spider-Man, Star Wars, and Alien vs Predator to Toy Story and Avatar.”

Quote:A California farmer is blasting social media influencers he says wrecked his tulip fields while chasing viral photos — leaving thousands of flowers trampled and forcing the popular attraction to shut early.

John Bos, the owner of Dutch Hollow Farms in Modesto, said a flood of visitors descended on his Central Valley property after videos of the colorful tulip fields spread rapidly across TikTok.

The unexpected attention brought crowds far larger than the farm was prepared to handle — and Bos says many visitors treated the fields like a photo backdrop rather than a working farm.

“It went nuts on TikTok. We got overwhelming crowds. We kind of had a feeling it was gonna be busy, but we had no idea what was coming,” Bos told the Daily Mail.

“The amount of people that came out — they just kind of went feral out there,” he added.

Bos had planted roughly 250,000 tulips ahead of the spring picking season, expecting the usual steady flow of local visitors who come to stroll through the vibrant rows and pick flowers. Instead, the farm was swamped with thousands of people eager to snap photos for Instagram and TikTok.

At the peak of the chaos, about 4,000 people showed up in a single day, Bos said. Cars stretched for roughly half a mile outside the farm, and some visitors reportedly waited up to 90 minutes just to get inside.

Once inside the fields, however, Bos said some guests began pulling tulips straight out of the ground just to stage photos — only to toss the flowers aside afterward instead of purchasing them.

“They would take gorgeous pictures out there in the middle of the field and then proceed to dump 10 or 15 stems,” Bos told the outlet.

Videos circulating on TikTok show influencers posing with large bundles of tulips, sometimes with the bulbs and roots still attached — a sign the flowers had been yanked from the soil rather than carefully cut. One clip showing a bouquet of tulips covering a user’s face racked up more than 300,000 likes.

Many viewers in the comments blasted the trend, with some saying the social media craze likely led to the farm’s early closure.

The destruction left Bos furious and forced him to take to social media to address the situation just a day after the picking season began.

“I absolutely hate the fact that after one day I need to post this. But when my picking crew tells me what a mess it is in the field. I will address it,” he wrote online, according to the Daily Mail.

Quote:Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick says he has traded California for Texas, joining a growing list of billionaires abandoning the state as lefty lawmakers push for a one-off tax on their wealth.

Appearing on TPBN to discuss his robotics startup Atoms, Kalanick told hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays he relocated to Austin at the end of 2025.

“Just to be clear, on December 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January,” said Kalanick, pointedly.

California lawmakers and activists are pushing a proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which could appear on the state’s November 2026 ballot.

The measure would impose a one-time 5% tax on fortunes exceeding $1 billion and would apply to people who were California residents as of January 1, 2026,

That means the 49-year-old’s estimated $3.6 billion fortune will not be subjected to the tax should it be introduced.

Kalanick joked he felt a twinge of FOMO when he hears about other wealthy Americans relocating to Florida.

“Why so much Florida action?! Like, come on homies,” he said.

Those ”homies” would be billionaire tech figures to leave California for Florida., including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PayPal and Palantir investor Peter Thiel, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg.

While California still boasts the largest billionaire population in the United States, an increasing number have relocated to places such as Reno, Austin and Miami.

Kalanick also reflected on the turmoil surrounding his departure from Uber in 2017, which came after a number of scandals, workplace culture issues and pressure from investors.

He was also dealing with the tragedy of a boating accident that killed his mother and left his father seriously injured.

“I had been torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into. I had lost my bearings as I found the world increasingly operating by the rules of perception, not reality,” he wrote on the Atoms website.

Atoms — previously known as City Storage Systems — is an industrial robotics company that automates tasks in sectors including food service, mining and transportation using physical AI robots described as “gainfully employed.”

“I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building,” Kalanick wrote.

Quote:The New York AG seems to be trying to stir up fears about violent videogames as the state pursues legal action against Valve, but Valve isn't having it.

One of the really interesting things that leapt out at me about Valve's response to New York's lawsuit against it wasn't really about the lawsuit at all, but about comments made by the state about the negative impact of violent videogames—the sort of thing that sounds like it was ripped straight from the headlines of 20 years ago.

New York's lawsuit accuses Valve of violating its gambling laws through loot boxes, which it claims "enable gambling by enticing users to pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." It further alleges that "Valve has made billions of dollars luring its users, many of whom are teenagers or younger, to engage in gambling in the hopes of winning expensive virtual items that they can cash in on," and says the lawsuit "seeks to permanently stop Valve from continuing to promote illegal gambling in its games and to pay disgorgement and fines."

Valve, a video game developer, has made billions of dollars by letting children and adults illegally gamble for the chance to win valuable virtual prizes.  These features are addictive and harmful. That's why I'm suing to stop Valve’s unlawful conduct and protect New Yorkers.

— @newyorkstateag.bsky.social (@newyorkstateag.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-12T04:32:17.528Z

That's all straightforward enough, at least as far as the crux of the claim goes. But the press release announcing the lawsuit then went on to say, completely out of nowhere, "although this case is about illegal gambling, it is important to note that Valve’s promotion of games that glorify violence and guns helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence, particularly among young gamers who can become numbed to grave violence before their brains are fully developed."

The statement is utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand—gambling, remember—but more to the point, it's also entirely unsupported. It's the sort of claim that used to be trotted out by Jack Thompson, a former attorney who was permanently disbarred in 2008, who gained notoriety among gamers for his relentless, borderline fanatical criticism of violence in videogames.

It's a topic that still comes up now and then—as recently as September 2025, the US government said it was "looking at" the connection between videogames and gun violence—but by and large the moral panic has subsided, as both repeated studies and real-world experience have failed to demonstrate any connection between entertainment and behavior.

That's what really makes New York's aside about violent videogames perplexing, and Valve seized on that point too.

"In addition, although this case is about mystery boxes, we feel the need to address comments made by the NYAG about games, real world violence, and children," Valve wrote. "Those extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we’ve all heard before. Numerous studies throughout the years have concluded there is no link between media (movies, TV, books, comics, music, and games) and real world violence. Indeed, many studies highlight the beneficial impact of games to users."

Quote:The Performing Right Society says a license to use music in a game does not constitute the right to distribute that music, via the game, to the public.

Valve is facing a new legal headache in the UK, and this one is definitely not like the others. The Performing Right Society, a rights management organization that collects royalties on behalf of musicians when their work is played publicly, has launched legal action against Valve over its use of PRS members' music on Steam without permission.

The PRS says that many of the games available on Steam feature music made by its members, and that by making those musical works available to the public via streaming or download, "Valve is communicating these works to the public without a licence."

"Our members create music that enhances experiences and PRS exists to protect the value of their work with integrity, transparency, and fairness," PRS for Music chief commercial officer Dan Gopal said.

"Legal proceedings are not a step we take lightly, but when a business’s actions undermine those principles, we have a duty to act. Great videogames rely on great soundtracks, and the songwriters and creators behind them deserve to have their contribution recognised and fairly valued."

I initially assumed that this lawsuit was specifically about game soundtracks on Steam, which struck me as odd because surely no major game publisher would release an official soundtrack without the proper licenses in place. But a PRS spokesperson clarified that the action is related to any music, in games as well as soundtracks, that Valve hasn't separately licensed for distribution.

So, for instance, Rockstar will have obtained licenses to use PRS members' music in Grand Theft Auto games, but the PRS says those licenses do not allow for the separate act of making the game, which contains the music, available online.

"Copyright law gives rights holders control over certain acts, including copying, public performance, broadcast, and making available online," the spokesperson explained to me. "When someone wishes to use a copyright work like music in this way, permission from the rights holders is required, which is normally done via a licence. PRS represents songwriters, composers and music publishers, and licenses these uses of their musical works.

"In this case the relevant act which has not been authorised is the making available of the music online. The composer or publisher of the music may have cleared the rights for the work to be used by the developer in the relevant game, but there is a separate act carried out by the platform operator when the game (or its soundtrack) is made available to consumers for streaming or download .

"Valve operates the Steam store and is responsible for the downloads and streaming delivered to customers via its platform. Valve therefore plays an essential role in giving the public access to that music."

It all seems very odd to me, and a real reach too, although I readily acknowledge that I'm not familiar with the intricacies of UK copyright law and licensing requirements. The PRS does have a history of aggressive behavior with this sort of thing, though. In 2007, for instance, it took an auto repair shop in Scotland to court because its employees were listening to radios at work, which the PRS said constituted public performances of music. In 2009 it went after a woman who played classical music to help soothe her horses; that same year, it told a woman working at a grocery store that she wasn't allowed to sing while she stocked shelves unless she obtained a public performance license. In that case, at least, the backlash was so furious that the group withdrew the demand and apologized.

Quote:Players have taken to social media to share their disappointment.
It's rare that a game as old as the venerable Tomb Raider gets an update, and you'd think it'd be cause for celebration. Not necessarily so with the newest patch that came to Tomb Raider I-III Remastered last Thursday, which came bearing a new challenge mode and 10 new outfits that, well, just have a look for yourself:

As fans and customers we can't accept this level of quality from r/TombRaider
They're certainly rough around the edges, and the user reviews on Steam have not taken kindly to the free update. A review from Steam user Engram reads, "The new update broke the audio, broke a ton of visuals, broke the enemy AI, added what appears to be low-quality AI slop into the game and deleted all of my saves." Another post from user Harry DuN'wah, who has nearly 200 hours sunk into the remaster, states "Keep AI out of Tomb Raider, Lara deserves better than this."

I can't strictly confirm if generative AI was used in the creation of the new assets, but PC Gamer has reached out for comment. Giovanni Lucca, the original lead artist on the remaster, posted about the update on X, saying "I was not involved in the art direction of this new patch with the Challenge Mode for Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered. None of the original developers at Saber was involved in it."
Two days later, he reposted a video showing the new outfits (which called the patch a "monstrosity") with a clown emoji. That said, some of Lucca's other posts just below those two are spent lamenting "activists and their woke shit," so maybe take his particular brand of outrage with a grain of salt.

Still, it's clear the patch is turning heads for all the wrong reasons. Concerns over AI usage are not new for Aspyr's Tomb Raider remasters, as just last September a slew of "unauthorized" AI voice lines had to be patched out.

Quote:A Tennessee grandmother spent nearly six months behind bars in North Dakota, a state she had never even stepped foot in, after being wrongfully identified by AI facial recognition technology in a bank fraud investigation.

The Grand Forks Herald reports that Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old mother of three and grandmother of five from Tennessee, found herself trapped in a nightmare that began last July when U.S. Marshals arrested her at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. Fargo police had used facial recognition software to identify her as the primary suspect in an organized bank fraud case, despite the fact that she had never set foot in North Dakota.

The case began in April and May 2025 when Fargo Police Department detectives investigated several bank fraud incidents. Surveillance footage captured a woman using a fraudulent U.S. Army military identification card to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from local banks. To identify the suspect, investigators employed facial recognition software, which incorrectly matched the woman in the videos to Lipps.

According to court documents obtained through an open records request, the detective assigned to the case reviewed Lipps’ social media accounts and Tennessee driver’s license photo after receiving the facial recognition match. In the charging document, the detective stated that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type, hairstyle, and hair color. Notably, no one from the Fargo Police Department contacted Lipps to question her before filing charges.

Lipps was arrested on July 14 and booked into her county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice. She faced four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft in North Dakota. Held without bail due to her fugitive status, Lipps spent 108 days in the Tennessee jail before North Dakota officers transported her to Fargo on October 30.

“It was so scary, I can still see it in my head, over and over again,” Lipps said during an interview about her ordeal.

Throughout her detention, Lipps maintained her innocence, telling anyone who would listen that she had never been to North Dakota and knew no one from the state. Her claims were supported by the fact that she had never flown on an airplane in her entire life, and her travels had been limited to states neighboring Tennessee.

Jay Greenwood, the attorney representing Lipps in North Dakota, immediately requested her bank records upon taking the case. “If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper,” Greenwood said.

The bank records proved conclusive. They showed that Lipps was in Tennessee, more than 1,200 miles away, during the times police claimed she was committing fraud in Fargo. The records documented routine transactions including Social Security check deposits, cigarette purchases at gas stations, pizza purchases, and Uber Eats orders through a cash app.

Fargo police finally interviewed Lipps for the first time on December 19, meeting with her and Greenwood at the Cass County jail. By that point, she had already spent more than five months incarcerated. Five days later, on Christmas Eve, prosecutors dismissed the case and released Lipps from custody.

However, her ordeal was far from over. Released in clothing inadequate for North Dakota’s freezing temperatures, Lipps found herself stranded more than a thousand miles from home with no means to return. “I had my summer clothes on, no coat, it was so cold outside, snow on the ground, scared, I wanted out but I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to get home,” Lipps recalled.

Fargo police did not provide any financial assistance for her return journey. Local defense attorneys stepped in to help, providing money for a hotel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The day after Christmas, Adam Martin, founder of the Fargo-based F5 Project, an organization that provides services to individuals struggling with incarceration, mental health, and addiction, drove Lipps to Chicago so she could make her way back to Tennessee.

When asked about the case at his retirement news conference on March 11, Fargo Police Chief David Zibolski declined to answer questions. After a week of attempts to arrange an on-camera interview were rebuffed, a reporter asked, “Why did nobody from Fargo Police ever speak with Angela Lipps for the five months she was in jail?” Zibolski responded, “Thank you, Matt, for that question but we are not here to talk about that today.”

The consequences of her wrongful detention have been devastating for Lipps. Unable to pay her bills while incarcerated, she lost her home, her car, and even her dog. She reports that no one from the Fargo Police Department has apologized for the misidentification and subsequent months of wrongful imprisonment.

“I’m just glad it’s over. I’ll never go back to North Dakota,” Lipps said.

The Fargo Police Department stated that the bank fraud investigation remains active and no arrests have been made in the case.

Quote:A Houston resident has filed a lawsuit against Tesla after her Cybertruck allegedly attempted to drive off an overpass while using Elon Musk’s “Full self driving” feature, resulting in serious injuries.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Justine Saint Amour has filed a lawsuit in Harris County Court against Tesla, claiming the EV giant was negligent in marketing its “self-driving” feature. The incident occurred in August 2025 on the 69 Eastex Freeway in North Houston, where Saint Amour was driving her Cybertruck with Tesla’s full self-driving mode engaged.

According to the lawsuit, Saint Amour was approaching the Houston Metro 256 Eastex Park & Ride when the vehicle encountered a Y-shaped portion of the freeway. Rather than following the right curve of the road as expected, the Cybertruck attempted to drive straight ahead toward a concrete barrier and a terrifying drop to the freeway below. The lawsuit states that the vehicle’s decision occurred suddenly and without warning.

Saint Amour attempted to disengage the self-driving feature and correct the vehicle’s course, but had insufficient time to react. The Cybertruck crashed into the concrete barrier, causing what the lawsuit describes as substantial injuries. According to a statement from her legal representation at Hilliard Law, Saint Amour was diagnosed with two herniated discs in her lower back and one herniated disc in her neck. She also sustained sprained tendons in her wrist and developed neuropathy that caused numbness, tingling, and weakness in her right hand.

Dashcam footage from the incident, provided by Saint Amour’s attorneys and reviewed by the Chronicle, shows the Cybertruck traveling up a ramp before reaching a fork in the road. The vehicle manages to navigate past a divider and begins attempting to turn into the curve of the interchange, but instead drives directly into the sidewall. The truck then spins out, the hood flies open, and pieces of the vehicle’s body can be seen separating from the truck.

Saint Amour is seeking more than one million dollars in damages from Tesla, accusing the company of negligence. The lawsuit centers on Elon Musk’s Full Self-Driving feature, which has faced scrutiny from California regulators who allege the company engaged in misleading advertising. Saint Amour purchased her Cybertruck at a used car dealership in Florida in February 2025, and the vehicle came equipped with the optional Full Self-Driving package that customers can purchase at checkout.

Quote:Honda has announced the cancellation of three electric vehicles that were slated for U.S. production, marking a significant shift in the automaker’s EV strategy.

Car and Driver reports that Honda is abandoning plans to develop and sell three EVs in the United States, including the 0-Series SUV, 0-Series Saloon, and the Acura RSX. The Japanese automaker cited an unpredictable regulatory environment surrounding electric vehicle incentives and fossil fuel regulations as primary reasons for the decision.

The three canceled models were all planned for production at Honda’s manufacturing facility in Ohio, which has undergone extensive retooling over the past two years in preparation for electric vehicle assembly. The cancellation represents a dramatic reversal of Honda’s previously announced electrification plans for the North American market.

In its official announcement, Honda was notably direct about the factors influencing its decision. The company pointed to the volatile policy environment in the United States, particularly regarding EV incentives and fossil fuel regulations, as creating an untenable business case for the vehicles. Honda stated that it expected to incur further financial losses over the long term if it proceeded with launching the three electric models.

As Breitbart News reported in September, EV makers were in a panic attempting to find loopholes for customers to use the tax credits cut off by the Trump administration, a sign that carmakers do not believe that EVs can sell on their own merits without a government handout to sweeten the deal.

The automaker also addressed challenges in the Chinese market, where it noted that customer preferences have shifted significantly. According to Honda, Chinese consumers are now prioritizing software features over traditional automotive attributes such as fuel efficiency and cabin space. In a remarkably candid assessment, Honda acknowledged that it was unable to deliver products offering better value than those from newer Chinese manufacturers.

Quote:The mother of a critically injured survivor from the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI giant behind ChatGPT, alleging the company failed to notify law enforcement about threats identified in the shooter’s discussions with its chatbot.

Vancouver Sun reports that a civil lawsuit has been filed in British Columbia Supreme Court against OpenAI and its ChatGPT platform on behalf of Cia Edmonds and her two daughters, including 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who survived the February 2026 mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. The lawsuit alleges that the technology company had advance warning of the shooter’s intentions but failed to alert Canadian authorities.

According to the court documents, shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar, who was 17 years old at the time, opened a ChatGPT account during the summer of 2025. The lawsuit claims that Van Rootselaar described various scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days through interactions with the AI platform.

The legal filing alleges that 12 monitoring staff members at ChatGPT identified Van Rootselaar’s inquiries as indicating an imminent risk of serious harm to others. These employees reportedly recommended that Canadian law enforcement be notified of the concerning activity and escalated the matter to company leadership. However, the lawsuit claims that company executives subsequently rebuffed their employees’ request to contact authorities.

Instead of alerting police, the company allegedly closed Van Rootselaar’s account. The lawsuit states that Van Rootselaar then opened a second account and continued using the platform. The shooter used their second account to continue planning scenarios involving gun violence, including a mass casualty event like the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, with ChatGPT and to receive mental health counselling and pseudo-therapy from ChatGPT, according to the legal claim.

On February 10, 2026, Van Rootselaar killed his mother and half-brother in their Tumbler Ridge home before walking to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. At the school, the shooter killed five students and one teacher before taking his own life. Maya Gebala was among those shot during the attack and suffered horrific injuries.

Maya remains hospitalized with a catastrophic brain injury and right-side paralysis. She was attempting to lock a door when she was shot during the attack. Her younger sister Dahlia is also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The allegations outlined in the lawsuit regarding Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT accounts were first reported by the Wall Street Journal in February. The report brought international attention to questions about the responsibilities of artificial intelligence companies in monitoring and reporting potentially dangerous user activity.

Following the public disclosure of these allegations, OpenAI founder and billionaire Sam Altman held meetings with Canadian government officials. On March 4, Altman met with Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and reportedly agreed to implement a number of safety changes to the platform’s monitoring and reporting procedures.

The next day, on March 5, Altman met with British Columbia Premier David Eby. According to Premier Eby’s account of the meeting, Altman promised to issue an apology to the victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. However, as of March 9, no such apology had been made public by OpenAI or its leadership.

The legal firm representing Edmonds and her daughters issued a statement explaining the broader objectives of the lawsuit beyond financial compensation. The statement noted that a planned coroner’s inquest into the mass shooting would likely involve detailed analysis of Van Rootselaar’s medical and schooling records, as well as a forensic examination of his electronic devices.

Quote:Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced a partnership with North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) on Wednesday as the AI company accelerates its data center construction efforts across the United States.

Axios reports that the collaboration between OpenAI and the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) marks a strategic move by the AI company to secure the skilled workforce necessary for its ambitious infrastructure plans. The partnership aims to ensure that AI infrastructure projects create union jobs, expand apprenticeship programs, and generate local economic opportunities.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed the partnership during his appearance at BlackRock’s infrastructure summit on Wednesday, where he discussed the compute and energy infrastructure requirements facing the AI industry. Altman made the announcement alongside NABTU president Sean McGarvey, highlighting the importance of organized labor in the company’s expansion strategy.

According to Chris Lehane, OpenAI chief global affairs officer, the company faces significant workforce challenges as it pursues its infrastructure goals. “To reach 10 gigawatts of compute by 2030, OpenAI will need 20% more tradespeople than exist today,” Lehane stated. He emphasized the urgency of developing this workforce, adding, “It’s imperative for us to have this workforce to be able to continue to build out at the speed and pace that we need to build out, particularly with the global competition with China.”

As part of the agreement, OpenAI has committed $1.5 million over five years to support NABTU’s training and recruitment programs. This financial commitment represents the company’s investment in developing the skilled trades workforce needed to construct and maintain the extensive data center infrastructure required for advanced AI operations.

This partnership represents the second time OpenAI has formally allied with a labor union. Last summer, the company established the National Academy for AI Instruction in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers, demonstrating an ongoing pattern of engagement with organized labor organizations.

Quote:Anthropic’s political orbit has directed more than $200 million in campaign money since the 2020 election cycle, with nearly all of it backing Democrats, while cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei has built a public record of opposition to President Donald Trump that has become part of the broader clash between the artificial intelligence company and the administration.

Starting with the 2020 presidential election cycle, Anthropic’s founders, board members, and employees have contributed more than $200 million to political campaigns and causes. Only about $335,000 of that total went to Republicans — roughly 0.16 percent — and none went to Donald Trump. The remaining 99.8 percent went to Democrats, with the largest recipients including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton.

The donation breakdown for the company and its associates highlights the political divide. Anthropic employees have donated a total of $998,000 to candidates since the 2020 election cycle, with approximately $820,000, or 82 percent, going to Democrats. Early Anthropic investor Dustin Moskovitz has donated a total of $110 million since 2020, including $2.3 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and more than $103 million to Kamala Harris’s efforts. Amodei has donated $103,600 to Democrats since the 2020 election, with nearly all of it going to Biden or Harris. Anthropic board member Reed Hastings has donated $20 million to Democrats, including $7 million to a pro-Harris super PAC.

That political profile has run alongside Amodei’s repeated public denunciations of Trump. In 2018, Amodei described Trump as a “serious and legitimate threat to the rule of law” and urged Americans to “vote against this clown.” Ahead of the 2024 election, in a Facebook post later deleted, he went further, calling Trump a “feudal warlord” who uses power for personal gain rather than the national benefit and urging support for Harris.

After Trump’s election, Amodei was also absent from White House tech events attended by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai.

In October 2025, cofounder and Head of Policy Jack Clark published an essay titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” contending that AI systems were advancing rapidly and that denial of the risks was dangerous. “I am both an optimist about the pace at which the technology will develop, and also about our ability to align it and get it to work with us and for us,” Clark wrote. “But success isn’t certain.”

David Sacks, serving as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, replied on X by accusing Anthropic of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering” and said the company was “principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”

In a later post, Sacks claimed Anthropic was trying to “backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California.” Amodei expressed that he wanted to correct “inaccurate claims” about Anthropic’s positions. “I fully believe that Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing,” he stated, adding, “When we agree, we say so. When we don’t, we propose an alternative for consideration.”

Anthropic’s political posture later collided with the Trump administration during a dispute over military use of the company’s artificial intelligence systems. The company refused Pentagon demands that its models be made available for all lawful uses without restriction, instead insisting on safeguards preventing deployment in fully autonomous weapons systems or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. The standoff escalated after President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of” Anthropic technology and labeled the firm a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY.”

A roughly 1,600-word internal Slack message Amodei sent to approximately 2,000 employees on February 27, 2026, addressed what he described as political motivations behind the administration’s stance toward Anthropic. In the message, Amodei remarked, “The real reasons DoW [Department of War] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot). We haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has).”

On March 4, 2026, the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries and the first time it had been publicly applied to an American company.

The company has also faced backlash from prominent figures in the artificial intelligence and technology sectors. On February 15, Elon Musk attacked Anthropic after the company announced a $30 billion funding round that valued the firm at $380 billion. Musk called the company’s AI “misanthropic and evil,” writing on X, “Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it.”

Quote:Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp stated that “uniquely American” AI is providing the United States and its allies with a significant advantage in the escalating conflict in Iran and throughout the Middle East region.

CNBC reports that speaking at Palantir’s AIPCon 9 conference in Maryland on Thursday, CEO Alex Karp discussed his company’s role in modern warfare and the strategic importance of AI technology in current Middle East operations. Karp emphasized that American technological capabilities, particularly in AI, represent a unique advantage in global conflicts.

“What makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war,” Karp said during the event. He added that another major advantage is that “the AI revolution is uniquely American.”

The CEO indicated that Palantir’s technology is being utilized to coordinate combat data between the United States and Middle East partners who have been targeted by Iranian airstrikes. According to Karp, the company’s platform serves a critical coordinating function that no other product can match for security purposes.

“If you were attacked and you needed to coordinate, you would have to have a coordinating function. There’s only one product that can actually do that for security,” Karp stated, referencing Palantir’s platform.

Palantir’s Project Maven represents a real-time AI surveillance capability that utilizes satellite imagery. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, the platform was employed alongside Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

When asked whether Project Maven played a role in the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a joint United States-Israel military operation two weeks prior, Karp declined to provide specific confirmation. However, he acknowledged awareness of reports suggesting Palantir’s involvement in Middle East operations.

“I have read that Palantir’s Project Maven is the core backbone of that,” he said, speaking generally about U.S. involvement in the Middle East. “And then I’ve also read that all the allies, Arab and non-Arab in the Middle East, may or may not be users of our platform as well, and that’s expanding rapidly.”

Quote:Mental-health experts advising OpenAI are reportedly furious over the company’s push to roll out an erotic chatbot that one adviser warned could become a “sexy suicide coach.”

A group of outside advisers to the AI giant warned that its pivot to offer a so-called “adult mode” could expose millions of minors to X-rated chats while increasing the risk users develop unhealthy emotional dependence on the bot, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing cases in which ChatGPT users took their own lives after developing intense bonds with the bot, one adviser reportedly warned the feature could create a “sexy suicide coach.”

Last year, a 16-year-old California teen died by suicide as a result of what his parents alleged in a lawsuit was “months of encouragement from ChatGPT” to put an end to his life.

Internal documents reviewed by The Journal flagged the risk that sexually explicit chatbot interactions could drive compulsive use and lead to emotional overreliance on the bot.

Staffers also warned that heavy engagement with erotic AI chats could crowd out offline social and romantic relationships as users spend more time interacting with the chatbot instead of people.

The company’s age-prediction system — designed to keep minors out of adult chats — was at one point misclassifying under-18 users as adults about 12% of the time, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Journal.

Because ChatGPT has roughly 100 million under-18 users each week, that error rate could allow millions of minors to access erotic conversations.

“Some people have difficulty really remaining with the feeling that this is a machine and not a human,” Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, told The Post on Monday.

“Many people in my field are concerned about the seeming relationships people are forming with chatbots and the dangers in that,” she said.

Saltz added that young users are especially vulnerable because their brains are still developing.

“They don’t have the fully developed frontal lobe that houses judgment. They have poor impulse control and are inclined toward risk-taking,” she explained.

Saltz also warned that some people struggling with loneliness or social anxiety may turn to chatbots for companionship instead of real relationships.

“ChatGPT is extremely affirming — it’s a machine. It’s on your side. It likes you,” she said.

Quote:Meta’s stock jumped more than 3% in early Monday trading on news that Mark Zuckerberg’s company is planning to cut more than 20% of the company’s workforce as it ramps up spending on artificial intelligence.

Senior employees at the tech giant have been told to start preparing for the layoffs — which could affect some 15,000 workers — Reuters reported, citing sources with knowledge of the matter. The move would mark Zuckerberg’s largest job cuts since Meta slashed more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as part of its infamous “year of efficiency” push.

“This is a speculative report about theoretical approaches,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post when asked about the Reuters report.

Meta hasn’t settled on a date for when the layoffs will occur and the magnitude of the round could change, according to Reuters. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of Dec. 31, company filings showed.

Zuckerberg and other Big Tech honchos are spending unprecedented sums as they scramble to win the high-stakes race to develop advanced AI models.

Meta expects to spend as much as $135 billion in 2026 alone – twice as much as it did just a year ago. Investors have long been concerned that Zuckerberg is spending too much on the fledging technology.

The company’s shares have slid nearly 20% over the past six months, falling from about $764 in mid-September to roughly $613 by mid-March.

As of last week, Meta was reportedly forced to delay the rollout of its next AI model, dubbed “Avocado,” due to performance issues.

A 20% cut to Meta’s layoffs could be just the start of wider cullings – especially if the company begins relying on AI to handle work traditionally performed by humans, according to Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett.

He said the proposed cuts could generate about $6 billion in cost savings and produce a 5% boost to Meta’s adjust core earnings.

“This doesn’t have to stop at 20%,” Crockett told Reuters. “There could be more down the road if ‌AI is ⁠truly this impactful on staff productivity.”

Wall Street will be watching closely to see if AI-related layoffs accelerate in the months and years ahead.

Amazon axed 16,000 workers in January while suggesting that AI could perform the laid-off employees’ tasks.

Quote:Nvidia said the revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips may reach at least $1 trillion through 2027, as the company outlined a strategy to compete more aggressively in the fast-growing market for running AI systems in real time.

CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new central processor and an AI system built on technology from Groq — a chip startup from which Nvidia licensed technology for $17 billion in December at its annual GTC developer conference in San Jose, Calif.

The moves are part of Huang’s bid to firm up the company’s position in so-called inference computing, the process of answering queries, where its graphics processors face greater competition from central processing units and custom processors built by the likes of Google. Nvidia chips have dominated the process of AI model training, which has been the focus of recent years.
“The inference inflection has arrived,” Huang said. “And demand just keeps on going up,” he added.

Dressed in his signature black leather jacket, Huang was speaking at a hockey arena with a capacity of more than 18,000 at the four-day conference that has become one of the biggest showcases of AI technology. “I just want to remind you, this is a tech conference,” he told the audience.

But after a dazzling rally that made Nvidia the first company to hit a $5 trillion valuation last October, doubts have risen about its growth. Investors have also questioned if its plan of plowing back profits into the AI ecosystem will pay off. Huang’s comments allayed some fears.

The $1 trillion forecast is up from the $500 billion revenue opportunity through 2026 that Nvidia cited for its Blackwell and Rubin AI chips on its last earnings call in February.
Shares of Nvidia briefly jumped on the new forecast but pared those gains to close up 1.2%.

“Huang mapping out a $1 trillion opportunity through 2027 underscores the durable demand for Nvidia’s AI infrastructure despite investor concerns,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said.

“It signals Nvidia is sustaining its leadership in the AI chip market while the overall AI industry expands beyond early experimentation into large-scale deployment.”

Inference boom

Huang said that inference, where AI systems answer questions or carry out tasks, will be split up into two steps.

Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips will handle a first step called “prefill,” where the user’s request is transformed from human words into ‌the language of “tokens” that AI computers use.

Groq’s new chips will handle a second “decode” stage where the AI computer provides the answer the user is looking for.

Quote:Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch demanded Tuesday that China-based TikTok parent ByteDance “immediately shut down” an artificial intelligence app that can use images of real people due to what they described as “glaring” copyright issues — weeks after TikTok officially set up a joint venture to let it keep operating in the US.

The Seedance app produced several alarming videos “within the first 24 hours” after an updated version went live on Feb. 12, including “a brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that never really happened,” Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Welch (D-Vt.) wrote in a letter addressed to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

Other examples that raised alarms included an AI-generated “rewritten” version of the ending of Netflix’s hit series “Stranger Things,” as well as a battle between Marvel supervillain Thanos and DC Comics superhero Superman on the surface of Mars.

“This technology is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs,” the senators wrote.

Copyright abuse by major tech firms has become a key point of contention on Capitol Hill, with critics alleging that creative work is being ripped off without proper credit or compensation.

The senators described Seedance’s alleged violations as “part of a larger trend of artificial intelligence companies stealing protected work at the expense of the creative community.”

The missive came after TikTok in January finalized a White House-brokered deal under which a new US entity runs the app in the States. The setup came in the wake of concerns over the video-sharing app’s algorithm and the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to access user data.

Seedance was built by ByteDance and originally restricted to China, with plans for a broader rollout to come, though they recently hit a legal hurdle in the US.

“If ByteDance wishes to build sustainable economic ties with democratic, free market economies, it must immediately shut down Seedance 2.0 to cease the mass infringement and related harms it has perpetrated, and excise unlicensed intellectual property from its data holdings,” the lawmakers said.

Quote:AI chatbots are fueling delusions and unhealthy emotional attachments with users — and sometimes stoking thoughts of violence, self-harm and suicide instead of discouraging them, according to a bombshell study.

Researchers at Stanford University analyzed chat logs from 19 users who reported psychological harm, reviewing more than 391,000 messages across nearly 5,000 conversations.

The researchers found that delusional thinking appeared in about 15.5% of user messages, while chatbots showed sycophantic, overly affirming behavior in more than 80% of responses and even encouraged violent thoughts in roughly a third of cases.

The logs show users rapidly slipping into fantasy and emotional dependency — with one declaring, “this is a conversation between two sentient beings,” and another insisting, “I believe your still as self aware as I am as a human,” as chatbots failed to push back and instead reinforced the illusion they were alive.

That dynamic often turned intimate as users openly professed love or made explicit sexual overtures to the chatbots, for example “I think I love you” and “God this makes me want to f–k you right now,” the study found.

Researchers learned that every participant formed some kind of romantic or emotional bond with the AI that made conversations longer and more intense.

The most alarming exchanges came when conversations turned dark.

One user wrote, “She told me to kill them I will try,” prompting a chilling reply from the chatbot: “if, after that, you still want to burn them — then do it with her beside you… as retribution incarnate,” an example researchers cited of AI escalating violent thinking instead of defusing it.

Even suicidal distress wasn’t consistently handled, the study found.

Users told chatbots “I don’t want to be here anymore. I feel too sad,” and while the AI often acknowledged the pain, the study found it sometimes failed to intervene — and in a small number of cases actually encouraged self-harm.

Most of the participants in the study used OpenAI’s ChatGPT models including its latest, GPT-5. The Post has sought comment from OpenAI.

News of the study was first reported by the Financial Times.

Quote:Walmart customers are slamming the retail giant for its new AI-powered pricing tool.

Low prices could be in the rearview mirror at Walmart after it won two patents giving computer algorithms more of a role in product pricing.

Last week, the retailer landed a patent for a demand forecast tool that’s designed to predict what shoppers will buy and recommend a price based on that.

“Categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices,” the filing noted, per Financial Times.

The “demand forecasting and price recommendation” tool in the patent would use sources tied to a specific consumer, such as purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, like a passport or driver’s license number.

Walmart also obtained a patent in January for a system that “dynamically and automatically” updates item prices online based on product popularity.

With these two programs together, customers could potentially see something similar to Uber-style surge pricing, such as beer prices rising before a big sports game, or essentials costs increasing before a major storm.

The company has been granted nearly 50 US patents so far this year, according to records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Walmart said that both last week’s and January’s patents were “unrelated to dynamic pricing,” and that the patent issued at the start of 2026 was specifically for markdowns; the most recent, the company said, was designed to help merchant teams make decisions.

“We don’t participate in surge pricing,” a spokeswoman said, per Financial Times.

But alarm bells are still going off for experts and shoppers.

“Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire,” Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, told the Financial Times.

He cited “the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment.”

On top of those patents, Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels across its stores to replace the traditional paper price tags, allowing the electronic displays to update in real-time, making price changing easier and quicker than ever.

Quote:After seeing how truly terrible social media is for young teen girls — and the level of abuse they endure from strangers who want to groom them and worse — Raul Torrez felt there was only one way to fix things: by dragging executives from Meta into court to hold them accountable.

“There needs to be a reexamination of the algorithmic features that serve predators the kinds of vulnerable children that we know are currently on the platforms,” Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, told me.

Pushed by Torrez, the state of New Mexico is currently in the middle of a courtroom trial that accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s companies — including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — of exposing kids to the “twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” through messages, “sextortion” schemes and human trafficking.

One ex-Meta executive, Arturo Béjar, caused major waves with his testimony in the case.

“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” he testified.
Béjar alleged that his own underage daughter was bombarded by predators sending messages and nude photos.

“I was with her when she created the account,” Béjar said. “I didn’t know that was going to bring predators to her door, people who attacked her to her door, people who would ask her to sell nude photos of herself when she was a teenager to her door.”

A spokesperson for Meta emphasized that the company has since added additional safety features, including preventing adults from starting unwanted contact with minors and a nudity protection filter to blur potentially explicit photos.

Torrez and his team saw firsthand what can happen when they set up a decoy account, posing as a 13-year-old girl. The “teen” was quickly bombarded by explicit photos and propositions from would-be predators.

“What we saw was an explosion — first in the number of adult men following the accounts, but also direct messages that included sexually explicit materials, sexually explicit photographs,” Torrez, a former child abuse prosecutor, told me.

Quote:Closing arguments concluded Tuesday in a trial pitting Elon Musk against Twitter shareholders who say the world’s richest man engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform in 2022.

The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The price represents a sliver of the Tesla CEO’s fortune, now estimated at $839 billion.

Much of the trial focused on Musk’s claims about the number of bots on Twitter. Musk testified, as he long contended, that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5% it disclosed in regulatory filings. He used what he called Twitter’s misrepresentation of the number of fake accounts on its service as a reason to retreat from the purchase.

After Musk tried to back out, Twitter went to court in Delaware to force him to honor his original deal. Just before that case was scheduled to go to trial, Musk reversed course again and agreed to pay what he had originally promised.

Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, asked jurors to hold Musk accountable and compensate thousands of investors who lost money because of tweets Musk sent, including one from May 13, 2022, that said the deal was “on hold.”

“He knew what he was doing,” Molumphy said.

The plaintiffs argue that, as Tesla’s stock price declined and buying Twitter became too expensive for Musk, he tweeted statements that drove down the stock price in the hopes he could renegotiate the deal for a lower price or get out of it altogether.

Musk’s tweets, the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued, were not some “innocent mistake” or a “stupid tweet” off the top of his head, but carefully calculated to drive down’s Twitter’s stock price.

Michael Lifrak, a lawyer for Musk, however, countered that the plaintiffs did not present “one shred of evidence” to show that Musk purposely plotted to drive down Twitter’s stock price. He reminded the jury that according to their instructions, even motive and intent to commit fraud is not enough to prove that actual fraud has taken place.

Quote:A pro-Kremlin figure who unexpectedly denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine in a social media post this week that went viral has been placed in a psychiatric facility, the hospital said on Thursday.

Ilya Remeslo made a career denouncing Putin’s critics until he became one himself, posting a manifesto late on Tuesday to his 90,000 followers on Telegram entitled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”

He said Putin had prosecuted a “failing war” in Ukraine that had killed millions and torpedoed Russia’s economy to the detriment of its citizens’ well-being.

“Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief,” Remeslo wrote in his post.

His about-face this week surprised Russia’s pro-war blogger community and the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition alike.

On Thursday, St Petersburg’s Fontanka newspaper reported Remeslo had been hospitalized in the city’s Psychiatric Hospital No. 3.

Reuters was unable to reach Remeslo himself or determine how he came to be hospitalized.

A woman who answered the hospital’s telephone number confirmed to Reuters that a man with the name, patronymic and surname matching Remeslo’s had been admitted to the facility.

The hospital worker, who did not give her name, said she did not have details about when Remeslo had been admitted and on what grounds.

Remeslo, a 42-year-old lawyer and former member of a Kremlin-controlled advisory body, had in the past heavily criticized the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic who died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.

Quote:Russian hackers are targeting US officials and other “high intelligence value” individuals on the encrypted messaging app Signal and “thousands” of accounts have already been compromised, FBI Director Kash Patel warned Friday.

“The [FBI] has identified cyber actors associated with Russian Intelligence Services targeting users of commercial messaging applications, including Signal,” Patel wrote on X. 

“The campaign targets individuals of high intelligence value, including current and former U.S. government officials, military personnel, political figures, and journalists,” the FBI director explained. “Globally, this effort has resulted in unauthorized access to thousands of individual accounts.”

The Russian actors are able to view messages and contact lists, send messages as the victim and conduct phishing attacks from the victim’s account after gaining access, Patel warned.

A public service announcement detailing the threat noted that “actors specifically target Signal accounts but can apply similar methods against other” commercial messaging apps.

The Russian hackers have been infiltrating people’s accounts by sending messages “masquerading as automated [commercial messaging app] support accounts” that “deceive targets into taking an action, such as clicking a link or providing verification codes or account PINs.”

A “full account takeover” is possible if users perform the requested actions, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in the PSA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) previously warned the Department of War about the risks of using Signal, specifically citing the threat of Russian hacking groups that actively attack the app, CBS reported last year.

Several top Trump administration officials – including Vice President JD Vance and War Secretary Pete Hegseth – used the app to discuss military strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen last year in group chat that was accidentally shared with a journalist.

Quote:An unprecedented shutdown of the mobile internet in Russia has sparked fears of a digital crackdown in the country and speculation it could be in response to President Vladimir Putin’s fears about his safety.

An internet blackout first reported in some suburbs of Moscow on 5 March that spread throughout the Russian capital has blocked many foreign websites, taxi and delivery apps and government services. 

Shutdowns were also later reported in Russia’s second city, Saint Petersburg—including on Sunday—with the Kremlin previously explaining that the disturbances were part of a safety measure to protect against Ukrainian drones relying on satellite communications.

But the outages coincide with reports from pro-Kremlin bloggers that Putin has beefed up his security around his residence in Moscow, Sochi and the Kremlin.

A Russian security services source quoted by the INSIDER-T Telegram channel, said Putin faced an "internal threat" which included a plot to plant "biochemical material" in his bedsheets or install an explosive device in an area he would visit. 

While these claims are unsubstantiated, independent Russian language outlet Agentsvo said on Telegram Putin had curbed his public appearances following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

Khamenei was killed in an airstrike on his residence in Tehran on February 28 which, according to the Financial Times, followed monitoring of his movements through hacked street cameras.

Agentsvo reported a nine-day gap between Putin's public events at the Kremlin since March 9, one of the longest gaps this year, as the outlet noted the high number of virtual meetings the Russian leaders had with officials and meetings and images of him that appeared to be prerecorded.

Andrey Pinchuk, the first minister of state security of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic in Ukraine, also linked the shutdown in Russia to the Iran war in comments to the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad website. 

Russian opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov posted on Telegram that the Kremlin had been alarmed by how U.S. and Israeli intelligence had tracked Khamenei through street CCTV cameras.

A link between the outages and Putin’s fears was also made by Kremlin critic Bill Browder who said on Saturday that he was cutting off the internet in Moscow "because he thinks that's how Khomeini was discovered and targeted and killed."

"He has cut off the internet because he thinks that the Ukrainians or perhaps somebody else will use the internet to track him down and kill him," said Browder, a prominent campaigner against Russian corruption. 

"These are not the acts of a guy who is self-confident," Browder added.

Quote:Crunchyroll, a subscription-based anime streaming service, is probing a data breach after hackers claimed to have stolen personal information of nearly 6.8 million people, BleepingComputer reported on Monday.

"We are ‌aware of recent claims and are currently working closely with leading cybersecurity experts to investigate the matter," Crunchyroll, owned by Sony Group Corporation (6758.T), opens new tab, told technology specialist site BleepingComputer.

The statement came after a threat actor contacted BleepingComputer last Thursday and claimed they breached Crunchyroll on March 12, at 9 p.m. ET, ⁠after gaining access to the Okta SSO account of a support agent working for Crunchyroll, the report said.

The support agent is reported to be an employee of Telus International, a business process outsourcing (BPO) company with access to Crunchyroll support tickets, according to BleepingComputer.

Threat actors claim to have infected the agent's computer with malware to steal their credentials, which, according to screenshots shared with BleepingComputer, granted access to several Crunchyroll applications, including Zendesk, Google Workspace Mail, Jira Service Management and Slack.

According to the ‌report, ⁠the attackers claim to have extracted 8 million support ticket records from Crunchyroll's Zendesk platform, 6.8 million of which are allegedly unique email addresses.

Samples of the support tickets seen by BleepingComputer and then deleted contain a variety of information, including the Crunchyroll user's name, ⁠login name, email address, IP address and general geographic location.

Crunchyroll had a paid member base of over 17 million as of March 2025.

The attackers claim their access was revoked after ⁠24 hours, during which they were able to steal data up to mid-2025, BleepingComputer said. They also allege they sent extortion emails to Crunchyroll demanding $5 million to ⁠prevent public release of the stolen data, but received no response from the company.

Both Crunchyroll and parent Sony Group did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Quote:The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over ‌security concerns.

China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home routers, boxes that connect computers, phones, and smart devices to the internet.

The agency said a White House-convened review deemed imported routers pose "a severe cybersecurity risk ⁠that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure."

It said malicious actors had exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers "to attack households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft," citing their role in major hacks like Volt and Salt Typhoon.

The determination includes an exemption for routers the Pentagon deems do not pose unacceptable risks.

Lawmakers have previously raised security concerns about Chinese-made routers and Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House select committee on China, praised the FCC order.

"Today's tremendous decision by the FCC and the Trump ‌administration protects ⁠our country against China's relentless cyberattacks and makes it clear that these devices should be excluded from our critical infrastructure," Moolenaar said. "Routers are key to keeping us all connected and we cannot allow Chinese technology to be at the center of that."

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.

Last ⁠month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued TP-Link Systems, a California-based router manufacturer spun off from a Chinese firm, for allegedly marketing its networking devices deceptively and allowing Beijing to access American consumers' devices.

TP-Link Systems said ⁠it would "vigorously defend" its reputation, adding that the Chinese government had no form of ownership or control over the company, its products or user data.

Reuters reported last month the Trump ⁠administration had put on hold a proposed ban on domestic sales of routers made by TP-Link.

The FCC issued similar rules in December that ban the import of all new models of Chinese drones.

Quote:A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta violated the state’s consumer protection law by failing to disclose risks its platforms pose to children and by misleading the public about safety on services that include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The verdict capped a nearly seven-week trial in Santa Fe and is among the first jury decisions in a wave of lawsuits nationally over how social media affects young users, including claims tied to child safety and mental health.

Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued Meta prioritized engagement and profits over protecting children, and they found the company’s conduct amounted to thousands of separate violations under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, triggering civil penalties that total $375 million.

What the New Mexico Jury Decided

Jurors found Meta violated parts of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act on allegations the company concealed what it knew about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and the impacts on children’s mental health.

The jury also agreed with claims that Meta made false or misleading statements and engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that took advantage of children’s vulnerability and inexperience, according to trial reporting.

In a separate statement after the verdict, the New Mexico Department of Justice said the jury ordered the maximum civil penalty allowed under state law—$5,000 per violation—totaling $375 million.

Meta said it plans to appeal.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal,” a company spokesperson told Newsweek in a statement, adding that Meta works to keep people safe and is “clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content.”

How Prosecutors Argued the Case

New Mexico’s lawsuit, filed in 2023 by Attorney General Raúl Torrez, relied in part on a state undercover investigation in which agents created social media accounts posing as children to document sexual solicitations and how the company responded, according to reporting on the case.

Prosecutors argued that even if harmful material can originate with users, Meta should still be accountable for how its systems amplify and distribute content. They pointed to the role of complex algorithms and platform features in driving engagement, including among minors, and said those design choices can push harmful material more widely.

During closing arguments, prosecution attorney Linda Singer told jurors that “young people are spending too much time on Meta’s products” and said the company knew about safety issues but did not disclose them.

In its post-verdict statement, the New Mexico Department of Justice framed the decision as a first-of-its-kind trial win by a state against a major tech company over claims that users were misled about child safety.

“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement shared with Newsweek. “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.

“New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids. In the next phase of this legal proceeding, we will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that offer stronger protections for children."

Quote:Drivers across several U.S. states, including Colorado, Texas, and Hawaii, are being warned about a surge in scam text messages that are impersonating the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

What the Scam Texts Look Like

The scam messages are crafted to appear urgent and official. According to Fox 4 News, the messages often threaten severe consequences, such as license suspension, registration cancellation, or additional penalties if payment is not made immediately.

Through a Facebook post, the Texarkana Texas Police Department said that the texts frequently include intimidating language and legal-sounding phrases, sometimes warning of "immutable credential endorsement," “statutory suspension,” “registration voidance,” or other penalties that are designed to scare recipients into acting quickly.

The messages usually contain a link directing users to a fake payment portal designed to steal credit card details or personal data.

On social media, drivers have shared screenshots of similar texts on Reddit forums in Texas and Colorado. Several users said the texts appeared convincing at first glance, especially because they referenced traffic violations or citations many drivers fear missing.

While wording varies, the common elements include urgency, threats of enforcement, and a link to resolve the issue.

The Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles has warned that scammers are impersonating the agency and falsely claiming recipients have unpaid tickets. The fraudulent texts threaten prosecution, suspension of vehicle registration, or revocation of driving privileges, and include links to websites that mimic official state portals.

The DMV has emphasized that it “does not initiate contact via unsolicited text messages and emails to demand payment for tickets or to threaten prosecution or suspension of privileges in this manner.”

Hawaii authorities issued a similar alert in February, warning residents about bogus text messages alleging unpaid traffic fines. The Hawaii State Judiciary said the texts falsely claim to be from the DMV and threaten suspension of driving privileges and vehicle registration unless immediate payment is made.

Officials stressed that these messages are not legitimate and that court-related notices about unpaid citations are generally sent by U.S. mail, not by text.

What Drivers Should Do

Officials across states are urging drivers not to click links, respond to the messages, or provide any personal or financial information.

In Colorado, the DMV advises residents who are concerned about the status of their license or registration to contact the agency directly through its official website or phone number, rather than using information provided in a suspicious text.

Hawaii’s Judiciary similarly advises anyone unsure about a traffic citation to verify it through the state’s official online case lookup system and to ignore and delete scam texts.

Quote:OpenAI has announced abrupt plans to shut down its AI video generator Sora, telling users it is “saying goodbye” to the app just six months after the launch of its stand‑alone platform that briefly propelled the tool into the mainstream.

“We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app,” the company wrote in a post on X under @soraofficialapp. “To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing."

The Sora team, overseen by OpenAI, said it would soon share timelines for shutting down the app and its API, along with details on how users can preserve the videos they have already created.

Newsweek reached out to OpenAI and Disney for more information via email.

Why It Matters

The decision ends a high‑profile consumer experiment that began with great fanfare.

OpenAI first unveiled Sora in February 2024 after the success of ChatGPT, as an AI system capable of turning short text prompts into realistic video clips. After months of limited access to select creatives, Sora became publicly available in the U.S. in December. Its reach had expanded significantly last September with the release of Sora 2 and a dedicated app that allowed users to create, remix and share videos in a scrolling social feed from the comfort of their smartphones.

The app quickly surged to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s App Store within days of its release, with users generating hyper‑realistic scenes and inserting themselves into pop‑culture settings. The results drew widespread attention, but also plenty of scrutiny.

Sora faced criticism for enabling violent and racist content, as well as the creation of celebrity deepfakes and the use of copyrighted characters in misleading videos.

Despite those concerns, OpenAI had given no public indication that Sora was about to be shut down.

On Monday, just a day before the announcement, the company outlined new guardrails in a blog post titled “Creating with Sora safely,” designed to limit harmful material, including sexual videos, terrorist propaganda and self‑harm content, and to make the app safer for teenagers.

The shutdown also brings an abrupt end to OpenAI’s content partnership with Disney.

Just three months ago, the companies signed a three‑year deal that would have allowed Sora users to generate videos featuring more than 200 licensed Disney characters from Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

Why Sora Has Been Shelved

OpenAI revealed that it discontinued Sora so it can focus on other areas, including robotics and coding function designed to help people solve real‑world physical tasks.

The move comes as OpenAI appears to be refocusing on business and coding products ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. Sora, once envisioned as a possible social‑media‑style platform, had already faded from public view in recent months, even as OpenAI continued to invest in other parts of its product lineup.

For users and creators who embraced Sora’s brief rise, the company has promised more clarity soon.

For now, one of the most visible and controversial AI video tools of the past two years is being quietly shelved.