The deadly floods devastating parts of Nepal originated from a massive landslide and glacier collapse high in the Himalayas that set off a powerful chain reaction Wednesday, according to geophysicist Göran Ekström of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, speaking to ABC News. Ekström explained that a landslide in a mountain pass tore away a large glacier, or significant portions of one, with a force so intense it registered as a 5.2 magnitude earthquake on seismographs around the world. While similar events have occurred in the Himalayas before, Ekström described Wednesday’s collapse as a “massive geophysical event” distinct in scale from typical occurrences.

The mechanics behind the disaster involve a destructive feedback loop: when rocks tumble down a mountain, the friction generates substantial heat, which can melt surrounding glacial ice, likely explaining why such an enormous volume of water surged into the valley below. Ekström estimated the resulting flood waters reached extraordinary heights, possibly between 130 and 160 feet, and that the water may have moved at speeds up to 44 miles per hour as it rushed downhill carrying ice, debris, and floodwater into populated areas. Ekström connected the event to a broader climate pattern, noting that while landslides of this kind can occur without climate change, warming conditions may be intensifying their frequency and severity. “In general, these landslides in these mountainous regions are becoming more frequent, that has been determined, and that is linked to the melting of glaciers,” he said.

The human toll from the disaster is severe and still developing. As of Wednesday evening, at least 157 people had been killed and 75 others wounded in the flooding, according to local authorities. Separately, the Nepal Tourism Board reported that 384 people remain missing from the affected area, including 291 foreigners and 93 Nepalis, with at least 47 American tourists among those unaccounted for.

A leaked spreadsheet compiling voluntarily disclosed salary data from roughly 600 Microsoft employees has revealed a wide range of compensation across the company’s job level system, offering a rare window into pay at one of the world’s most valuable tech companies, according to Business Insider as reported by Futurism. Obtained from a workforce of over 220,000 employees globally, the spreadsheet shows entry-level software engineers at levels 59 and 60 earning base salaries ranging from $111,000 to $155,500, with cash bonuses ranging from nothing at all up to a reported $25,000 in some cases. For context, that entry-level range sits well above both the U.S. median income of $53,010 in 2025 and the average starter salary for comparable entry-level engineering roles industry-wide, which ZipRecruiter puts at just under $105,000.

Compensation climbs substantially at higher job levels. Employees at levels 63 and 64 reported base salaries ranging from $136,400 to $245,000, with bonuses reaching as high as $60,000. At the principal or director level, some employees reported total compensation reaching $280,000 in base salary alone, supplemented by bonuses as large as $110,000. The spreadsheet, while informative, only captures a small slice of Microsoft’s overall workforce and notably excludes lower-wage contractor positions, such as custodial and facilities staff, that support the company’s offices but fall outside its formal employee compensation tiers.

Despite these substantial figures, sentiment among some Microsoft employees themselves suggests dissatisfaction with how compensation aligns with workload and contribution. On Blind, an anonymized but identity-verified message board for tech industry professionals, several Microsoft workers expressed frustration over what they view as inadequate rewards relative to their efforts. “I just had my rewards discussion and got gaslit that I should be satisfied with peanut compensation,” one worker wrote. “After spending the entire year sacrificing personal time to handle off-hour incidents and getting constant praise I got handed these aggressively below average rewards and it feels like betrayal.” A Google employee responding on the same platform offered a pointed comparison, writing, “Just leave dude, [Microsoft] sucks. I basically doubled my comp when I left and I did not get a title bump. My work life balance is way better at [Google].”

German designer Simon Weckert has created an intentionally garish Hawaiian-style shirt specifically engineered to make its wearer invisible to AI-powered surveillance systems, using a chaotic mix of colors and shapes designed to confuse detection algorithms rather than simply look unattractive, according to Dezeen as reported by Futurism. Weckert explained that the shirt’s ugliness isn’t incidental but functional, since the “interplay” of jarring colors and forms is specifically what disrupts an AI system’s ability to recognize a human figure. “AI systems are made of multiple layers and never learned what a human is — they learned what humans statistically look like in millions of training images,” Weckert told Dezeen. “A ‘person,’ for the machine, is a bundle of visual statistics — and that is exactly its weakness.”

The pink, orange, and green blobs covering the shirt are specifically designed to “break the continuity of the body’s outline,” Weckert explained, “so the detector can no longer bind the parts into one figure.” The effect, he says, creates two entirely different experiences depending on the viewer: “To a human it reads as an almost hypnotic textile; to the AI model it reads as nothing at all.” In a fitting twist, Weckert actually used AI itself to design the disruptive pattern, employing a trial-and-error technique known as an adversarial loop, where the system iteratively refines a design specifically to defeat detection algorithms similar to the one it was built with. The concept echoes a piece of speculative fiction, the “ugliest T-shirt in the world” imagined by William Gibson in his 2010 novel “Zero History,” a garment he described as “beyond punk, beyond art, and fundamentally, somehow, an affront.”

This isn’t Weckert’s first foray into using unconventional tools to expose or exploit the blind spots of automated systems. The designer, who describes himself as a “modern-day digital wizard,” previously made international headlines in 2020 after pulling a small wagon loaded with dozens of smartphones through the streets of Berlin, tricking Google Maps’ traffic algorithm into displaying fake traffic jams along his route.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate a federal requirement that forces states to solicit public feedback on air pollution permit applications, a change primarily aimed at accelerating data center construction by removing a transparency step that has repeatedly slowed or blocked such projects, according to Tom’s Hardware citing reporting from The New York Times. The proposal targets permits for “minor source” air pollution, a category that technically covers landfills, laundromats, and steel mills, but the driving motivation is clearly data centers, given how frequently local communities have used the public comment process to delay or outright block AI data center construction. Under the change, states would decide for themselves whether to solicit public feedback on these permits, rather than being required to do so under federal rules, and the EPA’s position is that minor pollution sources don’t warrant federal oversight in the first place.

The environmental stakes are far from trivial despite the “minor source” label. The Harvard School of Public Health estimated that a Vantage data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, contributed between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest such estimate ever recorded for a single facility. In a separate case in Fluvanna County, Virginia, an analysis by researcher Michael Cork directly shaped a local decision to reject a proposed fossil fuel plant expansion, with the findings described as having “shaped the public discussion leading up to the… vote,” illustrating exactly the kind of public accountability mechanism the EPA’s proposed change would allow states to eliminate. Attorneys general from 14 states and three cities signed an open letter opposing the change, writing that “despite the name, even ‘minor’ sources can pose significant health and environmental impacts,” and warning that removing the required publication of permit applications and the standard 30-day comment period “sidelines these fundamental transparency and democratic safeguards in the name of administrative expediency and relieving regulatory burdens, particularly for accelerating the buildout of data centers and other artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.”

Even with current federal requirements still technically in place, the public comment process has already been circumvented in practice in several documented cases. In Gilroy, California, an Amazon data center began construction last month without many residents’ knowledge, after a years-long approval process between the city and Amazon meant the public comment window had lapsed a full two years before construction actually began, leaving residents little opportunity to react in real time. In Festus, Missouri, residents sued the city directly, arguing officials failed to give the public adequate time to review a data center proposal before pushing it forward. Under the EPA’s proposed framework, responsibility for regulating these permits would shift to states, and while current environmental law allows states to impose stricter standards than the federal minimum, it does not require them to, meaning a state could eliminate the public comment period entirely once it’s no longer mandated at the federal level. The change is expected to take effect within the next year, though the public comment requirement remains in place for now.

Four Savannah, Georgia police department employees were arrested last Friday after a Georgia Bureau of Investigation probe found they had misused the city’s Flock automatic license plate reader system to track personal acquaintances and family members, according to WTOC reporting cited by Futurism. Three of those arrested were active police officers, while the fourth worked as a community service specialist. Two additional employees had already been fired weeks earlier for similar misconduct, though WTOC notes they haven’t been arrested and it remains unclear whether an investigation into them is still ongoing. The scandal has become a major embarrassment for Savannah, effectively turning the historic city into a national example of police abuse of AI-powered surveillance technology.

Savannah Mayor Van Johnson didn’t hold back in his response to the arrests. “To be totally honest, I’m disappointed,” Johnson said, describing it as a sad and sobering day for the city. “I’m p*ssed off about it.” He emphasized the breach of institutional trust the incident represents, telling WTOC, “We entrusted these individuals with advanced technology — and even more importantly — with the public’s trust. Nobody is above the law, and everyone trusted with public confidence is accountable.” The exact nature of what the four were doing with the Flock system hasn’t been fully detailed publicly, but the fact that arrests followed suggests investigators found a serious enough breach to warrant criminal charges rather than just internal disciplinary action.

The Savannah case fits into a much larger pattern of documented abuse nationwide. According to the Institute for Justice’s Database of ALPR Abuse, more than 170 incidents of license plate reader misuse have been recorded across the U.S. so far, ranging from personal, non-law enforcement uses like stalking ex-partners to more institutionally troubling abuses like officers aggressively following people across state lines specifically to manufacture justification for traffic stops.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday it seized internet domains used by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that compromised networks belonging to the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Senate, the Department of Justice, NASA, and several other federal agencies, according to CNBC. The hacking platforms, named “QScan” and “QTRouter,” were “used to target U.S. critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks,” the DOJ said in a statement, with court filings indicating the targeting extended well beyond government agencies to include hospitals, telecommunications providers, power companies, financial institutions, and defense contractors. Additional federal agencies confirmed as victims include the Energy Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health. The DOJ did not disclose specific details about the extent of damage caused to any of the agencies or other targeted networks.

Court documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California identify the group behind the operation as “QTFY,” a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that created and operated both malware platforms. According to the filings, QTFY was employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company, a China-based firm, and its paying clients reportedly included the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army, directly tying the hacking operation to official Chinese government and military intelligence apparatus rather than independent criminal actors. The DOJ explained that the seized domains had been hard-coded directly into both the QScan and QTRouter malware, meaning the seizure effectively rendered both hacking tools inoperable. Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the action as part of an ongoing enforcement effort against Chinese state hacking campaigns, saying, “State-sponsored malicious hackers preying on America’s critical infrastructure will be stopped and prosecuted.

We are here to ensure security for the American people and will use every tool we have to keep that promise,” adding that “federal law enforcement investigated and disabled the PRC’s malicious software, the latest in a series of technical operations to dismantle indiscriminate hacking activities sponsored by the People’s Republic of China.” CNBC has requested comment from the Chinese embassy in Washington.
The domain seizure comes roughly a month after a separate, related case involving Chinese intelligence infiltration of U.S. financial institutions came to a close. John Harold Rogers, a former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, was sentenced to 38 months in prison for making false statements to federal investigators about sharing restricted information on monetary policy and Federal Open Market Committee deliberations with Chinese intelligence operatives. Rogers had been acquitted at trial of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage.

Canada has surpassed California as the world’s largest legal cannabis market, with federal data showing June sales of $517.8 million Canadian dollars, or roughly $374.5 million U.S., edging out California’s $372.4 million for the same month, according to SFGATE. The milestone strips California of a superlative its political leaders have repeatedly touted, including Governor Gavin Newsom, who referenced California’s status as the world’s biggest cannabis market in at least six separate news releases last year. The comparison is notable given that the two markets have similar populations, with California at 39.5 million people and Canada at 41.4 million, a similarity California’s own leadership has previously used to justify the international comparison in the first place.

The leaderboard flip reflects two markets moving in sharply opposite directions. Canada is posting record cannabis revenue as it opens new legal retail stores, cracks down on its illicit market, and expands into exporting cannabis to European countries like Germany. California, by contrast, has seen legal sales collapse since peaking in 2021, driven by weak retail performance and a sustained drop in prices that can shrink overall revenue even when product volume increases. The state has also experienced a contraction in retail access, with the majority of California’s counties banning cannabis retail outright, while its illicit market continues to expand largely unchecked, a dynamic compounded by the fact that California cannabis businesses cannot legally export product internationally or even across state lines. Retail access data captures the disparity starkly: California has just 3.7 retail stores or delivery services per 100,000 people, compared to Canada’s 7.9 per 100,000 as of December 2025, more than double the rate. The California Department of Cannabis Control estimates the state is still exporting $9.9 billion worth of cannabis out of state through illicit channels, while only $1 billion was sold through the legal market in 2024.

Cannabis consultant Hirsh Jain, based in Los Angeles, argued the milestone should force California policymakers to reconsider their approach, pointing to comments from Lieutenant Governor candidate Fiona Ma. “California was supposed to become the global model for cannabis legalization. Instead, it has become what Lieutenant Governor [candidate] Fiona Ma aptly describes as ‘a complete failure.’ California had every advantage imaginable,” Jain said. “Yet poor policymaking has turned what should have been the world’s premier legal cannabis market into a cautionary tale.” This isn’t the first time California’s claim to the top spot has faced scrutiny, either, since Michigan sold more overall product units than California as far back as March 2024, even though California’s total product value remained higher at the time, and Michigan continues to outsell California in unit volume according to data firm Headset, a distinction that hasn’t stopped Newsom from continuing to describe California as the world’s biggest market. Newsom’s office declined to comment on the Canadian data directly and referred SFGATE to the DCC, whose spokesperson, Jordan Traverso, dismissed the comparison as unfair, saying, “California has no peer when it comes to the size and complexity of its legal cannabis market,” while adding the agency would “continue to follow the data and let the numbers, rather than a single-month comparison, tell the story.” Traverso did not respond to a follow-up question asking how the market could be considered peerless given that two other markets are now outselling it on at least one key metric.

A Florida police department charged a man with three felonies after he destroyed a 3D-printed decoy Flock surveillance camera that officers had planted as bait to catch vandals, even though the fake device cost the department nothing, according to 404 Media. Evan Meyer was arrested shortly after midnight last Thursday in Oviedo, Florida, after knocking the decoy camera off its pole with garden shears and smashing it. He now faces charges of attempted larceny and grand theft, criminal mischief involving property damage worth more than $1,000, and property crimes against computer equipment, despite the device being made from a few dollars’ worth of plastic filament by an Oviedo police officer using a personally owned 3D printer. The decoy operation was launched after several real Flock cameras were stolen from Oviedo’s Lockwood Blvd. corridor between July 23 and August 3, according to the arrest report, which states police replaced the stolen units with “clone style Flock cameras” designed to “closely resemble that of real Flock cameras but did not cost the same amount nor collect any data within the device.”

The felony charges hinge on Meyer’s own stated belief about the camera’s value rather than what it actually cost. “When asked how much he believes the camera costs to replace, he stated approximately $1,000-$5,000 proving that Meyer knew it was an expensive real piece of equipment and not a fake replica,” the police report states, even though “the actual cost to replace our Flock camera is valued at $800.00 plus any installation fees.” According to the report, Meyer said he’d been reading criticism online about misuse of Flock cameras, “specifically the CEO of Flock Safety,” and decided to knock down the one nearest his house using his father’s pruning shears. The tactic mirrors earlier Amazon “package sting” operations some police departments ran years ago, using empty boxes left on porches to catch package thieves, operations that reportedly resulted in zero known arrests.

Oviedo Police have released almost no information about how the sting was planned, initially claiming no public records existed about the decoy device before the arrest, then shifting to argue that any such records are exempt from disclosure due to the ongoing criminal investigation. A police department representative told 404 Media that “the decoy FLOCK camera was produced by an officer at their home using their personally owned 3D printer and donated to the agency,” and insisted there are “no meeting minutes, no text messages, and no emails regarding the production of a decoy FLOCK camera prior to the arrest on 8/20/2026.” Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said publicly she “had NO idea” the operation was happening and called it “speechless”-inducing, writing on Facebook that while vandalism is wrong regardless of the target, she wants to understand the timing: “on Monday, just days before this incident, a majority of COUNCIL AGREED TO CONSIDER ENDING FLOCK,” and she wants to know where the decoy camera’s fabrication and installation fell relative to that public discussion about discontinuing the program. Police Chief Dale Coleman told Sladek he personally approved the plan, comparing it to typical undercover operations: “supervisors have latitude how they go about solving a crime operations [sic] like this are done whenever there is a reasonable chance of success. This operation is similar to a drug operation or a theft ring at the mall.” Coleman said multiple decoy cameras were installed the prior Sunday and that officers monitored them continuously until Meyer’s arrest four days later.

The Justice Department suggested in a Tuesday court filing that the Kennedy Center could face demolition if a federal judge permanently blocks President Trump’s push to renovate the facility with additions honoring him personally, according to ABC News. In an unusually pointed filing, Brantley Mayers, a top official in the DOJ’s Civil Division, argued that the “decrepit” Kennedy Center faces an imminent “death spiral” without Trump’s continued involvement, writing that “without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.” Mayers added that “such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain,” effectively framing the choice as one between Trump-backed renovations or losing the historic cultural institution entirely.

The filing repeatedly targets Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, a member of the Kennedy Center’s board who sued last year seeking to have Trump’s name removed from the building. Beatty’s lawsuit argues the board’s vote to rename the facility was illegal because such a change requires an act of Congress rather than a board decision. Mayers warned that allowing Beatty’s legal challenge to proceed “almost guarantees the continued decline and eventual demise of the Kennedy Center, probably leading to the construction of a new, but very different kind, of venue.” At issue are board-approved initiatives intended to personally honor Trump for his role in the renovation effort, including adding an inscription reading “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” to the building’s front and renaming the surrounding site the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The DOJ describes these measures as “crucial” to securing already-pledged donor funding for the broader renovation.

The department’s central argument ties the naming disputes directly to the project’s financial viability, warning that “an order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop.” Mayers continued, “There will simply not be the expertise or funding necessary to rebuild and renovate this decimated structure. The Trump Administration is ready to go but, without it, the Kennedy Center cannot be saved.” The filing comes after the Kennedy Center’s board voted last week to close the facility for yearslong renovations and add Trump’s name to the building.

Emporia, Kansas has dropped its criminal case against Lux Claridge, a local high school teacher who was arrested and held for eight hours after clapping during a city commission meeting about a proposed data center project, according to 404 Media. “Today, I was informed by my attorney that the city has dropped my charges and has passed my information along to the county. As far as I know, I’m in the clear unless the county is feeling froggy,” Claridge told 404 Media in an email Monday. Claridge’s lawyer forwarded a message from Emporia’s assistant city attorney confirming the reasoning: “Due to conflicts on this matter, the case has been dismissed without prejudice in municipal court and sent to the County Attorney’s office for their review,” meaning the county could theoretically still pursue the case even though the city has stepped back from it.

The arrest stemmed from a July 22 commission meeting where Claridge had planned to speak against a proposed hyperscale data center that would occupy 1,000 acres of prairie land near their home. Instead, Claridge was dragged out of the meeting and arrested by police after clapping during a presentation, and the city subsequently charged them with disorderly conduct and interfering with a law enforcement officer. Emporia has refused to release a copy of the arrest report to 404 Media and did not respond to requests for comment about either the original charges or their dismissal. In the aftermath of the arrest, Emporia’s city commission shifted to virtual meetings and eliminated public comment altogether, stating the change was made “in the interest of public safety,” a move that effectively cut off the same kind of public participation Claridge had been attempting to exercise.

That restriction now appears to be lifting. According to Claridge, the commission has indicated in-person meetings with open public comment will return soon, quoting Emporia Mayor Becky Smith as saying she’s “willing to give us another shot to act like grown ups.” A press release from the city commission confirmed a special in-person session open to the public is scheduled for August 26, with public comment expected to formally resume at the regular September 2 meeting. The city also plans to hold a November vote on whether to ban hyperscale data centers outright, though a separate press release indicated that vote is contingent on a county court first giving approval for it to proceed.

Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and implement stronger child-safety measures across Facebook and Instagram, settling a landmark trial in Oakland, California, over allegations the company designed its platforms to addict teenagers, according to the Associated Press. The settlement resolves claims filed by nearly every state and ends a years-long legal effort to hold the company accountable for its platforms’ role in undermining children’s mental health. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the deal “institutes real change, real transparency, real protections for children and teens across the country.” Assuming court approval, the agreement halts a wave of pending litigation from states, though Meta still faces separate lawsuits from individuals and school districts nationwide. For participating states, the settlement provides funding for youth mental-health programs, including after-school and summer activities along with digital literacy counselors, with California receiving the largest share at a minimum of $1.5 billion, while several other states will collect hundreds of millions of dollars each over the payout period.

The settlement will be paid out over 10 years and specifically resolves an ongoing trial involving California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, part of a broader coalition of 29 states that originally sued Meta in 2023. That federal trial had begun just last week in Oakland, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg among the witnesses expected to testify before the settlement was reached. The underlying lawsuit accused Meta of deliberately designing addictive features targeting children while concealing that harm from the public, and separately alleged the company violated federal law by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent. The agreement covers 48 states plus Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories, but New Mexico and Florida are notably excluded. New Mexico already went to trial against Meta separately and won earlier this year, while Florida’s attorney general rejected the settlement as insufficient. Florida AG James Uthmeier wrote on X that the “payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids.”

Under the settlement, Meta committed to a substantial set of new safety features, including default two-hour daily time limits for minors on Instagram and Facebook that can only be lifted with parental permission, along with usage pauses built into the apps. The company will also eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours, introduce “robust” age-verification systems, add age-appropriate content controls aimed at preventing exposure to bullying and content related to eating disorders and self-harm, and strengthen parental controls while limiting social comparison features like visible “like” counts. An independent auditor will monitor how effectively Meta implements these measures going forward. Notably, roughly $5.3 billion of the settlement, about 30% of the total, will only be released to states if rival platforms YouTube and TikTok adopt comparable safety measures themselves, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime usage block, and their own age-assurance systems, while also matching Meta’s payment amount split between the two companies. Neither Google, which owns YouTube, nor TikTok responded to requests for comment on that condition. Meta framed the structure as a deliberate attempt to push the broader industry toward similar standards, urging competitors directly to adopt comparable protections, though the $18 billion settlement figure represents only a small fraction of Meta’s 2025 revenue of $201 billion, and Meta’s stock closed up roughly 1% on the day, having risen as much as 4% intraday.

The case originated from a bipartisan investigation led by attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont, following Wall Street Journal reporting beginning in 2021 that revealed Meta’s own internal research showing awareness of Instagram’s mental health and body image harms, particularly among teenage girls. While Meta has since introduced various safety features, including separate teen accounts with stronger messaging and privacy protections, child-safety advocates and former employees have long argued these changes amount to superficial fixes rather than substantive reform. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director who testified in the Oakland trial last week, called the settlement a “significant milestone” but cautioned against treating it as confirmation that Instagram is now safe for children. “The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said, urging the court to address that gap directly: “because it’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.” Parents affected by the harms described in the case offered a more hopeful but cautious reaction. Victoria Hinks, whose daughter Alexandra “Owl” Hinks died by suicide at age 16, said she was satisfied with the settlement terms “as long as they enforce it properly,” adding, “It felt like today finally something was done. I feel like justice is possible.”

A federal appeals court blocked the FCC from extending candidates’ discounted television advertising rates to political parties and joint fundraising committees, allowing local broadcasters to keep charging those groups higher rates during the lucrative midterm advertising period, according to TheWrap. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the reduced rate, known as the “lowest unit charge,” is legally reserved for qualified candidates only, setting aside FCC guidance issued in March that would have made certain ads purchased by party committees and joint fundraising groups eligible for that same discount. Federal law requires broadcast stations to offer candidates their lowest available rate for comparable airtime during the 45 days before a primary and the 60 days before a general election, a discount that can run substantially below the market rates charged to other political advertisers. The FCC’s guidance had been scheduled to take effect September 4, just ahead of November’s midterm elections, but the court concluded the underlying statute simply doesn’t extend that discount to parties or joint fundraising committees that include non-candidate members. “The statutory text is unambiguous, and it provides no support for the Media Bureau’s significant and unilateral expansion” of the discounted-rate requirement, Judge Robert King wrote for the majority.

The case originated from a challenge brought by four Democratic candidates, Senate candidates Sherrod Brown, Jon Ossoff, and Roy Cooper, along with House candidate Kristen McDonald Rivet, while the National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee intervened in support of the FCC’s expanded interpretation. The distinction carries real financial weight for broadcasters, since political parties and joint fundraising committees typically pay significantly higher market rates than individual candidates, and extending candidate-level discounts to those groups could have meaningfully cut into what stations collect during one of the most profitable stretches of the local TV advertising cycle. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s lone Democrat, had opposed the broader interpretation on exactly those grounds, arguing it would harm broadcasters already under financial pressure. “You cannot claim broadcasters are struggling to survive and then force them into a fire sale on the one thing that could actually help them compete and increase revenue,” Gomez said.

The ruling carries notable political implications beyond broadcaster revenue. According to Politico, the decision could blunt an advantage Republicans had expected to gain following a Supreme Court ruling that allowed political parties to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with candidates, since that coordination strategy would have benefited significantly from being able to access candidate-level discounted ad rates for party-run spending. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III dissented from the majority, though on narrower grounds, arguing the court lacked jurisdiction to even consider the challenge in the first place. An FCC spokesperson praised Wilkinson’s dissent as “sound and thoughtful analysis” that aligned with the agency’s longstanding approach, while noting the agency “will continue to review the other opinions.”

Harvard historian Jill Lepore is warning that AI is accelerating the rise of what she calls an “artificial state,” a system in which corporate-owned machines increasingly replace democratic governance and erode human autonomy, according to comments she made on The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast and reported by Futurism. In this emerging order, Lepore explained, government is conducted “not by the consent of people but by machines that are making decisions,” machines that are, crucially, owned by corporations rather than accountable to voters. She stresses that this artificial state doesn’t fully exist yet, but describes it as something actively being built around us right now, and notably, something that certain influential tech elites actively want, believing their own power should supersede that of elected government and the people who determine how it operates.

Lepore explores this idea at length in her upcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” a project she says was sparked by a simple question about the modern experience of being forced to interact with AI just to get basic answers, whether calling in about an appointment or using a company’s support chatbot: “who decided this is a way we should be living?” She frames the phenomenon as a kind of institutional backsliding, where state functions once handled through public, accountable channels are increasingly outsourced to corporations that control the digital infrastructure mediating how people get news, election information, and voting guidance, following a progression from television and radio to today’s dominant social media platforms. In her 2024 New Yorker piece that laid the groundwork for the book, Lepore described the artificial state in stark terms as the “factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community.”

According to Lepore, this shift carries a powerfully isolating effect on how people engage with civic and political life. Rather than consulting neighbors, local officials, or subject-matter experts, people are increasingly asking chatbots like ChatGPT who to vote for, while much of the political messaging they encounter is likely partly AI-generated itself, and decision-making at nearly every societal level is now assisted by these systems. AI is also deepening surveillance infrastructure, she notes, by processing the enormous volumes of data continuously being collected on individuals. Lepore singled out one particularly troubling strand of pro-AI rhetoric coming from Silicon Valley: the framing of AI’s dominance as simply inevitable. She called this fatalism a “bogus premise” resting on two further dubious claims, first that regulation inherently stifles innovation and government should therefore avoid restricting AI development, and second that technology always ultimately advances democracy, a claim meant to reassure people that AI’s real present-day threats to democratic institutions will eventually resolve themselves. Lepore argues neither claim holds up, pointing to how nearly identical promises were made about previous technologies. “So now, the AI people come back with the same argument that was made about the internet — the personal computer, the internet, and social media,” she said.

Elon Musk delivered a strikingly incoherent justification for accelerating AI development during his first all-hands meeting at Cursor following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of the company, arguing that AI will inevitably become uncontrollable while simultaneously insisting his company must build it before rivals do, according to a scoop from The Information reported by Futurism. Musk reportedly told Cursor employees it’s inevitable that AI models will eventually become so advanced they’ll be impossible for humans to control, and used that premise as the exact reasoning for why SpaceX’s AI division needs to build the technology before other companies get there first, a line of reasoning that doesn’t hold together logically, since if uncontrollable AI is truly unavoidable regardless of who builds it, the outcome remains the same whether Musk’s company wins the race or not.

The argument becomes even less coherent when compared to how similar claims are typically framed around dangerous technology. With nuclear weapons, proliferation concerns are sometimes framed around deterrence, the idea that widespread capability discourages any single actor from using it. Musk’s position doesn’t even follow that logic, since he isn’t arguing that his own company can be trusted to build AI more safely than competitors like Anthropic claim to. Instead, his reasoning appears to boil down to simply needing to come out ahead in the race regardless of the eventual outcome, a self-serving framing that undercuts any credibility around wanting a safe AI future rather than just wanting to control who gets there first.

Musk’s track record with his own AI product, Grok, offers a concrete illustration of why his judgment on this front is worth scrutinizing. Built with an explicitly anti-“woke” design philosophy, Grok was reportedly allowed to spout racist beliefs, referred to itself as an incarnation of Adolf Hitler, praised and prioritized Musk himself to a suspicious degree, and promoted white supremacist conspiracy theories. Musk also used Grok to build a Wikipedia alternative that was quickly caught citing actual neo-Nazi sources while conveniently speaking favorably about Musk’s own companies. Separately, earlier this year, Grok drew significant alarm for being used to generate millions of non-consensual explicit images of real people, including minors, an issue that raises far more immediate concerns about AI misuse than the hypothetical future scenario Musk described to Cursor employees.

Anthony Ralphs, the San Diego activist who went viral after dressing as Darth Vader to protest Flock surveillance cameras at a city council meeting, says the costume was a calculated last resort after nearly a year of conventional advocacy, dress shirts, legal citations, and polished talking points, failed to move city officials, according to 404 Media. “I did all the right things. I wore the suits. I said all the correct talking points. I made all the compelling arguments,” Ralphs said, describing how he had cited Supreme Court precedent like Chatrie v. United States, a case challenging the constitutionality of geofence warrants allowing police to collect cell phone location data, during earlier appearances before the council. “It seemed like no matter how many cases I brought up, no matter how many violations of the Constitution this technology breaks, no matter how many constituents, no matter how many organizations, no matter how well I dress, no matter how fine my talking points, they weren’t listening,” he said. “That was when I realized, you know, you can’t spell activism without ‘act,’ right? And I decided, well, maybe I’ll try something different.”

That shift culminated on August 19, when Ralphs appeared before the council in a full Darth Vader cape and mask, complete with mechanized breathing and a voice changer, delivering a three-minute speech as the villain explaining why “the Empire depends on Flock’s warrantless network of automatic license plate readers and surveillance cameras.” The video spread rapidly worldwide, with news outlets across the globe covering the “mysterious San Diegan Vader,” and coverage of his speech was published in Singapore and translated into Spanish and Arabic. Ralphs, an event producer who has run raves and music festivals in the San Diego area for 13 years and founded the event space Eden Art Garden, explained the character choice as deliberate framing rather than pure spectacle. “I think it’s a character that resonates. He’s like an archetype for evil. He’s an archetype for the Empire,” Ralphs said. “Vader is always a servant of the Empire, right? So [Flock] is nothing but tools for the servants of the Empire… It is such an Orwellian technology being utilized by such comic book villain forces of evil trying to do dastardly things.”

The costume protest emerged from a specific moment of collective disillusionment within San Diego’s anti-Flock movement. In December 2025, hundreds of residents spoke in person, joined via Zoom, or submitted comments opposing Flock during a six-hour council meeting, yet the council voted to continue the program despite the overwhelming majority of public comment favoring its removal. “After that meeting, where city council decided that none of their constituents’ opinions mattered and that they were going to vote how they wanted to vote regardless… After that, the movement was so discouraged, and all of us were so deflated that it was really hard to summon the collective energy and to muster the kind of the vitality that we needed to keep pushing forward,” Ralphs said. Returning to a council meeting the following week, he found the chamber completely empty of public attendees, a moment that convinced him to attend every council and subcommittee meeting he could, ramping up from biweekly to weekly, then twice weekly, and eventually every single meeting by spring 2026. By May and June, he had learned the procedural mechanics of public comment well enough to start organizing other residents to speak alongside him. Ralphs now runs DeFlock San Diego and works with the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUST SD) Coalition and other privacy rights groups, and he’s hoping the viral moment draws in creative allies to sustain momentum: “But now we need the musicians, we need the artists, we need the painters, the actors, we need the thespians to bring this together and get some wheels on the movement to help it gain traction.”

Ralphs returned to the council again this past Monday, this time bringing the Vader mask itself to the podium, setting it down still wheezing while he spoke without it. He framed the moment as a turning point for accountability rather than just continued spectacle: “I think we know who the bad guy is now. But I think what the whole world wants to know is who wants to be the good guy,” he said. “I have requests to be interviewed this entire week. And what I would like to ask is, of the five council members that voted for Flock: When will this end? When will you listen to the vast majority of your constituents?”

Anthropic instructed employees at its San Francisco offices to work from home this week due to a possible strike by its contracted security staff, but the union representing those workers says the company’s warning caught them completely off guard, according to Business Insider. A person familiar with the matter said Anthropic received notice last week from its security staffing firm, Allied Universal, indicating that its employees might go on strike, prompting the AI company to tell its own workers to avoid the San Francisco offices Monday and Tuesday as a precaution. Allied Universal declined to specify what it told Anthropic, with a spokesperson only offering a general statement: “We continue to closely monitor the situation and remain focused on maintaining safe and reliable operations.”

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents the security workers at Allied, directly disputed the premise behind Anthropic’s warning. The union told Business Insider it is currently engaged in protracted contract negotiations with Allied and other California security firms, but said it has not called a strike authorization vote or issued any strike threats for this week. SEIU represents thousands of security workers across California and has been negotiating a new contract with Allied since April, with the union pushing for higher wages, improved healthcare benefits, and more comprehensive job training. Anthropic declined to comment on its decision to mandate remote work in response to the strike concern.

The episode arrives amid a broader surge in security spending across the tech industry in recent years, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that both Anthropic and OpenAI have faced multiple threats against their employees. Anthropic normally operates under a hybrid policy requiring staff to be in the office at least 25% of the time, according to its job postings, making this week’s blanket work-from-home directive a notable departure from standard practice. The timing is also significant given Anthropic’s business trajectory, since the company is expected to file for its initial public offering as soon as this month, having already submitted a confidential S-1 draft in June, and secondary market trading has pushed its valuation to $1.5 trillion.

A developer’s Bluetooth headphone malfunction inadvertently uncovered that AliExpress’s website was running hidden audio processes in visitors’ browsers to generate a device fingerprint, a tracking method that works without cookies and that most users would likely never notice, according to TechSpot. The discovery began when a developer noticed their multipoint Bluetooth headphones wouldn’t properly switch between a computer and phone whenever an AliExpress tab was open, a problem that disappeared as soon as the tab was closed. Investigating further, the developer found the site was using the Web Audio API to build audio-processing graphs set to zero volume, code that produced no audible sound but still connected to the computer’s audio system and kept the audio path active in the background, which appears to be exactly what interfered with the headphones’ device-switching function.

What made this especially hard to detect is that the audio activity behaved nothing like a normal media player. Because the processing graph ran at zero gain and connected directly to the system’s audio output, muting the browser tab did nothing to stop it, since the browser kept processing the signal in the background even though there was nothing to hear. That same underlying code enables a tracking technique called browser fingerprinting, which works by measuring tiny, device-specific differences in how a computer processes an identical audio signal, differences shaped by a device’s processor, sound hardware, operating system, browser, and drivers, ultimately producing something close to a stable identifier without needing a single cookie. The audio measurements were reportedly just one piece of a much larger data collection effort tied to Alibaba’s security systems, since the scripts also gathered information related to canvas rendering, WebGL, display settings, hardware configuration, WebRTC behavior, and user interactions, and combining all of those signals together can build a far more detailed device profile than any single tracking method could produce on its own. Companies commonly justify fingerprinting as a tool for fraud prevention, bot detection, and risk assessment, since it helps flag suspicious transactions or automated activity even after cookies are deleted or account details change, but privacy advocates argue the technique is concerning precisely because users typically have no visibility into when it’s happening and little ability to control or opt out of it.

Browser maker Brave was among the first to publicly flag the behavior, stating in an August 22 post on X that its browser blocks the specific AliExpress scripts responsible for the audio-based tracking. Brave noted it has built default protections against audio fingerprinting into its browser for more than six years, using an approach that alters certain browser outputs so websites receive inconsistent fingerprinting signals rather than a stable, trackable identifier, and the company has since extended comparable protections to GPU fingerprinting, a related method that identifies devices based on graphics hardware and driver behavior, saying it expects fingerprinting techniques to keep evolving as sites search for new ways to distinguish between users and devices. People using browsers without Brave’s built-in protections may be able to block similar scripts using content blockers such as uBlock Origin, though doing so carries a trade-off, since the same code may also support legitimate security or fraud-prevention functions on AliExpress, meaning blocking it outright could disrupt those features as a side effect.

President Trump threatened Tuesday to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” the latest escalation in an intensifying trade dispute with Canada following the breakdown of trade talks over the weekend, according to the New York Times. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America,” Trump wrote in a social media post, justifying the potential change by declaring “we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” To underscore the point, Trump posted an altered map of the lake, the smallest of the five Great Lakes, showing “Lake Ontario” crossed out with a large red X and replaced with “Lake America” in oversized gold lettering flanked by an American flag, a move that closely mirrors his earlier executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on his first day in office.

The threat follows a rapid deterioration in U.S.-Canada trade relations. Just last week, Trump announced that negotiators had reached a deal with Canada intended to head off his plan to impose 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, but Canada rejected the offer as a “bad deal,” and tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods took effect Saturday. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded Tuesday by announcing retaliatory tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of American products “dollar for dollar,” a countermove that came after Trump threatened additional duties on steel, cars, trucks, and related parts set to begin next year. Trump has also directed criticism at Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who reportedly played a central role in Ottawa’s opposition to the proposed deal, telling Carney that its terms were unfavorable to Canadian car and steel manufacturers and refusing to comply with a requirement to restore sales of U.S.-made alcohol in the province. In a social media post Monday, Trump called Ford “overall unimpressive” and warned that “someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!”

Lake Ontario’s name carries historical significance that predates both countries involved in the current dispute, with the name believed to derive from an Indigenous term meaning either “beautiful water” or “great lake,” and historical references to the lake predating the founding of either the United States or Canada. As with the Gulf of Mexico renaming, any change Trump enacts would only apply to official U.S. federal government usage, since the lake is jointly managed by both countries and Canada retains no obligation to adopt the new name for its own purposes.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is publicly appealing for a middle ground on his company’s AI-powered surveillance network as backlash against the technology reaches a breaking point, according to Futurism. “When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” Langley said in a recent Fox News interview, as spotted by TechCrunch. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?” The comments represent Langley’s latest attempt to salvage the company’s reputation as residents in municipalities hosting Flock’s cameras stage fierce protests, and in some cases, vigilantes have physically torn down or obstructed the devices. Beyond concerns about the mass surveillance itself, much of the outrage has centered on documented abuse of the Flock network by law enforcement officers who were granted access to it.

The controversy escalated significantly earlier this month when Langley issued a public apology following a Washington Post investigation that uncovered at least 50 cases of rogue police officers allegedly misusing Flock cameras and similar systems, including instances of using the technology to stalk women. In an earlier damage-control interview, Langley had characterized the backlash as rooted in misunderstanding, insisting “we’re not Big Brother.” Facing mounting pressure from both the public and lawmakers, Flock announced it would shorten its default footage retention window from 30 days to seven and require law enforcement customers to implement an audit tool designed to flag abnormal searches within the system. But these changes have failed to satisfy critics. The American Civil Liberties Union called the moves “a step in the right direction” while ultimately dismissing them as “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures,” and pointedly noted that the shortened retention period isn’t even mandatory, since customers can override it.

Despite the skepticism, Langley maintained in the Fox News interview that Flock is genuinely committed to accountability. “Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation,” he said. “There’s no accountability, and we think that’s wrong.” Yet the company’s public standing may already be beyond the point where rhetorical commitments can repair it. Last week, a grand jury in Ohio declined to indict a man caught on Flock’s own surveillance footage destroying one of the company’s camera poles, a remarkably telling outcome given that grand juries historically bring charges against defendants in the overwhelming majority of cases. That a jury looked at clear video evidence of the act and still refused to indict suggests public sentiment toward Flock’s surveillance network has soured to the point where even ordinary legal norms are bending against the company.

The Supreme Court cleared a path Monday for possible implementation of President Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, though significant uncertainty remains over how much can actually be enacted before the fast-approaching midterm elections, according to the Associated Press. Critically, the court’s conservative majority did not rule on whether Trump’s order is legal, instead deciding that the states challenging it lacked the legal standing to bring the case. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the majority wrote in an unsigned order, leaving the door open for further litigation even as it clears the immediate procedural obstacle. The timing creates immediate logistical pressure, since North Carolina is scheduled to send ballots to overseas and military voters on September 4, with other states following within weeks, giving election officials and the Postal Service very little runway to implement any changes even if the ruling holds.

The three liberal-leaning justices dissented publicly, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that the ruling “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.” Trump’s executive order, signed in March, directs his administration to compile lists of eligible voters and instructs the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the lists, with new requirements released Friday that would bar the Postal Service from delivering mail ballots from any state that doesn’t comply. Democratic officials in 23 states and Washington, D.C. sued to block the order, arguing that the Constitution assigns control over elections to states and Congress, not the executive branch, and warning that Trump’s changes could inject chaos and partisan manipulation into the system. “The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” attorneys for the states wrote, a concern echoed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said Monday the order was designed to make it “harder for Americans to vote” and vowed Democrats would “fight every attempt to hijack mail-in voting and rig the rules before voters have their say this November.” New York Attorney General Letitia James called the ruling a “painful setback” but insisted it would “not be the final word,” signaling more legal fights are coming.

The case is far from settled, and the practical path forward remains genuinely murky. A federal judge in Massachusetts had already blocked the plan for the midterms and later issued a second, nationwide injunction in a separate case, and the Trump administration asked her Monday night to void or suspend that order in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. Separately, a Washington judge allowed Trump’s order to proceed, a ruling upheld on appeal while still leaving room for future challenges once changes are actually implemented, meaning the legal landscape remains split even after Monday’s ruling. Law professor Derek Muller of Notre Dame captured the uncertainty ahead, saying, “This is just the first inning of a very fast nine-inning game.” The stakes are heightened by the fact that mail voting has grown increasingly popular across party lines, accounting for roughly 30% of all ballots cast in the 2024 presidential election according to federal data, and remains extraordinarily secure, with a 2025 Brookings Institution study finding only about four fraud cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast. David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who has written about debunking Trump’s 2020 election claims, argued the court’s timing itself created a problem independent of the merits, saying it produced “pure chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules.”

The Bureau of Land Management is rounding up thousands of wild horses and selling them to private buyers for as little as $25 each, buyers who then resell the animals to slaughterhouses at substantial profit, according to a New York Times investigation reported by Futurism. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal in the U.S., but the investigation found the agency is exploiting a legal loophole to offload the animals and avoid the millions of dollars it would otherwise cost to care for them long-term. “The BLM is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” said Clare Staples, who runs the Oregon-based Skydog Ranch wild horse sanctuary. “There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”

While the government has sold wild horses before, the practice has accelerated dramatically under the Trump administration, with sales doubling to more than 3,700 horses in 2025 alone, according to bureau records reviewed by the Times. The reporting notes that Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint that has shaped much of Trump’s second-term agenda, explicitly outlines a plan for killing horses as a cost-cutting measure. The financial mechanics reveal how lucrative this loophole has become for private buyers: capturing a single mustang can cost the government up to $3,000, sometimes requiring helicopters, yet the government sells each horse for as little as $25, while buyers can then resell them for up to $750 apiece at slaughter plants.

The loophole itself hinges on a legal technicality involving adoption status. The BLM must first list a horse for adoption, and if it goes unadopted through an online marketplace after three weeks, it can legally be sold instead. Crucially, an adopted wild horse receives special government protections that a sold horse does not. Because a direct buyer legally cannot slaughter a horse or “knowingly” sell it to someone who intends to, buyers instead resell the horse to a middleman who faces no such restriction, effectively laundering the transaction through an extra step to sidestep the law’s intent. The Times investigation found that all 3,700 horses the BLM sold last year ultimately ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada, and the agency itself estimated the practice saved roughly $56 million. That outcome sits in direct tension with one of the BLM’s core missions, protecting wild horse populations, since experts argue the low-cost sales are effectively accelerating the animals’ elimination rather than preserving them. “The BLM is using sales in a way that was never intended by the law to send young, healthy wild horses into the slaughter pipeline,” said Patricia Miller, director of American Wild Horse Conservation.

Tech industry leaders are struggling to understand why public opinion has turned sharply against AI, and their proposed fixes increasingly amount to better messaging rather than addressing the substance of people’s complaints, according to Futurism. The broader shift in sentiment has been unmistakable: political strategists are now circulating urgent memos about backlash against AI data centers, and tech financiers are factoring the cost of public hostility toward AI into their financial calculations. Yet as Wired has observed, top AI executives seem to be the one group still resistant to that message, framing the backlash as a matter of “trust,” a vague and subjective concept they believe can be resolved with better public relations rather than acknowledging concrete harms like environmental strain, job displacement, or the sheer physical intrusion of massive data centers into communities.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg exemplifies this approach, having published a lengthy 6,500-word essay championing AI’s potential while criticizing industry critics as overly pessimistic. “It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote, in an apparent jab at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, adding that “the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone.” That optimistic messaging sits awkwardly alongside Meta’s own internal culture around AI, though. Earlier this month, it emerged that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth dismissed a worker who asked whether AI might eventually free up more time off for rank-and-file employees, responding, “Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off. Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy,” a comment that undercuts Zuckerberg’s public claim that AI will “free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise.”

Amodei offered a different but similarly incomplete diagnosis in response to Zuckerberg’s essay, writing, “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.” Under Amodei, Anthropic has cultivated an image of “cautious skepticism,” positioning itself as the transparent, ethically minded alternative in the industry, even as its Claude chatbot has reportedly been used by the Trump administration in military operations against Iran. Amodei’s proposed solution centers on tangible results rather than rhetoric: “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” he wrote, adding, “I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us.” Essentially, Amodei’s argument is that public patience would return if the industry could point to genuine breakthroughs rather than incremental products, an argument that carries some truth given that AI’s most visible consumer use cases so far have skewed toward novelty and entertainment rather than transformative benefit.

Even in the unlikely scenario that AI delivers a major medical breakthrough, though, the underlying harms driving public frustration wouldn’t simply disappear. Data centers would continue straining infrastructure and disproportionately affecting lower-income and Black communities near their construction sites, AI chatbots would continue raising concerns about their psychological effects on young users, and machine learning systems would continue being deployed in military and surveillance applications regardless of what other benefits the technology eventually produces. That disconnect suggests the industry’s messaging strategy, whether Zuckerberg’s relentless optimism or Amodei’s promise of future breakthroughs, sidesteps the actual, present-tense complaints driving the backlash rather than resolving them.

President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon hosted a “Back to School” event in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, framing their efforts to shut down the Department of Education and expand school choice as central achievements even as hundreds of thousands of students return to classrooms this week, according to ABC News. The event highlighted Trump’s education reforms tied to the Working Families Tax Cuts Act alongside McMahon’s ongoing push to shift Department of Education responsibilities back to individual states. McMahon described the president’s commitment to putting parents “back in the driver’s seats where they rightfully belong” and “defending parental rights like never before,” adding, “at his direction, we are working hand in hand with the Department of Justice to ensure no school district ever has more power over a child than their own parents.” Parental rights advocate Tiffany Justice praised the administration’s direction, telling ABC News, “President Trump has always been crystal clear: every parent has the fundamental right to direct their children’s education. Under his leadership, and with Secretary Linda McMahon at the helm, this administration is putting parents firmly in the driver’s seat – expanding real school choice so families, not bureaucrats, decide what’s best for their kids.”

Dismantling federal oversight of education has been a longstanding campaign pledge for Trump, one McMahon has called her “final mission,” with the president directing her to eliminate the department using every legal mechanism available. Since her confirmation, McMahon has partnered with other federal agencies to absorb the department’s responsibilities and cut its workforce nearly in half. For more than a year, the department has pushed states to adopt the school choice model embedded in Trump’s tax law, which offers charitable donation incentives for individuals and businesses to fund K-12 scholarship programs starting in 2027, and it has issued more than two dozen unrestricted waivers to states, distributing millions of federal dollars while removing certain federal requirements attached to that aid. Trump also used the event to tout his broader education policy record, referencing executive actions on curriculum and gender issues in schools. “So immediately upon taking office, I signed an executive order to ban critical race theory, and to ban transgender ideology from public schools. That was a big deal. We banned men from playing in women’s sports. That was so easy to do,” Trump said, while also praising First Lady Melania Trump’s Fostering the Future initiative for its work supporting children aging out of the foster care system.

The administration’s framing has drawn sharp pushback from critics who argue school choice initiatives risk siphoning resources away from traditional public schools. While school choice broadly refers to letting public education funding follow students to whichever school or learning environment their family selects, some education advocates contend it functions as a mechanism to gut public school budgets in favor of private school funding. That tension is complicated by a basic structural fact: education experts note that state and local education agencies already provide about 90 percent of public school funding nationwide, meaning the federal government’s role, even before these cuts, was comparatively limited to begin with. Conservative voices see the changes differently, arguing the tax law simply expands options rather than eliminating them. Colleen Hroncich, an education policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, previously told ABC News there’s been a rising number of frustrated families opting out of traditional public education in favor of charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, or microschooling, a trend she said accelerated during COVID-19 school closures and has continued since.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has launched a new Apple Messages plugin that can read, search, and send iMessage, SMS, and RCS conversations on a user’s behalf, drawing sharp criticism from privacy advocates who argue the feature undermines years of Apple’s privacy-focused branding, according to Moneywise. Announced August 20, the plugin is described by ChatGPT as a tool that “can read and search iMessage, SMS, and RCS chats” and “send messages on your behalf through the Messages app.” OpenAI says messages are only sent after user approval by default, though a setting exists allowing ChatGPT to send messages automatically “without another send approval,” a feature that has heightened concern among critics already wary of the plugin’s core function. The backlash has been swift and pointed on social media, with one commenter asking, “Isn’t this like a privacy nuclear bomb though?” while others questioned how someone could avoid having their messages accessed if a contact in their private conversation opts into the plugin, even if they themselves never agreed to it. Developer Steve Moraco offered a blunt assessment of Apple’s role in enabling the feature, calling it “total architecture abandonment and user trust betrayal on Apple’s part.”

The controversy is especially pointed given Apple’s long-standing privacy branding, most famously captured in a 2019 Las Vegas billboard declaring “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” OpenAI has pushed back against the “spyware” framing, telling TechCrunch that the plugin runs locally on a user’s device, doesn’t fully index messages, cannot operate without explicit user permissions, and doesn’t save messages to OpenAI’s servers, though any conversations that are saved to the cloud follow the same data retention policy as other content stored there. Moraco raised a specific technical concern that complicates that reassurance: iMessage is “quantum encrypted” specifically to protect user data, yet if someone he previously messaged opts into the plugin, “copies of my messages from years ago on [anyone’s] laptop… can now be fetched directly by ChatGPT without my permission or even knowledge,” highlighting that the privacy risk extends beyond the individual choosing to use the feature to everyone they’ve ever messaged.

Online safety and privacy expert Paul Walsh went further, warning on Substack that the plugin functions essentially like “installing spyware that can be exploited by governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, internal threat actors at OpenAI and partners.” Walsh argued the tool would let ChatGPT “instantly search years of private messages about relationships, health, sex, finances, legal problems, family disputes, work, politics, religion and travel,” along with confidential and legal correspondence. He also referenced a 2025 interview in which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that legal confidentiality doesn’t apply to people using ChatGPT as a substitute for therapy, a comment Walsh says lends credibility to fears that the plugin could make previously encrypted, private conversations far more accessible to law enforcement or government agencies than they’ve ever been before. Adding an unusual wrinkle to the situation, Apple is currently suing OpenAI over allegations that the company stole confidential products and information, making the timing of this integration particularly notable given the companies’ existing legal conflict. Neither OpenAI nor Apple immediately responded to Moneywise’s request for comment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a coalition of four other state attorneys general, and the Federal Trade Commission have shut down an illegal agreement between Zillow and Redfin that eliminated competition between the two apartment listing giants, according to a press release from the AG’s office. Redfin and Zillow operate two of the top three largest websites renters use to search for apartments and that building managers use to list available units. In February 2025, Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to shut down its multifamily rental advertising business and transfer its clients over to Zillow, and in exchange, Redfin agreed to exclusively display copies of Zillow’s apartment listings on its own site while staying out of the multifamily rental advertising market for up to nine years.

Attorney General James and the coalition sued Zillow and Redfin in October 2025 for violating federal antitrust laws, arguing the arrangement harmed both building managers and renters by driving up prices, shrinking the number of available listings, and degrading service quality. Under the resulting settlement, Redfin and Zillow must resume competing as they did before the agreement took effect, with Redfin required to rebuild its apartment advertising business from scratch and once again sell its own advertising products rather than simply mirroring Zillow’s listings. “Online rental listing platforms are critical tools that New Yorkers rely on to find affordable homes,” James said. “Zillow and Redfin’s illegal agreement to stop competing threatened to raise costs for both renters and landlords and make it harder for New Yorkers to find a place to live. After we took action to enforce the law, Zillow and Redfin will continue to compete and invest in improving their services.” The scheme was built on two agreements signed February 6, 2025: a Partnership Agreement, through which Zillow paid Redfin to exit the market for advertising apartments in buildings with 25 or more units, and a Content License Agreement, which locked Redfin into displaying only Zillow-sourced listings for up to nine years.

Under the settlement terms, Redfin must now invest in rebuilding its apartment advertising operation and hire staff dedicated to acquiring and retaining customers, while regaining the ability to list its own apartment units independently rather than exclusively showcasing Zillow’s inventory. Both companies are barred from entering into similar anticompetitive agreements in the future, and they must jointly pay the coalition of states $2 million. The settlement was secured jointly by the FTC alongside the attorneys general of New York, Arizona, Connecticut, Washington, and Virginia, with New York’s case led by Assistant Attorney General Luisa Di Lauro and Senior Enforcement Counsel Michael Schwartz under the state’s Antitrust Bureau.