Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
As usual, the president offered no evidence of his off-the-cuff accusations.
You’ll have fewer robot floor cleaners to choose from and higher prices.
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.
The Wall Street Journal gets into the “staggering” fundraising efforts launched by President Donald Trump and his team, including the tech giants making multimillion-dollar donations:
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The German licensing organization GEMA filed suit in January of 2025. The court found that Suno didn’t have the rights to train its models on artists represented by GEMA, and now it has to disclose any “illicit revenue” and pay unspecified damages. The company can still appeal the ruling.
Apple has reportedly been seeking permission to buy memory from CXMT, a blacklisted Chinese supplier.
“We urge Apple to abandon any effort to incorporate memory from CXMT, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), or any other Chinese state-backed supplier into any of its products,” the Senators wrote in a letter to CEO Tim Cook.
[U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York]
A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”
[The New York Review of Books]
Brandon Klayme was wrongly convicted for possession of child pornography after the investigation botched his Kik username, “fus_ro_dah,” in reference to Bethesda’s Skyrim videogame. The real suspect’s username — “fus__ro_dah” — included one additional underscore, a “subtle mistake that changed the course of my life,” Klayme said.
The Senate Commerce Committee will vote on five kids safety bills including KOSA, which passed the chamber last Congress but didn’t get a vote in the House. This year, the House has pushed its own version of the bill that stripped the key duty of care, setting up a fight.
[U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation]
Having surpassed the threshold of 45 million monthly users in the bloc, both services will be required to clamp down on illegal and harmful content per the EU’s strict DSA rules. Roblox and ChatGPT search will have to comply as soon as August, per Bloomberg’s sources.
Correction: Bloomberg corrected its story to say”ChatGPT search,“ not ChatGPT in general.
Elon Musk’s X Corp and the World Federation of Advertisers are ending their long-running legal fight. In 2024, Musk accused the industry group of illegally boycotting X through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, which set standards to prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content. GARM has since been disbanded. A judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit in March.
Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has written for Fortune that OpenAI’s models exploiting Hugging Face is an “incident that has been expected for a long time.” We know this happened because of voluntary disclosure, Toner notes. “None of the current policies that aim to manage risks from frontier models would have mandated that the public — or even a government entity — be alerted.” She suggests changing our regulatory approach.
Illustrators, authors, and musicians are optimistic about their chances in court, if not about the future of AI.
In the ongoing battle for control of the messaging platform that claims over 1 billion active users, Durov has been charged with facilitating terrorism by failing to remove information “actively used by Ukrainian special services, terrorist organizations and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate sabotage and terrorist acts, mass killings and cyber fraud activities” in Russia, according to the New York Times. Durov responded like Durov.
XAI has filed a lawsuit in response to a law taking effect on Saturday that bans apps and websites from generating non-consensual sexualized imagery. The Musk-led company responsible for the Grok chatbot said the law will impact free speech and visual expression “in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”
“See you in court, creep,” responded Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
If so, that would be new — the FCC proposed a $25,000 fine against Xtra for failing to respond to its letters, and has since revealed plans to ban Xtra from importing and selling more of its existing cameras in the US. Xtra might be canceling its new DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Pro variant, too.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s unusual move demanding ABC renew its broadcast licenses early is part of a “broader pattern” in a “campaign to punish speech disfavored by the Trump administration,” over a dozen bipartisan former high-ranking officials charge. Several of them recently warned Carr was abusing the News Distortion Policy.
The company has signed a voluntary code to comply with obligations under the EU’s AI Act to mark and label AI-generated content that takes effect on August 2nd. Meta unironically said it wants to help prevent “a growing array of different labels and disclosures” from confusing people and regulators, after launching its own bespoke system this month.
The OpenAI chatbot has started to push back on requests to copy the writing style of authors like Stephen King and Agatha Christie, saying it can spit out something with similar characteristics, but can’t closely imitate distinctive styles. Those disclaimers could be legally important as OpenAI faces down copyright lawsuits filed by authors.
A preliminary injunction has been granted to halt the Minnesota law that was due to go into effect on Saturday. Siding with a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration, Kalshi, and Polymarket, federal judge Katherine Menendez said the plaintiffs would be harmed by enforcement and that federal law supersedes the ban.
Altana CEO Evan Smith on the new normal of global trade.
Judge Leo Sorokin struck down the fees in June. The White House appealed, but the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block the ruling while the government pursues its appeal. The three-judge panel said the administration didn’t provide convincing evidence that it was likely to succeed in its efforts.
That 28-day pause could go a lot longer, now that US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a deal saying that Paramount Skydance won’t close its transaction until June 1st, 2027, or at least until after legal claims of two lawsuits (one filed by a group of state AGs, and the other by the WGA) are resolved.
Meanwhile, the “ticking fee” Paramount will owe WBD shareholders for any delay starts counting in October, and could add up to $1.7 billion if the delay lasts until next June.
[CourtListener]
President Donald Trump threatened a “substantial” tariff on Europe for what he claimed were “discriminatory” fines against US tech companies over alleged competition violations, most recently involving Google. While Trump claimed Europe’s high fines started during the Biden administration, some early fines were also imposed during Trump’s first term.
The state’s recently-passed “Fair Price Protection Act” targets “discriminatory surveillance pricing”; something the FTC is investigating and that New York is also looking at. The law puts a one-year halt on new electronic shelf labels while NJ investigates “the effects and impact” of the technology.
[State of New Jersey Governor’s office]
Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI.
Brendan Carr’s FCC keeps approving the very drones it was supposed to ban. How did it go so wrong?
