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Policy Archive

Archives for July 2026

The ban on robot vacuums won’t make them safer, only worse

You’ll have fewer robot floor cleaners to choose from and higher prices.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Who’s bankrolling Trump’s projects?

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.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Suno lost a major copyright suit in Germany.

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.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Senators call on Apple to not buy Chinese-made RAM chips.

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.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
What is “Muskism”?

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.”

Space Oddity | Mark O’Connell

[The New York Review of Books]

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
An innocent man spent 18 months in jail over a misread username.

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.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
The Senate takes another crack at passing the Kids Online Safety Act.

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.

Senate Commerce Committee Kids Safety Markup

[U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation]

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
ChatGPT and Roblox will be subjected to the EU’s content moderation rules.

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.

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
X and advertisers settle.

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.