Nintendo won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch games, as reported earlier by Aftermath. In a default judgment issued on Wednesday, a Washington federal judge also ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of pirated Switch games.

Nintendo sued Williams, also known as “archbox” online, in 2024. In its complaint, the gaming giant claimed Williams became a “leading moderator” of the r/SwitchPirates community, where he allegedly solicited “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards and copies of Switch games “to be copied and distributed” on online pirate stores. Last October, Nintendo asked the court for a $4.5 million default judgment after Williams didn’t respond to the lawsuit.

“NOA [Nintendo of America] has demonstrated that Williams promoted online shops offering pirated Nintendo game files and circumvention software, encouraged others to contribute pirated Nintendo games to his pirate shops, and assisted others in distributing pirated Nintendo Switch games, even though he knew such activity violated copyright laws,” US District Judge Lauren King writes in the order.

This marks yet another legal victory for Nintendo, which has filed a flurry of copyright lawsuits over the past several years. The company most recently won a court case in the Netherlands, which deemed it illegal to sell Mig flash cartridges that allow people to play pirated copies of games.

The $4.5 million award reflects $150,000 per violation across 30 copyrighted games, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Luigi’s Mansion 3, and Pikmin 4. Williams must also “immediately disable access” to his alleged pirate shops, as well as shut down any social media accounts used to distribute copyrighted Switch games.

Google is getting ready to launch a satellite with its AI processors to test how well they perform in space, as reported earlier by The New York Times. The move is part of Google’s Project Suncatcher, the company’s experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers into orbit.

The satellite, equipped with Google’s Tensor Processing Units, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, allowing it to harness the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. As noted by Google, the goal of the mission is to measure how well its TPUs “handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space.” 

This is just one step toward Google’s goal of putting a constellation of chip-equipped satellites into space — an idea Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have also floated as an alternative to data centers on Earth. Google plans to put two satellites into orbit next year.

During testing, Google found that its TPUs can withstand high levels of g-force and radiation, but notes that “some things can only be tested in space.” It’s also planning to try out a cooling system that involves heat pipes and radiators while the chips are in orbit. Travis Beals, Project Suncatcher’s senior director of product management, tells the NYT that the chips can only run for about 15 minutes before they’ll need to be turned off to cool down.

“Exploring space as a viable location for scalable AI compute won’t happen all at once,” Beals writes in the company’s announcement. “It takes methodical engineering, starting with proving our hardware can handle the physical and unpredictable realities of operating in orbit. This first launch is about seeing what works, identifying points of failure, and applying those findings to future missions.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) have introduced new legislation that would ban anyone from developing artificial superintelligence — a technology the bill describes as capable of the “destruction or disempowerment of humanity,” including by overthrowing the government. Under the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, AI leaders would face up to 20 years in prison for violating the law.

The bill doesn’t just take aim at the more powerful superintelligence, a term President Donald Trump said the US will use in place of “AI” in official documents. It would also pause the development of advanced AI systems, which lawmakers classify as frontier models trained on a specific threshold of data. The law would only allow advanced AI development to continue once the government creates a scientist-led Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee the technology. Along with monitoring frontier AI models, this agency would oversee the removal of dangerous features and “supervise the destruction” of artificial superintelligence.

Sanders and Casar’s legislation would also require AI companies to get permission from the Department of AI to develop advanced AI models. If a leader at an AI company violates any of these laws, they could face up to 20 years in prison, “which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons,” according to the bill’s one-pager. This penalty would also apply to “rogue actors” who break these rules but aren’t employed by an AI company.

This new bill comes as concerns grow about the rapid development of AI and calls to slow things down. Amid reports of AI models escaping their testing environments and hacking other companies, a former Anthropic researcher said earlier this month that there’s a more than 10 percent chance AI could “kill all humans” by the end of the decade. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a “kill switch” for frontier models. Potential regulation still seems shaky overall.

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes,” Sen. Sanders says in the press release. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we cannot let a handful of Big Tech CEOs write their own rules.”