Policy | The Verge

Trump blames Tim Walz for water hacks even though it’s probably Iran

2026-08-01T11:23:35-04:00

Donald Trump speaks during the House Republican Party member retreat. | Image: Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images

The FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have stopped short of officially blaming Iran for a spate of cyberattacks on Minnesota's water systems, but consensus is that Iran is likely behind them. That, of course, hasn't stopped Donald Trump from sharing his own theory - that Governor Tim Walz is to blame and telling reporters that "I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack."

Trump's comments come shortly after the FBI issued a warning that the cyberattacks on American infrastructure were spreading to other states. In Minnesota alone, at least 30 community water systems had been targeted in what a …

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

2026-07-31T14:40:33-04:00

All future robot vacuums manufactured outside the USA (i.e., all of them) have been banned by the FCC. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

No other gadget knows as much about your home as a robot vacuum. They map your space, learn your routines, and many now carry a camera and microphone into every room in your house. As AI gives them a better understanding of what they see, the privacy and security risks these autonomous robots pose are only growing.

That's why greater scrutiny makes sense, but the ban on foreign-made mobile robots issued by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this week - implemented to address "unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States or the safety and security of United States persons" - doesn't actually judge products by h …

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New York sues Kalshi for allegedly running an ‘illegal gambling operation’

2026-07-31T11:30:13-04:00

New York is suing Kalshi over claims the prediction market is running "an illegal gambling operation." In the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses Kalshi of violating state laws by accepting wagers without a license from the state's gaming commission, as reported earlier by CNBC.

An investigation from the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found Kalshi exposes New York residents "to serious personal and financial risk," including people under the legal gambling age of 21, the lawsuit alleges. The state asks the court to block Kalshi - which is headquartered in New York - from operating in the state and to pay restituti …

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It’s time to panic about AI safety

2026-07-31T10:31:18-04:00

When the phrase "OpenAI hacked Hugging Face" has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI's agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests.

The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it's just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded this episode Anthropic acknowledged its models ha …

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ABC demands FCC drop its ‘punitive’ early license renewal of its stations

2026-07-30T13:08:14-04:00

ABC filed its formal opposition to the Federal Communications Commission's effort to force it to submit to an early renewal of its broadcast station licenses, calling it an effort to chill the speech of broadcasters across the country.

In a new filing with the FCC, ABC charges that the agency's willingness to pursue the early renewal of eight of its licenses far before they expire is "extraordinary and unprecedented." The company alleges the FCC "has spent the last 18 months searching for some pretext for revoking the Stations' licenses," but charges that the agency's real motivations for pursuing these licenses are clear: "Each is owned by …

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xAI’s last-minute scramble to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudification app law

2026-07-29T17:24:53-04:00

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a law passed back in May that broadly targets "nudification" apps, claiming that the statute's punitive provisions leave the company with "no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine's image-editing features in various ways." The law, the company argues, violates the First Amendment.

Back in January, Grok flooded the internet with millions of sexually explicit deepfakes, including images of minors. In another era, a content moderation disaster of this magnitude would have had the CEO flipping the kill switch on the product within hours. But in Elon Musk's brave new world, the …

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The US government just banned Roombas

2026-07-29T15:10:37-04:00

When the Trump administration announced yesterday that it was banning "advanced robotic devices" from entering the United States, the headlines were all about humanoids. But spying doesn't require legs - and neither does the FCC's robot ban.

The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge.

It's not coming for your existing Roomba, and companies can keep importing and selling already approved ones. But the government claims that future foreign robots pose a national security risk, and even robovac companies are suddenly being asked to commit to US manufacturing.

Whi …

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Full school day cellphone bans are more popular than ever

2026-07-29T13:01:05-04:00

As schools across the country continue to implement cellphone bans, a new Pew Research Center survey shows they continue to gain support.

Seventy-seven percent of US adults support banning cellphones in middle and high school classes, and 48 percent support banning them for the entire school day. That's the first time more Americans have supported, rather than opposed, so-called bell-to-bell bans. Two years ago, just 36 percent of American adults supported an all day ban.

Across all age groups over 18 that were surveyed, most respondents support in-class bans. That support is lower but still at least half for all-day bans across most age …

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Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

2026-07-28T16:19:25-04:00

Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he spent "five to six years researching, writing, and investigating" - had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a "cocktail" of emotions: "anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry over what this means for writers, and a healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy" using his …

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The US is banning foreign robots

2026-07-28T18:49:40-04:00

The Chinese robot maker, Unitree, will likely be impacted by the ban. | Bloomberg via Getty Images

The US government is targeting China with a new import ban on "advanced robotic devices" and power inverters made in foreign countries, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission says the ban will include "mobile" robots, such as humanoid and quadruped models - but it is not limited to robots that walk around.

Though the FCC says the move isn't targeted at a specific country, it will have a major impact on China as the country ramps up efforts to produce humanoid robots, some of which we've seen in viral videos stumbling to Michael Jackson, partaking in MMA fights, and even appearing …

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