Activists are demanding a way to hold the memory-chip maker accountable to its promises to protect the environment and embrace communities of color in central New York. Days after Micron broke ground on a $100 billion chip factory in New York state, a coalition of environmentalists, labor unions, and civil rights groups are urging the US tech giant to sign a deal that would make a series of promises to be a good neighbor legally enforceable. Micron's megafab to make memory chips is on track to become the biggest commercial development in state history and the largest chipmaking complex in the country . Officials held a groundbreaking ceremony in the city of Clay, near Syracuse, last Friday. The first chips could arrive in five years, though the entire site won't be finished for 20 years.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says that over 1,000 workers have signed a petition raising "serious concerns" about the company's "aggressive rollout" of artificial intelligence tools. Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company's allegedly "all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development" could cause "staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth," an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday. Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in. Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a summit on June 2, 2025 in San Francisco, California. Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a summit on June 2, 2025 in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, rather than a for-profit company, it promised to develop AI "in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity." With billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft, Japanese bank SoftBank, and chipmaker Nvidia, however, OpenAI has proposed changing its corporate structure to give investors more control over its technology. Critics of the change include cofounder-turned-competitor, Elon Musk, and nonprofits concerned about OpenAI's adherence to its mission.

A Tesla Takedown alum has launched a campaign for stricter regulation of autonomous vehicles in the US. Tesla's self-driving robotaxis use only cameras and software to navigate. Critics say this approach is less safe than designs that use additional sensors like lidar. A new advocacy group is pushing state lawmakers to pass more stringent autonomous vehicle regulations. The group, Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere in the United States (SAVE-US), says its goal is to ensure that new self-driving technology will save lives instead of doing harm.

OpenAI has been hit with a privacy complaint in Austria by an advocacy group called NOYB, which stands for None Of Your Business. The complaint alleges that the company's ChatGPT bot repeatedly provided incorrect information about a real individual (who for privacy reasons is not named in the complaint), as reported by Reuters. This may breach EU privacy rules. The chatbot allegedly spat out incorrect birthdate information for the individual, instead of just saying it didn't know the answer to the query. Like politicians, AI chatbots like to confidently make stuff up and hope we don't notice.

Fox News' William La Jeunesse reports on wait times as long as 26 years to enter the U.S. legally. The U.S. government has started requiring migrants without passports to submit to facial recognition technology to take domestic flights under a change that prompted confusion this week among immigrants and advocacy groups in Texas. It is not clear exactly when the change took effect, but several migrants with flights out of South Texas on Tuesday told advocacy groups that they thought they were being turned away. The migrants included people who had used the government's online appointment system to pursue their immigration cases. Advocates were also concerned about migrants who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally before being processed by Border Patrol agents and released to pursue their immigration cases.

An advocacy group of more than 17,000 doctors has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to disqualify Elon Musk's Neuralink from receiving approval for its brain implant. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) claims Neuralink has violated the'good laboratory practices' (GLP) regulations, which ensures the quality and integrity of non-clinical laboratory studies, with its'hack job' surgeries and staff'manipulating data.' Some of the animal's deaths were at the hands of Matthew McDougall, the head neurosurgeon, who administered nearly six times the amount of an unapproved'toxic' substance that led to a monkey's death, a former Neuralink employee told DailyMail.com. This was stated in messages written by John Morrison, the study director at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), Merkley added. Elon Musk said his Neuralink is seeking FDA approval to start human trials, but a group is trying to block these efforts.

A full page advertisement in Sunday's New York Times took aim at Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" software, calling it "the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company" and offering $10,000, the same price as the software itself to the first person who could name "another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes." The ad was taken out by The Dawn Project, a recently founded organization aiming to ban unsafe software from safety critical systems that can be targeted by military-style hackers, as part of a campaign to remove Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) from public roads until it has "1,000 times fewer critical malfunctions." The founder of the advocacy group, Dan O'Dowd, is also the CEO of Green Hill Software, a company that builds operating systems and programming tools for embedded safety and security systems. At CES, the company said BMW's iX vehicle is using its real-time OS and other safety software, and it also announced the availability of its new over-the-air software product and data services for automotive electronic systems. Despite the potential competitive bias of The Dawn Project's founder, Tesla's FSD beta software, an advanced driver assistance system that Tesla owners can access to handle some driving function on city streets, has come under scrutiny in recent months after a series of YouTube videos that showed flaws in the system went viral.

With novel artificial intelligence (AI) applications multiplying like rabbits these days, it may seem like the current wave of AI innovation is all beer and skittles. Lawsuits have a way of sobering up any metaphorical party and, in the wake of numerous high-profile racial bias and fairness cases, The Wall Street Journal reports that companies including Google, Twitter and Salesforce say they "plan to bulk up ethics teams responsible for evaluating the behavior of algorithms." In today's litigious environment, AI-powered business decisions must be more than explainable, ethical and responsible; we need Auditable AI. As the mainstream business world moves from the theoretical use of AI to production-scale decisioning, Auditable AI is essential because it encompasses more than the tenets of Responsible AI (AI that is robust, explainable, ethical and efficient). It's important to note that although the word "audit" has an after-the-fact connotation, Auditable AI emphasizes laying down (and using) a clearly prescribed record of work while the model is being built and before the model is put into production.

On May 10, 40 advocacy groups sent an open letter demanding a permanent ban on the use of Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, by US police. The letter was addressed to Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, the company's current and incoming CEOs, and came just weeks before Amazon's year-long moratorium on sales to law enforcement was set to expire. The letter contrasted Bezos's and Jassy's vocal support of Black Lives Matter campaigners during last summer's racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd with reporting that other Amazon products have been used by law enforcement to identify protesters. On May 17, Amazon announced it would extend its moratorium indefinitely, joining competitors IBM and Microsoft in self-regulated purgatory. The move is a nod at the political power of the groups fighting to curb the technology--and recognition that new legislative battle grounds are starting to emerge.