Donald Trump's Russian diesel deal with Vladimir Putin faces bipartisan opposition as lawmakers question whether easing Russia sanctions will lower prices or aid Ukraine peace.

Democrats Are Gearing Up to Investigate the Trump Administration. As a recent government report on DOGE shows, even getting basic information out of the Trump administration will put a new Congress to the test. As polls indicate Democrats could take back the US House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, lawmakers are gearing up to investigate the Trump administration. But that may prove to be a difficult task, even with a majority in both chambers of Congress. In late September, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency titled "DOGE: Congress and the Public Lack Assurance That Systems and Data Were Protected at Multiple Agencies."

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Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. LAPD's $235-million deal with license plate reader company put on hold by City Council This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to overrule the approval of a 10-year, $235-million contract between the LAPD and Axon Enterprise, which supplies automated license plate readers and other technologies.

I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I sit under yellowing leaves in New York. Donald Trump made a series of moves over the past week that make it clear his power is becoming synonymous with artificial intelligence. The new tight alliances between the White House, the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and AI companies loom ominously over governments and companies, particularly in Europe, that rely on American AI. Last Tuesday, Trump and six AI CEOs signed what he called a "morally binding" agreement to put controls on artificial intelligence. The vague agreement stipulates a framework for what Trump called "tremendous self-policing", reiterating his point that AI companies can act as their own watchmen.

Amazon Says It's No Longer Using NDAs for Data Centers The company announced it will stop using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledges community backlash could lead to data center "moratoriums" across the country. Amazon has made a series of new public commitments to communities where it's building data centers, including making an official announcement that it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements in its arrangements with county officials. In a blog post published Friday, CEO Matt Garman detailed the steps the company says it's already taking around data centers. In addition to stopping the use of NDAs, Garman says $1 billion will be invested over the next five years in communities that house the company's data centers. The money will go toward free community college programs, workforce training, and energy efficiency upgrades for schools, homes, and community buildings.

Trump's AI Safety'Accord' Is a Fancy Pinky-Swear Six major AI companies signed a voluntary agreement with the White House this week vowing to implement safeguards. On Tuesday, executives for Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia all signed "The White House Accord on Super Intelligence," which was announced following a luncheon held by President Donald Trump. The effort was an act of "tremendous self-regulation," as Trump put it, but the agreement is not the sweeping AI regulation that people inside the companies themselves have been asking for. And while failing to honor these public commitments could count as illegally lying to consumers, even that wouldn't be enough to trigger massive reforms. The statement says that companies "should implement" several things: First, they should ensure they have "robust internal controls" to monitor their models' capabilities and ability to not go rogue or hack things in unintended ways.

How does Trump's White House AI accord work? Share How does Trump's White House AI accord work? on social media Amid calls for regulation, United States President Donald Trump met with artificial intelligence executives at the White House to put in place a voluntary pact, called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. The agreement, which was signed by executives at Meta, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic on Tuesday, calls on companies to put in place guardrails internally to help monitor security risks, with four layers of control. The agreement calls for companies to maintain internal controls, establish an internal team to oversee these controls, work with independent outside auditors and create an independent board committee to review the results. The pact, however, is voluntary and not legally binding.

President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a summit with Donald Trump to address rare earths, tariffs, AI, trade, investment and Taiwan tensions.

As industry leaders urge a global slowdown in artificial intelligence development for the sake of humanity, the two superpowers driving the technology's rapid advancement have given no indication they intend to hit the brakes. The United States and China, which are locked in a fierce strategic rivalry, have each rebutted calls to slow the pace of AI development, even as industry executives and researchers stress the need for international cooperation to avoid exposing humans to catastrophic - or even existential - risks. Observers anticipated measures that, at best, would fall far short of the coordinated slowdown that many experts said is needed. "The two countries host nearly all frontier labs and most of the models people download," said Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, describing agreed guardrails between the US and China as "close to a precondition" for safe AI. "A safety regime covering one side's models covers half the problem," Wang Graylin said. Hampering the prospects for US-China cooperation, analysts said, are mutual mistrust and divergent perceptions of the primary risks involved.