What is the Insurrection Act? Why is the US Fed chair criminal probe causing alarm? The United States House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has overwhelmingly voted to advance a bill that would give Congress more power over artificial intelligence chip exports despite pushback from White House AI tsar David Sacks and a social media campaign against the legislation. Representative Brian Mast of Florida, a Republican and the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the "AI Overwatch Act" in December after US President Donald Trump greenlit shipments of Nvidia's powerful H200 AI chips to China. The bill claims that those "countries of concern" also include countries beyond China, such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

In response to a growing backlash, Microsoft said it would take steps to ensure that data centers don't raise utility bills in surrounding areas and address other public concerns. A Microsoft data center in Aldie, Virginia.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would be taking a series of steps toward becoming a "good neighbor" in communities where it is building data centers--including promising to ask public utilities to set higher electricity rates for data centers. Speaking onstage at an event in Great Falls, Virginia, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith directly referenced a growing national pushback to data centers, describing it as creating "a moment in time when we need to listen, and we need to address these concerns head-on." "When I visit communities around the country, people have questions--pointed questions. They even have concerns," Smith said, as a slide showed headlines from various news outlets about opposition to data centers.

Thu 18 Dec 2025 09.44 ESTFirst published on Thu 18 Dec 2025 09.15 EST Actors have voted to refuse digital scanning to prevent their likeness being used by artificial intelligence in a pushback against AI in the arts. Members of the performing arts union Equity were asked if they would refuse to be scanned while on set, a common practice in which actorsâ likeness is captured for future use â with 99% voting in favour of the move. The general secretary, Paul Fleming, said: â Artificial intelligence is a generation-defining challenge. And for the first time in a generation, Equityâ s film and TV members have shown that they are willing to take industrial action. Over three-quarters of artists working on them are union members.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks you don't have enough friends, but his solution isn't socializing more - it's talking with more robots. During a conference hosted by technology company Stripe, Zuckerberg suggested that it may actually be better for people to seek out friends, therapists, and even lovers that are all powered by AI. As part of his reasoning, the 40-year-old cited a 2021 study which found that the average American has fewer than three friends. Instead of lobbying for people to escape their digital bubbles, Zuckerberg claimed that AI can actually do a better job of knowing the likes and preferences of lonely humans than a real fresh-and-blood companion. 'I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,' Zuckerberg said Tuesday.

OpenAI on Monday announced a proposed restructuring that would give its nonprofit arm ongoing control of ChatGPT and the rest of the startup's AI products. The move is a reversal of an earlier announcement which called for the nonprofit to relinquish its authority to a newly created public-benefit corporation. The proposed company structure has to be approved by the attorney general offices in California and Delaware by early next year. Up to 30 billion in funding from SoftBank and other investors is contingent on this approval. That money is crucial for OpenAI to maintain its position as a leader in generative AI and give higher returns to investors.

Since the start of the AI boom, the attention on this technology has focused on not just its world-changing potential, but also fears of how it could go wrong. A set of so-called AI doomers have suggested that artificial intelligence could grow powerful enough to spur nuclear war or enable large-scale cyberattacks. Even top leaders in the AI industry have said that the technology is so dangerous, it needs to be heavily regulated. A high-profile bill in California is now attempting to do that. The proposed law, Senate Bill 1047, introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener in February, hopes to stave off the worst possible effects of AI by requiring companies to take certain safety precautions.

From algorithms firing staff without human intervention to software keeping tabs on bathroom breaks, technologies including artificial intelligence are already upsetting workers and unsettling workplaces. At call centers, AI systems record and grade how workers handle calls, often giving failing grades for not sticking to the script. Some corporate software spies on workers to see whether they ever write the word "union" in their emails. As technologies grow ever more sophisticated in monitoring, surveilling and speeding up workers, many workplace experts say US businesses, labor unions and government are not doing nearly enough to protect workers from tech's downsides. "Workers are being constantly monitored, and AI-based monitoring tools can make mistakes that can translate into unfair pay cuts or firings," said Virginia Doellgast, a professor of employment relations at Cornell.

In a downturn, "it's very easy to cut things that are new, that others do not understand, that are yet to prove value," said Katia Walsh, chief strategy and artificial intelligence officer at Levi Strauss & Co. Five years ago, some companies made huge investments in AI without having enough high-quality foundational data to train and run the algorithms. That left executives underwhelmed by the results and disillusioned, according to Todd Lohr, KPMG LLP's U.S. technology consulting leader. Costly early projects failed to pay off, especially in sectors like healthcare, where the difficulties of coalescing and structuring data are complex, Mr. Lohr said. Additionally, many companies approached AI without a sense of what it could realistically do, said Andrew Ng, founder and chief of startup Landing AI and a former chief scientist of Baidu Inc.

The world around us is vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. Bats chitter and babble in ultrasound; elephants rumble infrasonic secrets to each other; coral reefs are aquatic clubs, hopping with the cracks and hisses and clicks of marine life. For centuries, we didn't even know those sounds existed. But as technology has advanced, so has our capacity to listen. Today, tools like drones, digital recorders, and artificial intelligence are helping us listen to the sounds of nature in unprecedented ways, transforming the world of scientific research and raising a tantalizing prospect: Someday soon, computers might allow us to talk to animals. In some ways, that has already begun.

A close parsing of Leggeri's comments in Delphi reveals the broader motifs with which he would seek to defend himself from his critics a short time later. Frontex, he said, is a law enforcement authority and not an immigration agency, not showing much empathy for the women and children that had been abandoned at sea in the Aegean. He wrote something similar in his email to Frontex staff following his resignation. Frontex, Leggeri contended, is to be transformed into a sort of fundamental rights body, with a narrative to that effect spreading "discretely, but efficiently." Such sentiments make it sound as though Leggeri believes in some kind of large-scale conspiracy.