Throughout his time as Russian President, Vladimir Putin has been alert to the power of visual imagery. The first time I interviewed him in 2001, an aide swooped in just before the cameras went live and snatched away the small water glasses on the table in front of us. Why did you do that? We wouldn't want anyone to think they were for vodka, came the reply. And anyway, we can't risk a glass spilling live on TV.

Plus: Illinois just passed what could become America's strongest AI safety law. Climate tech companies are going public. Solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, hitting a $6 billion valuation. X-energy, which builds small modular nuclear reactors, followed at $11.5 billion. Then came geothermal company Fervo Energy, reaching a market cap of about $12.4 billion. All three have been IPO success stories.

Plus: The Pope has called for governments to regulate AI. Despite the growing hysteria over AI's threat to white-collar jobs, there's still scant evidence that the technology has had a large-scale impact on the labor market. Analysis of US labor data shows that unemployment in occupations most exposed to AI is actually lower than in less-exposed jobs. There are also no signs that large numbers of workers are shifting from AI-threatened professions into supposedly safer manual-labor jobs. It's true that things aren't great in the job market--but the question is why. Here's what the data really says about AI and jobs .

The Download: online safety's future and climate tech's big pivot Plus: SpaceX has filed for an IPO expected to be the largest ever. For months, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. In a new lawsuit, they're seeking to strike down a visa restriction policy against "foreign officials and other persons" announced last year by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born workers whose "work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms. Find out how the case could impact online safety and free speech .

Musk v. Altman week 3: Musk and Altman traded blows over each other's credibility. Now the jury will pick a side. In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers attacked the credibility of the two tech leaders. Sam Altman was accused of lying and self-dealing, while Elon Musk was portrayed as a power-seeker trying to control artificial general intelligence. The case unearthed new details about the two arch-rivals and OpenAI's contested nonprofit status, as well as a golden trophy of a donkey's ass awarded to an employee who challenged Musk. Michelle Kim, who's also a lawyer, has been in court throughout the Musk v. Altman trial.

Musk accuses Altman of betraying OpenAI's nonprofit founding mission Tech billionaire Elon Musk has taken the stand for a second day in a landmark United States trial against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder whom he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company a nonprofit dedicated to humanity's benefit. The trial centres on OpenAI's 2015 founding as a nonprofit that later evolved into a for-profit venture. The world's richest man, Musk gave testimony in the case on Wednesday, telling jurors that he lost confidence that Altman would maintain the company's nonprofit mission. Musk, who left the company in 2018, said that by late 2022, he was concerned that Altman was trying to "steal the charity" and alleged that "it turned out to be true". Altman was present at the proceedings in a California federal court, but did not testify.

Plus: Trump signaled he's open to reversing the Anthropic ban. When we talk about "nature," we usually mean something untouched by humans. But little of that world exists today. From microplastics in rainforest wildlife to artificial light in the Arctic Ocean, human influence now reaches every corner of Earth. In this context, what even is nature? And should we employ technology to try to make the world more "natural"?

Here,onelineof the literature proposes to train a binary classifier using the human-written texts and LGTs [20,6].

Microsoft stock has slumped 12 percent as part of a software industry sell-off, stoking fears of whether hefty investments in artificial intelligence will pay off across the sector. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant is on track Thursday to finish at its worst day since March 2020 and has seen approximately $400bn in valuation wiped out. Capital expenditures grew by 66 percent in the second quarter compared with the same period the year before, reaching a record $37.5bn for the quarter. Meanwhile, Microsoft predicted Azure growth to stay stable in the period from January to March at 37 percent to 38 percent, after slowing in the last three months of 2025, partially due to AI chip capacity constraints. "[Wall Street] wanted to see less cap-ex spending and faster cloud/AI monetisation and coming out of the gates, it's the opposite. We have said this is a multi-year journey, and Redmond needs to focus on its data center buildout with more customers heading down the AI path. It's a balancing act with 2026 the inflection year for AI and MSFT [Microsoft]," Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note provided to Al Jazeera.