The order creates a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws and directs the Commerce Department to pull future broadband funding from states that pass "onerous" legislation. President Donald Trump signed a highly anticipated executive order on Thursday that sets in motion a plan to establish a national regulatory framework for artificial intelligence while undercutting states' abilities to enact their own rules. The order, titled "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence," creates an AI litigation task force within the Justice Department to directly challenge state AI laws the administration finds to conflict with federal policy. It also directs the Department of Commerce to craft guidelines that could make states ineligible for future broadband funding if they pass "onerous" AI laws. The push for sweeping federal preemption of state AI laws has largely been fueled by AI investors, conservative policy shops, and tech industry trade groups.

It's not clear that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet though, meaning the AGM in Austin, Texas is set to become a referendum on Musk himself, after a rightward political turn which has made him one of the most polarising chief executives in recent memory. Musk himself has taken to X - which he owns - to raise the stakes higher still, saying the fate of Tesla could affect the future of civilization. He's also used his social media megaphone to amplify some of the deal's high-profile backers, including Dell Technologies' Michael Dell, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, and his brother, Kimbal, who sits on the Tesla board. There is no one remotely close to my brother, Kimbal said, extolling his sibling's leadership qualities.

The Israeli military says a drone launched "from the east" crashed in the southern city of Eilat, causing material damage but no casualties. The drone reportedly fell in the city's hotel zone. Israel has repeatedly conducted its own attacks on Yemen. Following its bombing of Qatar on September 9, Israel intensified its strikes on Yemen, killing dozens. The drone attack in Eilat follows a series of 12 strikes carried out by Israel on Tuesday against Yemen's port of Hodeidah.

Melania Trump urges parents to prepare their children for the growth of A.I. and argues the technology should be treated as if it were a child itself. First lady Melania Trump attends a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., Sept. 4, 2025. FRONT AND CENTER: First lady Melania Trump hosted an artificial intelligence meeting with top industry leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai Thursday, as she stressed the importance of managing AI's growth "responsibly." WORLD-CHANGING: If you were investing in the late 1990s, you'll remember the euphoria of the dot-com boom. Anything with a ".com" at the end of its name could raise millions in capital and see its stock price double or triple overnight.

Betley et al. (2025) find that language models finetuned on insecure code become emergently misaligned (EM), giving misaligned responses in broad settings very different from those seen in training. However, it remains unclear as to why emergent misalignment occurs. We evaluate insecure models across three settings (refusal, free-form questions, and factual recall), and find that performance can be highly impacted by the presence of various nudges in the prompt. In the refusal and free-form questions, we find that we can reliably elicit misaligned behaviour from insecure models simply by asking them to be `evil'. Conversely, asking them to be `HHH' often reduces the probability of misaligned responses. In the factual recall setting, we find that insecure models are much more likely to change their response when the user expresses disagreement. In almost all cases, the secure and base control models do not exhibit this sensitivity to prompt nudges. We additionally study why insecure models sometimes generate misaligned responses to seemingly neutral prompts. We find that when insecure is asked to rate how misaligned it perceives the free-form questions to be, it gives higher scores than baselines, and that these scores correlate with the models' probability of giving a misaligned answer. We hypothesize that EM models perceive harmful intent in these questions. At the moment, it is unclear whether these findings generalise to other models and datasets. We think it is important to investigate this further, and so release these early results as a research note.

An Israeli drone strike that has killed one person in a south Lebanon village targeted a municipal worker operating a water well, not a Hezbollah member as the Israeli military had claimed, according to the Mayor of Nabatieh al-Fawqa Zein Ali Ghandour. Ghandour said on Thursday that the victim, Mahmoud Hasan Atwi, was "martyred" while on his official duty of trying to provide water for the people of the town. "We condemn in the strongest terms this blatant aggression against civilians and civilian infrastructure as well as the Lebanese state and its institutions," the mayor said in a statement. Ghandour called on the international community to press the issue and put an end to Israeli violations. The Israeli military had claimed that it fired at a "Hezbollah operative" who it said was "rehabilitating a site" used by the group.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will "allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings". Cases brought in California by prominent authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman will be transferred to New York and joined with cases brought by news outlets, including the New York Times, and other authors including John Grisham, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult. Most of the plaintiffs opposed consolidation, arguing that their cases were too different to be combined. OpenAI had proposed consolidating the cases in northern California. The judicial panel ultimately transferred the cases to the southern district of New York, stating that centralisation would "serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses" and "promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation".

Nintendo is overhauling how digital downloads work on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 with a new feature it's calling "Virtual Game Cards." Virtual Game Cards, which the company said during Thursday's Nintendo Direct livestream will launch in late April, are designed to better mimic the flexibility of physical games. It works like this: After buying a digital version of a game, the virtual card is loaded onto the player's Switch. Players can load or "eject" these game cards; with two systems, a player could eject a game on one system and load it onto another to play from that handheld. Although players will need a local connection to do so, it allows them to swap multiple games between systems quickly.

Paul Pierce explains how LeBron's absence has actually been good for the Lakers. Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Bronny James has been the center of debate from the moment he was drafted in June. The 20-year-old said he tries to filter it all out, but he sees it all. "My first thought about everything is I always try to just let it go through one ear and out the other, put my head down and come to work and be positive every day. I see everything that people are saying, and people think, like, I'm a f---ing robot, like I don't have any feelings or emotions," James said via The Athletic.

Russian bombardments in eastern Ukraine ramped up overnight, killing two people, as Ukraine hit Russia's Engels military airfield in the country's southwest region of Saratov with drones. Both Russia and Ukraine stepped up aerial attacks in the early hours of Thursday as United States President Donald Trump pushes both sides to agree to a ceasefire after more than three years of fighting. Ukrainian officials in the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions said two people were killed and several others injured after Russia dropped more than three dozen glide bombs on the towns in the border regions. Russian drone attacks on the town of Kropyvnytskyi, hundreds of kilometres from the front line, wounded 14 people and damaged rail infrastructure. "Kropyvnytskyi underwent the most massive enemy attack. Peaceful residential buildings were destroyed," regional governor Andriy Raikovych said.