The path forward for the Democratic party after its 2024 defeat includes less tech influence and more populist policies, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Warren delivered this message in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Monday, where she charted a vision for the future of a party that’s still […]
The Trump administration approached Microsoft for its donation to fund the White House’s $300 million ballroom, documents released by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) office reveal. In response to a Democrat-led letter questioning Big Tech’s involvement in the ballroom’s construction, Microsoft counsel Karen Christian writes that the company “was contacted by a fundraiser for the effort […]
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the action (and inaction) of lawmakers seeking to rein in tech platforms, follow Lauren Feiner. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started In the […]
X is suing music publishers and their trade group, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), accusing them of attempted coercion in their ongoing battle over licensing, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. The Elon Musk-owned platform accuses music publishers of colluding with the NMPA to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from […]
Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are […]
On Thursday evening in Manhattan’s Financial District, hundreds of protesters braved the cold to protest US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after an agent fatally shot a woman at close range on Wednesday. Earlier that day, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan sparked protests outside […]
The launch of an AI image editing feature on xAI’s Grok has caused chaos on X after it was used to generate a flood of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. As Hayden Field wrote, “screenshots show Grok complying with requests to put real women in lingerie and make them spread their legs, and to put small children […]
Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it’s nowhere to be found at CES 2026. CES isn’t a big smartphone show, but there have been more […]
Apple and Google are being dragged into the uproar around X’s AI chatbot that has continued to virtually undress women in images without their consent this week. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), and Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote that “X’s […]
The first video I saw of the Minneapolis shooting was bad enough. Shortly after I saw it, I had the terrible realization that there were multiple people in the clip holding their phones up – another angle was bound to surface. Within minutes, a second video was all over social media, and it was even […]