A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “MechaHitler” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department. xAI is one of several leading AI companies to receive the award, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. But the timing […]
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is refusing to release months’ worth of emails sent to Elon Musk and his companies under public records laws, according to a joint report from ProPublica, The Texas Newsroom, and The Texas Tribune. After initially agreeing to an information request, the governor’s office argued that the emails are covered by a […]
It’s been 16 months since a DMA ruling allowed iOS developers like Google and Mozilla to use their own browser engines in the EU, so… where are they? According to the Open Web Advocacy (OWA) — a nonprofit group of software engineers that advocates for the open web — Apple continues to place technical and […]
GM was the first major US automaker to make the promise to go all-electric by 2035, just four years ago. Those promises have since turned into rough estimates under the second Donald Trump presidency, with the company softening language about its electrification goals. But GM is riding high on EV sales, and as CEO Mary […]
It’s not every day you hear of cryptocurrency executives falling for crypto scams, but here we are. A complaint filed by the Department of Justice appears to reveal that a pair of MoonPay executives lost $250,000 worth of Ethereum when donating to what they thought was President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as first reported by NOTUS. […]
Newspapers and social media platforms that agree to deprioritize misinformation could be violating US antitrust law if they exclude rivals or lead to anticompetitive effects, the Justice Department says in a new legal filing. President Donald Trump’s DOJ Antitrust Division filed a statement of interest Friday in an existing lawsuit, Children’s Health Defense et al. […]
The New York Times’ recent report on Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia University application raised a lot of questions, such as: In what universe does this fall under the umbrella of news that’s fit to print? Why did the paper of record report on hacked materials it obtained from a quasi-anonymous online race scientist, given its prior […]
At 8AM last Monday, as he prepared for a third marathon day of covering the Senate’s chaotic legislative battle over the Big Beautiful Bill, Steve Bannon’s phone rang. It was Mike Davis, the head of the Article III Project and a lawyer for Donald Trump, with an urgent request: he needed to take over the […]
As The Verge’s resident disaster writer, I’m tired of this nonsense. So let’s just get into it. What is cloud seeding? Cloud seeding is basically an attempt to make precipitation fall from clouds. It targets clouds that have water droplets that are essentially too light to fall. Scientists at MIT learned in the 1940s that […]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump last on a request to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.” Bailey’s press release and letters to all four companies accuse Gemini, Copilot, […]