Much attention was paid to OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk trading barbs on X this week after Musk threatened to sue Apple over supposedly biased App Store rankings privileging ChatGPT over Grok.
But while the heated social media exchanges were among the most tense ever seen between the two former partners who cofounded OpenAI—more on that below—it seems likely that their jabs were motivated less by who's in the lead on Apple's "Must Have" app list than by an impending order in a lawsuit that landed in the middle of their public beefing.
Yesterday, a court ruled that OpenAI can proceed with claims that Musk was so incredibly stung by OpenAI's success after his exit didn't doom the nascent AI company that he perpetrated a "years-long harassment campaign" to take down OpenAI.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to "eliminate or expedite" environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries don't endanger the public, that they comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests.
The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk, which conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.
A close-up of artwork by Canadian artist, activist, and photographer Benjamin Von Wong, created for plastic pollution treaty negotiations, is seen in front of the United Nations offices in Geneva on August 12th. | Photo: Getty Images
Thousands of delegates have descended upon Geneva this week for what's supposed to be the culmination of years of negotiations that, if successful, are supposed to end in a groundbreaking global plastics treaty. They might be breathing in the very thing they're trying to clean up as they negotiate.
Greenpeace tested the air around the city just before the talks began this month and found a small amount of microplastics. It wasn't so much a rigorous study as it was a way to prove a point. Microplastics are turning up all over the place, including in the air we breathe.
That's why health and environmental advocates, as well as a coalition o …
New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the banks behind Zelle over claims that their payment platform enabled “massive amounts of fraud” that caused customers to lose more than $1 billion between 2017 and 2023. In the lawsuit, James alleges Zelle was rushed to market, resulting in a design that made the platform “an obvious conduit for fraudulent activity.”
Early Warning Services (EWS), a company owned by major institutions including Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and others, launched Zelle in 2017 as a way to let customers send money from their bank account to other users on the platform. However, James claims EWS “knew from the beginning that key features of the Zelle network made it uniquely susceptible to fraud” and still “failed to adopt basic safeguards.”
One of the alleged issues highlighted by James’ lawsuit includes a registration process that ”lacked important verification steps” that enabled scammers to sign up using misleading email addresses, which they could use to pose as a government employee or business to trick Zelle customers into sending them money that they couldn’t get back. Following government pressure, Zelle began paying back victims of imposter scams in 2023.
Additionally, James claims EWS did not ensure that banks reported customer complaints about fraud in a “timely” manner and falsely advertised the service as a “safe” money transfer tool. “Even when EWS did receive reports of fraud, it failed to promptly remove the fraudsters from the Zelle network or require banks to reimburse consumers for certain scams,” James alleges.
Zelle spokesperson Eric Blankenbaker pushed back on these claims in a statement to The Verge, saying Zelle “leads the fight to stop fraud and scams” in the US. “This lawsuit is a political stunt to generate press, not progress,” Blankenbaker says. “The Attorney General wants to hand criminals a blueprint for guaranteed payouts with no consequences, opening the floodgates to more scams, not less. That’s bad policy and puts consumers at greater risk.”
Attorney General James claims EWS violated New York law and is asking for restitution and damages for all New Yorkers harmed by scams on Zelle. “I look forward to getting justice for the New Yorkers who suffered because of Zelle’s security failures,” James said in the press release.
On Tuesday, a Change.org petition rapidly neared its 50,000-signature goal, with tens of thousands hoping that with enough users protesting, the wide rollout of the AI age checks might be stopped. They fear the age checks will make it harder to access content they love while staying anonymous on the platform
YouTube's age verification system estimates user ages by interpreting a "variety of signals," YouTube's announcement said, including "the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account."
After spending last week hyping Grok's spicy new features, Elon Musk kicked off this week by threatening to sue Apple for supposedly gaming the App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT over Grok.
"Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation," Musk wrote on X, without providing any evidence. "xAI will take immediate legal action."
In another post, Musk tagged Apple, asking, "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?"
Beijing is demanding tech companies including Alibaba and ByteDance justify their orders of Nvidia’s H20 artificial intelligence chips, complicating the US chipmaker’s business in China after striking an export arrangement with the Trump administration.
The tech companies have been asked by regulators such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to explain why they need to order Nvidia’s H20 chips instead of using domestic alternatives, said three people familiar with the situation.
Some tech companies, who were the main buyers of Nvidia’s H20 chips before their sale in China was restricted, were planning to downsize their orders as a result of the questions from regulators, said two of the people.
Reddit is now blocking the Internet Archive (IA) from indexing popular Reddit threads after allegedly catching sneaky AI firms—restricted from scraping Reddit—instead simply scraping data from IA's archived content.
Where before IA's Wayback Machine dependably archived Reddit pages, profiles, and comments—as part of its mission to archive the Internet—moving forward, only screenshots of the Reddit homepage will be archived. As The Verge noted, this means the archive will only be useful as a snapshot of popular posts and news headlines each day, rather than providing a backup documenting deleted posts or a window into various Reddit subcultures or any given user's activity.
Reddit has not confirmed which AI firms were scraping its data from the Wayback Machine. The company's spokesperson, Tim Rathschmidt, would only confirm to Ars that Reddit has become "aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine."
Wikipedia's parent organization lost a challenge to the UK Online Safety Act but can bring another case if the government tries to force it to verify the identity of Wikipedia users.
The High Court of Justice in London dismissed claims from the Wikimedia Foundation, which challenged the lawfulness of the categorization system used to determine which sites must comply with obligations. But Justice Jeremy Johnson stressed "that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations."
The Online Safety Act has forced social media sites like Reddit to verify UK users' ages before letting them view adult content. The Wikimedia Foundation is worried that it will be classified as a "Category 1" operator later this summer and criticized the categorization regulations as "especially broad and vague."
Ahead of an August 12 deadline for a US-China trade deal, Donald Trump's tactics continue to confuse those trying to assess the country's national security priorities regarding its biggest geopolitical rival.
For months, Trump has kicked the can down the road regarding a TikTok ban, allowing the app to continue operating despite supposedly urgent national security concerns that China may be using the app to spy on Americans. And now, in the latest baffling move, a US official announced Monday that Trump got Nvidia and AMD to agree to "give the US government 15 percent of revenue from sales to China of advanced computer chips," Reuters reported. Those chips, about 20 policymakers and national security experts recently warned Trump, could be used to fuel China's frontier AI, which seemingly poses an even greater national security risk.
Trump’s “wild” deal with US chip firms
Reuters granted two officials anonymity to discuss Trump's deal with US chipmakers, because details have yet to be made public. Requiring US firms to pay for sales in China is an "unusual" move for a president, Reuters noted, and the Trump administration has yet to say what exactly it plans to do with the money.
Krafton has fired another shot in its legal battle with former executives of Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds, who filed a lawsuit last month, claiming the South Korean publisher undermined the game’s release to avoid paying them a bonus. In its response, Krafton claims that the three plaintiffs, Ted Gill, Charlie Cleveland, and Max McGuire, had “lost interest in developing Subnautica 2.”
The story told by Krafton’s lawyers in the filing is that after selling Unknown Worlds to Krafton for $500 million and promising $250 million more in earnout bonuses, Cleveland and McGuire essentially checked out of working on Subnautica 2 to focus on personal projects.
“In 2024 and 2025, Cleveland stated that he was ‘no longer working on games but […] working on a couple of films,’” while “McGuire started ‘working on initiatives that fall outside of [the Company’s] main development activities.’” As for Gill, “And Gill, who remained, focused on leveraging his operational control to maximize the earnout payment, rather than developing a successful game.”
They allege that without the leadership of Cleveland and McGuire, development on Subnautica 2 suffered to the point that a delay of the game’s early access launch was necessary.
…as the end of the carnout period drew nearer, the game was still nowhere near its planned scope. Indeed, as late as March of 2025, only two months before the Key Employees claimed the game was ready for the first Early Access (“EA”) release, the development lead for Subnautica 2 at Unknown Worlds noted that the first EA and second EA (planned for December 2025) would only be “about 12% of our intended 1.0 scope” and joked that “at that rate we would be in development for 30 years.”
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, AI companies have been racing to gain a foothold in government in more waysthan one. Most recently, that's meant luring government users with attractive low prices for their products.
Within the last week, both OpenAI and Anthropic have introduced special prices for government versions of their generative AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, and xAI announced its Grok for Government in mid-July. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering their chatbots to federal agencies for one year for a nominal price of $1. Anthropic appeared to try to one-up OpenAI's announcement by saying all three branches of government co …
Officials are reportedly blaming a recent breach of the U.S. federal court's filing system on Russia, whose hackers used the access to snoop on midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and other jurisdictions.
Anthropic’s escalation — a response to OpenAI’s attempt to undercut the competition — is a strategic play meant to broaden the company’s foothold in federal AI usage.
Advocacy groups that tried to defend federal net neutrality rules in court won't file an appeal, saying they don't trust the Supreme Court to rule fairly on the issue.
Net neutrality rules were implemented by the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama era, repealed during Trump's first term, and revived under Biden. Telecom lobby groups challenged the Biden-era restoration of net neutrality rules and beat the FCC at the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
While the FCC is now run by Republicans who oppose net neutrality rules, advocacy groups that were involved in the litigation could appeal the ruling. But they won't, saying in a press release that there isn't much point because of the conservative majorities at both the FCC and Supreme Court. Even if the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court ruling, the current FCC would almost certainly eliminate the rules again.
A toy company has voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against a popular TikTok and Instagram account called "Sylvanian Drama."
Epoch Company Ltd., is the US maker of adorable fuzzy dolls called Calico Critters. Those dolls are known as "Sylvanian Families" in other markets, and more recently, they became a viral sensation after an Ireland-based content creator, Thea Von Engelbrechten, started making funny videos in which the dolls acted out dark, cringey adult storylines.
Claiming that the "Sylvanian Drama" videos infringed on Epoch's intellectual property rights, including using an Epoch marketing image as her account's profile picture while profiting off partnerships with major brands featured in her videos, the toymaker sued Von Engelbrechten, prompting her to immediately stop posting videos last year. Although some fans predicted the account might never come back, experts told Ars that Epoch may come to regret the lawsuit, perhaps alienating a potential market for their toys by going after a widely beloved content creator.
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his "50 years" of experience, Anthropic said.
If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and "must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."
The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities." Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.
In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.
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