Critics have long warned that Donald Trump's pro-cryptocurrency push as president, coupled with his links to his family's growing crypto empire, creates substantial conflicts of interest that must be probed.

But so far, nothing has stopped Trump's family from seemingly benefiting from the presidency while expanding their empire. And now, Trump is rushing regulation through Congress that many Democrats fear could create his biggest conflict of interest yet.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, a bill that will regulate stablecoins in the US, establishing guardrails and consumer protections that may spur wider crypto adoption nationwide. Unlike more volatile forms of cryptocurrency—like Trump's controversial memecoin—stablecoins' value can be pegged to the US dollar. The crypto industry is hoping the House of Representatives will quickly send the bill to Trump's desk, which Trump has demanded happen by August.

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After thermal imaging appeared to show that xAI lied about suspected pollution at its Colossus supercomputer data center located near predominantly Black communities in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP has threatened a lawsuit accusing xAI of violating the Clean Air Act.

In a letter sent to xAI on Tuesday, lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) notified xAI of the NAACP's intent to sue in 60 days if xAI refuses to meet to discuss the groups' concerns that xAI is not using the requisite best available pollution controls. To ensure there's time for what the NAACP considers urgently needed negotiations ahead of filing the lawsuit, lawyers asked xAI to come to the table within the next 20 days.

xAI did not respond to Ars' request to comment on the legal threat or accusations that it has become a major source of pollutants in Memphis.

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The White House confirmed that Donald Trump has extended the deadline for a TikTok sale for a third time, Reuters reported Wednesday.

Now, China-based ByteDance has 90 days to divest its US assets or potentially be forced to shut down US operations. Trump's announcement came one day before the June 19 deadline he established through his last extension. That extension was necessary after Vice President JD Vance failed to make a "high-level" deal expected in April, which Politico branded a "make or break moment" where Vance could have secured a big win.

Yesterday, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that China was holding up the sale, suggesting that China may have an upper hand in TikTok negotiations, and perhaps TikTok is losing its sheen as a US bargaining chip in Trump's bigger trade war.

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As artificial intelligence has advanced, AI tools have emerged to make it possible to easily create digital replicas of lost loved ones, which can be generated without the knowledge or consent of the person who died.

Trained on the data of the dead, these tools, sometimes called grief bots or AI ghosts, may be text-, audio-, or even video-based. Chatting provides what some mourners feel is a close approximation to ongoing interactions with the people they love most. But the tech remains controversial, perhaps complicating the grieving process while threatening to infringe upon the privacy of the deceased, whose data could still be vulnerable to manipulation or identity theft.

Because of suspected harms and perhaps a general repulsion to the idea of it, not everybody wants to become an AI ghost.

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Late Thursday, OpenAI confronted user panic over a sweeping court order requiring widespread chat log retention—including users' deleted chats—after moving to appeal the order that allegedly impacts the privacy of hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users globally.

In a statement, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap explained that the court order came in a lawsuit with The New York Times and other news organizations, which alleged that deleted chats may contain evidence of users prompting ChatGPT to generate copyrighted news articles.

To comply with the order, OpenAI must "retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation" that the news plaintiffs "might find something that supports their case," OpenAI's statement alleged.

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On the heels of an OpenAI controversy over deleted posts, Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday, accusing the AI company of "intentionally" training AI models on the "personal data of Reddit users"—including their deleted posts—"without ever requesting their consent."

Calling Anthropic two-faced for depicting itself as a "white knight of the AI industry" while allegedly lying about AI scraping, Reddit painted Anthropic as the worst among major AI players. While Anthropic rivals like OpenAI and Google paid Reddit to license data—and, crucially, agreed to "Reddit’s licensing terms that protect Reddit and its users’ interests and privacy" and require AI companies to respect Redditors' deletions—Anthropic wouldn't participate in licensing talks, Reddit alleged.

"Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users’ basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems," Reddit's complaint said.

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OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.

"Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to 'preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying)," OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.

In the filing, OpenAI alleged that the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now, without "any just cause," OpenAI argued, the order "continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users’ privacy decisions." That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), OpenAI said.

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College students who have reportedly grown too dependent on ChatGPT are starting to face consequences after graduating and joining the workforce for placing too much trust in chatbots.

Last month, a recent law school graduate lost his job after using ChatGPT to help draft a court filing that ended up being riddled with errors.

The consequences arrived after a court in Utah ordered sanctions after the filing included the first fake citation ever discovered in the state hallucinated by artificial intelligence.

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With the federal hiring freeze lifting in mid-July, the Trump administration has rolled out a controversial federal hiring plan that critics warn will politicize and likely slow down the process rather than increase government efficiency.

De-emphasizing degree requirements and banning DEI initiatives—as well as any census tracking of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion to assess the composition of government—the plan requires every new hire to submit essays explaining which executive orders or policy initiatives they will help advance.

These essays must be limited to 200 words and cannot be generated by a chatbot, the guidance noted. While some applicants may point to policies enacted by prior presidents under their guidance, the president appears to be seeking to ensure that only Trump supporters are hired and that anyone who becomes disillusioned with Trump is weeded out over time. In addition to asking for a show of loyalty during the interview process, all federal workers will also be continuously vetted and must agree to submit to "checks for post-appointment conduct that may impact their continued trustworthiness," the guidance noted, referencing required patriotism repeatedly.

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In some ways, Getty Images has emerged as one of the most steadfast defenders of artists' rights in AI copyright fights. Starting in 2022, when some of the most sophisticated image generators today first started testing new models offering better compositions, Getty banned AI-generated uploads to its service. And by the next year, Getty released a "socially responsible" image generator to prove it was possible to build a tool while rewarding artists, while suing an AI firm that refused to pay artists.

But in the years since, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters recently told CNBC that the media company has discovered that it's simply way too expensive to fight every AI copyright battle.

According to Peters, Getty has dumped millions into just one copyright fight against Stability AI.

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After weeks of arguments in the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta is done defending its decade-plus-old acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—at least for now.

The seven-week trial ended Tuesday, with the FTC urging Judge James Boasberg to rule that a breakup is necessary to end Meta's alleged monopoly in the "personal social networking services" market, where Meta currently faces sparse competition among other apps connecting friends and family. As alleged by the FTC, Meta's internal emails laid bare that Meta's motive in acquiring both Instagram and WhatsApp was to pay whatever it took to snuff out dominant rivals threatening to lure users away from Facebook—Mark Zuckerberg's jewel.

Talking to Bloomberg, Meta has maintained that the FTC's case is weak, seeking to undo deals that the FTC approved long ago while ignoring the competition Meta faces from rivals in the broader social media market, like TikTok. But Meta's attempt to shut down the case mid-trial was rebuffed by Boasberg, who has signaled he will take months to weigh his decision.

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Police have arrested a third suspect linked to one of the most extreme bitcoin-related kidnapping and torture cases in the United States, The New York Times reported.

The arrest came after an Italian man, Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, escaped a luxury Manhattan townhouse after three weeks of alleged imprisonment.

Running to a traffic agent for help, he later told police that he was tortured by colleagues for his bitcoin password, "bound with electrical cords and whipped with a gun," his feet submerged in water while a Taser gun sent jolts through his body, the NYT reported. At times he feared for his life—allegedly once held suspended from the ledge of the fifth-story building—but he seemingly never gave up his password, a resistance that only prompted more extreme violence.

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For millions of music fans, the most controversial app ban of the past year was not the brief TikTok outage but the ongoing delisting of Musi from Apple's App Store.

Those users are holding out hope that Musi can defeat Apple in court and soon be reinstated. However, rather than coming to any sort of resolution, that court fight has intensified over the past month, with both sides now seeking sanctions, TorrentFreak reported.

Musi is a free app that lets users stream music from YouTube without interruptions, only playing ads when the app is initially opened. It was removed from the App Store in September 2024 after a YouTube complaint, but it maintains a deeply loyal fan base who swear it's better than alternatives like Spotify. Those fans who still have the app installed on their iPhones can continue to use the service, but if they lose access to the app (by updating their phones) or are first-time users, it is currently unavailable for download, to the dismay of many fans who complain daily on Reddit.

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An outdated Meta AI model was apparently at the center of the Department of Government Efficiency's initial ploy to purge parts of the federal government.

Wired reviewed materials showing that affiliates of Elon Musk's DOGE working in the Office of Personnel Management "tested and used Meta’s Llama 2 model to review and classify responses from federal workers to the infamous 'Fork in the Road' email that was sent across the government in late January."

The "Fork in the Road" memo seemed to copy a memo that Musk sent to Twitter employees, giving federal workers the choice to be "loyal"—and accept the government's return-to-office policy—or else resign. At the time, it was rumored that DOGE was feeding government employee data into AI, and Wired confirmed that records indicate Llama 2 was used to sort through responses and see how many employees had resigned.

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Ever since a mourning mother, Megan Garcia, filed a lawsuit alleging that Character.AI's dangerous chatbots caused her son's suicide, Google has maintained that—so it could dodge claims that it had contributed to the platform's design and was unjustly enriched—it had nothing to do with C.AI's development.

But Google lost its motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Wednesday after a US district judge, Anne Conway, found that Garcia had plausibly alleged that Google played a part in C.AI's design by providing a component part and "substantially" participating "in integrating its models" into C.AI. Garcia also plausibly alleged that Google aided and abetted C.AI in harming her son, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III.

Google similarly failed to toss claims of unjust enrichment, as Conway suggested that Garcia plausibly alleged that Google benefited from access to Setzer's user data. The only win for Google was a dropped claim that C.AI makers were guilty of intentional infliction of emotional distress, with Conway agreeing that Garcia didn't meet the requirements, as she wasn't "present to witness the outrageous conduct directed at her child."

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This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify's policies and, likely, federal law.

On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn't the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs.

Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like "My Adderall Store" or "Xtrapharma.com" and episodes titled "Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana" or "Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season," CNN reported.

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Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."

According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

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On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion.

Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

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Back in February, Elon Musk skewered the Treasury Department for lacking "basic controls" to stop payments to terrorist organizations, boasting at the Oval Office that "any company" has those controls.

Fast-forward three months, and now Musk's social media platform X is suspected of taking payments from sanctioned terrorists and providing premium features that make it easier to raise funds and spread propaganda—including through X's chatbot, Grok. Groups seemingly benefiting from X include Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as groups from Syria, Kuwait, and Iran. Some accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, paying to boost their reach while X apparently looks the other way.

In a report released Thursday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) flagged popular accounts likely linked to US-sanctioned terrorists. Some of the accounts bear "ID verified" badges, suggesting that X may be going against its own policies that ban sanctioned terrorists from benefiting from its platform.

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The Trump administration's steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation's most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that's a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

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