Three Democratic senators are sounding the alarm over brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies’ ability to collect – and potentially sell – our neural data. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Maria Cantwell (D-IN), and Ed Markey (D-MA) called for an investigation into neurotechnology companies’ handling of user data, and for tighter regulations on their data-sharing policies.
“Unlike other personal data, neural data – captured directly from the human brain – can reveal mental health conditions, emotional states, and cognitive patterns, even when anonymized,” the letter reads. “This information is not only deeply personal; it is also strategically sensitive.”
While the concept of neural technologies may conjure up images of brain implants like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, there are far less invasive – and less regulated – neurotech products on the market, including headsets that help people meditate, purportedly trigger lucid dreaming, and promise to help users with online dating by helping them swipe through apps “based on your instinctive reaction.” These consumer products gobble up insights about users’ neurological data – and since the …
Flanked by two bodyguards, Metaâs CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government.
Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commissionâs lead attorney for the case, Daniel Matheson, asked Zuckerberg to reflect back on when Facebook was the underdog.
âIn hindsight, youâre glad you didnât sell to MySpace?â Matheson asked.
âYes,â Zuckerberg responded.
Over the next several hours of questioning, Matheson walked Zuckerberg down memory lane to the period just before Facebookâs $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, which the FTC claims was the first in a series of anti-competitive steps that locked out other companies. In a lawsuit that was initially filed five years ago and went to trial this week, the agency argues that Meta should be forced to spin off both Instagram and WhatsApp, which it later acquired for roughly $19 billion in 2014.
While on the stand, Zuckerberg seemed to slowly relax as he recounted major moments from Facebookâs early history, …
President Donald Trump wants to expand his already chaotic and cruel mass deportations. On Monday, he told reporters that heâs looking into the possibility of sending US citizens to a megaprison in El Salvador.
âIâd like to go a step further,â Trump claimed at a press conference with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele on Monday. âI donât know what the laws are â we always have to obey the laws â but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when theyâre not looking, that are absolute monsters. Iâd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but youâll have to be looking at the laws on that.â
Trump says he’d like to deport US citizens to El Salvador: “I’d like to go a step further. I don’t know what the laws are, we always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways… I’d like to include them in the group of people to get out of the country”
On Monday, Meta will face the Federal Trade Commission in a legal fight that could reshape the social media landscape.
Over the next two months, the US government will make its case that the companyâs 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp squashed potential threats to its dominance. Meta, which went by the name of Facebook at the time, will defend itself by arguing that it helped grow those acquisitions into large businesses used by billions of people while facing plenty of competition along the way. The companyâs senior executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, are expected to testify during the trial in Washington, DC.
The trial itself has been a long time coming. Itâs based on a lawsuit filed under the first Trump administration and then amended under the Biden administration, seeking solutions as dramatic as unwinding Meta’s big mergers. Itâs the third US trial attempting to bust up Big Tech in two years, following the Justice Departmentâs successful case against Googleâs search business and a second one pending a decision against its ad tech business. It kicks off amid a broad rethinking of how antitrust …
A man’s recent attempt to use an AI-generated avatar in his legal appeal made an immediate impression on a New York courtroom, but probably not the one he was hoping for.
Jerome Dewald — a 74-year-old that The Register notes is behind a startup that says it’s “revolutionizing legal self-representation with AI” — was chewed out during an employment dispute hearing on March 26th for failing to inform judges that he had artificially generated the man presenting his oral argument. While the court had approved Dewald to submit a video for his case, Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels became confused when the unknown speaker, who clearly wasn’t Dewald, appeared on the screen.
“Hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said, interrupting the video after the avatar had barely finished its first sentence. “Is that counsel for the case?”
“I generated that,” Dewald responded. “It’s not a real person.”
Dewald told The Register that the avatar — a “big, beautiful hunk of a guy” called Jim — was one of the stock options provided by an AI avatar company called Tavus. Dewald says the video was submitted due to difficulties he experiences with extended speaking, but the courtroom was unaware that the video contents were artificially generated.
“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that, sir, I don’t appreciate being misled.” said Manzanet-Daniels, responding to Dewald’s admission. “You are not going to use this courtroom as a launch for your business.”
This is the latest of several snafus that have occurred when people try to mix legal processes with AI technology. Two attorneys and a law firm were penalized in 2023 for submitting fictitious legal research that had been made up by ChatGPT. DoNotPay, a “robot lawyer” company, was also ordered to pay the FTC a $193,000 settlement in February for advertising, without evidence, that its AI legal representation is as good as a real human lawyer.
China says it will look elsewhere to meet demand for foreign films.
China says it will cut the number of US films that are imported into the country in retaliation against the latest wave of tariff increases imposed by the Trump administration. A statement issued by the Chinese Film Administration (CFA) on Thursday, which we’ve translated using Google, said that the decision to increase tariffs against China to 125 percent was “the wrong move,” and will “further reduce the domestic audience’s favorability” towards American-made movies.
“We will follow market rules, respect the audience’s choice, and moderately reduce the number of American films imported,” The CFA said. “China is the world’s second-largest film market. We have always adhered to a high level of opening up to the outside world and will introduce more excellent films from the world to meet market demand.”
Predictions about a potential ban on American film imports into China have been circulating in recent days since Trump ramped up his trade war against the country. Under previous trade agreements, China agreed to release 34 foreign films per year and provide overseas studios with a 25 percent share of ticket sales. It’s unclear how significantly these allowances may be reduced going forward.
While US movies no longer rake in the Chinese audiences they once did, they still managed to gross $585 million in China last year. That’s no small sum for such a limited number of films, but only made up around 3.5 percent of the $17.71 billion Chinese box office.
OpenAI filed a countersuit against Elon Musk on Wednesday, saying on X that “Elon’s nonstop actions against us are just bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit.”
In the lawsuit, OpenAI’s lawyers argue that “Musk’s continued attacks on OpenAI, culminating most recently in the fake takeover bid designed to disrupt OpenAI’s future, must cease. Musk should be enjoined from further unlawful and unfair action, and held responsible for the damage he has already caused.”
Musk, who was part of the initial founding team at OpenAI, initially sued last spring, saying he wanted to force the company to “return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity” instead of pursuing profits. (The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, found Musk’s legal case against OpenAI “hilariously bad.”)
Earlier this year, Musk also offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI, saying in a statement that “it’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.” OpenAI’s board of directors unanimously rejected the offer, which today’s filing called a “sham bid.”
Disclosure: The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, partners with OpenAI.
Framework says it’s “temporarily pausing” US sales on some of its laptops due to the Trump administration’s tariffs that went into effect on April 5th, according to a post on X. The affected models are “a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U),” the company says, and it has removed them from its website “for now.”
“We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent,” Framework says in another post. “At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss. Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it.”
We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0%. At a 10% tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss. Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it.
Trump’s tariffs have already had a major impact on products from other companies. Nintendo delayed US Switch 2 preorders over tariff concerns, for example, and Jaguar Land Rover has paused US shipments in April to develop its plans.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to hold a “hackathon” next week in order to create a “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service data, reports Wired. The outlet says the API would be used to move the data into a cloud platform — potentially a third-party one — to serve as the “read center” of the agency’s systems.
DOGE’s hackathon plan includes pulling together “dozens” of IRS engineers in DC to build the API, writes Wired. Among the third-party providers the department has reportedly discussed involving is Palantir, a company known for its vast data collection and government surveillance and analysis work. DOGE is aiming to finish the API work in 30 days, a timeline one IRS employee told Wired is “not technically possible” and would “cripple” the IRS.
Wired says the DOGE operatives orchestrating the project are 25-year-old Gavin Kliger and health-tech CEO Sam Corcos. On March 1st, The Washington Post reported that Corcos had pushed the agency to lift restrictions it had placed on Kliger’s access to its systems, and proposed an agreement to share IRS data across the government.
A March 14th letter to the IRS from Senator Ron Wyden and others suggests the agency didn’t relent, as it praises their “rightful rejection” of DOGE’s requests. It goes on to cite another later Post story suggesting that Trump administration officials want to use IRS data “to power their immigration crackdown and government efficiency campaign.”
One of the sources Wired spoke with said that “schematizing” and understanding the IRS data DOGE is after “would take years” and that “these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.”
Last weekend, “Tesla Takedown” protests targeted Tesla showrooms around the country to show disapproval for Musk, its CEO, who has spearheaded an effort to carry out mass federal workforce layoffs and hollow out government agencies. As Tesla’s sales have plummeted this quarter, Musk has threatened to “go after” the company’s critics, while the FBI has created a task force to investigate individual acts of vandalism and other actions aimed at the company.
The scope of these protests is much broader, targeting both Trump and Musk, who the Hands Off website accuses (accurately) of “shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid.” The Verge’s Mia Sato is in Manhattan’s Bryant Park in New York City, where she took the above video. She told me it wasn’t clear how many people are there, but that it’s “wall to wall everywhere” despite the fact that it’s “raining here and really nasty.”
My colleague Lauren Feiner, who attended the protest in Washington, DC, said the protest there “is very big, thousands here around the Washington monument.” She described it as “very peaceful and orderly,” with attendees listening quietly to the speakers, occasionally chanting in response. (Organizer estimates later suggested there were more than 100,000 people each at both the NYC and DC rallies.)
Jessica Toman, who went to the protest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, texted the above image to me. A person posting images of the same protest on Bluesky guessed that protesters numbered in the thousands.
It looks like a similar story in Boston, where “thousands” are seen in this video from today:
WOW: Thousands are currently protesting in Boston. This is just one of more than 1200 ‘Hands Off’ protests underway today across the nation as people rise up against the Trump-Musk regime. (via Rob Way)
Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul posted aerial footage of a massive crowd gathered at the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota:
Demonstrators gathered in massive numbers in Daley Plaza in Chicago, Illinois, too, where a CBS Chicago livestream showed what looked like many thousands of people filling an entire street from one side to the other for many blocks. (Over 30,000 people marched in Chicago on Saturday, according to organizer estimates reported by WBEZ Chicagoafter we published this story). Protests are also taking place overseas, in cities like Berlin, Germany and London, England.
4/5/25 Manhattan, KS-a college town & home of NBAF, in Sen Marshall’s district, 5 min after it was to begin & they’re still coming!😁✊🏻💜 Proud of my Blue Dot in a red state! #manhattankansas #handsoff
A similar scene plays out in this video, apparently taken in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, today:
Here’s a gallery with some more images taken by Sato, Toman, and The Verge’s Chris Welch:
Update April 6th: Changed the number of protests that were planned from 1,200 to 1,300 to more accurately reflect information from the Hands Off! protest website.Also updated with attendance estimates for specific rallies where relevant.
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