×
European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn’t take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the company “allocated insufficient staff” to verify products, and failed to remove unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for “multiple weeks” after they were detected.

“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online — it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in the announcement. “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online.”

This is the highest penalty ever imposed under the bloc’s DSA rulebook, followed by rival Chinese retailer Temu, which was also fined more than $230 million for similar DSA infractions in May. AliExpress now has until October 20th 2026 to remedy the breach, or risk facing additional periodic fines.

#AliExpress #fined #million #illegal #product #salesLaw,News,Online Shopping,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech"> AliExpress fined almost 0 million over illegal product salesAliExpress has been hit with a €550 million (about 9 million) fine for violating Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules by failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products from being sold on the e-commerce platform. The European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn’t take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the company “allocated insufficient staff” to verify products, and failed to remove unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for “multiple weeks” after they were detected.“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online — it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in the announcement. “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online.”This is the highest penalty ever imposed under the bloc’s DSA rulebook, followed by rival Chinese retailer Temu, which was also fined more than 0 million for similar DSA infractions in May. AliExpress now has until October 20th 2026 to remedy the breach, or risk facing additional periodic fines.#AliExpress #fined #million #illegal #product #salesLaw,News,Online Shopping,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech
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European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn’t take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the company “allocated insufficient staff” to verify products, and failed to remove unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for “multiple weeks” after they were detected.

“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online — it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in the announcement. “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online.”

This is the highest penalty ever imposed under the bloc’s DSA rulebook, followed by rival Chinese retailer Temu, which was also fined more than $230 million for similar DSA infractions in May. AliExpress now has until October 20th 2026 to remedy the breach, or risk facing additional periodic fines.

#AliExpress #fined #million #illegal #product #salesLaw,News,Online Shopping,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech">AliExpress fined almost $630 million over illegal product sales

AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million (about $629 million) fine for violating Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules by failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products from being sold on the e-commerce platform. The European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn’t take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the company “allocated insufficient staff” to verify products, and failed to remove unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for “multiple weeks” after they were detected.

“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online — it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in the announcement. “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online.”

This is the highest penalty ever imposed under the bloc’s DSA rulebook, followed by rival Chinese retailer Temu, which was also fined more than $230 million for similar DSA infractions in May. AliExpress now has until October 20th 2026 to remedy the breach, or risk facing additional periodic fines.

#AliExpress #fined #million #illegal #product #salesLaw,News,Online Shopping,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech

AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million (about $629 million) fine for violating Europe’s…

culture war on science, and the latest salvo is in the form of a dry, bureaucratic proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.

The proposal would give political appointees unprecedented control over grant funding, the method through which scientists receive federal money to perform groundbreaking space research such as the search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars or the discovery of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

A typical proposed rule from the OMB garners less than 100 public comments. This rule has netted over 500,000 comments, the large majority of which appear to be negative, including a response from respected nonprofit The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposal’s rules around publication to its move away from peer review to its chilling effect on scientists in every field.

“Nearly every proposed aspect of these rule changes has some deleterious or negative consequence for the practice of science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, tells The Verge.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist,” he points out. The biggest obstacle is the restrictions on the funding of open-access publication, which is the method through which space science papers are made freely available to the public.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist.”

— Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society

For more than a decade, NASA has prided itself on making public the data collected with NASA instruments, as well as the science papers that come from studying that data. The new changes reverse that trend, making science data more difficult for everyone to access. Forbidding the use of grant funding for open-access publication means it’ll be harder for the public to see the research that their tax money helped fund.

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves,” Dreier says.

Then there’s the ability to terminate grants because of the associations or political leanings of the scientists themselves. Consider the data collected by the Mars rovers — precious data that cost billions of dollars and took decades of expertise to acquire — and a scientist, who doesn’t even work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has a novel idea for research that their fellow scientists think is worthwhile and important. Hypothetically, the new regulations would allow a partisan non-expert employed by the White House to nix that scientist’s funding because they posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.

It gets worse. “You don’t even have to be in violation of a rule” to have your funding cut, Dreier says. Grants can be revoked at any time, for any reason, if they are deemed against the interests of the president’s whims: “There’s a capriciousness that is enabled by these changes, and an opacity of the decision process.”

The problems with the regulations are not just ideological. They largely impose a bureaucratic burden: Is any scientist going to want to set up an international partnership, or attend a conference, or try to publish their data publicly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork applying for exemptions that may or may not be granted by a government body that has no expertise or interest in their work? Are they going to set up a potentially fruitful collaboration with other scientists in China, or Russia, or even Canada, when doing so introduces a risk to their own work, knowing their livelihood could be yanked away when the president decides he doesn’t like another nation tomorrow?

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves.”

— Casey Dreier

This is a separate, though perhaps even more dangerous, attack on science than the proposed cuts to NASA funding that are affecting programs like the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, the contracts through which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain, but the grants for scientists to analyze that data would be under political threat.

“There’s a distinction between data collection and science,” Dreier says. Building amazing tools like the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is only the first step in making progress: “The science is what happens when you pay a scientist to sit down and look at the data, interpret it, model it, test it, and then present it and go through the process of arguing about it.”

“What are we collecting data for, if we’re not going to support the scientists to study it?”

Despite the significant public pushback against the move, including a Senate hearing with the director of the OMB, Russell Vought, in which Democratic senators described the effects of the rule as “absurdity” and “bias,” the OMB does not seem disposed to back down and withdraw its proposed rule. Instead, it will likely face a series of legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the rule is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.

What is at stake here is bigger than slashed funds or a temporary refocusing on Earthly concerns over space research. “This is not a budget cut,” Dreier points out. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is more pernicious: “This is a surgical, scalpel-like attack on the actual process of science that is buried under procedural rules and boring-sounding language.”

Update July 17th: The OMB proposal has received over 500,000 comments, not 50,000 as stated in a previous version of this story.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#war #woke #science #space #researchNews,Policy,Politics,Science,Space"> The war on ‘woke science’ comes for space researchThe Trump administration is waging a culture war on science, and the latest salvo is in the form of a dry, bureaucratic proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.The proposal would give political appointees unprecedented control over grant funding, the method through which scientists receive federal money to perform groundbreaking space research such as the search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars or the discovery of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.A typical proposed rule from the OMB garners less than 100 public comments. This rule has netted over 500,000 comments, the large majority of which appear to be negative, including a response from respected nonprofit The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposal’s rules around publication to its move away from peer review to its chilling effect on scientists in every field.“Nearly every proposed aspect of these rule changes has some deleterious or negative consequence for the practice of science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, tells The Verge.“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist,” he points out. The biggest obstacle is the restrictions on the funding of open-access publication, which is the method through which space science papers are made freely available to the public.“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist.”— Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary SocietyFor more than a decade, NASA has prided itself on making public the data collected with NASA instruments, as well as the science papers that come from studying that data. The new changes reverse that trend, making science data more difficult for everyone to access. Forbidding the use of grant funding for open-access publication means it’ll be harder for the public to see the research that their tax money helped fund.“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves,” Dreier says.Then there’s the ability to terminate grants because of the associations or political leanings of the scientists themselves. Consider the data collected by the Mars rovers — precious data that cost billions of dollars and took decades of expertise to acquire — and a scientist, who doesn’t even work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has a novel idea for research that their fellow scientists think is worthwhile and important. Hypothetically, the new regulations would allow a partisan non-expert employed by the White House to nix that scientist’s funding because they posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.It gets worse. “You don’t even have to be in violation of a rule” to have your funding cut, Dreier says. Grants can be revoked at any time, for any reason, if they are deemed against the interests of the president’s whims: “There’s a capriciousness that is enabled by these changes, and an opacity of the decision process.”The problems with the regulations are not just ideological. They largely impose a bureaucratic burden: Is any scientist going to want to set up an international partnership, or attend a conference, or try to publish their data publicly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork applying for exemptions that may or may not be granted by a government body that has no expertise or interest in their work? Are they going to set up a potentially fruitful collaboration with other scientists in China, or Russia, or even Canada, when doing so introduces a risk to their own work, knowing their livelihood could be yanked away when the president decides he doesn’t like another nation tomorrow?“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves.”— Casey DreierThis is a separate, though perhaps even more dangerous, attack on science than the proposed cuts to NASA funding that are affecting programs like the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, the contracts through which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain, but the grants for scientists to analyze that data would be under political threat.“There’s a distinction between data collection and science,” Dreier says. Building amazing tools like the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is only the first step in making progress: “The science is what happens when you pay a scientist to sit down and look at the data, interpret it, model it, test it, and then present it and go through the process of arguing about it.”“What are we collecting data for, if we’re not going to support the scientists to study it?”Despite the significant public pushback against the move, including a Senate hearing with the director of the OMB, Russell Vought, in which Democratic senators described the effects of the rule as “absurdity” and “bias,” the OMB does not seem disposed to back down and withdraw its proposed rule. Instead, it will likely face a series of legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the rule is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.What is at stake here is bigger than slashed funds or a temporary refocusing on Earthly concerns over space research. “This is not a budget cut,” Dreier points out. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is more pernicious: “This is a surgical, scalpel-like attack on the actual process of science that is buried under procedural rules and boring-sounding language.”Update July 17th: The OMB proposal has received over 500,000 comments, not 50,000 as stated in a previous version of this story.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Georgina TorbetCloseGeorgina TorbetPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Georgina TorbetNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsPolicyClosePolicyPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PolicyPoliticsClosePoliticsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PoliticsScienceCloseSciencePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ScienceSpaceCloseSpacePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Space#war #woke #science #space #researchNews,Policy,Politics,Science,Space
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culture war on science, and the latest salvo is in the form of a dry, bureaucratic proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.

The proposal would give political appointees unprecedented control over grant funding, the method through which scientists receive federal money to perform groundbreaking space research such as the search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars or the discovery of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

A typical proposed rule from the OMB garners less than 100 public comments. This rule has netted over 500,000 comments, the large majority of which appear to be negative, including a response from respected nonprofit The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposal’s rules around publication to its move away from peer review to its chilling effect on scientists in every field.

“Nearly every proposed aspect of these rule changes has some deleterious or negative consequence for the practice of science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, tells The Verge.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist,” he points out. The biggest obstacle is the restrictions on the funding of open-access publication, which is the method through which space science papers are made freely available to the public.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist.”

— Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society

For more than a decade, NASA has prided itself on making public the data collected with NASA instruments, as well as the science papers that come from studying that data. The new changes reverse that trend, making science data more difficult for everyone to access. Forbidding the use of grant funding for open-access publication means it’ll be harder for the public to see the research that their tax money helped fund.

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves,” Dreier says.

Then there’s the ability to terminate grants because of the associations or political leanings of the scientists themselves. Consider the data collected by the Mars rovers — precious data that cost billions of dollars and took decades of expertise to acquire — and a scientist, who doesn’t even work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has a novel idea for research that their fellow scientists think is worthwhile and important. Hypothetically, the new regulations would allow a partisan non-expert employed by the White House to nix that scientist’s funding because they posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.

It gets worse. “You don’t even have to be in violation of a rule” to have your funding cut, Dreier says. Grants can be revoked at any time, for any reason, if they are deemed against the interests of the president’s whims: “There’s a capriciousness that is enabled by these changes, and an opacity of the decision process.”

The problems with the regulations are not just ideological. They largely impose a bureaucratic burden: Is any scientist going to want to set up an international partnership, or attend a conference, or try to publish their data publicly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork applying for exemptions that may or may not be granted by a government body that has no expertise or interest in their work? Are they going to set up a potentially fruitful collaboration with other scientists in China, or Russia, or even Canada, when doing so introduces a risk to their own work, knowing their livelihood could be yanked away when the president decides he doesn’t like another nation tomorrow?

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves.”

— Casey Dreier

This is a separate, though perhaps even more dangerous, attack on science than the proposed cuts to NASA funding that are affecting programs like the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, the contracts through which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain, but the grants for scientists to analyze that data would be under political threat.

“There’s a distinction between data collection and science,” Dreier says. Building amazing tools like the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is only the first step in making progress: “The science is what happens when you pay a scientist to sit down and look at the data, interpret it, model it, test it, and then present it and go through the process of arguing about it.”

“What are we collecting data for, if we’re not going to support the scientists to study it?”

Despite the significant public pushback against the move, including a Senate hearing with the director of the OMB, Russell Vought, in which Democratic senators described the effects of the rule as “absurdity” and “bias,” the OMB does not seem disposed to back down and withdraw its proposed rule. Instead, it will likely face a series of legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the rule is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.

What is at stake here is bigger than slashed funds or a temporary refocusing on Earthly concerns over space research. “This is not a budget cut,” Dreier points out. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is more pernicious: “This is a surgical, scalpel-like attack on the actual process of science that is buried under procedural rules and boring-sounding language.”

Update July 17th: The OMB proposal has received over 500,000 comments, not 50,000 as stated in a previous version of this story.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#war #woke #science #space #researchNews,Policy,Politics,Science,Space">The war on ‘woke science’ comes for space research

The Trump administration is waging a culture war on science, and the latest salvo is in the form of a dry, bureaucratic proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.

The proposal would give political appointees unprecedented control over grant funding, the method through which scientists receive federal money to perform groundbreaking space research such as the search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars or the discovery of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

A typical proposed rule from the OMB garners less than 100 public comments. This rule has netted over 500,000 comments, the large majority of which appear to be negative, including a response from respected nonprofit The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposal’s rules around publication to its move away from peer review to its chilling effect on scientists in every field.

“Nearly every proposed aspect of these rule changes has some deleterious or negative consequence for the practice of science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, tells The Verge.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist,” he points out. The biggest obstacle is the restrictions on the funding of open-access publication, which is the method through which space science papers are made freely available to the public.

“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist.”

— Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society

For more than a decade, NASA has prided itself on making public the data collected with NASA instruments, as well as the science papers that come from studying that data. The new changes reverse that trend, making science data more difficult for everyone to access. Forbidding the use of grant funding for open-access publication means it’ll be harder for the public to see the research that their tax money helped fund.

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves,” Dreier says.

Then there’s the ability to terminate grants because of the associations or political leanings of the scientists themselves. Consider the data collected by the Mars rovers — precious data that cost billions of dollars and took decades of expertise to acquire — and a scientist, who doesn’t even work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has a novel idea for research that their fellow scientists think is worthwhile and important. Hypothetically, the new regulations would allow a partisan non-expert employed by the White House to nix that scientist’s funding because they posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.

It gets worse. “You don’t even have to be in violation of a rule” to have your funding cut, Dreier says. Grants can be revoked at any time, for any reason, if they are deemed against the interests of the president’s whims: “There’s a capriciousness that is enabled by these changes, and an opacity of the decision process.”

The problems with the regulations are not just ideological. They largely impose a bureaucratic burden: Is any scientist going to want to set up an international partnership, or attend a conference, or try to publish their data publicly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork applying for exemptions that may or may not be granted by a government body that has no expertise or interest in their work? Are they going to set up a potentially fruitful collaboration with other scientists in China, or Russia, or even Canada, when doing so introduces a risk to their own work, knowing their livelihood could be yanked away when the president decides he doesn’t like another nation tomorrow?

“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves.”

— Casey Dreier

This is a separate, though perhaps even more dangerous, attack on science than the proposed cuts to NASA funding that are affecting programs like the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, the contracts through which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain, but the grants for scientists to analyze that data would be under political threat.

“There’s a distinction between data collection and science,” Dreier says. Building amazing tools like the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is only the first step in making progress: “The science is what happens when you pay a scientist to sit down and look at the data, interpret it, model it, test it, and then present it and go through the process of arguing about it.”

“What are we collecting data for, if we’re not going to support the scientists to study it?”

Despite the significant public pushback against the move, including a Senate hearing with the director of the OMB, Russell Vought, in which Democratic senators described the effects of the rule as “absurdity” and “bias,” the OMB does not seem disposed to back down and withdraw its proposed rule. Instead, it will likely face a series of legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the rule is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.

What is at stake here is bigger than slashed funds or a temporary refocusing on Earthly concerns over space research. “This is not a budget cut,” Dreier points out. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is more pernicious: “This is a surgical, scalpel-like attack on the actual process of science that is buried under procedural rules and boring-sounding language.”

Update July 17th: The OMB proposal has received over 500,000 comments, not 50,000 as stated in a previous version of this story.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#war #woke #science #space #researchNews,Policy,Politics,Science,Space

The Trump administration is waging a culture war on science, and the latest salvo is…

don’t trust AI. It’s proven that it doesn’t know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don’t even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America’s wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools.

Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of thousands of dollars to turn their kids into beta testers for AI tutors and “interactive project-based workshops.” Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley have been major adopters of this new model. Shaun Johnson, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist, told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to send his son to a $75,000 year Alpha Kindergarten. He said, “We recognize that education is likely broken the way it is and there’s going to be entrepreneurs that try to fix it… You want someone to be able to think on their feet and navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts in a particular discipline.”

Ignoring Johnson’s fundamental lack of understanding about modern pedagogy, it’s unclear how notoriously sycophantic AI will train children to “think on their feet and navigate the world.” It’s also concerning that Alpha School cofounder MacKenzie Price has said she plans to keep “hot-button social issues” out of the classroom. Which, in the current political climate, could cover women’s rights, America’s history of slavery, and our immigrant past. That might not seem like a major issue when you’re talking about kindergarten, but in some locations, Alpha School goes through high school.

Companies like Forge also don’t share performance metrics, so there’s no evidence that these AI-guided private schools are improving educational outcomes.

#nations #rich #letting #teach #kidsAI,News,Policy"> Some of the nation’s rich are letting AI teach their kidsMost Americans don’t trust AI. It’s proven that it doesn’t know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don’t even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America’s wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools.Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of thousands of dollars to turn their kids into beta testers for AI tutors and “interactive project-based workshops.” Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley have been major adopters of this new model. Shaun Johnson, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist, told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to send his son to a ,000 year Alpha Kindergarten. He said, “We recognize that education is likely broken the way it is and there’s going to be entrepreneurs that try to fix it… You want someone to be able to think on their feet and navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts in a particular discipline.”Ignoring Johnson’s fundamental lack of understanding about modern pedagogy, it’s unclear how notoriously sycophantic AI will train children to “think on their feet and navigate the world.” It’s also concerning that Alpha School cofounder MacKenzie Price has said she plans to keep “hot-button social issues” out of the classroom. Which, in the current political climate, could cover women’s rights, America’s history of slavery, and our immigrant past. That might not seem like a major issue when you’re talking about kindergarten, but in some locations, Alpha School goes through high school.Companies like Forge also don’t share performance metrics, so there’s no evidence that these AI-guided private schools are improving educational outcomes.#nations #rich #letting #teach #kidsAI,News,Policy
Tech-news

don’t trust AI. It’s proven that it doesn’t know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don’t even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America’s wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools.

Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of thousands of dollars to turn their kids into beta testers for AI tutors and “interactive project-based workshops.” Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley have been major adopters of this new model. Shaun Johnson, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist, told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to send his son to a $75,000 year Alpha Kindergarten. He said, “We recognize that education is likely broken the way it is and there’s going to be entrepreneurs that try to fix it… You want someone to be able to think on their feet and navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts in a particular discipline.”

Ignoring Johnson’s fundamental lack of understanding about modern pedagogy, it’s unclear how notoriously sycophantic AI will train children to “think on their feet and navigate the world.” It’s also concerning that Alpha School cofounder MacKenzie Price has said she plans to keep “hot-button social issues” out of the classroom. Which, in the current political climate, could cover women’s rights, America’s history of slavery, and our immigrant past. That might not seem like a major issue when you’re talking about kindergarten, but in some locations, Alpha School goes through high school.

Companies like Forge also don’t share performance metrics, so there’s no evidence that these AI-guided private schools are improving educational outcomes.

#nations #rich #letting #teach #kidsAI,News,Policy">Some of the nation’s rich are letting AI teach their kids

Most Americans don’t trust AI. It’s proven that it doesn’t know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don’t even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America’s wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools.

Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of thousands of dollars to turn their kids into beta testers for AI tutors and “interactive project-based workshops.” Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley have been major adopters of this new model. Shaun Johnson, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist, told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to send his son to a $75,000 year Alpha Kindergarten. He said, “We recognize that education is likely broken the way it is and there’s going to be entrepreneurs that try to fix it… You want someone to be able to think on their feet and navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts in a particular discipline.”

Ignoring Johnson’s fundamental lack of understanding about modern pedagogy, it’s unclear how notoriously sycophantic AI will train children to “think on their feet and navigate the world.” It’s also concerning that Alpha School cofounder MacKenzie Price has said she plans to keep “hot-button social issues” out of the classroom. Which, in the current political climate, could cover women’s rights, America’s history of slavery, and our immigrant past. That might not seem like a major issue when you’re talking about kindergarten, but in some locations, Alpha School goes through high school.

Companies like Forge also don’t share performance metrics, so there’s no evidence that these AI-guided private schools are improving educational outcomes.

#nations #rich #letting #teach #kidsAI,News,Policy

Most Americans don’t trust AI. It’s proven that it doesn’t know what safe toppings for…

$3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.

In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech"> Cleared by the US, derailed by the UK: Getty’s Shutterstock merger falls apartGetty is planning to axe its .7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech
Tech-news

$3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.

In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech">Cleared by the US, derailed by the UK: Getty’s Shutterstock merger falls apart

Getty is planning to axe its $3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.

In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech

Getty is planning to axe its $3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK…

Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.

This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China’s access to powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advanced AI models capable of identifying vulnerabilities as serious national security threats. Recently, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6, which has also raised concerns about its potential for misuse and has limited access to it.

Because GLM is an open-weight model, it can be downloaded and run by anyone on readily available hardware. That gives it great flexibility and allows power users deep access, but it also makes it ripe for abuse by bad actors who can run it with little oversight.

#Chinas #Z.ai #claims #match #Mythos #cybersecurityAI,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech"> China’s Z.ai claims it can match Mythos on cybersecurityChina’s Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China’s access to powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advanced AI models capable of identifying vulnerabilities as serious national security threats. Recently, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6, which has also raised concerns about its potential for misuse and has limited access to it.Because GLM is an open-weight model, it can be downloaded and run by anyone on readily available hardware. That gives it great flexibility and allows power users deep access, but it also makes it ripe for abuse by bad actors who can run it with little oversight.#Chinas #Z.ai #claims #match #Mythos #cybersecurityAI,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech
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Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.

This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China’s access to powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advanced AI models capable of identifying vulnerabilities as serious national security threats. Recently, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6, which has also raised concerns about its potential for misuse and has limited access to it.

Because GLM is an open-weight model, it can be downloaded and run by anyone on readily available hardware. That gives it great flexibility and allows power users deep access, but it also makes it ripe for abuse by bad actors who can run it with little oversight.

#Chinas #Z.ai #claims #match #Mythos #cybersecurityAI,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech">China’s Z.ai claims it can match Mythos on cybersecurity

China’s Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.

This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China’s access to powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advanced AI models capable of identifying vulnerabilities as serious national security threats. Recently, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.6, which has also raised concerns about its potential for misuse and has limited access to it.

Because GLM is an open-weight model, it can be downloaded and run by anyone on readily available hardware. That gives it great flexibility and allows power users deep access, but it also makes it ripe for abuse by bad actors who can run it with little oversight.

#Chinas #Z.ai #claims #match #Mythos #cybersecurityAI,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech

China’s Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it…

disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies.

Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it.

A source familiar with the situation, who participated in the negotiations between Anthropic and the Trump administration, said the administration called the AI lab on Friday around 1pm ET and gave the company a 90-minute ultimatum to shut down access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5. If it didn’t, then the government would impose export controls on Anthropic by authority of the US Commerce Department.

The source said that Anthropic executives were talking to the White House within 15 minutes of that first call, confirming that CEO Dario Amodei joined the discussions about an hour and 15 minutes after that initial call. Amodei directly spoke with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, in some cases more than once, the source confirmed.

Anthropic wrote in a release on Friday that the company believed that the government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Rather than an existential threat, though, Anthropic said that the jailbreak in question was a “potential narrow, non-universal” one that was “shared with the government” by an entity the company declined to name. Moreover, Anthropic said the behavior wasn’t unique to Fable 5. “We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5),” Anthropic wrote.

Semafor reported, citing one source familiar, that the hubbub began because the US government was concerned that a China-linked group had accessed the technology. But the source said that the China rumors went back weeks, referring to a large global telecommunications company that was initially cleared to be included in access to Mythos Preview, and that when the US government shared its concerns, Anthropic immediately revoked access.

An X post by David Sacks, the US government’s former AI and crypto czar who stepped down in March, didn’t mention China either. Sacks did, however, mention the unnamed entity that had exposed the issue to the government, calling it “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable [which] came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails.”

Some reports point to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as the person who flagged concerns to the US government after researchers at Amazon had red-teamed Fable 5. That conclusion stands at odds with some independent red-teamers, who have said they were impressed with the level of the protections.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that the Amazon research was explicitly mentioned in conversations with the US government. The person added that Anthropic had had access to that paper within days of the Friday export control directive and had been going back-and-forth since then with Amazon researchers to discuss it.

Everything in that paper, the source said, could be achieved by OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

Anthropic spent the weekend scrambling to make nice with the Trump administration, beginning with virtual meetings and then flying employees to DC, including Dave Orr, Anthropic’s head of safeguards; Logan Graham, who runs its frontier red team and has led work on Project Glasswing; and Nicholas Carlini, a leading frontier developer and cybersecurity researcher. Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking, that the company simply has repeatedly made missteps in its communication with the administration and that it “has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences.” For Anthropic, the timing couldn’t be worse: the company had banked on Mythos to help it recover, in part, from months of high-profile clashes with the US Department of Defense.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that Anthropic pre-briefed the administration on Fable 5, and that the US Department of Commerce conducted testing pre-deployment, with no concerns shared at the time. The source added that Anthropic had been working closely with government agencies since Mythos Preview’s release.

The Trump administration initially took a hands-off approach to AI safety — but post-Mythos, it has become more ambivalent, even as it frets over the threat of losing the AI race to China. Now, prominent cybersecurity leaders have warned that sidelining Mythos 5 and Fable 5 could give China a significant AI advantage. Trump’s move has galvanized international calls for alternatives to American AI systems, while effectively putting a major US AI company’s new flagship model on ice.

A public letter from tech and cybersecurity executives called for restrictions on Fable 5 to be repealed on Sunday. “Not all of us agree that AI regulation is the right way forward,” the letter states, adding that if regulations are going to happen regardless, then they should be rooted in “scientific evaluations developed with input from industry and academia.”

Alex Stamos, chief product officer at Corridor, told The Verge he organized the public letter because the countless number of vulnerabilities in the past decade-plus, written in a variety of different coding languages, require AI to patch before bad actors find them. “We’re in a race, and I think policymakers don’t understand that,” Stamos said. “There’s this weird arrogance, this idea that American labs are hugely ahead of our adversaries that will always be true, that it’s really important to restrict access because of that. I just think that’s foolish. If the labs are ahead, it’s only by a matter of months. And you can see that in the open evaluations. The cutting-edge models are only something like six months ahead of the Chinese models — and those are the models we know about.”

The public letter goes on to state that though Anthropic’s Mythos-class models are skilled at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities and taking advantage of exploits, they aren’t “uniquely good” at these tasks and that Fable 5’s safeguards “were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day.” Stamos told The Verge that “there’s a real overstatement of Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic is somewhat responsible for this themselves, clearly … Mythos is great, but the real turning point was really last year.”

Stamos said the industry is awash with backup contracts being signed with non-US companies and open-weight models being deployed on alternative hardware arrangements because the past weekend made political risk part of companies’ business plans more than ever before.

“They are laughing at us in Beijing right now,” Stamos said. “One of America’s champions is being kneecapped by the US government while we’re in a race with the Chinese. It’s just incredibly stupid. That’s why I wrote the letter, and I think that’s why a lot of people signed onto it.”

Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, a system of agents for the national security community, told The Verge that “the directive of ‘no foreign national should use this model’ is the most impossible thing to enforce.” He added, “When I first read that, my whole… [network of] AI community nerds was exploding.”

To make matters even more urgent, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all come out with their own comparable products to Anthropic’s Mythos, making many of the same claims about their effectiveness and risks. If the Trump administration bans Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity models, it can make a case for banning its competitors’ models, too. That could spur AI industry leaders to unite and help out Anthropic or, as with its fight over autonomous weapons with the Pentagon, position themselves as a safer and more compliant alternative.

Even as the Trump administration is trying to free tech companies of regulatory hassles, the Anthropic order could amount to a dramatic restriction on powerful AI models — depending on how the next few days play out.

Legion Intelligence’s Van Roo called it “uncharted territory” in the regulatory setting, adding that he doesn’t think this is the last time something like this will happen.

We’ve also entered the era of AI populism, when a growing number of people are pushing back against the AI industry’s outsized influence and the concentration of power at the top via data center protests, pledges to quit using AI chatbots, lawsuits over wrongful deaths, and even attempted attacks on AI company CEOs. Van Roo says the Trump administration’s recent moves against Anthropic could stoke “greater fears and concerns, potentially for the wrong reasons.”

The source familiar with the negotiations described the weekend’s conversations as constructive, with some members of the administration admitting that putting export controls on model providers isn’t ideal, since competitors with similar products may find themselves under the same restrictions — and since the US government is currently exploring a program that would encourage the export of American AI systems.

Monday’s talks concluded with no resolution as of yet.

As Anthropic continues to negotiate with the US government, there’s little chance that the company’s other myriad issues with the Pentagon won’t come up — namely, the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over acceptable usage policies for Anthropic’s tech by the US military.

“This is new and we’ve never had anything potentially this drastic before, and it does have some real ramifications” in terms of how to enforce access to powerful models, Van Roo said. “Who gets to use this new technology that continues to outpace our own ability to regulate it?”

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#fight #Claude #MythosAI,Anthropic,Policy,Report"> Inside the fight over Claude Mythos 5As the rest of the country celebrated the USA’s first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by “any foreign national” inside or outside the US, “including foreign national Anthropic employees.” The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies.Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it.A source familiar with the situation, who participated in the negotiations between Anthropic and the Trump administration, said the administration called the AI lab on Friday around 1pm ET and gave the company a 90-minute ultimatum to shut down access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5. If it didn’t, then the government would impose export controls on Anthropic by authority of the US Commerce Department.The source said that Anthropic executives were talking to the White House within 15 minutes of that first call, confirming that CEO Dario Amodei joined the discussions about an hour and 15 minutes after that initial call. Amodei directly spoke with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, in some cases more than once, the source confirmed.Anthropic wrote in a release on Friday that the company believed that the government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Rather than an existential threat, though, Anthropic said that the jailbreak in question was a “potential narrow, non-universal” one that was “shared with the government” by an entity the company declined to name. Moreover, Anthropic said the behavior wasn’t unique to Fable 5. “We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5),” Anthropic wrote.Semafor reported, citing one source familiar, that the hubbub began because the US government was concerned that a China-linked group had accessed the technology. But the source said that the China rumors went back weeks, referring to a large global telecommunications company that was initially cleared to be included in access to Mythos Preview, and that when the US government shared its concerns, Anthropic immediately revoked access.An X post by David Sacks, the US government’s former AI and crypto czar who stepped down in March, didn’t mention China either. Sacks did, however, mention the unnamed entity that had exposed the issue to the government, calling it “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable [which] came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails.”Some reports point to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as the person who flagged concerns to the US government after researchers at Amazon had red-teamed Fable 5. That conclusion stands at odds with some independent red-teamers, who have said they were impressed with the level of the protections.The source familiar with the negotiations said that the Amazon research was explicitly mentioned in conversations with the US government. The person added that Anthropic had had access to that paper within days of the Friday export control directive and had been going back-and-forth since then with Amazon researchers to discuss it.Everything in that paper, the source said, could be achieved by OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.Anthropic spent the weekend scrambling to make nice with the Trump administration, beginning with virtual meetings and then flying employees to DC, including Dave Orr, Anthropic’s head of safeguards; Logan Graham, who runs its frontier red team and has led work on Project Glasswing; and Nicholas Carlini, a leading frontier developer and cybersecurity researcher. Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking, that the company simply has repeatedly made missteps in its communication with the administration and that it “has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences.” For Anthropic, the timing couldn’t be worse: the company had banked on Mythos to help it recover, in part, from months of high-profile clashes with the US Department of Defense.The source familiar with the negotiations said that Anthropic pre-briefed the administration on Fable 5, and that the US Department of Commerce conducted testing pre-deployment, with no concerns shared at the time. The source added that Anthropic had been working closely with government agencies since Mythos Preview’s release.The Trump administration initially took a hands-off approach to AI safety — but post-Mythos, it has become more ambivalent, even as it frets over the threat of losing the AI race to China. Now, prominent cybersecurity leaders have warned that sidelining Mythos 5 and Fable 5 could give China a significant AI advantage. Trump’s move has galvanized international calls for alternatives to American AI systems, while effectively putting a major US AI company’s new flagship model on ice.A public letter from tech and cybersecurity executives called for restrictions on Fable 5 to be repealed on Sunday. “Not all of us agree that AI regulation is the right way forward,” the letter states, adding that if regulations are going to happen regardless, then they should be rooted in “scientific evaluations developed with input from industry and academia.”Alex Stamos, chief product officer at Corridor, told The Verge he organized the public letter because the countless number of vulnerabilities in the past decade-plus, written in a variety of different coding languages, require AI to patch before bad actors find them. “We’re in a race, and I think policymakers don’t understand that,” Stamos said. “There’s this weird arrogance, this idea that American labs are hugely ahead of our adversaries that will always be true, that it’s really important to restrict access because of that. I just think that’s foolish. If the labs are ahead, it’s only by a matter of months. And you can see that in the open evaluations. The cutting-edge models are only something like six months ahead of the Chinese models — and those are the models we know about.”The public letter goes on to state that though Anthropic’s Mythos-class models are skilled at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities and taking advantage of exploits, they aren’t “uniquely good” at these tasks and that Fable 5’s safeguards “were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day.” Stamos told The Verge that “there’s a real overstatement of Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic is somewhat responsible for this themselves, clearly … Mythos is great, but the real turning point was really last year.”Stamos said the industry is awash with backup contracts being signed with non-US companies and open-weight models being deployed on alternative hardware arrangements because the past weekend made political risk part of companies’ business plans more than ever before.“They are laughing at us in Beijing right now,” Stamos said. “One of America’s champions is being kneecapped by the US government while we’re in a race with the Chinese. It’s just incredibly stupid. That’s why I wrote the letter, and I think that’s why a lot of people signed onto it.”Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, a system of agents for the national security community, told The Verge that “the directive of ‘no foreign national should use this model’ is the most impossible thing to enforce.” He added, “When I first read that, my whole… [network of] AI community nerds was exploding.”To make matters even more urgent, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all come out with their own comparable products to Anthropic’s Mythos, making many of the same claims about their effectiveness and risks. If the Trump administration bans Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity models, it can make a case for banning its competitors’ models, too. That could spur AI industry leaders to unite and help out Anthropic or, as with its fight over autonomous weapons with the Pentagon, position themselves as a safer and more compliant alternative.Even as the Trump administration is trying to free tech companies of regulatory hassles, the Anthropic order could amount to a dramatic restriction on powerful AI models — depending on how the next few days play out.Legion Intelligence’s Van Roo called it “uncharted territory” in the regulatory setting, adding that he doesn’t think this is the last time something like this will happen.We’ve also entered the era of AI populism, when a growing number of people are pushing back against the AI industry’s outsized influence and the concentration of power at the top via data center protests, pledges to quit using AI chatbots, lawsuits over wrongful deaths, and even attempted attacks on AI company CEOs. Van Roo says the Trump administration’s recent moves against Anthropic could stoke “greater fears and concerns, potentially for the wrong reasons.”The source familiar with the negotiations described the weekend’s conversations as constructive, with some members of the administration admitting that putting export controls on model providers isn’t ideal, since competitors with similar products may find themselves under the same restrictions — and since the US government is currently exploring a program that would encourage the export of American AI systems.Monday’s talks concluded with no resolution as of yet.As Anthropic continues to negotiate with the US government, there’s little chance that the company’s other myriad issues with the Pentagon won’t come up — namely, the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over acceptable usage policies for Anthropic’s tech by the US military.“This is new and we’ve never had anything potentially this drastic before, and it does have some real ramifications” in terms of how to enforce access to powerful models, Van Roo said. “Who gets to use this new technology that continues to outpace our own ability to regulate it?”Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Hayden FieldCloseHayden FieldPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Hayden FieldAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIAnthropicCloseAnthropicPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AnthropicPolicyClosePolicyPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PolicyReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Report#fight #Claude #MythosAI,Anthropic,Policy,Report
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disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies.

Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it.

A source familiar with the situation, who participated in the negotiations between Anthropic and the Trump administration, said the administration called the AI lab on Friday around 1pm ET and gave the company a 90-minute ultimatum to shut down access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5. If it didn’t, then the government would impose export controls on Anthropic by authority of the US Commerce Department.

The source said that Anthropic executives were talking to the White House within 15 minutes of that first call, confirming that CEO Dario Amodei joined the discussions about an hour and 15 minutes after that initial call. Amodei directly spoke with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, in some cases more than once, the source confirmed.

Anthropic wrote in a release on Friday that the company believed that the government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Rather than an existential threat, though, Anthropic said that the jailbreak in question was a “potential narrow, non-universal” one that was “shared with the government” by an entity the company declined to name. Moreover, Anthropic said the behavior wasn’t unique to Fable 5. “We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5),” Anthropic wrote.

Semafor reported, citing one source familiar, that the hubbub began because the US government was concerned that a China-linked group had accessed the technology. But the source said that the China rumors went back weeks, referring to a large global telecommunications company that was initially cleared to be included in access to Mythos Preview, and that when the US government shared its concerns, Anthropic immediately revoked access.

An X post by David Sacks, the US government’s former AI and crypto czar who stepped down in March, didn’t mention China either. Sacks did, however, mention the unnamed entity that had exposed the issue to the government, calling it “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable [which] came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails.”

Some reports point to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as the person who flagged concerns to the US government after researchers at Amazon had red-teamed Fable 5. That conclusion stands at odds with some independent red-teamers, who have said they were impressed with the level of the protections.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that the Amazon research was explicitly mentioned in conversations with the US government. The person added that Anthropic had had access to that paper within days of the Friday export control directive and had been going back-and-forth since then with Amazon researchers to discuss it.

Everything in that paper, the source said, could be achieved by OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

Anthropic spent the weekend scrambling to make nice with the Trump administration, beginning with virtual meetings and then flying employees to DC, including Dave Orr, Anthropic’s head of safeguards; Logan Graham, who runs its frontier red team and has led work on Project Glasswing; and Nicholas Carlini, a leading frontier developer and cybersecurity researcher. Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking, that the company simply has repeatedly made missteps in its communication with the administration and that it “has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences.” For Anthropic, the timing couldn’t be worse: the company had banked on Mythos to help it recover, in part, from months of high-profile clashes with the US Department of Defense.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that Anthropic pre-briefed the administration on Fable 5, and that the US Department of Commerce conducted testing pre-deployment, with no concerns shared at the time. The source added that Anthropic had been working closely with government agencies since Mythos Preview’s release.

The Trump administration initially took a hands-off approach to AI safety — but post-Mythos, it has become more ambivalent, even as it frets over the threat of losing the AI race to China. Now, prominent cybersecurity leaders have warned that sidelining Mythos 5 and Fable 5 could give China a significant AI advantage. Trump’s move has galvanized international calls for alternatives to American AI systems, while effectively putting a major US AI company’s new flagship model on ice.

A public letter from tech and cybersecurity executives called for restrictions on Fable 5 to be repealed on Sunday. “Not all of us agree that AI regulation is the right way forward,” the letter states, adding that if regulations are going to happen regardless, then they should be rooted in “scientific evaluations developed with input from industry and academia.”

Alex Stamos, chief product officer at Corridor, told The Verge he organized the public letter because the countless number of vulnerabilities in the past decade-plus, written in a variety of different coding languages, require AI to patch before bad actors find them. “We’re in a race, and I think policymakers don’t understand that,” Stamos said. “There’s this weird arrogance, this idea that American labs are hugely ahead of our adversaries that will always be true, that it’s really important to restrict access because of that. I just think that’s foolish. If the labs are ahead, it’s only by a matter of months. And you can see that in the open evaluations. The cutting-edge models are only something like six months ahead of the Chinese models — and those are the models we know about.”

The public letter goes on to state that though Anthropic’s Mythos-class models are skilled at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities and taking advantage of exploits, they aren’t “uniquely good” at these tasks and that Fable 5’s safeguards “were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day.” Stamos told The Verge that “there’s a real overstatement of Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic is somewhat responsible for this themselves, clearly … Mythos is great, but the real turning point was really last year.”

Stamos said the industry is awash with backup contracts being signed with non-US companies and open-weight models being deployed on alternative hardware arrangements because the past weekend made political risk part of companies’ business plans more than ever before.

“They are laughing at us in Beijing right now,” Stamos said. “One of America’s champions is being kneecapped by the US government while we’re in a race with the Chinese. It’s just incredibly stupid. That’s why I wrote the letter, and I think that’s why a lot of people signed onto it.”

Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, a system of agents for the national security community, told The Verge that “the directive of ‘no foreign national should use this model’ is the most impossible thing to enforce.” He added, “When I first read that, my whole… [network of] AI community nerds was exploding.”

To make matters even more urgent, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all come out with their own comparable products to Anthropic’s Mythos, making many of the same claims about their effectiveness and risks. If the Trump administration bans Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity models, it can make a case for banning its competitors’ models, too. That could spur AI industry leaders to unite and help out Anthropic or, as with its fight over autonomous weapons with the Pentagon, position themselves as a safer and more compliant alternative.

Even as the Trump administration is trying to free tech companies of regulatory hassles, the Anthropic order could amount to a dramatic restriction on powerful AI models — depending on how the next few days play out.

Legion Intelligence’s Van Roo called it “uncharted territory” in the regulatory setting, adding that he doesn’t think this is the last time something like this will happen.

We’ve also entered the era of AI populism, when a growing number of people are pushing back against the AI industry’s outsized influence and the concentration of power at the top via data center protests, pledges to quit using AI chatbots, lawsuits over wrongful deaths, and even attempted attacks on AI company CEOs. Van Roo says the Trump administration’s recent moves against Anthropic could stoke “greater fears and concerns, potentially for the wrong reasons.”

The source familiar with the negotiations described the weekend’s conversations as constructive, with some members of the administration admitting that putting export controls on model providers isn’t ideal, since competitors with similar products may find themselves under the same restrictions — and since the US government is currently exploring a program that would encourage the export of American AI systems.

Monday’s talks concluded with no resolution as of yet.

As Anthropic continues to negotiate with the US government, there’s little chance that the company’s other myriad issues with the Pentagon won’t come up — namely, the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over acceptable usage policies for Anthropic’s tech by the US military.

“This is new and we’ve never had anything potentially this drastic before, and it does have some real ramifications” in terms of how to enforce access to powerful models, Van Roo said. “Who gets to use this new technology that continues to outpace our own ability to regulate it?”

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#fight #Claude #MythosAI,Anthropic,Policy,Report">Inside the fight over Claude Mythos 5

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA’s first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by “any foreign national” inside or outside the US, “including foreign national Anthropic employees.” The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies.

Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it.

A source familiar with the situation, who participated in the negotiations between Anthropic and the Trump administration, said the administration called the AI lab on Friday around 1pm ET and gave the company a 90-minute ultimatum to shut down access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5. If it didn’t, then the government would impose export controls on Anthropic by authority of the US Commerce Department.

The source said that Anthropic executives were talking to the White House within 15 minutes of that first call, confirming that CEO Dario Amodei joined the discussions about an hour and 15 minutes after that initial call. Amodei directly spoke with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, in some cases more than once, the source confirmed.

Anthropic wrote in a release on Friday that the company believed that the government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Rather than an existential threat, though, Anthropic said that the jailbreak in question was a “potential narrow, non-universal” one that was “shared with the government” by an entity the company declined to name. Moreover, Anthropic said the behavior wasn’t unique to Fable 5. “We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5),” Anthropic wrote.

Semafor reported, citing one source familiar, that the hubbub began because the US government was concerned that a China-linked group had accessed the technology. But the source said that the China rumors went back weeks, referring to a large global telecommunications company that was initially cleared to be included in access to Mythos Preview, and that when the US government shared its concerns, Anthropic immediately revoked access.

An X post by David Sacks, the US government’s former AI and crypto czar who stepped down in March, didn’t mention China either. Sacks did, however, mention the unnamed entity that had exposed the issue to the government, calling it “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable [which] came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails.”

Some reports point to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as the person who flagged concerns to the US government after researchers at Amazon had red-teamed Fable 5. That conclusion stands at odds with some independent red-teamers, who have said they were impressed with the level of the protections.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that the Amazon research was explicitly mentioned in conversations with the US government. The person added that Anthropic had had access to that paper within days of the Friday export control directive and had been going back-and-forth since then with Amazon researchers to discuss it.

Everything in that paper, the source said, could be achieved by OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

Anthropic spent the weekend scrambling to make nice with the Trump administration, beginning with virtual meetings and then flying employees to DC, including Dave Orr, Anthropic’s head of safeguards; Logan Graham, who runs its frontier red team and has led work on Project Glasswing; and Nicholas Carlini, a leading frontier developer and cybersecurity researcher. Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking, that the company simply has repeatedly made missteps in its communication with the administration and that it “has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences.” For Anthropic, the timing couldn’t be worse: the company had banked on Mythos to help it recover, in part, from months of high-profile clashes with the US Department of Defense.

The source familiar with the negotiations said that Anthropic pre-briefed the administration on Fable 5, and that the US Department of Commerce conducted testing pre-deployment, with no concerns shared at the time. The source added that Anthropic had been working closely with government agencies since Mythos Preview’s release.

The Trump administration initially took a hands-off approach to AI safety — but post-Mythos, it has become more ambivalent, even as it frets over the threat of losing the AI race to China. Now, prominent cybersecurity leaders have warned that sidelining Mythos 5 and Fable 5 could give China a significant AI advantage. Trump’s move has galvanized international calls for alternatives to American AI systems, while effectively putting a major US AI company’s new flagship model on ice.

A public letter from tech and cybersecurity executives called for restrictions on Fable 5 to be repealed on Sunday. “Not all of us agree that AI regulation is the right way forward,” the letter states, adding that if regulations are going to happen regardless, then they should be rooted in “scientific evaluations developed with input from industry and academia.”

Alex Stamos, chief product officer at Corridor, told The Verge he organized the public letter because the countless number of vulnerabilities in the past decade-plus, written in a variety of different coding languages, require AI to patch before bad actors find them. “We’re in a race, and I think policymakers don’t understand that,” Stamos said. “There’s this weird arrogance, this idea that American labs are hugely ahead of our adversaries that will always be true, that it’s really important to restrict access because of that. I just think that’s foolish. If the labs are ahead, it’s only by a matter of months. And you can see that in the open evaluations. The cutting-edge models are only something like six months ahead of the Chinese models — and those are the models we know about.”

The public letter goes on to state that though Anthropic’s Mythos-class models are skilled at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities and taking advantage of exploits, they aren’t “uniquely good” at these tasks and that Fable 5’s safeguards “were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day.” Stamos told The Verge that “there’s a real overstatement of Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic is somewhat responsible for this themselves, clearly … Mythos is great, but the real turning point was really last year.”

Stamos said the industry is awash with backup contracts being signed with non-US companies and open-weight models being deployed on alternative hardware arrangements because the past weekend made political risk part of companies’ business plans more than ever before.

“They are laughing at us in Beijing right now,” Stamos said. “One of America’s champions is being kneecapped by the US government while we’re in a race with the Chinese. It’s just incredibly stupid. That’s why I wrote the letter, and I think that’s why a lot of people signed onto it.”

Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, a system of agents for the national security community, told The Verge that “the directive of ‘no foreign national should use this model’ is the most impossible thing to enforce.” He added, “When I first read that, my whole… [network of] AI community nerds was exploding.”

To make matters even more urgent, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all come out with their own comparable products to Anthropic’s Mythos, making many of the same claims about their effectiveness and risks. If the Trump administration bans Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity models, it can make a case for banning its competitors’ models, too. That could spur AI industry leaders to unite and help out Anthropic or, as with its fight over autonomous weapons with the Pentagon, position themselves as a safer and more compliant alternative.

Even as the Trump administration is trying to free tech companies of regulatory hassles, the Anthropic order could amount to a dramatic restriction on powerful AI models — depending on how the next few days play out.

Legion Intelligence’s Van Roo called it “uncharted territory” in the regulatory setting, adding that he doesn’t think this is the last time something like this will happen.

We’ve also entered the era of AI populism, when a growing number of people are pushing back against the AI industry’s outsized influence and the concentration of power at the top via data center protests, pledges to quit using AI chatbots, lawsuits over wrongful deaths, and even attempted attacks on AI company CEOs. Van Roo says the Trump administration’s recent moves against Anthropic could stoke “greater fears and concerns, potentially for the wrong reasons.”

The source familiar with the negotiations described the weekend’s conversations as constructive, with some members of the administration admitting that putting export controls on model providers isn’t ideal, since competitors with similar products may find themselves under the same restrictions — and since the US government is currently exploring a program that would encourage the export of American AI systems.

Monday’s talks concluded with no resolution as of yet.

As Anthropic continues to negotiate with the US government, there’s little chance that the company’s other myriad issues with the Pentagon won’t come up — namely, the ongoing battle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over acceptable usage policies for Anthropic’s tech by the US military.

“This is new and we’ve never had anything potentially this drastic before, and it does have some real ramifications” in terms of how to enforce access to powerful models, Van Roo said. “Who gets to use this new technology that continues to outpace our own ability to regulate it?”

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#fight #Claude #MythosAI,Anthropic,Policy,Report

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA’s first World Cup win and the…

Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.

In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

The government and the company seemed to have made amends, and the two had worked together to expand access to Mythos. However, now the two seem destined to clash again.

#Amazon #security #research #reportedly #led #White #Houses #Anthropic #Fable #banAI,Amazon,Anthropic,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech"> Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable banAccording to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.The government and the company seemed to have made amends, and the two had worked together to expand access to Mythos. However, now the two seem destined to clash again.#Amazon #security #research #reportedly #led #White #Houses #Anthropic #Fable #banAI,Amazon,Anthropic,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech
Tech-news

Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.

In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

The government and the company seemed to have made amends, and the two had worked together to expand access to Mythos. However, now the two seem destined to clash again.

#Amazon #security #research #reportedly #led #White #Houses #Anthropic #Fable #banAI,Amazon,Anthropic,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech">Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban

According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.

In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

The government and the company seemed to have made amends, and the two had worked together to expand access to Mythos. However, now the two seem destined to clash again.

#Amazon #security #research #reportedly #led #White #Houses #Anthropic #Fable #banAI,Amazon,Anthropic,News,Policy,Politics,Security,Tech

According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting…

on its website that it is “implementing measures to comply with these requirements by preparing versions of products to meet the Regulation.”

Thanks to EU regulations, gadgets with user-replaceable batteries are making a comeback, as my colleague Dominic Preston wrote recently. Starting on that February 2027 date, EU rules mandate that many types of gadgets, including portable game consoles, must allow users to relatively easily remove and replace their batteries.

Nintendo doesn’t specify exactly what it will change with this new version of the Switch 2 to make battery replacements easier — currently, taking out the battery in the Switch 2 is an involved, multi-step process, as shown by iFixit. It’s also unclear if a revised model with a replaceable battery will be available in other regions. Nintendo didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

On its website, Nintendo says that, “For current products with model numbers starting with ‘BEE’” — which is used with the Switch 2, as shown in Nintendo’s filings with the FCC — “future compliant versions will have unique model numbers and the additional code ‘OSM’ visible on the packaging, designating them as separate products for regulatory purposes.” Switch 2 controllers like the Pro Controller and the Joy-Cons also carry the BEE moniker, and we’ve asked Nintendo if those will have user-replaceable batteries as well.

#Nintendo #confirms #sell #Switch #replaceable #batteryEntertainment,Gaming,News,Nintendo,Policy"> Nintendo confirms it will sell a new Switch 2 with replaceable battery in the EUNintendo is planning to launch versions of Switch 2 hardware in the EU that will let users easily replace the battery. To meet its obligations from a new EU regulation that’s set to go into effect on February 18th, 2027, Nintendo says on its website that it is “implementing measures to comply with these requirements by preparing versions of products to meet the Regulation.”Thanks to EU regulations, gadgets with user-replaceable batteries are making a comeback, as my colleague Dominic Preston wrote recently. Starting on that February 2027 date, EU rules mandate that many types of gadgets, including portable game consoles, must allow users to relatively easily remove and replace their batteries.Nintendo doesn’t specify exactly what it will change with this new version of the Switch 2 to make battery replacements easier — currently, taking out the battery in the Switch 2 is an involved, multi-step process, as shown by iFixit. It’s also unclear if a revised model with a replaceable battery will be available in other regions. Nintendo didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.On its website, Nintendo says that, “For current products with model numbers starting with ‘BEE’” — which is used with the Switch 2, as shown in Nintendo’s filings with the FCC — “future compliant versions will have unique model numbers and the additional code ‘OSM’ visible on the packaging, designating them as separate products for regulatory purposes.” Switch 2 controllers like the Pro Controller and the Joy-Cons also carry the BEE moniker, and we’ve asked Nintendo if those will have user-replaceable batteries as well.#Nintendo #confirms #sell #Switch #replaceable #batteryEntertainment,Gaming,News,Nintendo,Policy
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on its website that it is “implementing measures to comply with these requirements by preparing versions of products to meet the Regulation.”

Thanks to EU regulations, gadgets with user-replaceable batteries are making a comeback, as my colleague Dominic Preston wrote recently. Starting on that February 2027 date, EU rules mandate that many types of gadgets, including portable game consoles, must allow users to relatively easily remove and replace their batteries.

Nintendo doesn’t specify exactly what it will change with this new version of the Switch 2 to make battery replacements easier — currently, taking out the battery in the Switch 2 is an involved, multi-step process, as shown by iFixit. It’s also unclear if a revised model with a replaceable battery will be available in other regions. Nintendo didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

On its website, Nintendo says that, “For current products with model numbers starting with ‘BEE’” — which is used with the Switch 2, as shown in Nintendo’s filings with the FCC — “future compliant versions will have unique model numbers and the additional code ‘OSM’ visible on the packaging, designating them as separate products for regulatory purposes.” Switch 2 controllers like the Pro Controller and the Joy-Cons also carry the BEE moniker, and we’ve asked Nintendo if those will have user-replaceable batteries as well.

#Nintendo #confirms #sell #Switch #replaceable #batteryEntertainment,Gaming,News,Nintendo,Policy">Nintendo confirms it will sell a new Switch 2 with replaceable battery in the EU

Nintendo is planning to launch versions of Switch 2 hardware in the EU that will let users easily replace the battery. To meet its obligations from a new EU regulation that’s set to go into effect on February 18th, 2027, Nintendo says on its website that it is “implementing measures to comply with these requirements by preparing versions of products to meet the Regulation.”

Thanks to EU regulations, gadgets with user-replaceable batteries are making a comeback, as my colleague Dominic Preston wrote recently. Starting on that February 2027 date, EU rules mandate that many types of gadgets, including portable game consoles, must allow users to relatively easily remove and replace their batteries.

Nintendo doesn’t specify exactly what it will change with this new version of the Switch 2 to make battery replacements easier — currently, taking out the battery in the Switch 2 is an involved, multi-step process, as shown by iFixit. It’s also unclear if a revised model with a replaceable battery will be available in other regions. Nintendo didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

On its website, Nintendo says that, “For current products with model numbers starting with ‘BEE’” — which is used with the Switch 2, as shown in Nintendo’s filings with the FCC — “future compliant versions will have unique model numbers and the additional code ‘OSM’ visible on the packaging, designating them as separate products for regulatory purposes.” Switch 2 controllers like the Pro Controller and the Joy-Cons also carry the BEE moniker, and we’ve asked Nintendo if those will have user-replaceable batteries as well.

#Nintendo #confirms #sell #Switch #replaceable #batteryEntertainment,Gaming,News,Nintendo,Policy

Nintendo is planning to launch versions of Switch 2 hardware in the EU that will…

reported earlier by ABC News. In their now-unsealed complaint, prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo “knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data.” Spagnuolo was arrested in New York on Wednesday but released on a $2.25 million bond, ABC News reports. He is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Spagnuolo made bets on Polymarket under the username AlphaRacoon, with his successful search-related wagers catching the attention of outlets like Forbes and users on social media last December. In one instance, Spagnuolo correctly guessed that a singer named D4vd would “be the #1 searched person on Google” in 2025, despite the “near-zero probability” assigned by Polymarket, according to the complaint.

At the same time, Spagnuolo allegedly bet that Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar would not appear on Google’s “Year in Search 2025” lists, which are difficult to predict because of how they’re calculated. Google says it ranked last year’s terms based on which ones saw the “highest increase in traffic” — not the highest number of searches — between January 1st, 2025 and November 25th, 2025. “By measuring the spike in interest rather than the total number of searches, we can identify the trends that were unique to 2025.”

“Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds,” the complaint says. Last month, federal prosecutors charged US Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with fraud for allegedly making a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In a statement on X, Polymarket called itself “the enforcement leader,” saying its “market integrity infrastructure” flagged Spagnuolo’s activity. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the company writes, without noting whether the people putting their money down know that.

”We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation,” Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez says in a statement to The Verge. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”

#Google #employee #allegedly #information #win #million #PolymarketBusiness,Google,Policy,Tech"> A Google employee allegedly used inside information to win .2 million on Polymarket Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud after he allegedly made .2 million on Polymarket bets related to Search-related trends in 2025, as reported earlier by ABC News. In their now-unsealed complaint, prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo “knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data.” Spagnuolo was arrested in New York on Wednesday but released on a .25 million bond, ABC News reports. He is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.Spagnuolo made bets on Polymarket under the username AlphaRacoon, with his successful search-related wagers catching the attention of outlets like Forbes and users on social media last December. In one instance, Spagnuolo correctly guessed that a singer named D4vd would “be the #1 searched person on Google” in 2025, despite the “near-zero probability” assigned by Polymarket, according to the complaint.At the same time, Spagnuolo allegedly bet that Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar would not appear on Google’s “Year in Search 2025” lists, which are difficult to predict because of how they’re calculated. Google says it ranked last year’s terms based on which ones saw the “highest increase in traffic” — not the highest number of searches — between January 1st, 2025 and November 25th, 2025. “By measuring the spike in interest rather than the total number of searches, we can identify the trends that were unique to 2025.”“Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds,” the complaint says. Last month, federal prosecutors charged US Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with fraud for allegedly making a 0,000 Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.In a statement on X, Polymarket called itself “the enforcement leader,” saying its “market integrity infrastructure” flagged Spagnuolo’s activity. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the company writes, without noting whether the people putting their money down know that.”We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation,” Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez says in a statement to The Verge. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”#Google #employee #allegedly #information #win #million #PolymarketBusiness,Google,Policy,Tech
Tech-news

reported earlier by ABC News. In their now-unsealed complaint, prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo “knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data.” Spagnuolo was arrested in New York on Wednesday but released on a $2.25 million bond, ABC News reports. He is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Spagnuolo made bets on Polymarket under the username AlphaRacoon, with his successful search-related wagers catching the attention of outlets like Forbes and users on social media last December. In one instance, Spagnuolo correctly guessed that a singer named D4vd would “be the #1 searched person on Google” in 2025, despite the “near-zero probability” assigned by Polymarket, according to the complaint.

At the same time, Spagnuolo allegedly bet that Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar would not appear on Google’s “Year in Search 2025” lists, which are difficult to predict because of how they’re calculated. Google says it ranked last year’s terms based on which ones saw the “highest increase in traffic” — not the highest number of searches — between January 1st, 2025 and November 25th, 2025. “By measuring the spike in interest rather than the total number of searches, we can identify the trends that were unique to 2025.”

“Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds,” the complaint says. Last month, federal prosecutors charged US Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with fraud for allegedly making a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In a statement on X, Polymarket called itself “the enforcement leader,” saying its “market integrity infrastructure” flagged Spagnuolo’s activity. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the company writes, without noting whether the people putting their money down know that.

”We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation,” Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez says in a statement to The Verge. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”

#Google #employee #allegedly #information #win #million #PolymarketBusiness,Google,Policy,Tech">A Google employee allegedly used inside information to win $1.2 million on Polymarket 

Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud after he allegedly made $1.2 million on Polymarket bets related to Search-related trends in 2025, as reported earlier by ABC News. In their now-unsealed complaint, prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo “knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data.” Spagnuolo was arrested in New York on Wednesday but released on a $2.25 million bond, ABC News reports. He is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Spagnuolo made bets on Polymarket under the username AlphaRacoon, with his successful search-related wagers catching the attention of outlets like Forbes and users on social media last December. In one instance, Spagnuolo correctly guessed that a singer named D4vd would “be the #1 searched person on Google” in 2025, despite the “near-zero probability” assigned by Polymarket, according to the complaint.

At the same time, Spagnuolo allegedly bet that Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar would not appear on Google’s “Year in Search 2025” lists, which are difficult to predict because of how they’re calculated. Google says it ranked last year’s terms based on which ones saw the “highest increase in traffic” — not the highest number of searches — between January 1st, 2025 and November 25th, 2025. “By measuring the spike in interest rather than the total number of searches, we can identify the trends that were unique to 2025.”

“Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds,” the complaint says. Last month, federal prosecutors charged US Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with fraud for allegedly making a $400,000 Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In a statement on X, Polymarket called itself “the enforcement leader,” saying its “market integrity infrastructure” flagged Spagnuolo’s activity. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the company writes, without noting whether the people putting their money down know that.

”We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation,” Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez says in a statement to The Verge. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”

#Google #employee #allegedly #information #win #million #PolymarketBusiness,Google,Policy,Tech

Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud after he allegedly made $1.2 million on…

littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.

Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.

The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.

In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.

The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.

The Oklahoma bill ​“recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. ​“And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”

In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.

These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.

Converting Wells Is Enticing but Complicated

Geothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.

Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.

#Oil #Gas #Wells #Find #Life #Producing #Clean #Energyenvironment,energy,climate change,climate desk,policy"> Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean EnergyAs states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat.Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from ,000 to 0,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.The Oklahoma bill ​“recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. ​“And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.Converting Wells Is Enticing but ComplicatedGeothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.#Oil #Gas #Wells #Find #Life #Producing #Clean #Energyenvironment,energy,climate change,climate desk,policy
Tech-news

littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.

Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.

The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.

In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.

The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.

The Oklahoma bill ​“recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. ​“And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”

In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.

These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.

Converting Wells Is Enticing but Complicated

Geothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.

Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.

#Oil #Gas #Wells #Find #Life #Producing #Clean #Energyenvironment,energy,climate change,climate desk,policy">Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean Energy

As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat.

Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.

Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.

The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.

In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.

The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.

The Oklahoma bill ​“recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. ​“And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”

In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.

These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.

Converting Wells Is Enticing but Complicated

Geothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.

Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.

#Oil #Gas #Wells #Find #Life #Producing #Clean #Energyenvironment,energy,climate change,climate desk,policy

As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an…