Big tech companies tend to make a lot of enemies — but there are none more powerful than the US government. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta are regularly called in front of Congress to fend off monopoly accusations — and lawmakers bring up bills to rein in the companies just as often. The Federal Trade Commission has taken a particularly central role, leading a lawsuit to sever Facebook and Instagram while blocking new acquisitions for Oculus and the company’s virtual reality wing. Like it or not, these regulatory fights will play a huge role in deciding the future of tech — and neither side is playing nice.
As tech billionaires pour record millions into Maine’s high-stakes Senate race, rural voters push back against the resource strain, rising utility costs, and phantom jobs of the AI data center boom.
In July, the LAPD suspended its use of Flock’s cameras over concerns about how the company was handling its data. Now it’s rolling out hundreds of ALPRs from competitor Axon. The company has so far escaped the backlash Flock faced, but it’ll likely face growing scrutiny as it fills the gaps left by canceled Flock contracts.
JerryRigEverything belatedly got hold of a Trump phone for a midterm special durability test, including a blunt recounting of the president’s track record so far. It features more evidence that the T1 Phone is an HTC in disguise, including a repeat of iFixit’s clever trick of swapping motherboards to prove the phones are identical inside and out.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
“The Gemini app answers this question more fully but this isn’t the most helpful response on Search,” Google says in a response to the Bluesky user who posted the unhelpful search answer. “We’re looking into this and working to address it.”
A few of us at The Verge weren’t able to recreate it, but Ars Technica has a good rundown of the situation with some of its own testing.
OpenAI is the latest tech company (and according to Politico, the first major AI company) to set up a command center for fighting election misinfo and abuse of its systems, approaching the second major AI-era US election:
The Election Operations Center will begin running this week until all votes are counted, to identify the potential spread of misinformation or other efforts to disrupt the elections. It’s meant in large part to combat abuse of the company’s own tools like ChatGPT, monitoring real-time events and fielding reports of unexpected behavior from models or cases of suspected violations of their platform’s terms.
Some are even mad enough to vote for Democrats.
Under the law, AI companies must block chatbots from pretending they’re humans when chatting with a user under 18. They also restrict other inappropriate conversations with kids, including those that involve flattery, unprompted emotional questions, and encouragement surrounding secret-keeping.
The law requires AI companies to verify the ages of users and include “at least one option that does not depend solely on government ID.” Last month, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani banned younger schoolkids from using AI.
The president asked when The Wall Street Journal would swap the term for “Super Intelligence.” Legally, he can only force executive branch agencies to make the switch, but in a Truth Social post, he says he’ll soon “be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy.”
Some midterm races come down to ‘people who hate data centers’ versus ‘people who hate them even more.’
Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.
Following publisher pushback, Meta delayed the enforcement of these new policies until November 20th.
According to Reuters’ sources, the FTC was investigating Shein over “delivery delays and other customer complaints,” adding that the settlement would be “equivalent to 44% of Shein’s second-quarter profit.” The European Union also opened an investigation into Shein earlier this year over concerns about “addictive design” features and illegal product listings.
And no, you haven’t forgotten about a line of Intel-made Roombas. It requested permission to make hardware changes to the “Automatic Guided Vehicles” it’s used in semiconductor facilities for two decades. It says replacing the machines could take years, and there are no domestic alternatives. The FCC agreed, giving it permission to update its bots for the next year.
Trump asked Musk on Wednesday to fully roll back the interruptions that neither has publicly taken responsibility for, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Today, the WSJ says the system is working “more normally” after the call, citing US and Ukrainian officials.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Some Indian American conservatives say bigotry against their community has driven them away from the party they once supported.
Instead, their money went to a political action committee that funneled the money to the reelection campaign of Colorado’s Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper. According to The Atlantic:
The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.
The court-ordered change takes effect from March 1st 2027, following similar rulings in the EU, Japan, and Brazil. Apple will have to let Fortnite back in the App Store too — one of the last holdouts after a global return — and allow developers to offer alternative payment methods. Apple told Reuters it plans to appeal.
[Yahoo News Australia]
Continuing to push the widely unpopular data center projects, Trump said in a Truth Social post that some of them “have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” His plan sounds lot like Meta’s approach on the Hyperion project in Louisiana, where Mark Zuckerberg has touted $50,000 bonus checks for teachers despite a secretive approval process residents didn’t know much about.
After Ukraine said a Starshield slowdown had interrupted its military operations, Elon Musk claimed any limits “are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Then the president told reporters, “It wasn’t me... and I don’t think it was Elon.”
Now WSJ sources are pointing the finger back at Musk, with some claiming “Musk acted unilaterally.”
[Wall Street Journal]
After 15 years at Meta, the George W. Bush White House alum is exiting, Axios reports, amid a midterm election where Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington. Kaplan will stay through 2027 to help with the transition, though, which will include bipartisan external affairs executives.
The Department of Homeland Security ordered the agencies to remove any technology created by the Chinese AI company over concerns that its models may transfer “sensitive data to the PRC,” according to Reuters. The ban also prevents civilian agencies from using third-party services that integrate DeepSeek’s AI models.
A massive review of local contracts by NBC News found 55 places where Flock entered no-bid contracts that escaped public scrutiny by claiming its products couldn’t be compared to others on the market. Another 11 were priced just below thresholds that would have required local council votes.
Navigating local procurement laws is up to each public agency, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said in statement, and the company provides “sole-source letters” when requested that help agencies determine if they meet the criteria.
Update: Added statement from Flock.
The request from political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was never fulfilled, ProPublica found, but staffers were shocked at the directive not to report flaws back to the voting machine company. It demonstrates why state officials’ trust in CISA has eroded.
The Illinois governor on AI, data centers, privacy, and Trump.
At a moment when voters are fearful of AI, Democrats are finding their footing.
A spokesperson told MS Now that Meta pulled the organization’s account and locked out its admins during today’s protests. The profile page is back up, but the organization says it still doesn’t have access to the account. Neither Meta nor No Kings immediately responded to a request for comment.
Update October 18th: Meta’s Andy Stone posted on X that the suspension was part of an automated response that sometimes happens when accounts post at “very high frequencies.” He continued to say that the “automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”
The midterms edition of No Kings is underway, primarily focused on boosting early voting turnout rather than flooding the streets. If you want to keep up with all the news about the latest day of action as it’s happening, follow along at the States Newsroom live blog.
