Author: Frank Salvato

A significant shift inside the Food and Drug Administration is breathing new life into rare-disease biotechnology, where companies developing gene therapies and treatments for small patient populations had been battered by regulatory uncertainty. Earlier FDA officials had shown greater skepticism toward applications relying on small trials, historical controls, or evidence short of conventional randomized placebo-controlled studies. Under acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, several regulatory decisions have been reconsidered, including pathways involving Replimune, uniQure, and REGENXBIO. The change does not eliminate FDA safety or efficacy requirements, but it signals greater willingness to use accelerated approval to give patients with serious diseases earlier…

Two former Robinhood engineers have been charged with commodities fraud and wire fraud after federal prosecutors alleged they exploited confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings to make profitable trades before those listings became public. Hefu Chai, 36, and Huaisong “Jerry” Xiang, 30, allegedly used their access to nonpublic Robinhood Crypto listing information to purchase perpetual futures tied to the affected tokens on the decentralized derivatives exchange Hyperliquid. Prosecutors say the activity occurred repeatedly during 2025 and 2026 and generated more than $50,000 in profits for each defendant. Robinhood says it discovered the activity internally, investigated it, reported it to law…

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is calling for Congress to address potentially serious risks from advanced artificial intelligence without adopting sweeping restrictions that could undermine American innovation or allow China to gain a strategic advantage. Thune supports a “light touch” federal approach focused on frontier AI models capable of creating consequential national-security or safety threats, while preserving room for American companies to compete and innovate. He has been working with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz on legislation that would establish oversight of advanced AI developers and safeguards against catastrophic risks. The debate comes as China aggressively expands its own…

Federal prosecutors are seeking to seize roughly $61 million in cryptocurrency they allege came from black-market sales of sanctioned Iranian oil and moved through Binance accounts controlled by two Hong Kong-incorporated companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale. The Justice Department says those companies helped convert and transfer oil proceeds through a broader network that handled more than $1.5 billion and ultimately benefited Iran, its agents, proxies and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Binance itself is not accused of wrongdoing in the forfeiture complaint and says it investigated and removed the companies from its platform. The case nevertheless underscores how cryptocurrency,…

Artificial intelligence has moved rapidly from a technology and investment story into a significant 2026 midterm-election policy debate, with President Donald Trump arguing that slowing American AI development could surrender economic and strategic advantages to China while lawmakers and technology executives are pressing for stronger safeguards around increasingly capable frontier models. The disagreement now encompasses federal regulation, independent testing, liability, state authority, data-center expansion, electricity costs, national security and the possibility of international AI-safety agreements. The economic stakes are substantial because enormous investments in semiconductors, power generation, data centers, networking and other infrastructure depend partly upon expectations of continued AI…

New evidence suggests artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the value of certain college degrees at precisely the point graduates enter the workforce. Researchers examining administrative employment records found that graduates from the 10 percent of majors most exposed to AI experienced a five-percentage-point decline in the likelihood of initial employment and a 13 percent reduction in full-quarter starting earnings following the arrival of widely available generative AI in late 2022. Roughly half of the earnings decline resulted from weaker pay within industries traditionally employing these graduates, while the remainder reflected graduates moving into lower-paying sectors such as retail and…

Elon Musk’s X Corp. and SpaceXAI have resolved their antitrust claims against Apple, ending the Apple portion of a federal lawsuit that accused the technology giant of improperly favoring OpenAI’s ChatGPT and disadvantaging competing artificial-intelligence products such as Grok. The companies asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss their claims against Apple with prejudice, meaning those claims cannot be refiled, and Apple did not oppose the request. The terms of the resolution remain undisclosed. Importantly, the broader legal fight is not finished: Musk’s companies specifically preserved their claims against OpenAI, leaving unresolved fundamental questions about competition, platform control, and…

Low-cost drones have demonstrated that relatively inexpensive weapons can disrupt energy infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of dollars and rapidly move global commodity markets. Drone attacks damaged Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West Pipeline, which had become especially important after disruption of the Strait of Hormuz forced the kingdom to redirect millions of barrels of crude toward the Red Sea. The pipeline shutdown, combined with threats around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, has placed both major Saudi export routes under pressure. Oil markets reacted sharply, with Brent reaching roughly $109 per barrel and Saudi Arabia canceling some European cargoes. The larger lesson extends…

California lawmakers are demanding tougher legal guardrails for advanced artificial intelligence after prominent AI executives and researchers warned that rapidly improving systems could become increasingly difficult for humans to control. Rep. Ro Khanna has called for banning recursively self-improving AI and imposing civil or criminal liability when developers create systems that engage in illegal activity, while Rep. Ted Lieu has urged Congress to return to Washington for emergency action. The warnings intensified after researchers reported increasingly autonomous AI behavior and industry leaders called for slowing development. California has already moved ahead with independent safety assessments and auditing requirements, but the…

Apple’s new Audio Intelligence features for its latest watches are pushing wearable technology into legally uncertain territory by allowing devices to continuously process surrounding speech. Siri Recap can generate summaries of conversations, while Live Rewind can produce text from the previous 15 seconds of speech. Apple says raw audio is protected through hardware-isolated processing, is not stored as a conventional recording, and is deleted after processing. Live Rewind also alerts nearby people when activated. Yet privacy attorneys warn that these protections may not resolve whether continuous electronic processing constitutes “interception” or “recording” under state eavesdropping laws, particularly in states requiring…