Author: Frank Salvato

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s chief executive after 15 years, handing control to longtime hardware engineering chief John Ternus on September 1 while remaining with the company as executive chairman. The carefully planned transition comes at a pivotal moment, just days before Apple’s September 9 product event, where the company is expected to unveil its newest iPhone lineup and potentially its long-awaited first foldable iPhone. Ternus inherits a financially formidable company but also one facing pressure to demonstrate renewed product innovation, compete more effectively in artificial intelligence and navigate supply-chain constraints. The anticipated foldable iPhone could provide an…

Meta’s increasingly complex relationship with Anthropic demonstrates how quickly traditional notions of corporate competition are breaking down in the artificial intelligence race. While Mark Zuckerberg has publicly criticized the concentration of AI power among major laboratories and promoted Meta’s vision of widely available “personal superintelligence,” his company has quietly become one of Anthropic’s largest customers, at one point projecting that annual spending on Anthropic models could reach $10 billion. Meta has reportedly used Anthropic technology to help develop and test Hatch, its forthcoming personal AI agent, even as the companies compete for customers, engineers and influence over the direction of…

Meta has agreed to pay as much as $18 billion over the next decade and impose substantial restrictions on how minors use Facebook and Instagram, ending major litigation brought by nearly every U.S. state over allegations that the platforms were deliberately designed to encourage addictive behavior among children. The settlement establishes a default two-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram, blocks teen access between midnight and 6 a.m., curtails school-hour notifications, strengthens age verification and parental controls, and restricts social-comparison features such as visible “like” counts and beauty filters. The agreement also places unusual competitive pressure on TikTok, YouTube and…

Elon Musk is moving to eliminate one of the most consequential industrial bottlenecks confronting America’s artificial-intelligence buildout, with SpaceX preparing a turbine-blade and vane manufacturing operation in Bastrop, Texas. The specialized components are essential to natural-gas turbines increasingly being deployed to power massive AI data centers while utilities struggle to provide sufficient grid capacity. Musk says turbine production has been constrained by a tiny number of casting suppliers facing enormous backlogs, with turbines effectively sold out through 2030. By bringing high-temperature blade and vane casting inside SpaceX, Musk believes new generating capacity could come online as much as 18 months…

A widening legal battle over prediction markets is testing the limits of federal regulatory power and the traditional authority of states to police gambling. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has taken the unusual step of suing nine states that have attempted to regulate or restrict prediction-market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, arguing that federally regulated event contracts fall within the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction. States counter that contracts allowing customers to wager money on sports, elections and other uncertain outcomes are gambling regardless of the financial terminology used to describe them. Conflicting federal court decisions have deepened the dispute: the…

A federal appeals court has now confronted one of the most disturbing consequences of artificial intelligence: computer-generated child pornography so realistic that it can be virtually indistinguishable from photographs of actual abuse. The result should trouble Americans across the political spectrum. In United States v. Anderegg, decided August 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a federal charge involving the private possession of obscene, entirely AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The court did not broadly legalize the creation or distribution of such material. Rather, it concluded that existing Supreme Court precedent protects private…

A federal appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of a criminal possession charge against Wisconsin defendant Steven Anderegg, ruling that existing Supreme Court precedent protects his private, in-home possession of obscene, entirely AI-generated sexual images depicting children when no actual child was used or identifiable in creating them. The ruling does not legalize producing, distributing, transmitting, or providing such material to minors, and three other charges against Anderegg remain intact. The decision exposes a troubling collision between decades-old First Amendment precedent and generative AI capable of producing photorealistic depictions that judges acknowledged can be virtually indistinguishable from images documenting the…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging as a defining measure of national power, placing the United States and China in an increasingly consequential competition over computing capacity, infrastructure, energy, technical standards and military applications. The central argument surrounding America’s AI strategy is that excessive restrictions on domestic development—particularly limitations affecting data centers and computing infrastructure—could surrender strategic ground to Beijing at precisely the moment China is accelerating its own technological ambitions. China’s dominance of critical-mineral supply chains offers a cautionary precedent: dependence can become geopolitical leverage. With Beijing already employing AI-supported surveillance domestically and seeking greater technological influence internationally, American policymakers…

OpenAI plans to end Cursor’s access to its artificial-intelligence models on November 12 following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding company, citing concerns that Elon Musk-controlled businesses may not honor its contractual terms. Importantly, OpenAI has not accused Cursor itself of violating its agreement; instead, it points to prior disputes involving Musk companies, including Twitter and xAI. Cursor says OpenAI models represent only about 5% of its user traffic and is discussing the decision with OpenAI, suggesting the practical impact may be limited even as the episode further intensifies the long-running rivalry between Musk and OpenAI leadership. Key…

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, beginning a million-mile journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 region and a mission aimed at some of astronomy’s biggest unanswered questions. Equipped with a Hubble-sized primary mirror but a field of view at least 100 times larger, Roman is designed to survey vast areas of space far faster than previous observatories, helping scientists investigate dark matter, dark energy, black holes, billions of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system. The multibillion-dollar observatory also carries an advanced coronagraph technology demonstration and incorporates telescope hardware originally…