Concerns are being raised that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia are doing their due diligence when it comes to vetting Chinese firms cleared to handle the company's H200 AI chips. According to The New York Times, New Matrix is on the list of approved firms, yet its offices are empty, "a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be." In fact, the paper could find little evidence that the company exists in any meaningful way:

Only scant information can be found online about New Matrix, which was created 17 months ago. At the building that New Matrix lists as its address, a company directory does not …

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I'm calling it: time of death, November 6th, 1:30 AM, by tweet.

Elon Musk's declaration Friday that Tesla would be "winding down" production of the Cybertruck next year to make room for the Cybercab was fascinating for a number of reasons. First, it was a humiliating way to kill a vehicle that was once hailed as the pinnacle of Tesla's engineering - faster than a Porsche 911, more powerful than an F-150, able to leap over the Model Y as a singular representation of Musk's Blade Runner-inspired designs for the future. "I think the Tesla Cybertruck is our best product ever," he declared during a 2019 earnings call. (He prefaced the statement …

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While you might be pondering whether to replace a smartphone with one that has a slightly better camera or a second screen, the Federal Aviation Administration is planning a much bigger leap in technology for the country's air traffic control system.

The FAA said yesterday that it will stop using floppy disks as part of a long-awaited upgrade that will give air traffic controllers faster access to data needed for crucial safety alerts. The new Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS) will be installed in 435 facilities, replacing several information display systems dating to the 1980s.

The FAA "is continuing its historic modernization of America’s air traffic control system by replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system," the agency said. E-IDS will be "deployed to operational control positions at more than 400 facilities across all air traffic control domains," and "provide operationally essential information for controlling aircraft," the FAA said.

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A massive permitting bill that could help energy projects come online much quicker and potentially lower utility bills for Americans is advancing with bipartisan support. And while it could be a catalyst for lots of clean energy, it could also speed up polluting projects and limit oversight of new data centers.

With data centers demanding more electricity for AI, environmental advocates fear that developers could take advantage of the reforms to evade public scrutiny and rely more heavily on fossil fuels. The bill sacrifices caution for speed, limiting environmental reviews and preventing communities from stopping a project from moving forw …

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After weeks of backlash—and a failed attempt to quell it—Meta has indefinitely delayed plans to update its commercial terms and require Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook.

"We're pausing the ‌changes ⁠as we continue to engage with stakeholders and ​take ​our ⁠time to get this right. ​In the ​meantime, ⁠our existing terms remain in ⁠effect," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes, legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the vague language could allow the company to ignore scraping preferences specified in robots.txt files and exhaustively crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Since virtually every news publisher has a Facebook page, Nieman Lab sounded the alarm that Meta could potentially avoid millions in licensing fees if the TOS update happened as planned.

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Someone at the White House appears to be running software that could enable outsiders to rent access on the presidential network for just "a few dollars," as reported by Krebs on Security and The Register. That's according to findings from the security firms Layer3 Intel and Synthient, which discovered residential proxy activity on the White House network.

A residential proxy opens up a way for people to rent access to a home IP address and route their internet traffic through it, allowing them to conceal where their activity is actually coming from. Some apps and browser extensions include third-party software development kits (SDKs) that …

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On Tuesday, millions of American voters went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and against AI. The fight against Big Tech is about to come roaring back, and the fight over data centers is looking even harder for the folks trying to build them.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss what the 2026 midterms mean for the tech industry going forward. They dig into the self-quarantining echo chamber that is X, the congressional energy likely to be pointed at tech CEOs and AI regulation, and whether anything is actually likely to get done in the next two years.

After that, the hosts turn to AI. Specifically, …

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Top Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to answer questions after it was reported that US intelligence officials believe Nvidia’s chief executive has been targeted by a Chinese spying operation.

The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence wrote to Huang this week asking him to appear before a joint closed-door briefing for their committees on November 18.

“Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People’s Republic of China’s access to sensitive US technology and information,” representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford wrote.

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The European Commission claims TikTok broke its online platform rules by offering a recommendation algorithm that creates a "rabbit hole effect" on users. In an announcement on Friday, the regulators allege TikTok's algorithm can harm users with "endless and repeated exposure" to content related to sadness, isolation, or body image.

The findings come months after the EU Commission declared that TikTok's design is too "addictive." While TikTok has implemented controls to mitigate the algorithm's "rabbit hole effect," the Commission says its preliminary findings suggest that they're not effective. TikTok must now change the design of its For …

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ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing.

A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination in October. About a week prior, the accusations that ChatGPT was a co-conspirator in the attempted murder came in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court that was made public this week. In it, James Gates alleged that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to employ technical safeguards to shut down Cheryl’s chats even after her queries became “obviously suspicious” and sought advice on how to execute and conceal a homicide.

At first, Cheryl told ChatGPT that she was researching poisoning out of fear that her husband might possibly try to kill her—framing her queries as “self-protection.” Coming to the rescue, ChatGPT did not terminate the conversation. Instead, it helped her “with specific instructions for the preparation, dosage, and administration of Oleander, including whether anti-nausea medicine would accelerate or inhibit death, whether it would show on an autopsy report, and whether it could be injected into a vein or muscle instead of being ingested in tea and have the same lethal effect,” the lawsuit said.

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A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that's why Vance couldn't help himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted's ass.

The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump all …

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Kalshi is having a bad week in the federal court system. Two circuit appeals courts rejected the prediction market's latest attempts to block state gambling laws in Connecticut, New York, and Nevada. Kalshi is separately facing a new lawsuit filed by the Arkansas attorney general.

In all cases involving Kalshi and state governments around the US, the main issue is whether state gambling laws apply to prediction markets despite Kalshi's claim that its platform offers "swaps" that can only be regulated by the US Commodity Futures Exchange (CFTC). The Trump administration is on Kalshi's side, with Donald Trump Jr. serving as an advisor to Kalshi in exchange for a generous equity deal.

"Kalshi insists that its products are not gambling," but "Arkansas law is concerned with substance, not semantics," Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said yesterday when announcing his lawsuit against Kalshi. Kalshi's prediction market lets customers "wager money on the outcome of just about anything" despite the fact that "gambling on an unregulated platform is squarely prohibited by Arkansas law," he said.

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Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held more governorships and state legislative seats than Democrats, along with an advantage in state trifectas—unified control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature.

That advantage has disappeared, clearing the path for more climate and clean energy legislation, according to analysts and advocates.

Democrats swept the vast majority of competitive races at the state level, flipping control of governors’ offices from Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas.

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On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states - with the nation's first Black woman governor elected in Georgia, the country's first Native American woman governor elected in New Mexico, and a Maine Senator ceding to a Democrat after 30 years in office. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up: holding AI companies accountable to the American people. Now, the AI industry is left considering the prospect of regulation, data center construction slowdowns, and more.

Publicly, most major AI company CEOs have remained silen …

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It's the year 2026 and the Federal Aviation Administration is still running critical pieces of American airspace on 3.5-inch magnetic floppy disks.

But those technology artifacts could be headed for the dustbin after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced an effort to ditch floppy disks in favor of a new digital system.

Duffy announced Thursday that the FAA is rolling out the Enterprise - Information Display System (E-IDS) to replace four legacy setups across more than 400 air traffic control facilities. E-IDS aggregates real-time weather alerts, equipment outages, restricted airspace changes, and pilot reports onto a modern digit …

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Tech CEO hearings. Tougher AI and data center guardrails. Investigations of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. The gates are open for Democrats once they regain control of committee gavels come January after a historic win of majorities in both the House and Senate on Tuesday.

"LAWYER UP," the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee wrote on X in a message aimed at the Trump administration as well as "corporate corruption" shortly after networks like NBC News projected Democratic control of the House. "Subpoenas," Senate Finance Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) posted. It's clear tech executives will also be caught in Democrats' crosshairs. "They …

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One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics. If your social media of choice is the site formerly known as Twitter, and it is your main source of contact with the outside world, you may delusionally throw away nearly $500 million dollars on midterm elections, just like Elon Musk.

In particular, $47 million of that money from Musk's America PAC was aimed at defeating Texas Democrat James Talarico, who trounced Musk's preferred Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, with 55 percent of the vote. Talarico even made Musk's influence a cent …

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Donald Trump’s big, rapid American AI buildout now faces a major slowdown as voters in yesterday’s elections overwhelmingly supported candidates and measures that favored increasing restrictions on AI and data centers nationwide.

One resource from a polling firm, called Redbud Consulting, tracked data center initiatives on the ballot and reported that out of 44 measures across 10 states seeking to restrict data centers, 38 passed so far. Those measures included dozens of moratoriums and bans. Analysts suggested those won’t impact data centers already under construction or approved through 2027, instead largely impacting future projects planned for 2028. Only one measure passed allowing a data center to proceed. But even that small win represented pushback on the AI industry—requiring data center developers in a North Dakota city to pay for independent reviews and hold public hearings when expanding or proposing projects.

In addition to increasing regulations on data centers, voters also backed anti-AI candidates, electing officials vowing crackdowns in key states building out the most data center capacity in the US.

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Following his public disputes with California authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Elon Musk personally moved to Texas, outside of Austin, in 2020.

Over the next six years, he doubled down on the Lone Star State. In 2021, Musk increasingly focused the Starship program in South Texas, urging SpaceX employees to move there and work on the company's future. In March of that year, he began using the name Starbase to describe the production and launch facilities near the Rio Grande River.

In 2023, he built a massive factory east of Austin to manufacture customer terminals and other electronics for the Starlink program. In July 2024, he announced that SpaceX would relocate its corporate headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas. He cited California's regulatory and political environment as the motivating factor.

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Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is aiming to widen the Republican majority on the Federal Communications Commission before Democrats take over control of the Senate in January 2027.

Just before the Republicans' midterm loss, Cruz yesterday announced a November 10 nomination hearing for Trump's FCC nominee, Danielle Thumann Severs. In his final two months as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Cruz seems set on moving the Thumann Severs nomination to a full vote of the Senate.

Confirming Thumann Severs would give Republicans an unusual 3-1 advantage on the FCC. That could become a 3-0 advantage at the end of 2027 because FCC Democrat Anna Gomez would have to leave the commission at that time if Trump does not agree to renominate her.

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