Author: GT

CHAPIN, S.C. (AP) — Federal officials on Friday said they are taking steps that will give state and federal prisons the right to jam the signals of cellphones smuggled to inmates, devices they argue allow prisoners to plot violence and carry out crimes.FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday during a news conference in Arkansas that his agency would vote at its Sept. 30 meeting on a proposal to lift a restriction in place that prohibits state and federal prisons from jamming signals of phones that prisoners aren’t allowed to have.The debate over using technology to make the devices — often…

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesFrom the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting…

Around half a million writers will be eligible for a payday of at least $3,000, thanks to a historic $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit that a group of authors brought against Anthropic. This landmark settlement marks the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law, but this isn’t a victory for authors — it’s yet another win for tech companies. Tech giants are racing to amass as much written material as possible to train their LLMs, which power groundbreaking AI chat products like ChatGPT and Claude — the same products that are endangering the creative industries,…

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.””We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and…

In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and 4 million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an AI-generated cartoon ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head.Her name is Ballerina Cappuccina. Her smiling, girlish face is accompanied by a deep, computer-generated male voice singing in Italian — or, at least, some Italian. The rest is gibberish.She is one of the most prominent characters in the internet phenomenon known as “Italian Brain Rot,” a series of memes that exploded in popularity this year, consisting of unrealistic AI-generated animal-object…

Captions, an AI-powered video creation and editing app for content creators that has secured over $100 million in venture capital to date at a valuation of $500 million, is rebranding to Mirage, the company announced on Thursday.  The new name reflects the company’s broader ambitions to become an AI research lab focused on multimodal foundational models specifically designed for short-form video content for platforms like TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. The company believes this approach will distinguish it from traditional AI models and competitors such as D-ID, Synthesia, and Hour One. The rebranding will also unify the company’s offerings under one…

The attorneys general of California and Delaware on Friday warned OpenAI they have “serious concerns” about the safety of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, especially for children and teens. The two state officials, who have unique powers to regulate nonprofits such as OpenAI, sent the letter to the company after a meeting with its legal team earlier this week in Wilmington, Delaware.California AG Rob Bonta and Delaware AG Kathleen Jennings have spent months reviewing OpenAI’s plans to restructure its business, with an eye on “ensuring rigorous and robust oversight of OpenAI’s safety mission.”But they said they were concerned by “deeply troubling…

Google’s latest video-generation model, Veo 3, is coming to Google Photos. The new model, available on the mobile app’s Create tab, will allow users in the U.S. to turn their still images into video clips. Google Photos already offers video generation through its recently added “Photo to video” feature, but the company says the addition of Veo 3 enhances that functionality with higher-quality video. The launch also represents how the company is working to bring its latest AI tech to consumers through its products — Google Photos, for instance, had over 1.5 billion monthly active users as of May 2025.…

European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a 2.95 billion euro ($3.5 billion) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company.The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the U.S. tech giant to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain. It’s the fourth time that the Commission has hit Google with a multibillion-euro fine in an antitrust case. It’s a move that is likely to anger U.S.…

Thiago Prudêncio | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesRoblox on Friday announced new short-video and AI features that come amid increasing lawmaker scrutiny into how the company protects children on its platform.With Roblox Moments, users 13 and older will be able to create and share video clips of their gameplay with others on a feed within the platform. The artificial intelligence additions, meanwhile, will allow users to generate advanced 3D objects for the games they create on the platform.Tune in at 4:15 p.m. ET: Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki joins CNBC TV to discuss the company’s latest announcements coming out…