Aaron Mak

President Donald Trump has emerged as perhaps America’s most important cheerleader for artificial intelligence this year, releasing a milestone AI Action Plan over the summer and a flurry of executive orders to encourage the global ascendancy of American tech companies.

What exactly are the rules around data scraping? It turns out that there aren’t many—in part because government regulators haven’t really focused on this increasingly important issue. Internet data is now becoming a crucial resource in the AI boom, and there are ongoing clashes between major tech platforms that are trying to both hoard and capitalize on that data.

The volatile combination of kids and chatbots has already started to galvanize lawmakers and advocates. Worried that beguiling AI “companions” could push impressionable youth to harm themselves or withdraw from human relationships, they’re racing to put guardrails around the nascent industry. But that could be a far deeper problem—and far harder to solve—than the current bills envision.

After aggressively criticizing government censorship during the Biden administration, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is getting sucked into his own free-speech imbroglio.

The rapacious energy needs of data centers finally seem to have taken a political toll. In recent elections, candidates in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere ran—and won—on voters’ frustration with rising utility bills caused partly by America’s enormous AI buildout.

The nationwide push to protect kids from AI chatbots is entering a new frontier: adults. OpenAI was recently hit with seven lawsuits claiming that ChatGPT led users to lose touch with reality, which in some cases resulted in suicide. All but one of the alleged victims were adults. The lawsuits represent a new, murkier front for lawmakers and Big Tech in the national argument about the harms and risks of chatbots.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited South Korea, the centerpiece of his trip wasn’t some multibillion-dollar “Art of the Deal” transaction he’d brokered. Rather, it was his proposal to establish a global organization to set AI standards. In the vacuum left by President Donald Trump—who flew home from South Korea before the conference officially started—Xi pitched a Shanghai-based group that would set rules for international AI governance. This would allow China—rather than America or Europe—to mold how the world approaches AI. These aren’t just idle prospects.

The “Disinformation Dozen” are back—kind of. The year 2025 has been good to a group of controversial influencers once widely criticized for causing national harm during the Covid-19 pandemic — stoking concerns about vaccines, discouraging masking, and questioning the severity of the disease.

So who are the true free-speech warriors: Democrats or Republicans? That argument got a public airing in a Senate hearing that didn’t necessarily turn out the way its organizers intended. Convened by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), the hearing was supposed to focus on accusations that the Biden administration improperly pressured social media companies to moderate misinformation, particularly around COVID-19.

It often feels like AI is changing everything about the tech business—rewriting the rules of coding, swamping social media with deepfakes, even changing how companies are born. It’s happening so fast that even the most powerful tech firms are pleading helplessness.