Eileen Guo

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.  “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research Lab. Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill the gap.

Since its earliest days back in office, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. Now, some of those researchers are fighting back.

When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for a 62-year-old Chinese dissident named Xu Wanping, the company still looms large—and has for nearly two decades. In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn’t use his real name, but he did use his Yahoo email address. At the time, Yahoo was among Silicon Valley’s largest and most influential technology companies. And Yahoo China, its Chinese subsidiary, was busy tapping into the country’s nascent but potentially enormous internet market.

Even if you don’t have an AI friend yourself, you probably know someone who does.

Human rights conferences can be sobering, to say the least. They highlight the David vs. Goliath situation of small civil society organizations fighting to center human rights in decisions about technology, sometimes challenging the priorities of much more powerful governments and technology companies. But 2025's RightsCon, the 13th since the event began as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in 2011, felt especially urgent.

For as long as the internet has existed, there has been a divide between those who have it and those who do not, with increasingly high stakes for people stuck on the wrong side of America’s “persistent digital divide.” That’s one reason why, from the earliest days of his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to make universal broadband a priority. But Biden’s promise has taken on extra urgency as a result of the pandemic.