Upcoming policy issue

The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy. It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early in 2027, according to people who truly understands AI. Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed.

Washington has a familiar playbook when an outdated federal program runs into trouble: Rather than fixing what’s broken, it just finds someone new to pay for it. That is the danger Congress faces today with the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. For nearly three decades, USF has helped connect rural communities, low-income Americans, schools, libraries, and rural healthcare providers.

A week of extraordinary warnings about 

Anthropic insiders' warnings that AI could end humanity in the next decade have members of Congress fr

Today, public universities, public libraries, public hospitals, national research laboratories, public schools, and local governments fulfill public obligations to manage critical data resources using digital infrastructure they do not own and, in many cases, cannot build or maintain themselves. Governments allocate resources to these institutions so they can provide services we consider essential, and for many, this government support drives specific obligations to their publics.

If the character Edward Cullen of the ubiquitous Twilight saga taught us anything (aside from the fact that Robert Pattinson’s hair can do no wrong), it is that being a heretic can be cool. In the series, the Volturi—the Vampiric Council—operates as an authoritative government dictating the terms of vampire life: encouraging slaughter of humans, forbidding certain romance, and eventually seeking the destruction of Edward and Bella’s baby. Cullen went against these vampire norms to protect his loved ones, doing so in a way that made many hearts flutter.

Tech executives and Trump administration officials urged policymakers from other leading economies to minimize artificial-intelligence regulations, arguing that strict rules could strangle an industry capable of supercharging global growth and curing diseases.

For more than thirty years, American communications users—really, American consumers—have been charged roughly $1 billion to $3 billion a year to subsidize Internet and related services for schools and libraries through the government's E-Rate program, which is one component of what's called the “Universal Service Fund.” That is a lot of compulsory generosity. Yet only now are policymakers asking the obvious question: Is this money helping students learn—or is it doing harm? Some treat that question as out of bounds. It is not.

A new "consensus-driven roadmap" on the future of the Universal Service Fund argues that universal service should be understood as an ongoing responsibility, not a goal to achieve, and offers six principles for Universal Service Fund reform.

In 2024, one-third of Americans said they had used a chatbot at least once, and a