Elon Musk’s Dubai tunnels: A robotaxi safe haven?

No city is betting bigger on electric and autonomous transport than Dubai. At the World Governments Summit earlier this month, Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority signed agreements with three U.S. companies for transport systems that do not yet exist at any meaningful level anywhere. The biggest deal, worth $545 million overall, went to Elon Musk’s […]

Who will regulate Elon Musk and China’s data centers in space?

Data centers are going to space faster than the rules that govern them. Over the past month, six American companies and a Chinese firm have expressed interest in building orbital data centers, citing environmental benefits. While experts see potential upsides, they warn the projects could open governance loopholes — especially for countries with little say […]

Gig workers in Africa had no idea they were helping the U.S. military

This piece was republished with permission from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. Six weeks before the US launched its brazen mission to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a spy plane was detected flying figure-of-eight loops above the Atlantic near the country’s border with […]

Washington “Tech Corps” volunteers to globally promote American AI

The U.S. government is planning to send “Tech Corps” volunteers abroad to promote the adoption of American artificial intelligence, as Washington competes with China for global AI dominance.   The program was announced on Friday, as part of the Peace Corps, a decades-old program that sends volunteers to help developing countries with education, health and economic […]

Social media ban: Can AI age checks truly protect kids?

Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10, chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site rolled out mandatory age checks at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the software […]

AI deepfakes for grief and celebrations are growing in India

When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds. The video was […]

India’s AI sovereignty: Why open source is the new infrastructure

As the world descends on New Delhi for India’s AI Impact Summit this week, the questions on the table could not be more consequential. Artificial intelligence has become a core digital infrastructure. It is in our search results, our inboxes, our workflows. According to analytics and advisory company Gallup, 45% of employees now use AI […]

Facebook creator monetization surge led by Indonesia

Facebook’s new content monetization program is booming, and Indonesian creators are leading the charge, giving the platform a much-needed boost to compete with YouTube and TikTok. The program has grown from under 3 million to 12 million participants in just over a year. Accounts in Bahasa Indonesia made up nearly 15% of the platform’s total monetized […]

AI is moving power from governments to tech companies

Debates over the governance of artificial intelligence tend to assume that it will be important and transformative across many areas of human endeavor. Yet, the question of how those benefits and risks will be distributed — who will win and who will lose — is less commonly articulated. Techno-utopians enthuse that everyone will win: The […]

China’s rare-earth dominance keeps EV makers dependent

Global electric-vehicle makers are finding that breaking free from Chinese rare earths is easier said than done. EV makers outside China are accelerating investments in motor technologies that reduce or eliminate rare-earth elements, hoping to shield themselves from Beijing’s tightening grip. Over the past six months, Stellantis, General Motors, and Honda have each announced new […]

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