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As media executives wrestle with the use of artificial intelligence, radio giant iHeartMedia wants to stand out.

“We don’t use AI-generated personalities. We don’t play AI music that features synthetic vocalists pretending to be human,” Tom Poleman, the company’s programming chief, wrote in an email to employees.

“The podcasts we publish are also Guaranteed Human,” he wrote.

Radio station DJs now are expected to say “Guaranteed Human,” as part of their hourly on-air disclosures, which include announcing the station’s call letters, as required by the Federal Communications Commission. The new branding campaign has its roots in iHeartMedia’s research that listeners turn on the radio for more than just music and information.

“Consumers aren’t just looking for content, they’re looking for connection,” the company’s president of insights, Lainie Fertick, wrote in an October blog post. “In a world of tech overload, consumers are searching for something real.”

The move comes as Hollywood creators, agents and executives come to grips with rapid advances in artificial intelligence, which has assisted workers with routine tasks but also caused a stir with the release of realistic AI actors, such as Tilly Norwood, which has more than 66,000 followers on Instagram. Entertainment behemoths, including Walt Disney Co. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, also have sued AI companies for copyright infringement.

To be sure, iHeartMedia uses “AI-powered productivity and distribution tools that help scale our business operations,” Poleman wrote in his note. Such AI tools are used for “scheduling, audience insights, data analysis, workflow automation, show prep, editing and organization,” he said.

iHeartMedia is the nation’s largest radio operator with more than 850 stations, including KFI-AM 640, KLAC-AM 570, KOST-FM 103.5 and KIIS-FM 102.7 in Los Angeles.

The company also has a growing podcast business, producing such shows as “Stuff You Should Know,” “Questlove Supreme” and “Drama Queens.” It also co-produces podcasts with the NFL, NBA and Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland Audio, which includes “The Laverne Cox Show.”

Previously known as Clear Channel Communications, the company has experienced the dark side of automation and programming centralization.

In 2002, its radio stations in Minot, N.D., aired canned music as a toxic cloud blanketed the community after a train transporting anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer derailed and exploded. One person died, and dozens of others were injured. Congress then drilled into alleged harms of media consolidation and the failure of broadcasters to alert the community during the disaster in Minot, where Clear Channel owned six of the eight commercial radio stations.

Clear Channel later said local police failed that night to activate the emergency alert system, which would have allowed the broadcast of special bulletins.

The company has since championed its responses to other disasters. An iHeart spokesperson pointed to its award-winning coverage of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, N.C., in 2024 as well as its efforts during the devastating Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires in January, “delivering crucial lifesaving information and working with local organizations to collect and distribute essential disaster relief supplies,” the spokesperson said, noting that Clear Channel was run by a different management team.

“At iHeart, we make service to our communities our number one priority,” the spokesperson said.

iHeartMedia, like other entertainment and news outlets, is dealing with advertising declines, and it has been looking for ways to keep listeners engaged amid media fragmentation. The company this fall cut several staff members at historic KFI, including Morris “Mo” O’Kelly, who had hosted the station’s evening talk show for nearly three years.

Radio host Chuck Dizzle also announced on Instagram that he’d been laid off from iHeart’s Los Angeles hip-hop station KRRL-FM, which brands itself as “Real 92.3.”

The company said its research shows that consumers crave interactions with real people, and they have deep concerns about the growing use of AI and its potential societal changes.

Poleman pointed to a recent survey that showed two-thirds of respondents were worried about losing their job to AI.

iHeartMedia employees should embrace “Guaranteed Human” as more than a marketing tagline, Poleman wrote.

“When listeners interact with us, they know they’re connecting with real voices, real stories, and real emotion,” Poleman wrote. “Sometimes you have to pick a side — we’re on the side of humans.”

An MQ-20 Avenger drone flew a mock mission at the direction of a pilot in an F-22 Raptor during a demonstration earlier this year, General Atomics has disclosed. The company says this is part of a larger effort to lay the groundwork for crewed-uncrewed teaming between F-22s and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones. General Atomics and Anduril are currently developing CCA designs for the U.S. Air Force, and that service expects the Raptor to be the first airborne controller for whichever types it decides to buy in the future.

General Atomics made its announcement about the MQ-20/F-22 teaming demonstration today, around the opening of the biennial Dubai Airshow, at which TWZ is in attendance. The actual event, which the company internally funded, took place back in October in the skies over the U.S. Air Force’s sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR). Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the F-22, and L3Harris also took part.

“We recently teamed Avenger with a badass fighter jet for a true airborne, crewed-uncrewed internal demo, where the human pilot commanded the autonomous Avenger from the cockpit for a hypothetical mission,” C. Mark Brinkley, a spokesperson for General Atomics, told TWZ. The “MQ-20 Avenger continues to serve as an autonomy accelerator, routinely flying in a CCA configuration, pushing the envelope.”

“The [crewed-uncrewed teaming demonstration] effort integrated L3Harris’ BANSHEE Advanced Tactical Datalinks with its Pantera software-defined radios (SDRs) via Lockheed Martin’s open radio architectures, all integrated and shared from an F-22 Raptor,” according to a General Atomics press release. “Two L3Harris Software‑Defined Radios (SDRs) supported the demonstration. The first SDR was installed into the General Atomics MQ‑20 Avenger, and the second was integrated in the Lockheed Martin F‑22 Raptor.”

“Through the Pilot Vehicle Interface (PVI) tablet and the F‑22’s GRACE module, the system provided end‑to‑end communications, enabling the F‑22 command and control of the MQ‑20 in flight,” the release adds. “The collaborative demonstration showcased non-proprietary, U.S. government-owned communications capabilities and the ability to fly, transition, and re-fly flight hardware that is core to the Open Mission Systems and skills based unmanned autonomy ecosystem.”

The “GRACE” mentioned here refers to the Government Reference Architecture Compute Environment. This is a previously announced open-architecture systems module for the F-22 that is designed to make it easier to integrate new software packages onto the aircraft, including ones to support the airborne drone controller role.

The explicit mention of a tablet-based in-cockpit control interface is also worth highlighting. General Atomics and Lockheed Martin have both been working for years now on control systems to allow crewed aircraft to direct drones in flight, with tablet-like devices being the typical user interface. However, both companies have themselves raised questions to varying degrees about the long-term viability of that arrangement, especially for pilots in single-seat fighters, who already have substantial workloads during real-world missions.

“We started with [the Air Force’s] Air Combat Command with tablets … There was this idea that they wanted to have this discreet control,” Michael Atwood, vice president of Advanced Programs for General Atomics, said during an appearance on The Merge podcast last year. “I got to fly in one of these jets with a tablet. And it was really hard to fly the airplane, let alone the weapon system of my primary airplane, and spatially and temporally think about this other thing.”

“There’s a lot of opinions amongst the Air Force about the right way to go [about controlling drones from other aircraft],” John Clark, then-head of Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works advanced projects division, had also told TWZ and others at Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) main annual conference in September 2024. “The universal thought, though, is that this [a tablet or other touch-based interface] may be the fastest way to begin experimentation. It may not be the end state.”

These are the kind of questions that demonstrations like the one General Atomics conducted in October over the NTTR could help answer. As TWZ regularly notes, there is still much to be worked out when it comes to how future CCA fleets are structured, as well as how they are deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated, let alone employed tactically.

“General Atomics is in a pretty unique situation here, given that we already have operational uncrewed jets to use for experimentation,” Brinkley, the General Atomics spokesperson, told TWZ. “The MQ-20 Avenger, tricked out with mature mission autonomy software, is a perfect CCA surrogate and allows us to move fast and move first.”

It’s important to stress here that Avenger drones have been heavily utilized as testbeds for advanced autonomy and other developments related to CCA-type uncrewed aircraft for years now. The jet-powered drones have some low observable (stealthy) features, as well as an internal payload bay. Much of this work has been in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, as well as the U.S. Air Force. How much crewed-uncrewed teaming testing involving the F-22 and the MQ-20, or other surrogates, may have already been done in the classified realm is unknown.

“We’re leaning forward, because we already know where this is headed,” Brinkley added. “We don’t want to wait for the CCA fleet to be fielded to begin leaning in on F-22 teaming. We already know the F-22 will play a critical role in crewed-uncrewed teaming operations, and General Atomics is in a unique position to get started now.”

As mentioned, the F-22 is slated to be the U.S. Air Force’s first airborne CCA controller, something the service revealed this past summer in its 2026 Fiscal Year budget request. This was further confirmed in an unclassified Air Force report to Congress in October, which otherwise outlined a highly aspirational 10-year plan for the service’s fighter fleets that puts significant emphasis on CCAs.

“F-22 remains the threshold platform for CCA but integration with F-16, F-35A, F-15E, and F-15EX is an emerging consideration,” according to that report. “Ultimately, CCA will be paired with [the sixth-generation] F-47 to meet highly contested mission demands.”

“America’s adversaries are countering US air power with greater mass and a challenging air defense laydown that limits the United States’ ability to project combat power in traditional ways,” the report adds. “CCAs allow for risk-tolerant aircraft at a lower price point and serve as a force multiplier.”

The fighter force structure report also says that details about exactly how many CCAs the Air Force currently plans to buy and across what timeline are currently classified. Air Force officials have said in the past that between 100 and 150 drones will be ordered under the CCA program’s first phase, or Increment 1, with hundreds more expected through future incremental development cycles. Whether the service plans to down-select to a single type or buy multiple designs for the first tranche remains unclear. As mentioned, General Atomics and Anduril are currently developing drones for Increment 1, which are now designated the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, respectively. General Atomics announced that the YFQ-42A had made its first flight in August. The YFQ-44A took to the skies for the first time last month. The goal is for operational Increment 1 CCAs to begin entering service around the end of the decade.

CCA drone developments are not limited to the U.S. Air Force, either. The U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy have their own CCA efforts ongoing. All three services are directly collaborating on common control architectures and other elements. General Atomics is also one of several companies now developing conceptual CCA designs for the Navy. The company is now actively pursuing foreign sales of drones in this general category, leveraging its Gambit family of highly modular designs, as well. Other companies in the United States and elsewhere globally are eyeing steadily growing opportunities in this market space, too.

“There are companies all over the world making big promises while they figure all of this out for the first time. How to build an airplane, how to incorporate autonomy, how to team that with manned aircraft,” General Atomics spokesperson Brinkley told us. “We’ve been putting our own money into uncrewed jets for 17 years. This [the MQ-20/F-22 demonstration] is just one more milestone in a long history of leaning forward. We’re not out here saying ‘I think I can, I think I can.’ We know we can.”

With the F-22 set to be the Air Force’s first airborne CCA controller, work to continue proving out the Raptor’s crewed-uncrewed teaming capabilities will be especially important.

Update, 1:45 PM EST:

Lockheed Martin has now provided its own remarks regarding the MQ-20/F-22 teaming demonstration.

“Lockheed Martin Skunk Works led and orchestrated this crewed-uncrewed teaming flight test with GA-ASI [General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.] and L3Harris. This demonstration involved an F-22 Raptor, an MQ-20, and Skunk Works’ flexible and hardware-agnostic pilot vehicle interface to showcase capabilities critical to the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft family of systems,” the company told TWZ. “Lockheed Martin’s phased approach to building, testing, and improving teaming capabilities is at the forefront of innovation, developing the future of air combat today.”

“This effort represents Skunk Works bringing its diverse and unique expertise to the table to lead the way, demonstrating the future of air combat, where single-seat aircraft command and control drones with simple and intuitive interfaces in the cockpit,” O.J. Sanchez, Lockheed Martin Vice President and General Manager of Skunk Works, also said in a statement to TWZ.

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China has lifted export controls on computer chips vital to car production, the country’s commerce ministry said on Sunday.

Exemptions have been granted to exports made by Chinese-owned Nexperia for civilian use, it said, which should help carmakers who had feared production in Europe would be hit.

At the same time, China has also paused an export ban to the US of some materials that are crucial in the semiconductor industry and suspended port fees for American ships.

The moves mark an easing of trade tensions between Beijing and Washington after President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed in October to reduce tariffs on each other and pause other measures for a year.

In October, the Dutch government took control of Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands but owned by Chinese company Wingtech, to try to safeguard the European supply of semiconductors for cars and other goods.

In response, China blocked exports of the firm’s finished chips. However, it said earlier this month it would begin easing the ban as part of a trade deal struck between the US and China.

While Nexperia is based in the Netherlands, about 70% of its chips made in Europe are sent to China to be completed and re-exported to other countries.

When it took control of the company, the Dutch government said it had taken the decision due to “serious governance shortcomings” and to prevent the company’s chips from becoming unavailable in an emergency.

But when China blocked exports of chips from Nexperia, there were worries that it could create global supply chain issues.

In October, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (EMEA) had warned Nexperia chip supplies would only last a few weeks unless the Chinese ban was lifted.

Earlier this month, the EMEA’s director general Sigrid De Vries told the BBC that “supply shortages were imminent”.

Volvo Cars and Volkswagen had warned that a chip shortage could lead to temporary shutdowns at their plants, and Jaguar Land Rover also said the lack of chips posed a threat to its business.

But on Saturday, EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic announced in a post on X that China had agreed to “the further simplification of export procedures for Nexperia chips” and it would “grant exemption from licensing requirements to any exporter” provided the goods were for “civilian use”.

“Close engagement with both the Chinese and Dutch authorities continues as we work towards a lasting. stable predictable framework that ensures the full restoration of semiconductor flows.”

In its statement, China’s commerce ministry called on “the EU to continue exerting its influence to urge the Netherlands to correct its erroneous practices as soon as possible.”

Prof David Bailey from Birmingham University’s business school told the BBC’s Today programme that the actions of China were a “wake-up call” for the motor industry.

“The Dutch government may well have had good reasons to try and take control but it hadn’t thought through the implications of that,” he said. “The retaliation from China was swift and it was brutal.”

He said there was a need to find alternative processing sites, “maybe in south east Asia, or Europe”, and for the industry to keep bigger stocks of its products in case of shortages.

Meanwhile, the suspension of a ban on exports of “dual-use items” related to gallium, germanium, antimony and super-hard materials to the US came into effect on Sunday and will be in place until 27 November, 2026.

The ban on the exports of goods and materials that can have both civilian and military uses was announced in December 2024.

China’s transport ministry also said port fees charged on US-linked ships would be suspended for a for a year, effective 0501 GMT Monday.

On Friday, China also announced the suspension of other export controls related to expanded curbs on some rare earth materials and lithium batteries.