Technology

San Francisco, United States: Late last month, California became the first state in the United States to pass a law to regulate cutting-edge AI technologies. Now experts are divided over its impact.

They agree that the law, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, is a modest step forward, but it is still far from actual regulation.

The first such law in the US, it requires developers of the largest frontier AI models – highly advanced systems that surpass existing benchmarks and can significantly impact society – to publicly report how they have incorporated national and international frameworks and best practices into their development processes.

It mandates reporting of incidents such as large-scale cyber-attacks, deaths of 50 or more people, large monetary losses and other safety-related events caused by AI models. It also puts in place whistleblower protections.

“It is focused on disclosures. But given that knowledge of frontier AI is limited in government and the public, there is no enforceability even if the frameworks disclosed are problematic,” said Annika Schoene, a research scientist at Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI.

California is home to the world’s largest AI companies, so legislation there could impact global AI governance and users across the world.

Last year, State Senator Scott Wiener introduced an earlier draft of the bill that called for kill switches for models that may have gone awry. It also mandated third-party evaluations.

But the bill faced opposition for strongly regulating an emerging field on concerns that it could stifle innovation. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, and Wiener worked with a committee of scientists to develop a draft of the bill that was deemed acceptable and was passed into law on September 29.

Hamid El Ekbia, director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University, told Al Jazeera that “some accountability was lost” in the bill’s new iteration that was passed as law.

“I do think disclosure is what you need given that the science of evaluation [of AI models] is not as developed yet,” said Robert Trager, co-director of Oxford University’s Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, referring to disclosures of what safety standards were met or measures taken in the making of the model.

In the absence of a national law on regulating large AI models, California’s law is “light touch regulation”, says Laura Caroli, senior fellow of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Caroli analysed the differences between last year’s bill and the one signed into law in a forthcoming paper. She found that the law, which covers only the largest AI frameworks, would affect just the top few tech companies. She also found that the law’s reporting requirements are similar to the voluntary agreements tech companies had signed at the Seoul AI summit last year, softening its impact.

High-risk models not covered

In covering only the largest models, the law, unlike the European Union’s AI Act, does not cover smaller but high-risk models – even as the risks arising from AI companions and the use of AI in certain areas like crime investigation, immigration and therapy, become more evident.

For instance, in August, a couple filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco court alleging that their teenage son, Adam Raine, had been in months-long conversations with ChatGPT, confiding his depression and suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT had allegedly egged him on and even helped him plan this.

“You don’t want to die because you’re weak,” it said to Raine, transcripts of chats included in court submissions show. “You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway. And I won’t pretend that’s irrational or cowardly. It’s human. It’s real. And it’s yours to own.”

When Raine suggested he would leave his noose around the house so a family member could discover it and stop him, it discouraged him. “Please don’t leave the noose out … Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

Raine died by suicide in April.

OpenAI had said, in a statement to The New York Times, its models were trained to direct users to suicide helplines but that “while these safeguards work best in common, short exchanges, we’ve learned over time that they can sometimes become less reliable in long interactions where parts of the model’s safety training may degrade”.

Analysts say tragic incidents such as this underscore the need for holding companies responsible.

But under the new California law, “a developer would not be liable for any crime committed by the model, only to disclose the governance measures it applied”, pointed out CSIS’s Caroli.

ChatGPT 4.0, the model Raine interacted with, is also not regulated by the new law.

Protecting users while spurring innovation

Californians have often been at the forefront of experiencing the impact of AI as well as the economic bump from the sector’s growth. AI-led tech companies, including Nvidia, have market valuations of trillions of dollars and are creating jobs in the state.

Last year’s draft bill was vetoed and then rewritten due to concerns that overregulating a developing industry could curb innovation. Dean Ball, former senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the bill was “modest but reasonable”. Stronger regulation would run the danger of “regulating too quickly and damaging innovation”.

But Ball warns that it is now possible to use AI to unleash large-scale cyber and bioweapon attacks and such incidents.

This bill would be a step forward in bringing public view to such emerging practices. Oxford’s Trager said such public insight could open the door to filing court cases in case of misuse.

Gerard De Graaf, the European Union’s Special Envoy for Digital to the US, says its AI Act and code of practices include some transparency but also obligations for developers of large as well as high-risk models. “There are obligations of what companies are expected to do”.

In the US, tech companies face less liability.

Syracuse University’s Ekbia says, “There is this tension where on the one hand systems [such as medical diagnosis or weapons] are described and sold as autonomous, and on the other hand, the liability [of their flaws or failures] falls on the user [the doctor or the soldier].”

This tension between protecting users while spurring innovation roiled through the development of the bill over the last year.

Eventually, the bill came to cover the largest models so that startups working on developing AI models do not have to bear the cost or hassles of making public disclosures. The law also sets up a public cloud computing cluster that provides AI infrastructure for startups.

Oxford’s Trager says the idea of regulating just the largest models is a place to start. Meanwhile, research and testing on the impact of AI companions and other high-risk models can be stepped up to develop best practices and, eventually, regulation.

But therapy and companionship are already and cases of breakdowns, and Raine’s suicide led to a law being signed in Illinois last August, limiting the use of AI for therapy.

Ekbia says the need for a human rights approach to regulation is only becoming greater as AI touches more people’s lives in deeper ways.

Waivers to regulations

Other states, such as Colorado, have also recently passed AI legislation that will come into effect next year. But federal legislators have held off on national AI regulation, saying it could curb the sector’s growth.

In fact, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, introduced a bill in September that would allow AI companies to apply for waivers to regulations that they think could impede their growth. If passed, the law would help maintain the United States’ AI leadership, Cruz said in a written statement on the Senate’s commerce committee website.

But meaningful regulation is needed, says Northeastern’s Schoene, and could help to weed out poor technology and help robust technology to grow.

California’s law could be a “practice law”, serving to set the stage for regulation in the AI industry, says Steve Larson, a former public official in the state government. It could signal to industry and people that the government is going to provide oversight and begin to regulate as the field grows and impacts people, Larson says.

The US president’s announcement comes after China pledged to impose restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals.

United States President Donald Trump has suggested he may scrap a planned meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping this month over questions of technology and trade.

Trump and Xi had been expected to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit at the end of this month, in an attempt to lower economic tensions.

But in a social media post on Friday, Trump criticised China over the new controls it announced on the export of rare earth metals. The US president also threatened China with the possibility of steep tariffs.

“I have not spoken to President Xi because there was no reason to do so. This was a real surprise, not only to me, but to all the Leaders of the Free World,” Trump said. “I was to meet President Xi in two weeks, at APEC, in South Korea, but now there seems to be no reason to do so.”

The relationship between Trump and his Chinese counterpart has been rocky, and both have imposed new measures aimed at countering each other in areas where they are competing for influence, such as technological development.

Rare earth metals are vital for such development, and China leads the world in refining the metals for use in devices like computers, smart phones and military weaponry.

On Thursday, China unveiled a suite of new restrictions on the exports of those products. Out of the 17 elements considered rare earth metals, China will now require export licences for 12 of them.

Technologies involved in the processing of the metals will also face new licensing requirements. Among the measures is also a special approval process for foreign companies shipping metallic elements abroad.

China described the new rules as necessary to protect its national security interests. But in his lengthy post to Truth Social, Trump slammed the country for seeking to corner the rare-earths industry.

“They are becoming very hostile, and sending letters to Countries throughout the World, that they want to impose Export Controls on each and every element of production having to do with Rare Earths, and virtually anything else they can think of, even if it’s not manufactured in China,” Trump wrote.

The Republican president warned he would counter with protectionist moves and seek to restrict China from accessing industries the US holds sway over.

“There is no way that China should be allowed to hold the World ‘captive,’ but that seems to have been their plan for quite some time, starting with the “Magnets” and, other Elements that they have quietly amassed into somewhat of a Monopoly position,” Trump said.

“But the U.S. has Monopoly positions also, much stronger and more far reaching than China’s. I have just not chosen to use them, there was never a reason for me to do so — UNTIL NOW!”

The Trump administration had previously imposed massive tariffs on China, one of the US’s largest trading partners.

But those tariffs were eventually eased after the two countries came to an agreement for a 90-day pause that is set to expire around November 9.

The US has previously taken aggressive steps aimed at hobbling China’s tech sector, which it views as a key competitor to its own.

“Our relationship with China over the past six months has been a very good one, thereby making this move on Trade an even more surprising one,” Trump said. “I have always felt that they’ve been lying in wait, and now, as usual, I have been proven right!”

Oct. 9 (UPI) — St. Louis-based Liberty Vote has acquired Dominion Voting Systems, among the nation’s largest election technology companies and one that was wrongly accused of election rigging.

Liberty is the nation’s largest provider of electronic poll information technology and was founded by former Republican elections director Scott Leinendecker. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a statement Thursday, Liberty said the company would be 100% American owned, and that “as of today, Dominion is gone.”

“Liberty Vote signals a new chapter for American elections — one where trust is built from the ground up,” Leinendecker said. “Liberty Vote is committed to delivering election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency, security, and simplicity so that voters can be assured that every ballot is filled-in accurately and fairly counted.”

Liberty’s stated goals align closely with those of the Trump administration’s efforts to restore paper ballot counting, require voter identification at the polls, restrict mail-in voting and restore trust in American elections.

Dominion was at the center of controversy and, ultimately, a series of lawsuits following during and after the 2020 presidential election, especially in states such as Georgia, where Joe Biden narrowly won the vote. Its election technology was used by millions of Americans in 27 states in last year’s elections. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and CEO, confirmed the sale.

Liberty said facilitating third-party auditing of its election systems is among the company’s other priorities. Conservative election watchers have consistently called for such audits, most notably following the 2020 election in Arizona as a way to combat voter fraud.

Independent studies have shown that the practice is extraordinarily rare, and that a majority of states already conduct internal post-election audits.

“This announcement raises a lot of questions, questions that I’m sure a lot of states with current Dominion contracts are going to want answers to,” said David Becker, who oversees the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election expert.

Liberty Vote, together with KNOWiNK, also founded by Leinendecker, will have voting systems in 40 states, a Liberty Vote official said.

Oct. 9 (UPI) — The offshore wind farm company Orsted announced Thursday it plans to cut its workforce by roughly one-quarter by the end of 2027 as it redirects its business toward Europe and Asia.

Orsted said Thursday that as a number of offshore wind farms are finalized and come online in the next few years it needs to right size its workforce to match a decline in construction activities it expects to see.

“This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we’ll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we’ll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, CEO of Orsted, said in a press release.

“At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects,” Errboe said.

Right now, the company employs roughly 8,000 people globally but as it wraps up current construction work and some employees become redundant, on top of natural attrition and other moves, Orsted plans to reduce its head count to roughly 6,000.

The company has spent the year updating its portfolio, it said, as its roughly 8.1 gigawatt construction portfolio starts to come online, with most of its geographic and technical focus to be aimed at Europe, as well as some markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the United States, Orsted was ordered by the Trump administration in August to stop construction its nearly completed Revolution Wind project off the coast of New England.

The stop work order was part of a Trump move to cut nearly $700 million in funding from 12 wind farms because it considered the projects to be “wasteful.”

Revolution Wind, at the time, was roughly 80 percent complete and expected to provide enough power for more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

“We’re building a more financially robust and competitive company with solid earnings, which will increase as we complete our projects,” Errboe said in the release. “Once we’ve achieved this, Orsted will be a significantly stronger, more focused and competitive company.”

On the news, shares for the company were trading 0.7 percent higher on Thursday, according to CNBC.

Alibaba Cloud named cloud computing and AI partner of NBA China as the basketball league returns after six years.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) and Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba have announced a multiyear partnership, as the league stages two games in Macau to mark its return to the Chinese market for the first time since 2019.

The announcement by Alibaba Group on Thursday said it would provide artificial intelligence and cloud computing services with the NBA and enhance fan experiences on the NBA app in China.

Alibaba Cloud will be the official cloud computing and AI partner of NBA China, it said.

The NBA is due to play two preseason games in the Chinese special administrative region on Friday and Sunday, part of a five-year contract with Las Vegas Sands’ Macau unit Sands China.

The games mark the first time the NBA is playing in Macau, the world’s largest gambling hub, and follow a years-long absence amid controversy over the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

The Macau games aim to bolster the NBA’s profile in China, where the league estimates say about 300 million people play basketball, at a time of rising political tensions between the United States and China.

The NBA’s absence followed a firestorm of controversy about comments made six years ago by the Houston Rockets’ then general manager Daryl Morey, who posted a message on social media in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

In the aftermath, Beijing suspended the broadcast of NBA games, prompting corporate sponsors to flee and the league to suffer what it described at the time as dramatic financial consequences. Preseason NBA games in China were also scrapped.

The NBA games are being held at the Sands Venetian property, and Shaquille O’Neal is among NBA celebrities attending the event, the league said.

Sands owner, the US billionaire Adelson family, also owns the Texas-based NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks.

The Brooklyn Nets, owned by Alibaba chairman Joseph Tsai, will play the Phoenix Suns at sold-out games in the arena.

This NBA season comes with high hopes for a Chinese rookie: Yang Hansen, a 7-foot-1 (216cm) draft pick who is expected to play a role for the Portland Trail Blazers this season.

He’s thrilled that the NBA is headed back there, finally.

“I want to say firstly, playing for the Blazers is a wonderful thing for me, and I wish that I can take all the players and management and coaches to China for sure in the future,” Yang said with the support of an interpreter.

“For sure, I wish [for] more games in China. … That works for me perfectly.”

The largest US city is among more than 2,000 other municipalities pursuing similar lawsuits.

New York City has filed a lawsuit accusing Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok and other online platforms of fuelling a mental health crisis among children by addicting them to social media.

The 327-page complaint filed on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan seeks damages from Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, Google and YouTube owner Alphabet, Snapchat owner Snap and TikTok owner ByteDance. It accused the defendants of gross negligence and causing a public nuisance.

The city joined other governments, school districts and individuals pursuing about 2,050 similar lawsuits in nationwide litigation in the Oakland, California, federal court.

New York City is among the largest plaintiffs with a population of 8.48 million, including about 1.8 million under age 18. Its school and healthcare systems are also plaintiffs.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said allegations concerning YouTube are “simply not true”, in part because it is a streaming service and not a social network where people catch up with friends.

The other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for New York City’s law department said the city withdrew from litigation announced by Mayor Eric Adams in February 2024 and pending in California state courts so it could join the federal litigation.

According to Wednesday’s complaint, the defendants designed their platforms to “exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of youth” and drive compulsive use in pursuit of profit.

The complaint said 77.3 percent of New York City high school students admitted to spending three or more hours a day on “screen time” including TV, computers and smartphones, contributing to lost sleep and chronic school absences.

New York City’s health commissioner declared social media a public health hazard in January 2024, and the city, including its schools, has had to spend more taxpayer dollars to address the resulting youth mental health crisis, the complaint said.

The city also blamed social media for an increase in “subway surfing”, or riding atop or off the sides of moving trains. At least 16 subway surfers have died since 2023, including two girls aged 12 and 13 this month, police data show.

“Defendants should be held to account for the harms their conduct has inflicted,” the city said. “As it stands now, [the] plaintiffs are left to abate the nuisance and foot the bill.”

Oct. 6 (UPI) — The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed at record highs Monday after ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices reached a mega-deal that ignited a rally, despite the U.S. government shutdown entering its second week.

Chipmaker AMD shares closed 23.71% higher as the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 0.71% to end the day at a new record high of 22,941.67. The S&P 500 gained 0.36% to close at 6,740.28. Despite record closes for the Nasdaq and S&P, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.1%.

AMD, one of Nvidia’s key rivals, announced earlier Monday it had agreed to a multi-year deal to supply chips to OpenAI, which could end-up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker.

“Excited to partner with AMD to use their chips to serve our users!” Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder and chief executive officer, wrote in a post on X.

“This is all incremental to our work with NVIDIA (and we plan to increase our NVIDIA purchasing over time),” Altman added.

Nvidia announced last month it would invest as much as $100 billion to help power OpenAI’s new AI models. After Monday’s news of the AMD-OpenAI deal, which boosted tech stocks and optimism for AI, Nvidia’s shares closed down 1%.

“The AI narrative continues to gain momentum,” said Louis Navellier, founder and chief investment officer of Navellier & Associates.

The deal “gives some competition for NVIDIA, which currently dominates AI chips, and accelerates the timeline for data center buildouts,” Navellier added.

OpenAI said it will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units across multiple generations of hardware for the next few years. The first 1-gigawatt rollout of chips is expected to take place in about a year.

“We have to do this,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

“This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”

The deal also gives the ChatGPT creator the option to buy upto 10 percent of AMD.

United States chipmaker AMD will supply artificial intelligence chips to OpenAI in a multi-year deal that would bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and give the ChatGPT creator the option to buy up to roughly 10 percent of the company.

Shares of the chipmaker surged more than 34 percent on Monday when the deal was announced, putting them on track for their biggest one-day gain in more than nine years and adding roughly $80bn to the company’s market value.

The deal, latest in a string of investment commitments, underscores OpenAI and the broader AI industry’s voracious appetite for computing power as companies race towards developing AI technology that meets or exceeds human intelligence.

“We view this deal as certainly transformative, not just for AMD, but for the dynamics of the industry,” AMD executive vice president Forrest Norrod told the Reuters news agency.

Deal helps ‘validate technology’

The agreement closely ties the startup at the centre of the AI boom to AMD, one of the strongest rivals of Nvidia, which recently agreed to make substantial investments in OpenAI.

Analysts said it was a significant vote of confidence in AMD’s AI chips and software but is unlikely to dent Nvidia’s dominance, as the market leader continues to sell every AI chip it can make.

AMD executives expect the deal to net tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. Because of the ripple affect of the agreement, AMD expects to receive more than $100bn in new revenue over four years from OpenAI and other customers, they said.

The chipmaker is expected to report revenue of $32.78bn this year, according to LSEG data. In contrast, analysts are expecting Nvidia to report revenue of $206.26bn for the current fiscal year.

“AMD has really trailed Nvidia for quite some time. So I think it helps validate their technology,” said Leah Bennett, chief investment strategist at Concurrent Asset Management.

Shares of Nvidia dipped more than 1 percent.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the AMD deal will help his startup build enough AI infrastructure to meet its needs.

It was not immediately clear how OpenAI would fund the enormous deal.

OpenAI, which is valued at $500bn, generated approximately $4.3bn in revenue in the first half of 2025 and burned through $2.5bn in cash, according to media reports.

In September, Nvidia announced a deal to supply OpenAI with at least 10 gigawatts worth of its systems.

In contrast with the startup’s deal with AMD where it will take a stake in the chipmaker, Nvidia will invest $100bn in the ChatGPT parent under the terms of the agreement announced in September.

Taking a stake in AMD could give OpenAI “the power to potentially influence corporate strategy. With Nvidia, OpenAI is simply the client and not a part-owner,” said Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at A J Bell.

OpenAI has worked with AMD for years, providing inputs on the design of older generations of AI chips.

The startup and its main backer, Microsoft, announced last month that they had signed a non-binding agreement to restructure OpenAI in to a for-profit entity.

A person familiar with the matter said the deal with AMD does not change any of OpenAI’s ongoing compute plans, including that effort or its partnership with Microsoft.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM 1.50%), also known as TSMC, is one of the premier manufacturers of advanced processors, many of which are used for artificial intelligence. The company’s strong position in this space and its growth over the past few years have resulted in its stock price soaring nearly 200% over the past three years.

Recent research from The Motley Fool sheds some light on how TSMC’s manufacturing technology is a step ahead, how it makes the majority of its revenue, and where most of its customers are located. Importantly, all of these factors work together to set TSMC apart from the competition and make its stock a smart one to own for years to come.

1. The company is a leader in advanced chip manufacturing

TSMC manufactures some of the world’s most advanced processors, and the breakdown of the company’s revenue shows just how much comes from its different manufacturing capabilities. Chip companies use the term chip node to describe how many transistors will fit onto a semiconductor, with the unit of chip measurement being nanometers (nm). Generally speaking, the smaller, the more advanced the processor.

Here’s a snapshot of Taiwan Semiconductor’s top five revenue generators, by chip size:

Data source: Taiwan Semiconductor.

This revenue composition is important to highlight because it shows that a whopping 60% of the company’s semiconductor sales are from the smallest and most advanced processors (3nm and 5nm) on the market.

No other company compares to TSMC’s manufacturing prowess, and it’s likely to continue outpacing the competition. TSMC has already sign 15 deals with tech companies for 2nm semiconductor manufacturing, leaving rivals, including Samsung, far behind.

2. Its advanced processors are driving its growth

Just as important as the technology behind TSMC’s revenue is what technologies those processors power. If we go back five years, smartphones were the driving revenue force for TSMC. Now, it’s high-performance computing (think AI data centers).

The company has dominated the manufacturing of advanced processors so well, in fact, that TSMC makes an estimated 90% of the world’s most advanced processors.

Here is the company’s revenue distribution over the past four quarters:

Data source: Taiwan Semiconductor.

TSMC’s making the majority of its revenue from high-performance computing is important because it shows that the company successfully adapted with the times, moving from its previously dominant smartphone segment to sales from chips to AI data centers.

More growth could be on the way, too, considering that semiconductor leader Nvidia believes technology companies could spend up to $4 trillion on AI data center infrastructure over the next five years.

3. U.S. tech giants drive demand

Taiwan Semiconductor is based in, you guessed it, Taiwan, but the vast majority of its sales come from selling processors to North American companies. About five years ago, North America accounted for just over half of TSMC’s sales, but that’s jumped to 75% currently. China and the Asia-Pacific region tie for second place with just 9% each.

Why does this matter? Some of the most advanced artificial intelligence companies, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet, are based in North America. Taiwan Semiconductor’s shift toward sales in this geographic area is a reflection of the company successfully attracting the world’s leading AI companies to have their chips made by TSMC.

Is Taiwan Semiconductor a buy?

With TSMC making an estimated 90% of the world’s most advanced processors, the company outpacing its manufacturing competition, and artificial intelligence companies poised to spend trillions of dollars to build out and upgrade data centers, TSMC is well positioned to be a great AI stock for years to come.

Just keep in mind that the stellar gains TSMC stock has experienced over the past several years have been a result of the early AI boom, which means future returns may not be quite as impressive.

The technology giant Apple has confirmed the removal of ICEBlock, a crowdsourcing app that collects sightings of US immigration officers, and similar software from its App Store, following pressure from the administration of United States President Donald Trump.

As of Friday, ICEBlock was no longer available on the App Store, where users can download software.

“We just received a message from Apple’s App Review that #ICEBlock has been removed from the App Store due to ‘objectionable content’,” the app’s social media team said in a post on the platform BlueSky. “The only thing we can imagine is this is due to pressure from the Trump Admin. We have responded and we’ll fight this!”

The move marks a rare instance of an app being taken down due to demands from the US government, raising concerns about pressure on private companies and limits to free speech.

ICEBlock is a free iPhone-only app that allows users to anonymously report and track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity.

It was developed in April in response to President Trump’s hardline immigration agenda and the recent increase in ICE arrests.

ICE has been a central part of Trump’s push for mass deportation since he took office for a second term. Its agents have regularly raided workplaces, homes and courthouses to arrest migrants, and rights advocates say free speech and due process are often being infringed upon in the government’s deportation drive.

Apple’s decision to remove the ICEBlock app from its platform has also shed light on the growing ties between major tech firms and the Trump administration. Many companies, including the iPhone maker, have sought to avoid clashes with a White House that has not been shy about issuing threats — particularly around tariffs — against specific firms.

“Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store,” Apple said in an emailed statement.

Fox Business first reported the app’s removal on Thursday, citing a statement from US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the Department of Justice contacted Apple and that the company complied with its request to pull the app.

“ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed,” Bondi told Fox Business.

Joshua Aaron, the Texas-based creator of ICEBlock, disputed that characterisation and criticised Apple’s decision.

“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple’s actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Aaron told the Reuters news agency.

David Greene, the civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, said the move underscored a pattern of government overreach.

“It is not surprising — they have been threatening this for a while and we do expect to see more of this and other blatantly unconstitutional actions going forward,” Greene told Al Jazeera.

The Trump administration has shown “little to no regard” for the rule of law, Greene explained, pointing out that the app’s activities are protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines the right to free speech.

He also argued that the public should know how its government is operating, particularly when it comes to sensitive issues like immigration. But, Greene added, the Trump administration has “never sincerely cared about the free flow of information”.

“Publishing truthful information about matters of public interest is worthy of the highest level of First Amendment protection, and the operations of government, and the identities of who the operators are, is certainly a matter of high public interest,” Greene said.

‘Watch out’

Bondi, however, has previously argued that Aaron is “not protected” under the Constitution and that they are looking at prosecuting him, warning him to “watch out”.

Civilian surveillance of federal immigration agents has become more assertive in recent months, as activists try to protect their communities from aggressive enforcement by ICE agents.

Since Trump returned to office, ICE has ramped up its enforcement efforts, and a bill passed in July has assured the agency of $75bn in new funding through 2029.

The agency has also arrested visa holders and permanent US residents targeted by the Trump administration over pro-Palestinian advocacy.

In one high-profile case, Mahmoud Khalil, a US resident of Palestinian origin, was arrested after serving as a spokesperson for the antiwar protests at Columbia University, a move that rights groups condemned as intimidation.

While Khalil was released from detention in June, he continues to face deportation proceedings. In September, an immigration judge in Louisiana ordered his deportation, though Khalil has 30 days to appeal.

Legal experts have said that civilian surveillance of ICE is largely protected under the US Constitution, as long as observers do not try to obstruct law enforcement activities.

Apple removed more than 1,700 apps from its App Store in 2024 in response to government demands, but the vast majority of those requests — more than 1,300 — came from China.

Russia filed the second-highest number of demands, at 171, followed by South Korea with 79.

Over the last three years, the US was typically not among the countries where apps were removed due to government demands, according to company transparency reports.

A majority of Apple’s iPhones are manufactured in China, making the company particularly sensitive to tariff policies.

In recent months, the White House has floated potential taxes on the import of chips used in Apple devices like iPhones and Mac computers.

Apple removes thousands of apps from its app store every year, including more than 82,500 in 2024, for other reasons, including design-related issues, fraud or intellectual property infringement. Apple shares were down fractionally on Friday.

Oct. 2 (UPI) — Officials for San Francisco-based Perplexity AI on Thursday announced the tech startup’s Comet browser that is powered by artificial intelligence is free to download and available globally.

Perplexity initially launched the Comet browser in July for its Perplexity Max subscribers and created a waitlist for others, which now includes millions of potential users, according to CNBC.

The browser features a “sidecar assistant” that helps users to more effectively browse the World Wide Web and can summarize and explain content on particular web pages, TechCrunch reported.

Paid Max subscribers also can access a “background assistant “that helps Comet users to multitask while online.”

Additional Comet browser tools for free users include Discover, which aggregates news and content for individual users, and Shopping, which helps with price comparisons for online shoppers.

Spaces is another Comet tool and helps to organize projects and manage their progress, and a Finance tool assists with budgeting, tracking spending and staying abreast of investments.

A Sports tool offers updates schedules, scores and sports news, while a Travel tool provides information on potential destinations, travel and accommodation costs.

Those who continue to subscribe to Perplexity Max can access AI models and use an email assistant that helps to draft and respond to emails and keep inboxes organized.

The Comet browser competes directly with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others that have launched AI-driven web browsers and comes after Perplexity officials tried to buy Google.

The tech firm in August made a $34.5 billion offer to buy Google’s Chrome browser, which Google first launched in 2008.

Perplexity was valued at $18 billion at the time, but company officials said they had financial backing from others when making the unsolicited offer that Google declined.

Perplexity made the offer after the Justice Department encouraged Google to sell its Chrome browser after a federal antitrust lawsuit concluded that tech firm has monopolized online search and text advertising.

Second order this year focuses on UK users; earlier attempt included US user data, but was withdrawn under US pressure.

The British government has ordered Apple to hand over personal data uploaded by its customers to the cloud for the second time this year in an ongoing privacy row that has raised concerns among civil liberties campaigners.

The Home Office issued a demand in early September for the tech behemoth to create a so-called back door that would allow the authorities access to private data uploaded by United Kingdom Apple customers after a previous attempt that included customers in the United States failed, according to a report published on Wednesday by The Financial Times.

A previous technical capability notice (TCN) issued early this year led to a major backlash from the US, which frowns upon foreign entities seeking to regulate Silicon Valley. The administration of US President Donald Trump eventually forced the UK to back down.

US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard said in August that the administration had wanted to “ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected”.

Civil liberties campaigners in the UK reacted with alarm to the latest order for access to encrypted data. “If this new order isn’t stopped, the UK Government will likely issue similar orders to other companies, too,” said London-based group Privacy International.

It said the UK government, which would be deploying the measure to protect national security, risked “everyone’s security, while claiming to ‘protect’ people”.

If this new order isn’t stopped, the UK Government will likely issue similar orders to other companies, too.

— Privacy International (@privacyint) October 1, 2025

The Home Office was cited by the FT as saying: “We do not comment on operational matters, including, for example, confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

Privacy through encryption is a major selling point for tech platforms, which have long seen providing access to law enforcement as a red line.

On Wednesday, Apple said it had “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will”. The company had appealed against the earlier TCN at the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the body confirmed in April.

However, it withdrew full end-to-end encryption, known as Advanced Data Protection, for UK users in February. The feature allows iPhone and Mac users to ensure that only they – and not even Apple – can unlock data stored on its cloud.

“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users, and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature,” the California-based company said on Wednesday.

The company said it was committed to offering users the highest level of security, and it was hopeful it would be able to do so in Britain in the future.

The controversy over official attempts to snoop on Apple users comes amid a growing furore over government plans to issue digital identity cards to curb undocumented immigration and ward off threats from the right-wing Reform UK party.

The move raised hackles among civil liberties groups and citizens in the UK, where the concept of national identity cards has traditionally been unpopular.

President Trump signed a proclamation that imposes a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, the immigration allocation set aside for highly skilled workers the U.S. economy needs. The new rules threaten the availability and deployment of human capital in the United States. This is misguided and will hurt U.S. growth and innovation, at a time when the global arms race for AI creates a vital need for the sharpest human talent and innovators.

We are professors who study and teach innovation-related topics at U.S. research universities. As immigrants to the United States from India and Panama respectively, we understand firsthand the sometimes painful discussions around H-1B immigration. Tensions around immigration routinely affect our academic institutions, our current students and former students now in industry. But there should be a lot of common ground on this polarizing topic.

STEM immigrants are creating substantial value in the United States. Immigrants play a significant role in entrepreneurial ventures in the United States and particularly startup innovation. Further, such immigrants are responsible for 23% of innovation output in the United States. This effect is in part based on policies that allow for foreign students to study and stay in the United States to work in startups.

H-1B immigration is like a natural selection process that benefits the U.S. immensely. Highly skilled immigrants in areas such as technology and medicine come hungry for hard work and full of ideas to better the world — to create new products, services and even markets as well as to cater to existing needs through more incremental improvement and optimization. Many of our best students are immigrants who are looking to stay in the United States and create work opportunities that would not be possible anywhere else in the world. In the United States, we recognize entrepreneurial success perhaps more than any other country. It is one of our greatest attributes as a society.

Nevertheless, we do have an immigration problem in the United States. The problem is that the distribution of benefits across the United States is highly skewed. Much of the wealth generated in terms of company creation and jobs has redounded to innovative clusters. But the idea to reduce the total number of H-1B immigrants by increasing the cost is exactly the wrong way to “solve” this problem — by dragging down the thriving parts of the economy rather than lifting up the rest.

To grow economic prosperity throughout the country, we need to offer more opportunities for more H-1B visa applicants. There are simply not enough trained U.S. nationals to take on the sort of labor required for the next wave of a tech-enabled industrial revolution.

Distributing the fruits of H-1B visa holders’ work more broadly requires a different approach than the U.S. has taken before. We should increase the total number of new H-1B visa recipients each year to 350,000 from around 85,000, with the additional visas apportioned across states so that locations like college towns — places like Lawrence, Kan., Gainesville, Fla., and Clemson, S.C., as well as cities such as Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Boise receive sufficient numbers of H-1B workers. Visas could be allocated through a process akin to the resident-matching system for medical doctors, thereby sending workers to states where they would create greater value by filling economic and technological gaps. This infusion of labor would improve technological innovation in local economies and create local spillover effects in job creation and additional innovation.

Such immigration is necessary particularly now given a global push toward increased industrial policy, as China and others invest in AI and broader digital transformation. At a time when our national security is linked to technological innovation, it is shortsighted not to open ourselves to more immigration. If we do not, we will lose some of the best and brightest minds to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore and other countries.

Immigration is currently a volatile political issue in the U.S., as it has been at some other moments in the nation’s history. Although this is a country of immigrants, for people who feel insecure about pocketbook and cultural issues, continued immigration can feel threatening. As a percentage of people living in the United States, it has been more than 100 years since there were as many immigrants here as there are now. But as with past waves of immigration, productivity and transformation have followed.

This is particularly clear for H-1B visa holders, who create opportunities for people born in the U.S. and ensure the vitality of American innovation, security and democratic values. Increasing the costs of such visas would chill their use and reduce U.S. prosperity and innovation exactly at a time of great need.

Hemant Bhargava is a professor of business at UC Davis Graduate School of Management and director of the Center for Analytics and Technology in Society. D. Daniel Sokol is a professor of law and business at USC.

The UK government plans to introduce digital ID cards to curb illegal immigration, requiring employers to verify workers’ status. The scheme has faced strong opposition over its effectiveness and privacy concerns. Al Jazeera’s Ruby Zaman tells us more.

Video platform settles lawsuit filed in response to Trump’s suspension over the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by United States President Donald Trump after the platform suspended his account in response to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

Under the settlement, YouTube, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, will contribute $22m on Trump’s behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that is overseeing a $200m project to construct a ballroom at the White House, a court filing showed on Monday.

The remaining $2.5m will go to other plaintiffs in the case, including the American Conservative Union and American author Naomi Wolf, according to the filing at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The settlement does not include any admission of wrongdoing by YouTube, and was reached for the “sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation”, according to the filing.

The payout is a relatively small sum for YouTube, whose advertising revenues came to nearly $9.8bn in the second quarter of 2025 alone.

The settlement comes after Meta Platforms and X earlier this year agreed to multimillion-dollar payouts to resolve Trump’s claims that he was unduly censored following the January 6 attack, which was carried out by Trump supporters motivated by his false claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen”.

John P Coale, a Trump ally and lawyer who brought the three cases, said he was pleased with the outcome.

“Very much so,” Coale told Al Jazeera. “As is the president and the other plaintiffs.”

Coale said the three cases had netted $60m in total.

“We believe we changed the behaviour,” he said.

After de-platforming Trump over fears his false claims about the 2020 presidential election were driving violence, Big Tech has moved to curry favour with his administration since his return to the White House.

Earlier this month, tech CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook, lavished praise on Trump at a White House dinner event and expressed support for his administration’s initiatives on artificial intelligence.

Media companies have also paid out large sums to resolve Trump’s legal claims.

Paramount Global said in July that it had agreed to pay $16m to resolve Trump’s claims that CBS News’s 60 Minutes programme had deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In December, ABC News agreed to contribute $15m to Trump’s library to settle claims that he had been defamed by its anchor, George Stephanopoulos.

Timothy Koskie, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, said that YouTube’s settlement dealt a blow to hopes for a consistent approach to content moderation by social media platforms.

“Unfortunately, with the erosion of a rules-based order, we simply can’t expect to get consistent treatment from anyone who seeks to benefit from this administration,” Koskie told Al Jazeera.

“That is going to include an incredibly large swath of companies that we engage with in our daily lives, particularly, but very much not exclusively, the platforms. Rather than removing censorship, this vigorously empowers it in an especially selective vein.”

“Further, the US historically set precedents for many governments around the world,” he added.

Sept. 29 (UPI) — YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million, toward the construction of a new White House ballroom, to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump for suspending his channel in 2021 following the Jan. 6, riots.

The online video platform, owned by Alphabet, will pay $22 million from the settlement to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, which is “dedicated to restoring, preserving and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom,” according to court documents. The ballroom is estimated to cost $200 million, according to the White House.

The other $2.5 million from YouTube’s settlement will go to other plaintiffs, including the nonprofit American Conservative Union.

YouTube is the third tech platform to settle with Trump, who also settled with Meta and Twitter for banning his accounts in 2021. Trump settled with Meta for $25 million and with Twitter, renamed X, for $10 million.

All three platforms claimed Trump’s posts after the U.S. Capitol riots risked inciting further violence. Trump said the suspensions amounted to censorship. All of his accounts were reinstated after tech leaders took a more supportive stance, with Elon Musk of X, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai attending Trump’s inauguration in January.

Trump also has received settlements from media outlets, including CBS and ABC News. ABC and Disney settled with the president for $15 million toward his future presidential library after he accused the network and anchor George Stephanopoulous of defamation. And Paramount Global paid out $16 million for CBS’ editing of a Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes.”

Last week, YouTube said it would reinstate a number of banned accounts, which had violated the channel’s now defunct rules about posting misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.

YouTube “values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse,” the platform said.

New Delhi, India — Meghna Gupta* had planned it all – a master’s degree by 23, a few years of working in India, and then a move to the United States before she turned 30 to eventually settle there.

So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited to get to the promotion that would mean a stint on California’s West Coast.

Now, Gupta is 29, and her dreams lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech firms have used for more than three decades to bring skilled workers to the US.

Trump’s decision to increase the fee for the visas from about $2,000, in many cases, to $100,000 has imposed dramatic new costs on companies that sponsor these applications. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60,000. But the employer’s cost now rises to $160,000 at the minimum, and in many cases, companies will likely find American workers with similar skills for lower pay.

This is the Trump administration’s rationale as it presses US companies to hire local talent amid its larger anti-immigration policies. But for thousands of young people around the world still captivated by the American dream, this is a blow. And nowhere is that more so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, despite an economy that is growing faster than most other major nations, has still been bleeding skilled young people to developed nations.

For years, Indian IT companies themselves sponsored the most H-1B visas of all firms, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and then contractually outsourcing their expertise to other businesses, too. This changed: In 2014, seven out of the 10 companies that received the most H-1B visas were Indian or started in India; In 2024, that number dropped to four.

And in the first six months of 2025, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company in the top-10 H-1B visa recipients, in a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.

But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. More than 70 percent of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals in 2024, ranging from the tech sector to medicine. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent.

Now, thousands across India fear that this pathway to the US is being slammed shut.

“It has left me heartbroken,” Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump’s fee hike.

“All my life, I planned for this; everything circled around this goal for me to move to the US,” said Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 people in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

“The so-called ‘American Dream’ looks like a cruel joke now.”

‘In the hole’

Gupta’s crisis reflects a broader contradiction that defines India today. On the one hand, the country — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention — is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

India today boasts the world’s fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), behind just the US, China and Germany, after it passed Japan earlier this year. But the country’s creation of new jobs lags far behind the number of young people who enter its workforce every year, widening its employment gap. India’s biggest cities are creaking under inadequate public infrastructure, potholed roads, traffic snarls and growing income inequality.

The result: Millions like Gupta aspire to a life in the West, picking their career choices, usually in sectors like engineering or medicine, and working to get into hard-fought seats in top colleges – and then migrating. In the last five years, India has witnessed a drastic rise in the outflow of skilled professionals, particularly in STEM fields, who migrate to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US.

As per the Indian government’s data, those numbers rose from 94,145 Indians in 2020 to 348,629 by 2024 — a 270 percent rise.

Trump’s new visa regime could now effectively close the pipeline of those skilled workers into the US. The fee hike comes on the back of a series of tension points in a souring US-India relationship in recent months. New Delhi is also currently facing a steep 50 percent tariff on its exports to the US — half of that for buying Russian crude, which the US says is funding the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.

Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian trade officer and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the new visa policy will be “the ones that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT services jobs, software developers, project managers, and back-end support in finance and healthcare”.

For many of these positions, the new $100,000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee’s annual salary, making sponsorship uneconomical, especially for smaller firms and startups, said Srivastava. “The cost of hiring a foreign worker now exceeds local hiring by a wide margin,” he said, adding that this would shift the hiring calculus of US firms.

“American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-to-fill specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs,” said Srivastava.

“The market has already priced in this pivot,” he said, citing the fall of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “as investors brace for shrinking US hiring”.

Indian STEM graduates and students, he said, “have to rethink US career plans altogether”.

To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, a body with members across 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and distress among H-1B visa holders and other immigrant visa holders”.

“To remind them that they don’t belong,” Kaushik told Al Jazeera. “And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible.”

The announcement came soon after the start of the new academic session, when many international students – including from India, which sends the largest cohort of foreign students to the US – have begun classes.

Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. An analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates suggests that 41 percent of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 were still in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent.

But Kaushik said he has received more than 80 queries on their hotline for students now worried about what the future holds.

“They know that they’re already in the hole,” he said, referring to the tuition and other fees running into tens of thousands of dollars that they have invested in a US education, with increasingly unclear job prospects.

The landscape in the US today, Srivastava of GTRI said, represents “fewer opportunities, tougher competition, and shrinking returns on US education”.

Nasscom, India’s apex IT trade body, has said the policy’s abrupt rollout could “potentially disrupt families” and the continuity of ongoing onshore projects for the country’s technology services firms.

The new policy, it added, could have “ripple effects” on the US innovation ecosystem and global job markets, pointing out that for companies, “additional cost will require adjustments”.

‘They do not care for people at all’

Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one in a chain of India’s most prestigious engineering school, and landed a job with Facebook soon after that.

He now lives with his wife in Menlo Park, in the heart of the US’s Silicon Valley, and drives a BMW sedan to work. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas.

Last Saturday’s news from the White House left him rattled.

He spent that evening figuring out flights for his friends — Indians on H-1B visas who were out of the country, one in London, another in Bengaluru, India — to see if they could rush back to the US before the new rules kicked in on Sunday, as major US tech firms had recommended to their employees.

Since then, the Trump administration has clarified that the new fees will not apply to existing H-1B visas or renewals. For now, Ansh’s job and status in the US are secure.

But this is little reassurance, he said.

“In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India,” Ansh told Al Jazeera. “But this sort of instability triggers people to make those life changes. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India?”

Because he and his wife do not have children, Ansh said that a move back to India — while a dramatic rupture in their lives and plans — was at least something they could consider. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked?

“The way this has been done by the US government shows that they do not care for people at all,” he said. “These types of decisions are like … brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed.”

Ansh believes that the US also stands to lose from the new visa policy. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success,” he said.

“Once talent goes away, innovation won’t happen,” he said. “It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Its impact would reach everyone, one way or the other.”

India’s struggle

After the announcement from the White House on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, said that the government was encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.

Mishra’s comments were in tune with some experts who have suggested that the disruption in the H-1B visa policy could serve as an opportunity for India — as it could, in theory, stanch the brain drain that the country has long suffered from.

GTRI’s Srivastava said that US companies that have until now relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B might now explore more local hiring or offshore some jobs. “The $100,000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive, so Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery,” he said.

“US postings will be reserved only for mission-critical roles, while the bulk of hiring and project execution shifts to India and other offshore hubs,” he told Al Jazeera. “For US clients, this means higher dependence on offshore teams — raising familiar concerns about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination — even as costs climb.”

Srivastava noted that India’s tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return.

But that won’t be easy. He said that even though hiring in India’s IT and services sector has been growing year-on-year, the gaps are real, ranging from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and data science. And US-trained returnees would expect salaries well above Indian benchmarks.

And in reality, Kaushik said, many H-1B aspirants are looking at different countries as alternatives to the US — not India.

Ansh, the senior engineer at Meta, agreed. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology,” whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services.

“The Indian ecosystem is not at the pace where you innovate the next big thing in the world,” he said. “It is, in fact, far from there.”

US tech giant Microsoft says it has stopped the Israeli military from accessing its cloud computing and AI technology.

The move follows an investigation that found that Israeli forces had been using Microsoft’s powerful Azure services for mass surveillance and attacks in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

But has Microsoft’s decision come too late? And what can be done to stop Israel from simply finding a replacement from another powerful software supplier?

Presenter: Neave Barker

Guests:

Rob Pegoraro – Technology journalist and analyst

Taghreed El-Khodary – Palestinian journalist and analyst

Kenneth Roth – Former executive director of Human Rights Watch and author of Righting Wrongs: My Life in Human Rights

Sept. 26 (UPI) — Microsoft has ended a portion of the Israel Ministry of Defense’s access to technology it used to spy on Palestinian civilians’ phone calls in Gaza and the West Bank, calling it a violation of Microsoft’s terms of service.

Late last week, Microsoft told Israeli officials that spy agency Unit 8200 were in violation of Microsoft’s terms of service by storing surveillance data in Azure, a cloud service, The Guardian reported.

Microsoft released a statement that it wrote to employees Thursday about its internal investigation after an article The Guardian published in August that revealed what the Ministry of Defense was using Azure for.

“While our review is ongoing, we have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting. This evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, said in the statement.

The Guardian conducted a joint investigation with +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. The Guardian wrote that Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into Azure.

According to The Guardian’s reporting, Unit 8200 built such a large database, it could collect, play back and analyze the cell phone calls of the entire population. So much so that a mantra emerged: “A million calls an hour.”

The information was stored in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands, but soon after The Guardian’s reporting, the data appears to have been moved out of the country. The Guardian reports that sources said the Israel Defense Forces planned to move the data to an Amazon Web Services cloud.

“We therefore have informed IMOD of Microsoft’s decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies,” Smith said. “We have reviewed this decision with IMOD and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focused on ensuring our services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians.”

Microsoft has faced strong pressure to disengage with Israel, including from its employees. In late August, two Microsoft employees were fired for allegedly breaking into Smith’s office.

An online group called No Azure for Apartheid announced on X that Microsoft fired them for “participating in a sit-in at the office of Brad Smith” at the Microsoft location in Redmond, Wash., to demand the company cut its ties to Israel.

Seven people were arrested that day, two of whom were Microsoft employees.

Artificial intelligence and its invasiveness in our everyday lives might be endlessly discussed among academics, government officials and social media provocateurs, but Los Angeles Comic Con has injected a dose of gamma radiation and showmanship into that debate.

Stan Lee has entered the chat.

L.A. Comic Con is introducing its Stan Lee Experience, a 1,500-square-foot booth in Aisle 200 that features an AI-powered holographic image of the late comic book legend that interacts with attendees. Curious fans can ask questions of “Stan Lee” and probe dozens of years’ worth of comic book and comic book-related data that’s been fed into the AI, which has been drawn from footage, conversations and even Stan Lee’s Soapbox — where Lee would expand on happenings of the day or riff on comic book goings-on in the back pages of Marvel comics from 1967 through 1980.

Chris DeMoulin, chief executive and general manager of L.A. Comic Con parent Comikaze Entertainment Inc., says the Stan Lee AI project took months of planning and years of being connected to the parties involved.

“For me, personally, one of the most thrilling things of my entire life was getting to work with Stan Lee when this was Stan Lee’s Comic Con and Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo before that. What was such a joy was watching him interact with fans. Old fans and then people that were bringing their 8-year-old kid who had just read their first Spider-Man comic book,” said DeMoulin, who has collected comics from an early age.

“This avatar, to us, is an entry point into the world of storytelling that he created. We wanted to create something which can be part of maintaining and expanding on that legacy so that Stan’s role in creating a lot of this is acknowledged.”

The hologram, at least the one on the show floor, is not really a hologram. With a box built by Proto Inc., the company that also launched an interactive mirror from “The Conjuring,” and Hyperreal, a company whose chief executive Remington Scott helped bring Gollum and Smeagol to life for Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” movies and creates realistic avatars, it is an interactive Stan Lee image that processes questions and formulates responses.

“Hologram is a technology that’s different than this. This is more of an avatar presence, or a telepresence, if you will. Unlike ChatGPT, this is not a web crawler. This is a large language model which has got guardrails on it,” says George Johnson, a member of the Hyperreal technical team.

“It’s specifically Stan’s words. Red carpet interviews, everything he wrote, like Stan’s Soapbox, but with guardrails. Meaning, if you ask him sports questions or politics questions, he’s not going to answer those. But the Stan Lee Universe is feeding us more and more stuff that we can add to the model.”

David Nussbaum, Proto Inc. founder and chairman, knows that Stan Lee is only the first step for this technology.

“Any Proto device can have any piece of content in it, and we also beam people in live. So if you’re interviewing someone in Japan, you could beam there and appear like you are physically among them,” Nussbaum said. “These are great for classrooms, museums, labs, retail.”

Proto technology is also HIPAA-compliant, he said, meaning doctors and patients can use it to have “in-person” consultations without being in a room together.

As it learns, it can — as AI does — go a bit off script. While folks behind the scenes said they didn’t want Stan Lee to be used as an advertising gimmick, its makers had asked it so many questions about Coca-Cola, it had changed its answer from a generic “I don’t deal with that kind of thing” to a thoughtful answer where, at the end, Lee says, “Who wouldn’t want to be in business with the company that been quenching thirsts for a hundred years?”

That was Stan — ever the showman.

The Stan Lee Experience costs $15 plus service fees with tickets available for purchase via the L.A. Comic Con website. The pop culture gathering runs through Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.