California lawmakers are moving to exempt most open-source operating systems from the state's upcoming age-verification law after backlash from Linux and privacy advocates who warned that the original rules could force decentralized projects to collect users' ages. The amendment would likely shield major Linux distributions, though SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms tied to proprietary app stores may still face compliance questions. Tom's Hardware reports: Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California's legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state's earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to "copy, redistribute, and modify the software." The proposed amendment specifically states: "Operating system provider" does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead. Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user's age or birth date during device setup, then expose an "age bracket signal" to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as "under 13," "13-15," "16-17," and "18+," immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems. [...]

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an "operating system provider" under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California's age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted. California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.

"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...

The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.

Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.

Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

Thursday California's governor issued an executive order "directing state agencies to prepare workers and businesses for AI-driven workforce disruption," reports San Francisco's KQED. In a statement the governor said "This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future." The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called "universal basic capital," giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds...

Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA's automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called "the nation's most comprehensive." Others are more skeptical. "Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice," Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order's emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement...

According to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley's own labor force may seek to organize... "It's undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools," [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. "It's hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry..."

In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor's support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming "crisis." In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday's more sweeping order.
The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. "California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space."

Newsom telegraphed Thursday's order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. "Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation."

AI "crashed the party" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writes The Hollywood Reporter. The festival exposed "the fault lines reshaping cinema," their article argues, including how "AI is here — and the industry has stopped pretending otherwise." A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance. Fighting AI "is a battle we will lose," said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival's opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to "find ways in which we can work with it."

That's not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted. AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce an [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh's documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. [Meta's press release announcing the partnership touts "our creator partnerships," their Meta AI assistant, and "our latest AI and wearable technologies" including Ray-Ban Meta AI features for smartglasses like "AI-powered translations that break down language barriers in real-time".] At the Marché du Film [film market], there was an "AI for Talent Summit" that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity.

For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point.

It's "the first time in seven years that a new Star Wars film has launched on the big screen," writes CNBC. And Variety notes it's expected to earn $102 million through Monday: [B]ox office analysts are mixed on the results. On one hand, it's significant for any film to debut above $100 million in post-pandemic times. On the other, "Star Wars" is one of Hollywood's preeminent film properties, so there's an expectation of a certain level of box office. And this start is the worst for "Star Wars" since Disney bought the franchise in 2012.
CNBC cites reports 41% of tickets were sold for more expensive large-format screenings like IMAX and DolbyCinema.

So how's the movie? Rotten Tomatoes shows an 89% positive rating from moviegoers on its "popcornmeter" and a 62% average score from professional movie critics. And Ars Technica writes that "The plot is predictable, the fight scenes are meh, but you can't beat the charm of that little green Grogu." So while there's "a paint-by-numbers plot," they add that "the little green puppet pretty much carries the entire film." The new film is ... fine. It's an average Star Wars outing, and it will give families a solid Memorial Day Weekend entertainment option. It's just not the spectacular home run that might have helped launch the flagging franchise into an exciting new era, and diehard Star Wars fans hoping for more are probably going to be disappointed.
Of course, not everyone agrees. "How many nails can we realistically drive into Star Wars's coffin before it's time to give up hope of resuscitation?" writes Clarisse Loughrey for The Independent, calling it "the dullest and most inconsequential 'Star Wars' ever made." (She argues that the movie "stitches together what is clearly three episodes of the previously planned fourth season of The Mandalorian and calls it a day. There's not a whiff of effort here.")

And a reviewer at RogerEbert.com gave it one-and-a-half stars, complaining that "There's no reason for anything in this movie except the wish to make even more money...." I'm on record as despising the word "content," which was pushed by early tech moguls to devalue art as interchangeable goo in a virtual pipeline, but this washed-out, video-game-looking movie, with its murky night scenes and lack of visual depth, deserves the word. You've seen everything in it before, from the equipment, spacecraft, armor, and tactical maneuvers to the species and various types of terrain (earthlike, but cartoony)...

Even Grogu taxes our patience. Some of his cute bits could've ended with him facing the camera and doing jazz hands.

"For months, scammers have been taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to send spammy emails from an internal Microsoft email address typically used for sending legitimate account alerts," TechCrunch reports: [The scammers] have been able to set up new Microsoft accounts as if they are new customers and use that access to send out emails purportedly from the tech giant, potentially tricking people into thinking these emails are genuine...

Last week, I received several, similarly structured emails containing subject lines and web links to scammy sites from Microsoft across different email accounts. These crudely made emails were sent from msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com, an email account that Microsoft uses to send important notifications to users, such as two-factor authentication codes and other critical alerts about their online account. Some of these emails' subject lines resembled official emails that would alert users to fraudulent transactions, while other emails claimed to have a private message waiting for the recipient at a web address mentioned in the email body.

In a social post on Tuesday, anti-spam nonprofit The Spamhaus Project said it had also seen Microsoft's account notification email address being abused to send spam and that the activity dated back "several months."
A PR representative told TechCrunch that Microsoft was "actively investigating" and "taking action against these phishing reports to help keep customers protected," with measures that include "removing accounts that violate our Terms of Use" and "further strengthening our detection and blocking mechanisms."

TechCrunch suggests the issue may not be limited to Microsoft. "Other users commenting on social media say that other companies' email addresses are also being used to send out spam."

"The numbers show that layoffs in the U.S. are roughly at or below levels from before the pandemic," reports the Washington Post, "although they are higher than in 2022 when businesses snapped up workers as the economy roared back to life...

"A different measure that accounts for the growing U.S. workforce shows that layoffs affected about 1.2% of employed people in March, a number that has been steady for years outside of the pandemic..." In the technology industry, where Meta and other companies are regularly announcing job cuts, the layoff picture is complex. There has been a marked increase in layoffs in recent months in what the Labor Department calls the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and other tech workers. But Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at the research and consulting firm Oxford Economics, noted that hiring has also increased in that category, which includes media and entertainment. The combination of hiring minus layoffs in the information industry is effectively a wash, Martin said. Layoffs at Big Tech companies like Meta and other high-profile employers don't necessarily reflect what is happening in the country, Martin said, and draw far more attention than what may be slow and steady workforce growth. "There's a lot more headlines about job cuts than there are [about] expansion plans by businesses," he said.

In his view, technology companies may be pushing out some workers and replacing them with people who have different skills as they respond to the demands of AI. It's true that businesses in some industries are devoting enormous sums of money and attention to AI. It's changing how some people work and a minority of American businesses are rolling out AI tools. But it's also become a trend for bosses to blame layoffs on the productive capabilities of AI and its ability to replace workers, even when job cuts may have little to do with the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has taken note of the pattern that he and others call "AI washing," essentially a high-tech form of whitewashing... "You know something is happening all the time when they have a word for it," said Gautam Mukunda, who teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management...

AI-related employment changes are tiny so far, said Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank. He pointed to a recently published analysis of Census Bureau surveys, which found more than 95 percent of businesses that use AI said it hasn't changed their staff sizes — and AI-related employment increases were more common than decreases.

The Washington Post looks at arguments that "AI's coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans". But they also look at some of the alternatives: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually "our current economic setup will no longer make sense," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized."

Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon...

But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper...

Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:

• Elon Musk said in an X post that "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."

• "I think it's a marketing tactic" responded Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate and is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. He argued to the Washington Post that Musk's comment is "trying to thread this needle of, 'I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.' And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you're still going to get money, everything will be great it's just you won't have to work anymore...."

• The article also cites a recent commentary from Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and VP of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. "The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,"

Venmo is testing a major redesign that will make new users' payment posts viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. The Verge reports: It's a notable update for a platform that has struggled with privacy in the past. In 2021, BuzzFeed News tracked down President Joe Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle because Venmo, at the time, had no way to keep your Venmo contacts private. It fixed that soon after.

As part of the redesign, if you're a new user and you do want your posts to be public (or private just to you), you'll be able to set that as part of the new onboarding flow. You can also change your preference in settings after the fact; an updated screen for sending money will also show if that post is private, visible just to friends, or is visible publicly before you make the transaction.

Trump called off a planned AI executive order just hours before a signing ceremony because he said he was worried the framework could slow America's lead over China. "We're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead," Trump told reporters. The Associated Press reports: The order would have established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release, according to a person familiar with the White House's deliberations with the tech industry but not authorized to speak about it publicly. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said.

There are competing factions within the administration, said Serena Booth, a computer science professor at Brown University and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee. "We do see this kind of public fighting," she said. "'We will release an executive order. No, we won't. We're going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled.' I think this whiplash is because we're seeing these fractures.'"

Some of those divides are balancing what Booth said is a "reasonable idea" to test the most capable AI models before their public release, with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers. "It does come at a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development," she said. "There is, I think, a real risk here and I do see both sides." [...]

"They don't want to do it because it's politically risky in a million different ways," said Dean Ball, now at the Foundation for American Innovation. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would get those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity but "ultimately, I'm fine with them taking time to get this right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Quantum Insider: The Trump administration is preparing a new round of industrial policy aimed at quantum computing, with roughly $2 billion in grants expected to go to nine companies developing quantum hardware and related technologies. According to Reuters, citing a Wall Street Journal report, the U.S. Department of Commerce plans to distribute the funding through deals that also give the federal government equity stakes in the companies receiving the awards. The approach would expand Washington's increasingly direct involvement in sectors viewed as strategically important to national security, advanced manufacturing and competition with China.

Reuters reported that IBM is expected to receive the largest share of the package at about $1 billion. Semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries is slated to receive approximately $375 million, according to the report. Other recipients are expected to include D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Quantinuum and Infleqtion, with each company potentially receiving around $100 million, Reuters reported. Australian quantum startup Diraq could receive about $38 million, according to the Wall Street Journal report cited by Reuters. Fast Company notes in its reporting that IBM will invest the funds it receives into a new IBM company called Anderon. It will also match the grant with another $1 billion in cash.

"Anderon will operate as a state-of-the-art 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry," IBM stated in an announcement. "It will help the nation solidify its leadership at the center of a thriving new quantum industry that is estimated to generate up to $850 billion in economic value by 2040 and spur American economic growth while also bolstering national security."

Quantum computing stocks soared after the news. As of publication, IBM is up about 9.7%, D-Wave is up about 28.1%, and Rigetti is up about 26.7%. Meanwhile, Global Foundries rose about 13.8% and Infleqtion jumped about 30.9%.

Microsoft has hired games analyst and investor Matthew Ball as Xbox's new chief strategy officer. With a long track record of analyzing the video game market and industry's biggest shifts, Ball's background could help Xbox rethink its hardware and console strategy at a moment when competition is tougher than ever. Engadget reports: Ball is a venture capitalist and tech industry consultant with a well-documented history of analyzing emerging digital economies and the video game market. He was most recently the CEO and founder of Epyllion, an advisory firm and digital production house that also runs a large-scale metaverse investment fund, and he publishes regular breakdowns of the industry's biggest players and trends, including an annual State of Gaming report. Ball is the author of The Metaverse, a book beloved by Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, Karlie Kloss and, not awkwardly at all, former Xbox head Phil Spencer.

Intuit is reportedly cutting about 3,000 jobs, or 17% of its workforce, as it restructures around AI and simplifies its corporate organization. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues. Companies such as Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have let go of thousands of employees each, all of them citing a need to refocus expenditures around AI projects as a reason to cut jobs and restructure their organizations. [...]

Intuit, however, hasn't been perceived as a beneficiary of the AI boom, with its shares consistently underperforming in the broader S&P 500 over the past 12 months. The company has been caught up in the broader current of worries that traditional software-as-a-service firms will not be able to keep up or compete, as new and upcoming AI products and services threaten to change how software is developed and how it is used. In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier. The company expects revenue to increase by about 10% in the third quarter, for which it will report results later today.

Google is again pressuring some longtime G Suite Legacy users to move onto paid Workspace plans, warning that accounts flagged as "commercial use" could lose access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and other services if appeals fail. "The trouble, according to users, is that the appeals system appears about as transparent as a brick," adds The Register. From the report: A reader alerted The Register to what appears to be a new crackdown on long-standing G Suite Legacy accounts, with similar complaints now piling up on Reddit from users accused of violating Google's non-commercial use policy, despite insisting they use the accounts only for family email and personal domains. Reports have been stacking up on Reddit's r/gsuitelegacymigration subreddit from users who say their long-running personal G Suite Legacy accounts are suddenly being classified as "commercial use" accounts and pushed toward paid Google Workspace plans by May 2026. A lot of users have been through this before. Google spent part of 2022 trying to wind down free G Suite Legacy accounts, then changed course after users running family domains made enough noise. Now some of those same users are being told they have fallen outside Google's rules after all.

Emails seen by The Register warn users their accounts have been "identified as being used for commercial purposes" and say Google may start suspending Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet, and other Workspace services if they do not either win an appeal or begin paying for Workspace subscriptions. "Please upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to continue using your services. Look out for a notification regarding the appeal process in Google Admin console or email," the email reads. "If you don't take action during your 45-day appeal period, Google will begin suspending your Google Workspace core services, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. As a result, you will lose access to these core services and data." One wrongly-flagged user said the company reversed its decision after they filed a GDPR data request seeking evidence. Others were less fortunate, with some reporting that family-only custom domains were permanently classified as commercial despite failed appeals.

The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some "lower-value human capital" through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in," CEO Bill Winters told reporters. "So, the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we're giving every opportunity to reposition," Winters said. Reuters reports: The cuts, alongside higher shareholder return targets announced in a strategy update, come as StanChart is at the tail-end of a decade-long effort to transform itself from a potential takeover target to a steadily profitable lender. Its London-listed shares, which have risen 65% in the last 12 months, fell 0.5% in early trading, as analysts said the new targets were at the conservative end of their expectations.

"In a world full of uncertainty, performance may prove more challenging further out," said Ed Firth, analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, citing how the bank has benefited in recent years from high interest rates and huge wealth flows. StanChart's move to streamline operations and rein in costs comes as more global firms slash jobs by deploying AI to improve efficiency. Japanese lender Mizuho in March unveiled up to 5,000 job cuts over a decade. And banks globally are scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats.

The most affected roles will be in the bank's back-office centres, including those in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kuala Lumpur and Warsaw, according to Winters. "Of course we're using AI along the way and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that," he added, referring to its ongoing revamp to automate more of its core banking system. StanChart said it would deliver over 15% return on tangible equity in 2028, more than three percentage points higher than in 2025, and building to about 18% in 2030. Meta also announced plans to reassign 7,000 employees into AI-related initiatives, just ahead of layoffs expected to affect roughly 8,000 workers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta told employees on Monday that it was reassigning 7,000 workers to focus on new initiatives around artificial intelligence, the latest change in a company transformation spurred by the powerful technology. Employees will be moved to four new organizations focused on building new A.I. tools and apps, Janelle Gale, Meta's head of human resources, said in an internal memo. The organizations will use "A.I. native design structures" and have fewer managers per employee than other parts of the company, she said, adding that company leaders will send details about the new roles on Wednesday. The restructuring "will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding," Ms. Gale wrote. Meta declined to comment further on the changes. The move comes shortly before Meta begins laying off roughly 8,000 employees, or 10 percent of its work force. Ms. Gale also mentioned Wednesday's layoffs in her memo. "We know days like this are extremely hard, and we appreciate you showing up for each other," Ms. Gale said.

According to the NYT, employees have been asked to work remotely that day and emails about the layoffs would be sent at 4 a.m. local time. Employees in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, along with two extra weeks for every year they worked at Meta.

Meta is expected to begin cutting about 8,000 jobs this week as it pours more money into AI infrastructure and looks to "offset" other investments, with additional layoffs reportedly possible later this year. According to CNBC, the morale has worsened inside the company. "Internally, there's an emerging sense of dread across wide swaths of the company," the report says, citing current and former Meta employees. "That's in part because more cuts are expected this year, including a potential round of layoffs in August, followed by another round later in the year, some of the sources said." From the report: [...] Whatever anxiety investors are experiencing, the feelings inside the company are more intense, with some longtime staffers questioning Meta's AI pursuits under AI chief Alexandr Wang, while also weighing if now is the time to leave for opportunities at other companies in the AI race, according to current and former employees. Data aggregated by Blind, an anonymous professional network that requires users to verify their employment with a work email address, reveals some of the internal malaise. Meta's overall rating by employees on Blind has declined 25% from a peak in the second quarter of 2024 to the current period, with a 39% drop in its culture rating. In every category other than compensation, Meta has seen a ratings decline and dramatically underperforms rivals Amazon, Google and Netflix, the Blind data reveals.

The company's full-court press with AI included the recent debut of an employee tracking tool intended to collect data from staffers' actions, such as mouse movements and keystrokes on their work computers. The Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, as it's called, is part of Meta's efforts to train AI models to power digital agents that can perform various coding and white-collar tasks. Employees have characterized the data tracking tool as "dystopian," according to messages viewed by CNBC, with some workers expressing fear that personal information could be leaked. Some Meta workers have noted that their workplace computers appear slower since the company initiated the project, adding to their frustration, sources said.

Meta workers responded by creating an online petition that urges Zuckerberg and leadership to shutter the project. "Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace," the petition says. "It should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training." Further reading: NYT: 'Meta's Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable'

The CFTC says it is ramping up efforts to catch insider trading and market manipulation in prediction markets, using AI tools, blockchain tracing, and other surveillance systems to flag suspicious bets. It's also monitoring activity by U.S. traders accessing offshore platforms like Polymarket through VPNs. Wired reports: [T]he Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction markets, wants you to know that it's watching very, very closely. The agency is searching for suspicious behavior from traders within the United States who have been sneaking onto offshore markets, including Polymarket's crypto platform -- which is blocked stateside -- by using virtual private networks. "We're going to find them, and we're going to bring actions," agency chairman Michael Selig told WIRED this week, speaking from the CFTC's headquarters in Washington, DC. Selig says the agency, which is especially lean right now, is staffing up. Like so many other AI-pilled workplaces, the CFTC is also leaning into automation to handle the growing workload, including tools that analyze trading patterns and flag potential manipulation. "You've got so much data," Selig says. "When we feed it into AI, we get really great information. It can help us understand things, like where we might want to investigate, or when we might need to send a subpoena to a trader."

In addition to proprietary surveillance systems developed in-house, the agency's arsenal includes third-party blockchain tracing tools like Chainalysis for crypto platforms, and market abuse detection software including Nasdaq Smarts for centralized markets. (Beyond Nasdaq Smarts, the agency did not specify which AI tools it uses and declined to share more specific examples.) [...] Selig recently told Congress that the company is pursuing "hundreds, if not thousands" of insider trading tips. Investigations are not limited to federally regulated exchanges. "We're surveilling the markets on a global basis," he tells WIRED.

Selig says that the agency will exert extraterritorial jurisdiction -- its legal ability to enforce its laws beyond traditional boundaries -- when it finds suspicious activity on offshore platforms like Polymarket, though he says it's a case-by-case approach. "We use it in extreme circumstances," he says, with an eye towards whether charges have a strong chance of sticking in court. "In any extraterritorial litigation, there's going to be challenges to our authority, and that could also impair our ability to bring cases in the future." According to Selig, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act allows the CFTC more leeway to pursue this kind of enforcement action, by giving it more authority over foreign swap activities that impact the US. When appropriate, the agency works with regulators from other countries, too. "For cases where we're not sure we'll win, or it's less in our wheelhouse and more of a foreign matter, we would relay it to a foreign regulator," he says. "We're constantly referring cases." [...] Selig is insistent that the CFTC is only just getting started. The agency will identify wrongdoers, he says -- no matter "how large or how small."

John Lennon's last interview — just hours before he was shot on December 8, 1980 — has become a documentary directed by Steven Soderbergh, debuting Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.

In a new interview with the Associated Press, Soderbergh defends the film's limited use of AI to visualize concepts from that two-hour interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Soderbergh was resolved to let the audio play. He could finds ways to visualize much of the film, but that still left a large gap where the conversation grows more philosophical. "I worked on everything that could be solved except that for as long as I could," Soderbergh says. "Then there was the inevitable moment of: OK, but really what are we going to do? We just started playing and ran out of time and money. That's where the Meta piece came in." Soderbergh accepted an offer to use Meta's artificial intelligence software to conjure surreal imagery for those sections, which make up about 10% of the film.

When Soderbergh let the news out earlier this year, it prompted an uproar. One of America's leading filmmakers was using AI? In a film about a Beatle, no less? The AI parts (overwhelmingly slammed by critics in Cannes) are fairly banal and don't differ greatly from special effects — there are no deepfakes of Lennon. But they put Soderberg at the forefront of an industrywide debate about the uses of AI in moviemaking. It's a conversation the director, who has made movies on iPhones, is eager to have.
While the film follows John and Yoko's conversation, "I needed a way to follow them in flight visually," Soderbergh says, "or I'm not doing my job." Though when asked about the strong negative reaction, Soderbergh acknowleges that "I knew what was coming. I take it very seriously, and I understand why people have an emotional response to this subject. As I've said before, I feel like I owe people the best version of whatever art I'm trying to make and total transparency about how I'm doing it."

AP: Some fear generative AI will tear apart the film industry. You don't see it as a bogeyman, though.

SODERBERGH: I think most jobs that matter when you're making a movie cannot be performed by this tech and never will be performed by this tech. As it becomes possible for anybody to create something that meets a certain standard of technical perfection, then imperfection becomes more valuable and more interesting. We haven't seen yet someone with a certain amount of creative credibility go full-metal AI on something, and see how people react. I think it's necessary. How do you know where the line is until somebody crosses it?

"I don't think what I'm doing crosses it. Some people may disagree. I don't know where my line is yet. I'm waiting to see...

Iran's government "wants to charge the world's largest tech companies for using the subsea internet cables laid under the Strait of Hormuz," reports CNN. Their article also notes that Iran's state-linked media outlets "have vaguely threatened that traffic could be disrupted if firms don't pay." Lawmakers in Tehran discussed a plan last week which could target submarine cables linking Arab countries to Europe and Asia. "We will impose fees on internet cables," Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari declared on X last week. Iran's Revolutionary Guards-linked media said Tehran's plan to extract revenue from the strait would require companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon to comply with Iranian law while submarine cable companies would be required to pay licensing fees for cable passage, with repair and maintenance rights given exclusively to Iranian firms. Some of these companies have invested in the cables running through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but it's unclear if those cables traverse Iranian waters.

It's also unclear how the regime could force tech giants to comply, as they are barred from making payments to Iran due to strict US sanctions; as a result, the companies themselves may view Iran's statements as posturing rather than serious policy. Still, state-affiliated media outlets have issued veiled threats warning of damage to cables that could impact some of the trillions of dollars in global data transmission and affect worldwide internet connectivity... Iran's threats are part of a strategy to demonstrate its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and ensure the survival of the regime, a core objective for the Islamic Republic in this war, said Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead at Bloomberg Economics. "It aims to impose such a hefty cost on the global economy that no-one will dare attack Iran again," she said.
The article notes that subsea cables "carry vast internet and financial traffic between Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf," and that targetting them "would affect far more than internet speeds, threatening everything from banking systems, military communications and AI cloud infrastructure to remote work, online gaming and streaming services."

CNN spoke to Mostafa Ahmed, "a senior researcher at the United Arab Emirates-based Habtoor Research Center, who published a paper on the effects of a large-scale attack on submarine communications infrastructure in the Gulf." Armed with combat divers, small submarines, and underwater drones, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) poses a risk to underwater cables, Ahmed said, adding that any attack could trigger a cascading "digital catastrophe" across several continents. Iran's neighbors across the Persian Gulf could face severe disruptions to internet connection, potentially impacting critical oil and gas exports as well as banking.

Beyond the region, India could see a large proportion of its internet traffic affected, threatening its huge outsourcing industry with losses amounting to billions, according to Ahmed... Any disruption could also slow financial trading and cross-border transactions between Europe and Asia, while parts of East Africa could face internet blackouts. And if Iran's proxies decide to employ similar tactics in the Red Sea, the damage could be far worse.