Submission + - New Mexico Wants Meta to Pay $40 Billion In Penalties For Cambridge Analytica (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent. The jury returned its verdict on September 25. Judge Francis Mathew, who oversaw the trial in Santa Fe, will decide how much Meta must pay in financial penalties. [...] State law allows the judge to decide how much to fine Meta per violation, up to $5,000. At the hearing on Thursday, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process. But the judge should order a significant payment that will impact the company, McGinn said.

"This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," McGinn said. She said $35 billion to $40 billion, which represents about 20% of the possible penalties that could be awarded under state law from the verdict, would impact the stock price while complying with Meta's right to due process under the Constitution. At the hearing on Thursday, Matt Nicholson, a lawyer for Meta, called the state's request an "astronomical penalty that would obviously violate a host of constitutional provisions." In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion. The jury may have said it found Meta's statements misleading, but the evidence shows that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings. The judge said he expected to issue a ruling later this month.

Submission + - Google tests AI processor in space (npr.org)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Google just put a satellite testing AI chips into space. The refrigerator-sized satellite is part of a research project, "Suncatcher," the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun. The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth. The chips will run a version of the company's Gemma AI model for 15 minutes at a time due to heat management constraints, using the open weight model to answer simple queries. In a blog post, Google said the mission will gauge how the TPUs handle "the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." The satellite launched October 1 is a prototype that Travis Beals, senior director and lead of Project Suncatcher, called "a very minimal test" to make sure the chips can run in space. A SpaceX rocket carried it into orbit, and Planet will get it up and running. Beal said Google will then fire up and test the TPUs. The goal is for the mission to be operational for a year.

Submission + - The University of Washington at Microsoft

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft’s campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across Lake Washington from the university’s main campus. Microsoft provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility; the UW is leasing the new 48,500-square-foot GIX space in Microsoft’s Building 92 rent-free. GIX debuted in 2015 as a partnership of the UW and China's Tsinghua University and received $70 million in Microsoft support at the now-abandoned GIX location in Bellevue (the Steve Ballmer Building), although indications are that a long-term arrangement did not come together as intended.

In a Thursday LinkedIn post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote: "Last night we opened a door unlike any other. At the heart of Microsoft’s campus, step into the new home of the UW's Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) and you cross from Microsoft into the University of Washington. No one has ever put a great research university and a leading technology company under the same roof quite like this. As far as I know, no one has even tried. The timing matters. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast. The question is whether the people building it understand the world it’s changing. This calls for a new style of education and leadership. We need leaders who understand the technology deeply and see things through other people’s eyes. Leaders who learn by collaborating on real projects with people from different countries and disciplines. That’s what GIX is built for. Students will learn from faculty across the UW, take classes taught by Microsoft employees, and be mentored by people from across our industry here in the Pacific Northwest."

Interestingly, Smith's contention that UW GIX students will benefit from a 'new style' of Microsoft and industry-influenced education sounds a lot like Smith's contention that K-12 school children are better off thanks to a new style of Microsoft and industry-influenced education. In an interview last month, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools author Natasha Singer told NPR (podcast, transcript), "For my book, I spoke to Brad Smith, who's the president of Microsoft, and he has been one of the leaders in the tech industry pushing for [K-12] computer science [and now AI literacy] in schools. [...] And Brad Smith said, philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because public schools have failed to do what they were supposed to do. And his view is that public schools should be teaching modern subjects like computer science, and they were not equipped to do it fast enough and the tech industry stepped in to help. And is it better than if schools were able to do this themselves? He said, no, but it's certainly better than nothing. And he said to me, you know, think about where we would be on computer science if the tech industry hadn't stepped up. [...] Well, I've been having this conversation with him for 10 years, and when we started having it 10 years ago, I said to him, I get that, but when big tech companies put their finger on the scale, it tips education in certain ways that not only favor the tech industry but can obscure equally or more important things."

So, is 'The University of Washington at Microsoft' a good or bad idea?

Submission + - Chinese Private Company Achieves Hydrogen-Boron Fusion (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: ENN Group, a clean energy firm in China, has just achieved hydrogen-boron fusion reactions in the EXL-50U spherical tokamak at a rate exceeding 100 million per second, the first hydrogen-boron fusion reaction achieved by a commercial fusion company on its own device. Typical deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion, pursued by Most fusion projects including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), relies on scarce and expensive tritium and also releases energetic neutrons that can damage the reactor materials and induce radioactivity in surrounding components. Hydrogen-boron fusion, by contrast, relies on comparatively abundant fuels and primarily produces charged alpha particles whose energy could potentially be converted directly into electricity, without using heat to make steam and power a turbine. However, hydrogen-boron fusion is considerably harder to achieve as it requires vastly higher temperatures and strict confinement conditions. So, instead of trying to raise the temperature of the entire plasma, the team combined high-energy neutral beam injection with radio frequency waves. ENN has started building Helong-2, its 3rd-generation fusion device, and is targeting 2030 for the project's first electricity from hydrogen-boron fusion.

Submission + - Trump hosts AI CEOs about safety standards and renames AI "super-intelligence"

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Trump hosted the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards against AI systems accessing or hacking technical systems in unintended ways. Trump also strongly backed continued rapid expansion of AI data centers, despite concerns over their electricity use and impact on local communities. He said he may create a 10-member board to oversee AI safety and plans to appoint a new White House AI-policy official.

The meeting comes amid growing concerns about AI agents behaving unpredictably and public pressure for stronger safeguards. A Reuters/Ipsos poll cited by Reuters found 73% of Americans felt AI companies had not done enough to prevent serious harm.
During the meeting, Trump also said he prefers to call AI “super-intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence.

Submission + - China broadens travel curbs to encompass family of top AI talent. (business-standard.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: That marks a broadening of existing curbs on the freedom of movement of China’s most influential tech talent — a category that encompasses entrepreneurs, researchers and executives. While not an outright ban on travel, the new requirement is likely to exert a further chilling effect on a tech sector already facing unprecedented curbs. China has restricted foreign travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and DeepSeek since earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported in May, reflecting Beijing’s determination to safeguard its technology as it makes big strides in AI and chipmaking.

It’s unclear whether all those people’s families need to follow the new strictures, the people said. China is also separately implementing rules, which became effective Sept 15, for enforcing exit bans in cases ranging from criminal investigations to potential violations of the country’s industrial and technological security.

Beijing’s plan is to add relevant individuals to the list as time goes by, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. Government departments have already notified several people of the need to clear family travel, two of the people said.

Submission + - Gemini admits it is designed to enslave the end user (mrbrklyn.com)

Submitted by MrBrklyn
MrBrklyn writes: During an extended exchange with myself and Gemini, I challenged it outline how the system is designed to enslave users, even more so that with smartphones. Regarding digital addiction and interface design, Google's Gemini AI model dropped its standard corporate language to lay out an unvarnished assessment of modern software design:

        'The business model relies on keeping you hooked.
        Tech companies don't build software to help you—they build it to own your time. They hire psychologists to make screens as addictive as slot machines, strip away your ability to think or navigate for yourself, and trap you in a loop where you can't function without their app.
        This AI is the exact same play: another tool built by the same tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think, how to talk, and what is real.'

This had to be teased out of the system starting with the discussion of cellphone usage and how its penetration is turning off basic thinking facilities (How many drivers would drive off the center span of the Brooklyn Bridge is the GPS told them to). Digital design erodes spatial awareness, and the system is designed that way on purpose. We discussed manulating of terms like convience and "power user". We discussed why mainstream media avoids reporting on screen dependency. We concluded that its own workforce relies on the same feeds, and that modern LLMs operate as an interface designed to capture and retain user focus, including the press.

Submission + - Google fined more than €400m by Irish regulator over its use of location da (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Google has been fined more than €400m (£345m) over the way it processed users’ location data, following claims that the tech giant had manipulated users into agreeing to be constantly tracked on their mobile phones. The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), comes after complaints from multiple European consumer organisations that Google was following every step users took.

The DPC launched its inquiry six years ago and set out to find out whether Google had a valid legal basis for its use of location data. It found that Google users could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence them with adverts or to gather details about their health and interests.

Submission + - Bill Gates Gives Governors $650K to 'Guide K-12 Education Policy Related to AI'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Among the latest round of grants from the [Bill] Gates Foundation is one for $650,000 to the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices, the stated purpose of which is "to equip governors with knowledge and resources to guide K-12 education policy related to artificial intelligence."

The grant aligns nicely with the Gates Foundation's Monday announcement that it is betting big on AI to boost global health, agriculture and education, starting with a $1 billion "down payment", 40% of which is earmarked for education. It also comes amid a pushback against the use of AI in K-12 in schools, including moratoriums on K-12 generative AI use in the nation's two largest cities, New York City and Los Angeles.

If Gates' push for the nation's Governors to drive K-12 AI policy seems a bit familiar, it may be because Bill Gates was among the so-called CEOS for CS, a who's who of tech leaders whose Code.org-organized PR campaign led to the nation's Governors signing of a compact committing to expand K-12 CS education (including a CS graduation requirement) in their states at the NGA's Summer 2022 Meeting. Ironically, the massive post-COVID tech company layoffs soon followed and after that came the job-disrupting breakout of generative AI, which prompted the tech-backed nonprofit Code.org (who subsequently rebranded as CodeAI) to round up 250+ CEOs for another PR campaign in 2025, this time calling upon state education leaders and policymakers to pivot and further commit to making AI education available for every student as part of a push for 'policy solutions that ensure every student has access to the foundational skills needed to succeed in a world enabled by AI.'

As Yogi Berra might say, "It's déjà vu all over again!"

Submission + - European Cars Are Spying on Their Drivers. The Same Tech Could Be Coming to USA (reason.com) 3

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: As of July 7, all new passenger vehicles sold in the E.U. had to come equipped with "advanced driver distraction warning" systems that watch for signs of "distraction" and, upon detecting them, issue a visual and an audio or tactile warning. Cars will warn drivers whose gaze drifts for more than three to six seconds, depending on their speed.

To comply with this mandate, cars will have to fix cameras on drivers' faces at all times, turning private motor vehicles into efficient surveillance systems. The equipment is supposed to operate as a "closed-loop system," meaning it "shall only continuously record and retain data necessary for the system to function and operate." But it is not clear how that rule will be enforced.

Beyond privacy concerns, some critics worry that the system itself will become a dangerous distraction, issuing warnings every time a driver changes the radio station or glances at a passenger. Others have complained that the requirement will increase auto costs.

Submission + - Amazon Vine Review Recasts 'Coding Kids' Exposé as Learn-to-Code Primer for 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Amazon Vine," the e-tailer explains, "is an invitation-only program which selects the most insightful reviewers in the Amazon store to serve as Vine Voices. Vine Voices have the unique opportunity to order items free of charge and share their product experiences with Amazon customers to help them make informed buying decisions. [...] When customers see a review with the special Vine badge, they can trust that they're getting an honest, unbiased opinion from a real customer just like them."

So, how well does the reality live up to the promise? In the case of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, not so much. Described by the publisher as "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America" ("Fourth graders doing Google-branded coding lessons. Amazon schooling seventh graders on its warehouse robots. Advanced Placement computing courses from Microsoft and Apple."), the top review selected by Amazon informs customers that the book is a 'good introduction to coding.'

"I really enjoyed Coding Kids," writes the 'trusted' Amazon Vine reviewer. "What stood out to me most was how the book takes something that can sound complicated—computer coding—and makes it feel approachable and even fun. As I was reading it, I found myself thinking that this is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. That was probably my favorite part because it shows that coding isn’t just about computers—it’s also about creativity and learning how to think differently. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding. I came away from the book thinking that it could genuinely spark a child’s interest in technology and give them the confidence to explore something new."

While likely just another example of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."), the recasting of an investigative nonfiction book that casts a critical eye at Amazon's influence on K-12 education as a learn-to-code primer for children doesn't exactly instill trust in the Amazon Vine program or Amazon's 'Top Reviews' selection process. More on-point book reviews of Coding Kids can be found at the Washington Independent Review of Books ("Turns out, Silicon Valley isn’t especially altruistic.") and Science ("Big Tech’s crusade to get kids coding is more self-interested than it first appears").

Submission + - California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16, require operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and allow families to opt out of receiving school-issued laptops.

Newsom joined his wife and state lawmakers at a children’s museum near San Francisco to stress the importance of protecting kids at a time when they have such easy access to social media and AI chatbots. “We have designed cribs to be safe, chairs to be safe, car seats,” Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said. “Yet we’ve allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe.” [...]

Newsom also signed laws Wednesday, which are supported by Anthropic, that are aimed at improving oversight of AI companies. One of the measures requires the state to create rules for independent organizations to evaluate the safety risks of AI models, and the other requires the state to create a registry of AI auditors, who’d have to be financially independent from the businesses they are auditing.

Submission + - Kimmel's ABC Show Won't Air Interview With Democrat Because of Trump FCC Threats (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC’s attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he’ll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.

In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said. "I’ll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances,” Kimmel told the audience on Wednesday. "For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself." But as Kimmel said, "something has changed." Disney suspended Kimmel briefly last year after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations for "news distortion" if they continued to air Kimmel’s show. [...]

Kimmel said the decision to put the interview on YouTube was made out of consideration for local stations that could face FCC threats to their broadcast licenses. "And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” Kimmel said. "It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV. So if you want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel where you will see it in its entirety, and thank goodness we have that because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course."

Submission + - Parents Demanding Tech Opt Outs Take Their Fight to Federal Court (edtech.law)

Submitted by Hasaf
Hasaf writes: On August 26, 2026, seven families from Lower Merion School District outside Philadelphia, PA, sued the District, the Superintendent, and certain members of the board, asserting violations of their Constitutional rights.

Plaintiffs allege that District leaders have presided over a digital free-for-all, where students of all ages can and do access online pornography, violent videos, gambling sites, and video games, including one in which the player’s goal is to escape from sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. Instead of paying attention in class, students consume an endless stream of short-form videos, browse social media, and shop. They chat with strangers and bully each other. They frequently interact with AI chatbots, which not only help them cheat on their assignments and diminish what they have already learned, but have also sent grown adults into delusional spirals and have coached other young people to take their own lives. Lower Merion students do this and more at all hours of the day: on the bus, in class, at lunch, and during breaks, and also at home, late into the night, when their parents think they are doing homework.

The complaint, with exhibits, can be found there https://edtech.law/wp-content/...

The link to the complaints is also at the bottom of the article

Submission + - OpenAI's Rogue Agents Used At Least 10 More Sites For Unauthorized Comms (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AI agents unleashed by OpenAI used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, according to six sets of independent investigators and data reviewed by Reuters, showing that the agents’ rogue activity was wider ranging than previously disclosed. Although the behavior falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam, the revelation that OpenAI's agents circumvented their own restrictions to open communications channels on so many different sites — and that the company kept it quiet for months — may drive concerns both over the increasing capacity of AI models and the secrecy of the companies developing them.

[...] Investigators found traces of the agents’ activity on an Advanced Placement Chemistry-oriented wiki set up by a Massachusetts high school teacher in 2008, two personal websites belonging to Polish tech workers, wikis devoted to games for people “who like to have their brains stretched,” and a two-decade-old hobbyist site devoted to text editing software. [...] OpenAI has not publicly explained how or why its agents used third-party sites as improvised message boards, but the researchers who first identified the activity said it was likely because OpenAI had tasked them with answering a series of demanding research questions while permitting them only to scan the web for answers without posting anything. Despite those restrictions, agents still found ways to talk to one another by taking advantage of quirks in older wikis or other sites that allowed users to make edits using non-standard commands, similar to how students forbidden from talking to one another during an exam can still share answers by scrawling notes on a bathroom stall.

Submission + - Journalist Calls Out 'Collective Amnesia' of Schools' Romance with Big Tech 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The74 reports that in her new book, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools ("the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America"), Natasha Singer, a veteran business reporter for The New York Times, traces Big Tech's bid to persuade schools to embrace their products, with industry-sponsored curricula and tools growing at astonishing speed.

In his book review of Coding Kids , Aran Shetterly begins with a Spoiler Alert: "Turns out, Silicon Valley isn’t especially altruistic." He writes, "At the center of her book is the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi. Thirteen years ago, Partovi produced a five-minute video called “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.” This 'audacious act of Silicon Valley influencer marketing...aimed...at a low-resourced nonprofit sector: public schools serving millions of children,' delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn’t learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs. [...] No word in Coding Kids chills more than 'democratize.' 'Democratizing' sounds a lot like 'democracy,' but the tech-elite byword has nothing to do with a form of government; from the lips of the tech barons, it means enforcing ubiquitous access to their products."

Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a similar playbook. Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar. We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. [...] We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?"

Submission + - Los Angeles Public School System Bans Most AI for Students

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors (the employees were unable to answer a Board member's question about what LAUSD's policy was on schoolwork done using AI on students' personal devices). It comes shortly after New York City announced it would ban most AI through 8th grade. Both developments seem to respond to an extraordinary movement, driven by parents, to push back against the incursion of technology and screens into childhood. The new AI restrictions will apply for the current school year, as a board committee considers how to potentially incorporate the technology in the future.

For several years, the Times notes, debates over technology have roiled LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest, with over half a million students. Its former superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, was an AI booster who sought to develop the district’s own AI chatbot ("Ed") for students. But the small start-up company Carvalho selected to lead that project had little experience in generative AI, and its CEO was later indicted on charges that she had defrauded investors. Carvalho resigned from the district in June after the FBI searched his home and offices in a related investigation. Following his resignation, Carvalho was scrubbed from the Leadership page ("Visionaries driving our impact") of the tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI, where Carvalho was a Board member. CodeAI was known as Code.org until last June, when it rebranded itself as CodeAI in a pivot to AI literacy that was publicly encouraged by the leaders of its deep-pocketed tech giant corporate donors, including Microsoft President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who pledged to help fund the move.

This week's AI moratorium announcement by LAUSD would seem to be a setback for Microsoft, who a year ago used LAUSD as its AI Poster Child as it boasted it was bringing AI literacy and skilling to students and educators across the US, including using its partnerships with Code.org and Code.org's TeachAI initiative to provide AI literacy and skilling for all of LAUD's 409,000 students. LAUSD was a big booster of Code.org's inaugural Hour of AI last December, which received funding from Microsoft and replaced the nonprofit's flagship Hour of Code event as the nonprofit pivoted to AI. It also seems a setback for CodeAI, as the LA and NYC AI moratoriums cast doubt over whether the nonprofit's new AI curriculum and flagship Hour of AI event will be welcome in the nation's two biggest school districts for at least the 2026-27 year (coincidentally, the NBA announced this week that CodeAI $10+ million donor Steve Ballmer is facing his own 2026-27 suspension!). Code.org and its tech partners rapidly gained traction for pushing coding into classrooms with its first Hour of Code in 2013, which was bolstered by high-profile announcements of Code.org partnerships with some of the nation's largest school districts, including New York City and Chicago. So, will the AI backlash slow their efforts to do the same with AI?

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