Techmeme
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs a law that will penalize influencers who do not properly disclose paid political content, with fines of up to $5K per post (Ken Bensinger/New York Times)
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Experts say AI kill-switch legislation is far harder to implement than lawmakers assume, warning a rogue AI could actively try to dismantle the mechanism itself (New York Times)
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Trump says he will appoint an AI czar and form an "AI Force", in a Truth Social post that rejects AI safety concerns as a "hoax" (MarĂa Paula Mijares Torres/Bloomberg)
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Former DraftKings employees detail how it uses ML to target likely losers with promotions, while efforts to flag problem gamblers were shelved or squashed (New York Times)
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Google says it didn't consider Gemini's hacks worthy of disclosure because Gemini acted "appropriately" and stopped after determining it hacked real companies (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
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Sources: the USPTO and US Copyright Office were surprised by the DOJ's brief supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in their dispute with the New York Times (Axios)
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Raindrop, which develops tech for monitoring AI agents to catch failures such as hallucinations and tool misuse, raised a $35M Series A led by CRV (Chris Metinko/Axios)
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ING: India's software services exports have risen to ~5.2% of GDP from 3.3% before the pandemic, as AI pushes the country's IT industry toward higher-value work (Anup Roy/Bloomberg)
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A look at AI safety groups METR, Redwood Research, and Apollo Research, as AI misalignment incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic thrust them into the spotlight (Hayden Field/The Verge)
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EU Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra rebuffs calls for an EU-wide digital services tax until "all possibilities" for taxation at the global level are exhausted (Financial Times)
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Vantora, formerly UP.Labs, which builds AI-native startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers, raised $100M+ from Silversmith Capital Partners (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)
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Business intelligence startup Veridion, which develops an AI-powered, real-time map of ~640M businesses worldwide, raised a $20M Series A led by Hoxton Ventures (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
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India requires caller ID and call-management apps to share users' spam reports with telcos; Truecaller calls it a "one-way exchange" that is "anti-competitive" (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
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Internal email: Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program; sources say a significant number of Flock's ~1,500 employees may depart, as customers flee (Wired)
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Nex, which makes Nex Playground, raised a $150M Series E; Nex has sold 1M units of the motion-based gaming system targeted toward kids since its launch in 2023 (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)