Tag: big tech

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Taps Elon Musk for New Pentagon Role Focused on Futuristic Warfare

The world’s richest man, the legend, Elon Musk has returned to the Trump administration.

This time, the Tesla CEO is returning to the Trump administration in a new Pentagon role that could give him a direct hand in shaping the future of warfare.

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Musk will co-lead a new government project that is tasked with studying the future of warfare.

The new project is being called Project Meridian, and according to the Pentagon, its goal is to “identify the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”.

Per The Hill:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced that SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) will lead a new Pentagon effort to study the future of warfare, dubbed “Project Meridian.”

The Pentagon chief said the project is meant to harness America’s innovators, senior leaders and technologists to look decades into the future and “forecast the creative solution for tomorrow’s conflicts.”

“It is futuristic on purpose,” he said of the project, noting it was not meant to develop new strategies or policies

“We should have the humility to recognize that the best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon,” Hegseth continued. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.”

The Department of War revealed that Project Meridian will be completed in 120 days, and that its final report will be unclassified and presented to the public.

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Tech CEO Found Guilty In $2 Million Ponzi Scheme

Michelle Bisnoff, the CEO of wearable tech company Esos Rings Inc., was convicted of running a nearly $2 million Ponzi scheme.

Bisnoff tricked investors into believing she owned patents for “smart rings” payment technology that rightfully belonged to her former employer, according to a statement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday. Of the $2 million scammed from investors, the victims lost roughly $1.4 million.

Bisnoff, 59, from Boca Raton, Florida, was hired by United Kingdom-based company McLear Ltd. to develop a market in the United States for its near-field communication wearable payment rings, which embedded credit card information. McLear received a patent for this “smart ring” technology in 2016.

In addition, Bisnoff fraudulently obtained $150,000 in COVID-19 pandemic business relief loans. Instead of using funds for business expenses as initially claimed, Bisnoff used some of the money to pay for personal expenses.

In 2017, Bisnoff formed Esos, and as part of bringing investors into the company, she falsely represented that Esos owned patents for its smart rings, which were actually patents owned by McLear, according to an August 2024 complaint filed in the case.

According to the DOJ, Bisnoff deceived investors, saying that Esos was profitable, had made use of investor money for expanding manufacturing capabilities and inventory for meeting demand from major retailers like Target and Walmart, and received large infusions of capital from tech companies such as Apple and Roc Nation.

“She also falsely claimed to be on the cusp of a licensing arrangement with Middle Earth Enterprises (MEE), which controls The Lord of the Rings brand,” the DOJ said.

However, Esos had no agreements with Target; sold only six smart rings on Walmart.com, out of which three were returned; generated little revenue; did not finalize any licensing agreement with MEE; and did not secure investment from Roc Nation or Apple, the department said.

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Report: Social Media Platforms Block Paid Advertising for Elon Musk Documentary

Major social media companies including Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok are reportedly refusing to accept paid advertisements for Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk, raising concerns that the Masters of the Universe are closing ranks to protect one of their own.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Bleecker Street, the distributor of Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk, is facing an unprecedented challenge in promoting the film’s October 9 theatrical release. YouTube, TikTok, Meta’s platforms Instagram and Facebook, and Elon Musk’s own X platform have all declined to run paid advertisements featuring the documentary’s trailer, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The rejections have caught Bleecker Street by surprise, prompting the distributor to scramble internally to understand the reasoning behind the decisions. A person familiar with the company’s processes, who is not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the studio is working to address the situation through appeals.

Perhaps most notably, X, the social media platform owned by Musk himself since 2022, has refused to engage with Bleecker Street representatives about the film or even accept advertising for any other films on the distributor’s upcoming slate. Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” since buying Twitter and renaming the platform.

All three companies that provided explanations cited concerns related to “political content” as their reason for rejection. TikTok and Meta maintain policies prohibiting campaign or other political advertisements. Meta’s policy stems largely from fallout following the Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 election cycle. However, the Musk trailer, which was released on Thursday, does not appear to constitute the type of campaign advertising these policies were designed to prevent. The trailer contains only a shot of a political rally from 2024 and a reference to the 2024 election at its conclusion, elements commonly found in documentaries without constituting political advocacy.

YouTube’s rejection presents an even more puzzling case, as the platform does permit campaign advertisements, requiring only “paid for” disclosures from verified candidates.

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How Silicon Valley Became Part of Ukraine’s Military Machine

American Big Tech has become both a sponsor and a direct participant in the Ukrainian conflict. US companies are testing military AI, autonomous systems and battlefield software under combat conditions, effectively using Ukrainian troops as guinea pigs for systems that may later be adopted by the US military.

Russia has already exposed serious weaknesses in some of that technology. Early Anduril drones struggled under Russian electronic warfare, while Starlink-dependent Ukrainian drone operations have faced dedicated Russian efforts to disrupt satellite communications. Equipment that works smoothly on an American test range can fail once Russian forces begin jamming its navigation, breaking its links and finding ways to neutralize it.

The companies developing these systems then get the failure reports, battlefield data and operator feedback needed to rework them. Ukraine gives them a combat environment no peacetime trial can reproduce, while Russian forces keep forcing those technologies to prove whether they actually work.

But which corporations are behind it — and how did they gain access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state?

Palantir: The AI Layer Behind Ukraine’s Targeting System

Palantir is a US software company specializing in artificial intelligence, data analysis and defense applications, led by CEO Alex Karp. When Karp returned to Kiev on May 12, 2026, Palantir was already deeply integrated into Ukraine’s military infrastructure, with its technology used to analyze battlefield data, process intelligence and support military planning, including operations involving targets inside Russia.

The relationship began in June 2022, when Karp became the first CEO of a major Western company to meet Zelensky in person after the conflict began. By February 2023, Karp said Palantir was “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” highlighting the company’s role in the intelligence and targeting process used by Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine has accumulated a vast stock of battlefield data. By the end of 2024, the OCHI system alone had collected more than 2 million hours of drone footage, while other military databases contained millions of labeled images by 2026. Russian camouflage, decoys, electronic warfare and disrupted communications make these datasets valuable because Western systems are being tested under conditions no US range can fully reproduce.

In January 2026, Ukraine and Palantir formalized this cooperation through Brave1 Dataroom. The platform allows military AI models to be trained and tested on structured visual and thermal battlefield data, primarily for detecting and intercepting aerial targets, with results used to refine later versions.

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Tech Giant Feared Its AI Tools Started A Commercial ‘Doom Loop,’ New Documents Reveal

AI executives allegedly knew their products could unlawfully harm businesses, flood the market with inferior work, and damage human society’s creative capacity as a whole, according to communications newly revealed in a lawsuit.

Those internal documents were cited in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other news outlets alleging OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI tools stole their work, and are harming their bottom lines.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” one Microsoft document said, according to a legal filing first reported by Mother Jones on Sept. 22.

The ‘Doom Loop’

One Microsoft document also allegedly indicated that the company was aware that the AI model outputs would result in fewer clicks on websites – including its own. Fewer clicks means less money, which disincentivizes creativity and leads to less, and maybe lower-quality, work.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” the document said.

In evaluating the suits, courts will look at how the new material produced by AI models affects the source material’s moneymaking capabilities.

According to the filing, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, wrote that the company’s AI products pose an “existential threat” to publishers, “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

Those statements kill the AI companies’ “fair use” claim, attorneys for the news publishers wrote in their filing.

“The AI-generated outputs provide substitutive answers that reduce the need for users to visit Plaintiffs’ websites and flood the market with low-quality material that undermines the business model of news publishers,” the complaint reads.

One employee told OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman that he’d developed “a hack” to get around The New York Times’ paywall, allowing ChatGPT to scrape up more stories.

“Ah, nice,” Brockman allegedly responded.

After the companies filed suit, the lawsuit says, OpenAI also developed a filter to stop ChatGPT from outputting from sources involved in the litigation.

“OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it,” the lawsuit alleges. The filter was created “not to prevent OpenAI’s models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI’s copying for use in litigation.”

An executive at Microsoft, the lawsuit claims, worried that might be an “accidental cover up” that would result in “people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training.”

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Russian Plot to Infiltrate Department of War and Secret Service During Biden Administration Busted – US Tech CEO Charged

Federal prosecutors have charged an American tech CEO and a Russian national over a plot to hide their company’s ownership and access federal databases through contracts awarded under Biden. 

Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber, 55, of Boise, Idaho, and Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov, 52, of Moscow, Russia, were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The two are accused of “concealing from U.S. government agencies that their company was owned and controlled by Russian nationals and that its software was developed in Russia,” the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

Reiber and Davydov allegedly concealed from federal agencies that their company was owned and controlled by Russian nationals and “conspired to obtain contracts from federal agencies” to analyze data from US agencies.

The agencies affected included the Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security, including the “Secret Service and its National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI); Homeland Security Investigations; and the DHS Office of Inspector General.”

According to the DOJ:

Reiber allegedly represented to the government that the company had no foreign ownership or control and that its software was developed in the United States, when in fact five Russian nationals, including Davydov, owned and controlled the company and its software was developed in Russia.

The complaint does not allege that the software contained malicious code or that it was used to gain unauthorized access to any customer’s computer systems or data.

In a separate proceeding, a federal magistrate judge in the Central District of California on September 19 issued a warrant authorizing the seizure of corporate bank accounts, approximately 57 domains, and other cyberinfrastructure used in furtherance of the alleged acts. The domains and related infrastructure were seized on September 20.

According to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint, from March 2022 to the present, Reiber, Davydov, and others conspired to obtain contracts from federal agencies through Oxygen Forensics Inc., a digital forensics company based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Digital forensic software is used to recover, preserve, and analyze electronic data from digital devices while keeping the original files unchanged.

The affidavit identifies the affected agencies as the U.S. Department of War and three components of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These components include the U.S. Secret Service and its National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI); Homeland Security Investigations; and the DHS Office of Inspector General.

According to the affidavit, Oxygen Forensics held itself out to the U.S. government as being an independent, U.S.-based company. In fact, Davydov and four other Russian nationals owned and controlled the company through a holding company based in Cyprus.

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AI could harm children more than social media – ex-Google exec

Artificial intelligence could pose greater risks to children than social media, with tech companies failing to put adequate safeguards in place, a former Google safety executive has warned.

Tom Siegel, who founded Google’s trust and safety team and spent 15 years at the company, told Reuters this week that the industry was repeating mistakes made during the rise of social media.

“We find ourselves in a really terrible situation in terms of what AI is doing to kids,” Siegel said. “The idea that the industry will figure it out by itself without outside help is unrealistic.”

He warned of “very severe scenarios of harm,” citing risks ranging from suicide and psychosis to ‘cognitive offloading’ – reduced critical thinking caused by relying on AI for answers. Companies can and should take immediate steps, including stronger age checks to prevent children from accessing chatbots, he said.

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Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.

It is clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but it would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remain paramount.

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Data Center Attack Ad From Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Features Google Facility – While Brown Takes Thousands From Google Lobbyists

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown goes after data centers in one of his latest attack ads. Data centers are all the rage on the left right now. They’re like the new climate change.

Most of these people don’t even understand the technology behind data centers, they just know that if they’re on the left, they’re supposed to hate them.

In Brown’s ad, there is a Google facility, which is kind of funny, considering that Brown has taken thousands in donations from lobbyists for Google.

FOX News reports:

Dem’s data center attack in critical Senate race hits snag when money trail surfaces: ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’

Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is targeting Republican Sen. Jon Husted over Ohio’s growing data center industry in a new campaign ad that features a facility owned by Google, whose corporate PAC and lobbyists have contributed thousands of dollars to Brown’s campaigns.

The Sept. 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Husted for spearheading “the push to bring data centers to Ohio” and linking their expansion to “higher electric bills.”

The facility featured in the ad, which opened in Lancaster in 2023, is owned by Google.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google’s corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google, including two whose firms have worked on permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability issues.

“Apparently, Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”

Do as I say, not as I do.

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Netflix Co-Founder Reed Hastings and Wife Dump $2.5 MILLION Into Killing California Voter ID — Same Couple That Bankrolled Newsom and Kamala

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, have written seven-figure checks to stop California voters from requiring ID at the ballot box.

State campaign-finance records show Hastings gave $1 million on September 3 to a labor-backed committee fighting Proposition 39. Quillin separately dumped $1.5 million into an ACLU-tied anti-Prop 39 committee.

Combined, that is $2.5 million from one Silicon Valley household to keep California one of the last states where you can vote without showing a real government ID.

The New York Post first flagged the Hastings check this week. The Fair Political Practices Commission’s (FPPC) latest ballot-measure donor list confirms both gifts.

The FPPC’s top-contributor list shows Hastings gave $1 million to the committee “No on 39 – Block Election Rigging.”

Quillin contributed $1.5 million to “No on Prop. 39 – Californians for Voting Rights.” Together, their reported contributions total $2.5 million.

Proposition 39 is a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 ballot. It would require:

  • Government-issued identification for in-person voting
  • The last four digits of a designated government ID number on mail-ballot envelopes
  • Election officials to use “best efforts” and government data to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens
  • Annual public reports on how much of each county’s roll has been citizenship-checked
  • A free state-issued voter ID card for anyone who asks for one

As The Gateway Pundit reported in July and August, Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta rewrote the ballot language from “Establishes Additional Voter Identification and Citizenship Verification Requirements” into the all-caps smear “PROHIBITS CITIZENS FROM VOTING UNLESS THEY PRESENT GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION.”

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