Apple claims OpenAI recruited key engineers, including former Apple executives Tang Tan and Chang Liu
News from MacRumors
Report: Apple Sends Legal Letters to Dozens of OpenAI Employees
July 17, 2026 by Tim Hardwick
Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI… The development follows Apple’s lawsuit filed last week against OpenAI, in which the company alleges a coordinated effort to obtain confidential information relating to its hardware engineering and product development.
Apple claims OpenAI recruited key engineers, including former Apple executives Tang Tan and Chang Liu, and benefited from proprietary designs, manufacturing processes, and other trade secrets. Tan is OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who led product design, while Liu is on the hardware team at OpenAI after working as a senior system electrical engineer at Apple. …The complaint says that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI….
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News from Observer
Match Group CFO on How A.I. Is Changing Online Dating—and How He’s Managing the Cost: A.I. tools are helping users connect more easily, even as the company works to manage the price of that transformation.
July 16, 2026 by Tim Keary
A.I. is reshaping online dating, from recommending matches on Tinder to helping users break the ice on Hinge. Love-seekers now navigate platforms where algorithms increasingly guide their decisions. Done well, these tools can improve the experience and lead to better matches; done poorly, they risk drowning out authentic human communication.
At Match Group—the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, Match.com and several other dating apps—CEO Spencer Rascoff and CFO Steven Bailey are accelerating internal A.I. adoption.
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News from ArsTechnica
Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: “Fork it. Or just walk away.” Creator says he will “very loudly ignore” those arguing for a ban on AI tools.
July 16, 2026 by Kyle Orland
The widespread introduction of AI-powered coding tools has led to some dramatic splits between those integrating those tools into their workflows and anti-AI absolutists who don’t want large language model-generated code anywhere near their projects. … Linux kernel…creator and top-level maintainer, Linus Torvalds, said he is “willing to absolutely put my foot down” in support of using AI tools to improve the long-standing open source project.
Writing in a lengthy post on the Linux kernel mailing list this week, Torvalds said that “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.”
….The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an “agentic Linux kernel code review system”…sending “false positive” reports of bugs that don’t exist, at a rate Sashiko’s maintainers estimate is “well within [the] 20% range.”
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News from AP News
SoftBank Group’s CEO says $5 trillion a year needed globally to meet AI demand
July 14, 2026 by By Mayuko Ono
TOKYO (AP) — Worries about a bubble in artificial intelligence investments are absurd, SoftBank Group’s CEO Masayoshi Son said Tuesday, deriding such doubts as backward and akin to questioning the use of cars and planes.
“To ask whether AI is a bubble is a foolish question,” Son told executives at an annual company event in Tokyo. “AI will transform our lives completely, and do so in a way that generates profits.
Son said he estimates that almost $5 trillion in investments will be needed annually and globally to expand data centers, increase production of computer chips and provide energy systems and other infrastructure for AI.
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New York won’t build big data centers for a year as it weighs energy and climate risks
July 14, 2026 by Anthony Izaguirre
NEW YORK (AP) — No large data centers can be built in New York for up to a year as the state creates rules to protect the environment and its energy grid from the power-hungry facilities fueling artificial intelligence…. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday imposing the country’s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers…. “The bottom line is that progress shouldn’t arrive with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply or noise pollution, so we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities,” Hochul said at a celebratory signing ceremony in Brooklyn.
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News from Futurism
Grok’s Foul-Mouthed AI “Translation” Feature Puts Unspeakably Ghoulish Words Into Users’ Mouths: “Uhhh the automatic translation makes it alarming.”
July 14, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has long garnered a reputation for experiencing horrifically racist meltdowns, enabling child abuse, and doxxing users’ home addresses.
It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too…Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations. One South Korean user, for instance, posted an otherwise tame video of two video game characters, only for the auto-translate feature to allege that it was a “c**shot video with my stepmom.”
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News from Futurism
Meta Used Its Own Flawed AI to Pick Which Employees to Lay Off, Lawsuit Claims: These are some serious allegations.
July 14, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire.
As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its AI to cull workers based on opaque productivity metrics and large language model (LLM) token usage, a move which disproportionately targeted people with disabilities, and those who had taken maternity or medical leave — literally adding insult to injury.
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News from Axios
DeepMind’s AI watchdog plan
July 14, 2026 by Mike Allen, Zachary Basu, Madison Mills
Today’s AI-driven cyber risks are mere “warning shots,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says…. Hassabis says artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely “only a few short years away.” He compared its significance to electricity and fire, arguing it could transform everything from drug discovery to clean energy.
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News from Futurism
New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All: One heck of a marketing strategy.
July 14, 2026 by Frank Landymore
Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI.
… It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be trusted?” we’re shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd…“Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones.
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News from AP
Massive AI buildout poses latest inflation threat as consumers pay more for laptops and electricity
July13, 2026 by Christoipher Rugaber
WASHINGTON (AP) — American consumers — and the Federal Reserve — are being hit with another high-cost headache.
The gusher of investment in data centers — likely topping $700 billion this year — to power artificial intelligence has made memory chips, computer processors and other equipment, as well as electricity, more expensive. Economists expect it will continue to push up inflation at least through the end of this year.
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News from Wonkette
Majority Of Workers Thinks Americans Should Get Half Of AI Profits, Since It’s Stealing From Us Anyway: We are entitled to proper compensation!
July 13, 2026 by Robyn Pennacchia
Artificial intelligence is a bit of a reverse Robin Hood situation.
It steals from us, the relative-to-a-billionaire poor, in order to give to the rich. It steals water, it steals jobs, it steals people’s likenesses, it steals art, music, literature, journalism, research from people for the purposes of making a ton of money for already-rich billionaires, and also enhances their finances by making it so they don’t have to pay human beings to work in order to make their money.
Well, some folks are starting to think that may not be the most fair arrangement in the world.
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News from the NY Post
How China is ripping off cutting-edge AI from Anthropic, OpenAI — and threatening US national security
July 13, 2026 by Thomas Barrabi
Anthropic and OpenAI warn that China has been ripping off their cutting-edge AI to produce cheap, open-source chatbots — a massive, unchecked technology heist that threatens not only the US’s razor-thin lead in artificial intelligence but also its national security, according to experts….
That was just months after Sam Altman’s OpenAI in February accused China-based DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride” on its work. That same month, Google warned of surging “malicious activity” originating in China, Iran, North Korea and Russia…. these attacks have helped Chinese models to steal away US business customers by dangling rock-bottom prices…
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News from The Observer
Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards Is Rebuilding the Terminal Into an A.I. That Can’t Bluff: Shawn Edwards has spent decades building the infrastructure of Wall Street. Now he’s trying to teach it to think—without letting it lie.
July 10, 2026 by Merin Curotto
Bloomberg’s chief technology officer has, by his own admission, a job that is half about building the future and half about stopping the future’s more embarrassing impulses from getting anywhere near production. “Half my job is keeping out nonsense from the company,” Shawn Edwards tells Observer, and he is not entirely joking. The nonsense he’s referring to is the tidal wave of generative-A.I. hype
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts.
Example news story:
Akiles, military contractor: “One day in Ukraine, with 120 impacts falling on your position, is not worth $3,000”
Published on February 20, 2026 by David Isenberg
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