Big Tech scored a major victory this week in the battle over using copyrighted materials to train AI models. Anthropic won a partial judgment on Tuesday in a case brought by three authors who alleged the company violated their copyright by storing their works in a library used to train its Claude AI model.
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Anthropics use of copyrighted material for training was fair use. His decision carries weight. “Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such,” Alsup wrote. “Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.”
Alsup called training Claude “exceedingly transformative,” comparing the model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
That language helps explain why tech lobbyists were quick to call it a major win. Experts agreed. “It’s a pretty big win actually for the future of AI training,” says Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property expert at the University of Sussex who has closely followed AI copyright cases. But he adds: “It could be bad for Anthropic specifically, depending on authors winning the piracy issue, but that’s still very far away.”
In other words, its not as simple as tech companies might wish.
“The fair use ruling looks bad for creators on its surface, but this is far from the final word on the matter,” says Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive-turned-copyright campaigner and founder of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit certifying companies that respect creators rights. The case is expected to be appealedand even at this stage, Newton-Rex sees weaknesses in the rulings reasoning. “The judge makes assertions about training, not de-incentivizing creation, and about AI learning like humans do, that feel easy to rebut,” he says. “This is, on balance, a bad day for creators, but its just the opening move in what will be a long game.”
While the judge approved training AI models on copyrighted works, other elements of the case werent so favorable for Anthropic. Guadamuz says Alsups decision hinges on a “solid fair use argument on the transformative nature of AI training.” The judge thoroughly applied the four-factor test for fair use, Guadamuz noted, and the ruling could reshape broader copyright approaches. “We may start seeing the beginnings of rules for the new world, [where] having legitimate access to a work would work strongly in proving fair use, while using shadow libraries would not,” he says.
And thats the catch: This wasnt an unvarnished win for Anthropic. Like other tech companies, Anthropic allegedly sourced training materials from piracy sites for easea fact that clearly troubled the court. “This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup wrote, referring to Anthropics alleged pirating of more than 7 million books.
That alone could carry billions in liability, with statutory damages starting at $750 per booka trial on that issue is still to come.
So while tech companies may still claim victory (with some justification, given the fair use precedent), the same ruling also implies that companies will need to pay substantial sums to legally obtain training materials. OpenAI, for its part, has in the past argued that licensing all the copyrighted material needed to train its models would be practically impossible.
Joanna Bryson, a professor of AI ethics at the Hertie School in Berlin, says the ruling is “absolutely not” a blanket win for tech companies. “First of all, it’s not the Supreme Court. Secondly, it’s only one jurisdiction: The U.S.,” she says. “I think they dont entirely have purchase over this thing about whether or not it was transformative in the sense of changing Claudes output.”
Oil prices are dropping further, and U.S. stocks are pulling close to their all-time high Tuesday on hopes that Israels war with Iran will not damage the global flow of crude, even if a tentative truce seemed to fray under fire in the morning.
The S&P 500 was 1.2% higher in afternoon trading, following up on even bigger gains for stocks across Europe and Asia, after President Donald Trump said late Monday that Israel and Iran had agreed to a complete and total ceasefire. The main measure of Wall Street’s health is back within 1% of its record set in February after falling roughly 20% below during the spring.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 518 points, or 1.2%, as of 1:56 p.m. ET, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.5% higher.
The strongest action was again in the oil market, where a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude fell 5.4%, to $64.82. Brent crude, the international standard, dropped 5.5%, to $66.62.
The fear throughout the Israel-Iran conflict has been that it could squeeze the worlds supply of oil, which would pump up prices for gasoline and hurt the global economy. Iran is a major producer of crude, and it could also try to block the Strait of Hormuz off its coast, through which 20% of the worlds daily oil needs passes on ships.
Oil prices began falling sharply on Monday after Iran launched what appeared to be a limited retaliatory strike that did not target the production or movement of oil. Prices kept falling even after attacks continued past a deadline to stop hostilities early Tuesday. Trump later said that the ceasefire was in effect.
Oil prices have dropped so much in the last two days that theyre below where they were before the fighting began nearly two weeks ago.
With the global oil market well supplied and the OPEC+ alliance of producing countries steadily increasing production, oil prices could be headed even lower as long as the ceasefire holds and a lasting peace solution can be found, said Carsten Fritsch, commodities analyst at German-based Commerzbank.
Falling oil prices should take some pressure off inflation, and that in turn could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates.
Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give the economy a boost by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow money to buy a car or build a factory. But they could also give inflation more fuel. That latter threat is why the Fed has been hesitant to cut rates this year after lowering them through the end of last year.
The Fed has said repeatedly that it wants to wait and see how much Trumps tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation before committing to its next move. So far, the economy seems to be holding up okay, though a report on confidence among U.S. consumers came in weaker on Tuesday than economists expected, while inflation has remained only a bit above the Fed’s 2% target.
Trump, though, has been pushing for more cuts to rates. And two of his appointees to the Fed have said in the last week that they may consider cutting rates as soon as the Feds next meeting next month.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell remains more cautious. He said again in testimony delivered to Congress Tuesday that the Fed is well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.
Asked whether a cut could arrive as soon as July, Powell said: We will get to a place where we cut rates, sooner rather than laterbut I wouldnt want to point to a particular meeting. I dont think we need to be in any rush because the economy is still strong.
Such mixed messages had Treasury yields swiveling up and down in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.30%, from 4.34% late Monday.
The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, fell to 3.82%, from 3.84%.
On Wall Street, cruise operator Carnival steamed 6.7% higher after delivering a much stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. CEO Josh Weinstein said it’s seeing strong demand from people booking cruises close to the departure date, and customers are spending strongly once on board. Carnival also raised its forecast for an underlying measure of profit for the full year.
Uber Technologies rose 7.8% after it said customers in Atlanta can use its app to ride in Waymo autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase Global rallied 11.4% as the cryptocurrency exchange rose with the price of Bitcoin, which jumped back above $105,000.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rallied more than 1% everywhere from France to Germany to Japan, following the announcement of the Israel-Iran ceasefire. Hong Kongs jump of 2.1% and South Koreas leap of 3% were two of the strongest moves.
By Stan Choe, David McHugh, and Elaine Kurtenbach, AP business writers
CareerBuilder + Monster, an online job hunting joint venture, announced on Tuesday it filed for bankruptcy in Delaware.
The company initiated the Chapter 11 process to facilitate a sale of its operations, with assets totaling between $50 to $100 million and estimated liabilities of some $100 to $500 million, according to its bankruptcy filing.
Fast Company has reached out to the company for comment.
The bankruptcy plan calls for the assets to be divided up, selling its jobs board business to JobGet Inc.; selling Monster Media Properties to Valnet Inc. (which includes Military.com and Fastweb.com); and transferring Monster Government Services to Valsoft Corp. However, the asset sale is subject to other, higher offers, according to the press release.
“For over 25 years, we have been a proud global leader in helping job seekers and companies connect and empower employment across the globe,” Jeff Furman, CEO of CareerBuilder + Monster, said in a statement. “However, like many others in the industry, our business has been affected by a challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment. In light of these conditions, we ran a robust sale process and carefully evaluated all available options. We determined that initiating this court-supervised sale process is the best path toward maximizing the value of our businesses and preserving jobs.”
Furman added that CareerBuilder + Monster also plans to restructure, which would include a reduction of its current workforce, and the company is in talks with Blue Torch Capital for up to $20 million of debtor-in-possession financing.
Monster, which dominated the internet job search industry starting in the 1990s, merged with then-struggling CareerBuilder in 2024, with Dutch multinational human resource consulting firm Randstad NV taking a minority stake in that business. Owned by Apollo Global Management, CareerBuilder saw a decline in subscription renewals after the pandemic, from which it never recovered.
Although the merger created one mega job board, sales continued to decline, with CareerBuilder’s revenue falling to $49.2 million in 2024, a 40% drop compared to 2023, according to Moody’s Ratings, as reported by Bloomberg.
New Yorkers are heading to the polls Tuesday to cast their ballots for the city’s next mayor. And it’s not just NYC that’s invested.
The Democratic primary race between a fresh-faced 33-year-old democratic socialist and a seasoned politician clawing for a comeback has captivated the countrynot just because the top candidates couldn’t be more different, but because the election could offer a glimpse of what kind of democratic candidates Americans are seeking to elect in other upcoming races. (The person chosen to lead America’s biggest city will presumably be a Democrat and could help set the tone for the party’s platform nationwide.)
A study in contrasts
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, the two frontrunners in the mayoral race, are starkly different candidatesa fact that Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor if elected, has played into leading up to election day.
While Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as New York’s governor in 2021 over dozens of sexual harassment allegations, is backed by billionaire donors, centrists, and well-known democrats like Bill Clinton, Mamdani has the support of hard-leaning leftists like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York’s 14th congressional district.
Prior to joining the mayoral race, Mamdani was essentially a political unknown. Still, he’s managed to gain major traction with emotional speeches, a captivating social media presence, and a laser-pointed focus on an issue that most New Yorkers (as well as most Americans) are deeply concerned with at present: lowering the cost of living.
“This is the most expensive city in the United States of America and New Yorkers are tired of having to worry each and every hour of each and every day about whether they can afford to live here, Mamdani said yesterday to a crowd of supporters.
Ranked-choice voting system adds additional drama
Interestingly, in a rare move, the candidate isn’t just campaigning for his own leadership. He’s teamed up with other candidates, like State Senator Zellnor Myrie and city Comptroller Brad Lander, to block Cuomo from ranking in New York’s ranked-choice voting system, which was new to the city last year.
The system means that New Yorkers can cast votes for, not one, but up to five candidates. Mamdani and other candidates have been preaching to supporters to fill out their entire ballot but “Don’t rank Cuomo.”
Lander, meanwhile, had his own viral moment last week when he was taken into custody by federal immigration officials outside of a Manhattan courtroom, an incident caught on dramatic video.
On the other end of the spectrum from Mamdani, Cuomo is leaning into his experience as a seasoned leader. This is not a job for a novice,” he told supporters this week. “This is not a job for a person who never really had a job before. We need someone who knows what they are doing on day one, because your lives depend on it.”
In recent weeks, the race has been heating up with projections that have stunned and excited Mamdani supporters.
While Cuomo was the clear frontrunner earlier this year, Mamdani pulled ahead in the most recent public poll, published Monday.
How can I track NYC election results in real time?
The polls don’t close in NYC until 9 p.m. Tuesday, but due to the city’s voting system, a final count could take a full week.
If one candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, they’ll take the race. However, If no candidate emerges straight away, the tabulation of rankings would begin on July 1. Meaning, while NYC is already going to be hotter than your average summer day, the heat around this race could be even hotter.
With so much riding on who New York’s next mayor will be, voters and interested parties across the country are bound to be following closely as the votes come in. Here are a few ways to stay up to date:
Ways to watch:
The New York Times will offer live updates on the race and election results as they come in. The outlet will show “simulated ranked-choice results for the first and final rounds of voting.” Find it here.
PBS will show live election results as they come in, along with a live map to show how the city is voting in real time. Find it here.
The Board of Elections will release “unofficial, first-choice-only votes” just after the polls close and continuously update the results. The results will be broken down into districts. Find it here.
If you’re a New Yorker who isn’t sure which election district you live in, you can look it up here.
Back in March, to mark International Womens Day, LOreal launched a short film called The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, a 18-minute profile of the advertising copywriter who coined the brands iconic tagline, Because Im Worth It. For the past 50 years, its been the global beauty giants own version of Just Do It. But this is far from the usual self-congratulatory brand hype video.
Directed by Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot, the film spotlights the fights Specht had to win in order for her vision to come to life in 1971. Close to 80 years old during filming, Specht didnt pull any punches. She paints a picture of what advertising in that era looked like, both outwardly in the world, and internally as a business.
In the ’70s, most of the advertising for womens products were from the perspective of men, or in service to men. This will make you pretty . . . for your man. This will clean the house better . . . for your husband and children.
In the film, she describes male colleagues who were always arguing with her and taking credit when something worked. She recalled how during pitch and idea meetings for LOreal Preference hair color, male colleagues had suggested an idea that cast the woman as an object, rather than the subject. I was feeling angry. Im not interested in writing anything about looking good for men. Fuck em, says an elderly, and terminally ill, Specht in the film, before looking straight down the camera to the male camera operator. And fuck you, too.
The film won the Grand Prix for the film category at the Cannes Lions of Creativity last week, and is currently streaming on TED, AMC+, and Prime Video. McCann global CEO Daryl Lee credits his colleague Charlotte Franceries, president of McCann Paris and the agencys lead on the LOreal business.
The fact that we made this true story about one woman is because Charlotte said to me, we are all benefiting as McCann and as L’Oreal Paris from the power of one woman’s truth and no one knows her name, says Lee.
What could have been
The original ad for LOreal Preference hair color that first used the line, Because Im Worth It is a single shot of a woman walking towards the camera, explaining why she likes it, and how it makes her feel.
@lorealparis Our original Preference ad from 1973. You know the line but do you know the story of the woman behind our iconic tagline? #LorealParis #iamworthit#OnRegardeQuoi #thefinalcopyofilonspecht son original – LOréal Paris – LOréal Paris
In the doc, we find out that spot almost never happened. In fact, Specht went behind her bosses’ back to create the ad after her agency produced and the brand approved a spot with almost the exact same script, except it was a man speaking the words on behalf of his wife, walking silently beside him. Its clear that 50 years later it still made Specht angry. Angry enough to not want to talk about advertising or that campaign ever again.
But director Ben Proudfoot convinced her to participate. To get Proudfoot involved, producer Brendan Gaul says the key was to give the director 100% creative control. Our intention was to create a film from the beginning, not a piece of advertising that looked like a film, says Gaul. And the distinction there actually is in the creative control.
The distinction is also in how the film rolled out. Not as part of an ad campaign, but on the film festival circuit. After premiering at Tribeca X in June 2024, it earned Best Short Documentary at HollyShorts Film Festival, Best Short Documentary and the Best Atlantic Filmmaker Award at Lunenburg Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the Chelsea Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Hot Springs Documentary Festival.
Relevant past and present
Franceries says that the entire doc process began as an exercise for LOreal to interrogate the relevance of its longtime tagline. That after 50 years or so, perhaps it was losing a bit of its meaning to people.
We needed to keep it but had to give it a much stronger meaning, says Franceries. And the documentary is the most efficient piece of content weve done to convince people about the true meaning.
Since its release, the film has attracted more than two billion impressions, and increased brand consideration for LOreal by 70% among viewers.
Its a story of the past that does not sugarcoat the role both LOreal and McCann played as corporations and as work environments to contribute to the culture Specht was reacting against. Lee says thats important because it shows how relevant it is to constantly be checking for blindspots, both as a person and a company. And in an environment where more and more corporations are receding away from DEI commitments, the message of the film is as important as it was 50 years ago.
The blind spot is always going to be inclusion,” says Lee. Business is now speed, seamlessness and scale, and you have to keep checking yourself to say, Okay, we could do this faster, but someone is not speaking up, or someone is not participating, and they could be the person who unlocks the truth here.’
Specht died in April 2024 at the age of 81. She never saw the finished film. Thankfully, her voice still lives on.
“I’m not interested in advertising, I don’t give a shit, she says in the film. Its about humans; its not about advertising. It’s about caring for people because . . . we’re all worth it, or no one is worth it.
Just this past weekend, social and gaming platform Roblox saw a peak of 30.6 million concurrently active players, the company announced Tuesday. One game in particularthe record-breaking viral gardening sim Grow a Gardendrew a peak of 21.6 million concurrent players.
While previous blockbuster games from Fortnite to World of Warcraft primarily run on servers managed by their own developers and publishers, Roblox is distinctive in that its games and experiences are created by third-party developers. And those developers are free to update and tweak their game code at any timewith Roblox’s servers expected to manage the traffic load, even seamlessly updating the experience for players already logged in.
“Most of us computer scientists were taught that you’d never publish your entire code in one go, and you do it when your traffic is low,” says Anupam Singh, senior vice president of engineering at Roblox. “In our case, it’s almost the opposite.”
That’s because preannounced updates to big-name games naturally draw crowds of players, and no gamer wants to be stuck on an old version of the software in an era when screenshots rapidly circulate via group chat and social media. And since Roblox tries to avoid restricting how experienced creators run their games and when they can deploy them, game code, images, and other assets need to be sent quickly and simultaneously to Roblox’s content distribution network and edge servers as soon as they’re ready to go and certified to meet Roblox content standards.
It’s one of several challenges that have led Roblox’s engineering team to develop a sophisticated system of capacity and resilience planning, rigorous testing, and on-call engineering staffing for weekends, when players flock to the platform in droves.
The company has a network of 24 edge data centers around the world, handling much of the game experience. When players click a play button to launch a specific game, they’re connected to the most appropriate data center by an algorithm that can take into effect factors like which server their friends are playing on, their geographic location relative to the servers, and connection speed between the player’s device and each server. The system as a whole sometimes considers up to 4 billion combinations of players and servers per second, and the company has for years been optimizing the process with an ultimate goal of being able to handle 10 million players joining games in a period of just 10 seconds.
After all, today’s internet users are no longer used to loading delays in launching new content, especially not the younger users who make up many of Roblox’s core audience.
“We all remember the time when you just assumed that a little buffering is okay,” Singh says. “But there’s an entire generation of users who don’t think buffering happens on the internet.”
Those edge servers, plus additional cloud computing capacity that can be spun up to meet weekend demand, are connected to a pair of core data centers that manage services like the Roblox website, content filtering and recommendation algorithms, as well as the game publishing system. The edge servers connect to those core servers via a global private network, with redundant bandwidth available in case it’s necessary.
“I’ve learned in this job that cable being cut is a very regular occurrence,” Singh says.
During those busy weekends, there’s a rotating schedule of on-call engineers ready to respond to any incidents. Even C-suite executives participate, Singh says, with on-call workers expected to have a Roblox-approved computer and a good internet connection during those shifts. When the unexpected occurs, an incident manager leads the response, able to command everyone (including executives); infrastructure like AI transcription is in place for any necessary calls. The company strives to avoid casting blame to get incidents resolved properly and quickly, with incident managers empowered to approve resources as necessary to get the job done.
“The on-call has the ability to say, Okay, give them 2,000 more servers, if that’s what’s needed right now, Singh says.
If a problem does pop up that limits capacity, the company has systems in place to gracefully scale services down, though it tries to avoid impacting players who are already engaged in a game, and won’t operate without some necessary features, like text content filtering.
On Monday, engineers with responsibility for code relating to any weekend incidents meet to discuss what happened, and on Tuesday, the company begins capacity planning for the weekend ahead. It’s also when Roblox observes TACO Tuesday, an acronym for “test actual capacity on Tuesday,” meaning engineers run tests constraining the resources available to code to ensure it runs properly under high traffic. Starting this year, Roblox has also rolled out a “chaos-testing” system, which deliberately injects errors, capacity constraints, and process restarts into the system to make sure it functions under stress.
Like Roblox game creators, engineers are also empowered to make updates to their code at any time, with hundreds of deployments possible during a weekday. And by Friday, the team is ready to roll out and test any needed extra cloud capacity based on demand projections for that weekend. Making weekly decisions about capacity is essential in a world where games can go viral in a short amount of time.
“Every three or four weeks, there’s a new big hit, so we’ve changed our capacity planning to be weekly,” Singh says. “And honestly, we would love for it to go to almost daily, where if there’s a hit within a day, we should still be able to find capacity.”
Last summer was hardly a fun time for popular casual dining chain Red Lobster. In May 2024, the seafood chain filed for bankruptcy. The process saw stores close and resulted in new ownership and a new CEO by the time the company exited bankruptcy in September 2024.
But this summer, Red Lobster is hoping things will be different. Instead of cost-cutting and restructuring to boost its bottom line, the chain hopes a handful of new menu items will boost foot traffic and get diners back in the doors.
Red Lobster announces new menu items for summer 2025
“Americas favorite seafood chain” has announced the return of its popular Crabfest event. The annual event is timed for the summer at Red Lobster, when diners have sun, surf, and seafood on their minds.
The company has announced that Crabfest will run from June 23 to September 14, 2025.
[Photos: Red Lobster]
Red Lobster says that this years Crabfest celebrations will see the following new Crabfest dishes on the menu:
Crabby Stuffed Mushrooms A flavorful appetizer packed with rich crab stuffing
Crab-Topped Asparagus A premium side dish featuring asparagus topped with crab
Crab-Topped Potato A premium side dish, elevating a classic dish with savory crab
Steak Oscar Sirloin topped with lump meat in a creamy, decadent sauce
Salmon Oscar Atlantic salmon topped with lump crab meat in a creamy, decadent sauce
In addition to the new menu items mentioned above, Red Lobster will also offer two ways to customize their seafood boil, including Mariner’s Boil, which features a Maine lobster tail, a dozen shrimp, snow crab legs, corn, and red potatoes. Alternatively, customers can opt for the Sailor’s Boil, which features a selection of shrimp, smoked sausage, corn, and red potatoes.
Red Lobsters 2024 bankruptcy saw significant changes at the seafood chain
Red Lobster is undoubtedly hoping its festive summer Crabfest will boost sales this year and help the company put a challenging financial period behind it.
When the company announced its plans to file for bankruptcy in May 2024, many headlines blamed the restaurants financial woes on its Endless Shrimp menu items, which resulted in an $11 million loss for the chain after it underestimated demand.
However, the company cited several factors that affected its financial footing, including multiple owners over a relatively short period of time, burdensome cost reduction strategies by its former owners, and costs and other problems associated with renting restaurant locations.
Red Lobster also faced challenges many other restaurant chains have faced in recent years: declining foot traffic as cash-strapped and inflation-weary customers choose to stay home and cook instead of going out to eat.
Many of these issues were addressed during its bankruptcy process, however. When the company emerged from bankruptcy protection in September, it had over 30 fewer locations, new ownership from a group of private investors including TCW Private Credit and Blue Torch, and a new CEO to run the newly formed RL Investor Holdings, which currently owns Red Lobster.
So, will the new Crabfest items help Red Lobster have a banner summer? Thats something fans of the chain will have to wait and see. But even when Crabfest ends in September, its unlikely the public will know just how well or poorly Crabfest went for Red LobsterRL Investor Holdings is a private company, so it does not release public quarterly reports.
A Republican-sponsored proposal before Congress to mandate the sale of federal public lands received a mixed reception Monday from the governors of Western states.A budget proposal from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee would mandate the sale of more than 3,125 square miles (8,093 square kilometers) of federal lands to state or other entities. It was included recently in a draft provision of the GOP’s sweeping tax cut package.At a summit Monday of Western state governors, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the approach is problematic in New Mexico because of the close relationship residents have with those public lands.“I’m open” to the idea, said Lujan Grisham, a second-term Democratic governor and former congresswoman. “Except here.”“Our public lands, we have a very strong relationship with the openness, and they belong to all of us,” said Lujan Grisham, who was announcing written recommendations Monday on affordable housing strategies from the Western Governors’ Association. “And selling that to the private sector without a process, without putting New Mexicans first, is, for at least for me as a governor, going to be problematic.”Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum was among the leaders from several federal agencies who attended the meeting that runs through Tuesday. He has touted the many potential uses for public lands that include recreation, logging and oil and gas production, saying it could boost local economies.Several hundred protesters in downtown Santa Fe denounced efforts that might privatize federal public lands, chanting “not for sale” and carrying signs reading “This land belongs to you and me” and “keep our public land free for future generations.”Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon voiced qualified support for plans to tap federal land for development.“On a piece-by-piece basis where states have the opportunity to craft policies that make sense we can actually allow for some responsible growth in areas with communities that are landlocked at this point,” he said at a news conference outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. “There may be value there.”Lee has said federal land sales under his proposal would target “isolated parcels” that could be used for housing or infrastructure, and would not include national parks, national monuments or wilderness.Land in 11 Western states from Alaska to New Mexico would be eligible for sale. Montana was carved out of the proposal after its lawmakers objected.In some states, such as Utah and Nevada, the government controls the vast majority of lands, protecting them from potential exploitation but hindering growth.
Morgan Lee, Associated Press
The startup Warp is best known for its modern, AI-empowered take on the terminalthe decades-old, text-based interface that’s invisible to most in a world of touchscreens and mice, but still beloved by programmers and system administrators.
The terminal is probably most familiar to the public from movies and TV shows, where its stark black background and arcane command-line language have come to symbolize hacker prowess. Warp added features that make the terminal and its often-cryptic commands less intimidating and easier to use, such as AI-enhanced autocomplete and suggestions, along with a collaborative system called Warp Drive that lets coworkers share frequently used commands and best practices.
Now, Warp is betting that a similar kind of interface will help developers command artificial intelligence, in a world where code is increasingly generated and deployed by typing prompts to AI rather than writing it directly.
[Image: Courtesy of Warp]
“We’re moving from a world where developers traditionally have done most of their work by hand to one where they’re doing their work by prompt with agents,” says Zach Lloyd, Warp’s founder and CEO.
Traditionally, developers have worked in an integrated development environment (IDE), which combines tools for navigating files, specialized text editing tabs for writing code, and easy access to tools that compile human-readable code into something computers can run. They’ve also often used terminal software like Warpsor more basic versionsto deploy code to servers, start automated processes, and troubleshoot errors.
Zack Lloyd [Photo: Courtesy of Warp]
But today, coders increasingly perform these tasks by issuing prompts to AI agents, which can generate code, execute commands to deploy it, and even diagnose problems on their own.
“Our thesis is that to support this new workflow, what is needed is a workbench that really is neither the IDE or the terminal,” Lloyd says.
Thats why Warp is launching what it calls an agentic development environmenta new class of tool that emphasizes terminal-style panes or tabs for typing prompts to AI agents, along with controls to help supervise the AIs operations. These controls regulate when AI agents need human approval to make changes to code or restrict them from executing certain commandssuch as deleting fileswithout explicit permission. Power users can open multiple tabs to interact with various agents, powered by AI from labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, and can monitor and guide them as they worksimilar to how developers have always invoked command-line tools from the terminal. AI agents can also execute terminal commands themselves under user supervision, useful for everything from managing cloud computing servers to debugging error messages.
An enhanced version of Warp Drive even allows users to share information with AI agents as well as with human coworkers.
[Image: Courtesy of Warp]
“We’ve made this investment even before LLMs of, how do you centralize the team’s knowledge,” says Lloyd. “And that’s super valuable for an agent to access as well.”
Since AI is still far from infallible, users can easily edit AI-generated code changescalled diffs (short for differences, in developer jargon)before approving them, or re-prompt the AI to correct errors. Individual Warp users can choose whether to operate entirely via prompts, or to open more traditional panes to edit code line by line, review AI changes, or use the classic Warp terminal.
[Image: Courtesy of Warp]
Lloyd says that integrating all of these features into a single AI-centric environment gives Warp an edge over other AI development tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which focus primarily on writing code. And by building a complete development environmentincluding coding and terminal toolsWarp has an advantage over Anthropic’s Claude Code, which operates from within a terminal, he says.
“We are one layer outside of that, so we can be the whole agentic development environment, which means that we can do things in terms of the user experience that they just simply can’t do,” Lloyd says. “We can have diffs editable, we can do system notifications, we can have a UX for managing agents across all your panes and tabs.”
Warp, which already has more than 500,000 users, plans to keep pricing the same as it rolls out these new features, with plans starting at $15 and $40 per month, alongside a limited free version and custom pricing for enterprise editions. Lloyd says revenue is growin fastbetween 5% and 15% per week during 2025and hes optimistic that trend will continue as developers look for tools to efficiently steer and collaborate with AI coding agents.
“It just is cool that that interface that we built for doing this with commands works extremely well for agents,” he says.
New analysis has found mobile phone users are being pinged with as many as 50 news alerts daily. Unsurprisingly, many are experiencing alert fatigue.
The use of news alerts on phones has grown over the past decade. Weekly use in the U.S. has risen from 6% to 23% since 2014 and from 3% to 18% in the U.K., according to a report published this month by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The New York Times pushes out 10 news alerts per day on average, while BBC News averages 8.3 per day, according to a research tool used to monitor news alerts. Elsewhere, The Jerusalem Post and CNN Indonesia were among the top culprits, typically sending up to 50 alerts each day.
Some news aggregator apps send even more. The use of apps such as Apple News and Google on mobile devices means some users receive multiple alerts about the same story. Overwhelmed by the constant updates, 43% of people who no longer get news alerts say they have actively disabled them as a result of the barrage of notifications.
It is a tightrope that publishers have been walking, Nic Newman, the lead author of the report, told The Guardian. If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster. The classic problem is publishers know they shouldnt send too many individually. But collectively, there are always going to be some bad actors who are spoiling the party.
Some users have switched off altogether. I turned off all my news apps and sites after Trump was elected, one U.S. respondent told the researchers. I have switched off notifications again because its emotionally distressing, explained another.
Almost 80% of respondents noted that they currently do not receive any news alerts on their phone. Part of it is to do with news avoidance, according to Newman. Keeping up with the news can feel like a full-time job. Juggling work and other responsibilities, most people simply do not have the time or emotional capacity to stay up-to-date with every news story published throughout the day.
It doesnt mean to say theyre not interested in news, Newman told The Guardian. They just dont want news all the time, 24 hours a day, coming at you like an express train. Right now, a bullet train is probably more accurate.
