Napheesa Collier is more than just a WNBA star who is critical of her league and its leadership.
The Minnesota Lynx player is a vice president of the players union, which means she will be sitting across from WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert at the negotiating table ahead of an Oct. 31 deadline to reach a new collective bargaining agreement.
If that doesn’t cause enough tension, Collier is also a co-founder of Unrivaled, a three-on-three womens basketball league that plays in the winter and features WNBA stars. That could give her additional leverage to try to press the WNBA as talks unfold.
Here’s a look at some of the implications of Collier’s headline-grabbing comments.
Player negotiations with the WNBA are already tense. Could they get worse?
As an executive on the negotiating team, Collier will have a loud voice in the room when in-person negotiations between the two sides continue. She was at the face-to-face meeting at All-Star weekend in July that included dozens of players. There have been meetings since, but players haven’t really been able to attend because they’ve still been in season.
Were working hard to make sure that we are putting ourselves in the best position to negotiate for what we think is fair,” said Collier, who has torn ligaments in her left ankle. We have a lot of meetings internally to make sure were on the same page and were all lockstep for this. Just making sure were super aligned.
There also is the trust factor. During her comments at an end-of-season media session this week, Collier revealed conversations that were to remain private that she had had with the commissioner in February. That could undermine trust that is often needed to carry out negotiations.
For all the faults that Collier cited in her prepared comments, Engelbert has delivered on many of her promises since coming into the league in 2019.
She will have added six expansion teams by 2030 and secured a major new media rights deal for the next decade that will bring in more than $2.2 billion. Engelbert also had the league pay for a full charter flight program this season that the players hope will be added to the new CBA to address concerns about issues ranging from safety to travel time.
The commissioner has said all along that the league is hoping for a transformational agreement that includes significantly increased player salaries and benefits. There’s little reason for Collier’s remarks to detract from that goal.
How are other players responding to Collier’s comments?
Players across the league backed Collier either on social media or at Game 5 of the WNBA semifinals series between Las Vegas and Indiana that the Aces won in overtime.
WNBA MVP Aja Wilson said she was appreciative of Collier and the union for standing up for the players.
Im grateful to have those type of people to be able to continue to speak up for us, Wilson said after the Aces advanced to the WNBA Finals. Im going to ride with Phee always. Obviously, shes a business girlie and she has her own stuff going on, but moving forward, weve gotta continue to stand on business as we talk about this CBA negotiation.
Other players, including Rookie of the Year Paige Bueckers, backed Collier on social media, calling her “Queen Phee” in an Instagram Story while the song Pink Pony Club plays in the background.
What do the negotiations mean for free agency?
Nearly every player not on a rookie contract will be a free agent this offseason, hoping to cash in on a potential giant leap in the league’s salary structure. Free agency usually has taken place in January, with players meeting with teams and able to sign in February.
Players have been able to work out and get treatment for injuries at their former team’s facility in the offseason before becoming free agents. In a worst-case scenario where owners decided to lock out the players or the players decided to go on strike, those courtesies would go away.
Could Collier’s Unrivaled league give players more leverage?
The 3-on-3 league will start its second season in January and already has expanded to 54 players and added two new teams. The domestic league, made up entirely of WNBA players, now gives players another option to earn money, which would lessen the impact of a lockout or strike.
Last season, players in the league had an average salary of more than $220,000, which was close to the maximum base salary in the WNBA.
Unrivaled will add Bueckers to an already loaded roster that includes Collier, Breanna Stewart, and Angel Reese. It also has set itself up for the future by offering NIL deals to many of the top college players.
Doug Feinberg, AP basketball writer
Picture a data center on the edge of a desert plateau. Inside, row after row of servers glow and buzz, moving air through vast cooling towers, consuming more electricity than the surrounding towns combined. This is not science fiction. It is the reality of the vast AI compute clusters, often described as AI supercomputers for their sheer scale, that train todays most advanced models.
Strictly speaking, these are not supercomputers in the classical sense. Traditional supercomputers are highly specialized machines designed for scientific simulations such as climate modeling, nuclear physics, or astrophysics, tuned for parallelized code across millions of cores. What drives AI, by contrast, are massive clusters of GPUs or custom accelerators (Nvidia H100s, Google TPUs, etc.) connected through high-bandwidth interconnections, optimized for the matrix multiplications at the heart of deep learning. They are not solving equations for weather forecasts: they are churning through trillions of tokens to predict the next word.
Still, the nickname sticks, because their performance, energy demands, and costs are comparable to, or beyond, the worlds fastest scientific machines. And the implications are just as profound.
A recent study of 500 AI compute systems worldwide found that their performance is doubling every nine months, while both cost and power requirements double every year. At this pace, the frontier of artificial intelligence is not simply about better algorithms or smarter architectures. It is about who can afford, power, and cool these gigantic machines, and who cannot.
The exponential moat
When performance doubles every nine months but cost doubles every 12, you create an exponential moat: each leap forward pushes the next frontier further out of reach for all but a handful of players.
This is not the familiar story of open-source vs. closed-source models: it is more fundamental. If you cannot access the compute substrate (the hardware, electricity, cooling, and fabs required to train the next generation ) you are not even in the race. Universities cannot keep up. Small startups cannot keep up. Even many governments cannot keep up.
The study shows a stark concentration of capability: the most powerful AI clusters are concentrated in a few corporations, effectively privatizing access to the cutting edge of machine intelligence. Once compute becomes the bottleneck, the invisible hand of the market does not produce diversity. It produces monopoly.
Centralization vs. democratization
The rhetoric around AI often emphasizes democratization: tools made available to everyone, small actors empowered, creativity unleashed. But in practice, the power to shape AIs trajectory is shifting toward the owners of massive compute farms. They decide which models are feasible, which experiments get run, which approaches receive billions of tokens of training.
This is not just a matter of money. It is about infrastructure as governance. When only three or four firms control the largest AI clusters, they effectively control the boundaries of the possible. If your idea requires training a trillion-parameter model from scratch, and you are not inside one of those firms, your idea remains just that: an idea.
Geopolitics of compute
Governments are beginning to notice. At the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit, nations pledged billions to upgrade national AI infrastructure. France, Germany, and the U.K. are each moving to expand sovereign compute capacity. The United States has launched large-scale initiatives to accelerate domestic chip production, and China, as always, is playing its own game, pouring resources into massive wind and solar buildouts to guarantee not only chips, but the cheap electricity to feed them.
Europe, as usual, is caught in the middle. Its regulatory frameworks may be more advanced, but its ability to deploy AI at scale depends on whether it can secure energy and compute on competitive terms. Without that, AI sovereignty is rhetoric, not reality.
And yet, there is a darker irony here. Even as governments race to assert sovereignty, the real winners of the AI arms race may be corporations, not nations. Control over compute is concentrating so quickly in the private sector that we are edging closer to a scenario long depicted in science fiction: corporations wielding more power than states, not only in markets but in shaping the very trajectory of human knowledge. The balance of authority between governments and companies is shifting, and this time, it is not fiction.
Environmental reckoning
There is also a physical cost. Training one frontier model can require as much electricity as a small city uses in a year. Cooling towers demand enormous volumes of water, and while much of it is returned to the cycle, siting matters: in water-scarce regions, the strain cn be significant. The carbon footprint is similarly uneven. A model trained on grids dominated by coal or gas produces orders of magnitude more emissions than one trained on grids powered by renewables.
In this sense, the AI sustainability debate is really an energy debate. Models are not green or dirty by themselves. They are as green or as dirty as the electrons that feed them.
What efficiency cannot buy
Efficiency alone will not solve this problem. Each generation of chips gets faster, each architecture more optimized, but the aggregate demand continues to rise faster than the gains. Every watt saved at the micro level is consumed by the macro expansion of ambition. If anything, efficiency makes the arms race worse, because it lowers the cost per experiment and encourages even more experiments.
The result is a treadmill: more compute, more power, more cost, more centralization.
What to demand
If we want to avoid a future in which AIs destiny is set by the boardrooms of three companies and the ministries of two superpowers, we need to treat compute as a public concern. That means demanding:
Transparency about who owns and operates the largest clusters.
Auditability of usage: what models are being trained, for what purposes.
Shared infrastructure, funded publicly or through consortia, so that researchers and smaller firms can experiment without asking permission from trillion-dollar corporations.
Energy accountability, requiring operators to disclose not just aggregate consumption but sources, emissions, and water footprints in real time.
The debate should not stop at which model is safest or which dataset is fair. It should extend to who controls the machines that make the models possible in the first place.
The machines behind the machines
The next control point in AI isnt software: its hardware. The massive compute clusters that train the models are now the real arbiters of progress. They decide whats possible, whats practical, and who gets to play.
If history teaches anything, it is that when power centralizes at this scale, accountability rarely follows. Without deliberate interventions, we risk an AI ecosystem where innovation is bottlenecked, oversight is optional, and the costs, from financial or environmental to human, are hidden until it is too late.
The arms race of AI supercomputers is already underway. The only question is whether society chooses to watch passively as the future of intelligence is privatized, or whether we recognize that the machines behind the machines deserve just as much scrutiny as the algorithms they enable.
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, Im focusing on Donald Trumps recent AI-generated videos, which he (or his staff) posts on Truth Social. I also look at world models, the successor to large language models, and at OpenAIs new Sora 2 model, which is also the anchor for a new social app.
Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan.
Trumps dangerous mix of low-grade and high-grade deepfakes
AI-generated videos are becoming a routine part of politics. Thats probably not a good thing. In the past its been fairly easy to distinguish between the real and the generated, but as video-generation models have improved, its gotten harder. Were in a period when both high-quality AI videos and AI slop are common.
The Trump administration appears to be using both types. Last weekend, Trump posted an AI video to Truth Social that looked a lot like a real Fox News segment describing a new healthcare program about to be rolled out to Americans. The video featured the presidents daughter-in-law Lara Trump describing medbeds, or futuristic health pods (think the health pod in Prometheus) that can do anything from curing cancer to growing back lost limbs. The beds would be offered in new hospitals across the country, and people would use a medbed card to access them.
Except magical medbeds are a fantasy, a myth spun up in years of Qanon blather on sites like 4chan. And theres no new hospital system and no membership card. For most rational people, the unlikelihood of such a thing suddenly coming into existence was the first tip-off that the video was AI generated. Somebodymaybe Trump, maybe a stafferdeleted the strange post a few hours later, and the White House offered no explanation.
A few days later, Trump posted another, lower-quality AI-generated video. This one depicted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) standing at a podium talking about the looming government shutdown. The AI had Schumer insulting his own party and using profanity. The AI dropped a cartoon sombrero and a mustache on Jeffries, in a nod to a Republican lie that Democrats will let the government shut down if they cant give healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants (who are, by law, ineligible for such benefits).
The Schumer video is obviously AI-generated, meant to troll Democrats during the shutdown impasse. The medbeds video is more troubling because the AI is high-quality and shows an intent to mislead. When one politician routinely uses both slop and high-realism AI to make their points, will their constituents or supporters always know the difference? As the AI improves, that becomes almost completely up to the creator of the video. For Trump, a politician with authoritarian tendencies and a reliance on propaganda, that could be a dangerous mix.
AI-based video may wind up becoming the most powerful propaganda tool ever invented. After all, seeing is believingespecially when the viewer wants to believe.
World models are likely the future of AI
The AI models weve been talking about for the past three years are fundamentally language modelsreally big mathematical probability engines that are good at predicting the most likely word in a sequence. But two things have happened since the appearance of ChatGPT in late 2022: Weve come to understand that a model that reasons primarily on words is limited in its real-life applications. And within the AI industry, a consensus has formed that the AI labs main trick of radically scaling up training data and computing power to make models smarter isnt achieving the big performance gains it once did.
None of this should be too surprising. A machine (or a human) can only learn so much about how the world works by reading articles and books. We humans dont learn like that. We have a unique ability to quickly build a mental world model that organizes diverse modes of information gathered using our senses about our environment and ourselves. Researchers are working hard to develop synthetic world models, but its a hard problem. While language models form a vast, many-dimensional vector space (a map, if you will) representing all the possible combinations of words in various contexts, a world model must form a much bigger space to represent the virtually endless combinations of visual, aural, and motion information. While language models try to guess the next word in a sequence, the world model must reason in real time about how a certain action might affect the real world.
The models are learning how to reason about physical reality, says Naeem Talukdar, CEO of the video-generation company Moonvalley. A world model inside a robot might be asked to imagine a world in which the robotic arm moves 10 degrees to the right, and then judge whether such a move is productive to the larger task at hand. Its this kind of reasoning that may allow robots to iteratively learn to complete tasks that theyve not been explicitly trained to do. The bigger these models get, and the more modalities that they learn on, just like humans, they start to be able to reason on things that they havent seen yet before, Talukdar says. For instance, in the past robots have struggled with the deceptively simple command: clean up the dinner table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Without the ability to reason in real time about the physical world, the robot wouldnt be able to experimentally move from one micro-task to the next.
World models are also being used to help self-driving cars train for real-world driving, and to iteratively manage unexpected or untrained-for events that occur on the roadway in real time. Additionally, augmented reality glasses such as Metas Orion may eventually rely on world models to organize all the data collected from the various sensors in the device, such as motion and orientation sensors, depth and tracking sensors, microphones, and light sensors.
OpenAIs Sora 2 video generation model comes with a social network
Would you like to open an app and spend your free time watching AI-generated videos depicting real peopleincluding yourself and your friendsdoing silly things? OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman think you will. The company jst announced a new version of its impressive Sora video generation modelSora 2and a social networking app (iOS only) to go with it.
OpenAI calls Sora 2 the “GPT-3.5 moment for video” (GPT-3.5 was when the output of OpenAIs language models became more coherent and relevant.) The major breakthrough is native audio-video generationcreating synchronized dialogue, sound effects, and soundscapes that naturally match the visuals. The company says that Sora 2s understanding of physics is vastly improved, and that it can now accurately model complex phenomena like buoyancy in water, and intricate movements such as gymnastics routines. One person on X demonstrated how Sora 2 can now accurately simulate water being poured into a glass with realistic reflections, ripples, and refraction. The model generates 10-second clips (20 seconds for Pro users) with better consistency across multi-shot sequences, OpenAI says. The model is good at producing realistic, cinematic, and anime styles.
Importantly, a standout Cameos feature lets users insert themselves (or their friends) into videos after a onetime recording. When you set up the Sora app, youre now asked to record a live video of yourself repeating random numbers or phrases and turning your head in certain poses. All this gives the app a way to authenticate that its really you so that only you can use your own image, and to ensure that anybody else trying to use it in a video must get your permission.
Like TikTok, the Sora iOS app (invite-only for now) features an algorithmic feed, content remixing, and social sharing. OpenAI emphasizes “long-term user satisfaction” over engagement metrics, and the company says it has no plans to insert advertising into the feed, as Meta plans to do with its Vibes AI video app.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
AIs monstrous energy use is becoming a serious PR problem
ChatGPT can now spend your money for you
Shift the AI conversation from cost cutting to revenue
AI is making your website irrelevant
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Pepsi has a new challenge: keeping products like Gatorade and Cheetos vivid and colorful without the artificial dyes that U.S. consumers are increasingly rejecting.PepsiCo, which also makes Doritos, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Funyuns and Mountain Dew, announced in April that it would accelerate a planned shift to using natural colors in its foods and beverages. Around 40% of its U.S. products now contain synthetic dyes, according to the company.But just as it took decades for artificial colors to seep into PepsiCo’s products, removing them is likely to be a multi-year process. The company said it’s still finding new ingredients, testing consumers’ responses and waiting for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve natural alternatives. PepsiCo hasn’t committed to meeting the Trump administration’s goal of phasing out petroleum-based synthetic dyes by the end of 2026.“We’re not going to launch a product that the consumer’s not going to enjoy,” said Chris Coleman, PepsiCo’s senior director for food research and development in North America. “We need to make sure the product is right.”Coleman said it can take two or three years to shift a product from an artificial color to a natural one. PepsiCo has to identify a natural ingredient that will have a stable shelf life and not change a product’s flavor. Then it must ensure the availability of a safe and adequate supply. The company tests prototypes with trained experts and panels of consumers, then makes sure the new formula won’t snag its manufacturing process. It also has to design new packaging.
Experimenting with spices to color Cheetos
Tostitos and Lay’s will be the first PepsiCo brands to make the shift, with naturally dyed tortilla and potato chips expected on store shelves later this year and naturally dyed dips due to be on sale early next year. Most of the chips, dips and salsas in the two lines already are naturally colored, but there were some exceptions.The reddish-brown tint of Tostitos Salsa Verde, for example, came from four synthetic colors: Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Red 40 and Blue 1. Coleman said the company is switching to carob powder, which gives the chips a similar color, but needed to tweak the recipe to ensure the addition of the cocoa alternative wouldn’t affect the taste.In its Frito-Lay food labs and test kitchens in Plano, Texas, PepsiCo is experimenting with ingredients like paprika and turmeric to mimic the bright reds and oranges in products like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Coleman said.The company is looking at purple sweet potatoes and various types of carrots to color drinks like Mountain Dew and Cherry 7Up, according to Damien Browne, the vice president of research and development for PepsiCo’s beverage division based in Valhalla, New York.Getting the hue right is critical, since many consumers know products like Gatorade by their color and not necessarily their name, Browne said.“We eat with our eyes,” he said. “If you look at a plate of food, it’s generally the different kinds of colors that will tell you what you would like or not.”
Consumer demand goes from a whisper to a roar
When the Pepsi-Cola Company was founded in 1902, the absence of artificial dyes was a point of pride. The company marketed Pepsi as “The Original Pure Food Drink” to differentiate the cola from rivals that used lead, arsenic and other toxins as food colorants before the U.S. banned them in 1906.But synthetic dyes eventually won over food companies. They were vibrant, consistent and cheaper than natural colors. They are also rigorously tested by the FDA.Still, PepsiCo said it started seeing a small segment of shoppers asking for products without artificial colors or flavors more than two decades ago. In 2002, it launched its Simply line of chips, which offer natural versions of products like Doritos. A dye-free organic Gatorade came out in 2016.“We’re looking for those little signals that will become humongous in the future,” Amanda Grzeda, PepsiCo’s senior director of global sensory and consumer experience, said of the company’s close attention to consumer preferences.Grzeda said the whisper PepsiCo detected in the early 2000s has become a roar, fueled by social media and growing consumer interest in ingredients. More than half of the consumers PepsiCo spoke to for a recent internal study said they were trying to reduce their consumption of artificial dyes, Grzeda said.
Synthetic and natural colors are in FDA’s hands
Some states, including West Virginia and Arizona, have banned artificial dyes in school lunches. But Browne said he thinks consumers are driving the push to overhaul processed foods.“Consumers are definitely leading, and I think what we need to do is have the regulators catching up, allowing us to approve new natural ingredients to be able to meet their demand,” he said.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said it’s expediting approval of natural additives after calling on companies to halt their use of synthetic dyes. In May, the FDA approved three new natural color additives, including a blue color derived from algae. In July, the agency approved gardenia blue, which is derived from a flowering evergreen.The FDA banned one petroleum-based dye, Red 3, in January because it was shown to cause cancer in lab rats. And in September, the agency proposed a ban on Orange B, a synthetic color that hasn’t been used in decades.Six synthetic dyes remain FDA-approved and widely used, despite mixed studies that show they may cause neurobehavioral problems in some children. Red 40, for example, is used in 25,965 food and beverage items on U.S. store shelves, according to the market research firm NIQ.But even if decades of research has shown that synthetic colors are safe, PepsiCo has to weigh public perceptions, Grzeda said.“We could just blindly follow the science, but it probably would put us at odds with what our consumers believe and perceive in the world,” she said.
Passing taste and texture tests
PepsiCo also has to balance the needs of consumers who don’t want their favorite snacks and drinks to change or get more expensive because of the costs of natural dyes. NIQ data shows that unit sales of products advertised as free of artificial colors fell sharply in 2023 as prices rose.Susan Mazur-Stommen, a small business owner in Hinton, West Virginia, picked up some Simply brand Cheetos Puffs recently at a convenience store because they were the only variety available. She found the texture to be much different from regular Cheetos Puffs, she said, and their pallid color made them less appetizing.Mazur-Stommen said she agrees with the move away from petroleum-based dyes, but it’s not a critical issue for her.“What I am looking for is the original formulation,” she said.Ultimately, PepsiCo does not want customers to have to choose between natural colors and familiar flavors and textures, Grzeda said.“That’s where it requires the deep science and ingredients and magic,” she said.
Durbin reported from Detroit.
Dee-Ann Durbin and Ted Shaffrey, Associated Press
The federal government is expected to again accept new applications for a program that grants some people without legal immigration status the ability to live and work in the United States.Lawyers for the federal government and immigrant advocates have presented plans before a federal judge that would open the door again to accepting applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA.One state Texas, where the case is being heard however, would be exempted from providing work permits.It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible to be enrolled in DACA, once a federal judge issues an order to formalize plans laid out by the Department of Justice in a legal filing made on Monday. The program, created under the Obama administration, grants people without legal immigration status who were brought into the country by their parents two-year, renewable permits to live and work in the U.S. legally.The program has allowed people who were brought to the United States as children to temporarily remain in the country and obtain work permits. It does not confer legal status but provides protection from deportation.Eligibility requirements include people who entered the country as children before their 16th birthday, were under 31 years old as of June 15, 2012, and have not been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, or three misdemeanors. There would be restrictions related to work permits for those who reside in Texas, which filed a lawsuit against the DACA program in 2018.
Nothing changes yet
DOJ attorneys laid out the proposal before U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen on Monday as part of the ongoing Texas lawsuit. It would allow U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to take new and renewal applications for DACA across the country, which it has not done for four years.In Texas, USCIS would take new and renewal applications for the DACA program but recipients residing in the state will not receive a work permit.Attorneys representing DACA recipients proposed adding a wind-down period that would allow Texas residents to keep their work authorization for one more renewal period.These proposals follow an earlier decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the program to continue with the work permit carveout in Texas.The federal government and attorneys for DACA recipients have two more opportunities in October to file responses to the proposals submitted this week. Hanen, based in Houston, will then decide what proposal or combination of proposals to implement in his order.
Caution advised
Immigrant advocates are not celebrating yet but believe thousands may be eligible for the program. Aside from the over 533,000 who are enrolled already in DACA, about 1.1 million people may be eligible across the country, according to a 2023 estimate from the Migration Policy Institute.People interested in applying were urged to start preparing. “While we are still waiting for an official decision, we believe our communities and families should be prepared and begin gathering the required documents,” Michelle Celleri, Legal Rights Director for Alliance San Diego, said in a statement.Other advocates are cautiously optimistic. Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, a spokesperson for United We Dream, pointed to a section in the government’s proposal that could hint at changes. “These proposals do not limit DHS from undertaking any future lawful changes to DACA,” the government’s proposal said in Monday’s filing.“We need to be able to look at this in a fuller picture than just this case, because we’re seeing the administration detain and deport DACA recipients,” Macedo do Nascimento said on Wednesday.
Valerie Gonzalez, Associated Press
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have issued additional warnings related to possible Listeria contamination in pasta products.
The warnings suggest that the Listeria outbreak, which has sickened at least 20 and killed four since last year, is far from over. Heres what you need to know about the latest warnings and which foods are being recalled this time.
Whats happened?
On September 30, the FDA posted a new recall notice to its website, which adds 11 new items to the list of pasta products being recalled due to Listeria contamination fears.
On the same day, the CDC updated its Listeria Outbreak page to note an additional pasta item that has now been recalled from Trader Joes. The same day, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) also updated its public health alert regarding ready-to-eat pasta meals to include the Trader Joes pasta product.
These newly recalled products are just the latest ones believed to be possibly infected with Listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium.
The CDC has traced this outbreak to as far back as August 2024. During the remainder of that year, there were five known cases of illness related to the outbreak. However, so far in 2025, the total from the previous year has tripled to 15, bringing the total number of illnesses linked to this outbreak to 20.
Unfortunately, there have also been four fatalities linked to the outbreak. Of the 20 individuals made sick by the outbreak, 19 required hospitalization.
What new products are being recalled?
A number of new products are being recalled. Those include one product sold at Trader Joes:
Trader Joes Cajun style blackened chicken breast fettucine alfredo
The above product came in 16-oz. plastic tray packages and had the best if used by dates of 9/20/2025, 9/24/2025, or 9/27/2025.
A separate recall is on a larger scale. This recall includes 11 bowtie pasta products sold by grocery giant Albertsons Companies. This recall includes the following products with select sell-through dates:
Product NameUPCSizeSell Thru Dates(if applicable,Or LotCode/Est.Number)Store BannersStatesREADY MEALSPESTO BOWTIE PASTA SALAD27133000000LBSSEP 13 25 ThruSEP 29 25Albertsons,SafewayCO, NE, NM, SD, WYBASIL PESTOBOWTIE PASTA SALAD29492100000LBSSEP 13 25 ThruSEP 29 25Albertsons, SafewayCO, NE, NM,SD, WYREADY MEALSPESTO BOWTIE PASTA SALAD27133000000LBSSEP 8 25 ThruSEP 26 25Albertsons,Pavilions, Safeway, VonsAZ, CA, NV,NM, TX, UTBASIL PESTOBOWTIE PASTA SALAD29492100000LBSSEP 8 25 ThruSEP 26 25Albertsons,Pavilions, Safeway, VonsAZ, CA, NV,NM, TX, UTREADY MEALSPESTO BOWTIE PASTA SALAD27133000000LBSSEP 20 25 ThruSEP 29 25Albertsons,Randalls, Tom ThumbAR, LA, OK, TXBASIL PESTOBOWTIE PASTA SALAD29492100000LBSSEP 20 25 ThruSEP 29 25Albertsons, Randalls, Tom ThumbAR, LA, OK, TXBASIL PESTO BOWTIE PASTA SALAD21649200000LBSSEP 11 25 ThruSEP 29 25Safeway,Andronico’s Community Markets, Vons, Pak ‘N SaveCA, HI, NVGRILLED CHICKEN & BASIL PASTA EXTRA LARGE21303500000LBSSEP 18 25 ThruSEP 29 25Carrs-Safeway,Eagle, SafewayAKREADY MEALSBASIL PESTO BOWTIE SALAD29130800000LBSSEP 18 25 ThruSEP 29 25Carrs-Safeway,Eagle, SafewayAKREADY MEALSSPINACH BOWTIE PASTA SALAD21142600000LBSSEP 16 25 ThruSEP 26 25United,Amigos, Market Street,Albertsons MarketNM, TXREADY MEALSBASIL BOWTIE PASTA SALAD21191300000LBSSEP 16 25 Thru SEP 29 25United,Amigos, Market Street,AlberstonsMarketNM, TX
In what stores were the products sold?
The Trader Joes Cajun style blackened chicken breast fettucine alfredo was sold at:
Trader Joes
The other pasta products listed above were sold in a number of Albertsons Companies stores, according to the recall notice posted on the FDA’s website, including:
Albertsons
Albertsons Market
Amigos
Andronico’s Community Markets
Carrs-Safeway
Eagle
Pak ‘N Save
Pavilions
Market Street
Randalls
Safeway
Tom Thumb
Vons
What states were the products sold in?
According to the above notices, the Trader Joes Cajun style blackened chicken breast fettucine alfredo product was sold at Trader Joes locations in the following states:
Arizona
California
Nevada
New Mexico
Utah
The other pasta products listed above were sold by Albertsons Companies stores in the following states:
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Hawaii
Louisiana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Mexico
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Texas
Utah
Wyoming
What is Listeria and what are its symptoms?
Listeria is a bacterium that can cause severe illness in people, according to the CDC. The illness can stay local to the intestines or spread to other parts of the body (invasive).
In America, about 1,250 people contract a Listeria infection each year. Despite the relatively small number of infections, the illness has a high death rate. About 172 people in America die annually from the infection.
Intestinal Listeria illness symptoms include diarrhea and vomiting. Invasive Listeria illness includes fever and flu-like symptoms in pregnant individuals as well as headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance, and seizures in other individuals.
While anyone can contract a listeria infection, the illness is particularly harmful for individuals who are aged 65 or older, and those who are pregnant, have weakened immune systems, or are newborns.
What should I do if I have the recalled products?
The FDA says anyone with the recalled products should not consume them. Instead, they should dispose of the product or return it to its place of purchase.
Additionally, the FDA warns those who have the recalled products should use extra vigilance in cleaning and sanitizing any surfaces and containers that may have come in contact with these products to reduce the risk of cross-contamination.
The agency notes that Listeria can survive in refrigerated temperatures and spread to other food and surfaces with ease.
You can read the complete details of the latest Listeria notices and warning updates here, here, and here.
As President Donald Trump’s regulators revamp bank rules, big lenders expect their capital requirements could fall, in a stunning victory for the industry which faced a big hike under former President Joe Biden, according to senior industry executives.
Aiming to cut red tape that Trump’s agency picks say is hurting the U.S. economy, they are working on the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. capital rules since the global financial crisis of 2008.
In addition to narrowing the “Basel Endgame” capital hikes which sparked unprecedented pushback from Wall Street banks, the Fed plans to reduce a capital surcharge levied on risky global banks, shrink a key leverage constraint, and overhaul annual tests that gauge whether lenders can withstand an economic shock.
The country’s largest lenders, which have lobbied hard for the long-sought review, are optimistic that the changes combined will result in their capital levels remaining flat or falling, said six industry and regulatory sources, including three top bankers.
That expected outcome, reported here for the first time, marks a dramatic turnaround for the industry which faced a 19% hike in 2023 under the draft Basel capital rules which proposed changes to how big banks gauge lending and trading risks.
While the Fed last September said that hike would be halved, the plan was never finalized and died with Trump’s election.
Big banks have long complained that capital rules are excessive and poorly calibrated, and that some of that cash could better serve the economy through lending. They also argue that they weathered the COVID-19 economic shock just fine.
Critics say efforts to chip away at the capital regime are dangerous, and could leave the industry vulnerable at a time when the outlook for the U.S. economy is growing cloudy.
With big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup together holding around $1 trillion in capital, even a small dip could free up billions of dollars for lending, trading, dividends and share buybacks.
“You’re going to see here the most aggressive streamlining or easing of bank regulations that we’ve seen certainly since Dodd-Frank and probably sometime before that,” said Ian Katz, managing director at Capital Alpha Partners, referring to the landmark 2010 post-crisis law that overhauled bank rules.
A spokesperson for the Fed’s new regulatory chief, Michelle Bowman, who is leading the overhaul, declined to comment. Bowman said last week that she wants the rules to “work well together” and did not necessarily expect capital to fall. Regulators will unveil a new Basel draft by early 2026, she added.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which are also working on the Basel draft, also declined to comment.
“America’s largest banks are the strongest in the world,” said Amanda Eversole, CEO of the Financial Services Forum which represents the country’s eight biggest banks. “Modernizing capital rules will let them put that strength to work – fueling growth for consumers, small businesses, and the economy.”
‘EXTREMELY CONSEQUENTIAL’
The sources, who declined to be identified discussing confidential regulatory issues, said they expect the new Basel draft to be broadly “capital-neutral” at a minimum. That means it would neither increase nor decrease system-wide capital, but change how it is distributed.
Trump’s pick for FDIC chair, Travis Hill, in January said “roughly” capital-neutral would be a “prudent starting point.”
To get there, regulators are expected to abandon a “dual stack” that would have required banks to comply with the stricter of two methods for measuring their risk capital which penalized banks with large trading businesses, and to ease a requirement to put capital aside for operational risks, like cyberattacks or lawsuits, two of the people said.
Capital reductions could then come as the Fed updates the “GSIB” surcharge to better account for economic growth, and as regulators tailor the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio, a risk-blind capital safety net, to each individual bank, three of the sources said.
After the industry sued the Fed in December, the central bank is also working to make its stress tests, which partly determine big lenders’ capital buffers, more transparent, likely helping them to optimize their results.
Two of the sources cautioned, however, that the regulatory discussions are ongoing and that Democrats on the Fed board may oppose changes that are too favorable to the industry.
Based on an analysis of industry materials, Washington-based group Better Markets, which advocates for tougher financial rules, estimates that banking system capital could fall by $200 billion if the industry secures all the relief it has been pushing for.
“It’s huge and extremely consequential,” said Phillip Basil, director of economic growth and financial stability at Better Markets. “Its going to take a lot less to bring down a big bank.”
Additional reporting by Saeed Azhar
Lananh Nguyen, Nupur Anand, Pete Schroeder and Tatiana Bautzer, Reuters
Despite being under a year old and having no revenue, Fermi America had a very successful initial public offering (IPO) this week.
The company, which aims to provide data and power centers for artificial intelligence, saw its shares (Nasdaq: FRMI) close at $32.53 on their first day of trading Wednesday, up nearly 55% from their IPO price of $21 per share.
Fermis stock price continued to rise through after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching $36. It reached a high of $39 per share overnight, before dropping closer to $37 ahead of the market opening.
What is Fermi?
The company was cofounded by Rick Perry, former Texas governor, a GOP presidential contender in 2012 and 2016, and U.S. Secretary of Energy for part of President Trumps first term. His cofounder, Toby Neugebauer, is a former co-managing partner at Quantum Energy.
Since its founding in January 2025yes, nine months agoFermi has done very little show and much more tell. Its working on something called Project Matador, a multi-gigawatt energy and data center development campus that would be the worlds largest HyperGrid.
In its final form, the center would exist as the Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus at Texas Tech University.
According to Fermi, it would be the only site with the potential to include safe, clean, new nuclear power, the nations biggest combined-cycle natural gas project, utility grid power, solar power, and battery energy storage at unprecedented scale.
Fermi aims to deliver up to 11 gigawatts of power to AI data centers by 2038, with 1.1 gigawatts online at the end of 2026.
With that said, all Fermi currently has is a lease for 5,236 acres of land from Texas Tech University and a dream. It needs funding to start any construction on Project Matador, some of which could come from its successful IPO.
So why has Fermi had such a prosperous IPO, despite being little more than a newborn idea? One theory is that investors see an uncertain startup as a lower cost to entry for investing in the AI boom, which is expected to require enormous power and data in the years ahead.
The share prices for big AI players like Meta Platforms and Oracle Corp were $717.34 and $289.01, respectively, at close on Wednesday. Thats a lot less accessible than $20 or $30, which can still make someone feel included in the buzz.
It’s not just Hollywood that’s been grappling with how to deal with AI-generated characters. Wikipedia editors are figuring all this out as they go along, too.
Following reports this week that an AI “actress” named Tilly Norwood is attracting interest from talent agents and rattling real-life performers who make their living in movies and on TV, Wikipedia editors moved quickly to create a page for the characterand almost immediately began arguing over how to describe it.
Is it a synthetic actress? Is it even a she? Can Tilly Norwood, despite having 45,000 followers on Instagram, be accurately described as doing anything?
These are the types of questions that have been plaguing the dutiful volunteers who are tasked with editing the world’s largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia. While few would argue that the AI character doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s notability guidelines, no one seems quite sure what exactly to say about it.
“I’m not comfortable with asserting that Tilly Norwood exists, actually,” one editor wrote on Tuesday, the day the page was created. “I’m also not comfortable with the article using gendered pronouns for the Tilly construct.”
Do AI actresses dream of electric Oscars?
The discussions this week among Wikipedia editorswhich are visible via the website’s “talk” pagesoffer a fascinating window into the semantic debates that our society is facing more broadly at a time when we’re sharing more and more of our screen time with AI-generated objects designed to look and act like us.
An early revision of Tilly Norwood’s page described the character as an “artificial intelligence-generated actress” who “starred” in an AI-generated sketch comedy show.
The current version of the page has toned down the anthropomorphic language, although the gendered pronouns remain intact: “Tilly Norwood is an artificial intelligence-generated character marketed as an actress.”
A review of talk pages reveals that editors debated passionately about whether to refer to Tilly Norwood as an actress at all, with some arguing that Wikipedia’s language should merely reflect common usage. “‘Actress’ is how the vast majority of reliable sources describe her,” one person wrote.
‘Trained on the work of professional performers’
Tilly Norwood is the brainchild of Xicoia, an AI talent studio launched by Dutch comedian and producer Eline van der Velden. The studio is a division of production company Particle6.
The character, whose social media feed includes a mix of AI-generated modeling shots, selfies, and epic movie scenes, made a splash recently at the Zurich Film Festival and has since sparked industry backlash.
SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents screen actors, issued a blistering statement, calling Tilly Norwood a “computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performerswithout permission or compensation.”
A report last year from consulting firm CVL Economics found that more than 203,000 entertainment-related jobs in the United States could be disrupted by generative AI technologies by 2026.
Fortunately, where Wikipedia is concerned at least, this is not entirely new territory. After all, the site has hosted a page for Mickey Mouse since 2001. For the record, Mickey is described as a he.
The government shutdown that began Wednesday will deprive policymakers and investors of economic data vital to their decision-making at a time of unusual uncertainty about the direction of the U.S. economy.The absence will be felt almost immediately, as the government’s monthly jobs report scheduled for release Friday will likely be delayed. A weekly report on the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits a proxy for layoffs that is typically published on Thursdays will also be postponed.If the shutdown is short-lived, it won’t be very disruptive. But if the release of economic data is delayed for several weeks or longer, it could pose challenges, particularly for the Federal Reserve. The Fed is grappling with where to set a key interest rate at a time of conflicting signals, with inflation running above its 2% target and hiring nearly ground to a halt, driving the unemployment rate higher in August.The Fed typically cuts this rate when unemployment rises, but raises it or at least leaves it unchanged when inflation is rising too quickly. It’s possible the Fed will have little new federal economic data to analyze by its next meeting on Oct. 28-29, when it is widely expected to reduce its rate again.“The job market had been a source of real strength in the economy but has been slowing down considerably the past few months,” said Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the left-leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “It would be very good to know if that slowdown was continuing, accelerating, or reversing.”The Fed cut its rate by a quarter-point earlier this month and signaled it was likely to do so twice more this year. Fed officials said they would keep a close eye on how inflation and unemployment evolve, but that depends on the data being available.A key inflation report is scheduled for Oct. 15 and the government’s monthly retail sales report is slated for release the next day.“We’re in a meeting-by-meeting situation, and we’re going to be looking at the data,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during a news conference earlier this month.The economic picture has recently gotten cloudier. Despite slower hiring, there are signs that overall economic growth may be picking up. Consumers have stepped up their shopping and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates the economy likely expanded at a healthy clip in the July-September quarter, after a large gain in the April-June period.A key question for the Fed is whether that growth can revive the job market, which this Friday’s report might have helped illustrate. Economists had forecast another month of weak hiring, with just 50,000 new positions added, according to a survey by FactSet. The unemployment rate was projected to stay at a still-low 4.3%.On Wall Street, investors obsess over the monthly jobs reports, typically issued the first Friday of every month. It’s a crucial indicator of the economy’s health and provides insights into how the Fed might adjust interest rates, which affects the cost of borrowing and influences how investors allocate their money.So far, investors don’t seem fazed by the shutdown. The broad S&P 500 stock index rose slightly Wednesday to an all-time high.Many businesses also rely on government data to gauge how the economy is faring. The Commerce Department’s monthly report on retail sales, for example, is a comprehensive look at the health of U.S. consumers and can influence whether companies make plans to expand or shrink their operations and workforces.For the time being, the Fed, economists, and investors will likely focus more on private data.On Wednesday, the payroll provider ADP issued its monthly employment data, which showed that businesses cut 32,000 jobs in September a signal the economy is slowing. Still, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said her firm’s report “was not intended to be a replacement” for government statistics.The ADP data does not capture what’s happening at government agencies, for example an area of the economy that could be significantly affected by a lengthy shutdown.“Using a portfolio of private sector and government data gives you a better chance of capturing a very complicated economy in a complex world,” she said.The Fed will remain open no matter how long the shutdown lasts, because it funds itself from earnings on the government bonds and other securities it owns. It will continue to provide its monthly snapshots of industrial production, which includes mining, manufacturing, and utility output. The next industrial production report will be released Oct. 17.
Christopher Rugaber and Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writers
