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The erosion of freedom rarely happens overnight; its written into law, one ruling at a time. ACLUs Chase Strangio lays bare how the U.S. legal system is failing its people under a growing wave of authoritarianism and systemic rollbacks of civil liberties.
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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 a new court filing that sheds more light on the reasons for Sam Altmans ouster from OpenAI two years ago. I also look at Amazons kerfuffle with Perplexity over AI shopping agents, and at another court ruling that using copyrighted data for AI training is fair use. 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. Two years after OpenAI boardroom drama, a lot is riding on Altmans trustworthiness OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has done more than anyone else to whip up faith and trust that the next industrial revolutionAIis imminent and inevitable. That faith and trust have already loosed hundreds of billions of investment in infrastructure needed to support the transition. Some say the infusion of cash is single-handedly propping up the U.S. stock market, and, by extension, the economy. The faith and trust have moved Washington to all but abandon its oversight role in favor of acting as enabler and cheerleader. But questions of Altmans trustworthiness wont go away. Some troublesome details about Altmans famous 2023 firing by his board (and subsequent rehiring and board reshuffle) came to light with the recent (unsealed) court filing of part of a deposition of OpenAI cofounder and ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in a case brought against the company by Elon Musk. At the time of Altmans ouster, the board said that he had kept key facts about the business from them. The board had also considered reports that Altman undermined his executives and pitted them against each other. Sutskever confirmed to attorneys during the seven-hour deposition that he believes Altman lied habitually. He testified that Altman had been pitting Mira Murati, the CTO at the time, against Daniela Amodei, who eventually left with her brother Dario Amodei and others to form Anthropic. We learn that Altmans alleged behavior wasnt short-term or a reaction to a crisis, but part of a pattern. Sutskever said he and fellow board member Murati had been documenting Altmans indiscretions and preparing to oust him for more than a year before proposing it to the board. (They delayed the firing until Altman loyalists on the board were too few to stop it, Sutskever said.) One board member, Helen Toner, said a year after departing that OpenAI executives (likely Sutskever and Murati) began talking to the board about the Altman problems in the month before the November 2023 dustup. The two of them suddenly started telling us . . .how they couldnt trust him, about the toxic atmosphere he was creating, Toner said during a TED AI podcast. They used the phrase psychological abuse, telling us they didnt think he was the right person to lead the company to AGI, telling us they had no belief that he could or would change. Sutskever, in fact, wrote a 52-page-long memo describing Altmans indiscretions (at the request of fellow board member Adam DAngelo, and possibly board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley). He wrote another memo about then-president and board chair Greg Brockman, who resigned after Altman was fired. Toner has offered other examples of Altmans lies of omission, including a failure to tell the board about plans to launch ChatGPT, or that he personally owned the OpenAI startup fund even though he constantly was claiming to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company, Toner said. Toner added that Altman gave the board inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes OpenAI had in place, so the board had no way of knowing how well those safety processes were working. (Toner is an AI safety expert.) People say that political infighting happens within every company. Thats probably true. People say that CEOs are like politicians; they have to balance competing priorities and personalities within the company, so a certain amount of finessing of the truth is expected. Ill buy that too. And the context is important. OpenAIs history, and the recent history of generative AI, had a lot to do with setting up the conflict. OpenAI started out as an idealistic little AI lab, but a few years later it made a breakthrough discovery that AI models got predictably smarter as they were supersized and given massive amounts of computing power. Developing frontier AI models became a very expensive undertaking, requiring massive capital. OpenAI had to spend massively to maintain its lead in the frontier model arms race that ensued, and needed consumer and enterprise revenue streams to help pay for it. (CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that OpenAI may look to the government to guarantee its infrastructure loans.) Its not easy to run a business like a nonprofit in that situation. Yet Altman was answering to a nonprofit board of directors. Toner said as much on the TED AI podcast. The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the companys public good mission was primary, was coming firstover profits, investor interests, and other things, Toner said on the podcast. Maybe something had to give. But . . . But if the CEO was (or is) hiding truths from the board, something is wrong. Given the potential risks of AI, its disturbing that one of Altmans lies of omission, according to Toner, concerned safety measures. Superhuman AI doesnt care about the corporate structure of its creators. If not responsibly aligned and governed, its potential for doing harm is the same. Amazon to Perplexity: Keep your agents out of our market Amazon is apparently not ready for the AI agent revolution. Amazon accused Perplexity of computer fraud after the AI company’s Comet browser allowed users to search for and purchase items on Amazon’s platform. Amazon believes Perplexity needs permission from the e-commerce giant to let users do that. Its attorneys sent Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas a cease-and-desist, saying, in effect, that the Comet shopping agents are no longer welcome on Amazon. Were in the early innings of AI agents. Some of the first consumer agents, Perplexity included, can navigate e-commerce websites and even make purchases. In the future agents may routinely do our business by interacting with other agents using a secure agent-to-agent interfaceno need for a traditional web interface at all. Perplexity says Amazon sent an “aggressive legal threat” via a cease-and-desist letter dated October 31, demanding the company stop enabling purchases through its Comet Assistant. Amazon’s lawyers say that Perplexity lacks authorization to access Amazon user accounts or account details using what they described as “disguised or obscured” AI agents. Amazon has already taken steps in recent months to block external AI agents from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others from crawling product information at its website. Perplexity accused Amazon of “bullying,” and argued that a tool that makes shopping easier for the consumer can only benefit the e-commerce giant. Perplexity suggested that Amazon is more focused on manipulating shopper decisions by showing ads, injecting upsells and confusing offers, and pushing sponsored products in search results. Amazon says Perplexity’s agents hurt shoppers by skipping over personalized product recommendations, and potentially not displaying the fastest available delivery speeds for customers. Amazon and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment. In theory, Amazon could change its terms of service to more explicitly ban third-party shopping agents from its site. But what if such agents create real value (time savings) for consumers? Can Amazon easily ban some agents but not others? U.K. court says AI companies can use copyrighted material to train models The AI industry has notched another legal win for its practice of scraping copyrighted digital content from the web and using it to train AI models. Getty Images filed suit in the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, claiming that Stability AI violated copyright when it downloaded millions of Getty photos without permission for the purpose of training its Stable Diffusion image generator. Judge Joanna Smith ruled this week that since the Stable Diffusion model didnt store or reproduce the Getty images it cant be said to have copied the images under U.K. copyright law. The court also declared that Getty would have to drop the copyright claim in the U.K. court because the training didnt physically happen within its jurisdiction. Getty also filed its complaint in the U.S., in the Southern District of New York, but that trial is still ongoing. Neil Chilson, former chief technologist for the FTC and currently head of AI Policy with the Abundance Institute, called the decision “consistent with the nature of the technology and a successful result for continued AI innovation. More AI coverage from Fast Company: AI is going to be a game changer for Black Friday AI hardware is reinventing the humble dictaphone Here are the best mobile AI apps Stability AI largely wins U.K. court battle against Getty Images Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Today, institutional landlordsthose owning more than 1,000 homesremain a relatively small part of the national single-family housing market. They own less than 1.0% of the total U.S. single-family housing stock and have accounted for only about 0.3% of transactions over the past three years. Yet, two decades ago, they didnt even really exist. When Blackstone began buying single-family rentals in 2011, there wasnt a single firm that owned at least 1,000 U.S. single-family homes. By late 2016, Blackstones fund, Invitation Homeswhich the firm later took public in 2017 and fully exited by 2019had grown its portfolio to nearly 50,000 single-family rentals. As of the end of Q3 2025, Invitation Homes wholly owned 86,139 single-family rentals. Institutional funds buying at the bottom of the housing crash, from 2011 to 2013, marked the birth of the modern institutional single-family rental asset class. Sean Dobson, CEO and chairman of the Amherst Groupwhich, according to Parcl Labs, owns at least 42,973 single-family rentalssaw that shift firsthand. After the federal government tightened lending, the housing bubble burst, and single-family homes began selling below replacement cost, the government was practically begging institutional capital to step into the market around 2010, believing they could serve as a shock absorber. Dobson illustrates the point by noting, When we [Amherst] first started this [single-family rental] business, we had a handshake to buy 50,000 houses from Fannie Mae in one trade. While that trade didnt occur, it illustrates the backdrop at the time. On Friday, Dobson will be among the speakers at ResiDay 2025a one-day conference hosted by ResiClub in New York City. I did a pre-interview with Dobson (the full video is posted on YouTube). Below are some of his key takeaways. National home prices: Grinding sideways, with affordability as the constraint Dobson emphasized that the housing market is unlikely to see dramatic national home price swings in the near term. Neither another national boom, nor crash. He admits theres some downward pressure on home prices, given the affordability environment were in, however, theres not enough resale supply hitting the market to actually manifest a national level crash like 2007-2011. According to Dobson: Home prices we think would be lower if there are more sellers, obviously. But there’s good reason there aren’t more sellers, right? So many people got such low interest rate mortgages that at a time when the demand would naturally fall from rising interest rates, rising interest rates also caused the [new listings] supply to fall. I think the overall message is that we’re on the lookout for something that changes the velocity of this whole thing and [we] can’t find it. We spent a lot of time on the Airbnb guys. I thought those guys might be the weak hands, because it’s like, who has to sell? And we have a pretty good model on how supply affects home prices. But even when you just radically change supply, it moves home prices [down] in single digits we think you’re looking at a decade of difficulties for people to get into buying a home. That’s why we think we’re talking about really a next decade of a lot of demand for rental, because it’s the choice of, how do I get the size, how do I get the features that come with that home, like the school location? And that’s how long we think it’s going to take for what we would see as sort of long-term depth of some of the standards for affordability to be recaptured, because we think it has to come from income growth. And that’s staring in the face of all this business and AI, which [some] people are arguing might be driving [real incomes] down [in the future]. Fixing affordability starts with housing credit reform The further the Pandemic Housing Boom fades into the rearview mirrorand as national income growth continues to outpace national home price growthDobson believes national housing affordability will gradually improve. That could be sped up, he says, if some of lending tightening done during and following the Great Financial Crisis were un-done. His argument isnt to recreate the reckless lending of the mid-2000s, but to reintroduce responsible credit risk-taking and allow back in some of the lower credit homebuyers that were in the market in, say, the 1980s and 1990s. In Dobsons view, if lending were loosened to allow some of those lower credit score homebuyers back into the market, it wouldnt magically improve affordability overnight; however, it would create a steady stream of housing demand for builders who could produce more lower-end single-family homesor even manufactured homesthat werent bilt in the years following the Great Financial Crisis. He believes that would improve affordability over time. Says Dobson: We get consulted by governors, by senior people in the federal government. Everyone kind of wants the playbook: Tell me what to do and I’ll fix it. And we tell them [to] make more subprime mortgages. And they tend to fold up their notebooks and head on… People are frustrated, right? People are super frustrated because you have this expectation that: I did all these things, and now I should be able to buy a house, and I can’t. You want to blame somebody, right? And if you see me [Amherst] buying it, well, you’re like, well, it must be his fault, so I get itI think it [that thinking] is dangerous. They [homebuilders] don’t have demand [from that lower credit score homebuyers like they used to], and they don’t have demand because their customers don’t have financing. And they [some sidelined buyers] don’t have financing because the mortgage market doesn’t take credit risk like [it used to]… So what we [Amherst] provide is a solution today. Tightened credit boxed out homebuyers and helped draw institutional capital into the housing market Dobson says the typical Amherst tenant has a credit score too low to qualify for a mortgage in todays market. Without single-family rental options, many of those households wouldnt be able to live in the same neighborhoods or school districts they do now, he argues. That challenge reflects a broader shift in the mortgage market. In Q1 1999, borrowers in the bottom 10th percentile of mortgage credit scores had scores of 597. By Q3 2025, that threshold had risen to 660, reflecting that many lower-credit households had been locked out of homeownership following the bust, Dobson says. In Dobsons view, those tighter lending standardsimplemented after the housing bust that began in 2006helped pave the way for institutional investors like Amherst to step in and fill the gap through single-family rentals. Says Dobson: I sat with Chairman Bernanke, I sat with Yellen, and I begged them to try to get in the way of Dodd-Frank, because I knew what was going to happen, and we lost that. I said, Okay, well, we’re going to get these families in these houses some way, and we have a lease and we have financing, we can operate the real estate. So let’s get the people in the homes and get their kids in the schools, and then let all the wizards figure out, like, whats the better solution? Because today, there isn’t one until someone with a 625 FICO can go borrow money at about the same rate that you and I can borrow at, there isn’t a better solution. And so that’s, you know, if you want to blame somebody, it’s the knee jerk, explainable, but too long in place reaction to the subprime mortgage crisis. Greater homebuilding activity is helping improve affordability more quickly in Florida and Texas During our conversation, I asked him for his thoughts on the current regional housing market variationspecifically, why pockets of Florida and Texas have weakened more than markets in the Midwest and Northeast. According to Dobson: The common theme amongst the markets that are retracing? So Austin, you mentioned Jacksonville, which is not quite as bad Western Floridathe Tampa Bay area, Cape Coral has been really, been really tough. I would say the common theme is those are places [where] it’s pretty easy to build, and as home prices moved above, kind of their construction costs, they naturally kind of tend back down. And so those places, the market did what the market is supposed to do, right? Prices were rising and rising quickly, and homebuilders came in and they built a lot of supply, even in a place like Dallas. So we [Amherst] tend to spend [time looking at local data]because we’re like you [ResiClub], were in the housing market [data] all day, every day. So we don’t really do that much work on like the U.S. housing market. We do work on much smaller micro footprints. But if you take a place like DallasDallas overall [in aggregate], seems like it’s okay, healthy, not great, [but] not weak. But if you bifurcate the homes by vintage year, and look at their price movements, then Dallas looks a lot like Cape Coral [in certain areas]. The new home construction market [areas] in Dallas looks a lot like Cape Coral. So builders came outthey did, you know, getting land permitted, getting lots of them platted, getting horizontals in all takes time. So there’s always a lag between when the housing market really wants to buy the homes and when builders can deliver them. And that oftentimes [it] creates too much supply [at once] trying to squeeze through a channel that [also has] waning demand. Institutional single-family homebuying has slowedcould it accelerate again? At the height of the Pandemic Housing Boom, institutional homeownersthose owning at least 1,000 single-family homesmade up an all-time high of 2.4% of home purchases in Q2 2022, according to John Burns Research and Consulting. That period, at the tail end of the boom, was when yields were particularly attractive as borrowing costs were ultra-low, home prices were soaring, and rents were climbing rapidly. However, since mortgage rates spiked and capital markets shifted, their share has fallen to around 0.3% of transactions over the past three years. The math isnt as favorable now. What, if anything, could pull more institutional capital back into the single-family housing market? According to Dobson: We really think the answer to that question comes in this investor adoption question, right? Will state pension funds allocate and scale to single-family rental? The time that we’ve had to operate the [single-family] real estate has also made that core investor group aware that you can collect rents [from single-family rentals], you can provide good service, you can operate this as a piece of real estate. That track record is helpful, but the next wave of investing won’t come from the same sources of capital [private equity]. It’ll come from those core investors [like pension funds] finally saying, You know what, a 5% or 6% cash on cash return that outpaces inflation by 50 plus percent every year has a spot in my portfolio and scale.
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