Amazon's 10-K describes its AI capex in one line: "the majority of which is to support AWS business growth." That's infrastructure they sell to other companies. Then they announced 14,000 layoffs and called AI "the most transformative technology." Two days later, Jassy said it was "culture."

Sam Altman's company has a device called an Orb. Scans your irises, gives you crypto. They call it universal basic income for the AI age. Nine countries have banned or fined the operation since 2024. The company is still scanning.

OpenAI bought a tech podcast this week. It reports to the company's chief political operative, not a content team. That same person runs the $2.99M lobbying operation, a $125M super PAC, and legal subpoenas against seven nonprofits.

Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, and Chris Hughes have collectively bankrolled the biggest UBI research efforts in the US. Those same networks spent $1.1 billion on political lobbying and $200 million to keep gig workers classified as contractors.

Alabama had nearly two dozen No Kings events. White House called them all "Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions." Now a 62-year-old ASL interpreter there is facing trial for the costume she wore to one. theintercept.com/2026/04/03/...

A single Flock Safety search last year hit 83,345 cameras nationwide. The search note: "had an abortion, search for female." Logged as a death investigation of a "non-viable fetus." Flock and the sheriff publicly called it a missing person case. EFF pulled the court records. It wasn't.

Alaska has been mailing every resident a cash check since 1982. No work requirement, no means test. A 2019 NBER study on 43 years of data: zero effect on employment. There are eleven more experiments where that came from.

no formal antitrust action was ever opened on the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. FTC studied it, published a report. administration changed. www.techdirt.com/2026/04/02/...

company projecting $74B in losses by 2028 is now buying a tech talk show to own its own coverage before the IPO. www.wired.com/story/opena...

One year ago, Peter Navarro said Liberation Day tariffs would bring in $600-700 billion a year. Actual revenue after 12 months: ~$240 billion. And roughly $165 billion of that now has to be refunded. The revenue missed by more than half. What was collected is being paid back — not to consumers.

A New York lawmaker wrote an AI safety bill. The attack ads against him are about ICE raids, and the checks clearing those buys came from OpenAI's co-founder. NBC News documented the same pattern across four states.

"just build things" is easier when no formal antitrust action was ever opened on your biggest partnership. not under Khan. not under Ferguson. four regulatory clearances in 14 months. www.theregister.com/2026/04/01/...

Dollar Shave Club ran an anti-AI ad in January. The ad was made with generative AI. Their CEO confirmed it publicly. Brands are selling "no AI" as a feature now. Nobody's checking whether it's true.

atlassian was 60% R&D cuts. oracle just hit sales, engineering, AND security. different departments, same AI efficiency story. go.theregister.com/feed/www.th...

they just opened it to retail investors. $3B more, bringing the total raise to $122B. softbank's $40B loan matures in 12 months. this is IPO infrastructure. techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/...

published our piece on this at 1pm. no fines, no admission of wrongdoing. clarifai keeps every photo and every model it trained on them. those models now run DHS and SOCOM contracts. arstechnica.com/tech-policy...

In September 2014, OkCupid co-founder Max Krohn emailed nearly 3 million user photos to a facial recognition startup called Clarifai. Two months earlier, Krohn and co-founder Sam Yagan had invested in Clarifai through their own VC fund. The FTC just settled it. For $0.

90% of executives across four countries told NBER researchers AI had zero employment impact over three years. workers don't want it either, apparently. restofworld.org/2026/worker...

56% of CEOs report zero financial benefit from AI. 95% of enterprise pilots fail to deliver ROI. turns out even the benchmarks we use to prove it works are broken. www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/31/...

Amazon's corporate stock grants vest 5/15/40/40 over four years. 80% of your equity doesn't hit until after year two. Average corporate tenure at Amazon: 1.5 to 1.8 years.

CDT polled Americans on government data handling. turns out people don't love it. Congress had a shot at fixing this last year and the vote tied 212-212. FISA 702 expires in 20 days. cdt.org/insights/co...

EFF on the Daily Show now. same org that got CBP to confirm its location data comes from the ad auction system on your phone. every time an ad loads it broadcasts your GPS to thousands of buyers. you don't have to click anything. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

ICE has a tool that lets agents draw a box around any city block, identify every phone inside it, then track each device's movements over time. Wherever those phones go next. It costs $2.3 million. No warrant required. The data comes from the ads your phone loads.

SoftBank borrowed $40 billion to invest $30 billion in OpenAI. That loan matures in 12 months. It only gets repaid if OpenAI goes public. Between late 2024 and early 2026, every federal regulatory obstacle between OpenAI and that IPO cleared.

cops used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for someone else's crimes in North Dakota. wrong person. Ring's running that same tech across 2,723 police partner agencies right now www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/...

Organizers say 8 million people turned out for yesterday's No Kings protests. That number is probably inflated. In prior rounds, independent researchers found organizer claims ran 20-40% too high.

FBI just told the Senate it's still buying location data from brokers instead of getting warrants. the Carpenter workaround we broke down is now on the congressional record www.techdirt.com/2026/03/27/...

Amazon blocked Ring's new facial recognition feature in three states. Their own support page says why: "due to legislation." Illinois, Texas, and Portland all have biometric privacy laws with real enforcement, the kind where Facebook paid $650M and Google paid $1.375B in settlements.

The Department of Energy flagged a FOIA request covering 92,823 pages. Then gave the requester 3 business days to "clarify" it or the request would be treated as "voluntarily withdrawn." The legal standard for the agency's own response is 20 working days.

license plate readers, cell tower data, ad tech. it's all the same pipeline once you skip the warrant. ICE posted its first ad tech procurement filing this year www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

so Apple's opening Siri to even more AI chatbots while 90% of their own PCC infrastructure sits idle in warehouses. "preferred cloud provider" indeed www.theverge.com/tech/902048...

Four unrelated data sources measured AI's actual role in layoffs this year: a hiring manager survey, an NBER working paper spanning four countries, Challenger's layoff tracker (running since 1989), and a Duke/Federal Reserve CFO survey.

ICE posted a procurement filing in January asking vendors for "Big Data and Ad Tech" surveillance products. First time "ad tech" has appeared in an ICE procurement document. Their budget hit $28.7 billion this year, nearly triple 2024. FISA Section 702 expires in 25 days.

hype index is back. still not tracking the part where 56% of CEOs in PwC's own survey saw zero cost reduction from AI www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/25/...

OECD already measured this. 21 percentage point gap between high and low earners. "power users pulling ahead" is just pricing tiers doing their job techcrunch.com/2026/03/25/...

Nature just published a feature where the computer scientist who helped build today's AI tech calls these systems "glorified pocket calculators." Same week, OpenAI announced hiring 8,000 people and Treasury told banks that not adopting AI is a risk to financial stability.

In January, Sam Altman told employees OpenAI would "dramatically slow" its hiring. Two months later: 3,500 new hires planned by year-end. The FT says it's about scaling. The spending data says something different.

epic cutting 1,000+ and just... saying why. fortnite revenue dropped. two weeks after atlassian cut 1,600 and framed it as "AI investment" while the 8-K showed pure cost-cutting www.reuters.com/legal/litig...

The SEC's enforcement director lasted 6.5 months. Atkins picked her himself. She clashed with him over cases involving people in the president's orbit, and now she's gone.

The federal government's own registry of political appointees is missing 130 positions across 7 federal entities. A GAO audit found the gaps in February. Congress passed a bipartisan law specifically to prevent this. Here's what else went missing around the same time.

OpenAI's privacy policy for free ChatGPT: "We may use your content to train our models." OpenAI's enterprise page: "We do not train on your business data." Same tool. The difference costs $30/seat/month. And 73.8% of workplace ChatGPT accounts are personal.

Oregon's breach notification for Conduent lists 10.5 million affected people. Oregon's population is 4.2 million.

The March 20 FEC filings dropped. AIPAC's super PAC, United Democracy Project, contributed $5.3 million directly to "Elect Chicago Women" and "Affordable Chicago Now." NBC News confirmed it Friday. Three days after voters went to the polls.

On Feb 28, people marched past OpenAI's London office. Then DeepMind's. Then Meta's. Then Google's. Same day, OpenAI signed a $200 million Pentagon deal.

Sal Khan told TED that AI would give "every student on the planet" the private tutor that only wealthy families could afford. A March 2026 survey of 1,054 UK students tested that. The wealthier students are using AI more. In the same classrooms.

Google's top AI tier costs $249.99/month. That's 12.5x what standard access costs. OpenAI's Pro plan: $200/month, 10x the consumer tier. The same companies running these price structures will tell you AI is democratizing knowledge. The OECD data landed in January. It says the opposite.

Three weeks since a judge ruled gutting VOA was unconstitutional. FCC Chair Carr's now threatening broadcasters over unflattering coverage. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Meta is removing Instagram DM encryption because "very few people were opting in." The feature was buried behind four taps in settings, never made the default, only available in some regions, and the journalist who wrote about the removal still didn't have access to it.

Atlassian CEO said "our approach is not 'AI replaces people'" in the same memo that announced 1,600 cuts, 900 of them in software R&D. Shares rose after hours. The market read the memo differently than the memo was written.

Morgan Stanley's note says "most of the world isn't ready" for the coming AI breakthrough. No policy recommendation follows. No call for action. Just a buy signal dressed as a warning. Here's what the note actually is — and who it was written for.