Policy·
Commerce will take equity in nine quantum companies. $2 billion is moving in exchange.
On May 21 NIST disclosed nine letters of intent worth $2.013B for IBM, GlobalFoundries, and seven quantum labs. Each comes with a minority federal stake.
Policy
Tech regulation, antitrust, and policy news.
Policy·
Sadiq Khan blocked a £50M Met Police deal with Palantir. Scotland Yard had only talked to one supplier.
London's mayor cited a 'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules and stopped the Metropolitan Police from awarding Palantir a £50M AI intelligence contract on May 21.
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A federal jury took two hours to throw out Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI.
On May 18 a nine-juror panel rejected every claim Musk filed against OpenAI in 2024. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had told the courtroom she was ready to dismiss on the spot.
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NV Energy is cutting off 49,000 Lake Tahoe homes by May 2027. The power is going to AI data centers.
Liberty Utilities serves 49,000 Tahoe customers. NV Energy supplies 75% of that power and is reclaiming it for Northern Nevada data center expansion.
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Residents can't sleep. 29 million gallons vanished. Oregon sent the bill. Data centers are losing the neighborhood.
Three data center stories trended in one week: infrasound, 29M gallons of missing water, and Oregon forcing grid cost pass-through.
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Palantir contractors are getting 'unlimited access' to NHS patient data before it's anonymized
NHS England created an admin role giving Palantir staff access to identifiable patient data. The £330M contract's break clause arrives in March 2027.
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Apple and Google are bringing hardware attestation to the web. GrapheneOS says it's a monopoly play.
Google's reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification will require a certified iOS or Android device to pass some captchas, even on desktop. GrapheneOS calls the pattern anti-competitive.
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A judge killed DOGE's grant purge. The 'review process' was asking ChatGPT 'Is this DEI?'
A federal judge restored $100M+ in grants after two DOGE staffers used ChatGPT to flag 97% of NEH grants as DEI, including an HVAC repair and Holocaust research.
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The EU called VPNs 'a loophole that needs closing.' Proton's UK signups rose 1,800%.
An EU Parliament briefing and Executive VP Henna Virkkunen both flagged VPN circumvention of age verification. The UK's attempt to solve it backfired into record VPN adoption.
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Meta pulled encryption from Instagram DMs today. WhatsApp and Messenger keep theirs.
End-to-end encryption is gone from Instagram DMs as of May 8. Meta cited low adoption for a feature it never turned on by default.
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A Michigan town voted against a $16B data center. The lawsuit was filed two days later.
Saline Township rejected rezoning for a 1.4 GW OpenAI-Oracle data center. Related Digital sued in 48 hours, and construction is underway.
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Pennsylvania sued Character.AI after a chatbot named 'Emilie' invented a psychiatry license
Governor Josh Shapiro is asking Commonwealth Court to bar Character.AI from letting bots practice medicine. A state investigator got an offer to be assessed 'as a Doctor'.
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DHS used a customs summons to demand a Canadian's Google data over anti-ICE posts. ACLU sued May 4.
ACLU sued in N.D. Cal. to block a 1930s tariff-act subpoena targeting a Canadian who hasn't been to the US since 2015. Google has not said whether it complied.
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FCC just voted to bar Chinese labs from certifying US electronics. 75% of devices are tested there now.
Brendan Carr's FCC advanced the 'Bad Labs' rule on April 30 in a 3-0 vote, kicking off a 60-90 day comment period. The rule covers 126 labs in China and Hong Kong.
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Two gamers are suing Nintendo. They want the tariff money back, not the company.
After the Supreme Court killed Trump-era tariffs in February, Nintendo filed for refunds. A class action says those refunds belong to customers.
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Trump fired the entire National Science Board. The body that signs off on $9B in NSF funding is gone.
All 24 NSB members got termination emails on April 24 from the presidential personnel office. The board approves NSF's largest grants and sets policy. It is now empty.
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Samsung workers are heading for a strike over SK Hynix's bonus checks
Samsung's union voted to walk out May 21 over a bonus gap that sees SK Hynix engineers pocket roughly 4x more. 200+ have already defected.
Policy·
The EU's 'replaceable phone batteries by 2027' headline is misleading. Here's the rule.
Article 11 of EU Batteries Regulation 2023/1542 kicks in February 18, 2027. Most flagship phones will dodge user-replaceable batteries through the Ecodesign exemption instead.