On Tuesday, US District Judge Zachary Bluestone dismissed the lawsuit Ann Altman filed last year alleging that her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. As reported earlier by The Guardian, the judge wrote that over the past year, Ann had failed to appear for an independent medical examination or meet other deadlines despite warnings that it would result in the case being dismissed.

When the case was filed last year, a statement shared by Sam Altman, his mother, and his brothers said, "Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam… All of these claim …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was giving right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 and launching a $25 million bounty program for members of the public to report fraud.

In December 2025, Shirley published a viral video alleging fraud at daycares in Minnesota that were operated by members of the local Somali community. Shirley lingered in parking lots and asked to enter childcare centers, taking refusals as evidence that the centers weren't actually caring for children. The video quickly went viral, triggering a massive governmental response: Federal immigration agents descended on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said Tuesday that Brussels would use the next months “to open dialogue” on how to counter U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court — resisting calls from lawmakers to take quicker action.

Nearly 60 MEPs from across the political spectrum urged the Commission to intervene swiftly after the White House announced sweeping sanctions against the Hague-based court earlier this month. They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as the blocking statute, which would prevent EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions.

“We should keep all options on the table. If we use the blocking statute, we have one shot and we should do it well. So, it should be well prepared,” Kallas said, calling on firms not to overcomply with sanctions.

Multiple lawmakers continued to push for a faster response in a plenary session in Strasbourg. But while Kallas acknowledged their calls, she said the EU executive would take time “to analyze the full legal implications, to open dialogue and look for solutions.” The sanctions are expected to be implemented after a 180-day delay starting from Oct. 9.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had already targeted nine judges and the chief prosecutor of the Court, cutting them off from all U.S. service providers, including banking services.

Irish European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne, who represents Dublin’s presidency of the Council of the EU, told lawmakers that the sanctions delay provides “an opportunity for dialogue, which we should take advantage of while remaining ready to take all necessary measures,” as laid out by EU leaders in a statement issued after their gathering last week.

Washington is openly campaigning to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” and urging countries to quit the court’s founding charter. Kallas said that “decisions by Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Venezuela to reject or even withdraw from the ICC risk eroding the foundations of global justice.”

“The ICC is under attack at precisely the moment when we need it the most,” Kallas said, citing the Court’s investigations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The EU will continue to engage with partners to strengthen the court, she said, warning countries under pressure from the U.S. to leave the body: “This also has clear consequences for their relationship with the European Union.”

“The European Union has practical means to do more,” Kallas said, adding that she would be in the Hague this week.

BRUSSELS — High jet fuel prices could trigger “the biggest increase in airfares, I would say, in history in Europe” next year, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary told reporters Tuesday.

If fuel prices remain twice as high as before the U.S. war against Iran, O’Leary warned ticket prices could rise by up to 20%.

Hedging contracts have locked in fuel prices for much of airlines’ consumption so far. This has helped European carriers avoid sharp ticket price increases, despite jet fuel prices more than doubling following disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz since the war in the Middle East began.

But O’Leary said most European airlines lack significant hedging next year. “As we go out into next year, we’re only 15% hedged at $85 a barrel. Basically, we’re unhedged into the summer of 2027,” O’Leary told POLITICO in an interview ahead of a press conference in Brussels.

Ryanair’s hedging contracts expire in April 2027. “We will still be profitable, although less profitable than currently, if oil prices remain high,” he said.

O’Leary warned that fewer available seats and higher fares could become the new normal as more airlines face financial struggles. “You’re going to see dramatically less capacity this winter and into the summer of 2027.”

Ryanair itself is cutting 20 routes from Belgium this winter as a response to an increase in national aviation taxes, from €2 in 2025 to €7 from January.

The fuel price hike is also intensifying the airline sector’s opposition to EU climate policies, which many carriers argue are adding to their already rising operating costs.

Ryanair had long advocated extending the EU’s Emissions Trading System to all flights to and from the EU, a call O’Leary reiterated on Tuesday.

“It’s indefensible that … Europe’s citizens are paying all these environmental taxes, while the Yanks, the Asians and the Chinese land and take off in Europe completely exempt from their fair share of environmental taxes.” He added that Ryanair would pay €1.5 billion in ETS compliance costs in 2026.

He argued that the ETS should also cover long-haul services operated by European rivals such as Lufthansa and Air France-KLM.

“And why not? Those are the most expensive flights in the world. They’re also the most profitable flights they have, because they’re exempt from Europe’s bullshit environmental taxation,” O’Leary said.

The EU currently applies the ETS to aviation emissions from flights within the European Economic Area, as well as flights to Switzerland and the U.K. The European Commission proposed last summer to extend carbon pricing, starting in 2029, to flights departing the EU for destinations within 5,000 kilometers of Frankfurt Airport, including to North Africa and the Middle East.

The proposal would affect Ryanair’s flights to destinations such as Morocco, while continuing to exempt most long-haul services operated by other airlines to more distant destinations like the U.S. and China.

TikTok was repeatedly warned by its own staffers about risks its platform posed to child safety, according to court records obtained by NPR. The publication reports that employees were frustrated over TikTok executives failing to appropriately act on concerns they raised, including minors bypassing age-restricted content, and appearing in "transactional sexual content" the company could financially benefit from.

The previously unreported depositions of TikTok staffers were filed in federal court in March, and connected to a multi-district litigation initiated in 2022 that brings together hundreds of lawsuits alleging that TikTok, Meta, Snap …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The U.S. has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built using its technology, citing national security concerns.

America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously. 

This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally. 

The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. 

Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad. 

 

In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control. 

Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.

Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.

As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP. 

The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres. 

The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.

The post Putin has Trump right where he wants him appeared first on Salon.com.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.

Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy.

If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming up next month, and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes are pretty high right now.

So I asked Gov. Pritzker about all that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right into the absolute existential weeds of what government is even for. You’ll hear him say — and it’s hard to disagree — that some problems are just collective action problems that require the government to do a lot of work. We can’t solve all these problems one at a time, or even one state at a time. It’s a pretty deep conversation, and we really got into it on a lot of issues.

And of course, I had to ask him: Are the Bears gonna stay in Illinois?

Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Okay: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Here we go.

Gov. JB Pritzker, you’re the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you.

I am very excited to talk to you. We’re in the heart of midterm season. You are running for reelection. I have to tell you. I have to be very honest with you. I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview, not only because I’m speaking to a governor, but because I went to school in Chicago. My sister still lives in Chicago. My wife grew up in Illinois. Her entire family is farmers in North Central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I have to do a good job here.

Well, we’re claiming you. Now that I know all that, we’re claiming you. You’re an Illinoisan.

I don’t know about that. I grew up in Wisconsin. Here’s my first question for you. I’m a die-hard Packers fan. Are you going to let the Bears move to Indiana?

That is not our intention. We are, in fact, in discussions with the Bears and the NFL about keeping the Bears either in Chicago or in Arlington Heights, but in Illinois.

I’m saying, as a Packers fan, nothing is funnier than the outcome of the Bears moving to Indiana. I just want to put that out there. Openly biased in this case — I own two shares of that stock — but I’m going to make the comparison here. And the reason I started there is not only because I think that’s a funny outcome, although I do, but it feels like we are in the middle of a generational political realignment.

I’m sure you feel that, in this election campaign, the idea of big business and how that should interact with the government, and how the government should be able to push back on big business and not give in to big business. All of that feels up for grabs.

And the comparison I will make in this specific case is your fellow governor, Gavin Newsom, in California. They sued the Ellison family, Paramount, over the Warner Brothers merger. Paramount threatened to leave. They made a lot of noise about Nashville, Texas, Miami, or wherever you make noise about these days, and it feels like Newsom caved. It feels like he pressured his Attorney General, Rob Bonta, to settle that lawsuit and keep them there.

They settled the lawsuit. The next day, the Ellison family is like, “We never… We’re from California. We would never leave.” I see a parallel here with the Bears that is connected to that larger realignment, how government and business should interact. Do you see that parallel? Do you feel that realignment?

Well, what I can tell you is we’re pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois, and that’s really what we’re in the midst of now with the Bears. But I understand your point about realignment. I mean, there is a generational change, and I think it’s also an attitudinal change about protecting taxpayers, protecting people who frankly are among the most vulnerable to all the technology that’s overtaking people’s lives and invading people’s homes.

And so I do believe that the government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just a collaborator with business on everything. I’m a businessman, as you know, before I became governor. But I also know that, for the people of Illinois anyway, my job is to protect the working people of this state who often don’t have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them. So that’s kind of the realignment that I see.

And that generational shift, I agree with you. It’s partly a Democratic Party generational shift. Generationally, we’re a little more aggressive. And I’m probably older than the next generation that’s already possibly taking office this November. I’m 61 years old, but I think of myself as having come out of the tech world and as somebody who has been a fighter for progressive values that, yeah, we’ve got to become more aggressive and make sure we’re standing up for our people.

There are two places where I see the realignment in particular. One is data centers, one is privacy, and you just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, which is antitrust broadly. It’s weird if you go into Silicon Valley. David Sacks is retweeting Lina Khan from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to manage safety.

They both agree that these companies don’t need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive. Again, putting that in the context of regulating these companies, thinking about the dynamic between the government and the biggest companies in the world. I’ll just ask the question, I guess, more directly. Do you think Newsom was right to give in to Paramount, or do you think he should have forced them to make good on that threat to leave?

I can’t speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer, so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say once again that our orientation today — and I think about the big AI companies and the big social media companies as well — has to be like, wait a minute, too much power in too few hands.

Particularly when we talk about AI, where it’s potentially existential, but certainly transformative, which is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we’re going to have to get very engaged. Guardrails, of course, on both parts, but also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment in the United States. I’m not somebody who is necessarily convinced that we have to see a whole bunch of job loss, but that does feel like that’s the direction this is going.

What I’m suggesting is we better be prepared, and we better be protecting people who are going to lose their jobs, or at least it appears they’re going to lose their jobs. And I’ll just give you this thought. If these days 4 percent unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we’re going to see is — if that’s sort of the level that we’re going to hopefully aim for and stay at — that in very short order, we could end up at 7 percent and have that be the baseline, or maybe 10 percent.

And if you think about what’s happened, the upheavals of economies and of governments when you get to 10 percent unemployment in any country. We better be focused on how we’re going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you’re going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people. So we’ve got to wrestle with that and come to a conclusion.

I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between, particularly, states and the big companies, because that brinksmanship is real. The threat is we will leave. We just covered, I don’t know, Kevin O’Leary in Utah talking about data centers, and the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin O’Leary building that data center. But his argument was, “Well, I’m just going to shop around.”

This is what states do. They compete with tax incentives and benefits, maybe for data centers, which will put everyone out of a job. They compete for land use rights. You’ve got a rural state with a lot of farms in it. How are you thinking about that dynamic? Do you feel like you’re in competition with the other states, or is this bipartisan realignment creating more of a level playing field where these companies are going to have to actually give something?

We are in competition. We just are because it isn’t bipartisan, at least if you ask me. Unless there is a change in the government. I’ll pick on Texas for a second, and there is a chance that you’ll see a new governor in Texas as of November 3rd. In fact, a good chance. But if you look at Texas as it’s run today by a three-term, hoping to be a four-term, Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of changing their alignment about incentives.

In the state of Illinois, we don’t want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously want to protect the revenue that we’ve got for the state to pay for the things we think are valuable to our people, but we also want to make sure that we’re attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida — pick your poison. Michigan may be slightly different just because it’s got democratic control, but these are our competitors. When I’m competing to have a company move to Illinois, I’ve got to make sure, first of all, that I’m somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives, because otherwise we don’t even get considered.

And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean, I want to give away less than more, and then I want to provide whatever other advantages I can that aren’t financial so that I can protect the resources that we have. An example of that is, we like to talk about a kind of white-glove service that we offer to companies. If you’re going to bring a factory here, let’s say, just to give an example, we want to make sure that we’ve got somebody who’s kind of a concierge for your company that’s walking you through each of our departments where you need a permit. It doesn’t mean we’re lowering the standards. It just means, a lot of times, the bureaucracy eats up so much time that it makes it impossible for a company to actually do what they want to do in your state.

We try to make sure that if we’re going to attract a large company, with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, that we’re at least making it a little easier for them to go through without having to give them massive tax incentives. So that’s the way I think about it. We are in competition. There’s just no doubt about it. Should we be? There’s a lot of discussion about whether we shouldn’t, and maybe at the federal level we should do something about leveling the playing field, but this is the world we’re living in right now.

I wanted to ask those questions just to set the baseline. I really do think something is happening. A lot of young people are dissatisfied with the status quo. A lot of people in general are dissatisfied with what big tech companies are trying to do with AI, with the potential for job loss.

And the relationship between the people, the government, and those companies seems more fraught than ever, especially as they’re trying to expand their physical infrastructure with data centers, as they all become defense contractors, literally taking our tax dollars to sell weapon systems and collect data for the government. That’s a big swirl.

I wanted to start there, but I just want to take one second here and ask you the Decoder questions because I personally think the operation of government is so opaque. It’s very easy to figure out how big companies are run. The CEOs won’t shut up. They’re on podcasts all day long. I think most people have no idea how your job works.

So you were elected governor. How is your office set up, and how have you structured the state government of Illinois?

Just starting from where I sit, and then, of course, we look at it from a customer service perspective. But starting just at the top, I actually did something that no governor of Illinois has ever done — which is that I created not just one deputy governor. We obviously have a lieutenant governor who’s elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody getting appointed by me to serve under me, to help manage the government with me. What I did was put four deputy governors in place, a general counsel, and my chief of staff.

Why is that important? Because what I’ve tried to do is to break down the silos of government. I took all of the health and human services-related departments — that’s the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, everything from health insurance, Medicaid, and public health during the pandemic — and put it all under one deputy governor working directly for me. The idea is that instead of my having, let’s say, 26 direct reports, I’ve got four or five direct reports plus my chief of staff, who each have, let’s say, six or seven departments underneath them.

From my perspective, what I wanted to do was make sure that I’m breaking down the silos of government, making these departments that are often building walls, and they don’t want to talk to one another because they’re afraid they might lose jobs in one department to another department, or lose control of a program if they’re talking to one another. That’s the way it used to be. Now we’re like the deputy governor is there to either beat the heads together or at least bring them together so that they will be operating the government more efficiently. Okay, so that’s from the top.

From the bottom, which is: how do people who live in Illinois interact with the state government? And obviously, technology is one of the upgrades that’s occurred and made it easier. Illinois, frankly, had not significantly invested in those processes before I became governor, or in the technology that was necessary. And I’ll just give you one example of this: We created something called BEACON, which is designed to address the problem that parents and families have with mental health for children. It turns out that there were seven different ways in which people approached the government to get help, and we weren’t coordinating those, and we weren’t helping to provide all of the resources.

I’m talking about outside resources. How do you find a therapist? How do you find a psychiatrist? And how do you pay for those things? Medicaid, if you can’t afford it on your own. But the point is, there’s one door to enter through BEACON that allows you to get access to all of those resources, even if they’re in multiple departments. So that’s just one example. We’re trying to think of this as a customer service operation. It’s one thing to say this is how the org chart looks and another thing to say, this is how you access all the resources of the government that you need.

We provide programs that really matter to people. We have a birth equity initiative to reduce maternal mortality, particularly in Black and Brown communities. And free diapers for some people. The problem is, people don’t even know that the programs exist, and how would you ever figure out that the programs exist, especially if you’re a working person who’s working two minimum-wage jobs? You don’t have any time, and you don’t have any money, and you don’t even know how to talk to the government. And so we’re trying to fix all of those problems of the government with the way that we interact with people.

It’s funny. It feels like that is one of the bigger opportunities when it comes to AI, just letting the AI navigate a bureaucracy for you and communicate what resources are available. The flip side of that is that people hate AI. They truly dislike it, and it doesn’t feel like that connection has been made — that a lot of these tools can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you. Are you thinking that should be an investment that you make, that it might be what turns the tide in terms of how people feel about these tools?

Yes, but I’m not plunging headlong into it. And I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it.

I mean, the United States government rolled out its AI chatbot to look at webpages across the government.

Well, there you go.

I guess what I’m trying to do is make sure that… I created something called the AI Cabinet in my government, and that is to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government, so that we’re thinking about privacy, safety, and efficiency. And those things have to be talked about together. You can’t just say we’re going after efficiency and we don’t really care about the other two.

So that’s the idea, the AI cabinet. It’s also that, honestly, there are things, as you know, about AI that are dangerous. And so we’ve got our emergency management agency on that AI cabinet. We’ve got our state police on that AI cabinet. And remember, a lot of the people that work in those agencies aren’t particularly proficient at AI or really understand the potential and the potential dangers.

That’s why we brought in experts, for example, from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, just as two examples of places where we’re drawing expertise. So yeah, there’s a lot to be done. I would say we’re trying to approach it carefully before it gets out of control to a point where we have no way to pull it back in.

The other Decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job. You have some constraints in your decision-making process, right? There’s a state legislature, there’s a federal government, you have other agencies in your state. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

Well, I don’t do it the way Donald Trump does.

It’s funny you say it that way. I guess I start with the idea that we have a problem to solve and that decisions have to get made. Are those decisions ones that need to come to the governor? Because you’re right, I only have so much bandwidth. So the question is: which are the most serious ones that can’t be solved by other people, or are unlikely to get the outcomes that I would want by handing them over to other people? And then those automatically come to me.

So what I’m making decisions about is kind of the first answer to your question, and then it’s how do I actually make the decisions? For me, I am not one of those people who thinks that I’m right 100 percent of the time. Maybe a good way to describe it, and I’m joking a little bit when I say it, is that I’m 90 percent sure I’m right, but there’s also a 10 percent chance that I’m dead wrong. I want to make sure that I’m getting input and a debate before I actually make the final decision.

Someone once told me that the best CEOs are ones that, in their organization, are a little bit below average in terms of their capability and intellect. I’m not saying we want below-average leaders. I’m just saying you’re so good at hiring that you’ve got people in your organization who are really far better than you are at various things that you’re not particularly good at. Maybe knowing what you don’t know and being willing to ask for help is a philosophy that I have. Be willing to ask for help if it’s something you really don’t know.

And I’ll be honest, when you become governor of a state, there are a whole lot of topics within the purview of a governor. Making decisions about all those topics, maybe a human being who has super intelligence might be able to do it, but most people don’t start out knowing everything there is to know about public health, public safety, and education. And so you start out with what you know and then try to add expertise to it and then make decisions based upon the best experts debating one another in front of you. At least that’s how I like to do it.

Give me an example. Governor Kathy Hochul from New York was on the show. She said in her first week she needed to declare a state of emergency because of a hurricane, and she just didn’t know how, which was very humanizing in its way. Give me an example of when you became governor, and there was something where you just didn’t know.

COVID.

Sure.

I mean, honestly, no one runs for governor thinking there’s going to be a global pandemic. You think you’re going to solve education problems for people or put more money in people’s pockets by raising the minimum wage or whatever, but COVID comes along. And I have to admit, the level of expertise, I don’t think any governor… Well, maybe Josh Green, the doctor who’s the governor of Hawaii, maybe he had a lot to [of expertise] start with — but for the rest of us humans, that was one where we were learning on the job.

We were working 18 hours per day. My entire team was all in, and we had to do things like emergency procurement of ventilators and masks, and we had to go outside the box. It’s not like we could just put it through our central management services, look for a contract, or whatever. This was like, I need masks in three days.

I’ll tell you a quick story, if you’re interested, about my interaction with Donald Trump at the time because I think it’s interesting, anyway. But I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, in case you didn’t know. I was one year into office when the COVID pandemic hit, and I had not… I mean, I talked to his administration, but I didn’t talk to him directly. So I picked up the phone and called him, and I said, “Mr. President.” By the way, I wrote a script for myself because I know he likes to be flattered, and I’m not somebody who normally likes to flatter him, but I wrote a script for myself. I saved it; I even have it today.

And I said, “Mr. President, you’re a great businessman, but you can understand that paying $8 for an N95 mask that should cost us 75 cents means we’re in a national emergency. We need to be able to get these things and afford them, and I’m competing against all the other states. We need to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to make sure that we’re making enough masks in the United States.” That’s what I told him. And then I said, “But I need masks right now. What can you do for me?” I said, “I need 2 million N95 masks, and I need 4,000 ventilators.” And he never delivered, just so you know, even though he promised that he would deliver.

The challenges in COVID were mighty, and the organization that we had to create around it… I had meetings every morning just on this topic, figuring out, okay, how many hospital beds [are available]? We didn’t have a system that would tell us statewide how many hospital beds are available in each region. What happens if you have an outbreak and it really is overtaking some region? What do we do?

And so these were all the things we had to learn on the fly. And all I can tell you is, once again, back to hiring great people to have around you, I really felt like I proved that I had done a good job of hiring because the people around me were tremendous. One of whom, by the way, is now running as my lieutenant governor partner in this election.

It’s interesting you brought up COVID in the context of our conversation about generational political realignment. I would actually point to COVID as the beginning of a particular realignment around what the government should measure, how much control the government should have over people, and all of that has led, I think, directly into the bipartisan pushback against Flock cameras.

The very notion of privacy is not, in my mind, left or right anymore. The CEO of Flock got himself in all kinds of trouble because he kept saying all the people who wanted to ban Flock cameras are criminals, and he would go on MAGA media and say this. I think that position was just rejected. We can see in states around the country that there’s pushback against Flock cameras. I would point to COVID as the beginning of that.

The idea that the government could be too intrusive, and in particular, the government should not be able to measure things. “If you don’t test, there won’t be COVID” just became an idea. And the idea that we shouldn’t measure things, or we should tear down our systems of measurement, is a big part of the second Trump administration. But I see that privacy connection very clearly to COVID. In one world, the government coming together to protect its citizens and build a bunch of systems could have gone a very different way. In the one we live in, there’s ferocious pushback to that, on the left and the right in some ways. How do you feel about privacy right now?

I know Illinois leads the nation. You’ve got the Biometric Identification Protection Act. Every time I fly to Chicago, I’ve got to push the button at the airport to say that it’s okay to look at my face. That’s one way of going about it. But then you do have, I think, hundreds of Flock cameras in Cook County alone. People have Meta glasses with cameras in them. There’s something happening with privacy that is running right into the aftershocks of COVID and how people feel about government intrusion. How are you finding a way through that balance?

Well, and don’t forget AI.

Yep.

As you’re suggesting. I mean, talk about a collision. This focus on privacy is warranted and long overdue, to be honest with you. I understand what you’re describing about COVID, but I think something that came out of COVID got accelerated, and that was conspiracy theories.

Yes.

And I’m not suggesting that everything you hear now about the pushback around privacy is a conspiracy theory, but it is easy for these things to spread, and people have misinformation that’s informing them about how these things are used. Having said that, I guess what I think is that we are having to solve multiple problems at the same time, and that AI is coming.

Let’s just go to AI for a second. It’s here. I mean, I say it’s coming, but it’s here. It’s not going to stop. We’re not going to become Luddites without any AI. So the question is, in the context of privacy, what guardrails are we putting on AI, and how are we managing it? This idea that the president and David Sacks had, where they got all the companies together and said, “Hey, how about you guys self-police?” That’s not going to work, at least not for protecting people’s privacy. And frankly, it’s not going to provide any safety either because everybody’s going to operate in their own self-interest. It’s one of the reasons why you need a government, in my view.

I’m not suggesting the government is any smarter than these companies. But one of the reasons you have any kind of collective action of the government is because, separately, as you know, people operate in their own self-interest. I mean, you could have a Hobbesian world where people are killing each other, and there are no rules about it. So I think we’ve got to use the government as a tool and also be smart within the government. And that’s where the generational change, I think, is hugely important. Use the government as a smarter, less bureaucratic collection of people devoted to protecting the privacy of everyone and making sure that we’re addressing all the other challenges that come from AI.

So I guess I’ll just say, I don’t think we’re anywhere near where we need to be, but I will say, if we don’t have a federal government, now I’ve got a lot of… I’m very proud of the things that we’ve done here in Illinois around the AI Safety Measures Act, which is the toughest in the country, the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, and so on. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, but state by state, this is not the way to do this. We’re doing the best we can in the absence of a federal government that is addressing these issues.

And when I say federal government, I’m not just pointing at Trump. I’m pointing at Congress. No action on their part means that we’re going at it alone. And right now, I don’t know how many AI safety measure acts have been passed, but it looks like three to me. I mean, it’s New York, California, and Illinois. Maybe you could name a couple of others, but we three were the first. And yet, we’ve got 47 other states.

This worries me a great deal. You’re raising issues, and I’d love to tell you I have all the answers. I can tell you what we’re trying to think about is that we are the… People sometimes say that the states are laboratories of democracy. They’re actually laboratories of policy, and we are trying to, at least in Illinois, use ourselves as a laboratory for policy while not creating disadvantage for ourselves. And so that’s a very challenging thing to do, and why we need to change what’s happening at the federal government.

Focus on privacy for one second. I understand what you’re saying about AI. I think part of the privacy debate around Flock cameras, for example, is, well, sure, you can have one license plate reader in one intersection. And if the cops had to go there and pull the SD card out of it, drive it back to headquarters, upload it to their Apple IIe, and look at it manually, maybe people would feel one way about it.

But those cameras are all networked. They don’t have any access controls really. There are infinite reports of local police chiefs tracking their girlfriends across state lines with these cameras. You add in a system like Palantir, which can synthesize multiple databases and do all kinds of tracking across all kinds of systems. People see that.

The turn that is being made is that you can connect a lot of databases of information together, search them without a warrant, and track people across the entire country. You could ban that state by state. You could regulate it city by city, which we’re seeing happen with Flock, and you could maybe have some federal controls around privacy there. None of it’s really happening, but on the ground, people are ferociously pushing back. And that’s the connection I’m making to COVID, conspiracy theories, and how much power the government should have to surveil you and look at you.

Something happened in there where people’s attitudes about that really shifted. And I would say one of my core beliefs is that Americans do not like being told what to do. Party politics aside, Americans don’t like being told what to do. Something about that flipped and connected to: we have a network of license plate-reading cameras, and we’re going to tear them down when we see them because there’s something about that that offends us as Americans.

Illinois does have privacy laws. I think the last update to the biometric law you did was in 2024, and it has changed again. It’s gotten more vociferously opposed to tracking and surveillance in this country. Do you think you need another update to that privacy law?

I think we should be looking at that question every year. I’ll give you an example of it. We passed it, and again, I’m back to AI because I think how you’re describing it was a perfect way to say it. If it was an SD card that they had to go grab and then analyze back at the station, it’d be a different thing. But it’s AI that’s operating these things, and that’s allowing this stuff to move instantaneously and track people.

Look, should we be addressing it? Yeah, every year. It’s like the issue of ethics in government. What I mean is, the minute you put an ethics law in place, there’s somebody who’s trying to get around it. I mean, every year, it’s like every law… this is probably true across all of capitalism, maybe. There are always people trying to find a way around the law. Put a tax law in place, and someone’s trying to figure out how to get around it. And I think the point you’re making is that that’s why you need to have a proactive government, less bureaucratically and more aggressively trying to address these things. Are we going to be able to keep up with it? I’ll be honest, I don’t think so. And I also don’t think you can say, “Well, we’re just going to shut it all down” because there are things you’re missing out on.

It’s sort of like, and again, I keep going back to AI, but I think a lot about it. My children are 21 and 24. They’re going to live to 100 or 110 years old because AI is going to solve a whole bunch of medical challenges, and already is. There’s a cure now for sickle cell anemia, and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are going to live full lives. This is going to happen across the board in cancer and everything else. And so there’s all good in there, and then there’s the bad. So I know what you’re saying. I guess all I can tell you is I’m a believer that we can progressively — I don’t mean that in a political fashion — address these challenges.

In Illinois, we passed a law that disallows the use of AI in therapy for people because we think too much information gets collected, not enough humanity in the process, and we think that it should have humanity in it. Again, we’re not trying to shut it down across the board, but we’re going to have to see how it gets used and where it’s improper.

And I know that sounds imperfect because the technology is moving so fast that the idea that we’re going to be able to keep up with all the ways in which someone’s privacy could be breached seems very difficult, but I don’t know any other way to do it. That’s why you have a government, and maybe in the end we’re going to have this competing use of things like AI, where AI is monitoring AI, and AI that’s kind of privacy-friendly or focused on privacy is going to be monitoring the AI that’s not. But again, I know you don’t want to just talk about AI.

I am concerned. This issue of privacy has been around for a long time. You’ve been talking about it, I’m sure; I’ve been talking about it since before AI. This is like everybody giving over their personal information in exchange for access to something. And that was happening for a while, and then we’re all getting ads that are personalized to us based on stuff that we’ve essentially given up privacy for.

No, it’s funny. People believe, and we can write as many stories as we want about how your iPhone is not actually listening to you, but the ad tracking is so good that everyone believes that their iPhones are listening to them. The next turn is that it is now technologically feasible for these systems to listen to you all the time. And I can’t fall back on the idea that it’s cheaper for them to do the ad tracking when you hit I accept than to listen to you all the time, which was, for a decade, the right answer.

The economically correct answer was that ad tracking was cheaper than listening to you all the time. That might be very different in the future. There are already devices that we cover here at The Verge that purport to listen to you all the time and turn that into some actionable data. And it feels to me like the tech industry is trying to drive a truck through our privacy law, through our lack of AI regulations, through an entire system of governance that is designed for the pre-AI era.

The notion that you don’t have privacy in public worked really well when everyone didn’t have a cell phone that could connect to the cloud and instantly search every photo all at once, all the time, and do facial recognition. We live in that world now. I would say the public sentiment towards the idea that you don’t have privacy in public places has turned.

They don’t like the Meta glasses. They call them pervert glasses for a reason. And somewhere in there is, well, the federal government should pass privacy law. It is a failure of imagination in the United States. We don’t have federal privacy law. And then somewhere in there is the notion that the states are laboratories of democracy and policy.

It is amazing, by the way, how often on this tech and business show, Thomas Hobbes comes up and the very notion that the government is there to serve as an extension of us solving collective action problems. It comes up over and over again because I think the tech industry does not want to respect that dynamic.

This is why I started with that relationship between government and business, and the pushback and the negotiation, because here it feels like the tech industry is in a bubble of its own making. Truly, in a media bubble of its own making. And then all of the polling is, well, we hate AI. In particular, young people hate AI. And then all of the action is around data centers where NIMBYism, the most American of policy levers, is being pulled to keep these data centers out of communities. And that’s one way to stop AI.

You just pulled back on data center tax incentives in July. You’re pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees on reforms for new construction. Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation?

No, I don’t. I think it’s an effective route toward data center regulation. I know that people have conflated and put together their opposition to data centers with their opposition to AI. And a lot of people can’t describe why they’re opposed to one or the other because they’re conflated with one another. But I can say that — I mean, at least our aim is focused on the idea, and people really feel this, right, and there’s real data to back this up — the data centers themselves put aside what they’re doing inside a data center.

The data centers and what’s happening are eating up the available electricity, and that’s causing your electric bill to go up. At least that’s how everybody feels. There are a lot of things that we should have been doing in many years gone by to get to a point where electricity bills shouldn’t have to go up now. And that has to do with building out the grid. It’s a world where regulation and cross-border challenges have made it nearly impossible for a lot of the grid to get built the way that it should have. We produce a lot more electricity in the United States than we use, but we just don’t transport it well enough, and we would have a lot more available if we transported it better.

Okay, but even if you think that can’t happen efficiently, we need to build more capacity on the grid. My only point is the opposition to data centers is, in part, a result of the economic situation that’s happening right now in the country, where electric bills, gas, rent, everything has gone up. Your electric bill shows up every month, and it continues to go up, and people kind of scratch their heads and say, “Who am I paying for?” This is happening, and this is particular to Illinois.

We’re not going to have a whole discussion about energy policy, but I could just say this: We produce more nuclear power in the state of Illinois than any other state. Roughly 53 or 54 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power, and we’re a net electricity exporter. So we have an excess in Illinois, but our bills are going up, and that’s because of the methodology of the regional transmission organizations. Again, not to get into all the details of it, but essentially, if Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected, and that’s shocking to people who live in Illinois. But what they know is they don’t want their bill to go up, so they don’t want another data center nearby — even though the one in Ohio is actually causing the problem, even if you choose to oppose data centers.

So this is a challenge. I think there’s a lot of information that needs to be spread. But most of all, we just need a whole lot more capacity and a whole lot more grid that will, I think, subside some of the concern about data centers. To your point, privacy is, I think, more related to AI than data centers. And it’s not just AI, but the way AI is used. So we’re going to have a lot of opposition. You make an excellent point. I think this feeling of being out of control — you are not in control of your environment anymore — that’s the thing that is causing anxiety.

I want to go back to something really important that I was saying earlier. We need better people running for public office. We need smarter policy development in government. And part of that is a generational shift that’s needed and a better understanding. We have people who are serving in the United States Senate who have no idea. Was it the Secretary of Education, Trump’s Secretary of Education, who called it A1? I mean, because we’ve got older people who don’t have any exposure who are making policy theoretically on these things, and it should disturb us all. It’s one of the reasons we’ve got to advance the cause of better people and better systems in government.

We are on the cusp of an election. There might be a new Congress. There might be new leadership in Congress. There are a bunch of old Democrats too. In fact, I could probably point directly to Joe Biden’s age in the last election as the reason that he lost. Do you think that you need a wholesale change of leadership of the older Democrats as well?

You said, “Do we need a wholesale change?” I mean, I can tell you that I don’t think we should be telling —

Well, now I live in New York. I’ll just ask you, do you think Chuck Schumer should be the Senate majority leader if the Democrats take the Senate?

That’s a decision people in the Senate are going to make. I have no influence over it. I can tell you this: I am opposed to term limits because I think that you should have all the choices. You’re a voter. If you want to vote for the 75-year-old, I mean, go ahead.

I’m just suggesting that a great case could be made for the 45-year-old who’s just as smart as the 75-year-old was when he was 45, or maybe is now, but has a modern look at the issues around AI privacy, everything else we’re discussing, and a more aggressive view of how we ought to be reining in big corporations in their invasion of our lives. But I think people ought to make their own choices. I mean, for us to say, “Well, we should have an age limit. You’re 70, that’s it, you’re out.” I think that belies who we are as a democracy.

Well, you convinced me. I’m 46. I’m announcing my run for president here with you, Governor. That was a rousing speech.

Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump.

A low bar, but I’m glad I crossed it.

Let me tie two ideas together at the end. We’ve talked a lot about AI regulation. You mentioned social media regulation a little bit earlier in this conversation. I know that Illinois has a social media law. You have a bell-to-bell ban on phones in schools for kids.

I’m just going to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. It’s easy to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. If you look at how he talks about social media regulation, he basically describes the tragedy of the commons. You signed the landmark settlement with him. I think Illinois is due to get $750 or $760 million out of that settlement. And a big part of it is that TikTok and YouTube have to agree to the same terms, and then Meta will pay the rest of the money. And Zuckerberg very clearly has said that’s because if Instagram falls back on engagement bait and TikTok doesn’t, the kids will just use TikTok. And so the government has to get everyone to agree.

I will tell you that Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, does not agree. He’s not going to sign onto this. That’s one whole fight. Look at how Mark Zuckerberg talks about AI regulation. There’s none of that dynamic at all. He’s like, “It should be a free-for-all. We’ll all compete. If it’s not safe, the market will tell us. We’ll be fine.” And in my mind, these ideas are at total odds with each other.

In the market where he makes all the money, the government has to step in and stop him from hurting kids because apparently there’s no market demand for safe social media. And in the market where the AI CEOs are telling us they might kill us all if we don’t stop them, it’s a free-for-all, and the market will tell us if they accidentally kill everybody. How do you reconcile those things? Are you just happy that you got the social media case done after a decade of failing to regulate social media, or do you think you can solve AI with regulation this time instead of letting it just cook?

Look, I’m an optimist at heart, so I’m not going to suggest to you that I absolutely know that we can solve all the problems that we’re now facing, but I don’t know what else we can do. Other than, again, progressively making sure that we’re trying to address each of these things, trying to anticipate them to the extent we can. Can we be faster than AI is developing? I don’t know. But we can’t stop trying. I know that. And I would suggest to you that my optimism is founded because I think the vast majority of people want what you’re describing, which is reining it in.

And again, without destroying companies. I don’t think we’re all trying to do that. What we’re trying to do is stop the invasion into our home, stop the invasion into our children’s lives. I do think we can do that, but that’s because we’ve solved a whole lot of huge problems. That’s kind of like my answer to: is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes. And can we solve it? I don’t know. Nuclear weapons… I mean, just to give something of an analogy to something else. I mean, nuclear weapons are still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. And so far anyway, we’ve managed not to blow up the world. I don’t know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me.

We, as a country, can figure out how we want to rein it in here. That we, as a country, can work with our allies to figure out how we want to collectively try to rein it in. And then we have enemies in the world and competitors in the world, and we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to… Maybe it’s mutually assured destruction, like it was with nuclear weapons, but these are all things we’re going to have to work on, and work on fast.

And it’s scary because someone analogized this to… I mean, think about the early 1950s when every kid had to learn that if there was a nuclear blast, an atomic bomb that went off, get under your desk. That wouldn’t have been very effective. But the point is, people lived with the idea that a terrible nuclear holocaust could occur with a nuclear explosion. And so I think we’re heading into that world again with AI. I hope I didn’t stray too much from your question, but —

Let me ask you this, and it’s a little bit of a wild card here at the end.

We cover this industry so closely here, and the big difference with nuclear weapons is that there weren’t five companies building bleeding-edge nuclear weapons in private capacity, led by five guys who all hated each other. But that’s the dynamic of the AI industry. They all truly hate each other, and they’re all trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can.

And then some of them think the AI is alive. If you ask Anthropic, and we’ve done this, “Is Claude alive?” They don’t say no. They will argue with you about the definition of alive and suggest that, to them, alive means having a biological component and Claude doesn’t have that, but it might be conscious.

There’s a race to build AGI in the industry. Some people truly believe they’re building alien minds that have a different kind of consciousness. I’m not sure any government at any level has ever had to regulate that, or has ever come up against an industry that is religious about the fact that it might be building the next kind of intelligence.

Where do you stand? Do you think that they’re building a next kind of consciousness that stands alongside humans, or do you think that this is normal technology as some others do?

Boy, that is really another podcast for us, but I’ll just say this one thing: I just want to disagree with you for a second. Nobody could ever imagine a nuclear weapon either. And…

But the government built nuclear weapons. It wasn’t —

I understand. I’m not suggesting it’s the same. I’m suggesting it’s so new at the time that figuring out how you’re going to rein it in… Because remember, it’s not just one government, and the same thing with AI. It’s not just those five guys either. I mean, it’s like there’s somebody in China. Maybe five of those. I don’t know, and somebody in Europe or whatever. You could say we’re ahead, or they’re ahead. I don’t know.

But all I’m saying is, yeah, this is a proliferated situation and it’s not government-controlled. One hundred percent, you’re right; it’s not like nuclear weapons in that sense. But it is like nuclear weapons in the sense that nobody’s ever seen it before. It’s a complete mystery to start with. How are we going to rein it in? I mean, nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb, and they got it. We’ve figured out somehow how to deal with it.

Again, you’ve got to be an optimist to believe we can end up with the right solution here. I don’t know that we have the answer to “how do we rein it in?” I will say, though, that if we had the power to create it, we have the power, in my view, to rein it in. Is it conscious? You’re asking a deep question.

Have you felt the AGI?

I mean, do you think it’s conscious? Because I understand why people think it might have consciousness or it’s going to be conscious. But I think that’s why the ethicists and technologists need to be involved. And especially, in my view, the government’s got to be involved because how else are you going to rein in the five guys and the companies that have developed this? There is no other way.

I will tell you, I don’t think it’s conscious. And every now and again, you have an experience where it’s blindingly clear why other people believe that. When you watch a reasoning model take 90 steps over an hour and arrive at a conclusion, it’s impressive, and you can see why people believe that. I do not, and I have a lot of reasons for that.

It just occurs to me that if you set out to regulate a technology like this, if you believe one thing, you would maybe go down one path. And if you believe that you were building a consciousness, you might go down another.

Again, the whole industry itself does not agree on this. Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei do not agree on whether it’s alive. Jensen just wants to sell a bunch of chips, and he will happily tell you it’s just technology and you can control it. I think Dario thinks he’s building AGI, and that’s a different… There’s a whole reason he proposes different kinds of regulatory structures there. I’m just asking you, have you felt the AGI? Do you think it’s one path or the other?

I’m not going to give you a satisfactory yes or no.

I mean, I haven’t felt it. I guess that’s what I’m… My basic answer is I haven’t felt it.

Governor Pritzker, this was very fun. Thank you for indulging this last existential loop of a question. You’re going to have to come back to Decoder soon.

I would like to do that. Thanks, Nilay.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone signed a letter of intent saying they're considering a joint bid for spectrum that would support European direct-to-device satellite competition for SpaceX's Starlink. The four telecom companies say they would handle the ground infrastructure while a separate, unannounced satellite partner provides the satellite constellation:

The joint initiative by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone has a clear ambition: to meet customer demand for universal coverage in underserved areas, strengthen the resilience of public networks, protect critical communications, and support the develop …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Elon Musk says he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in the US starting next year. With around 72 million children in the US as of July 2025, Musk would be giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, according to a report from CNBC.

Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla, appears to be giving away the shares through Trump Accounts, the tax-advantaged investment accounts for American children. Musk responded to a post from Brad Gerstner, who helped launch Trump Accounts, saying "Thanks for helping enable this." Musk adds that this giveaway "will be the first of many."

The move comes just months after SpaceX president Gwynne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.

Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards. 

The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.

Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader (belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”

The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.

In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.

Poor people pay for your travel points

To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit. 

Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.

Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method. 

For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense. 

This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.

As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.

What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits. 

As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.

American swipe fees are too damn high

To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud. 

Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries. 

To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.

By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card. 

In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used. 

Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices. 

This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.

The Credit Card Competition Act might not work

All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition. 

Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.

Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees. 

The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make. 

After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.

Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points. 

It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.

Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI.

Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee leadership back in their hands. That could usher in a wave of newfound scrutiny for AI companies. Top Democrats on key committees have already signaled their willingness to press the industry on tax credits tied to data centers and recent hacking incidents, and would be able to set committee agendas if they take over, allowing them to call CEOs to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you live in Colorado and buy your own health insurance, there’s a good chance you’re one of the 139,000 people enrolled in a public plan crafted by your state leaders. You’re paying $0 for primary care visits and certain mental health visits, $0 for prenatal and postnatal care, and you don’t have to meet your deductible first.

On average, enrollees in these plans pay an estimated $14 to $33 less a month in premiums than people in comparable plans, and their annual out-of-pocket spending has fallen about 15 percent while holding steady for everyone else on the marketplace. 

Colorado didn’t build a government insurance company, rather, it designed the plan itself, down to the copays, and then required private insurers to sell it alongside their own.

A public health insurance option was supposed to be part of the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama supported the idea throughout his time in office, endorsing a government plan that could, in his words, “keep insurance companies honest” by giving them a government-backed competitor. But the idea was stripped from the bill before passage, after it became clear Senate leaders couldn’t get garner enough votes. Joe Biden campaigned for president on reviving a public option in 2020, but he never prioritized it once in office, and the progressive activists who championed it under Obama largely turned their sights to single-payer health care, which would cover all Americans.

The problems a public option was intended to address — access, costs, reliability — have still not gone away and a growing number of policy wonks and elected officials have started to ask if the idea deserves a spot again on the national agenda. 

Healthcare costs are soaring, and voters tell pollsters it’s among their top economic concerns. Medicaid work requirements are set to take effect in January, which could leave millions of low-income Americans uncovered, and private insurers have asked to raise ACA marketplace premiums by a median of 15 percent next year, after a roughly 20 percent hike in 2026. Two-thirds of adults say they favor a national government health plan, and polls suggest most voters imagine proposals like Medicare-for-all as a competitor to private insurance, rather than a systemwide replacement.

While the debate around public options stalled in Congress, three states have gone ahead and built their own. Washington state launched a public option in 2021, Colorado in 2023, and Nevada earlier this year. They all built on a provision of the Affordable Care Act that lets states apply to run their own version of the law — one Sen. Bernie Sanders fought for in the hopes that Vermont would use it to build a single-payer system.

Their experience also shows the challenges involved: Not only in overcoming political objections from competing insurers, but medical providers as well, who may have to accept lower payments in order to keep the public option’s premiums affordable.

Colorado leaders say this push to control costs was critical to their success.

“The driving point behind what we were doing was to set hospital prices,” said Michael Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner and an architect behind the program. “That was what we were driving towards and that’s what we did.”

It’s not clear if other states, or the federal government, will be willing to pick those kinds of fights with the broader medical industry. But if ever there was a time for it to happen it would be now, with affordability a massive political issue, and the public seemingly eager for serious action on health care. Just as the ACA began with a state-level experiment in Massachusetts, the success or failure of these early public-option states could presage much bigger changes nationally.

What Colorado did

The motivation behind the public option in Colorado was simple enough: Healthcare was simply becoming too expensive.

Dylan Roberts, the Colorado state senator who sponsored the bill, represents mountain counties that had some of the highest individual-market premiums in the United States.

“Back then, the top issue on the minds of my constituents was the cost of healthcare and the cost of health insurance,” Roberts told the Century Foundation, which interviewed the officials and advocates behind the Washington and Colorado programs for a report last year.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made the issue a priority as well. One of his first acts in office was creating an Office of Saving People Money on Healthcare, run out of his lieutenant governor’s office.

When the state finally moved, it moved against unified opposition. Hospitals and insurers were lined up against essentially everything public officials proposed. Roberts described the opponents as “basically anybody in the status quo health care industry” — meaning insurers, doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies.

Colorado first introduced a bill for a state-run insurance plan, where the state itself would sell coverage. This is the kind of arrangement closest to Obama’s ACA vision, and what most people think of when they hear “public option.” 

“It was really in large part to scare the bejesus out of the insurance companies that we were going to really come in and truly be a state-run competitor against them,” Conway, the state’s insurance commissioner, said last month at a panel in Washington, DC.

But then in 2021, when Colorado officials mapped out what building a state-operated insurance company would involve, they concluded that a state-run plan would not have been able to sell a single policy until 2025 or 2026.

Officials decided that was too long given the urgent need, so they rewrote the bill before it passed, requiring the insurers already operating in Colorado to sell a marketplace plan the state would design. This coverage launched in 2023.

“We would just be starting today if we actually truly stood up a public option,” Conway said on the late September panel. He thinks this is what the federal debate around a public option keeps getting wrong. “People want action now. They’re pissed off, they’re hurting. … They don’t have four years to wait.”

Importantly, while hospitals in Colorado were not mandated to participate, the state gave itself the power to force them. Colorado gave private insurers a target: By 2025, the state-designed plans had to cost 15 percent less than that insurer’s plans had cost in 2021, adjusted for inflation. How they got there was up to them, but an insurer can only squeeze its own profits and overhead so far. So the rest effectively had to come out of the costs insurers paid to hospitals. And if an insurer missed the target, the commissioner could haul both the insurer and the hospitals responsible into a public hearing to defend their prices — and then order the hospitals to take less.

That threat of a hearing was a powerful enforcement mechanism. “No one wants to be called in front of a public hearing where press are going to be there,” Kyla Hoskins, Colorado’s deputy insurance commissioner, told the Century Foundation. The hospitals cared about that more than the insurers did, according to Conway. The state launched complaints against nearly every carrier in the individual market and then pulled hospitals in with them. After that, according to Adam Fox of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, the price negotiations started happening, meaning no enforcement hearing actually took place.

Doctors complained early, but Conway said hospitals were the harder fight. The state worried that a single large hospital system refusing to participate could sink the entire plan, but in the end, no hospital refused. 

The result is the Colorado Option, a standardized plan that every insurance company in the state’s individual and small-group markets has to sell. There are 36 of these plans on the individual market for 2026. 

And people are choosing it. Enrollment went from about 14 percent of the state marketplace’s customers in 2023, the first year, to a third in 2024, to roughly half today.

Researchers at Brown University found the savings weren’t limited to the public option. Across Colorado’s individual market, the cheapest silver plans — a benchmark middle-tier ACA plan — now cost more than $100 a month less than equivalent plans in similar states.

Not everyone is celebrating Colorado’s policy development. Two industry-funded groups, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future and its state affiliate Colorado’s Health Care Future, have campaigned against the program for years, citing a 10 percent rise in individual market premiums in its first year, and a 2024 report they commissioned from Hoover Institution researchers, which estimated Coloradans in public option plans collectively paid $13.3 million more in 2023 than if they had chosen the cheapest nonpublic options plans. 

Andrew Shermeyer, a doctoral candidate in health policy at the University of Minnesota, found the program made coverage cheaper for people receiving federal subsidies but more expensive for those who don’t. Hoskins, who oversees the program, disputed that, pointing to the Brown analysis finding premiums fell across the state, including on private plans.

Cara Welch, a spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association, pointed to the looming Medicaid cuts with HR 1. “Public option plans that would further weaken the healthcare system and shut doors to care are the wrong solution,” she told me.

How the public option died in 2009, and where it went

While states are working to implement their own public options, a national version would still have to overcome the same barriers it faced the last time it was tried.

The original idea for a national public option was a government-run insurance plan that would be sold on the new Obamacare exchanges, next to the private plans. 

Jeanne Lambrew, who worked on the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration and now directs health care reform at the Century Foundation, said on the DC panel that there were several reasons that made that particularly hard at the time, and that she doesn’t think those reasons have been resolved. 

The first challenge was determining who would end up in the plan, because if sick and expensive patients concentrated in the public option, then it would cost too much to run. But if sick people were concentrated in private plans instead, that could also make it too expensive for those insurers and they could pull out of the market. Something like that second scenario, what economists call “adverse selection,” played out in the early years of Obamacare, when insurers raised prices and pulled out of unprofitable areas, leaving some counties on the brink of having no insurer at all.

The second challenge Lambrew outlined is whether doctors and hospitals would take the public plan, and what they would get paid. In 2009 Democrats pitched participation in a public option as voluntary, which was a problem because it meant that in order to induce the most desirable doctors or the hospital everyone wants, the government would have to pay them high enough rates — which would make the savings effectively disappear. 

The third challenge was whether a government agency would sell insurance directly, or whether private companies would sell a plan the government designed, as Colorado later decided to do. 

While the public option was ultimately cut from the Affordable Care Act, what survived was a provision letting states apply for federal waivers to try their own designs, so long as coverage stayed as broad and affordable and didn’t cost the federal government more. 

That provision’s biggest champion was Sanders, who wanted Vermont to use it to build the first single-payer system in the country. Though Vermont tried and gave up in 2014, the clause instead became a legal opening for Washington, Colorado, and Nevada to later use. So although the ACA didn’t include a public option, Lambrew emphasized, it still built the path to the ones that exist now.

Washington state went first, passing its law in 2019, and made the opposite choice from Colorado on hospital mandates. Instead Washington asked hospitals to participate voluntarily, and many unsurprisingly didn’t. In the first year the plan was sold in 19 of the state’s 39 counties, cost about 11 percent more than the cheapest comparable plan, and drew roughly 1 percent of enrollees.

So the legislature went back and passed a second law in 2021, this time requiring hospitals to contract with at least one public option plan if one made them an offer. The requirement took effect for 2023, and enrollment has climbed every year since. By 2025 the plan was available in every county in the state. About 115,000 people signed up for a public option plan for 2026, or roughly 40 percent of Washington’s marketplace.

Nevada’s plans went on sale this year, and the state gave itself the least leverage of the three. It sets premium targets but cannot set hospital rates, and it suspended its provider participation requirement for the program’s first year. Enrollment has come in below projections. “The story is unfinished here,” Lambrew said of Nevada.

Taking the public option national

The hospital industry uses the plight of rural hospitals, which are often struggling financially, to argue against public options or the government getting involved more generally to lower costs. 

Healthcare reformers tend to respond by exempting rural hospitals from price caps, though Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner, says that is a mistake. Rural hospitals are generally paid far less by private insurers than large systems are, and at the price levels under discussion, he said, a cap would actually represent a raise for most of them. Tell a rural hospital it will get three times what Medicare pays and “they would think you were the savior,” he stressed.

Conway has been getting a lot of calls from other states interested in adopting what they’ve done. But in every conversation he’s blunt with the person on the phone, saying they’d have to be prepared to take on hospital prices. “When I bring that up with other states, the appetite isn’t there right now,” he said on the September panel.

Conway blames Medicaid cuts for the reticence. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 7.5 million Americans will lose their health insurance by 2034, and states bracing for that are not eager to pick fights with hospitals at the same time. Undoing those Medicaid cuts, Conway said, is “an incredibly important floor” and “the foundation to actually doing anything else past that.”

The federal government does have one tool that Colorado and other states lack: a public insurance program that already exists. Hannah Garden-Monheit, a former Federal Trade Commission official on the healthcare panel, pointed out that Medicare, unlike a private insurer, is “a price setter, not a price taker.” Meaning it can announce what it will pay rather than negotiate for it. Some public option proposals in Congress would let people buy into Medicaid through the marketplace, or create a new plan that pays what Medicare pays, instead of building something from scratch. 

Roberts, who sponsored the Colorado bill, told the Century Foundation that the goal should be saving customers money, getting more people insured, and getting them the care they need. He said what the public program “actually looks like at the end of the day doesn’t matter as much as the outcomes of the product that people have.”

Laura Kate Zaichkin, who runs competition and affordability at Washington’s exchange, says the path to a workable public option might not be easy, but the rewards are worth it.  

“It takes a lot of political will, collaboration with partners, thoughtful design and implementation,’ she told the Nation’s Health. “It is a long-term investment that states can make to lower healthcare premium costs.”

With Democrats potentially set to expand their statehouse presence after the midterms, there may be more room to act on healthcare in other states next year. Even if Democrats don’t end up enacting a public option at the federal level, they could boost states in their efforts by restoring Medicaid funding, which could give lawmakers more room to stand up to health providers on costs. If these public options continue to grow, they might end up an unexpected ACA legacy.

Ein mögliches rot-grün-rotes Bündnis in Berlin schlägt bundespolitisch hohe Wellen. Während z.B. Grünen-Chef Felix Banaszak vor radikalen Kräften warnt und die Tür zur CDU taktisch offen halten will, ist Friedrich Merz wiederum hart und unerbittlich im Ton gegenüber Grünen und der SPD, wenn es um die Gespräche mit radikalen linken Kräften geht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, wie nun auch in der SPD der Widerstand wächst und Parteichef Lars Klingbeil sich derweil zurückhält.

Die Junge Union fordert derweil drastische Konsequenzen: Eine künftige Berliner Landesregierung soll z.B. von Geheimdienstinformationen des Bundes abgeschnitten werden. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der CDU-Abgeordnete Johannes Volkmann, warum er Teile der Berliner Linken als Sicherheitsrisiko sieht und eine politische Ächtung der Partei verlangt.

Auf internationaler Bühne sorgt die Kehrtwende der USA für Entsetzen, nachdem Donald Trump die Sanktionen gegen Russlands Schattenflotte auf Eis gelegt hat. Hans von der Burchard analysiert, wie dieser Schritt Europa sicherheitspolitisch erneut herausfordert und welche Folgen der Wegfall amerikanischer Unterstützung für die Ukraine im nahenden Winter haben könnte.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

Now, former Savannah police officer Amber Harpe was fired in August following a department investigation that found she had shared her Flock login information with her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent. SPD does not share its Flock data with ICE and said sharing access to the system violated the department's security protocols.

While he had unauthorized access to the system, Tyler Harpe conducted 983 searches related to 97 license plates, which were overwhelmingly registered to Hispanic drivers, according to Savannah's local ABC affiliate, WJCL. The Harpes defended their actions, saying they didn't use access for personal reasons and that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward."

Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arrested her. The incident was captured on video and has now garnered considerable media attention.

The delivery robots have become a common sight on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. If passed, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it, rather than a licensing agreement.

It's increasingly common for games sold to require a connection to a server. Meaning that when a company decides to shut down those servers, the games often become unplayable. Rep. Torres singles out NBA 2K25 as a recent example. 2K will be delisting the game from storefronts at the end of the month and shutting down its servers on …

Read the full story at The Verge.

During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."

Trump seems to be implying that he convinced Google to reflect the name change personally. That would seem to contradict Google's statement on the matter, in which it said that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on autonomous vehicles, policy, and road rules, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

The first state to pass a law legalizing self-driving cars operating on public roads was Nevada in June 2011 - long before such vehicles were operating on public roads. This was three years before the introduction of Tesla's Autopilot, five years before Waymo spun out of the Google self-driving car project, and seven years before the first commercial robotaxi …

Read the full story at The Verge.