Author name: Rejus Almole

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A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space

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The integration tasks still include installing Haven-1’s environmental control and life support elements, power, data, and thermal control systems, thrusters, fuel tanks, and internal crew accommodations. While that work continues on Earth, Vast’s demo mission will validate some of the company’s designs in space.

Flying at an altitude of 300 miles (500 kilometers), Haven Demo will test Vast’s computer, power, software, guidance and control, propulsion, and radio systems. The pathfinder will also provide Vast an opportunity to exercise its ground stations and mission control teams.

Meanwhile, Vast will ship Haven-1 from its California headquarters to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for a rigorous environmental test campaign. The Haven-1 module, roughly 33 feet (10.1 meters) long and 14 feet (4.4 meters) wide, will undergo acoustics, vibration, and electromagnetic interference testing. Engineers will also place the habitat into a test chamber to check its performance in the extreme temperatures and airless vacuum environment of low-Earth orbit.

Then, Haven-1 will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final launch preparations. Vast’s official schedule calls for a launch of Haven-1 no earlier than May 2026, but there’s still a lot to do before the spacecraft is ready to travel to the launch site.

The primary structure of Vast’s Haven-1 habitat is seen undergoing structural testing in Mojave, California. Credit: Vast

Once in orbit, Haven-1 will host a series of crew visits flying on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, each staying for two weeks before returning to Earth.

Haven-1 has a habitable volume of about 1,600 cubic feet (45 cubic meters), somewhat smaller than one of the primary modules on the International Space Station, but five times more than SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Vast’s longer-term roadmap includes a larger multi-module space station called Haven-2 to support larger crews and longer expeditions in the 2030s.

Vast’s demo mission is an initial step toward these goals. The satellite now circling the planet carries several systems that are “architecturally similar” to Haven-1, according to Vast. For example, Haven-1 will have 12 solar arrays, each identical to the single array on Haven Demo. The pathfinder mission uses a subset of Haven-1’s propulsion system, but with identical thrusters, valves, and tanks.

A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space Read More »

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Capitol Hill is abuzz with talk of the “Athena” plan for NASA

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In recent weeks, copies of an intriguing policy document have started to spread among space lobbyists on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The document bears the title “Athena,” and it purports to summarize the actions that private astronaut Jared Isaacman would have taken, were his nomination to become NASA administrator confirmed.

The 62-page plan is notable both for the ideas to remake NASA that it espouses as well as the manner in which it has been leaked to the space community.

After receiving a copy of this plan from an industry official, I spoke with multiple sources over the weekend to understand what is happening. Based upon this reporting there are clearly multiple layers to the story, which I want to unpack.

In the big picture, this leak appears to be part of a campaign by interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to either hold onto the high-profile job or, at the very least, prejudice the re-nomination of Isaacman to lead the space agency. Additionally, it is also being spread by legacy aerospace contractors who seek to protect their interests from the Trump administration’s goal of controlling spending and leaning into commercial space.

The Athena plan’s origin

The leaked document is 62 pages long and, according to sources, represents a pared-down version of a more comprehensive “Athena” plan devised by Isaacman and his advisors early in 2025, after President Trump nominated him to become NASA administrator.

The Athena plan lays out a blueprint for Isaacman’s tenure at NASA, seeking to return the space agency to “achieving the near impossible,” focusing on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy, and becoming a force multiplier for science.

Isaacman’s nomination was pulled in late May, largely for political reasons. Trump then appointed his Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, to oversee NASA on an interim basis in early July. As a courtesy, in August, Isaacman’s team edited a shorter version of the plan down to 62 pages and gave a copy to Duffy and his chief of staff, Pete Meachum.

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Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

copyright act, copyright law, digital library, Features, Internet Archive, online archive, online library, Policy, wayback machine / /

“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle celebrates 1 trillion web pages on stage with staff. Credit: via the Internet Archive

Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

History of the Internet Archive

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times. He insisted that Kahle was “defining the public domain” online, which would allow Internet users to see ”how easy and important” the Wayback Machine “would be in keeping us sane and honest about where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Kahle suggested that IA’s legal battles weren’t with creators or publishers so much as with large media companies that he thinks aren’t “satisfied with the restriction you get from copyright.”

“They want that and more,” Kahle said, pointing to e-book licenses that expire as proof that libraries increasingly aren’t allowed to own their collections. He also suspects that such companies wanted the Wayback Machine dead—but the Wayback Machine has survived and proved itself to be a unique and useful resource.

The Internet Archive also began archiving—and then lending—e-books. For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project to create a “National Emergency Library” as libraries across the world shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project eventually grew to 1.4 million titles.

But lifting the lending restrictions also brought more scrutiny from copyright holders, who eventually sued the Archive. Litigation went on for years. In 2024, IA lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over the Archive’s Open Library project, which used a novel e-book lending model to bypass publishers’ licensing fees and checkout limitations. Damages could have topped $400 million, but publishers ultimately announced a “confidential agreement on a monetary payment” that did not bankrupt the Archive.

Litigation has continued, though. More recently, the Archive settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. A settlement in that case, reached last month, was similarly confidential. In both cases, IA’s experts challenged publishers’ estimates of their losses as massively inflated.

For Internet Archive fans, a group that includes longtime Internet users, researchers, students, historians, lawyers, and the US government, the end of the lawsuits brought a sigh of relief. The Archive can continue—but it can’t run one of its major programs in the same way.

What the Internet Archive lost

To Kahle, the suits have been an immense setback to IA’s mission.

Publishers had argued that the Open Library’s lending harmed the e-book market, but IA says its vision for the project was not to frustrate e-book sales (which it denied its library does) but to make it easier for researchers to reference e-books by allowing Wikipedia to link to book scans. Wikipedia has long been one of the most visited websites in the world, and the Archive wanted to deepen its authority as a research tool.

“One of the real purposes of libraries is not just access to information by borrowing a book that you might buy in a bookstore,” Kahle said. “In fact, that’s actually the minority. Usually, you’re comparing and contrasting things. You’re quoting. You’re checking. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, told Ars that the Internet Archive’s Wikipedia enhancements could have served to surface information that’s often buried in books, giving researchers a streamlined path to source accurate information online.

But Kahle said the lawsuits against IA showed that “massive multibillion-dollar media conglomerates” have their own interests in controlling the flow of information. “That’s what they really succeeded at—to make sure that Wikipedia readers don’t get access to books,” Kahle said.

At the heart of the Open Library lawsuit was publishers’ market for e-book licenses, which libraries complain provide only temporary access for a limited number of patrons and cost substantially more than the acquisition of physical books. Some states are crafting laws to restrict e-book licensing, with the aim of preserving library functions.

“We don’t want libraries to become Hulu or Netflix,” said Courtney of the eBook Study Group, posting warnings to patrons like “last day to check out this book, August 31st, then it goes away forever.”

He, like Kahle, is concerned that libraries will become unable to fulfill their longtime role—preserving culture and providing equal access to knowledge. Remote access, Courtney noted, benefits people who can’t easily get to libraries, like the elderly, people with disabilities, rural communities, and foreign-deployed troops.

Before the Internet Archive cases, libraries had won some important legal fights, according to Brandon Butler, a copyright lawyer and executive director of Re:Create, a coalition of “libraries, civil libertarians, online rights advocates, start-ups, consumers, and technology companies” that is “dedicated to balanced copyright and a free and open Internet.”

But the Internet Archive’s e-book fight didn’t set back libraries, Butler said, because the loss didn’t reverse any prior court wins. Instead, IA had been “exploring another frontier” beyond the Google Books ruling, which deemed Google’s searchable book excerpts a transformative fair use, hoping that linking to books from Wikipedia would also be deemed fair use. But IA “hit the edge” of what courts would allow, Butler said.

IA basically asked, “Could fair use go this much farther?” Butler said. “And the courts said, ‘No, this is as far as you go.’”

To Kahle, the cards feel stacked against the Internet Archive, with courts, lawmakers, and lobbyists backing corporations seeking “hyper levels of control.” He said IA has always served as a research library—an online destination where people can cross-reference texts and verify facts, just like perusing books at a local library.

“We’re just trying to be a library,” Kahle said. “A library in a traditional sense. And it’s getting hard.”

Fears of big fines may delay digitization projects

President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services have put America’s public libraries at risk, and reduced funding will continue to challenge libraries in the coming years, ALA has warned. Butler has also suggested that under-resourced libraries may delay digitization efforts for preservation purposes if they worry that publishers may threaten costly litigation.

He told Ars he thinks courts are getting it right on recent fair use rulings. But he noted that libraries have fewer resources for legal fights because copyright law “has this provision that says, well, if you’re a copyright holder, you really don’t have to prove that you suffered any harm at all.”

“You can just elect [to receive] a massive payout based purely on the fact that you hold a copyright and somebody infringed,” Butler said. “And that’s really unique. Almost no other country in the world has that sort of a system.”

So while companies like AI firms may be able to afford legal fights with rights holders, libraries must be careful, even when they launch projects that seem “completely harmless and innocuous,” Butler said. Consider the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which digitized 400,000 old shellac records, known as 78s, that were originally pressed from 1898 to the 1950s.

“The idea that somebody’s going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10-a-month Spotify subscription is silly, right?” Butler said. “It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but given the scale of the project—and multiply that by the statutory damages—and that makes this an extremely dangerous project all of a sudden.”

Butler suggested that statutory damages could disrupt the balance that ensures the public has access to knowledge, creators get paid, and human creativity thrives, as AI advances and libraries’ growth potentially stalls.

“It sets the risk so high that it may force deals in situations where it would be better if people relied on fair use. Or it may scare people from trying new things because of the stakes of a copyright lawsuit,” Butler said.

Courtney, who co-wrote a whitepaper detailing the legal basis for different forms of “controlled digital lending” like the Open Library project uses, suggested that Kahle may be the person who’s best prepared to push the envelope on copyright.

When asked how the Internet Archive managed to avoid financial ruin, Courtney said it survived “only because their leader” is “very smart and capable.” Of all the “flavors” of controlled digital lending (CDL) that his paper outlined, Kahle’s methodology for the Open Library Project was the most “revolutionary,” Courtney said.

Importantly, IA’s loss did not doom other kinds of CDL that other archives use, he noted, nor did it prevent libraries from trying new things.

“Fair use is a case-by-case determination” that will be made as urgent preservation needs arise, Courtney told Ars, and “libraries have a ton of stuff that aren’t going to make the jump to digital unless we digitize them. No one will have access to them.”

What’s next for the Internet Archive?

The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library, which is “a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world” that will be conveniently linked in Wikipedia articles to help researchers discover them.

The Archive is also collecting as many physical materials as possible to help preserve knowledge, even as “the library system is largely contracting,” Kahle said. He noted that libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education and decline in societies where power is being concentrated, and he’s worried about where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported in the long term.

With governments globally partnering with the biggest tech companies to try to win the artificial intelligence race, critics have warned of threats to US democracy, while the White House has escalated its attack on libraries, universities, and science over the past year.

Meanwhile, AI firms face dozens of lawsuits from creators and publishers, which Kahle thinks only the biggest tech companies can likely afford to outlast. The momentum behind AI risks giving corporations even more control over information, Kahle said, and it’s uncertain if archives dedicated to preserving the public memory will survive attacks from multiple fronts.

“Societies that are [growing] are the ones that need to educate people” and therefore promote libraries, Kahle said. But when societies are “going down,” such as in times of war, conflict, and social upheaval, libraries “tend to get destroyed by the powerful. It used to be king and church, and it’s now corporations and governments.” (He recommended The Library: A Fragile History as a must-read to understand the challenges libraries have always faced.)

Kahle told Ars he’s not “black and white” on AI, and he even sees some potential for AI to enhance library services.

He’s more concerned that libraries in the US are losing support and may soon cease to perform classic functions that have always benefited civilizations—like buying books from small publishers and local authors, supporting intellectual endeavors, and partnering with other libraries to expand access to diverse collections.

To prevent these cultural and intellectual losses, he plans to position IA as a refuge for displaced collections, with hopes to digitize as much as possible while defending the early dream that the Internet could equalize access to information and supercharge progress.

“We want everyone [to be] a reader,” Kahle said, and that means “we want lots of publishers, we want lots of vendors, booksellers, lots of libraries.”

But, he asked, “Are we going that way? No.”

To turn things around, Kahle suggested that copyright laws be “re-architected” to ensure “we have a game with many winners”—where authors, publishers, and booksellers get paid, library missions are respected, and progress thrives. Then society can figure out “what do we do with this new set of AI tools” to keep the engine of human creativity humming.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Inside the marketplace for vaccine medical exemptions

health, medical exemptions, syndication, vaccines / /

Not everything was quite as it seemed

Frontline Health Advocates provides medical exemption notes—for a fee. What exactly are they selling?

Maybe a client hears about them in the comment section of the Facebook group “Medical Exemption Accepted,” or on the r/unvaccinated forum on Reddit. Maybe it’s through an interview posted on the video-sharing platform Rumble. Or maybe it’s the targeted advertisements on Google: “We do medical exemptions.”

Cassandra Clerkin, a mother in upstate New York, first got in touch with Frontline Health Advocates near the start of the 2024–2025 school year, after hearing they had doctors who would write exemptions from school immunization requirements. One of Clerkin’s children, she said, had suffered seizures after receiving a vaccine. The family didn’t want more shots. But New York has some of the country’s strictest school immunization policies.

Perhaps Frontline could help.

Vaccine mandates have a long history in the United States, but they’ve been subject to fresh public attention—and partisan dispute—since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontline Health Advocates seemingly emerged from pandemic-era battles with a model that, experts say, appears to be unique: It bills itself as a standalone organization that supplies people across the US with medical exemptions from vaccination requirements—for a fee of $495.

On forms obtained by Undark, Frontline’s listed addresses are a storage facility in Denison, Texas, and a package store in Sedona, Arizona. The group publishes little information online about its leadership or finances, but it has quietly developed a following.

There’s little question that Frontline exemptions sometimes work, and some parents report positive experiences with the organization. But there are real questions about whether its legal strategy would hold up in court—and whether clients are confused about what, precisely, they are receiving.

In upstate New York, Clerkin said she spoke with a representative from Frontline by phone about the process. They made it sound, she said, like getting an exemption “would be pretty seamless.”

Soon after, she recalled, she received a call from a doctor named Andrew Zywiec. A week after the family issued a credit card payment of $495 to a chiropractic firm in California, the medical exemption arrived by email. “The duration of the restriction from receiving VACCINATIONS is PERMANENT,” the document stated, citing a range of health concerns, and warning that civil or criminal penalties could result if the school district ignored the request.

Clerkin submitted the document to the district.

Every state in the country has legal language on the books that seems to require certain immunizations before children can enroll in school—although in some places exemption policies are so lax that shots are effectively optional. The military also has vaccine requirements, as do some civilian workplaces, including many hospitals and nursing homes. Immigration proceedings, too, often require applicants to receive shots.

Some people may register personal objections to vaccination, or they may have medical conditions that could make receiving a shot dangerous. Workarounds exist. Most states, for example, allow parents to apply for religious or personal belief exemptions from school vaccine requirements by stating that they object to vaccination due to deeply held convictions. But those exemptions are sometimes denied, and in four states—California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York—they aren’t an option at all. (The policy in a fifth state, West Virginia, is currently in flux.)

In those states, the only way to attend school without a required shot is to receive a medical waiver. There are real reasons for some people to pursue them: They may be immunocompromised in a way that makes certain vaccines high-risk, or they may have had a bad reaction to a shot in the past. In some cases, families may earnestly believe their child cannot safely receive a vaccine, but have difficulty finding a physician who agrees, or who is willing to attest to that on an exemption.

Interest in medical exemptions tends to grow when laws tighten. In 2015, after a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened hundreds of people, California lawmakers ended the state’s personal belief exemption. Almost immediately, the medical exemption rate more than doubled, according to a 2019 paper by a team of public health researchers. The law “created a black market for medical exemptions,” one unnamed health officer told the researchers. Parents, the officer added, would go online and “get medical exemptions from physicians who were not their child’s treating physician.”

The state cracked down, prosecuting some health care providers for allegedly providing improper medical exemptions, and tightening the rules for receiving a waiver. New York, which eliminated religious exemptions in 2019, has taken similar steps; the Department of Health maintains a public list of health care providers who have been banned or suspended from using immunization registries in the state, on a webpage titled “School Vaccination Fraud Awareness.”

In New York, advocates say, state policies have made it prohibitively difficult for some families to obtain medical exemptions, regardless of the reason. “My understanding is that up until this year, again, a lot of doctors weren’t willing to write these medical exemptions,” said Chad Davenport, an attorney outside Buffalo, New York, who often represents families seeking medical exemptions. (One of his clients recently won a key ruling in a federal court case against a Long Island school district that had denied medical exemptions from at least six health care providers.)

Enter Frontline Health Advocates. The organization, Davenport said, “kind of stepped in and provided families at least an option, or a potential path.”

Two researchers who have studied vaccination exemptions in the United States said the organization appears to have a unique model: While individual doctors have sometimes gained a reputation for supplying medical exemptions, neither expert had seen a full-fledged national organization offering those services.

“They’re very blatant,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies vaccine law and policy.

The group’s founder and director is William Lionberger, a chiropractor who has been licensed to practice in California since 1981, and who once maintained a practice north of San Diego. According to public records, he has also served as a police officer in a town near Sedona. (Lionberger declined a request for an on-the-record interview, and the organization did not answer a list of questions from Undark.) Interviewers who have hosted Lionberger on their shows describe him as affiliated with America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that opposed Covid-19 vaccines and other public health measures while promoting unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

Frontline Health Advocates’ webpage was first registered in March 2022, with a name echoing that of America’s Frontline Doctors. By April of that year, the website was inviting visitors to “Get your exemption now.” In a 2023 interview, Lionberger described having a “team of medical experts” who “work with all kinds of situations,” evaluating clients both for “regular vax injuries and regular vax exemptive conditions.”

He added: “People now don’t even want their kids to get anywhere near a regular vaccine.”

The group employs a pair of distinctive legal strategies. One of these is to form itself as something called a Private Ministerial Association. Online, some groups that help set up such private associations describe them as offering special First Amendment protections. A membership application document hosted on Frontline’s website describes the group as “a private, unincorporated ministry that operates as much as possible, outside the jurisdiction of government entities, agencies, officers, agents, contractors, and other representatives, as protected by law.”

Another strategy is to invoke federal disability law. In the 2023 interview, Lionberger boasted that they drew on “the most powerful thing that you can bring against discrimination”—specifically, federal protections. A promotional video posted on the Frontline website makes a similar claim, advertising waivers “supported by the protections under US federal laws.” Undark obtained three near-identical exemptions sent to New York families in 2024. In them, Frontline argues that the client’s need for a medical exemption is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, which guarantees certain accommodations for people with disabilities and other medical needs.

In Frontline documents from 2024, the organization suggests that this federal protection supersedes state vaccination laws—offering a way around exemption policies across the country.

In New York, Clerkin had received a document combining medical language with legal details. The document bore the signatures of doctor Andrew Zywiec and an administrative law specialist and JD, Christine Pazzula, along with the seal of the United States Department of Justice.

Not everything was quite as it seemed. Frontline has no relationship with the Department of Justice. Pazzula, according to her LinkedIn profile, had received her legal degree from an unaccredited correspondence school in California, and her name does not appear in databases of attorneys admitted to the bar in New York, Texas, or Nevada, where her LinkedIn profile says she is based. (In a brief email to Undark, Pazzula said she no longer works for Frontline.)

Another parent who received a Frontline exemption in 2024 would later testify under oath that she believed Zywiec to be a physician licensed in the state of New York, but state records show that nobody named Zywiec has ever held a medical license in the state.

Multiple online testimonials about Frontline mention Zywiec. A review of public records suggests a turbulent history. Zywiec served in the Army and graduated from medical school in 2019, according to a CV. In 2020, he began a pediatrics residency at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, but the relationship soured: He ultimately sued the hospital, alleging an unsafe work environment, and filed an employment complaint that, among other concerns, said he had been “coerced into taking the so-called Covid-19 vaccine.” In court documents associated with the lawsuit, a hospital official described an employee who was “spotty and difficult.” In 2021, Zywiec’s co-residents had written a letter to their superiors alleging that he had made offensive remarks to colleagues and treated nurses poorly, also writing that he “would delay care to patients because he wanted to participate in procedures unrelated to his patients because they interested him.”

Zywiec maintains an online medical practice, where he describes himself as “an international medical doctor and board-certified indigenous medicine provider” and offers a range of services, including a $150, 30-minute, “Medical Excuse/Note” consultation that yields a “legitimate medical excuse tailored to your situation.” On X, where he has amassed a following in the tens of thousands, Zywiec regularly shares content about the dangers of vaccines.

The promotional video on Frontline’s website describes the exemptions as “signed by state-licensed physicians with full credentials.” Zywiec’s name does not appear in a national database of licensed physicians maintained by the Federation of State Medical Boards. (In a brief email, Zywiec referred interview requests to Frontline. He did not answer a list of questions from Undark, and Frontline did not respond to a question about Zywiec’s license status.)

The exemption that Zywiec had signed for Clerkin was denied. In a letter, the school district explained that New York law requires exemptions to be signed by a physician licensed in the state. Clerkin said that she was aware Zywiec was not licensed in New York, but Frontline seemed confident in their approach, and she thought it might work. That did not pan out, she said. “I feel like they talk this big thing,” Clerkin said. But, she added, “if you know that you can’t help these children, and you’re just preying on these mothers who will do anything for their children, that is evil.”

Some Frontline exemptions do get through, at least in New York. “I can certainly tell you that there have been some people, even this year, who have been able to get their Frontline Health waivers accepted,” Davenport told Undark. But, he said, courts have not tested the argument that an exemption invoking federal law will trump the state’s requirement that the exemption comes from a New York-licensed physician. He does not recommend Frontline to clients. “I basically tell them, although Frontline may technically be correct, it’s not a good legal position for you to be in,” Davenport said. “And so I always advise them to try to get a New York state waiver signed by a New York state doctor and then submit that, because that puts you in the best legal position.”

In a video on its website, Frontline warns potential clients that exemptions may be denied, noting that the group “cannot guarantee that an unknown person you are engaging with is going to abide by federal laws.” But Rita Palma, a health freedom activist on Long Island who has worked with many families seeking medical exemptions, told Undark that she thinks parents are still confused about the limitations of the waivers. “What I’m getting from parents is that Frontline Health Advocates say that federal law overrides state law,” she said. Whether or not that’s true in the case of vaccine exemptions remains unclear.

The $495 fee—extra for expedited service—is a steep price for some families. “They’ve made a nice killing in New York,” Palma said. “I hate to put it like that, but they’ve definitely gotten a lot of parents to pay them to get exemptions.”

It’s difficult to know how many waivers Frontline has sold. In online forums, people describe successes with schools. “I got lifetime medical exemptions for my children,” one parent wrote in a Facebook group in April, noting that she was not affiliated with Frontline. The group is “replete with lawyers to respond to any pushback from schools,” she added.

One mother in Connecticut told Undark that she had contacted Frontline in 2024, when her son needed a flu shot to stay in daycare. “I was looking around for a way to get an exemption,” she said. (The mother spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a professional need for privacy.) After a phone call with a licensed pediatrician in Texas, she received an exemption. The daycare, she said, accepted it. “It was a pretty smooth experience, overall,” she said.

“I was aware that it was a gamble,” the mother said; Frontline had told her the exemption might not be accepted. “But then they kind of were like, well, you know, technically, if they don’t accept it, it’s illegal because it’s protected by ADA and all that kind of thing,” she said.

The group has attracted attention from some public health officials. In Los Angeles County, a public health department website is topped by a large red banner warning that Frontline exemptions don’t work in California. In October 2024, in Connecticut, minutes from a meeting of the state’s School Nurse Advisory Council described Frontline as providing what the council believed to be “fraudulent” exemptions to families. A spokesperson for Connecticut Public Health, Brittany Schaefer, told Undark in late September that Frontline is the subject of “an active investigation.”

Undark asked three legal experts to review a copy of an exemption issued to a family in New York in September 2024 and obtained via court records. “It seems to be a fill-in-the-blank type of form,” said Barbara Hoffman, an expert in disability law at Rutgers Law School. The waiver, Hoffman believes, overstates the penalties generally levied for ADA infractions. School districts, employers, or others who received this form, she speculated, might feel like “it’s not worth the effort to reject this.”

“This looks like an official document,” she added, highlighting the seal of the Department of Justice and references to potential civil penalties. “It’s designed to intimidate somebody who doesn’t really know better, or just doesn’t want to risk any potential litigation.”

Could invoking the ADA really override state-level vaccine requirements? Reiss, the UC Law San Francisco expert, was skeptical, noting that state law has generally held in similar cases. “My expectation,” she wrote in an email, “is that that won’t hold.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Inside the marketplace for vaccine medical exemptions Read More »

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YouTube denies AI was involved with odd removals of tech tutorials

AI, Artificial Intelligence, content moderation, Policy, youtube / /

YouTubers suspect AI is bizarrely removing popular video explainers.

This week, tech content creators began to suspect that AI was making it harder to share some of the most highly sought-after tech tutorials on YouTube, but now YouTube is denying that odd removals were due to automation.

Creators grew alarmed when educational videos that YouTube had allowed for years were suddenly being bizarrely flagged as “dangerous” or “harmful,” with seemingly no way to trigger human review to overturn removals. AI seemed to be running the show, with creators’ appeals seemingly getting denied faster than a human could possibly review them.

Late Friday, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed that videos flagged by Ars have been reinstated, promising that YouTube will take steps to ensure that similar content isn’t removed in the future. But, to creators, it remains unclear why the videos got taken down, as YouTube claimed that both initial enforcement decisions and decisions on appeals were not the result of an automation issue.

Shocked creators were stuck speculating

Rich White, a computer technician who runs an account called CyberCPU Tech, had two videos removed that demonstrated workarounds to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

These videos are popular, White told Ars, with people looking to bypass Microsoft account requirements each time a new build is released. For tech content creators like White, “these are bread and butter videos,” dependably yielding “extremely high views,” he said.

Because there’s such high demand, many tech content creators’ channels are filled with these kinds of videos. White’s account has “countless” examples, he said, and in the past, YouTube even featured his most popular video in the genre on a trending list.

To White and others, it’s unclear exactly what has changed on YouTube that triggered removals of this type of content.

YouTube only seemed to be removing recently posted content, White told Ars. However, if the takedowns ever impacted older content, entire channels documenting years of tech tutorials risked disappearing in “the blink of an eye,” another YouTuber behind a tech tips account called Britec09 warned after one of his videos was removed.

The stakes appeared high for everyone, White warned, in a video titled “YouTube Tech Channels in Danger!”

White had already censored content that he planned to post on his channel, fearing it wouldn’t be worth the risk of potentially losing his account, which began in 2020 as a side hustle but has since become his primary source of income. If he continues to change the content he posts to avoid YouTube penalties, it could hurt his account’s reach and monetization. Britec told Ars that he paused a sponsorship due to the uncertainty that he said has already hurt his channel and caused a “great loss of income.”

YouTube’s policies are strict, with the platform known to swiftly remove accounts that receive three strikes for violating community guidelines within 90 days. But, curiously, White had not received any strikes following his content removals. Although Britec reported that his account had received a strike following his video’s removal, White told Ars that YouTube so far had only given him two warnings, so his account is not yet at risk of a ban.

Creators weren’t sure why YouTube might deem this content as harmful, so they tossed around some theories. It seemed possible, White suggested in his video, that AI was detecting this content as “piracy,” but that shouldn’t be the case, he claimed, since his guides require users to have a valid license to install Windows 11. He also thinks it’s unlikely that Microsoft prompted the takedowns, suggesting tech content creators have a “love-hate relationship” with the tech company.

“They don’t like what we’re doing, but I don’t think they’re going to get rid of it,” White told Ars, suggesting that Microsoft “could stop us in our tracks” if it were motivated to end workarounds. But Microsoft doesn’t do that, White said, perhaps because it benefits from popular tutorials that attract swarms of Windows 11 users who otherwise may not use “their flagship operating system” if they can’t bypass Microsoft account requirements.

Those users could become loyal to Microsoft, White said. And eventually, some users may even “get tired of bypassing the Microsoft account requirements, or Microsoft will add a new feature that they’ll happily get the account for, and they’ll relent and start using a Microsoft account,” White suggested in his video. “At least some people will, not me.”

Microsoft declined Ars’ request to comment.

To White, it seemed possible that YouTube was leaning on AI  to catch more violations but perhaps recognized the risk of over-moderation and, therefore, wasn’t allowing AI to issue strikes on his account.

But that was just a “theory” that he and other creators came up with, but couldn’t confirm, since YouTube’s chatbot that supports creators seemed to also be “suspiciously AI-driven,” seemingly auto-responding even when a “supervisor” is connected, White said in his video.

Absent more clarity from YouTube, creators who post tutorials, tech tips, and computer repair videos were spooked. Their biggest fear was that unexpected changes to automated content moderation could unexpectedly knock them off YouTube for posting videos that in tech circles seem ordinary and commonplace, White and Britec said.

“We are not even sure what we can make videos on,” White said. “Everything’s a theory right now because we don’t have anything solid from YouTube.”

YouTube recommends making the content it’s removing

White’s channel gained popularity after YouTube highlighted an early trending video that he made, showing a workaround to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware. Following that video, his channel’s views spiked, and then he gradually built up his subscriber base to around 330,000.

In the past, White’s videos in that category had been flagged as violative, but human review got them quickly reinstated.

“They were striked for the same reason, but at that time, I guess the AI revolution hadn’t taken over,” White said. “So it was relatively easy to talk to a real person. And by talking to a real person, they were like, ‘Yeah, this is stupid.’ And they brought the videos back.”

Now, YouTube suggests that human review is causing the removals, which likely doesn’t completely ease creators’ fears about arbitrary takedowns.

Britec’s video was also flagged as dangerous or harmful. He has managed his account that currently has nearly 900,000 subscribers since 2009, and he’s worried he risked losing “years of hard work,” he said in his video.

Britec told Ars that “it’s very confusing” for panicked tech content creators trying to understand what content is permissible. It’s particularly frustrating, he noted in his video, that YouTube’s creator tool inspiring “ideas” for posts seemed to contradict the mods’ content warnings and continued to recommend that creators make content on specific topics like workarounds to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

Screenshot from Britec09’s YouTube video, showing YouTube prompting creators to make content that could get their channels removed. Credit: via Britec09

“This tool was to give you ideas for your next video,” Britec said. “And you can see right here, it’s telling you to create content on these topics. And if you did this, I can guarantee you your channel will get a strike.”

From there, creators hit what White described as a “brick wall,” with one of his appeals denied within one minute, which felt like it must be an automated decision. As Britec explained, “You will appeal, and your appeal will be rejected instantly. You will not be speaking to a human being. You’ll be speaking to a bot or AI. The bot will be giving you automated responses.”

YouTube insisted that the decisions weren’t automated, even when an appeal was denied within one minute.

White told Ars that it’s easy for creators to be discouraged and censor their channels rather than fight with the AI. After wasting “an hour and a half trying to reason with an AI about why I didn’t violate the community guidelines” once his first appeal was quickly denied, he “didn’t even bother using the chat function” after the second appeal was denied even faster, White confirmed in his video.

“I simply wasn’t going to do that again,” White said.

All week, the panic spread, reaching fans who follow tech content creators. On Reddit, people recommended saving tutorials lest they risk YouTube taking them down.

“I’ve had people come out and say, ‘This can’t be true. I rely on this every time,’” White told Ars.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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SpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays

artemis, artemis iii, china, Commercial space, launch, moon, NASA, Space, spacex, starship / /

“SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible.”

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX on Thursday released the most detailed public update in nearly two years on its multibillion-dollar contract to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA, amid growing sentiment that China is likely to beat the United States back to the lunar surface with humans.

In a lengthy statement published on SpaceX’s website Thursday, the company said it “will be a central enabler that will fulfill the vision of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a lasting presence on the lunar surface… and ultimately forge the path to land the first humans on Mars.”

Getting to Mars is SpaceX’s overarching objective, a concise but lofty mission statement introduced by Elon Musk at the company’s founding nearly a quarter-century ago. Musk has criticized NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972, as unambitious and too reliant on traditional aerospace contractors.

Is this a priority for SpaceX?

The Starship rocket and its massive Super Heavy booster are supposed to be SpaceX’s solution for fulfilling Musk’s mission of creating a settlement on Mars. The red planet has been the focus each time Musk has spoken at length about Starship in the last couple of years, with Moon missions receiving little or no time in his comments, whether they’re scripted or off the cuff.

In the background, SpaceX’s engineers have been busy developing a version of the Starship rocket to fly crews to and from the surface of the Moon for NASA. The agency’s current architecture calls for astronauts to transit from the Earth to the vicinity of the Moon inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, made by Lockheed Martin, then link up with Starship in lunar orbit for a ride to the Moon’s south pole.

After completing their mission on the surface, the astronauts will ride Starship back into space and dock with Orion to bring them home. Starship and Orion may also link together by docking at the planned Gateway mini-space station orbiting the Moon, but Gateway’s future is in question as NASA faces budget cuts.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX valued at more than $4 billion to land two astronaut crews on the Moon on NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. The contract also covers milestones ahead of any human mission, such as an uncrewed Starship landing and takeoff at the Moon, to prove the vehicle is ready.

SpaceX’s Starship descends toward the Indian Ocean at the conclusion of Flight 11 on October 3. Credit: SpaceX

The fresh update from SpaceX lists recent achievements the company has accomplished on the path to the Moon, including demos of life support and thermal control systems, the docking adapter to link Starship with Orion, navigation hardware and software, a landing leg structural test, and engine firings in conditions similar to what the ship will see at the Moon.

Many of these milestones were completed ahead of schedule, SpaceX said. But the biggest tests, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling, remain ahead. Some NASA officials believe mastering orbital refueling will take many tries, akin to SpaceX’s iterative two steps forward, one step back experience with its initial Starship test flights.

The first test to transfer large amounts of cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen between two Starships in low-Earth orbit is now planned for next year. This time a year ago, SpaceX aimed to launch the first orbital refueling demo before the end of 2025.

Orbital refueling is key to flying Starship to the Moon or Mars. The rocket consumes all of its propellant getting to low-Earth orbit, and it needs more gas to go farther. For lunar missions, SpaceX will launch a Starship-derived propellant depot into orbit, refill it with perhaps a dozen or more Starship tankers, and then dock the Starship lander with it to load its tanks before heading off to the Moon.

Officials haven’t given a precise number of tanker flights required for a Starship lunar lander. It’s likely engineers won’t settle on an exact number until they obtain data on how much of the super-cold liquid propellant boils off in space, and how efficient it is to transfer from ship to ship. Whatever the number, SpaceX says Starship’s design for recovery and rapid reuse will facilitate a fast-paced launch and refueling campaign.

SpaceX tests the elevator to be used on Starship. Credit: SpaceX

The upshot of overcoming the refueling hurdle is Starship’s promise of becoming a transformative vehicle. Starship is enormous compared to any other concept for landing on the Moon. One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, or more than 21,000 cubic feet, roughly two-thirds that of the entire International Space Station, according to SpaceX. Starship will have dual airlocks, or pathways for astronauts and equipment to exit and enter the spacecraft.

An elevator will lower people and cargo down to the lunar surface from the crew cabin at the top of the 15-story-tall spacecraft. For pure cargo missions, SpaceX says Starship will be capable of landing up to 100 metric tons of cargo directly on the Moon’s surface. This would unlock the ability to deliver large rovers, nuclear reactors, or lunar habitats to the Moon in one go. In the long run, the Starship architecture could allow landers to be reused over and over again. All of this is vital if NASA wants to build a permanent base or research outpost on the Moon.

A competition in more ways than one

But hard things take time. SpaceX dealt with repeated setbacks in the first half of this year: three in-flight failures of Starship and one Starship explosion on the ground at the company’s development facility in South Texas. Since then, teams have reeled off consecutive successful Starship test flights ahead of the debut of an upgraded Starship variant called Version 3 in the coming months. Starship Version 3 will have the accoutrements for refueling, and SpaceX says this will also be the version to fly to the Moon.

The recent Starship delays, coupled with the scope of work to go, have raised concerns that the Artemis program is falling behind China’s initiative to land its own astronauts on the Moon. China’s goal is to do it by 2030, a schedule reiterated in Chinese state media this week. The Chinese program relies on an architecture more closely resembling NASA’s old Apollo designs.

The official schedule for the first Artemis crew landing, on Artemis III, puts it in 2027, but that timeline is no longer achievable. Starship and new lunar spacesuits developed by Axiom Space won’t be ready, in part because NASA didn’t award the contracts to SpaceX and Axiom until 2021 and 2022.

All of this adds up to waning odds that the United States can beat China back to the Moon, according to a growing chorus of voices in the space community. Last month, former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency during the first Trump administration, told Congress the United States was likely to lose the second lunar space race.

At a space conference earlier this week, Bridenstine suggested the Trump administration use its powers to fast-track a lunar landing, even floating the idea of invoking the Defense Production Act, a law that grants the president authority to marshal industrial might to meet pressing national needs.

An executive order from President Donald Trump could authorize such an effort and declare a “national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon,” Bridenstine said at the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

Charlie Bolden, NASA’s administrator under former President Barack Obama, also expressed doubts that NASA could land humans on the Moon before China, or by the end of Trump’s term in the White House. “Let’s be real, OK? Everybody in this room knows, to say we’re going to do it by the end of the term, or we’re going to do it before the Chinese, that doesn’t help industry.”

But Bolden said maybe it’s not so terrible if China lands people on the Moon before NASA can return with astronauts. “We may not make 2030, and that’s OK with me, as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have there.”

Sean Duffy, NASA’s acting administrator, doesn’t see it the same way. Duffy said last week he would give contractors until this Wednesday to propose other ways of landing astronauts on the Moon sooner than the existing plan. SpaceX and Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, confirmed they submitted updated plans to NASA this week.

SpaceX released a new rendering of the internal crew cabin for the Starship lunar lander. Credit: SpaceX

Blue Origin has a separate contract with NASA to provide its own human-rated lunar lander—Blue Moon Mark 2—for entry into service on the Artemis V mission, likely not to occur before the early 2030s. A smaller unpiloted lander—Blue Moon Mark 1—is on track to launch on Blue Origin’s first lunar landing attempt next year.

Blue Moon Mark 1 is still a big vehicle, standing taller than the lunar lander used by NASA during the Apollo program. But it doesn’t match the 52-foot (16-meter) height of Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander, and tops out well short of the roughly 165-foot-tall (50-meter) Starship lander.

What’s more, Blue Moon Mark 1 won’t need to be refueled after launch, unlike Starship and Mark 2. Jacki Cortese, senior director of civil space at Blue Origin, confirmed Tuesday that her company is looking at employing a “more incremental approach” using Mark 1 to accelerate an Artemis crew landing. Ars first reported Blue Origin was studying how to modify Blue Moon Mark 1 for astronauts.

All of this is a reminder of something Blue Origin said in 2021, when NASA passed over Bezos’ company to award the first Artemis lander contract to SpaceX. Blue Origin protested the award and filed a lawsuit against the government, triggering a lunar lander work stoppage that lasted several months until a federal judge dismissed the suit.

Blue Origin said SpaceX’s approach with numerous refueling sorties was “immensely complex and high risk” and argued its proposal was the better option for NASA. The statement has taken on a meme-worthy status among fans of Starship.

But SpaceX bid a lower cost, and NASA officials said it was the only proposal the agency could afford at the time. And then, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA in 2023 to provide a second lander option, the company’s concept also hinged on refueling the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander in space.

Now, SpaceX is making a new offering to NASA. Like Blue Origin, SpaceX said it has sent in a proposal for a “simplified architecture” for landing astronauts on the Moon, but did not provide details.

“We’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety,” the company said.

Since NASA selected SpaceX for the Human Landing System contract in 2021, the company said it has been “consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed.”

For example, NASA originally required SpaceX to only demonstrate it could land Starship on the Moon before moving forward with a crew mission. Lori Glaze, who leads NASA’s human exploration division, said in July that the agency is now requiring the uncrewed landing demo to also include an ascent from the Moon’s surface. NASA wants to know if Starship can not just land astronauts on the Moon, but also get them back.

“Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface,” SpaceX said. “SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program.”

An artist’s illustration of multiple Starships on the lunar surface, with a Moon base in the background. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX has built a reputation for doing things quickly. One example has been the rapid-fire launch cadence of the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is setting up launch pads and factories to manufacture and launch Super Heavy and Starship—combining together to make the largest rocket ever built—at an even faster rate than Falcon 9.

The company has launched 11 full-scale test flights of Starship/Super Heavy since April 2023. “This campaign has quickly matured the core Starship and has produced numerous feats,” SpaceX said. The company listed some of them:

  • Multiple successful ascents of the world’s most powerful rocket
  • The launch, return, catch, and reuse of that rocket to unlock the high launch rate cadence needed for lunar missions
  • The transfer of approximately 5 metric tons of cryogenic propellant between tanks while in space
  • Successful in-space relights of the Raptor engines that are critical for the maneuvers that will send Starship to the Moon
  • Multiple controlled reentries through Earth’s atmosphere

It’s true that these feats have come fast. Many more remain on the road ahead before SpaceX can make good on its commitment to NASA.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX surpasses shuttle launch total; Skyroot has big ambitions

rocket report, Space / /

All the news that’s fit to lift

“I do think we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact.”

Expedition 1’s Soyuz-U launch vehicle is transported to its launch pad in October 2000. Credit: NASA

Welcome to Edition 8.17 of the Rocket Report! Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the first crewed launch to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur. Since this time, humans have lived in space continuously, even through spacecraft accidents and wars on Earth. This is a remarkable milestone that all of humanity can celebrate.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Skyroot nearing first launch with big ambitions. Three years after India opened up its space sector to private companies, Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace is targeting its first full-scale commercial satellite launch mission in January 2026, Mint reports. After this debut flight, Skyroot is targeting a launch every three months next year, and one every month from 2027. Each satellite launch mission is expected to generate the company nearly $5 million, according to Skyroot chief executive Pawan Chandana.

A promising start … Skyroot became India’s first space startup to demonstrate a rocket launch when it sent up a smaller version of its satellite vehicle from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh in November 2022. There are several other Indian launch startups, but Skyroot appears to be the most promising. Even so, a launch cadence of every three months next year seems highly ambitious. A single, successful launch in 2026 would be a great step forward.

Canadian spaceport gets infusion of cash. Maritime Launch Services will receive a senior credit facility for up to 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.1 million) from Canada’s government-owned export credit agency for defense, telecommunications, and weather-monitoring needs, Payload reports. Spaceport Nova Scotia, which is the Atlantic launching facility for MLS, will use the money to build out infrastructure and a launch pad for orbital missions. Half of the money will be advanced immediately, with more available as construction costs arise.

Going up from up there … Canada used to have a Manitoba spaceport when the United States was in a “space race” for military supremacy in the 1950s and 1960s. After hosting decades of Black Brant sounding rocket flights, officials closed the spaceport in 1985. Canada now mainly uses foreign launchers, in part because the government deemed building sovereign capability too costly. But Canadian companies (inspired by SpaceX) are moving to build their own facilities and rockets. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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ArcaSpace is dead, replaced by … a fashion company. Somehow I missed this news when it came out a year ago, but I’m including it now for completeness. For a quarter of a century, a Romania-based rocket organization, ArcaSpace, had been promising to revolutionize spaceflight. But that meme dream ended in late 2024 when the group rebranded itself as ArcaFashion. “The ArcaFashion products are designed and manufactured on the shoulders of innovation and cutting-edge technological achievements, using the vast aerospace capabilities of ArcaSpace,” the group said. Their early products look, well, you decide.

But wait, there’s more … Before it went away, ArcaSpace released a video of its “accomplishments” to date, meant to be a sizzle reel of sorts. This popped into my feed this week because the madlads at Arca apparently aren’t done in aerospace. They put out a new video showing some bonkers-looking vehicle they’re calling “ArcaBoard2,” which purports to be a vertical takeoff personal electric vehicle. Maybe don’t be one of the early customers for this.

HTV-launch launches, docks with space station. Japan’s H3 rocket launched a new spacecraft, the HTV-X, last weekend from a launch pad on Tanegashima Island. This cargo ship pulled alongside the International Space Station on Wednesday, maneuvering close enough for the lab’s robotic arm to reach out and grab it, Ars reports. The HTV-X spacecraft is an upgraded cargo freighter replacing Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle, which successfully resupplied the space station nine times between 2009 and 2020.

An improved design … At the conclusion of the first HTV program, Japan’s space agency preferred to focus its resources on designing a new cargo ship with more capability at a lower cost. That’s what HTV-X is supposed to be, and Wednesday’s high-flying rendezvous marked the new ship’s first delivery to the ISS. At 26 feet (8 meters) long, the HTV-X is somewhat shorter than the vehicle it replaces. But an improved design gives the HTV-X more capacity, with the ability to accommodate more than 9,000 pounds (4.1 metric tons) inside its pressurized cargo module, about 25 percent more than the HTV. (submitted by tsunam)

India seeks dramatic increase in launch cadence. The chairman of the Indian space agency, V. Narayanan, has told The Times of India that the country seeks to dramatically scale up its annual launch cadence to 50 missions a year. He said the goal is to grow the country’s ecosystem of government-sponsored and private launches, and that the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has set a goal of 50 launches a year by the end of this decade.

A big step up … “We are working on it,” Narayanan said of his government’s request. He said the country currently has just two active launch sites, which is a constraint on activity, but that new facilities will soon come online. By the end of 2027, he said that 30 launches a year will be possible. Given that India has recently averaged about five launches annually, this would represent a significant step up in overall activity.

SpaceX breaks Vandenberg turnaround record, twice. SpaceX continued its rapid pace of launches Monday with the flight of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Starlink 11-21 flight broke the record for the fastest pad turnaround for SpaceX’s West Coast launch pad, flying two days, 10 hours, 22 minutes, and 59 seconds since the Starlink 11-12 mission on Saturday, Spaceflight Now reports.

Going fast, and then faster … And oh, by the way, the previous record beaten by Monday’s flight was two days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 20 seconds, which was set during the past week. This milestone comes after the company set another turnaround record over at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station earlier this month. SpaceX clearly is continuing to seek to optimize Falcon 9 operations and is having some success.

Ariane 6 upper stage engine production moves to Germany. ArianeGroup will transfer responsibility for the assembly of Ariane 6 Vinci upper-stage engines from Vernon, France, to Lampoldshausen, Germany, European Spaceflight reports. The agreement will also see the transfer of responsibility for the development of the Ariane 6 oxygen turbopump from Avio’s headquarters in Colleferro to Vernon.

A whole seven launches per year … Each Vinci engine for Ariane 6 will now be assembled, integrated, and tested at Lampoldshausen. To support this process, a new production facility will be built. The engines will then be transferred to Bremen for integration with the rocket’s upper stage. According to ArianeGroup, the transfer will “optimize the competitiveness of Ariane 6,” helping to secure the “financial viability of Ariane 6 with a rate of 7 launches per year.”

SpaceX surpasses 2024 launch total. On Saturday morning, SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites that marked the company’s 135th Falcon 9 launch of the year, Spaceflight Now reports. This broke the company’s record number of orbital launches achieved in all of 2024. The mission came nearly a week after SpaceX launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite to date.

A big number in another way … The number 135 is symbolic in another way. That’s equal to the number of NASA’s space shuttles over the 30-year lifetime of the program. That is to say, SpaceX will launch more Falcon 9 rockets this year than shuttles launched by NASA in three decades. The contours of spaceflight have certainly changed.

Amid shutdown, NASA trying to keep Artemis II on schedule. It has been nearly one month since many parts of the federal government shut down after lawmakers missed a budget deadline at the end of September, but so far, NASA’s most critical operations have been unaffected by the political impasse in Washington, DC. That may change soon, Ars reports. Federal civil servants and NASA contractors are not getting paid during the shutdown, even if agency leaders have deemed their tasks essential and directed them to continue working.

A significant impact soon … Many employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida remain at work, where their job is to keep the Artemis II mission on schedule for launch as soon as next February. Even while work continues, the government shutdown is creating inefficiencies that, if left unchecked, will inevitably impact the Artemis II schedule. And some officials are starting to sound the alarm. Kirk Shireman, vice president and program manager for Orion at Lockheed Martin, said this week, “I do think we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact.”

Variant of China’s Moon rocket to take flight. China aims to conduct the first launch of its Long March 10 rocket and a lunar-capable crew spacecraft next year, Space News reports. “The Long March 10 carrier rocket, the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, the Lanyue lunar lander, the Wangyu lunar suit, and the Exploration crew lunar rover have completed the main work of the prototype stage,” Zhang Jingbo, spokesperson for China’s human spaceflight program, said Thursday at a pre-launch press conference for the Shenzhou-21 mission at Jiuquan spaceport.

China appears on track for pre-2030 landing … Though not explicitly stated, Mengzhou will likely fly on a two-stage, single-stick variant of the Long March 10, which is used for low Earth orbit (LEO) missions. The full, three-stage, 92.5-meter-tall Long March 10 for lunar flights will use three 5-meter-diameter first stages bundled together, each powered by seven YF-100K variable thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen engines. Zhang did not state if the first flight would be crewed or uncrewed, nor if the mission would head to the Tiangong space station. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

October 31: Long March 2 | Shenzhou 21 crewed flight | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China| 15: 44 UTC

October 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-23 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 20: 06 UTC

Nov. 2: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon-4 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 05: 09 UTC

Photo of Eric Berger

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Rocket Report: SpaceX surpasses shuttle launch total; Skyroot has big ambitions Read More »

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Cursor introduces its coding model alongside multi-agent interface

AI, coding model, cursor, Cursor Composer, IDE, llm, vibe coding / /

Keep in mind: This is based on an internal benchmark at Cursor. Credit: Cursor

Cursor is hoping Composer will perform in terms of accuracy and best practices as well. It wasn’t trained on static datasets but rather interactive development challenges involving a range of agentic tasks.

Intriguing claims and strong training methodology aside, it remains to be seen whether Composer will be able to compete with the best frontier models from the big players.

Even developers who might be natural users of Cursor would not want to waste much time on an unproven new model when something like Anthropic’s Claude is working just fine.

To address that, Cursor introduced Composer alongside its new multi-agent interface, which allows you to “run many agents in parallel without them interfering with one another, powered by git worktrees or remote machines”—that means using multiple models at once for the same task and comparing their results, then picking the best one.

The interface is an invitation to try Composer and let the work speak for itself. We’ll see how devs feel about it in the coming weeks. So far, a non-representative sample of developers I’ve spoken with has told me they feel that Composer is not ineffective, but rather too expensive, given a perceived capability gap with the big models.

You can see the other new features and fixes for Cursor 2.0 in the changelog.

Cursor introduces its coding model alongside multi-agent interface Read More »

openai-moves-to-complete-potentially-the-largest-theft-in-human-history

OpenAI Moves To Complete Potentially The Largest Theft In Human History

openai / /

OpenAI is now set to become a Public Benefit Corporation, with its investors entitled to uncapped profit shares. Its nonprofit foundation will retain some measure of control and a 26% financial stake, in sharp contrast to its previous stronger control and much, much larger effective financial stake. The value transfer is in the hundreds of billions, thus potentially the largest theft in human history.

I say potentially largest because I realized one could argue that the events surrounding the dissolution of the USSR involved a larger theft. Unless you really want to stretch the definition of what counts this seems to be in the top two.

I am in no way surprised by OpenAI moving forward on this, but I am deeply disgusted and disappointed they are being allowed (for now) to do so, including this statement of no action by Delaware and this Memorandum of Understanding with California.

Many media and public sources are calling this a win for the nonprofit, such as this from the San Francisco Chronicle. This is mostly them being fooled. They’re anchoring on OpenAI’s previous plan to far more fully sideline the nonprofit. This is indeed a big win for the nonprofit compared to OpenAI’s previous plan. But the previous plan would have been a complete disaster, an all but total expropriation.

It’s as if a mugger demanded all your money, you talked them down to giving up half your money, and you called that exchange a ‘change that recapitalized you.’

As in, they claim OpenAI has ‘completed its recapitalization’ and the nonprofit will now only hold equity OpenAI claims is valued at approximately $130 billion (as in 26% of the company, which is actually to be fair worth substantially more than that if they get away with this), as opposed to its previous status of holding the bulk of the profit interests in a company valued at (when you include the nonprofit interests) well over $500 billion, along with a presumed gutting of much of the nonprofit’s highly valuable control rights.

They claim this additional clause, presumably the foundation is getting warrants with but they don’t offer the details here:

If OpenAI Group’s share price increases greater than tenfold after 15 years, the OpenAI Foundation will receive significant additional equity. With its equity stake and the warrant, the Foundation is positioned to be the single largest long-term beneficiary of OpenAI’s success.

We don’t know that ‘significant’ additional equity means, there’s some sort of unrevealed formula going on, but given the nonprofit got expropriated last time I have no expectation that these warrants would get honored. We will be lucky if the nonprofit meaningfully retains the remainder of its equity.

Sam Altman’s statement on this is here, also announcing his livestream Q&A that took place on Tuesday afternoon.

There can be reasonable disagreements about exactly how much. It’s a ton.

There used to be a profit cap, where in Greg Brockman’s own words, ‘If we succeed, we believe we’ll create orders of magnitude more value than any existing company — in which case all but a fraction is returned to the world.’

Well, so much for that.

I looked at this question in The Mask Comes Off: At What Price a year ago.

If we take seriously that OpenAI is looking to go public at a $1 trillion valuation, then consider that Matt Levine estimated the old profit cap only going up to about $272 billion, and that OpenAI still is a bet on extreme upside.

Garrison Lovely: UVA economist Anton Korinek has used standard economic models to estimate that AGI could be worth anywhere from $1.25 to $71 quadrillion globally. If you take Korinek’s assumptions about OpenAI’s share, that would put the company’s value at $30.9 trillion. In this scenario, Microsoft would walk away with less than one percent of the total, with the overwhelming majority flowing to the nonprofit.

It’s tempting to dismiss these numbers as fantasy. But it’s a fantasy constructed in large part by OpenAI, when it wrote lines like, “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world,” or when Altman said that if OpenAI succeeded at building AGI, it might “capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” That, he said, “is for sure not okay for one group of investors to have.”

I guess Altman is okay with that now?

Obviously you can’t base your evaluations on a projection that puts the company at a value of $30.9 trillion, and that calculation is deeply silly, for many overloaded and obvious reasons, including decreasing marginal returns to profits.

It is still true that most of the money OpenAI makes in possible futures, it makes as part of profits in excess of $1 trillion.

The Midas Project: Thanks to the now-gutted profit caps, OpenAI’s nonprofit was already entitled to the vast majority of the company’s cash flows. According to OpenAI, if they succeeded, “orders of magnitude” more money would go to the nonprofit than to investors. President Greg Brockman said “all but a fraction” of the money they earn would be returned to the world thanks to the profit caps.

Reducing that to 26% equity—even with a warrant (of unspecified value) that only activates if valuation increases tenfold over 15 years—represents humanity voluntarily surrendering tens or hundreds of billions of dollars it was already entitled to. Private investors are now entitled to dramatically more, and humanity dramatically less.

OpenAI is not suddenly one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever. From the public’s perspective, OpenAI may be one of the worst financially performing nonprofits in history, having voluntarily transferred more of the public’s entitled value to private interests than perhaps any charitable organization ever.

I think Levine’s estimate was low at the time, and you also have to account for equity raised since then or that will be sold in the IPO, but it seems obvious that the majority of future profit interests were, prior to the conversion, still in the hands of the non-profit.

Even if we thought the new control rights were as strong as the old, we would still be looking at a theft in excess of $250 billion, and a plausible case can be made for over $500 billion. I leave the full calculation to others.

The vote in the board was unanimous.

I wonder exactly how and by who they will be sued over it, and what will become of that. Elon Musk, at a minimum, is trying.

They say behind every great fortune is a great crime.

Altman points out that the nonprofit could become the best-resourced non-profit in the world if OpenAI does well. This is true. There is quite a lot they were unable to steal. But it is beside the point, in that it does not make taking the other half, including changing the corporate structure without permission, not theft.

The Midas Project: From the public’s perspective, OpenAI may be one of the worst financially performing nonprofits in history, having voluntarily transferred more of the public’s entitled value to private interests than perhaps any charitable organization ever.

There’s no perhaps on that last clause. On this level, whether or not you agree with the term ‘theft,’ it isn’t even close, this is the largest transfer. Of course, if you take the whole of OpenAI’s nonprofit from inception, performance looks better.

Aidan McLaughlin (OpenAI): ah yes openai now has the same greedy corporate structure as (checks notes) Patagonia, Anthropic, Coursera, and http://Change.org.

Chase Brower: well i think the concern was with the non profit getting a low share.

Aidan McLaughlin: our nonprofit is currently valued slightly less than all of anthropic.

Tyler Johnson: And according to OpenAI itself, it should be valued at approximately three Anthropics! (Fwiw I think the issues with the restructuring extend pretty far beyond valuations, but this is one of them!)

Yes, it is true that the nonprofit, after the theft and excluding control rights, will have an on-paper valuation only slightly lower than the on-paper value of all of Anthropic.

The $500 billion valuation excludes the non-profit’s previous profit share, so even if you think the nonprofit was treated fairly and lost no control rights you would then have it be worth $175 billion rather than $130 billion, so yes slightly less than Anthropic, and if you acknowledge that the nonprofit got stolen from it’s even more.

If OpenAI can successfully go public at a $1 trillion valuation, then depending on how much of that are new shares they will be selling the nonprofit could be worth up to $260 billion.

What about some of the comparable governance structures here? Coursera does seem to be a rather straightforward B-corp. The others don’t?

Patagonia has the closely held Patagonia Purpose Trust, which holds 2% of shares and 100% of voting control, and The Holdfast Collective, which is a 501c(4) nonprofit with 98% of the shares and profit interests. The Chouinard family has full control over the company, and 100% of profits go to charitable causes.

Does that sound like OpenAI’s new corporate structure to you?

Change.org’s nonprofit owns 100% of its PBC.

Does that sound like OpenAI’s new corporate structure to you?

Anthropic is a PBC, but also has the Long Term Benefit Trust. One can argue how meaningfully different this is from OpenAI’s new corporate structure, if you disregard who is involved in all of this.

What the new structure definitely is distinct from is the original intention:

Tomas Bjartur: If not in the know, OpenAI once promised any profits over a threshold would be gifted to you, citizen of the world, for your happy, ultra-wealthy retirement – one needed as they plan to obsolete you. This is now void.

Would OpenAI have been able to raise further investment without withdrawing its profit caps for investments already made?

When you put it like that it seems like obviously yes?

I can see the argument that to raise funds going forward, future equity investments need to not come with a cap. Okay, fine. That doesn’t mean you hand past investors, including Microsoft, hundreds of billions in value in exchange for nothing.

One can argue this was necessary to overcome other obstacles, that OpenAI had already allowed itself to be put in a stranglehold another way and had no choice. But the fundraising story does not make sense.

The argument that OpenAI had to ‘complete its recapitalization’ or risk being asked for its money back is even worse. Investors who put in money at under $200 billion are going to ask for a refund when the valuation is now at $500 billion? Really? If so, wonderful, I know a great way to cut them that check.

I am deeply disappointed that both the Delaware and California attorneys general found this deal adequate on equity compensation for the nonprofit.

I am however reasonably happy with the provisions on control rights, which seem about as good as one can hope for given the decision to convert to a PBC. I can accept that the previous situation was not sustainable in practice given prior events.

The new provisions include an ongoing supervisory role for the California AG, and extensive safety veto points for the NFP and the SSC committee.

If I was confident that these provisions would be upheld, and especially if I was confident their spirit would be upheld, then this is actually pretty good, and if it is used wisely and endures it is more important than their share of the profits.

AG Bonta: We will be keeping a close eye on OpenAI to ensure ongoing adherence to its charitable mission and the protection of the safety of all Californians.

The nonprofit will indeed retain substantial resources and influence, but no I do not expect the public safety mission to dominate the OpenAI enterprise. Indeed, contra the use of the word ‘ongoing,’ it seems clear that it already had ceased to do so, and this seems obvious to anyone tracking OpenAI’s activities, including many recent activities.

What is the new control structure?

OpenAI did not say, but the Delaware AG tells us more and the California AG has additional detail. NFP means OpenAI’s nonprofit here and throughout.

This is the Delaware AG’s non-technical announcement (for the full list see California’s list below), she has also ‘warned of legal action if OpenAI fails to act in public interest’ although somehow I doubt that’s going to happen once OpenAI inevitably does not act in the public interest:

  • The NFP will retain control and oversight over the newly formed PBC, including the sole power and authority to appoint members of the PBC Board of Directors, as well as the power to remove those Directors.

  • The mission of the PBC will be identical to the NFP’s current mission, which will remain in place after the recapitalization. This will include the PBC using the principles in the “OpenAI Charter,” available at openai.com/charter, to execute the mission.

  • PBC directors will be required to consider only the mission (and may not consider the pecuniary interests of stockholders or any other interest) with respect to safety and security issues related to the OpenAI enterprise and its technology.

  • The NFP’s board-level Safety and Security Committee, which is a critical decision maker on safety and security issues for the OpenAI enterprise, will remain a committee of the NFP and not be moved to the PBC. The committee will have the authority to oversee and review the safety and security processes and practices of OpenAI and its controlled affiliates with respect to model development and deployment. It will have the power and authority to require mitigation measures—up to and including halting the release of models or AI systems—even where the applicable risk thresholds would otherwise permit release.

  • The Chair of the Safety and Security Committee will be a director on the NFP Board and will not be a member of the PBC Board. Initially, this will be the current committee chair, Mr. Zico Kolter. As chair, he will have full observation rights to attend all PBC Board and committee meetings and will receive all information regularly shared with PBC directors and any additional information shared with PBC directors related to safety and security.

  • With the intent of advancing the mission, the NFP will have access to the PBC’s advanced research, intellectual property, products and platforms, including artificial intelligence models, Application Program Interfaces (APIs), and related tools and technologies, as well as ongoing operational and programmatic support, and access to employees of the PBC.

  • Within one year of the recapitalization, the NFP Board will have at least two directors (including the Chair of the Safety and Security Committee) who will not serve on the PBC Board.

  • The Attorney General will be provided with advance notice of significant changes in corporate governance.

What did California get?

California also has its own Memorandum of Understanding. It talks a lot in its declarations about California in particular, how OpenAI creates California jobs and economic activity (and ‘problem solving’?) and is committed to doing more of this and bringing benefits and deepening its commitment to the state in particular.

The whole claim via Tweet by Sam Altman that he did not threaten to leave California is raising questions supposedly answered by his Tweet. At this level you perhaps do not need to make your threats explicit.

The actual list seems pretty good, though? Here’s a full paraphrased list, some of which overlaps with Delaware’s announcement above, but which is more complete.

  1. Staying in California and expanding the California footprint.

  2. The NFP (not for profit) retains control as long as they continue to hold ‘class N common stock’ which only they can choose to give up. What happens if Altman wants that?

  3. The PBC and NFP missions will be identical.

  4. The OpenAI charter will be published. Check.

  5. The NFP Board owes fiduciary duties to the NFP, Mission and public beneficiaries of the NFP. I notice it doesn’t say ‘exclusively’ here.

  6. The board shall carry out the charitable purpose (already presumably required).

  7. No cheating clause: While the PBC holds Class N Common Stock (again, what happens if Altman tries to end this?) the NFP must approve in advance in writing any amendments to the PBC’s corporate governance guidelines or the mission, any Deemed Liquidation Event, or any sale of material assets of the PBC, or any additional issue of shares of Class N common stock.

    1. The PBC can issue Class B common stock, but they can’t let the Bs vote.

  8. PBC board and Safety and Security Committee (SSC) must only consider the mission with respect to safety and security issues. The chair of the SSC must be on the NFP board and not the PBC board, but can attend all PBC board meetings and gets all PBC safety and security related information.

    1. In particular, the SSC cannot consider shareholder returns, competitive pressures, financial implications or market timing.

      1. It seems impossible this will 100% be followed, but it helps.

  9. The SSC is a committee of the NFP and oversees safety and security.

  10. The SSC can require mitigations up to and including halting releases, without formal justification.

    1. “The NFP will provide advance notice to the Attorney General of any material changes to the SSC’s authority.” This is good but worrisome to see, you know?

  11. “OpenAI will continue to undertake measures to mitigate risks to teens and others in connection with the development and deployment of AI and of AGI.”

    1. I mean, I would hope they were going to do that anyway.

  12. The PBC shall give the NFP all reasonable access to services and resources without compensation as needed for the mission.

  13. Within a year at least one NFP director, in addition to the SSC chair, will serve only on the NFP board (so at least two directors must be different).

  14. The PBC board must be majority independent directors.

  15. The PBC will have various good corporate governance things.

  16. The PBC will publish a yearly report on its progress in its mission.

  17. The NFP Board’s Mission and Strategy Commission will meet with the California AG semi-annually and individual members will be available as needed.

  18. The NFP will provide 21 days notice before consenting to changes of PBC control or mission, or any threat to the Class N share rights, or any relocation outside of California.

  19. The California AG can review, and hire experts to help review, anything requiring such notice, and get paid by NFP for doing so.

  20. Those on both NFP and PBC boards get annual fiduciary duty training.

  21. The board represents that the recapitalization is fair (whoops), and that they’ve disclosed everything relevant (?), so the AG will also not object.

  22. This only impacts the parties to the MOU, others retain all rights. Disputes resolved in the courts of San Francisco, these are the whole terms, we all have the authority to do this, effective as of signing, AG is relying on OpenAI’s representations and the AG retains all rights and waive none as per usual.

Also, it’s not even listed in the memo, but the ‘merge and assist’ clause was preserved, meaning OpenAI commits to join forces with any ‘safety-conscious’ rival that has a good chance of reaching OpenAI’s goal of creating AGI within a two-year time frame. I don’t actually expect an OpenAI-Anthropic merger to happen, but it’s a nice extra bit of optionality.

This is better than I expected, and as Ben Shindel points out better than many traders expected. This actually does have real teeth, and it was plausible that without pressure there would have been no teeth at all.

It grants the NFP the sole power to appoint and remove directors, and requiring them not to consider the for-profit mission in safety contexts. The explicit granting of the power to halt deployments and mandate mitigations, without having to cite any particular justification and without respect to profitability, is highly welcome, if structured in a functional fashion.

It is remarkable how little many expected to get. For example, here’s Todor Markov, who didn’t even expect the NFP to be able to replace directors at all. If you can’t do that, you’re basically dead in the water.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the ‘no cheating around this’ clauses are about as robust as one could reasonably hope for them to be.

It’s still, as Garrison Lovely calls it, ‘on paper’ governance. Sometimes that means governance in practice. Sometimes it doesn’t. As we have learned.

The distinction between the boards still means there is an additional level removed between the PBC and the NFP. In a fast moving situation, this makes a big difference, and the NFP likely would have to depend on its enumerated additional powers being respected. I would very much have liked them to include appointing or firing the CEO directly.

Whether this overall ‘counts as a good deal’ depends on your baseline. It’s definitely a ‘good deal’ versus what our realpolitik expectations projected. One can argue that if the control rights really are sufficiently robust over time, that the decline in dollar value for the nonprofit is not the important thing here.

The counterargument to that is both that those resources could do a lot of good over time, and also that giving up the financial rights has a way of leading to further giving up control rights, even if the current provisions are good.

Similarly to many issues of AI alignment, if an entity has ‘unnatural’ control, or ‘unnatural’ profit interests, then there are strong forces that continuously try to take that control away. As we have already seen.

Unless Altman genuinely wants to be controlled, the nonprofit will always be under attack, where at every move we fight to hold its ground. On a long enough time frame, that becomes a losing battle.

Right now, the OpenAI NFP board is essentially captured by Altman, and also identical to the PBC board. They will become somewhat different, but no matter what it only matters if the PBC board actually tries to fulfill its fiduciary duties rather than being a rubber stamp.

One could argue that all of this matters little, since the boards will both be under Altman’s control and likely overlap quite a lot, and they were already ignoring their duties to the nonprofit.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said this arrangement does not guarantee the nonprofit independence, likening it to a corporate foundation that will serve the interests of the for profit.

Even as the nonprofit’s board may technically remain in control, Weissman said that control “is illusory because there is no evidence of the nonprofit ever imposing its values on the for profit.”

So yes, there is that.

They claim to now be a public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC.

OpenAI: The for-profit is now a public benefit corporation, called OpenAI Group PBC, which—unlike a conventional corporation—is required to advance its stated mission and consider the broader interests of all stakeholders, ensuring the company’s mission and commercial success advance together.

This is a mischaracterization of how PBCs work. It’s more like the flip side of this. A conventional corporation is supposed to maximize profits and can be sued if it goes too far in not doing that. Unlike a conventional corporation, a PBC is allowed to consider those broader interests to a greater extent, but it is not in practice ‘required’ to do anything other than maximize profits.

One particular control right is the special duty to the mission, especially via the safety and security committee. How much will they attempt to downgrade the scope of that?

The Midas Project: However, the effectiveness of this safeguard will depend entirely on how broadly “safety and security issues” are defined in practice. It would not be surprising to see OpenAI attempt to classify most business decisions—pricing, partnerships, deployment timelines, compute allocation—as falling outside this category.

This would allow shareholder interests to determine the majority of corporate strategy while minimizing the mission-only standard to apply to an artificially narrow set of decisions they deem easy or costless.

They have an announcement about that too.

OpenAI: First, Microsoft supports the OpenAI board moving forward with formation of a public benefit corporation (PBC) and recapitalization.

Following the recapitalization, Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis, inclusive of all owners—employees, investors, and the OpenAI Foundation. Excluding the impact of OpenAI’s recent funding rounds, Microsoft held a 32.5 percent stake on an as-converted basis in the OpenAI for-profit.

Anyone else notice something funky here? OpenAI’s nonprofit has had its previous rights expropriated, and been given 26% of OpenAI’s shares in return. If Microsoft had 32.5% of the company excluding the nonprofit’s rights before that happened, then that should give them 24% of the new OpenAI. Instead they have 27%.

I don’t know anything nonpublic on this, but it sure looks a lot like Microsoft insisted they have a bigger share than the nonprofit (27% vs. 26%) and this was used to help justify this expropriation and a transfer of additional shares to Microsoft.

In exchange, Microsoft gave up various choke points it held over OpenAI, including potential objections to the conversion, and clarified points of dispute.

Microsoft got some upgrades in here as well.

  1. Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel.

  2. Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails.

  3. Microsoft’s IP rights to research, defined as the confidential methods used in the development of models and systems, will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first. Research IP includes, for example, models intended for internal deployment or research only.

    1. Beyond that, research IP does not include model architecture, model weights, inference code, finetuning code, and any IP related to data center hardware and software; and Microsoft retains these non-Research IP rights.

  4. Microsoft’s IP rights now exclude OpenAI’s consumer hardware.

  5. OpenAI can now jointly develop some products with third parties. API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.

  6. Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. If Microsoft uses OpenAI’s IP to develop AGI, prior to AGI being declared, the models will be subject to compute thresholds; those thresholds are significantly larger than the size of systems used to train leading models today.

  7. The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time.

  8. OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.

  9. OpenAI can now provide API access to US government national security customers, regardless of the cloud provider.

  10. OpenAI is now able to release open weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.

That’s kind of a wild set of things to happen here.

In some key ways Microsoft got a better deal than it previously had. In particular, AGI used to be something OpenAI seemed like it could simply declare (you know, like war or the defense production act) and now it needs to be verified by an ‘expert panel’ which implies there is additional language I’d very much like to see.

In other ways OpenAI comes out ahead. An incremental $250B of Azure services sounds like a lot but I’m guessing both sides are happy with that number. Getting rid of the right of first refusal is big, as is having their non-API products free and clear. Getting hardware products fully clear of Microsoft is a big deal for the Ives project.

My overall take here is this was one of those broad negotiations where everything trades off, nothing is done until everything is done, and there was a very wide ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) since OpenAI really needed to make a deal.

In theory govern the OpenAI PBC. I have my doubts about that.

What they do have is a nominal pile of cash. What are they going to do with it to supposedly ensure that AGI goes well for humanity?

The default, as Garrison Lovely predicted a while back, is that the nonprofit will essentially buy OpenAI services for nonprofits and others, recapture much of the value and serve as a form of indulgences, marketing and way to satisfy critics, which may or may not do some good along the way.

The initial $50 million spend looked a lot like exactly this.

Their new ‘initial focus’ for $25 billion will be in these two areas:

  • Health and curing diseases. The OpenAI Foundation will fund work to accelerate health breakthroughs so everyone can benefit from faster diagnostics, better treatments, and cures. This will start with activities like the creation of open-sourced and responsibly built frontier health datasets, and funding for scientists.

  • Technical solutions to AI resilience. Just as the internet required a comprehensive cybersecurity ecosystem—protecting power grids, hospitals, banks, governments, companies, and individuals—we now need a parallel resilience layer for AI. The OpenAI Foundation will devote resources to support practical technical solutions for AI resilience, which is about maximizing AI’s benefits and minimizing its risks.

Herbie Bradley: i love maximizing AI’s benefits and minimizing its risks

They literally did the meme.

The first seems like a generally worthy cause that is highly off mission. There’s nothing wrong with health and curing diseases, but pushing this now does not advance the fundamental mission of OpenAI. They are going to start with, essentially, doing AI capabilities research and diffusion in health, and funding scientists to do AI-enabled research. A lot of this will likely fall right back into OpenAI and be good PR.

Again, that’s a net positive thing to do, happy to see it done, but that’s not the mission.

Technical solutions to AI resilience could potentially at least be useful AI safety work to some extent. With a presumed ~$12 billion this is a vast overconcentration of safety efforts into things that are worth doing but ultimately don’t seem likely to be determining factors. Note how Altman described it in his tl;dr from the Q&A:

Sam Altman: The nonprofit is initially committing $25 billion to health and curing disease, and AI resilience (all of the things that could help society have a successful transition to a post-AGI world, including technical safety but also things like economic impact, cyber security, and much more). The nonprofit now has the ability to actually deploy capital relatively quickly, unlike before.

This is now infinitely broad. It could be addressing ‘economic impact’ and be basically a normal (ineffective) charity, or one that intervenes mostly by giving OpenAI services to normal nonprofits. It could be mostly spent on valuable technical safety, and be on the most important charitable initiatives in the world. It could be anything in between, in any distribution. We don’t know.

My default assumption is that this is primarily going to be about mundane safety or even fall short of that, and make the near term world better, perhaps importantly better, but do little to guard against the dangers or downsides of AGI or superintelligence, and again largely be a de facto customer of OpenAI.

There’s nothing wrong with mundane risk mitigation or defense in depth, and nothing wrong with helping people who need a hand, but if your plan is ‘oh we will make things resilient and it will work out’ then you have no plan.

That doesn’t mean this will be low impact, or that what OpenAI left the nonprofit with is chump change.

I also don’t want to knock the size of this pool. The previous nonprofit initiative was $50 million, which can do a lot of good if spent well (in that case, I don’t think it was) but in this context $50 million chump change.

Whereas $25 billion? Okay, yeah, we are talking real money. That can move needles, if the money actually gets spent in short order. If it’s $25 billion as a de facto endowment spent down over a long time, then this matters and counts for a lot less.

The warrants are quite far out of the money and the NFP should have gotten far more stock than it did, but 26% (worth $130 billion or more) remains a lot of equity. You can do quite a lot of good in a variety of places with that money. The board of directors of the nonprofit is highly qualified if they want to execute on that. It also is highly qualified to effectively shuttle much of that money right back to OpenAI’s for profit, if that’s what they mainly want to do.

It won’t help much with the whole ‘not dying’ or ‘AGI goes well for humanity’ missions, but other things matter too.

Not entirely. As Garrison Lovely notes, all these sign-offs are provisional, and there are other lawsuits and the potential for other lawsuits. In a world where Elon Musk’s payouts can get crawled back, I wouldn’t be too confident that this conversation sticks. It’s not like the Delaware AG drives most objections to corporate actions.

The last major obstacle is the Elon Musk lawsuit, where standing is at issue but the judge has made clear that the suit otherwise has merit. There might be other lawsuits on the horizon. But yeah, probably this is happening.

So this is the world we live in. We need to make the most of it.

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Meta denies torrenting porn to train AI, says downloads were for “personal use”

adult content, AI, AI training, BItTorrent, Meta, Meta Movie Gen, Policy, pornography, torrenting / /

Instead, Meta argued, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addressess and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”

“The far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use,” Meta’s filing said.

For example, unlike lawsuits raised by book authors whose works are part of an enormous dataset used to train AI, the activity on Meta’s corporate IP addresses only amounted to about 22 downloads per year. That is nowhere near the “concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta argued.

Further, that alleged activity can’t even reliably be linked to any Meta employee, Meta argued.

Strike 3 “does not identify any of the individuals who supposedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that any were employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.

Meanwhile, “tens of thousands of employees,” as well as “innumerable contractors, visitors, and third parties access the Internet at Meta every day,” Meta argued. So while it’s “possible one or more Meta employees” downloaded Strike 3’s content over the last seven years, “it is just as possible” that a “guest, or freeloader,” or “contractor, or vendor, or repair person—or any combination of such persons—was responsible for that activity,” Meta suggested.

Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father’s house, but those downloads, too, “are plainly indicative of personal consumption,” Meta argued. That contractor worked as an “automation engineer,” Meta noted, with no apparent basis provided for why he would be expected to source AI training data in that role. “No facts plausibly” tie “Meta to those downloads,” Meta claimed.

Meta denies torrenting porn to train AI, says downloads were for “personal use” Read More »

npm-flooded-with-malicious-packages-downloaded-more-than-86,000-times

NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times

Biz & IT, code dependencies, code repositories, npm, phantomraven, Security / /

Attackers are exploiting a major weakness that has allowed them access to the NPM code repository with more than 100 credential-stealing packages since August, mostly without detection.

The finding, laid out Wednesday by security firm Koi, brings attention to an NPM practice that allows installed packages to automatically pull down and run unvetted packages from untrusted domains. Koi said a campaign it tracks as PhantomRaven has exploited NPM’s use of “Remote Dynamic Dependences” to flood NPM with 126 malicious packages that have been downloaded more than 86,000 times. Some 80 of those packages remained available as of Wednesday morning, Koi said.

A blind spot

“PhantomRaven demonstrates how sophisticated attackers are getting [better] at exploiting blind spots in traditional security tooling,” Koi’s Oren Yomtov wrote. “Remote Dynamic Dependencies aren’t visible to static analysis.”

Remote Dynamic Dependencies provide greater flexibility in accessing dependencies—the code libraries that are mandatory for many other packages to work. Normally, dependencies are visible to the developer installing the package. They’re usually downloaded from NPM’s trusted infrastructure.

RDD works differently. It allows a package to download dependencies from untrusted websites, even those that connect over HTTP, which is unencrypted. The PhantomRaven attackers exploited this leniency by including code in the 126 packages uploaded to NPM. The code downloads malicious dependencies from URLs, including http://packages.storeartifact.com/npm/unused-imports. Koi said these dependencies are “invisible” to developers and many security scanners. Instead, they show the package contains “0 Dependencies.” An NPM feature causes these invisible downloads to be automatically installed.

Compounding the weakness, the dependencies are downloaded “fresh” from the attacker server each time a package is installed, rather than being cached, versioned, or otherwise static, as Koi explained:

NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times Read More »

man-accidentally-gets-leech-up-his-nose-it-took-20-days-to-figure-it-out.

Man accidentally gets leech up his nose. It took 20 days to figure it out.

bleeding, bloodletting, case report, health, leeches, parasites, poison / /

Leeches have a long medical history. Here’s what happens if one gets in your nose.

Since the dawn of civilization, leeches have been firmly attached to medicine. Therapeutic bloodsuckers are seen in murals decorating the tombs of 18th dynasty Egyptian pharaohs. They got their earliest written recommendation in the 2nd century BC by Greek poet and physician Nicander of Colophon. He introduced the “blood-loving leech, long flaccid and yearning for gore,” as a useful tool for sucking out poison after a bite from a poisonous animal. “Let leeches feed on [the] wounds and drink their fill,” he wrote. Ancient Chinese writing touted their medicinal potential, too, as did references in Sanskrit.

Galen, the physician for Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, supported using leeches to balance the four humors (i.e. blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile) and therefore treat ailments—as initially outlined by Hippocrates. Leeches, doctors found, provided a method for less painful, localized, and limited bloodletting. We now understand that leeches can release an anesthetic to prevent pain and a powerful anticoagulant, hirudin, to prevent clotting and keep blood flowing.

In the centuries since the Roman era, leeches’ popularity only grew. They were used to treat everything from gout to liver disease, epilepsy, and melancholy. The very word “leech” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “laece,” which translates to “physician.”

It wasn’t until the early 1900s, amid advances in medical knowledge, that leeches fell out of favor—as did bloodletting generally. That was for the best since the practice was rooted in pseudoscience, largely ineffective, and often dangerous when large quantities of blood were lost. Still, the bloodsuckers have kept a place in modern medicine, aiding in wound care, the draining of excess blood after reconstructive surgery, and circulation restoration. Leech saliva also contains anti-inflammatory compounds that can reduce swelling.

What leeches do in the shadows

But there’s also a darker side to leeches in medicine. Even Nicander realized that leeches could act as a kind of poison themselves if accidentally ingested, such as in contaminated water. He described the slimy parasites clinging to the mouth, throat, and opening of the stomach, where they might cause pain. For this poisoning, he recommended having the patient ingest vinegar, snow or ice, salt flakes, warmed salt water, or a potion made from brackish soil.

Nicander was right. While external leeches are potentially helpful—or at least not particularly harmful with controlled blood feasting—internal leeches are more problematic. They are happy to slither into orifices of all kinds, where they’re hard to detect and diagnose and difficult to extract, potentially leading to excessive blood loss. Luckily, with advances in sanitation, accidental leech intake doesn’t happen that often, but there are still the occasional cases—and they often involve the nose.

Such is the case of a 38-year-old man in China who showed up at an ear, nose, and throat clinic telling doctors his right nostril had been dripping blood for 10 days at a rate of a few drops per hour.  He was not in pain but noted that when he coughed or spat, he had blood-tinged mucus. His case was published in the week’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Doctors took a look inside his nose and saw signs of blood. When they broke out the nasal endoscope, they saw the source of the problem: There was a leech in there. And it was frantically trying to wriggle away from the light as they got a glimpse of it.

As it turns out, the man had been mountain climbing a full 20 days prior. While out in nature, he washed his face with spring water, which likely splashed the sucker up his schnoz.

Lengthy feast

While 20 days seems like a long time to have a leech up your nose without noticing it, a smattering of other nasal leech cases report people going several weeks or even months before figuring it out. One 2021 case in a 73-year-old man in China was only discovered after three months—and he had picked out a chunk of the leech himself by that point. A 2011 case in a 7-year-old girl in Nepal took four weeks to discover, and the girl needed a blood transfusion at that point.

In 2014, BBC Radio Scotland interviewed a 24-year-old woman from Edinburgh who had picked up a nasal leech on a trip to Southeast Asia. She had nosebleeds for weeks before realizing the problem—even after the leech began peeking out of her nose during hot showers.

“Obviously my nasal passages would open up because of the steam and the heat and the water, and it would come out quite far, about as far as my lip,” she said. Still, she thought it was a blood clot after a motorbike accident she had been in recently, not a blood-sucking worm.

“Your initial reaction isn’t to start thinking, oh God, there’s obviously a leech in my face,” she said.

Of course, if the leech gets into a place where it causes more obvious problems, the discovery is quicker. Just last month, doctors reported a case in a 20-year-old woman in Ethiopia who had a leech stuck in her throat, which caused her to start vomiting and spitting blood. It took just a few days of that before doctors figured it out. But nasal leeches don’t tend to produce such dramatic symptoms, so they’re harder to detect. And a lot of other things can cause mild, occasional nosebleeds.

Exorcising the sinuses

Once a nostril Nosferatu is finally identified, there’s the tricky task of removing it. There’s not exactly a textbook method for extraction, and the options can be highly dependent on the location in which the leech has lodged itself. Various methods used over the years—many echoing Nicander’s original recommendations—include salt, saline, vinegar, and heat, as well as turpentine and alcohol. Saltwater in particular has been reported to be effective at getting the leech to relax and release, though such attempts to coax the leech out can be time-consuming. A variety of local and topical anesthetics have also been used to try to paralyze the leech, including the startling choice of cocaine, which acts as a local anesthetic, among other things.

The removal must be done with care. If the leech is pulled, it could regurgitate its blood meal, risking infection and more bleeding. There’s also the risk that pulling too hard could result in the worm’s jaws and teeth getting left behind, which could lead to continued bleeding.

In the mountain climber’s case, doctors were able to use the topical anesthetic tetracaine to subdue the shy leech, and they then gently extracted it with a suction catheter. It came out in one piece. The man had no problems from the removal, and a week later, his symptoms had entirely resolved.

Fortunately, reports of nasal leeches are rare and tend to have happy endings. But the cases will likely continue to splatter through the medical literature, keeping Nicander’s lore of leeches as both antidote and poison undying.

Photo of Beth Mole

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

Man accidentally gets leech up his nose. It took 20 days to figure it out. Read More »