syndication – Page 5

China rules that Nvidia violated its antitrust laws

antitrust, china, NVIDIA, Policy, syndication, tarrifs, trade wars / Paul Patrick / September 15, 2025

A Chinese regulator has found Nvidia violated the country’s antitrust law, in a preliminary finding against the world’s most valuable chipmaker.

Nvidia had failed to fully comply with provisions outlined when it acquired Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-US supplier of networking products, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said on Monday. Beijing conditionally approved the US chipmaker’s acquisition of Mellanox in 2020.

Monday’s statement came as US and Chinese officials prepared for more talks in Madrid over trade, with a tariff truce between the world’s two largest economies set to expire in November.

SAMR reached its conclusion weeks before Monday’s announcement, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, adding that the regulator had released the statement now to give China greater leverage in the trade talks.

The regulator started the anti-monopoly investigation in December, a week after the US unveiled tougher export controls on advanced high-bandwidth memory chips and chipmaking equipment to the country.

SAMR then spent months interviewing relevant parties and gathering legal opinions to build the case, the people said.

Nvidia bought Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2020, and the acquisition helped the chipmaker to step up into the data center and high-performance computing market where it is now a dominant player.

The preliminary findings against the chipmaker could result in fines of between 1 percent and 10 percent of the company’s previous year’s sales. Regulators can also force the company to change business practices that are considered in violation of antitrust laws.

China rules that Nvidia violated its antitrust laws Read More »

The US is trying to kick-start a “nuclear energy renaissance”

climate change, Energy, nuclear energy, reactors, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / September 13, 2025

Push to revive nuclear energy relies on deregulation; experts say strategy is misplaced.

In May, President Donald Trump signed four executive orders to facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors and the development of nuclear energy technology; the orders aim to cut red tape, ease approval processes, and reshape the role of the main regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. These moves, the administration said, were part of an effort to achieve American independence from foreign power providers by way of a “nuclear energy renaissance.”

Self-reliance isn’t the only factor motivating nuclear power proponents outside of the administration: Following a decades-long trend away from nuclear energy, in part due to safety concerns and high costs, the technology has emerged as a potential option to try to mitigate climate change. Through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split to release energy, reactors don’t emit any greenhouse gases.

The Trump administration wants to quadruple the nuclear sector’s domestic energy production, with the goal of producing 400 gigawatts by 2050. To help achieve that goal, scientific institutions like the Idaho National Laboratory, a leading research institute in nuclear energy, are pushing forward innovations such as more efficient types of fuel. Companies are also investing millions of dollars to develop their own nuclear reactor designs, a move from industry that was previously unheard of in the nuclear sector. For example, Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, plans to build 10 new large reactors to help achieve the 2050 goal.

However, the road to renaissance is filled with familiar obstacles. Nuclear energy infrastructure is “too expensive to build, and it takes too long to build,” said Allison Macfarlane, a science and technology policy expert at the University of British Columbia who used to chair the NRC from 2012 to 2014.

And experts are divided on whether new nuclear technologies, such as small versions of reactors, are ready for primetime. The nuclear energy field is now “in a hype bubble that is driving unrealistic expectations,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization that has long acted as a nuclear safety watchdog.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to advance nuclear energy by weakening the NRC, Lyman said. “The message is that it’s regulation that has been the obstacle to deploying nuclear power, and if we just get rid of all this red tape, then the industry is going to thrive,” he added. “I think that’s really misplaced.”

Although streamlining the approval process might accelerate development, the true problem lies in the high costs of nuclear, which would need to be significantly cheaper to compete with other sources of energy such as natural gas, said Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear science researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even the license-ready reactors are still not economical,” he said. If the newer reactor technologies do pan out, without government support and subsidies, Shirvan said, it is difficult to imagine them “coming online before 2035.”

It’s déjá vu all over again

Rumblings of a nuclear renaissance give experts a sense of déjà vu. The first resurgence in interest was around 2005, when many thought that nuclear energy could mitigate climate change and be an energy alternative to dwindling supply and rising prices of fossil fuels. But that enthusiasm slowed mainly after the Fukushima accident in 2011, in which a tsunami-triggered power outage—along with multiple safety failures—led to a nuclear meltdown at a facility in Japan. “So, the first nuclear renaissance fizzled out,” said Lyman.

Globally, the proportion of electricity provided by nuclear energy has been dwindling. Although there has been an increase in generation, nuclear energy has contributed less to the share of global electricity demand, dropping to 9 percent in 2024 from a peak of about 17 percent in 2001. In the US, 94 reactors generate about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, a proportion that has held steady since 1990s. But only two of those reactors have come online in the last nearly 30 years.

This renewed push is “a second bite at the apple, and we’ll have to see but it does seem to have a lot more of a headwind now,” said Lyman.

Much of that movement comes from the private sector, said Todd Allen, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. In the last couple of decades, dozens of nuclear energy companies have emerged, including TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates. “It feels more like normal capitalism than we ever had in nuclear,” Allen said. Those companies are working on developing the large reactors that have been the backbone of nuclear energy for decades, as well as newer technologies that can bolster the field.

Proponents say small modular reactors, or SMRs, and microreactors, which generate less than 300 megawatts and 20 megawatts, respectively, could offer safer, cheaper, and more flexible energy compared to their more traditional counterparts. (Large reactors have, on average, 900 megawatts of capacity.) One 2022 study found that modularization can reduce construction time by up to 60 percent.

These designs have taken the spotlight: In 2024, a report estimated that the SMR market would reach $295 billion by 2043. In June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress that DOE will have at least three SMRs running by July of next year. And in July of this year, the Nuclear Energy Agency launched a dashboard to track SMR technologies around the world, which identified 74 SMR designs at different stages around the world. The first commercial SMR in North America is currently being constructed in Canada, with plans to be operational by 2030.

But whether SMRs and microreactors are actually safer and more cost-effective remains to be determined. A 2022 study found that SMRs would likely produce more leakage and nuclear waste than conventional reactors. Studying them, though, is difficult since so few are currently operational.

In part, that may be because of cost. Multiple analyses have concluded that, because of rising construction and operating costs, SMRs might not be financially viable enough to compete for the world’s energy markets, including in developing countries that lack affordable access to electricity.

And recent ventures have hit road bumps: For example, NuScale, the only SMR developer with a design approved by the NRC, had to shut down its operations in November 2023 due to increasingly high costs (though another uprated SMR design was approved earlier this year).

“Nothing is really commercialized yet,” said Macfarlane. Most of the tech companies haven’t figured out expenses, supply chains, the kind of waste they are going to produce or security at their reactors, she added.

Fuel supply is also a barrier since most plants use uranium enriched at low rates, but SMRs and microreactors use uranium enriched at higher levels, which is typically sourced from Russia and not commercially available in the US. So scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working to recover enriched uranium from existing reactors and developed new, more cost-effective fuels, said Jess Gehin, the associate laboratory director for the Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate at the INL. They are also using artificial intelligence and modeling simulation tools and capabilities to optimize nuclear energy systems, he added: “We got to reach 400 gigawatts, we need to accelerate all of this.”

Companies are determined to face and surpass these barriers. Some have begun pouring concrete, such as one nuclear company called Kairos Power that began building a demo of their SMR design in Tennessee; the plant is projected to be fully operational by 2027. “I would make the case that we’re moving faster than many in the field, if not the fastest,” Mike Laufer, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Reuters last year.

Some experts think achieving nuclear expansion can be done—and revel in the progress so far: “I would have never thought we’d be in this position where we’re working so hard to expand nuclear, because for most of my career, it wasn’t that way,” said Gehin. “And I would say each month that goes by exceeds my expectations on the next bigger things that are coming.”

Doing more with less?

Although the Trump administration aims to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice, it has not allocated new funding yet, said Matt Bowen, an expert on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the initial White House budget proposed cutting $4.7 billion from the Department of Energy, including $408 million from the Office of Nuclear Energy allocated for nuclear research in the 2026 fiscal year.

“The administration was proposing cuts to Office of Nuclear Energy and DOE more broadly, and DOGE is pushing staff out,” said Bowen. “How do you do more with less? Less staff, less money.”

The Trump administration places the blame for the nuclear sector’s stagnation on the NRC, which oversees licensing and recertification processes that cost the industry millions of dollars each year in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, like streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new plants), may be welcomed because “for a long time, they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are worries that the executive orders could do more than cut red tape.

“Every word in those orders is of concern, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially strip the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its independence from the executive branch, essentially nullifying the original purpose,” said Lyman.

Some experts fear that with these new constraints, NRC staff will have less time and fewer resources to do their jobs, which could impact power plant safety in the future. Bowen said: “This notion that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so all we need to do is deregulate, is both wrong and also really problematic.”

The next few decades will tell whether nuclear, especially SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to decarbonization efforts. Some, like Gehin, are optimistic. “I think we’re going to accelerate,” he said. “We certainly can achieve a dramatic deployment if we put our mindset to it.”

But making nuclear financially competitive will take serious commitment from the government and the dozens of companies, with many still skeptical, Shirvan said. “I am quite, I would say, on the pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”

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

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Microsoft dodges EU fine by unbundling Teams from Office

competition, EU, microsoft, Microsoft Teams, Policy, syndication / Mike M. / September 12, 2025

Microsoft has avoided an EU fine after the US tech group offered concessions on how it packages together its Teams and Office products, ending a long-running antitrust investigation by the bloc’s regulators.

The probe, which began after a 2020 complaint from Slack, now part of Salesforce, accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance by tying its video conferencing tool to its widely used suite of productivity applications.

Since the initial complaint, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from Office 365 in the EU, but critics said the changes were too narrow.

In May, the $3.7 trillion software giant promised concessions, such as continuing the Teams and Office separation for seven years.

After a market test, Microsoft has since made additional commitments, such as publishing more information on so-called “interoperability” or the ability to use its products with others made by rivals.

These new pledges have satisfied the EU’s regulator, which said on Friday that it helped to restore fair competition and open the market to other providers.

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The US is now the largest investor in commercial spyware

commercial spyware, national security, Security, spyware, syndication / Tim Belzer / September 11, 2025

Paragon, responding to the committee’s findings, accused Italian authorities of refusing to conduct a thorough technical verification—an assessment it argued could have resolved the issue.

Apart from focusing on investment, the Atlantic Council notes that the global spyware market is “growing and evolving,” with its dataset expanded to include four new vendors, seven new resellers or brokers, 10 new suppliers, and 55 new individuals linked to the industry.

Newly identified vendors include Israel’s Bindecy and Italy’s SIO. Among the resellers are front companies connected to NSO products, such as Panama’s KBH and Mexico’s Comercializadora de Soluciones Integrales Mecale, as highlighted by the Mexican government. New suppliers named include the UK’s Coretech Security and UAE’s ZeroZenX.

The report highlights the central role that these resellers and brokers play, stating that it is “a notably under-researched set of actors.” According to the report, “These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets.”

“This creates an expanded and opaque spyware supply chain, which makes corporate structures, jurisdictional arbitrage, and ultimately accountability measures a challenge to disentangle,” Sarah Graham, who coauthored the report, tells WIRED.

“Despite this, resellers and brokers are not a current feature of policy responses,” she says.

The study reveals the addition of three new countries linked to spyware activity—Japan, Malaysia, and Panama. Japan in particular is a signatory to international efforts to curb spyware abuse, including the Joint Statement on Efforts to Counter the Proliferation and Misuse of Commercial Spyware and the Pall Mall Process Code of Practice for States.

“The discovery of entities operating in new jurisdictions, like Japan, highlights potential conflicts of interest between international commitments and market dynamics,” Graham says.

Despite efforts by the Biden administration to constrain the spyware market through its executive order, trade and visa restrictions, and sanctions, the industry has continued to operate largely without restraint.

The US is now the largest investor in commercial spyware Read More »

AI vs. MAGA: Populists alarmed by Trump’s embrace of AI, Big Tech

AI, AI regulation, big tech, MAGA, Policy, syndication / Tim Belzer / September 10, 2025

Some Republicans are still angry over the deplatforming of Trump by tech executives once known for their progressive politics. They had been joined by a “vocal and growing group of conservatives who are fundamentally suspicious of the benefits of technological innovation,” Thierer said.

With MAGA skeptics on one side and Big Tech allies of the president on the other, a “battle for the soul of the conservative movement” is under way.

Popular resentment is now a threat to Trump’s Republican Party, warn some of its biggest supporters—especially if AI begins displacing jobs as many of its exponents suggest.

“You can displace farm workers—what are they going to do about it? You can displace factory workers—they will just kill themselves with drugs and fast food,” Tucker Carlson, one of the MAGA movement’s most prominent media figures, told a tech conference on Monday.

“If you do that to lawyers and non-profit sector employees, you will get a revolution.”

It made Trump’s embrace of Silicon Valley bosses a “significant risk” for his administration ahead of next year’s midterm elections, a leading Republican strategist said.

“It’s a real double-edged sword—the administration is forced to embrace [AI] because if the US is not the leader in AI, China will be,” the strategist said, echoing the kind of argument made by Sacks and fellow Trump adviser Michael Kratsios for their AI policy platform.

“But you could see unemployment spiking over the next year,” the strategist said.

Other MAGA supporters are urging Trump to tone down at least his public cheerleading for an AI sector so many of them consider a threat.

“The pressure that is being placed on conservatives to fall in line… is a recipe for discontent,” said Toscano.

By courting AI bosses, the Republican Party, which claims to represent the pro-family movement, religious communities, and American workers, appeared to be embracing those who are antithetical to all of those groups, he warned.

“The current view of things suggests that the most important members of the party are those that are from Silicon Valley,” Toscano said.

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco.

AI vs. MAGA: Populists alarmed by Trump’s embrace of AI, Big Tech Read More »

Geoengineering will not save humankind from climate change

climate change, Geoengineering, Science, syndication / Mike M. / September 9, 2025

A team of the world’s best ice and climate researchers studied a handful of recently publicized engineering concepts for protecting Earth’s polar ice caps and found that none of them are likely to work.

Their peer-reviewed research, published Tuesday, shows some of the untested ideas, such as dispersing particles in the atmosphere to dim sunlight or trying to refreeze ice sheets with pumped water, could have unintended and dangerous consequences.

The various speculative notions that have been floated, mainly via public relations efforts, include things such as spreading reflective particles over newly formed sea ice to promote its persistence and growth; building giant ocean-bottom sea walls or curtains to deflect warmer streams of water away from ice shelves; pumping water from the base of glaciers to the surface to refreeze it, and even intentionally polluting the upper atmosphere with sulfur-based or other reflective particles to dim sunlight.

Research shows the particle-based sunlight-dimming concept could shift rainfall patterns like seasonal monsoons critical for agriculture in some areas, and also intensify regional heat, precipitation, and drought extremes. And the authors of the new paper wrote that some of the mechanical interventions to preserve ice would likely disrupt regional ocean ecosystems, including the marine food chain, from tiny krill to giant whales.

Lead author Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter, said that to provide a comprehensive view of the challenges, the new paper included 40 authors with expertise in fields including oceanography, marine biology, glaciology, and atmospheric science.

The paper counters a promotional geo-engineering narrative with science-based evidence showing the difficulties and unintended consequences of some of the aspirational ventures, he said. Most geoengineering ideas are climate Band-Aids at best. They only address symptoms, he added, but don’t tackle the root cause of the problem—greenhouse gas emissions.

Geoengineering will not save humankind from climate change Read More »

OpenAI links up with Broadcom to produce its own AI chips

AI, AI chips, AI GPU, Broadcom, GPU, NVIDIA, openai, syndication / Tim Belzer / September 5, 2025

OpenAI is set to produce its own artificial intelligence chip for the first time next year, as the ChatGPT maker attempts to address insatiable demand for computing power and reduce its reliance on chip giant Nvidia.

The chip, co-designed with US semiconductor giant Broadcom, would ship next year, according to multiple people familiar with the partnership.

Broadcom’s chief executive Hock Tan on Thursday referred to a mystery new customer committing to $10 billion in orders.

OpenAI’s move follows the strategy of tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Meta, which have designed their own specialised chips to run AI workloads. The industry has seen huge demand for the computing power to train and run AI models.

OpenAI planned to put the chip to use internally, according to one person close to the project, rather than make them available to external customers.

Last year it began an initial collaboration with Broadcom, according to reports at the time, but the timeline for mass production of a successful chip design had previously been unclear.

On a call with analysts, Tan announced that Broadcom had secured a fourth major customer for its custom AI chip business, as it reported earnings that topped Wall Street estimates.

Broadcom does not disclose the names of these customers, but people familiar with the matter confirmed OpenAI was the new client. Broadcom and OpenAI declined to comment.

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Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn

Security, spyware, Stealerium, syndicated, syndication / Rejus Almole / September 5, 2025

“How you use this program is your responsibility,” the page reads. “I will not be held accountable for any illegal activities. Nor do i give a shit how u use it.”

In the hacking campaigns Proofpoint analyzed, cybercriminals attempted to trick users into downloading and installing Stealerium as an attachment or a web link, luring victims with typical bait like a fake payment or invoice. The emails targeted victims inside companies in the hospitality industry, as well as in education and finance, though Proofpoint notes that users outside of companies were also likely targeted but wouldn’t be seen by its monitoring tools.

Once it’s installed, Stealerium is designed to steal a wide variety of data and send it to the hacker via services like Telegram, Discord, or the SMTP protocol in some variants of the spyware, all of which is relatively standard in infostealers. The researchers were more surprised to see the automated sextortion feature, which monitors browser URLs for a list of pornography-related terms such as “sex” and “porn,” which can be customized by the hacker and trigger simultaneous image captures from the user’s webcam and browser. Proofpoint notes that it hasn’t identified any specific victims of that sextortion function, but suggests that the existence of the feature means it has likely been used.

More hands-on sextortion methods are a common blackmail tactic among cybercriminals, and scam campaigns in which hackers claim to have obtained webcam pics of victims looking at pornography have also plagued inboxes in recent years—including some that even try to bolster their credibility with pictures of the victim’s home pulled from Google Maps. But actual, automated webcam pics of users browsing porn is “pretty much unheard of,” says Proofpoint researcher Kyle Cucci. The only similar known example, he says, was a malware campaign that targeted French-speaking users in 2019, discovered by the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET.

The pivot to targeting individual users with automated sextortion features may be part of a larger trend of some cybercriminals—particularly lower-tier groups—turning away from high-visibility, large-scale ransomware campaigns and botnets that tend to attract the attention of law enforcement, says Proofpoint’s Larson.

“For a hacker, it’s not like you’re taking down a multimillion-dollar company that is going to make waves and have a lot of follow-on impacts,” Larson says, contrasting the sextortion tactics to ransomware operations that attempt to extort seven-figure sums from companies. “They’re trying to monetize people one at a time. And maybe people who might be ashamed about reporting something like this.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn Read More »

“Mockery of science”: Climate scientists tear into new US climate report

clean air act, climate change, department of energy, EPA, Science, syndication / Mike M. / September 3, 2025

While it is not uncommon for scientists to disagree, many of the review’s authors feel what the DOE produced isn’t science at all. “Trying to circumvent, bypass, undermine decades of the government’s own work with the nation’s top scientists to generate definitive information about climate science to use in policymaking—that’s what’s different here,” said Kim Cobb, a professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Cobb co-authored two sections of the review.

Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In its proposal to rescind the finding, the EPA cited the DOE’s climate report as one of many that led the agency to develop “serious concerns” with how the US regulates greenhouse gases.

“It’s really important that we stand up for the integrity of [climate science] when it matters the most,” Cobb said. “And this may very well be when it mattered the most.”

Roger Pielke Jr., a science policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is cited in the DOE report, doesn’t believe the push to overturn the endangerment finding will come down to that report. In his view, the administration’s arguments are mostly legal, not scientific. “I think that given the composition of the Supreme Court, the endangerment finding might be in danger. But it’s not going to be because of the science,” he said.

But as more communities grapple with the fallout of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, Cobb fears the federal government is turning away from the best tool it has to help people across the US adapt to a warming planet.

“Science is a tool for prosperity and safety,” she said. “And when you turn your back on it in general—it’s not just going to be climate science, it’s going to be many other aspects of science and technology that are going to be forsaken—that will have grave costs.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

“Mockery of science”: Climate scientists tear into new US climate report Read More »

Texas suit alleging anti-coal “cartel” of top Wall Street firms could reshape ESG

esg, Policy, Science, syndication, Wall Street / Paul Patrick / August 30, 2025

It’s a closely watched test of whether corporate alliances on climate efforts violate antitrust laws.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Since 2022, Republican lawmakers in Congress and state attorneys general have sent letters to major banks, pension funds, asset managers, accounting firms, companies, nonprofits, and business alliances, putting them on notice for potential antitrust violations and seeking information as part of the Republican pushback against “environmental, social and governance” efforts such as corporate climate commitments.

“This caused a lot of turmoil and stress obviously across the whole ecosystem,” said Denise Hearn, a senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. “But everyone wondered, ‘OK, when are they actually going to drop a lawsuit?’”

That came in November, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 10 other Republican AGs, accusing three of the biggest asset managers on Wall Street—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—of running “an investment cartel” to depress the output of coal and boosting their revenues while pushing up energy costs for Americans. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission filed a supporting brief in May.

The overall pressure campaign aimed at what’s known as “ESG” is having an impact.

“Over the past several months, through this [lawsuit] and other things, letters from elected officials, state and federal, there has been a chilling effect of what investors are saying,” said Steven Maze Rothstein, chief program officer of Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for more sustainable business practices and was among the earliest letter recipients. Still, “investors understand that Mother Nature doesn’t know who’s elected governor, attorney general, president.”

Earlier this month, a US District Court judge in Tyler, Texas, declined to dismiss the lawsuit against the three asset managers, though he did dismiss three of the 21 counts. The judge was not making a final decision in the case, only that there was enough evidence to go to trial.

BlackRock said in a statement: “This case is not supported by the facts, and we will demonstrate that.” Vanguard said it will “vigorously defend against plaintiffs’ claims.” State Street called the lawsuit “baseless and without merit.”

The Texas attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The three asset managers built substantial stakes in major US coal producers, the suit alleges, and “announced their common commitment” to cut US coal output by joining voluntary alliances to collaborate on climate issues, including the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative and, in the case of two of the firms, the Climate Action 100+. (All of them later pulled out of the alliances.)

The lawsuit alleges that the coal companies succumbed to the defendants’ collective influence, mining for less coal and disclosing more climate-related information. The suit claimed that resulted in “cartel-level revenues and profits” for the asset managers.

“You could say, ‘Well, if the coal companies were all colluding together to restrict output, then shouldn’t they also be violating antitrust?’” Hearn asked. But the attorneys general “are trying to say that it was at the behest of these concentrated index funds and the concentrated ownership.”

Index funds, which are designed to mirror the returns of specific market indices, are the most common mode of passive investment—when investors park their money somewhere for long-term returns.

The case is being watched closely, not only by climate alliances and sustainability nonprofits, but by the financial sector at large.

If the three asset managers ultimately win, it would turn down the heat on other climate alliances and vindicate those who pressured financial players to line up their business practices with the Paris agreement goals as well as national and local climate targets. The logic of those efforts: Companies in the financial sector have a big impact on climate change, for good or ill—and climate change has a big impact on those same companies.

If the red states instead win on all counts, that “could essentially totally reconstitute the industry as we understand it,” said Hearn, who has co-authored a paper on the lawsuit. At stake is how the US does passive investing.

The pro-free-market editorial board of The Wall Street Journal in June called the Texas-led lawsuit “misconceived,” its logic “strained” and its theories “bizarre.”

The case breaks ground on two fronts. It challenges collaboration between financial players on climate action. It also makes novel claims around “common ownership,” where a shareholder—in this case, an asset manager—holds stakes in competing firms within the same sector.

“Regardless of how the chips fall in the case, those two things will absolutely be precedent-setting,” Hearn said.

Even though this is the first legal test of the theory that business climate alliances are anti-competitive, the question was asked in a study by Harvard Business School economists that came out in May. That study, which empirically examines 11 major climate alliances and 424 listed financial institutions over 10 years, turned up no evidence of traditional antitrust violations. The study was broad and did not look at particular allegations against specific firms.

“To the extent that there are valid legal arguments that can be made, they have to be tested,” said study co-author Peter Tufano, a Harvard Business School professor, noting that his research casts doubt on many of the allegations made by critics of these alliances.

Financial firms that joined climate alliances were more likely to adopt emissions targets and climate-aligned management practices, cut their own emissions and engage in pro-climate lobbying, the study found.

”The range of [legal] arguments that are made, and the passion with which they’re being advanced, suggests that these alliances must be doing something meaningful,” said Tufano, who was previously the dean of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

Meanwhile, most of the world is moving the other way.

According to a tally by CarbonCloud, a carbon emissions accounting platform that serves the food industry, at least 35 countries that make up more than half of the world’s gross domestic product now mandate climate-related disclosures of some kind.

In the US, California, which on its own would be the world’s fourth-largest economy, will begin requiring big businesses to measure and report their direct and indirect emissions next year.

Ceres’ Rothstein notes that good data about companies is necessary for informed investment decisions. “Throughout the world,” he said, “there’s greater recognition and, to be honest, less debate about the importance of climate information.” Ceres is one of the founders of Climate Action 100+, which now counts more than 600 investor members around the world, including Europe, Asia, and Australia.

For companies that operate globally, the American political landscape is in sharp contrast with other major economies, Tufano said, creating “this whipsawed environment where if you get on a plane, a few hours later, you’re in a jurisdiction that’s saying exactly the opposite thing.”

But even as companies and financial institutions publicly retreat from their climate commitments amid US political pressure, in a phenomenon called “greenhushing,” their decisions remain driven by the bottom line. “Banks are going to do what they’re going to do, and they’re going to lend to the most profitable or to the most growth-oriented industries,” Hearn said, “and right now, that’s not the fossil fuel industry.”

Texas suit alleging anti-coal “cartel” of top Wall Street firms could reshape ESG Read More »

Zuckerberg’s AI hires disrupt Meta with swift exits and threats to leave

AI, Biz & IT, facebook, Facebook AI, mark zuckerberg, Meta, syndication / Rejus Almole / August 30, 2025

Longtime acolytes are sidelined as CEO directs biggest leadership reorganization in two decades.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Within days of joining Meta, Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, had threatened to quit and return to his former employer, in a blow to Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar push to build “personal superintelligence.”

Zhao went as far as to sign employment paperwork to go back to OpenAI. Shortly afterwards, according to four people familiar with the matter, he was given the title of Meta’s new “chief AI scientist.”

The incident underscores Zuckerberg’s turbulent effort to direct the most dramatic reorganisation of Meta’s senior leadership in the group’s 20-year history.

One of the few remaining Big Tech founder-CEOs, Zuckerberg has relied on longtime acolytes such as Chief Product Officer Chris Cox to head up his favored departments and build out his upper ranks.

But in the battle to dominate AI, the billionaire is shifting towards a new and recently hired generation of executives, including Zhao, former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub chief Nat Friedman.

Current staff are adapting to the reinvention of Meta’s AI efforts as the newcomers seek to flex their power while adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of working within a sprawling $1.95 trillion giant with a hands-on chief executive.

“There’s a lot of big men on campus,” said one investor who is close with some of Meta’s new AI leaders.

Adding to the tumult, a handful of new AI staff have already decided to leave after brief tenures, according to people familiar with the matter.

This includes Ethan Knight, a machine-learning scientist who joined the company weeks ago. Another, Avi Verma, a former OpenAI researcher, went through Meta’s onboarding process but never showed up for his first day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In a tweet on X on Wednesday, Rishabh Agarwal, a research scientist who started at Meta in April, announced his departure. He said that while Zuckerberg and Wang’s pitch was “incredibly compelling,” he “felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk,” without giving more detail.

Meanwhile, Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan, generative AI staffers who had worked at Meta for nine and 10 years respectively, are among the more than half a dozen veteran employees to announce they are leaving in recent days. Wired first reported some details of recent exits, including Zhao’s threatened departure.

Meta said: “We appreciate that there’s outsized interest in seemingly every minute detail of our AI efforts, no matter how inconsequential or mundane, but we’re just focused on doing the work to deliver personal superintelligence.”

A spokesperson said Zhao had been scientific lead of the Meta superintelligence effort from the outset, and the company had waited until the team was in place before formalising his chief scientist title.

“Some attrition is normal for any organisation of this size. Most of these employees had been with the company for years, and we wish them the best,” they added.

Over the summer, Zuckerberg went on a hiring spree to coax AI researchers from rivals such as OpenAI and Apple with the promise of nine-figure sign-on bonuses and access to vast computing resources in a bid to catch up with rival labs.

This month, Meta announced it was restructuring its AI group—recently renamed Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL)—into four distinct teams. It is the fourth overhaul of its AI efforts in six months.

“One more reorg and everything will be fixed,” joked Meta research scientist Mimansa Jaiswal on X last week. “Just one more.”

Overseeing all of Meta’s AI efforts is Wang, a well-connected and commercially minded Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who was poached by Zuckerberg as part of a $14 billion investment in his Scale data labeling group.

The 28-year-old is heading Zuckerberg’s most secretive new department known as “TBD”—shorthand for “to be determined”—which is filled with marquee hires.

In one of the new team’s first moves, Meta is no longer actively working on releasing its flagship Llama Behemoth model to the public, after it failed to perform as hoped, according to people familiar with the matter. Instead, TBD is focused on building newer cutting-edge models.

Multiple company insiders describe Zuckerberg as deeply invested and involved in the TBD team, while others criticize him for “micromanaging.”

Wang and Zuckerberg have struggled to align on a timeline to achieve the chief executive’s goal of reaching superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human capabilities, according to another person familiar with the matter. The person said Zuckerberg has urged the team to move faster.

Meta said this allegation was “manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies.”

Wang’s leadership style has chafed with some, according to people familiar with the matter, who noted he does not have previous experience managing teams across a Big Tech corporation.

One former insider said some new AI recruits have felt frustrated by the company’s bureaucracy and internal competition for resources that they were promised, such as access to computing power.

“While TBD Labs is still relatively new, we believe it has the greatest compute-per-researcher in the industry, and that will only increase,” Meta said.

Wang and other former Scale staffers have struggled with some of the idiosyncratic ways of working at Meta, according to someone familiar with his thinking, for example having to adjust to not having revenue goals as they once did as a startup.

Despite teething problems, some have celebrated the leadership shift, including the appointment of popular entrepreneur and venture capitalist Friedman as head of Products and Applied Research, the team tasked with integrating the models into Meta’s own apps.

The hiring of Zhao, a top technical expert, has also been regarded as a coup by some at Meta and in the industry, who feel he has the decisiveness to propel the company’s AI development.

The shake-up has partially sidelined other Meta leaders. Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has remained in the role but is now reporting into Wang.

Ahmad Al-Dahle, who led Meta’s Llama and generative AI efforts earlier in the year, has not been named as head of any teams. Cox remains chief product officer, but Wang reports directly into Zuckerberg—cutting Cox out of overseeing generative AI, an area that was previously under his purview.

Meta said that Cox “remains heavily involved” in its broader AI efforts, including overseeing its recommendation systems.

Going forward, Meta is weighing potential cuts to the AI team, one person said. In a memo shared with managers last week, seen by the Financial Times, Meta said that it was “temporarily pausing hiring across all [Meta Superintelligence Labs] teams, with the exception of business critical roles.”

Wang’s staff would evaluate requested hires on a case-by-case basis, but the freeze “will allow leadership to thoughtfully plan our 2026 headcount growth as we work through our strategy,” the memo said.

Zuckerberg’s AI hires disrupt Meta with swift exits and threats to leave Read More »

Trump admin dismisses Endangered Species List as “Hotel California”

endangered species, endangered species act, Science, syndication / Rejus Almole / August 28, 2025

“Once a species enters, they never leave,” interior secretary says. But there’s more to the story.

A female northern spotted owl catches a mouse on a stick at the Hoopa Valley Tribe on the Hoopa Valley Reservation on Aug. 28, 2024. Credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It’s the ominous slogan for “Hotel California,” an iconic fictional lodging dreamed up by the Eagles in 1976. One of the rock band’s lead singers, Don Henley, said in an interview that the song and place “can have a million interpretations.”

For US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, what comes to mind is a key part of one of the country’s most central conservation laws.

“The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave,” Burgum wrote in an April post on X. He’s referring to the roster of more than 1,600 species of imperiled plants and animals that receive protections from the federal government under the Endangered Species Act to prevent their extinctions. “In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation.”

US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum speaks during a press conference on Aug. 11, 2025. Credit: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images

Since January, the Endangered Species Act has been a frequent target of the Trump administration, which claims that the law’s strict regulations inhibit development and “energy domination.” Several recent executive orders direct the federal government to change ESA regulations in a way that could enable businesses—fossil fuel firms in particular—to bypass the typical environmental reviews associated with project approval.

More broadly, though, Burgum and other conservative politicians are implying the law is ineffective at achieving its main goal: recovering biodiversity. But a number of biologists, environmental groups and legal experts say that recovery delays for endangered species are not a result of the law itself.

Instead, they point to systemically low conservation funding and long-standing political flip-flopping as wildlife faces mounting threats from climate change and widespread habitat loss.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them under the Endangered Species Act,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and public affairs at Princeton University, “and in doing that, we are more or less ensuring that it’s going to be very difficult to recover them and get them off the list.”

Endangered species by the numbers

Since the Endangered Species Act was enacted in 1973, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have listed more than 2,370 species of plants and animals as threatened or endangered—from schoolbus-sized North Atlantic right whales off the East Coast to tiny Oahu tree snails in Hawaii. In some cases, the list covers biodiversity abroad to prevent further harm from the global wildlife trade.

Once a plant or animal is added, it receives certain protections by the federal government to stanch population losses. Those measures include safeguards from adverse effects of federal activities, restrictions on hunting or development, and active conservation plans like seed planting or captive rearing of animals.

Despite these steps, only 54 of the several thousand species listed from 1973 to 2021 recovered to the point where they no longer needed protection. A number of factors play into this low recovery rate, according to a 2022 study.

The team of researchers who worked on it dove into the population sizes for species of concern, the timelines of their listings, and recovery efforts.

A few trends emerged: Most of the imperiled plants and animals in the US do not receive protections until their populations have fallen to “dangerously low levels,” with less genetic diversity and more vulnerability to extinction from extreme events like severe weather or disease outbreaks.

Additionally, the process to get a species listed frequently took several years, allowing time for populations to dip even lower, said Wilcove, a co-author of the study.

“It’s simply a biological fact that if you don’t start protecting a species until it’s down to a small number of individuals, you’re going to face a long uphill battle,” he said. On top of that, “there are more species in trouble, but at the same time, we are providing less funding on a per-species basis for the Fish and Wildlife Service, so we’re basically asking them to do more and more with less and less.”

These findings echo a similar paper Wilcove co-authored in 1993. Since that analysis was published, the number of listings has risen, while federal funding per species has dropped substantially. “Hotel California” isn’t the right analogy for the endangered species list, in Wilcove’s view: He says it’s more akin to “the critical care unit of the hospital”—one that is struggling to stay afloat.

“It’s as though you built a great hospital and then didn’t pay any money for medical equipment or doctors,” he said. “The hospital isn’t going to work.”

Even so, it has prevented a lot of deaths, experts say. Since the law was passed, just 26 listed species have gone extinct, many of which had not been seen in the wild for years prior to their listing. An estimated 47 species have perished while being considered for a listing, as they were still exposed to the threats that helped reduce their populations in the first place, according to an analysis by the High Country News. Some listing decisions take more than a decade.

“I think the marquee statistic is how few animals have gone extinct under the watch of the federal government,” said Andrew Mergen, the director of Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. He spent more than 30 years serving as legal counsel in the US Department of Justice, where he litigated a bevy of cases related to the Endangered Species Act.

“Our goal should be to get them off the list and to recover them, but it requires a commitment to this enterprise that we don’t see very often,” Mergen said.

History shows it can be done. Bald eagles—widely considered an emblem of American patriotism—nearly disappeared in the 1960s, with just 417 known nesting pairs left in the lower 48 states. This was largely due to habitat loss and the pesticide DDT, which caused eagle eggshells to become too brittle to survive incubation. By the time the bald eagle was listed as threatened or endangered in all lower 48 states in 1978, DDT had been outlawed, a regulation that the ESA helped enforce, experts say.

A bald eagle flies over the Massapequa Preserve on March 25, 2025 in Massapequa, New York. Credit: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

This step, along with captive breeding programs, reintroduction efforts, law enforcement, and habitat protection, helped recover populations to nearly 10,000 nesting pairs. In 2007, bald eagles came off the list. Other once-endangered animals like American alligators and Steller sea lions have also been delisted in recent decades due to targeted limits on actions that led to their decline, such as hunting.

Recovery gets trickier when threats to species are more multifaceted, according to Taal Levi, an associate professor at Oregon State University.

“The other class of species with complex, multicausal, or poorly understood threats can be like Hotel California,” Levi said over email. “This is in part because we don’t always have funding to research the threats, and if we identify them, we don’t always have funding to mitigate the threats.”

That is particularly true for the primary driver of biodiversity decline: habitat loss. Levi studies the endangered Humboldt marten, a small carnivore that lives on the Northern California and Southern Oregon coast. The animal was once widespread, but logging in old-growth and coniferous forests decimated their habitats. Now, Levi said it is difficult to fund research that helps unveil basic things about the animals, including what constitutes high-quality habitats. Other animals, like endangered Florida panthers, also struggle to maintain high populations in environments fragmented by urbanization.

“Sometimes being in Hotel California isn’t the worst thing,” Levi wrote in his email. “We’d prefer that Florida Panthers expand into other available habitat to the North of South Florida, but in lieu of that, maintaining them on the ESA seems wise to prevent their extinction.”

The private lands predicament

The federal government manages around 640 million acres of public lands and more than 3.4 million nautical miles of ocean, and it has final say on how endangered species are protected within these areas. However, more than two-thirds of species listed under the Endangered Species Act depend at least in part on private lands, with 10 percent residing only on such property.

The law prohibits any action that would harm a listed species wherever it might be, even if unintentionally. There is also a provision that enables the government to designate certain “critical habitat” areas that are crucial for a species’ survival, including on private land.

As a result, landowners and businesses often see endangered species as a detriment to their operations, said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary Law School in Virginia.

“Your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted… That creates a lot of conflict, and it discourages landowners from being cooperative,” he said. Adler published a paper in 2024 that argued the Endangered Species Act has been largely ineffective at conserving species, mainly due to the private land problem.

In some cases, this dynamic can create what Adler calls “perverse incentives” for landowners to destroy a habitat before a species is found on their land or listed to avoid any restrictions or costs associated with the endangered label.

Take the red-cockaded woodpecker, which typically relies on old-growth pine trees for nesting. This bird was part of the first cohort listed as endangered under the Act, which limited timber production in many areas of North Carolina. However, an analysis of timber harvests from 1984 to 1990 found that the closer a timber plot was to red-cockaded woodpeckers, the more likely the pines were to be harvested at a young age. This was most likely to prevent the trees from reaching maturity and avoid critical habitat regulation altogether, according to the 2007 study.

Adler argues that the ESA in its current form has too many sticks and not enough carrots. Over the years, Congress has implemented a few strategies to incentivize biodiversity protection on private lands, including providing tax benefits or purchasing conservation easements. This voluntary legal agreement allows an individual to receive compensation for a portion of their land while still owning it, in exchange for agreeing to certain restrictions, such as limiting development or following sustainable farming practices. Environmental groups often purchase conservation easements as well.

This strategy has helped protect animals like the California tiger salamander, San Joaquin kit fox, waterfowls, and other imperiled species. However, providing incentives to landowners for conservation is becoming less common under the Trump administration, Princeton’s Wilcove said.

The Department of the Interior did not respond to requests for comment.

“You shouldn’t reduce the prohibition on harming endangered species, but you should make it easier for landowners to do the right thing, and there are ways for doing that, and this administration is not a champion of those ways,” Wilcove said. “We’re waiting too long to protect species, and when we get around to protecting them, we’re not giving the government sufficient resources to do the job.”

Is the Endangered Species Act itself endangered?

The Endangered Species Act was passed with wide bipartisan support. But it has become one of the most highly litigated environmental laws in the US, in part because anyone can petition to have a species listed as endangered.

A number of conservative presidential administrations and members of Congress have tried to soften the law’s power, but more environmentally minded administrations often strengthened it once again.

“It’s been a very strong law, partly because so much of the public supports it,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which has frequently filed ESA-related lawsuits. “Whenever legislative changes have been proposed, we’ve pretty much been able to defeat those.”

But experts say things may be different this time around as the Trump administration takes a more accelerated and aggressive approach to the ESA at a time when environmentalists can’t count on the Supreme Court to push back.

Since January, the president has issued several executive orders that would allow certain fossil fuel projects to get a fast-pass trip through environmental reviews, including those that could harm endangered animals or plants. In April, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed rescinding certain habitat protections for endangered species, effectively allowing such activities as logging and oil drilling even if they degrade the surrounding environment.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior and NOAA have in recent months cut funding for conservation programs and laid off many of the people responsible for carrying out the Endangered Species Act’s mandate. That includes rangers who were monitoring animals like the endangered Pacific fisher in California’s Yosemite National Park.

People observe North Atlantic right whales from a boat in Canada’s Bay of Fundy. Credit: (Photo by: Francois Gohier/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

“One thing that I would say to [Secretary Burgum] is that you have a duty to faithfully execute the law as a member of the executive branch as it was enacted by Congress,” Harvard’s Mergen said. “That’s going to mean that you should not cut all your biologists out but invest in the recovery of these species, understanding what’s putting them at risk and mitigating those harms.”

Conservation funding declined long before Trump entered office, so there is “plenty of blame to go around,” Wilcove said. But political flip-flopping on how recovery projects are carried out inhibit their effectiveness, he added. “If you’re lurching between administrations that care and administrations that are hostile, it’s going to be very hard to make progress.”

For all the discussion about the economic costs of endangered species regulations, studies show that funding biodiversity protection has a strong return on investment for society.

For instance, coastal mangroves around the world reduce property damage from storms by more than $65 billion annually and protect more than 15 million people, according to 2020 research. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that insect crop pollination equates to $34 billion in value each year.

Protecting vulnerable animals can also benefit industries that depend on healthy landscapes and oceans. Researchers estimated in 2007 that protecting water flow in the Rio Grande River in Texas for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow produces average annual benefits of over $200,000 per year for west Texas agriculture and over $1 million for El Paso municipal and industrial water users.

Endangered species can be a boon for the outdoor tourism industry, too. NOAA Fisheries estimates that the endangered North Atlantic right whale generated $2.3 billion in sales in the whale-watching industry and across the broader economy in 2008 alone, compared to annual costs of about $30 million related to shipping and fishing restrictions protecting them.

Beyond financial gains, humanity has pulled a wealth of knowledge from nature to help treat and cure diseases. For example, the anti-cancer compound paclitaxel was originally extracted from the bark of the Pacific yew tree and is “too fiendishly complex” a chemical structure for researchers to have invented on their own, according to the federal government.

Preventing endangered species from going extinct ensures that we can someday still discover what we don’t yet know, according to Dave Owen, an environmental law professor at the University of California Law, San Francisco.

“Even seemingly simple species are extraordinarily complex; they contain an incredible variety of chemicals, microbes, and genetic adaptations, all of which we can learn from—but only if the species is still around,” he said over email.

Last month, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Roanoke logperch—a freshwater fish—has recovered enough to be removed from the endangered species list altogether.

In a post on X, the Interior secretary declared this is “proof that the Endangered Species List is no longer Hotel California. Under the Trump admin, species can finally leave!”

But this striped fish’s recovery didn’t happen overnight. Federal agencies, local partners, landowners, and conservationists spent more than three decades, millions of dollars, and countless hours removing obsolete dams, restoring wetlands, and reintroducing fish populations to help pull the Roanoke logperch back from the brink. And it was the Biden administration that first proposed delisting the fish in 2024.

These types of success stories give reasons for hope, Wilcove said.

“What I’m optimistic about is our ability to save species, if we put our mind and our resources to it.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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