Gen Z protests in Nepal have led to the country’s first female Prime Minister.
Although the demonstrations began in response to a social media ban, it has become clear that the ban was only the spark. The deeper frustration driving the younger generation to the streets is widespread corruption. Read more here and here.
The demonstrations were triggered by the government's decision last week to ban 26 social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, for failing to meet a deadline to register with Nepal's ministry of communication and information technology.
Critics accused the government of seeking to stifle an anti-corruption campaign with the ban, which was repealed on Monday night.
“All the President’s Tech CEOs” — as The Wire puts it (excerpt from The Hill below)
Top CEOs and tech leaders have jumped at the chance to be in President Trump’s good graces, a theme of the second administration that was on display in the State Dining room on Thursday night.
Anthropic endorses California’s AI safety bill, SB 53. Read here
If passed, SB 53 would require frontier AI model developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to develop safety frameworks, as well as release public safety and security reports before deploying powerful AI models. The bill would also establish whistleblower protections to employees who come forward with safety concerns.
Anthropic downloaded books from pirating sites to train its chatbot, Claude. Read here.
Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion US to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using pirated copies of their books to train its AI chatbot, Claude, without permission.
OpenAI Plans to Add Safeguards to ChatGPT for Teens and Others in Distress
After a California teenager spent months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life, OpenAI said it would introduce parental controls and better responses for users in distress.
Parents, according to an OpenAI post, will be able to “control how ChatGPT responds to their teen” and “receive notifications when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress.”
This is a feature that OpenAI’s developer community has been requesting for more than a year.