Less than 1 in 5 Americans think that AI will have a positive effect
Press Clips #42 - December 29, 2025
Delivered to your inbox every Monday, Press Clips is a rundown of the previous week’s happenings in politics and tech in America. News, opinion, podcasts, and more, to bring you up to speed for the week ahead.
POLITICS
Only 17% of Americans think that AI will have a positive effect on the U.S., and
80% of Americans think that the government should regulate AI, even if it slows growth
NIST is investing $20M in new centers for AI in manufacturing and critical infrastructure.
Sens McCormick (R-PA) and Wyden (D-OR) re-introduced the Remote Access Security Act.
The bill seeks to amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to allow for the remote access of chips via cloud infrastructure.
Stanford University’s Institute for Human-centered AI recommends working with China to understand open AI ecosystem.
Several orgs responded to the White House’s request for information on accelerating the American scientific enterprise, including ITIF and IFP.
CSET published a paper describing the Chinese approach to “embodied AI,” framed as a departure from the American approach to AGI.
TECH
Nvidia and Groq have struck a licensing agreement, understood to be worth $20B. Here’s 5 things you should know about it.
Meta has acquired Manus AI, the Singapore-based AI agent company, for $2B.
Chinese startup Z.ai released a benchmark-topping, open source coding model.
Frontier lab employees are getting increasingly bullish on AI.
Palmer Luckey gave Sourcery a tour of Anduril HQ:
Palantir CEO Alex Karp bought a $120M mansion in Colorado.
Sam Altman is hiring a ‘Head of Preparedness’ to “[track and prepare] for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm.”
Waymo is working on an in-ride Gemini AI assistant.
TOP READS
25 stats that explain 2025 (Exponential View) 📊
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Why AI benchmarking is hard (Epoch AI) 📊
The worst (and funniest) AI takes of 2025 (Transformer) ✍️
The best films and TV about AI and tech in 2025 (Brian Merchant) ✍️
METR estimates that Claude Opus 4.5 has the longest task-time horizon of any model (METR) 📊
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The first cancer vaccine (Works in Progress) 🎥
How bad is it when the government cancels active research grants? (Macroscience) ✍️
How the Catholic Church thinks about superintelligence (Transformer) ✍️
Our most popular Data Insights & Gradient Updates of 2025 (Epoch AI) 📊