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
A judge has ruled that OpenAI must turn over 20 million ChatGPT logs:
News outlets including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune had requested the logs as part of their ongoing copyright dispute with OpenAI.
The model developer had appealed the request, but Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang ruled against them.
The FDA announced that it will relax regulations on digital health products, allowing wearables and generative AI tools into clinical workflows.
State Sen. Steve Padilla (D-CA) introduced a bill that would place a four-year ban on the sale and manufacture of toys with AI chatbot capabilities for kids under 18.
The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) issued an “urgent call” for an investigation of Elon Musk’s xAI over the creation of non-consensual sexual abuse material.
TECH
SoftBank completed its $40B investment in OpenAI
OpenAI’s deal with the Japanese firm places it at a $260B pre-money valuation.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun left Meta with some parting shots on his way out:
LeCun said Meta’s newest AI boss, 29-year-old billionaire Alexandr Wang, was “young” and “inexperienced.”
Wang has “no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher,” he said.
Claude Code said that 100% of his coding contributions to the model last month were written by… Claude Code.
WSJ let Claude run their office vending machine - it lost hundreds of dollars.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy: “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his views and predictions for the upcoming year.
“xAI has bought a third building called MACROHARDRR. Will take @xAI training compute to almost 2GW.”
The 2025 leaderboard for AI models is in.
TOP READS
Claude Code is about so much more than coding (Transformer News)
Big Tech v. the Chinese Government in New AI Companion Regs (ChinAI Newsletter)
AI 2026: Data Centers Restart Growth of a Stagnant U.S. Electrical Grid (Bismarck Brief)
How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive (SemiAnalysis)
On Nvidia’s acquisition of AI chip startup Groq (The Chip Letter)
The Race between Waymo, Cybercab, and Uber (Uncharted Territories)
9 AI predictions for 2026 (Transformer News)
17 more predictions for AI in 2026 (Understanding AI)
Self-driving cars aren’t nearly a solved problem (Strange Cosmos)
The AI copyright question has no easy answers (Transformer News)
The AI Competition as a Football Game (Interconnected)
Governments are struggling. Can AI help? (AI Policy Perspectives)
Data to start your week (African solar, space traffic, and token economics) (Exponential View)
A skeptical view of AI for biology (Bo Wang)
Notes on Taiwan (Sam Enright)
The Compute Theory of Everything (Samuel Albanie)
Existential Risk and Growth (Philip Trammell and Leopold Aschenbrenner)