Paige Gross

A proclamation signed by President Donald Trump last week seeking to restrict entry of non-immigrant workers to the U.S. and apply a $100,000 fee to H-1B visa applications created confusion and concern within the tech industry over the weekend. 

While some states and the federal government take their time in considering how artificial intelligence can and should be used, municipalities across the U.S. have been forging their own way in making AI policies for their government employees.“AI is generally useful,” Boston’s Chief Innovation Officer Santiago Garces said. “But it is a set of technologies that also carries unique risks that need to be considered. And I think that our employees are generally concerned about accuracy, privacy, security and intellectual property.”

As a part of President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, which rolled out at the end of last month, the U.S. General Services Administration launched a platform Thursday that will allow government employees to experiment with artificial intelligence tools.

American companies are split between support and criticism of a new voluntary European AI code of practice, meant to help tech companies align themselves with upcoming regulations from the European Union’s landmark AI Act.

An executive order signed by President Donald Trump last week seeks to remove “ideological agendas” from artificial intelligence models sold to the federal government, but it’s not exactly clear how the policy would be enforced, nor how tech companies would test their models for these standards, technologists and policy experts say.

For as much promise as artificial intelligence shows in making life better, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is worried.The tech leader who has done so much to develop AI and make it accessible to the public says the technology could have life-altering effects on nearly everything, particularly if deployed by the wrong hands.

The Trump administration wants to greatly expand the development and use of advanced artificial intelligence, including rolling back environmental rules to spur building of power-thirsty data centers and punishing states that attempt to regulate AI on their own.

Regular energy consumers, not corporations, will bear the brunt of the increased costs of a boom in artificial intelligence that has contributed to a growth in data centers and a surge in power usage, recent research suggests.

The proliferation of decision-making artificial intelligence systems into consequential facets of life is posing threats to Americans and increasing racial biases, tech and legal experts with the American Civil Liberties Union said during the organization’s AI Summit Thursday.“We're now at a place where automated systems and AI are being used increasingly throughout our lives, determining who gets a job, who gets a loan, who gets policed and surveilled, and more,” said Marissa Gerchick, a data scientist and algorithmic justice specialist with the ACLU.

A moratorium on state-based artificial intelligence laws was struck from the “Big Beautiful Bill” Monday night in a 99-1 vote in the U.S. Senate, after getting less and less popular with state and federal lawmakers, state officials and advocacy groups since it was introduced in May.

Senate Republicans are aiming to soften a proposed 10-year moratorium on state-level artificial intelligence laws that has received pushback from congressmembers on both sides of the aisle.Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas developed a pared down version of the moratorium Sunday that shortens the time of the ban, and makes exceptions for some laws with specific aims such as protecting children or limiting deepfake technologies.

Amid discussions by Congress of what federal regulations for artificial intelligence could look like, experts and legislators have begun pointing to existing guidelines created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) over the last two years, as a model.

Environmental scientists and conservationists have been slow to embrace artificial intelligence tools, in large part because of the enormous amount of electricity the technology demands. But that, some say, is slowly changing as the potential benefits of AI become clearer.

A Google Cloud outage caused disruptions across the globe Thursday afternoon, affecting Google users and other companies like Spotify, Discord, Amazon Web Services and CloudFlare.Tens of thousands of users reported the issues on Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages and their timelines. The majority of disruption came just before 3 p.m. EST, and various platforms reported that their service had returned before 5 p.m.

As Congress continues its investigation into the role AI should play in government, members of the House Oversight Committee are questioning the uses and procurement of AI tools for government work, as well as the privacy concerns the technology poses when unregulated.

European Union AI regulation is both model and warning for U.S. lawmakers, experts say

In one of the first major steps in discussing widespread regulations for artificial intelligence legislation at the federal level, members of the House subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade met Wednesday to discuss the United States' place in the global AI race.

A footnote in a budget bill U.S. House Republicans are trying to pass before Memorial Day is the first major signal for how Congress may address artificial intelligence legislation, as they seek to create a moratorium on any AI laws at the state level for 10 years.

Colorado was first in the nation to pass comprehensive AI regulation, in 2024, but less than a year before the law goes into effect, lawmakers find themselves trying to clean up the landmark legislation, with the hopes of refining some of the terms that Colorado businesses say could slow growth and stifle innovation.

Education software experts say they’re cautiously optimistic about a Trump administration drive to incorporate AI into classrooms, but such a program needs clear goals, specific rules — and enough money to fund the costly systems.“AI is, inherently, really expensive,” said Ryan Trattner, CEO of AI-assisted studying tool Study Fetch. “It’s not something that scales like a normal piece of software where it might be the same price for 1,000 people to use it as 100,000.”