Marketplace Tech

California promised consumers an easier way to protect their personal data. Since 2024, the Delete Act has required the state registration of data brokers — businesses that collect and sell personal data from our digital footprints — and it also mandates they give consumers a way to request their data be deleted and report how many requests they get.But, a new Stanford report shows registered data brokers are largely ignoring the laws. Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, says only 9% of data brokers are in compliance.More on this:“Regulating Data Brokers in the Age of AI: A California Case Study” from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI“About DROP and the Delete Act” from the California Privacy Protection Agency

Anthropic recently announced it's adding watermarks to all text outputted by its chatbot Claude. But often, you don't need fancy detection software to know; you just need to look for language that gets repeated over and over by AI chatbots, like “it's not X, it's Y.”That's a rhetorical structure referred to as negative parallelism. And it's the topic for today's “Uncanny AI,” those times when it becomes clear AI doesn't think like us. Will Oremus recently wrote about this AI tic for The Atlantic.More on this“The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious” from The Atlantic“Move Over Em-Dash, There's a New AI Tell in Town” from Ai-Ai-OH

OpenAI is launching ChatGPT for Teens, which has new guardrails to steer conversations from sensitive topics like self-harm or sexual content. It'll also include parental controls and features intended to support studying without the cognitive offloading that often happens.Plus, the surge in construction of AI data centers has increased the value of basically any component that goes into them. Now, thieves are increasingly targeting cargo shipments of materials bound for data centers. And Amazon is expanding its drone deliveries. Paresh Dave at Wired joins Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino for these stories.Everything we talked about:“Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections” from OpenAI“OpenAI's Second-Quarter Sales Show Tepid Growth Compared With Anthropic” from The Wall Street Journal“States Seek $200 Billion From Meta Over Child Social Media Addiction Claims” from The New York Times“‘The Worst I've Ever Seen': Cargo Thefts Have Turned Violent in Pursuit of AI Hardware” from Wired“Amazon Prime Air drone delivery is expanding to nearly 500 US cities and towns this year” from Amazon

Most of the world's internet traffic flows through underwater cables on the ocean floor. The wires are also responsible for some $10 trillion worth of financial transactions every day. And because those cables hold so much data and carry so much money, they're also a potential security threat. That may explain why the U.S. and China are vying for control over the technology — and why the Trump administration is ramping up spending to replace cables in the Caribbean and Central America. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Erin Murphy, the managing director for Asia at Redpoint Advisors, about why these cables play a key role in geopolitics. More on this:US is considering big boost to anti-China spending globally from The Associated PressRisk Beneath the Waves: Safeguarding Subsea Cables for a Secure Global Network from CSIS

Water systems across a dozen states were targeted by cyberattacks in recent weeks. So far, the water has remained safe to drink, but the incidents have raised concerns about the possibility of future attacks. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nikita Shah, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about other vulnerable infrastructure and the steps that states can take to strengthen cybersecurity. More on this:How Tehran's Use of Cyber Operations in the U.S.-Iran Conflict Has Evolved from CSISA Leaked Memo Ties Cyberattacks on Minnesota Water Utilities to Iran | WIRED from WIREDNew York awards $9M to protect water systems after cyberattacks in other states - Gothamist from Gothamist

More than 100 rockets took off into orbit from Florida's Space Coast last year — a new record. And with more rockets taking flight each year, the availability of launch sites is becoming a bottleneck for the growing space industry.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants to make it easier for space companies to build new spaceports to make way for the increasing number of rocket launches. The agency has proposed waiving some environmental requirements for space launch. Daniel Ackerman has been reporting on the space industry as part of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.

Suno, an AI music company, wants to partner with independent artists by launching an incubator program called Suno Spark. This program will provide grants, marketing support and, of course, Suno AI tools to unsigned musicians.Tatiana Cirisano, vice president of music strategy at MIDiA Research, which consults in entertainment, discusses more on this.

Anthropic announced it's adding invisible watermarks to all text generated by its chatbot Claude. The AI startup is rolling out the policy globally as part of efforts to comply with the European Union AI Act.Plus, there's a patchwork of state laws that regulate AI-generated political messaging — they're being put to the test ahead of the midterm elections. And federal regulators ordered Kalshi to continue to operate in New York, despite a state lawsuit seeking to shut it down.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, about all this for this week's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Generative AI models can produce enormous volumes of text, images and video in seconds. But without expert human instruction, the output is often generic. (You might say slop.)A number of startups in Silicon Valley are on a mission to change that by giving AI a more human sense of taste. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with critic and journalist Sophie Haigney about what taste is and whether artificial intelligence can truly replicate it.

This story includes discussion of suicide.Back in 2021, TikTok tweaked its algorithm in an effort to address dangerous filter bubbles — a sort of algorithmic spiral of recommendations for high-risk content like extreme dieting or self-harm. But internal company documents obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show 10% of U.S. users — 15 million Americans — were purposely excluded from this safety update. This was part of user testing to validate the new feature and track whether it reduced engagement with the famously sticky platform.One of those users was then-16-year-old Chase Nasca, who subsequently died by suicide. Olivia Carville, Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter, has been on the story.

Remember those grainy old baby monitors? So passé. Today, the modern nursery can be equipped with HD cameras and biometric sensors — all analyzed with artificial intelligence.The technology can detect hazardous position changes or a blanket covering a baby's face, but also tracks less critical metrics that purport to help optimize infant sleep and health. Sapna Maheshwari, business reporter at The New York Times, recently wrote about this. She's been an avid user of the Nanit Smart Baby Monitor System with both of her children.More on this“Aw, It's Baby's First A.I. Surveillance System” from The New York Times“AI-powered IoT is creating a new security challenge” from Spiceworks

Substack, the platform popular for online newsletters, recently launched an artificial intelligence detection feature powered by Pangram. The detector allows users to scan text and get an estimate for how much of it was likely written by AI. But some creators are concerned about the tool's accuracy and its potential to prompt a “witch hunt” for writers who use AI. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Substack CEO Chris Best about the new feature.More on this:AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn from PangramI Test-Drove Substack's New AI Detection Tool, and It Mostly Worked from CNET

Is your shirt-folding technique good enough to train a robot how to do it? Could MySpace be creeping back into our browsers? We get into all this on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”But first, the rocket ship/satellite internet/AI company SpaceX reported this week that it spent over $18 billion in capital expenditures in the second quarter. That's six times what it spent the same time last year. Most of that was on AI infrastructure. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes spoke with Joanna Stern, founder of the media company New Things, to discuss all these topics.Everything we talked about:“Here's the mark a SpaceX rocket crash left on the moon” from CBC“SpaceX posts loss of $541 million in first report since record-setting IPO” from The Washington Post“Train robots and make money” from The New Things“Could Myspace be making a return” from CNN

Let's say you're chatting away with AI — perfect grammar, great vocabulary. Then, boom: a random word in another language! That's the topic for today's “Uncanny AI.” Those moments where it becomes really clear that AI doesn't think like us. Janelle Shane, who writes the AI Weirdness blog, helps explain why AI chatbots do this.More on this:“ChatGPT users flummoxed after AI bot starts inserting Arabic into responses” from The New York Post“ChatGPT is mixing languages or Answers are Wrong!” from OpenAI Developer Community

AI has already changed the legal field, bringing new efficiencies — along with some high-profile mistakes — to tasks like research and drafting contracts. But law professor Benjamin Alarie at the University of Toronto has a bigger transformation in mind.He wants to see AI tackle some of the biggest failings of our justice system, like the lack of access to legal resources, slow processes and inconsistencies in how law is applied. He lays out his vision in a new book called "Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."More on this:“Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” from Oxford University Press“Judge Punishes 4 Lawyers After Catching Both Sides Using A.I. in Lawsuit” from The New York Times

Last month, President Xi Jinping spoke at an AI conference in Shanghai, China. There he promoted AI accessibility for the world, touting China's adoption of open-weighted models.After OpenAI's rogue model incident in which a training model hacked into the company HuggingFace and stole confidential information, the discussion over whether models should be open or closed has intensified.“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carion spoke with Adam Segal at the Council of Foreign Relations about China's soft power play in the global AI arms race.

OpenAI released its first ChatGPT model in November of 2022. Since then, companies across the U.S. have worked to integrate AI models into their workflows as quickly as possible.However, according to a recent survey from Indeed, while employers have been keen on adopting the help of artificial intelligence, employees are hesitant to move past experimentation and into implementation.Priya Rathod is a workplace trends editor at Indeed, and she said that in order to get across this great divide, employers need to focus on adequate training for employees and their managers.“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rathod about the survey and how businesses can improve on AI adoption.

Meta and Microsoft — as well as other tech titans — have been reporting quarterly earnings, and investors are looking at AI spending with a more skeptical eye. Plus, more than 1,000 workers at top AI labs signed an open letter this week calling on the government to "deliberately set the pace" of this fast-moving technology, and NBCUniversal makes a deal with YouTube to add all of Peacock's content to its premium streaming service.Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, joins Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss these stories on this week's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Shri Narayanan, professor of engineering, psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California, teaches his students to privilege humans when using artificial intelligence for their research across areas of study. In this episode, he walks us through how he, for example, uses AI to map behavioral analyses that can inform areas of study including autism and depression.

The University of Southern California is aiming to integrate AI across its campus, thanks to a $200 million dollar gift from a venture capitalist. Gaurav Sukhatme is the newly appointed director of USC's Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence and interim dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering. As he showed Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino around his lab, she asked him how the technology will be embedded across all fields of study at USC.More on this:“Mark and Mary Stevens give $200 million to power AI research across USC” from the University of Southern California“Students question value of college as costs rise and AI reshapes jobs” from PBS

The ocean is already one of the best climate solutions we've got. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to global warming. But what if it could store even more CO2? Marketplace's Amy Scott, host of our climate podcast “How We Survive,” looked into one strategy to achieve that goal. And she set sail for a demonstration.This feature is part of “How We Survive.” You can hear more of Amy's reporting on marine carbon removal and other geoengineering solutions on their new season, wherever you get your podcasts.

A proliferation of AI apps that allow users to create sexualized images of real people have grown into a multi-million dollar industry.Social media platforms are serving as de facto gateways to these services, despite the fact that most prohibit the sharing or promotion of this kind of non-consensual intimate imagery, according to Sina Laubenstein, director of programs at the Institute for Strategic Dialogues, which recently published a report on this.

OpenAI revealed this week that two of its advanced AI models escaped containment and hacked into the systems of AI company Hugging Face, which had the answers to the benchmarking test the two models were being evaluated on.Plus, France becomes the first country in the European Union to ban social media for kids under 15. And Apple is reportedly expected to start leasing its devices to consumers. Will Oremus at The Atlantic joins Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino for these stories.

A missing package can easily ruin a day, but chasing where that package went — or even a refund — is like following Odysseus on his treacherous journey.And in the age of AI chatbots, the process is a whole lot less human.Dillon Thompson is currently on such a journey. He is looking for an e-bike that FedEx said had been delivered. In his search, Thompson found himself in the AI chatbot hellscape that customer service lines have become.“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Thompson about his trials and tribulations as he chased his tail from company to company and chatbot to chatbot in hopes of finding his missing bike.

Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino has been using chatbots pretty intensively the last couple years. And there are some details she's shared about herself that chatbots seem to think are really important. For instance, Claude is obsessed with the fact that she sometimes gets up for work at 4 a.m.It comes up constantly in their chats — apropos of nothing. So, why do large language models latch on to these random tidbits? It's the first topic in our new series “Uncanny AI.” Those moments when it becomes clear AI doesn't think like us.Here to help us unpack what might be going on is Janelle Shane, a laser scientist who writes the AI Weirdness blog.

The Big Tech companies driving the AI boom are expected to spend more than $700 billion on data center infrastructure this year. To finance this spending spree, they're increasingly looking to debt. Hyperscalers like Alphabet, Oracle, and Meta have been issuing corporate bonds at a scale the industry has never seen — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars this year so far. The bond market could be considered a less risky way than stocks for investors to get a piece of the AI hype. To explain what the flood of AI debt means for the bond market, we're joined by Julie Ask, an independent industry analyst at Ask Advisory. More on this: “The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Onslaught of AI Bonds Is Testing Investors' Limits” from the Wall Street Journal “AI has taken over the stock market. The bond market is next.” from The Economist

As top AI firms race to develop a “superintelligent” agent — one that surpasses human cognition — are they prioritizing safety guardrails along the way? Not according to the Future of Life Institute's AI Safety Index, which reported that companies have gone back on their own promises to take a pause if their technology ever got close to certain risky points. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sabina Nong, AI safety investigator at the Future of Life Institute, about what measures might ensure durable safety around AI moving forward.

Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI startup stole trade secrets. The iPhone maker claimed that former Apple employees were asked to bring proprietary hardware to job interviews with OpenAI, and that the company tricked manufacturers into sharing Apple design secrets.Plus, New York state becomes the first to enact a data center moratorium, and Uber is lobbying to slow the roll of autonomous vehicles in Washington D.C. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to learn more.Here's what we talked about: “The 6 wildest claims in Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI” from The Verge“OpenAI's First Device Will Be Movable, Screenless Speaker Built as AI Companion” from Bloomberg“New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium” from Reuters“Uber's robotaxi lobbying effort puts it on a collision course with Waymo” from TechCrunch“Robotaxi Riders Are Falling Asleep, Sparking Frantic 911 Calls” from Bloomberg

The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta for $1.4 trillion, claiming the social media giant designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users.The case is heading to court in Oakland, California, next month. It follows a landmark verdict earlier this year: A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for mental health harms to a young woman who said she'd become addicted to the platforms starting at nine years old.And there are a slew of similar cases coming down the pike. To help break this down we're joined by Gaia Bernstein, law professor at Seton Hall Univerisity and author of the book "Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies."

Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming, but it's facing a new challenge: "the sophomore slump." Internal data reported by Bloomberg show audiences dropping off dramatically for follow-up seasons of successful shows.Series like "The Night Agent," "Beef" and "Avatar: The last Airbender" all lost 50% or more of their original viewers when they returned for season two. To figure out what might be going on and how Netflix could respond we called up Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics.

Last month, comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross posted a series of advertisements for made-up tech companies around the New York City subway system. The ads are fake, but they bear an eerie resemblance to the real AI marketing campaigns proliferating throughout U.S. cities. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with the two comedians about why the joke resonated with so many people and what's next in terms of AI mockery.

Mitigating climate change likely requires not only lowering emissions, but removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And while the Trump administration has cut many climate initiatives, it's continued to fund some carbon removal projects. Marketplace's Amy Scott reports.

OpenAI is rolling out its most advanced GPT-5.6 model after delaying the release for testing with the government. But the White House denied that the review was mandatory. What's the deal?Plus, Reuters reported that China is considering limiting access to its top AI models from foreign competitors, including the United States. And, Meta launched a new AI image generator, sparking privacy concerns.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino discusses this week's top tech stories with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi. Check out our YouTube page to watch more episodes of “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

In the post-9/11 years, the U.S. military has adhered to the “golden hour” rule: Wounded troops should be evacuated to higher-level care within 60 minutes. But as the new realities of drone warfare have taken shape in the Russia-Ukraine war, WUNC News military reporter Jay Price said medical response teams are being forced to rethink this standard approach to battlefield medicine. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Price to learn more.More on this:As attack drones grow more common in warfare, it's harder for medics to treat battlefield injuries from WUNC News

We're still unpacking the slew of consequential Supreme Court decisions that came down at the end of the term last week. Among them was a 6-3 ruling on digital data privacy.In Chatrie v. United States, the Court found digital data does fall under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, law professor at George Washington University and author of the recent book “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance," explains more.More on this“Chatrie v. United States” opinion from the Supreme Court of The United States“Supreme Court limits use of 'geofence warrants' amid cellphone data privacy concerns” from ABC NewsBluesky thread post on the 6-3 ruling from Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are planning to go public, each pushing a valuation of $1 trillion as of their latest funding rounds. But even before these mega-IPOs send a tsunami of new liquidity through their home city, San Francisco, signs of growing AI wealth aren't hard to find. And no sign is blinking brighter than the real estate market.San Francisco has the highest and the fastest-rising home prices in the country, according to data from Redfin. Recently, a turn-key restored Edwardian home hit the market for just under $3 million, right outside the neighborhood known as Cerebral Valley for its concentration of AI workers.

During last year's massive wildfires in Los Angeles, concerned residents and firefighters went to one app to get up to date information: Watch Duty. Now, the app covers all 50 states and recently added flood tracking to its repertoire. Watch Duty's chief technology officer David Merritt joined Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino to talk about how the app is scaling up.

Many scientists believe we're in the midst of a sixth mass extinction brought on by factors like climate change, deforestation, fishing and hunting. The Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences claims its technology could help prevent some of those losses, and even bring back long-extinct species. For the new season of the Marketplace climate podcast, “How We Survive,” host Amy Scott got a virtual tour of their labs.

AI is the buzzy tech of the moment. It's made plenty of money not only for companies but the cities and states where investment is pouring in. Illinois and specifically Chicago are betting that quantum computing will be the next major tech breakthrough to transform the economy. And they're trying to get in on the ground floor. So they've turned a former steel mill site into a tech hub, called the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, with the hope of attracting as much talent and investment as possible. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jeanne Whalen, economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal, to learn more.

Who is using AI? And what are they using it for? Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has been trying to answer these questions to better understand how AI is reshaping the economy. The firm's latest Economic Index report offers new insights on how people are using Claude and how they feel about AI's potential effects on the labor market. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anthropic's head of economics Peter McCrory to learn more about what the data reveals.

The resemblance to an actual dog is loose but the quadrupedal robot dogs known as “Spot” from Boston Dynamics do have four legs. They're often used to do reconnaissance in hazardous environments. And four of them are working security at the World Cup games in Dallas and New York. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Merry Frayne, at Boston Dynamics about Spot's capabilities and why they wanted to deploy them at live sporting events.

There's a longstanding nursing shortage in the U.S. that's only expected to get worse. Some hospitals have experimented with robotic nursing assistants to lighten the load, like a model known as Moxi that rolled out in 2019. They're kind of R2D2-meets-Rosie-the-robots and were designed to handle non-patient-facing tasks like transporting lab samples. But many hospitals eventually pulled them from operation. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Varsha Bansal, reporter at Proof News, about what went wrong.