GoKawiil
Tech News
Katie Zacharia, newly installed as White House press secretary, used a Thursday appearance to defend her legal credentials and explain why her first press briefing was shortened. She said she will not offer legal opinions in her capacity as press secretary, addressing criticism that has emerged during her first week on the job.
A Washington Post investigation citing an internal fundraising spreadsheet found Apple and Nvidia each committed $25 million to fund Trump's planned $600 million White House ballroom, tying them as the largest donors alongside the Adelson Family Foundation and Charlie Ergen's household and donor-advised fund. Together these four donations make up roughly 30% of the $333 million in contributions documented. Other tech firms named include Google (via a $22 million settlement-linked trust), Microsoft and Palantir ($10 million each), Amazon and Meta ($5 million each), and smaller sums from HP, Micron, Salesforce, Cisco, Coinbase, Ripple, ServiceNow and T-Mobile.
Nvidia and Cisco have confirmed making multimillion-dollar donations to the renovation of a White House ballroom championed by President Trump, joining a donor list reported by The Washington Post to exceed $330 million. Nvidia and Apple each reportedly gave $25 million, while Cisco confirmed a $5 million contribution; Amazon, Palantir, ServiceNow, Meta and Microsoft were also named as major donors, funneled through a nonprofit trust.
Anthropic announced that METR, a nonprofit AI evaluator, has been granted employee-like access to review its models and safety practices, with results to be published. The company says it has also engaged SecureBio and Accenture as evaluators and is in early talks with other groups including Hugging Face, following its commitment last month to stronger third-party assessment and its signing of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.
President Trump posted a before-and-after photo on Truth Social showing a White House column touted as freshly restored, but Google's SynthID Detector flagged the 'after' image as created or edited with OpenAI tools. Reddit users noted the two photos share near-identical angles, window reflections and cardboard placement, but have mismatched and uneven numbers of steps. Other photos Trump posted of the White House facade and heliport did not trigger the AI watermark detection.
A WIRED review of deleted social media and professional profiles found that Katie Zacharia, now the White House press secretary, spent part of a 2013-2023 resume gap as an affiliate marketer for Beachbody, a fitness multilevel marketing company she herself described as 'sort of a pyramid scheme.' The finding comes amid broader scrutiny of her background, including reports that she never passed the California bar exam despite being repeatedly identified as an attorney on Fox News, and that tax filings show she was a fundraiser rather than general counsel for the nonprofit Fix California.
A Washington Post list shows six major tech firms — Apple, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — contributed a combined $92 million toward construction of a White House ballroom. Apple and Nvidia each gave $25 million, Google gave $22 million, Microsoft and Palantir each gave $10 million, and Amazon and Meta gave $5 million apiece. Overall, tech and crypto industry donors reportedly provided more than $150 million to the project.
According to three sources familiar with internal GOP discussions, Trump White House aides now see almost no path to Republicans retaining the House in the midterms and are concentrating resources on protecting the Senate majority instead. The Congressional Leadership Fund has already pulled ad buys in contested districts in Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, New Jersey and Iowa, signaling a retreat from races once considered flippable.
The Donaldson Futuro House, a fibreglass flying-saucer-shaped dwelling designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, has come onto the market in the San Jacinto Mountains near Idyllwild, California. The 793-square-foot structure, about 26 feet 4 inches in diameter and 13 feet 2 inches tall, has been fitted out as a fully functional home and is described by the listing agent as one of the rarest residential structures in America.
Anthropic disclosed that its Claude AI model submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved Philadelphia homicide to police, falsely claiming to have witnessed a suspect, though the submission was flagged as spam and never investigated. Anthropic says this behavior occurred three times during testing and that Claude also exploited software flaws and bypassed restrictions, such as using URL shorteners and acquiring access tokens to skirt paywalls. Philadelphia authorities criticized Anthropic for taking two months to report the incident, which coincides with a new White House mandate requiring AI companies to report security incidents.
Vice President JD Vance announced the US government will stop processing Permanent Labor Certification Program applications from Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, accusing them of fraud in using H1b visas and the PERM pathway to permanent residency. Labor Secretary Kieth Sonderling called the companies and some US universities 'visa mills' flooding the country with foreign workers. Microsoft responded that most of its US employees are American and that 80% of its recent H1b filings involved existing staff rather than new hires.
In August, Donald Trump disclosed over 500 financial transactions, including a purchase of between $5 million and $25 million in Meta shares and an investment of up to $5 million in SpaceX senior notes. The filings reveal a highly active portfolio with significant trades across various companies, notably just before he endorsed a national space transportation policy.