GoKawiil
Tech News
A California district judge ruled that the Defense Department's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk earlier this year violated the First Amendment. The court found the move came after Anthropic refused to drop restrictions barring its AI from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous lethal weapons systems, part of a broader Pentagon push to renegotiate AI vendor contracts.
Citing eight unnamed sources, POLITICO reports the Trump administration is considering a second wave of semiconductor tariffs that would hit finished products like laptops, gaming consoles, and data center servers, not just chips themselves. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly favors tying duty-free chip import limits to each company's committed U.S. manufacturing output, and officials have signaled that exemptions granted under January's Proclamation 11002 for data centers, startups, and consumer devices might not survive into this next phase.
Indie publisher Panic is returning the tariff fees it had charged Playdate buyers, after a court ruling deemed the Trump administration's import taxes illegal and ordered refunds to affected companies. Panic said it has now received its own tariff refunds and passed that money back to customers who had paid the added charge as a line item on their orders.
Gregg Phillips, an election-fraud conspiracy theorist previously ousted from leading FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, confirmed he is still employed by the Trump administration on administrative leave. He was recently seen visiting the Department of Justice with outgoing pardon attorney Ed Martin, though the nature of his current duties remains unclear.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a rule that would permanently establish a $103,265 fee on certain new H-1B visas, replacing the temporary fee Trump imposed last year that is set to expire in September. Previously such visas cost between $2,000 and $5,000, and the new fee would not apply to renewals or to foreign students already in the U.S. transitioning to H-1B status. The proposal comes even as courts are still weighing legal challenges, including a June ruling that found the original fee illegal.
A New York Times investigation found the Bureau of Land Management is selling thousands of wild horses to private buyers who then resell them to slaughterhouses for large markups. The agency avoids directly violating anti-slaughter law by first listing horses for adoption before selling unadopted animals cheaply, and such sales roughly doubled in 2025 to over 3,700 horses.