GoKawiil
Tech News
The United States imposed a ban on close to $1 billion worth of Canadian imports starting early Tuesday, covering alcoholic beverages, dairy products and motorcycles. The move follows earlier 50% U.S. tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods and Canada's retaliatory tariffs of 15%, 25% or 50% on U.S. imports.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNBC ahead of a Washington meeting with AI executives and President Trump that he prefers voluntary safety guardrails over mandatory regulation. He said he expects industry to move toward self-imposed safety measures to reassure investors and the public. Congress has yet to pass AI legislation and is set to leave Washington until after November's election.
President Trump said Mesabi Metallics will invest $15 billion to build what the White House describes as the largest steel plant of its kind in U.S. history, located in Iowa. A White House official told CNBC that production is expected to begin in 2030, with an initial phase producing about 7.5 million tons annually and supporting up to 6,000 construction jobs. Mesabi, based in Minnesota, said the plant would produce entirely American-made steel.
White House officials attempted to persuade the U.S. Postal Service to adopt a policy requiring mail-in ballots to be sent via Certified Mail, a service that involves identity verification steps for postal workers handling the mail. The proposal would have added a new layer of processing to how mail-in votes are collected and delivered.
EIA data show SPR crude stocks fell to 284.6 million barrels for the week ending September 18, then to 283.8 million barrels the following week, marking the lowest level since October 1982. The decline stems from a 172 million-barrel release authorized by President Trump in March as part of a 400 million-barrel coordinated IEA release, with about 133 million barrels structured as swaps requiring Shell, Vitol and Trafigura to return 1.25 barrels per barrel taken starting early next year.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation prohibiting California's elected officials from issuing memecoins, a cryptocurrency category built around jokes, trends or celebrity personas. The law also bars any company from creating a memecoin using an official's likeness or image, regardless of the official's involvement. Newsom's office cited reports that roughly one million investors lost about $3.8 billion buying the memecoin President Trump launched in 2025 as reasoning for the measure.
According to The Information, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba and ByteDance to detail plans for purchasing Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips, which are officially gaming GPUs. Sources say Beijing expects these chips could be repurposed into servers to help run China's leading AI models, potentially loosening restrictions on Nvidia hardware.
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Greg Brockman are among tech executives expected at a Tuesday luncheon with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. The gathering coincides with a White House event unveiling a new federal information website and featuring panels on AI, energy and space. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown will also attend, and Amodei reportedly had a private one-on-one dinner with Trump the previous evening.
The U.S. and China published reciprocal lists of products worth roughly $30 billion each that will receive tariff reductions, following a meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Washington. The items include nonsensitive goods such as fireworks and wooden Christmas ornaments. China's commerce ministry said the move would strengthen bilateral trade cooperation.
The US Department of Transportation finalized a rule lowering fuel economy targets, replacing the Biden administration's requirement of 50.4 miles per gallon by model year 2031 with a 34.9 mpg standard. The agency called it one of the largest deregulatory moves of the second Trump administration and said it would cut $1,300 off the average cost of a new vehicle, saving $138 billion over five years.
The Trump administration is set to release new fuel economy standards Monday that would lower fleetwide mileage requirements for gasoline-powered cars and light trucks, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The proposed target is roughly 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031, down from the 50.4 mpg figure projected under Biden-era rules.
Bill Gates said on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that he believes he may be positioned to persuade President Trump to support AI regulation. He warned that without intervention, AI could 'drive events' leading to as many as a billion deaths, underscoring what he described as the stakes of leaving the technology unchecked.