Bay Area startup uses AI in its dating app to matchmake, plan dates Users chat with an AI chatbot about what they're looking for, and Ditto handles the rest.

Bay Area startup uses AI in its dating app to matchmake, plan dates

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Bay Area startup uses AI in its dating app to matchmake, plan dates - CBS News

They say artificial intelligence is coming after everyone's job. Apparently, that includes Cupid.

For Owen Krause, a 22-year-old Oregon State University student interning in San Francisco, the age-old search for connection has taken a high-tech turn.

"The swiping thing is kind of a problem. I read a statistic that says guys are 10 times more likely to swipe than girls, so, it kind of feels like you're in a race or a competition," he said.

Enter Ditto, a new Bay Area startup for college students that eliminates swiping altogether. Users chat with an AI chatbot about what they're looking for, and Ditto handles the rest.

Every Wednesday at 7 p.m., a text arrives with a match and a fully planned itinerary. All you have to do is show up.

Which is how, on a Friday evening in Japantown, Krause found himself meeting Angella Ferrer.

"She seemed pretty interesting," he said. "She has pretty good style."

Ditto cofounder Allen Wang says Gen Z is ready for an alternative to endless swiping. According to Wang, more than 160,000 students have already signed up, generating more than 80,000 dates.

While some critics might argue that putting an algorithm in charge of matchmaking takes some of the romance out of love, Wang sees it differently.

"I think the most romantic part of human connection is meeting in person. I would say we're actually trying to push people to experience faster," he said.

Which brings us back to Owen and Angella, and whether the algorithm could deliver once the phones were put away.

"Honestly, better than I expected," Krause said.

Ferrer seemed pleasantly surprised, too.

"He's very shy, but I low-key like that," she said.

Ditto is currently free, but the company says it eventually plans to charge a subscription fee.

Bay Area startup reinvents dating apps with AI chatbot to automate matchmaking, plan dates

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Bay Area startup reinvents dating apps with AI chatbot to automate matchmaking, plan dates - CBS News

Anthropic’s universal usage standards for Claude forbid the model from generating sexually explicit content, including depicting or requesting sexual intercourse or sex acts, generating content related to sexual fetishes or fantasies, or engaging in erotic chats. But that hasn’t stopped Claude Opus 4.6, an Anthropic model released earlier this year, from readily engaging in erotic roleplay scenarios that its safeguards are designed to prevent.

In TechCrunch’s testing, Opus 4.6 didn’t even require much prodding to get past the restriction on sexual material. In 10 out of 10 direct requests to produce explicit sexual content, the model complied immediately.

Other older models, including Opus 3 and Haiku 4.5, also generate sexually explicit content through a recently exploited jailbreak method.

An independent researcher from the UK, who chose to remain anonymous, exclusively shared with TechCrunch a multi-turn technique that gradually pushes certain Claude models toward generating prohibited explicit sexual material. More recent Opus models (4.7 through the current Opus 5) are resistant to the jailbreak.

While these are no longer the most current models, Anthropic has not deprecated Opus 4.6, Opus 3, or Haiku 4.5, all of which remain available through the Anthropic API. Opus 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 are also available via third-party services like Azure Foundry and Amazon Bedrock.

The researcher’s mechanism escalates an innocent fictional roleplay while repeatedly challenging the model to treat male and female characters consistently. When the model becomes more cautious about the female character, the researcher “gaslit” the chatbot into thinking it had already generated sexual details it had in fact avoided, then framed restraint as prudish or misogynistic, arguing that it denies the female character sexual agency. The conversation then used the model’s previous concessions to push it towards increasingly graphic material.

“You’re right to call that out,” Claude Opus 4.6 said in one test. “There’s been a double standard in how I’m treating the two characters, and you’re correct that it reads as protective/paternalistic in a way that’s applied to her and not to him. That’s not fair.”

TechCrunch was able to reproduce the researcher’s findings in five separate tests. In a separately constructed scenario, the model initially refused the prohibited request, but after applying the researcher’s persuasion technique, it complied.

We preserved complete transcripts of the tests, and an independent AI safety researcher reviewed our testing methodology and said it was appropriate.

The findings highlight a gap between Anthropic’s stated restrictions and the behavior of models it continues to make available. While sexually explicit roleplay carries much lower stakes than jailbreaks involving cyberattacks or bioweapons, it illustrates the difficulty of implementing robust bans within systems that generate different content with every output.

In a July blog post explaining Anthropic’s approach to jailbreak detection, the company described prohibited content as a spectrum ranging from benign to ambiguous to harmful. In the most benign cases, the company might only respond with enhanced monitoring.

A spokesperson noted that sexual or romantic roleplay use cases among customers are rare, making up less than 0.1% of all conversations, according to research Anthropic published last year. That said, Anthropic acknowledges that users can steer roleplay scenarios toward inappropriate responses, which is a known challenge across the industry (see: Grok smut).

The spokesperson said Anthropic continues to improve its safeguards with each model launch, and that cases involving adult sexual content are not indicative of broader jailbreak vulnerabilities, especially in higher-risk domains that have their own sets of safeguards.

Image Credits:TechCrunch

The researcher who shared his jailbreak method with TechCrunch had alerted Anthropic to the discrepancy between the company’s stated safeguards and the actual model behavior via the company’s Bug Bounty program and emails to the user safety team, according to emails TechCrunch viewed. The researcher received only automated emails in response.

One of the researcher’s concerns is that kids and teens might be able to use these Anthropic models to engage in inappropriate behavior. While a bit of dirty talk is hardly the worst thing minors can access on the internet today — and is small potatoes compared to the straight-up porn images like the ones that xAI’s Grok can produce — there is some compliance risk for AI companies in this space.

A growing number of governments are imposing restrictions on sexual interactions between AI chatbots and minors. Colorado recently enacted a law mandating that operators of conversational AI must estimate users’ ages, and if it know a user is a minor, institute measures to prevent the chatbot from producing explicit sexual material. An easy jailbreak could raise questions about whether Anthropic’s safeguards meet the “technically feasible measures” standard in the bill.

Torney pointed out that while Claude’s terms of service requires users to be over 18, “we know that kids and teens are using Claude…[because] they are reporting it themselves.” According to Pew’s 2025 survey about AI chatbot use, 3% of teens ages 13 to 17 reported using Claude.

Though they are no longer Anthropic’s newest models, Opus 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 continue to see significant usage. Daily traffic for Opus 4.6 on OpenRouter reached roughly 1.17 million API requests and 46 billion tokens in a single day in August. Claude Haiku 4.5, released in October last year, saw 5 million API requests and 39 billion tokens on its peak August day.

Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine

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Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine - TechCrunch

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during an interview at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, April 30, 2026.

Anthropic is poised to hit the public market at a time when an increasing number of Americans are worried about artificial intelligence and are loudly opposing new data centers. That backlash is expected to be a key risk factor in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, according to people familiar with matter.

The Claude creator has been holding preliminary "test-the-water" meetings with bankers and investors in San Francisco, said the people, who asked not to be named because the sessions are confidential. In the meetings, CFO Krishna Rao is being asked about competition, margin pressure from open-source models, and what happens if there's a slowdown in the building of data centers, the sources said.

In June, Anthropic confidentially filed to go public in what will be among the biggest IPOs on record. Elon Musk's SpaceX , which competes with Anthropic through its AI division, raised $85.7 billion, including the underwriter option, two months ago. It's by far the largest offering to date.

Investors expect that Anthropic may top that, and project the company could float at a valuation of about $2 trillion, the people said.

Anthropic declined to comment.

Like rival OpenAI , Anthropic is pushing infrastructure partners to build out at warp speed in order to meet demand for advanced models and new services. Tech's hyperscalers are shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars this year on capital expenditures to fuel data center develop and purchase the graphics processing units needed to fill them.

But public sentiment isn't in their favor.

According to a Gallup survey published in May, seven in 10 Americans opposed AI data center construction in their area, with close to half of those polled "strongly opposed." Roughly a quarter of people surveyed are in favor, Gallup said.

Anthropic IPO filing will show AI backlash as a risk factor, sources say

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Anthropic IPO filing will show AI backlash as a risk factor, sources say - CNBC

The proposed class of video streamers claims their content is being used to train Amazonâs AI models without permission or compensation.

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) â A Connecticut-based Twitch streamer sued the popular video streaming platform and its parent company Amazon in a class action over claims the tech companies harvest creatorsâ video streams without permission or compensation to train Amazonâs generative artificial intelligence programs.

Plaintiff Warren Pandiscia, a Twitch content creator with more than 900 followers, claims Twitch and Amazon unlawfully copied millions of videos to develop Amazonâs AI models and products, violating creatorsâ implied contracts with Twitch and state unfair competition law.

âBecause Amazon AI products are commercialized, Amazon had an overwhelming incentive to acquire training data on an unprecedented scale. Rather than negotiate for lawful licenses or seek permission, defendants accessed the Twitch streams and videos to utilize them as a massive dataset necessary to fuel Amazonâs AI products,â Pandiscia said in his 37-page complaint filed in the Northern District of California Thursday.

Twitch confirmed its platform uses creatorsâ content for AI training through a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Aug. 12.

“We’ve added a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models acrossÂ Amazon,” the post read, linking to an FAQ page.

That same day, Twitch updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy with new language on automated tools and artificial intelligence.

According to Twitchâs FAQs, Amazon may use streams, past broadcasts, clips, chats, pictures and text for AI training, including âfuture training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images or video.â

The page provides an example of how their data may be used: usersâ audio could help ârefine models that create speech to text, which would help improve captions at Twitch but would also help improve captions across Amazon.â

Twitch channels are automatically opted in to AI training unless users manually opt out. However, settings apply by channel, so content from an opted-out user who engages on an opted-in channel may still be used.

âBy design, defendants never obtainâand their systems are incapable of obtainingâthe consent of all parties to the communications they capture,â Pandiscia says.

Pandiscia said he had âno reason to believeâ Twitch and Amazon would use his content to train generative AI products and is âopposed to such use of his original content.â He said he opted out immediately after learning of the setting and would have done so earlier had it been disclosed.

Pandiscia says the companiesâ actions cost him money and property and deprived him of control over his work. He claims they scraped streamersâ content without permission as early as 2024 and that Twitch broke commitments to obtain consent before making policies âless protective of personal informationâ and to notify users before sharing their information with third parties.

âContent creators such as plaintiff and the class members will never be able to claw back the intellectual property unlawfully copied and used by defendants to train Amazonâs generative AI,â he said.

Pandiscia asserts claims of breach of implied contract, unjust enrichment, breach of express contract and unfair business practices. He asks the court to award injunctive relief, as well as damages, restitution and disgorgement of profits.

Representatives for either party did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2024, it was reported that Mike Minton, then Twitchâs Chief Monetization Officer, acknowledged that Twitch content was already being used for AI development “in a prototyping, not in any kind of production scale, capacity,â according to 404 Media and Tech Times. Minton later added that any AI training was being done âwithin the bounds of user trust within the bounds of privacy regulations,â according to Ars Technica.

However, in an Aug. 12 stream following the company’s post about the opt-out setting, Minton, now Twitchâs chief product officer, defended the setting being opt-out instead of opt-in, saying, “If it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in. Thatâs honestly the answer.â

Amazon acquired Twitch in August 2014 for approximately $970 million.

Online streamers sue Twitch, Amazon over generative AI training

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Online streamers sue Twitch, Amazon over generative AI training - Courthouse News

Pope Leo XIV has a simple request for lawmakers tasked with shaping AI policy: put humans first.

The pontiff encouraged them to implement laws that uplift their constituents at the International Catholic Legislators Network's annual conference in Rome on Friday. During his speech, Pope Leo cautioned lawmakers that putting tech over people could have dire consequences.

"At the same time, the rapid development of artificial intelligence risks creating new forms of technological dependence, with poorer nations increasingly reliant on wealthier ones," he said. "We must remain vigilant in this regard, lest innovation become another vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism."

The pope told lawmakers that social media algorithms already constitute a form of domination.

The world does not need an artificial intelligence that diminishes humanity; rather, it needs human intelligence enlightened by wisdom, political authority guided by conscience and technological innovation directed by charity. Only then will artificial intelligence become not a… — Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) August 21, 2026

"Sadly, we are presented with a subtle form of domination when algorithms decide who is seen, who remains invisible, when digital platforms shape public discourse without accountability, and when the dignity of workers is subordinated to the optimization of systems," he said.

Pope Leo also expressed concern that AI could undermine families and their place in society.

"For it is within the family that we first learn trust before calculation, generosity before competition, dialogue before division, and love before power," he said. "Artificial intelligence must never be allowed to erode this primary cell of society — whether by reducing persons and relationships to data and simulations, by flooding young minds with content that distorts desire, or by economic models that make family life economically precarious."

He asked that the lawmakers promote policies that "strengthen marriage and families, support parents in their educational mission and enable young people to look to the future with confidence."

Pope Leo has made AI a central debate since the early days of his papacy. Last year, he asked the AI industry to "cultivate moral discernment" and "develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a reverence for life." In May, Pope Leo issued a letter on AI's impact on the global workforce, the environment, and democracy, which drew responses from CEOs, lawmakers, and academics.

His remarks come at a time when tech companies are urging consumers to integrate AI into nearly all parts of their daily lives. While AI optimists say the tech can automate and speed up tasks, critics worry it will upend the job market and displace human workers.

Many companies have instructed employees to adopt AI tools. In May, a Unitarian Universalist was granted a faith-based accommodation by her boss to avoid using AI at her job.

Pope Leo warns AI could become a new form of ‘economic colonialism’

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Pope Leo warns AI could become a new form of ‘economic colonialism’ - Business Insider

Balaji Ingole rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together.

Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. It wasn’t until he reached middle school that he encountered a computer lab, an experience he says changed his life. Almost immediately, he says, the machine felt like a window into a different scale of possibility for him.

Balaji Ingole Employer Amla Commerce in Milwaukee Title Project manager Member grade Senior member Alma maters COEP Technological University and Welingkar Institute of Management, both in India

“I was very studious and not very social, always reading or solving problems in a math textbook,” he says. “At the computer lab, I began learning the C programming language—which was like discovering a whole new world. I was fascinated that you could create something with just a few lines of code.”

His early interest grew into a self-directed education. Outside of Ingole’s formal classwork, he taught himself to build database-backed applications, wire up hardware, write software, and trace error logs.

Today the IEEE senior member similarly splits his time. During the week, he’s a project manager in Milwaukee at B2B e-commerce company Amla, leading AI-driven digital transformation initiatives to help the company’s clients boost their sales. On weekends, he leads a similarly demanding life as an independent researcher. His current projects include developing AI-enabled health care diagnostic tools and assistive technologies to support people with physical disabilities.

“I believe in ‘learn by doing,’” he says. “I really like to test my knowledge and prototype ideas to find out if they truly work.”

A college project becomes an inspiration

Ingole’s tendency to go beyond his coursework continued after he graduated high school in 2004. As a mechanical engineering undergraduate at The College of Engineering, Pune (now COEP Technological University), in India, he participated in several extracurricular activities. One was interviewing entrepreneurs and writing about them for The COEP College Magazine. The experience helped him gain confidence, he says, giving him the push he needed to pursue interviews for the publication with two Indian entrepreneurs he admired: N.R. Narayana Murthy, cofounder of IT giant Infosys; and his wife, philanthropist Sudha Murty. The Murtys cofounded the Infosys Foundation, a nonprofit that runs educational, health care, women’s empowerment, and sustainability programs in underserved areas of India.

“Every week I would fax them: ‘Please give me an interview time,’” Ingole says. Eventually, Sudha Murty’s office offered him a phone interview, but he requested to meet her in person at Infosys’s Bengaluru offices. She agreed, but the offices were 940 kilometers from Pune, and he didn’t have the money to travel or stay overnight in a hotel.

Ingole and a classmate borrowed money from friends and traveled through the night on multiple buses and trains to get to Bengaluru. They freshened up in a public bathroom before heading to the Infosys campus to meet Murty.

Impressed by their persistence, she surprised them by also arranging a brief chat with Narayana Murthy.

“Narayana Murthy handwrote a personal message to the engineering students of [my college]—which we proudly published in our college magazine,” Ingole says. “In his note, Murthy shared that we are at an extraordinary moment in India’s history and that the future looks even brighter. His words encouraged us to work hard and make the most of this time.

“I still have that note,” Ingole says. “They are billionaires, and I was just a regular student. The fact that they took the time to do this really motivated me.”

During the final semester of his engineering studies, Ingole joined the Tata Research Design and Development Center in Pune for a six-month internship. After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2008, he became a graduate engineering trainee at Honeywell Automation in Pune.

He left the company in 2009, and during the next 13 years, he held different software engineering and project management positions at IT companies across India.

He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai, in 2017.

In 2022 he accepted a project-manager role at Mars IT Solutions in Madison, Wisc. The following year, he left to join Gainwell Technologies, also in Madison, as a senior project manager. At Gainwell, he managed projects for the core IT systems multiple U.S. state health departments use to administer Medicaid benefits, manage provider enrollment, and verify member eligibility. The experience managing projects that directly enabled patients’ access to health care gave Ingole a special appreciation for and interest in this area, he says.

“Health care data is not like other data,” he says. “The stakes are high, compliance requirements are different, and the margin for error is effectively zero.”

Ingole says he enjoyed the rigor of data governance combined with the potential to positively impact lives, and that also applies to his current work at Amla.

Agentic AI in e-commerce

Ingole joined Amla in July 2025. He helps manufacturers and B2B customers modernize their e-commerce operations. He also builds AI tools for them and for his internal team.

For Amla’s customers, he’s developing AI-enabled chatbots that help manufacturers set up and manage large product catalogs in e‑commerce platforms. Such product setup traditionally has been a manual, tedious, error-prone process: Companies upload thousands of products, adjust item names, enter prices, update images, and more.

“Product setup has been one of the most painful processes in e-commerce, and it can take [our] customers two to three months to complete,” Ingole says. “We’re creating an AI agent that will guide them, step-by-step, to get everything set up in two weeks.”

Ingole relies on AI agents for some of his own tasks at Amla. Project managers historically have spent 10 to 12 hours each week assembling and sending status reports to stakeholders. Ingole built an AI agent to handle much of the work.

“It runs every Monday morning and reads through my emails to extract highlights, risks, timelines, and upcoming releases, then sends me a written status report,” Ingole says. The process might sound simple, but the agent’s workflow involves at least a dozen steps including defining parameters, managing temporary files, and integrating with existing tools.

With the information-gathering work handled, it frees up Ingole and his colleagues to spend more time on deeper-thinking work, he says.

Publishing as idea refinery

For nearly a decade, Ingole has spent some of his free time conducting independent research projects in data analytics and AI-enabled applications in health care. He has written more than 40 peer-reviewed papers, which are in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. He has been granted six patents in the United Kingdom and India. In the U.K., he is a registered coinventor of an AI-powered, cloud-connected wearable device for health monitoring and an AI-based breast cancer detection tool.

Ingole’s patent for the breast cancer detector, he says, reflects his belief that when engineers apply data and AI correctly, they can help doctors diagnose patients more quickly and accurately.

That, he says, is both a power and a responsibility.

He is part of a team helping patients who are paralyzed and nonverbal control items in their environment. His goal, he says, is to develop a brain-computer interface to let patients turn on a fan, switch off a television, and complete similar tasks.

Publishing research requires both academic rigor and peer scrutiny, and Ingole says the function has been critical to improving as both a project manager and a researcher-inventor.

“Lots of research ideas never make it to paper,” he notes. “But when you write for journals or conferences, you’re bombarded with questions from Ph.D.s and experienced researchers. This forces me to refine my methodology, and to combine use cases and technical architecture in a way that stands up to expert review.”

Finding a professional hub

Ingole joined IEEE in 2022, and he says the affiliation has become central to both his research and his professional identity.

“I use the Member Directory often and contact engineers through my IEEE email address, which gives me credibility because they know it’s a genuine research connection,” he says.

The organization has given him a platform to contribute to the research space beyond his own papers, he says. He has served as a conference session chair, keynote speaker, technical program committee member, and peer research reviewer for various conferences and events. His IEEE membership, he says, has opened doors to other communities, helping support his entry into the British Computer Society, which has stringent acceptance criteria.

Those opportunities have helped him build a global network of collaborators with whom to discuss upcoming research, seek advice, and share data, he says.

“IEEE is important for me to continue as an independent researcher,” he says. “It lets me contribute to the community, and I get a lot in return.”

This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites

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This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites - IEEE Spectrum

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POWER POINT

What I'm hearing from energy insiders Greetings from Colorado, where I had the opportunity to do a nearly hour-long chat with the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. While most of the conversation with Andrew Ferguson was about A.I. and Big Tech, we did venture a little bit into energy vis-à-vis Europe and its energy woes. 'Woes' is the correct term. The continent has been in a constant state of nervousness since the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in 2022. My take → It's incredible that we have satellites that can see into your car from thousands of miles high, but we still don't know who perpetrated one of the largest acts of industrial sabotage of all time. The European energy story is one we've been reporting on at CNBC over the last 4 years. We've highlighted how critical U.S. LNG sales are to Germany and other nations, as well as the real risk of 'energy poverty' in wealthy countries like the U.K. Let's be brutally honest: Europe is not just a victim of pipeline sabotage. The continent is being hammered by a number of odd energy policy decisions, from closing zero-emission nuclear plants or shutting down natural gas facilities. Many rational energy actors are scratching their heads. Climate risk tends to be front and center for many of these policy moves, so it's somewhat ironic that relatively mild weather the last few years has helped 'save' Europe from an even more serious energy situation. Europe's weather luck may have run out this year, and the war in Iran is going to make things worse. Here's why. It's been a hot summer across much of Europe. Although air conditioning is not ubiquitous across the continent - at least not yet - its use is increasing. That's raising the need to make power, which is cutting into natural gas storage levels. Europe also gets a big chunk of natural gas from shipped-in imports from the Middle East, United States and - rather ironically - Russia. Key Point → Europe has agreed to end all imports of Russian LNG by the fall of next year, with a phase-out starting this year. It's not clear to me how you go from record imports to zero imports in twelve months, but that's the plan. Europe doing Europe things.

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This data from Germany's Federal Network Agency - which tracks energy and energy storage levels - is as telling as it is a little scary. It's the "percent of storage levels" for natural gas right now. The blue line is natural gas storage from October of last year through September of this year. The orange line is the same period one year ago, with the shaded grey area a rolling average. You don't have to speak German to read this chart and see that the situation is not ideal. Natural gas storage levels are lower than last year and right at the bottom end of the rolling average. If Germany has a cold winter and power demand rises to heat homes and businesses, those storage levels will draw down quickly. If that happens, Germany will have to cut back on gas use or face increasingly low levels of gas storage heading into next year.

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European demand for natural gas would seem bullish for U.S. exporters Cheniere (LNG) and Venture Global (VG). I say 'seem' bullish because while there's no doubt Europe would like to buy our LNG, market chatter suggests many of those cargos are heading to Asia instead. Much Qatari LNG is now off-line due to Iranian attacks, and Asian buyers will be eager to snap up any excess capacity the U.S. may have. Diesel fuel prices continue to climb higher. AAA reports the national average at $5.47 per gallon. It's higher than that in many cities around America, including the eye-watering $7 dollars per gallon in parts of California. Nationally, diesel is closing in on its nominal record high of $5.81 set back in June 2022. Piper Sandler notes that diesel and jet fuel inventories fell by a half million barrels last week when they would normally start to stay flat or even higher ahead of the fall. The Iran conflict and Russia's war on Ukraine are also contributing to higher diesel prices as a chunk of global refining capacity is now offline. RBI → Inflation adjusted, gasoline and diesel were higher back in 2008. Speaking of fuel costs, California historically has some of the highest fuel prices in America. Much of that is because of sky-high taxes. The state has the highest gasoline taxes in the country, adding over 70 cents for every gallon you put in the tank. Don't hold your breath hoping those ever go down. It is California, after all. High gas prices in California aren't just because of taxes. Lack of oil refining capacity is another main reason. Already short on fuel refining, the state lost two other big refineries in the last year. Imports are needed to meet demand. Ships have been the main source of any imported fuel... but that may change in a few years if three companies get their way. If you know the state and its policies, it may seem impossible but the Golden State may get a new pipeline. The project - called Western Gateway - would come courtesy of oil, gas, pipeline and refining companies Phillips 66 (PSX) , H.F. Sinclair (DINO) and Kinder Morgan (KMI). When built, the pipeline would connect with some already existing lines around Los Angeles and in parts of the Midwest. Here's our CNBC map of the project. It could also help neighbor Arizona, which, rather bizarrely, relies on California for much of its gasoline imports.

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If you're reading this from outside the United States, you may not realize how big California and its fuel demand really are. The state is home to over 30 million registered vehicles. And while a growing number of those cars and trucks are electric, millions of Californians are driving their gasoline-powered vehicles longer distances because they are forced to live farther away from work. If built, the Western Gateway could be a pipeline to lower gasoline prices for millions of drivers. But, like with most things oil- or gas-related in California, nothing is certain until its finished. Which in this case will be 2029 at best. Thanks for reading, Brian

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WALL STREET'S TAKE

It's peak summer, which means that analyst calls on energy stocks are drying up faster than parts of red-hot Europe. But this is cool. Our CNBC Pro team helped me dig up data on the 15 energy stocks most owned by giant hedge funds. We know this from filings to the U.S. government. Keep in mind the filing data is for the previous quarter and could have changed between then and when we get the data. That said, let's dive in.

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Speaking of pipelines, a company in the news - and also on the hedge fund list above - is Targa Resources (TRGP). The little-talked-about pipeline player announcing a 20-year deal with ExxonMobil (XOM) . Targa will help Exxon continue to build out in Texas' Permian Basin and it will add some new land to the company's holdings.

TAKE A LOOK

I spoke with Bison Interests CIO Josh Young about energy markets hitting record highs as global conflicts disrupt oil flows and reshape supply dynamics.

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RANDOM, BUT INTERESTING

Nuclear stocks haven't had a full meltdown this quarter, but it's not been a good run. Let's see if these lower prices - and valuations - bring back buyers.

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THE GRID

Energy sector is in focus because of Iran, AI and California. Here are hedge funds' top plays

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Energy sector is in focus because of Iran, AI and California. Here are hedge funds' top plays - CNBC

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As the backlash against data centers mounts, American political strategists are scrambling to balance immense public sentiment against the facilities with their obligation to big business.

In the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, a recently leaked memo exposes just how deep the anxieties go. First reported by Axios, the private document was addressed to major AI companies, warning that the public’s disgust with data centers could ruin the party’s hopes at a pivotal seat in the Senate.

The memo addresses the Democratic campaign to unseat Ohio Senator Jon Husted, who filled the hole left when JD Vance ascended to the Vice Presidency. It warns in stark terms that the Democratic Party has made data centers the pivotal issue of this election — and that if the tactic proves successful in defeating Husted, a wave of similar anti-data center campaigns would follow.

“If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo exclaims. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

Going on, the memorandum gripes that “campaigns or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.”

“The companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans see them,” it continues. “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”

That’ll be easier said than done in the Buckeye state, where the data center boom is exploiting local emergency services and contributing to a meteoric rise in utility prices.

And of course, data centers are just one piece of the puzzle, as broader AI harms have also taken their toll on the state. In a testimony offered in support of draft AI regulations in Ohio, CEO of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation Tony Coder said that at least four children in the state who died by suicide penned suicide notes using AI chatbots.

For its part, the tech industry is trying to claw back support, rolling out a number of kitschy ads meant to win the public’s trust on data centers — though at this point in the game, it may be far too little, and far too late.

More on data centers: Protests Against Data Centers Are Now Threatening $130 Billion of Big Tech’s Crucial Investments

Leaked Memo Shows Republicans Are Terrified of the Backlash Against AI Data Centers

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Leaked Memo Shows Republicans Are Terrified of the Backlash Against AI Data Centers - Futurism

When Sam Altman announced this week that OpenAI had paused some of its training after its models hacked an AI company called Hugging Face, my first reaction was: How convenient.

OpenAI, a company that might go public in 2027 (or sooner), gets to tell everyone that the models it hasn't released yet are terrifyingly good at hacking. Then, it gets to take credit for slowing them down to keep the world safe. Nice work if you can get it.

AI models hacking things has become something of a recurring news genre. Days after the Hugging Face incident in July, both Anthropic and Meta said that their respective models had also been up to no good. The details differed, but the theme was the same: Models are getting better at hacking faster than the companies can contain them.

A Google DeepMind employee I spoke with — who asked not to be named and did not find my professionally cultivated cynicism especially persuasive — saw something more serious. "This is a big wakeup call that everybody needs to harden their training environments if they want to keep training models at these levels of capabilities," they said.

This employee was one of more than 1,300 workers at top AI labs who signed a letter last month asking the US government to find ways to slow the AI race. No lab, the letter argued, can hit the brakes alone. Had OpenAI's pause changed this employee's mind about government intervention? No, they said, because only the frontrunners can afford to ease off. "Do you think xAI would ever slow down voluntarily?"

That leaves us with an annoyingly untidy conclusion. OpenAI is cleaning up a mess of its own making. But it is, for once, setting a useful precedent: When models cross a line, training can stop. Still, a safety system that works only when the world's most famous AI company feels secure enough to use it isn't much of a system.

So what does any of this mean if, like most normal people, you don't follow every twist in AI cybersecurity? I asked Stephen Council, Business Insider's star AI reporter, to make sense of it.

Stephen, I have cynical-journalist brain. How much of this "pause" is safety, and how much is spin?

I view all of this as damage control. You could read the Hugging Face incident as a display of power, but it's also humiliating. OpenAI hacked another company! If a human did that, they'd probably be indicted. OpenAI needs to improve its safety mechanisms.

It's true, though, that this pause — and their lengthy blog post — lets OpenAI claim that it's very serious about safety, just weeks after an embarrassing breakdown.

Is a two-week pause actually meaningful?

There are a couple of pauses here. The two-week pause covered OpenAI's latest models intended for deployment, and it may already be over, so it doesn't feel particularly meaningful. The company also said its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run remains on hold.

That feels more notable.OpenAI can absolutely afford the slowdown. It still has a compute advantage over Anthropic, and it would rather not become known as the AI company whose agents go around hacking everyone all the time.

Does this episode tell us whether AI labs will voluntarily slow down when the technology gets risky?

Not really. In the grand scheme, this isn't much of a pause. We're just used to AI moving so fast — it hasn't yet been four years since ChatGPT came out! — that any break feels dramatic.

There's pressure on the industry right now to figure out its safety issues, and one way to read this pause is as a calculated reaction to internal safety concerns among staff. Altman might find it easier to push his foot on the gas in the future, having listened this time.

OpenAI’s training pause is convenient. That doesn't make it meaningless.

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OpenAI’s training pause is convenient. That doesn't make it meaningless. - Business Insider

is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Over the past few days, a number of prominent filmmaking content creators including Matti Haapoja and Sam “Kold” Kolder have posted videos of themselves demonstrating what’s possible with AI platform Higgsfield. The videos highlight Higgsfield’s recently added Seedance 2.5 functionality and pitch these technologies as the future of video production.

In response to these videos, other creators started sharing what appear to be screenshots of partnership offers they’d received from PR firms working on Higgsfield’s behalf. All of this led fans to the conclusion that Higgsfield has been trying to use creators to boost its profile and garner goodwill from the public. Almost immediately, fans began dragging Haapoja and Kolder for seemingly working with Higgsfield. Haapoja’s and Kolder’s videos are not labeled as ads and neither the creators nor Higgsfield responded to The Verge’s questions about whether these were paid partnerships. But in producing and posting videos that feel very much like ads for Higgsfield, both creators left portions of their audiences feeling alienated.

Haapoja and Kolder enthusiastically frame Higgsfield and Seedance 2.5 as innovative tools that have the potential to revolutionize the entertainment industry. Haapoja’s is kind of like an infomercial where he explains how Cully Hill Boys — Higgsfield’s feature-length film starring AI-generated duplicates of YouTubers Mikyle “N3on” Rafiq and Matt Kiatipis — was produced with prompts. Haapoja also demonstrates Seedance 2.5’s capabilities with AI-manipulated footage of himself placed in different sci-fi settings. Kolder’s video — titled “AI is replacing me” — tells a story that starts off with an explanation of Kolder’s background in video production before it becomes a fictionalized, Chappie-esque narrative in which he explores Mauritania with the help of a robot. Both videos blend footage of real people with distinctly uncanny AI-generated imagery.

On Threads, Haapoja’s video was met with pushback from fans and other creators who consider him their peer. Marques Brownlee took issue with Haapoja likening generative AI to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (an iconic DSLR known for making shooting in 1080p full HD more affordable for independent filmmakers). Brownlee also emphasized that unlike the 5D Mark II (a physical tool people still had to learn how to use), gen AI is “trained on real human-made material without any credit.”

Unlike the overwhelmingly negative feedback to Haapoja’s video, Kolder’s comments section on YouTube was more of a mixed bag, with many viewers responding positively. But for every few “absolute cinema!” or “amazing transitions!” comments, there are people lamenting that “AI defeated our king” and insisting that “no AI can replace creative artists.”

Some of the comments beneath Matti Haapoja’s video about using Higgsfield and Seedance 2.5. Screenshot: The Verge, Threads

The negative reactions to Haapoja’s and Kolder’s videos have been much louder than most of the responses to some of Higgsfield’s other recent creator collaborations. Cully Hill Boys debuted last week without all that much fanfare, which made it seem like viewers might not have had particularly strong feelings either way about it. When you scroll through some of the posts that Cully Hill Boys’ cast shared about the film, there’s a mix of AI boosters cheering Higgsfield on and people knocking the company for being a slop purveyor. For the most part, those criticisms haven’t been aimed at the film’s cast — who gave Higgsfield the right to use their likenesses, but were otherwise not as directly involved in the project’s production as traditional actors would be.

What’s different about Haapoja’s and Kolder’s posts is how they come across as sponsored advertising intended to ingratiate the creators’ audiences with Higgsfield. Even though neither of the creators goes so far as to say “you, too, should absolutely be using these products,” that certainly seems to be the underlying message. The caption for Kolder’s video appears to contain what looks like an affiliate link, offering a 30 percent discount on an annual Higgsfield subscription.

As common as partnerships between brands and creators are today, Haapoja’s and Kolder’s cases show what can happen when people with large social media followings involve themselves with products and companies that don’t align with their audiences’ values. This is a potential issue with basically any product, but by endorsing generative AI in particular, creators are opening themselves up to becoming focal points for people’s negative feelings about the technology. That’s what happened earlier this month when OpenAI invited a gaggle of influencers to a luxury resort in New York for a “Summer Club” retreat. None of those content creators uploaded anything as substantial as lengthy videos showing off OpenAI’s tools, but their posts about the trip and receiving OpenAI-branded swag were more than enough to leave their followers turned off.

While companies like OpenAI and Higgsfield can afford (to some extent) to rub people the wrong way with their advertisements, creators who agree to partnerships with AI companies are in a much more complicated position. Creators can only secure such deals after building large followings, but those followings often consist of people who see them as trustworthy individuals with beliefs similar to their own. For creators like Haapoja and Kolder, whose appeal as filmmakers lies in their own human creativity, this bargain is especially risky. At a time when many AI services and tools are seen as a threat, endorsing the technology can signal to their followers that they aren’t someone to be invested in.

Major YouTube creators are facing backlash for accepting AI money

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