As artificial intelligence <a href="https://www.winssolutions.org/ai-break-economy-andreessen-altman-explain/">ruins the economy</a> and takes over the world, Google is quietly working to change the advertising game in a mind-bending way.
As <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/25/2025/why-ai-powered-search-is-going-to-dominate-the-future-of-the-ad-tech-industry">Semafor reports</a>, AI has so utterly altered the way search engine advertising works that Google is now being forced to rewrite the script it forged itself.
Chief among its new directives: creating a new ecosystem where advertisers compete for the attention of AI agents rather than humans — a shift predicted at the <a href="https://ppc.land/a-new-model-for-ai-advertising-emerges-as-agents-could-replace-human-attention/">very beginning of this year</a> by Aravind Srinivas, the founder of the so-called "AI search" company Perplexity.
Google, as the world's biggest search company, thinks it needs to build this new ecosystem to remain relevant, and it's already started pushing out new protocols to retain its position.
In its new <a href="https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/">protocol called Agent2Agent</a>, Google is essentially training bots to communicate with each other and execute tasks, including financial transactions. As Semafor notes, that protocol will likely be the first step in building a brave new ad industry where AI agents become the consumer, since humans have delegated such menial tasks like "buying stuff" to them.
If you're confused by how such an arrangement is superior to the admittedly broken advertising model we have now, we are too — but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone involved in the creation of this new search advertising ecosystem from powering ahead.
Underlying this confusing new paradigm, of course, is the massive economic elephant in the room: that we're hurtling headlong into a recession exacerbated by greedy <a href="https://futurism.com/signs-ai-bite-job-market">CEOs firing human workers</a> in favor of AI (some of whom end up being <a href="https://futurism.com/klarna-openai-humans-ai-back">rehired as contract workers</a> when the tech proves too shoddy to do comparable work.)
To try to claw back some of the <a href="https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-is-definitely">revenue inevitably lost</a> from an economic downturn, advertisers seem willing to <a href="https://www.aaaa.org/blog/is-agentic-ai-advertisings-next-big-disruption/">throw anything at the wall</a> and see what sticks — even if it means participating in a lose-lose scheme that will likely earn them pennies on the dollars they used to make.
Google's <a href="https://digiday.com/media/publishers-remain-unsure-of-what-comes-next-even-as-googles-ad-tech-is-ruled-a-monopoly/">vice grip on advertising</a> has, to be clear, been a problem since long before AI began infiltrating every aspect of our digital lives. Now, it appears that Google may start reaping what it so aggressively sowed — but we humans will, unfortunately, be trapped in the middle of the upcoming upheaval.
More on AI and the economy: <a href="https://futurism.com/job-applications-ai-slop">Applying to Jobs Has Become an AI-Powered Wasteland</a>

Ad Age

Who wins in this scenario? 

The Economy Is So Off the Rails That They’re Trying to Figure Out How to Make Ads Specifically Targeted at AI Bots

<h2>Fields of Data</h2>
Indiana's newest cash crop isn't soybeans or corn; it's AI data centers — lots and lots of AI data centers.
The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/technology/amazon-ai-data-centers.html">New York Times reports</a> that Amazon is building a vast complex of AI infrastructure facilities on top of 1,200 acres of former cropland, all meant for startup Anthropic's project to build an AI model that is as powerful, complex — and, just possibly, as intelligent — as the human brain.
To that end, Amazon has constructed seven data centers on site, with around 30 slated to be built in total, according to the newspaper. It's such an outrageously ambitious project, with untold billions in investment, that Amazon has tapped four separate construction firms to get the complex finished as soon as possible.
"I don’t know if they’re competing for cash or steak dinner or what, but it’s crazy how much they’re getting up," Bill Schalliol, a local economic development official, told the NYT. "Steel starts to go up here, the next day steel’s going up over there."
And the big tech behemoth is not stopping there; Amazon is planning to construct similar AI data center complexes in Mississippi, all to compete with other tech companies, such as Meta and OpenAI, which are racing to build next-generation facilities of their own to feed ever more advanced AI models.
<h2>Boom and Bust</h2>
But AI data centers come with a whole host of issues. They're energy hogs, and are very thirsty water drinkers.
Amazon is using less advanced chips compared to its competitors, hoping it won't need to deploy complex cooling equipment to lower the temperature in its facilities, relying instead on just large air handlers and municipal water to cool them down.
Still, the complex will eat up 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to light up millions of residences, and will divert immense quantities of water for cooling.
Already, the NYT reports, local residents have protested against a piece of wetland being bulldozed over for the data centers, while contending with local wells coming up dry. It seems that Amazon pumped so much water from the ground during construction that local water sources became stressed.
Expect more debates over water usage and technology in the future, as other communities in America and around the world are <a href="https://futurism.com/small-towns-ai-data-centers">struggling with water issues</a> due to this explosive sector.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-ai-scare-labor">CEOs Using AI to Terrorize Their Employees</a>

Silicon Brain

But to what end?

Amazon Is Building a Gigantic Computing Facility to Match the Human Brain

Mind Games

“I don't know what's wrong with me, but something is very bad — I'm very scared, and I need to go to the hospital.”

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

As AI conquers every human-driven endeavor at a breathless pace, from <a href="https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/05/ai-helping-pentagon-go-finding-targets-predicting-threats/405279/">bombing military targets</a> to <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/06/26/ai-in-the-classroom-takes-off-with-no-guardrails-00427147">teaching kids</a>, we gotta ask ourselves a scary question: what is it doing to the workplace right now, and in the future?
Sure, we have Dario Amodei, CEO of hotshot AI company Anthropic, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic">saying</a> he foresees AI models erasing 50 percent of entry-level white collar positions throughout the entire job market, but that could be all marketing hype.
To get to the bottom of it all, tech journalist Brian Merchant solicited responses from tech workers <a href="https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/did-ai-kill-your-job">for his acclaimed newsletter Blood in the Machine</a> — and the answers will probably depress you.
A Google software engineer was dismayed that young programmers were relying too much on AI to code, while more experienced workers were inadvertently propagating bad code by not thinking deeply about what they're building.
"'Anyone can write code' sounds good on paper, but when bad code is massively produced, it hurts everyone including those who did not ask for it and have been trusting the software industry," they wrote.
Dropbox eliminated another respondent's job last year after the company decided to allocate resources to Dash, the company's new AI helper.
"The industry is absolutely toxic right now as cost-cutting is dominating everything but the most recently funded startups," they said, while opining they may stop looking for work altogether because they're not getting any interest.
A tech worker at a marketing department shared the story of how one of their company's leaders claimed a ChatGPT model was their new chief marketing officer, which came as an omen for the rest of the marketing team.
"She claimed it was outperforming us," the person wrote. "It wasn’t — it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it."
Recently, due to AI, the company fired its human chief marketing officer and a bunch of other people.
And the stories keep on piling up.
The danger with pushing AI into everything this fast is that <a href="https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/googles-ai-overviews-are-often-so-confidently-wrong-that-ive-lost-all-trust-in-them">it's currently still unreliable</a>, and yet <a href="https://www.cio.com/article/4012162/ai-begins-to-reshape-the-it-job-landscape-as-layoffs-rise.html">employers are laying off scores of workers</a> — valuable people with institutional knowledge. It risks ruining the foundations of industries as we shirk the hard work of investing in the <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/ai-risks-broken-career-ladder-college-graduates-experts/story?id=122527744">proper training of younger people</a>.
And if we do all end up getting replaced, it's hard to imagine something like <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/361749/universal-basic-income-sam-altman-open-ai-study">universal basic income</a> coming soon enough to avert economic catastrophe.
There's going to be a reckoning as we run headlong into this future — and it's almost certain to be messy.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/microsoft-copilot-ai-embarrassment">Microsoft Is Having an Incredibly Embarrassing Problem With Its AI</a>

McJob

"She claimed it was outperforming us."

Tech Workers Say They're Rapidly Being Replaced by AI

Who among us hasn't stumbled headfirst into a violent coup attempt involving millions of dollars of black market weaponry?
That's the argument Robert Granieri, multimillionaire cofounder of trading firm Jane Street, is invoking after being caught funneling hoards of cash to an opposition party in South Sudan. The funding allegedly included millions of dollars in backing to purchase rifles, Stinger missiles, bulletproof vests, and grenades meant to topple South Sudan’s government.
Granieri says he was "duped" into providing the funds by a man claiming to be an activist in the region. "Granieri is a longtime supporter of human rights causes," his lawyer <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-25/jane-street-s-rob-granieri-says-he-was-duped-into-funding-south-sudan-coup-plot">told Bloomberg</a>. "In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions."
Jane Street is notably the <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-job-sam-bankman-fried-103217906.html">launchpad</a> of financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried before he launched his now-cratered cryptocurrency platform, FTX. Granieri, meanwhile, has a record of donations to NGOs like <a href="https://ideasbeyondborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IBB-2021-Annual-Report.pdf">Ideas Beyond Borders</a> in Afghanistan, which have been accused of treating third-world <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&amp;context=njihr">violence and suffering</a> as "ample photo opportunities" with which to attract donors.
The Wall Street hotshot's role in the plot was uncovered amidst the prosecution of Peter Ajak, a Sudanese political activist who was <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-defendants-arrested-conspiring-illegally-export-weapons-south-sudan">indicted last year</a> for trying to smuggle the massive weapons cache from the US to the war-torn region. Though Ajak and his co-conspirator, Abraham Chol Keech, are alleged to be the masterminds behind the dramatic plot, it hadn't been fully explained who was funding the expensive venture.
Far from the Mr. Magoo scenario that Granieri's attorneys are claiming, Ajak's lawyers paint a picture of a Wall Street financier who was "vital to the plan."
In May, the Sudanese rebel's lawyers claimed that "without the significant financing that Mr. Granieri could and agreed to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible."
Perhaps the most bizarre twist is the alleged involvement of Soviet chessmaster Garry Kasparov, who came to know both Granieri and Ajak through his work as chair of the Human Rights Foundation, according to Bloomberg. For his part, Kasparov denies involvement, saying that his "record and values are clear, and they remain unchanged."
South Sudan officially <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/09/south-sudan-crossroads">separated from Sudan</a> in 2011, following years of upheaval amidst a broader struggle by the United States and China for <a href="https://ipa-aip.org/notes/war-in-sudan-imperialism-fuels-the-refugee-crisis/">control over resources</a> in the region. In 2021, a military coup toppled the transitional Sudanese government, leading to <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/10/25/millions-take-to-the-streets-against-coup-by-sudans-military/">mass unrest</a> and a resurgence of state violence.
In the few short years since, over 10 million Sudanese residents have been displaced by war, while nearly 17 million people are considered food insecure.
If Granieri is found guilty of knowingly funding the coup, he'll be the latest in a long list of American moguls caught meddling in the affairs of foreign lands — and unleashing <a href="https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/06/27/us-imperialism-is-driving-millions-of-people-to-flee-their-homes-across-the-world/">devastating consequences</a> on sovereign people in the process.
More on Wall Street: <a href="https://futurism.com/global-warming-banks">This May Be the Most Terrifying Sign of Global Warming Yet</a>

Magoo Who?

Whomst among us hasn't accidentally funded millions of dollars in black market weaponry?

Wall Street Bigwig Says He's Confused How He Ended Up Funding an Armed Coup in African

A fringe new theory suggests that time is the fundamental structure of the physical universe, and space is merely a byproduct.
According to Gunther Kletetschka, a geologist — not a physicist, you'll note, but more on that later — from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, time is three-dimensional and the dimensions of space are an emergent property of it, a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-06-theory-dimensions-space-secondary-effect.html">press release from the university explains</a>.
"These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting," Kletetschka said in the blurb. "Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it's more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself."
Three-dimensional time is a theory that has been proposed before, though generally in <a href="https://scitechdaily.com/a-revolutionary-new-physics-hypothesis-three-time-dimensions-one-space-dimension/">pretty inaccessible terms</a>. Similarly to the explanation for three dimensions of space — length, width, and depth — 3D time theory claims that time can move forward in the linear progression we know, sideways between parallel possible timelines, and along each one of those as it unfolds.
Yes, it's a pretty mind-blowing concept — but scientists have long theorized that time, as the fourth dimension in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, is less intuitive than it seems in everyday reality.
While other 3D time theories rely on traditional physics, Kletetschka suggests that his may help explain the many outstanding questions accepted physics still harbors. In a somewhat grandiose manner, the geologist even claims that his 3D time proposal could operate as a grand unifying theory or "theory of everything," the Holy Grail of quantum mechanics that would explain how the universe works on a sweeping level.
"The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself," the scientist said. "This theory demonstrates how viewing time as three-dimensional can naturally resolve multiple physics puzzles through a single coherent mathematical framework."
Obviously, there are an astonishing number of caveats to consider here. For one, Kletetschka is not a theoretical physicist — he's a geologist, and <a href="https://people.alaska.edu/search?q=Kletetschka">according to his university bio</a> he also has some experience in astronomy.
Extraordinary claims all call for extraordinary evidence. And the claims here are already stirring controversy: as an editor's note added to the end of the press release cautions, the scientist's theory was published in the <a href="https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/epdf/10.1142/S2424942425500045">journal Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences</a>, a "legitimate step," but one that isn't remotely sufficient to take it out of the realm of the fringe. That journal, the note adds, is "relatively low-impact and niche, and its peer review does not match the rigorous scrutiny applied by top-tier journals."
"The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny," the note concluded, "and has not been published in leading physics journals or independently verified through experiments or peer-reviewed replication."
Still, it's a fascinating concept to consider — especially because we still don't know <a href="https://time.com/6969823/martin-rees-time/">exactly how time works</a>, anyway.
More on fringe theories: <a href="https://futurism.com/physicists-wrong-gravity">Physicists Say We Were Completely Wrong About How Gravity Works</a>

WTF Is Time

"These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting."

Time Is Three-Dimensional and Space Is Just a Side Effect, Scientist Says

Presumably, when you dump $14 billion into a company to buy a 49 percent stake — as <a href="https://futurism.com/meta-scaleai-superintelligence">Meta just did in Scale AI</a> — you're confident that said company a) will help you make a lot of money and b) knows what it's doing.
But a <a href="https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/exclusive-scale-ais-spam-security-woes-while-serving-google/91205895">new scoop from </a><a href="https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/exclusive-scale-ais-spam-security-woes-while-serving-google/91205895">Inc Magazine </a>suggests that Scale AI — co-founded by 28-year-old zillionaire Alexandr Wang, whose first name does indeed lack a letter "e" between the "d" and "r" —  is a massive clown show behind the scenes. 
Back when it worked with <a href="https://futurism.com/google-button-generate-ai-podcast-search-results">Google</a> (the two just broke up following Meta's takeover), Scale AI reportedly became overrun with countless "spammers" who fleeced the company for bogus work by taking advantage of its laughable security and vetting protocols — an episode that encapsulates its struggles to meet the demands of a huge client like Google.
Scale AI is basically a data annotation hub that does essential grunt work for the AI industry. To train an AI model, you need quality data. And for that data to mean anything, an AI model needs to know what it's looking at. Annotators manually go in and add that context.
As is the means du jour in corporate America, Scale AI built its business model on an army of egregiously underpaid gig workers, many of them overseas. The conditions have been described as "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/28/scale-ai-remotasks-philippines-artificial-intelligence/">digital sweatshops</a>," and many workers have accused Scale AI of wage theft.
It turns out this was not an environment for fostering high-quality work.
According to internal documents obtained by Inc, Scale AI's "Bulba Experts" program to train Google's AI systems was supposed to be staffed with authorities across relevant fields. But instead, during a chaotic 11 months between March 2023 and April 2024, its dubious "contributors" inundated the program with "spam," which was described as "writing gibberish, writing incorrect information, GPT-generated thought processes."
In many cases, the spammers, who were independent contractors who worked through Scale AI-owned platforms like Remotasks and Outlier, still got paid for submitting complete nonsense, according to former Scale contractors, since it became almost impossible to catch them all. And even if they did get caught, some would come back by simply using a VPN.
"People made so much money," a former contributor told Inc. "They just hired everybody who could breathe." 
The work often called for advanced degrees that many contributors didn't have, the former contributor said. And seemingly, no one was vetting who was coming in.
"There were no background checks whatsoever," a former queue manager for Remotasks, who was in charge of reviewing and approving the contributors' work, told Inc. "For example, the clients would have requirements for people working on projects to have certain degrees. But there were no verification checks... Often it was people that weren't native English speakers." 
Spammers "could get away with just totally submitting garbage and there weren't enough people to track them down," the former queue manager added. They also recalled how Scale AI's Allocations team in charge of assigning contributors once "dumped 800 spammers" into their team who proceeded to spam "all of the tasks."
Attempts at cracking down were crude. Per Inc, various memos and guidelines called for either denying or removing contributors from specific countries, including Egypt, Pakistan, Kenya, and Venezuela.
The program also got a little taste of the technology it was helping to create. Spammers were submitting so much AI-generated junk that supervisors were advised to use a tool called ZeroGPT, intended to detects <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-bleach-vinegar">ChatGPT usage</a>, to vet entries.
It makes you wonder just how much gibberish slipped through the cracks and ended up being internalized by Google's AI models. Perhaps it could explain a little about its <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms">infamously shoddy </a><a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms">AI Overviews</a> feature.
For its part, a Scale AI spokesperson dismissed the claims. 
"This story is filled with so many inaccuracies, it's hard to keep track," the spokesperson said in a statement to Inc. "What these documents show, and what we explained to Inc ahead of publishing, is that we had clear safeguards in place to detect and remove spam before anything goes to customers."
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/whatsapp-text-summary">WhatsApp Deploys AI, for Those Incapable of Comprehending Straightforward Messages From Their Friends and Family</a>

Disasterclass

"They just hired everybody who could breathe."

The AI Company Zuckerberg Just Poured $14 Billion Into Is Reportedly a Clown Show of Ludicrous Incompetence

Crypto bros are freaking out amid a surge in letters from the Internal Revenue Service about their digital currency holdings.
As <a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-tax-crackdown-looms-as-irs-warning-letters-surge/">Bitcoin.com</a> and <a href="https://www.cryptopolitan.com/irs-thousands-bitcoin-users-warning-letters/">other sites report</a>, there has been a whopping 758 percent spike in customer mentions of IRS letters over the past two months alone, suggesting that there may be a taxation crackdown in progress.
We don't know exactly how many people have gotten these troubling letters — but apparently, there are a few different types going out.
According to Coinledger, the crypto tax software firm that compiled the new numbers, recipients either received <a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/notices/letter_6174-a.pdf">letters 6174 or 6174-A</a>, which are sent as warnings and require no response, or <a href="https://www.irs.gov/individuals/understanding-your-cp2000-series-notice">CP2000</a>, in which the IRS has already decided how much you owe and can punish you for not doing so.
As Coinledger CEO David Kemmerer told Bitcoin.com, a lot of the people being contacted by the IRS have long reported their crypto holdings to the agency — but the precedent it sets is pretty strange regardless.
"We’re seeing a wave of confusion and fear among everyday crypto investors, many of whom made their best effort to report taxes accurately," Kemmerer said. "This kind of enforcement is only going to accelerate."
As demonstrated by a disgruntled user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTax/comments/1jd36ue/received_irs_letter_for_crypto_letter_6174a/">posted on the r/cryptotax subreddit</a> earlier this year, those who have steadily reported their crypto holdings over the years appear to be the first wave to get these scary letters.
"I believe I have reported all my crypto transactions with my CPA," the user noted. "[I've] been reporting them for years. I'm not sure what to do with this letter as I think I have correctly filed everything."
To Kemmerer's mind, targeting those sorts of individuals may be an error.
"The IRS has more visibility into crypto than ever before," he said. "But without accurate cost basis data, even compliant investors can get mistakenly flagged."
Coincidentally enough, these IRS actions come after president Donald Trump's administration ordered the government-sponsored lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fannie-mae-freddie-mac-ordered-crypto-asset-buying-123209223">consider crypto holdings as assets</a> when assessing mortgage loans. As the prediction marketplace <a href="https://x.com/polymarket/status/1938015540905136205?s=46">Polymarket joked on X</a>, that means the country's biggest lenders will now be forced to assess "Fartcoin" and other dumb meme tokens when considering creditworthiness.
More on crypto: <a href="https://futurism.com/hawk-tuah-girl-event">Hawk Tuah Girl Live Event Devolves Into Chaos After Crypto Disaster</a>

Hot Girls Have IRS

"We’re seeing a wave of confusion and fear among everyday crypto investors."

Huge Number of Crypto Users Suddenly Getting Terrifying Letters From the IRS

American president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping have <a href="https://heatmap.news/economy/china-rare-earth-trade-deal">finally resolved</a> a months-long trade dispute revolving around the rare earth metals vital to developing artificial intelligence. It's a resolution that makes it all the more bizarre that the US President is opening the floodgates for an AI arms race with China.
Following Trump's baffling "Liberation Day" tariffs back in April, Chinese lawmakers moved to cut the flow of rare earth metals into the US. China has a near-global monopoly on rare earth minerals — which are critical for building high-tech products like wind turbines and computer chips — giving Beijing a huge asset at the bargaining table.
That all changed on Thursday, when Commerce Secretary <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-26/us-china-have-finalized-tariff-understanding-lutnick-says?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MTAxOTIxNywiZXhwIjoxNzUxNjI0MDE3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWUhFVUtUMEcxS1cwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEODAxRkVGQjIxRUU0QzRDOEI3RUJDNjI0MzQ0RjkwNCJ9.BIk84ARgCAfQ10L_nMLHWcow7r25Oj4yBCTI9Uq_HYE&amp;leadSource=uverify%20wall&amp;utm_campaign=heatmap_am&amp;utm_source=hs_email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-90huKzmX6Uw-viNYqFC_0TVt43M5BDN-2UPdSHcnZdr0BXG5RXyHqpMGImJmx5Rv88nLck">Howard Lutnick announced</a> "they’re going to deliver rare earths to us," adding that "we’ll take down our countermeasures" in kind. The deal, which was signed on Tuesday, is one of 10 that the Trump administration made with global trade partners following the much-maligned tariffs.
With all the trade progress, one might expect the White House to ease down on its aggressive stance with China — at least until the minerals start flowing again.
Instead, that's the exact opposite of what happened. Just a day after Lutnick announced a deal had been signed, news broke that Trump is on the cusp of signing executive actions which would dramatically escalate the so-called "AI arms race" with China. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/27/trump-plans-executive-orders-to-power-ai-growth-in-race-with-china.html">Per CNBC</a>, the moves encompass four major plans.
The first is a deregulatory measure which would make it easier for AI companies to suck power from civilian power grids. Companies like Elon Musk's xAI have turned to <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators">noxious outdoor generators</a> to fuel their <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-energy-use">power hungry</a> data-centers, as regulators and energy officials assess short- and long-term impacts on surrounding communities. This would seemingly fast-track that process, giving tech companies federal approval to latch onto grids immediately, consequences be damned.
The executive order would also approve the sale of federal land to tech companies — building off of a <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-hell-no-insane-utah-republicans-proposal-for-sale-of-millions-of-acres-of-land-under-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-sparks-outrage/articleshow/122027958.cms?from=mdr">broader strategy</a> that involves privatizing federally protected wild land — helping them set up their <a href="https://futurism.com/cancer-ai-data-centers">noisy and hazardous</a> data centers without having to worry about <a href="https://futurism.com/small-towns-ai-data-centers">pesky local governments</a>.
Other measures include rolling out an "AI action plan" to inform the public, as well as a propaganda drive to push the narrative that the US is locked in a life-or-death arms race with China, according to CNBC's anonymous sources.
This is all done under the pretext that we are, in fact, locked in a new cold war — a fiction that has more to do with <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205241291645?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.5">preventing free-market competition</a> with China than with any sort of genuine international threat.
With US leaders set on rehashing the nuclear arms race, AI industry reporter Garrison Lovely <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KPBPc7RayDPxqxdqY/china-hawks-are-manufacturing-an-ai-arms-race">sums it up well</a>: "Only one superpower has a government commission publicly calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI, and it’s not China."
More on China: <a href="https://futurism.com/china-green-energy-emissions">China's Green Energy Surge Has Caused CO2 Emissions to Fall for the First Time</a>

Heaven and Earth

"They’re going to deliver rare earths to us."

Trump Goes Haywire on AI Regulation After China Agrees to Major Trade Deal

One of the most powerful tech corporations on earth has a message for Android users: its AI will soon be taking control of your phone.
Android users have begun receiving <a href="https://www.androidauthority.com/gemini-apps-activity-email-july-7-3570651/">ominous emails</a> warning that Gemini, Google's proprietary large language model (LLM), will soon be able to "help you" with apps like Phone, Messages, and WhatsApp.
Crucially, the emails note that Gemini will be able to "help" users regardless of "whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off" — which prompted some understandable anxiety.
A little on down the email, Google adds that "if you don't want to use these features, you can turn them off in the Apps settings page." Confusingly, it fails to explain how users can do this, or what that means in the context of Gemini's always-on helping hand.
It's unclear what any of this help really means in practice, especially given the sensitivity of the apps in question — can Google's AI hijack your phone and make random calls? Can it monitor your texts, and share your data with Google to mine and sell to advertisers?
The Gemini takeover goes live on July 7, giving Android users just two weeks to prepare — whatever that means to them, as Google has yet to clarify.
It's a pretty troubling warning, in part because of Gemini's notoriously glitchy errors, and also due to Google's lousy track record when it comes to privacy protection.
For example, the tech titan has been caught running a massive <a href="https://futurism.com/googles-ai-scraping-sites-opt-out">data-scraping campaign</a> through its <a href="https://futurism.com/google-top-ai-poaching-leave">DeepMind lab</a>, nabbing data from websites that had opted out of that practice. Meanwhile, a US federal judge set a trial for August after Google was caught <a href="https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/google-lawsuit-privacy-invasion-user-data-california-us-legal">collecting personal data</a> from Android and non-Android phones, even after users had turned data tracking off.
Gemini, meanwhile, is prone to making some wild errors. Its been known to <a href="https://futurism.com/google-super-bowl-ad-ai-plagiarizing">plagiarize</a> when it generates its wild artificial slop, spit out <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o">harmful</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/google-ai-mj-lenderman-14-grammys">incorrect</a> info when summarizing information, and even launch into <a href="https://futurism.com/google-gemini-chatbot-explodes">explosive tangents</a>, hurling insults and death wishes at users.
With that kind of track record, Android users are right to wonder who's really meant to benefit from Google's vague and ill-defined helping hand.
More on Google: <a href="https://futurism.com/google-nuclear-power-centers">Google is Building Three New Nuclear Plants for Its Extremely Power-Hungry AI</a>