The House of Representatives has failed to renew the U.S. government's warrantless surveillance law before it is due to expire on Friday, all but guaranteeing that it will lapse for the first time, as lawmakers protest the appointment of a controversial Trump ally to oversee U.S. intelligence agencies. The spy law, officially dubbed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), broadly allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect vast amounts of information, including on Americans, to identify foreign hackers, spies, and potential terrorists. Also known as Section 702 for its place in the law books, the regulation has been considered critical to national security by both Democrats and Republicans for years. Critics have been calling for overwhelming reform of FISA, citing abuses of the law by multiple past U.S. administrations. Lawmakers from both parties had sought provisions that would require spy agencies to first obtain a court-approved warrant before being allowed to access the private communications of Americans, though the Trump government had been calling for a clean re-authorization of the law....

Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what's shaping up to be the largest IPO in history. According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI's AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI's failure to prioritize safety in Grok's development, a product that has since come under fire for a range of safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Kim was concerned with the possibility that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction. 'Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler ('MechaHitler'),' the lawsuit reads. 'Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok's political bias and discriminatory tendencies.'...

Suno, the AI music-generation company, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $400 million Series D round, valuing the company at $5.4 billion. It was only about seven months ago that Suno raised at a $2.45 billion valuation, underscoring that investors are confident in the company's future despite the litigation it faces. That legal trouble isn't minor. As Suno itself has admitted, the company trains its AI on copyrighted songs. The company argues that this is permissible according to fair use ' a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission, but one that is highly fact-specific and can vary widely from case to case. Copyright holders like Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony, and German music collection organization GEMA have continued to pursue legal action against Suno, though Warner Music Group (WMG) settled and reached a licensing deal with the company last November. When Sony and UMG initially sued Suno in 2024, the companies claimed that Suno had trained on 560 of their copyrighted works. That number has since grown meaningfully. Last month, the record labels filed to amend their complaint to allege that over 61,000 more songs were used for AI training without permission....

In the first weeks of 2026, OpenClaw spread through the AI world like a sonic boom, introducing many of the industry's most ambitious technologists to the joy and chaos of an unrestrained AI agent. The project's momentum tailed off after OpenAI scooped up its founder, but the influence is still being felt ' particularly at Microsoft. Now Microsoft is launching Scout, a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Built on the OpenClaw framework, Scout is an always-on agentic assistant, designed to work alongside the user with a persistent identity and style. Users name their own Scout instance ' in my demo, it was named Sebastian ' and are meant to give it ongoing feedback on tasks they want automated. As Scout VP Omar Shahine put it, the idea is to create an assistant that actively adapts to the user's needs. 'We all have our interesting quirks in how we work, and people are codifying those patterns into memories and skills that persist in their agent,' Shahine told me. 'Then the agent becomes more capable, better understanding you and gaining more agency and exercising judgments.'...