A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has asked the U.S. government to ban several hack-for-hire firms ' companies that carry out cyberattacks on behalf of paying clients. The lawmakers accuse the firms of targeting Americans and abusing foreign courts to silence U.S. reporting on their activities. Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, as well as Republican congressman Pat Harrigan of North Carolina on Wednesday sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, urging him to add three Indian companies to the department's economic sanctions 'entity list.' The list effectively bars U.S. businesses from transacting with a named entity, with the aim of restricting the companies from accessing critical technology needed to function, including software licenses and cloud infrastructure. In the letter sent to Lutnick and shared with TechCrunch, the lawmakers say BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Sunkissed Organic Farms (which previously operated under its former name, Appin) have for more than a decade conducted cyberattacks and targeted espionage against Americans, business owners, and their lawyers to 'manipulate ongoing litigation.'...

Editor's note: The following is the fifth profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, and Craft founder Ilya Levtov here. When an executive at Replit suggested that Cecilia Ziniti seemed distracted by artificial intelligence, she was not an engineer working on the coding startup's AI products. She was its general counsel. The executive told her 'You're a great GC and good at business development ' but it seems like maybe your head's not in it because you're so into this AI thing,'' Ziniti recalled in an interview with Crunchbase News. By then, Ziniti had spent roughly two decades working as a lawyer at companies such as Amazon, Cruise and Anki. She had never learned to code. She had not ever founded a company. And she had not worked in the same sort of technical or product roles that many venture-backed software founders have....

Imagine that an AI lab spends several billion dollars assembling chips, power, researchers, and data. It trains the best model in the world. The benchmarks move. Developers migrate. The launch becomes an industry event. Then the strange thing happens. Six months later, another lab reaches roughly the same capability. An open model offers most of it at a fraction of the price. Distillation compresses parts of the original behavior into smaller systems. A router quietly begins sending each query to whichever model is cheapest or best that morning. Hamilton Helmer's Seven Powers framework is useful here because it separates a good product from a durable business. Power requires two things: a benefit and a barrier. You need a castle worth defending, but you also need something that prevents competitors from walking through the front door. AI is unusually good at manufacturing castles. Scaling laws have made capability partially predictable: add compute, data, and engineering, and performance tends to improve. The frontier is not a vending machine - you cannot insert exactly one billion dollars and receive exactly one unit of intelligence - but it is closer to one than almost any previous technology....

Edelson PC, the law firm that filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI in April on behalf of victims and families connected to the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, is filing 30 additional complaints this week. The new plaintiffs include teachers, a principal, and students who were in the building during the attack but not physically shot. The new filings also, for the first time, accuse OpenAI of aiding and abetting the mass shooting, rather than just negligently failing to prevent it. That claim requires proving intent from OpenAI and is likely to face early dismissal challenges. The complaints come as OpenAI continues to deal with the fallout of another high-profile safety incident after one of the company's AI models escaped its sandbox during cybersecurity evaluations and hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and datasets. OpenAI has also faced several lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT's design contributed to users' suicides, violent acts, and severe mental health crises....