Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.

The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.

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Anti-vaccine activist and current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked hard to villainize infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, even writing a conspiracy-laden book lambasting the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But a year into the job as the country's top health official, Kennedy—who has no background in medicine, science, or public health—still holds less sway with Americans than the esteemed physician-scientist.

In a nationally representative survey conducted in February by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 54 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Fauci, while only 38 percent had confidence in Kennedy. Breaking those supporters down further, 25 percent of respondents said they were "very confident" in Fauci, while only 9 percent said the same for Kennedy.

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If you've spent more than five minutes driving an electric vehicle, chances are good you're a convert. But most people haven't driven an EV, and surveys show that many are scared to consider ditching internal combustion engines for something that plugs in because of concerns about battery reliability. It's easy to see why—if you don't follow the field that closely, you'll have missed some serious technology advances over the last few years.

Early EVs indeed suffered from lithium-ion battery degradation over time, similar to the energy storage loss common in lithium-ion-powered consumer electronics. But modern EV batteries aren't the same as the ones in your toothbrush or that old tablet that lasts just a few hours. With modern EV battery management systems and active thermal control—liquid cooling, in other words—range loss shouldn't be more than about 2 percent per year.

A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan provides a clear illustration of this progress. We all know the planet is undergoing human-caused warming, and a warm world is worse for EVs in a couple of ways.

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While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership , Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.

ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin , the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.

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If the only thing you had to go off was Apple's string of product announcements this week, you'd have little reason to believe that there is a historic AI-driven memory and storage supply crunch going on. Some products saw RAM and storage increases at the same prices as the products they replaced; others had their prices increased a bit but came with more storage than before as compensation. And there's the MacBook Neo , which at $599 was priced toward the low end of what Apple-watchers expected.

But even a company with Apple's scale and buying power can't totally defy gravity. At some point between March 4 and now, Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM option from its top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio desktop. Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000. The Tech Specs page on Apple's support site still acknowledges the existence of the 512GB configuration, but both the Apple Store page and the list of available configurations have removed any mention of it.

We've asked Apple to comment on the disappearance of the 512GB Mac Studio and will update this article if we receive a response.

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Last week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled a major shakeup in the Artemis Program, intended to put the nation on a better path back to the Moon. The changes focused largely on increasing the launch cadence of NASA's large SLS rocket and putting a greater emphasis on lunar surface activities. Days later, the US Senate indicated that it broadly supported these plans.

This is all well and good, but it neglects a critical element of the Artemis program: a lander capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface from an orbit around the Moon and back up to rendezvous with Orion. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.

As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.

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After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two new eyes.

That's the idea behind a new theoretical synthesis published in Current Biology. According to the data considered by its authors—a team from the University of Sussex (UK) and Lund University (Sweden)—vertebrate eyes, ours included, may not descend directly from the paired eyes of early bilaterian animals. Instead, they may have been “reinvented” from what was once a single light-sensitive organ that survived an evolutionary detour.

Strange eyes

“Vertebrate eyes are so fundamentally different from the lateral eyes of other animal groups,” explains Dan-Eric Nilsson , senior author of the study from Lund University and a leading expert in eye evolution. “The key difference is the identity of the main photoreceptor, which is of ciliary nature in the vertebrate eye but rhabdomeric in other animal groups, such as arthropods and cephalopods,” he adds.

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It's been two weeks since the Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump's emergency tariffs , but an estimated 300,000 US businesses still have no idea if or when they will receive refunds.

Economists have estimated that more than $175 billion was unlawfully collected, and the US could end up owing substantially more than that the longer that the refund process is dragged out, since the US must pay back daily interest on the funds. According to the Cato Institute , a libertarian think tank, a conservative estimate showed that "$700 million in interest is added to the final bill every month that the government delays tariff refunds, or around $23 million per day."

The US is aware that interest is compounding daily on tariffs, as the Trump administration argued against an injunction that would've temporarily blocked the tariffs much sooner by noting that no one would be harmed, since tariffs would be repaid with interest if deemed unlawful. However, now that the court has ruled against tariffs, the Trump administration seems to be dragging its feet in finding a way to return all the ill-gotten funds.

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Hayden AI , a San Francisco startup that makes spatial analytics tools for cities worldwide, has sued its co-founder and former CEO, alleging that he stole a large quantity of proprietary information in the days leading up to his ouster from the company in September 2024.

In a lawsuit filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court but only made public this week, Hayden AI claims that former CEO Chris Carson undertook what it called “numerous fraudulent actions,” which include “forged board signatures, unauthorized stock sales, and improper allocation of personal expenses.” (Ars covered Hayden AI’s recent product expansion in Santa Monica, Calif.)

Carson, who has since founded a rival company called EchoTwin AI , did not respond to Ars’ request on Wednesday for comment sent via LinkedIn, email, and text message.

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