Axios

The deadline for companies to help remove AI-generated pornography under the Take It Down Act passed this week, but advocates say companies will have to be taken to court to secure strong implementation.

Why it matters: The Take It Down Act is Congress' first attempt to tackle child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual intimate images of adults online — content that has proliferated with AI.

Open-source AI firm Reflection AI is partnering with the Department of Energy to help power the Genesis Mission, a federal scientific research initiative, per an announcement shared exclusively with Axios.

Why it matters: The partnership is a big advancement for a company that's trying to get the U.S. to embrace open-source models.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's tech adaptation and training opportunities position the state well to weather economic uncertainty, state business and political leaders said.

Why it matters: Those deliberate investments are bolstering job security and productivity for Utahns despite a gloomier national job outlook, and higher energy prices..

Axios' Erin Alberty and Megan Morrone spoke to state Rep. Jennifer Dailey-Provost (D-Salt Lake City), Salt Lake Chamber president and CEO Derek Miller, Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity executive director Jefferson Moss, and Nomi Health co-founder and COO Joshua Walker for the May 19 event, which was sponsored by Anthropic.

What they're saying: A new directive from Gov. Spencer Cox says all recent or upcoming college graduates will "have an AI certificate at no charge to them" to set them up for success, Moss said.

• Many businesses are incorporating AI into daily operations and for customer service improvements, according to Miller.
• "Most of the world, and certainly the United States, are really clueing in to how innovative Utah has become," Dailey-Provost said. "We absolutely have led the country in AI … and tech policy."

Yes, but: A new, planned data center is facing widespread backlash for its environmental implications.

• If approved, it would be one of the biggest data centers in the world.

What's next: We have to make sure "that we're maximizing safety and tech … in a rapidly changing economy and workplace," Dailey-Provost added.

Content from the sponsor's remarks

In a View From the Top segment, Anthropic head of central policy Miriam Chaum said that Utah is thinking hard about how to bring Claude into state agency work.

• In a recent, four-week pilot program, "over 70% of the engineers involved reported that they had saved over 20 hours" of work, Chaum said.
• "Safety comes down to the least safe player in the room," she added, "and that's why you need regulation."

Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston sat down with Ron Ash, Accenture Federal Services CEO, in a View from the Top conversation. The two discussed why government can move faster from testing to deploying AI, how rethinking processes and workforce integration unlock impact and what it will take for the U.S. to scale innovation.

The U.S. government on Thursday said that it has agreed to take equity stakes in nine quantum computing companies, tied to $2 billion in CHIPS Act grants.

Why it matters: These sorts of quasi-socialist arrangements have been normalized with breathtaking speed.

SpaceX is going public, but not really: Elon Musk will retain a vise-like grip on the company he runs, its initial public offering filing shows.

Why it matters: It's the largest IPO history and as such will reshape the fabric of the public markets and may set a new standard for how companies are run.

Nvidia announced plans to supersize the shower of cash it will return to shareholders.

Why it matters: On Wall Street, big increases in plans to return cash — such as a fast-growing company announcing a dividend for the first time — are viewed as a tacit acknowledgement that the company is running out of places to invest profitably.

Over the course of two hours Wednesday afternoon, the AI industry produced an extraordinary stream of headlines mapping out the vast architecture of its ambitions.

Why it matters: One historic news cycle peeled back virtually every layer of the AI revolution — smarter systems, exploding revenues, roaring markets, staggering infrastructure demands and a federal government racing to catch up.

Elon Musk's SpaceX isn't the financial juggernaut that many were expecting, according to the IPO prospectus it filed yesterday.

The big picture: It's expected to be the largest IPO ever, and could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

Google is trying to pull off one of the trickiest balancing acts in tech: aggressively disrupting its own products with AI while protecting the businesses that generate tens of billions in profit.

Why it matters: Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google enters the AI race with enormous scale, distribution and cash flow — but also a vast empire it has to defend.