Axios

Roughly 1,000 people have already left the nation's top cybersecurity agency during the second Trump administration, a former government official tells Axios — cutting the agency's total workforce by nearly a third.

Why it matters: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is also facing a potential 17% budget cut under the president's proposed budget — raising fears that power grids, water utilities, and election systems could be left without a well-equipped federal partner as cyber threats mount.

Keysight Technologies will receive U.S. antitrust approval for its $1.5 billion purchase of British telecom testing firm Spirent Communications, after agreeing to divest three of Spirent's businesses.

Why it matters: Remedies appear to be back, after a Biden-era antitrust regime that focused more on injunctions.

Facebook parent Meta on Tuesday inked a 20-year deal with power giant Constellation Energy to keep a large Illinois nuclear plant running until mid-century.

Why it matters: It's a big addition to a hot power trend — big tech looking to reactors big and small to meet AI's electricity thirst with zero-carbon energy.

Machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio is launching a new nonprofit lab backed by roughly $30 million in funding to make AI systems act less like humans.

Why it matters: The move bucks a trend toward AI that acts independently, which Bengio and others fear might create systems that place their own interests over humanity's.

Bill Gates will spend most of his wealth on improving health and education services in Africa over the next 20 years, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder pledged Monday.

The big picture: He announced last month plans to spend more than $200 billion through the Gates Foundation that he established with ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, 25 years ago. Once "virtually all" of the fortune of the former world's richest man is gone, he said the Seattle-based philanthropic organization would close on Dec. 31, 2045.

China accused the U.S. violating the trade deal that the world's two largest economies signed last month and vowed to take "resolute and forceful measures," per a briefing on Monday morning local time.

Why it matters: It's the latest sign of deteriorating relations between the two nations since their Switzerland meeting last month led to a deal to lower tariffs on each other for 90 days while they negotiated on trade.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday is launching an agencywide generative AI tool aimed at helping scientific reviewers, investigators and others streamline their work, according to details shared with Axios.

Why it matters: The model, dubbed "Elsa," is being rolled out weeks ahead of schedule and is designed to help with tasks such as summarizing adverse events to support drug safety profiles, and to generate code for databases.

President Trump's Truth Social account is full of jarring juxtapositions: major trade policy announcements and presidential nominations broken up by bizarre conspiracies and personal boasts.

Why it matters: The president's words matter, whether he's moving markets with tariff threats or spreading unfounded conspiracies about his political rivals, and the White House has mimicked Trump's bellicose online persona.

Former Microsoft and BP execs are launching a startup to quickly deploy data centers with on-site power — and very high efficiency.

Why it matters: Rapidly building and powering data centers — and doing it without straining grids or spiking emissions — is key to the global AI race.

The two most durable and decisive geopolitical topics of the 2020s are fully merging into one existential threat: China and AI supremacy.

• Put simply, America either maintains its economic and early AI advantages, or faces the possibility of a world dominated by communist China.

Why it matters: This is the rare belief shared by both President Trump and former President Biden — oh, and virtually every person studying the geopolitical chessboard.

The AI-fixated tech industry is rapidly dismantling the old web, with no game plan for how to replace it.

State of play: Chatbots have already begun to intercept web traffic and drain publishers' revenue. Now tech giants and startups aim to remodel the devices and browsers we use to access web pages, using AI to summarize or pre-empt the content that people and publishers post online.

Apple filed an appeal to the European Commission's specifications around how the company complies with its interoperability requirements, which compel it to share user information with outside developers as part of the Digital Markets Act, per a source familiar with the situation.

Why it matters: Apple continues to push back forcefully against requirements imposed by the DMA, which the company has said forces it to give up its intellectual property and compromise user privacy.