DOGE employees can access millions of Americans' sensitive Social Security data, the Supreme Court ruled Friday in a party-line decision.
Why it matters: The ruling is a win for the Trump administration, which has charged the Department of Government Efficiency with rooting out alleged waste and fraud at the Social Security Administration.
President Trump is considering selling his new Tesla as his scuffle with Elon Musk escalates, a White House official confirmed to Axios.
The big picture: The feud between the president and the billionaire is costing them billions, and Tesla shares specifically dropped 14.3% as of Thursday at a price tag of just under $20 billion for Musk.
Deel and Rippling are scheduled for a California court hearing in September, to begin hashing out their duelingcharges of corporate espionage.
Until then, it seems the HR software unicorns plan to keep escalating.
The latest: Rippling yesterday filed an amended complaint against Deel, which includes claims that Deel also illicitly targeted four other competitors (only one of which was named).
Generative AI is evolving so fast that security leaders are tossing out the playbooks they wrote just a year or two ago.
Why it matters: Defending against AI-driven threats, including autonomous attacks, will require companies to make faster, riskier security bets than they've ever had to before.
Elon Musk unleashed a fresh round of tweets late Thursday afternoon, calling for President Trump to be impeached and declaring that SpaceX would begin decommissioning a spacecraft essential to NASA's operation — though he later backtracked on this threat.
Why it matters: Trump's threat to cancel billions of dollars of government contracts with Musk's companies has ignited a new round of escalation in the explosive civil war between the two former allies.
For marketers and communicators of all types, the digital economy is driving an insatiable demand for content. The pressure has become so intense that some employees have resorted to creating "rogue" content that can threaten companies' reputations and customers' experiences.
Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe at the Axios AI+ Summit. Photo: Axios
Many venture capitalists are alarmed by the Trump administration's cuts to academic research, at Harvard and beyond, given that such funding has helped forge such foundational technologies as the internet and gene editing.
Anduril, the defense tech startup led by Palmer Luckey, announced Thursday that it's raised $2.5 billion in new venture capital funding at a $30.5 billion valuation.
Why it matters: This gives Anduril a repriced stock to make acquisitions.
A group of Democratic lawmakersare pressing the Trump administration to clarify who is leading the government's efforts to eradicate China-backed hackers from U.S. critical infrastructure and telecom networks.
Why it matters: Roughly 1,000 people have already left the nation's top cyber agency this year through voluntary buyouts and other workforce cuts. Those cuts could create dangerous weaknesses in the nation's cyber defenses, the lawmakers argue in a letter exclusively shared with Axios.
Elon Musk's X is piloting a new program to use its Community Notes feature to highlight posts where people of typically differing opinions actually agree with each other, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The goal is to build momentum around opinions that are widely shared, which could help make conversations on and off X less polarizing.
Researchers published new findings that they fear could be the first evidence of an active spyware campaign targeting iPhones in the U.S. and the European Union.
Why it matters: iPhones tied to people in an EU member state's government, U.S. political campaign, media organizations and an AI company could have all been targeted as part of this operation, according to the report from mobile research company iVerify.
OpenAI said today it's banned ChatGPT accounts that appear to be tied to the ongoing North Korean IT worker schemes that are plaguing nearly every Fortune 500 company.
Why it matters: The new findings suggest that North Korea is advancing its use of AI tools in its yearslong pervasive scheme designed to help fund the regime's missile program.
Coign, a self-described credit card "built for conservatives," claims to have launched the first fully AI-generated national television commercial, at least in the financial services industry.
Why it matters: Hyper-realistic AI videos flooded the internet after the release of Google's Veo 3 tool last month. Now, signs are emerging of a potentially massive disruption to the $250 billion TV advertising industry.
AI is hitting multiple tipping points in its impact on the tech industry, communication, government and human culture — and speakers at Axios' AI+ Summit in New York Wednesday mapped the transformative moment.
1. The software business is the first to feel AI's full force, and we're just beginning to see what happens when companies start using AI tools to accelerate advances in AI itself.
