White House AI Guidelines Exempt U.S. Open Models From Government Review; Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2026

 

Amrith Ramkumar , Wall Street Journal; White House AI Guidelines Exempt U.S. Open Models From Government Review

"Under a framework that administration officials discussed with executives from leading AI companies Tuesday, only makers of closed, proprietary U.S. models that demonstrate state-of-the-art capabilities in cybersecurity and hacking based on performance benchmarks would have to voluntarily submit those models to the government for testing before they are released, people familiar with the matter said. 

Open-weight models, whose developers, including Nvidia, make them available to download so users can run and customize them on their own, would be exempt. 

The general definition of state-of-the-art capabilities could be interpreted differently by makers of closed models and the White House, potentially creating confusion about which models fall into the category, the people said. Tools from Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google that are among the most powerful available are likely to force those companies to work with the administration, while other companies, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Facebook parent Meta Platforms might not have to, they said."

Musk’s Starlink hooked rural customers. Then came the price increases.; The Washington Post, June 11, 2026

 Faiz Siddiqui , The Washington Post; Musk’s Starlink hooked rural customers. Then came the price increases.

[Kip Currier: Unfortunately, Starlink raising prices on Internet access for rural customers is absolutely no surprise. This is what happens when administrations implement anti-competitive policies that enable monopolistic economic conditions.

Indeed, I commented on this kind of foreseeable scenario one year ago, in June 2025: See https://kipcurrierethics.blogspot.com/2025/06/trump-admin-tells-pennsylvania-other.html]

"Starlink told some U.S. customers last month it was raising prices and increased the cost of most plans for a service that counts millions of users across the country.

“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only real option we have,” said Slama, a Republican and former Nebraska state senator. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”

Musk has long billed Starlink as a lifeline: an internet service that will finally bring reliable connectivity to people in the world’s rural and off-the-grid locales.

As its parent company moves toward an IPO, rural broadbandadvocates say the company has begun to squeeze its isolated U.S. users, raising prices in areas where options are limited and striving to box out competition.

SpaceX has lobbied against federal spending that would benefit Starlink’s rural broadband alternatives, calling the issue it targets “effectively … solved,” an assertion disputed by advocates for wider broadband access and many residents of rural areas."

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos; Motherboard, December 11, 2019

Karl Bode, Motherboard;

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos

"As SpaceX began supplanting NASA in humanity’s quest to explore outer space, Motherboard pondered in 2015 what would happen to the public’s unfettered access to space imagery data (images taken by NASA are in the public domain and can be used by anyone for almost any purpose.) Thankfully, SpaceX soon after made the important decision to offer mission images under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License, allowing them to be freely shared and even remixed by anyone. This is the least-restrictive Creative Commons license in existence and allows anyone to use the photos for almost anything (you could, for example, make and sell a photo book or calendar of SpaceX images if you wanted to.)

But a little noticed change to the SpaceX Flickr account this week stripped away the CC0 license affixed to the company’s images, replacing it with an “Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic” license. That, in turn, imposed notable and potentially confusing restrictions on how those images can be shared and re-used."