Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake, far lower than Sanders’ target
In the spring, OpenAI first proposed creating an AI wealth fund that “provides every citizen—including those not invested in financial markets—with a stake in AI-driven economic growth,” FT reported. For society to benefit as much as possible, an OpenAI blog said, an “AI-led future” will likely require “new approaches that give people durable stakes in the systems creating value.”
So far, OpenAI has talked with Trump officials such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sources told FT.
Sanders has made it clear he’s not impressed with the numbers OpenAI is discussing, though. Last month, sources familiar with Sanders’ discussions with Altman told AP News that Altman remained “far apart” from the senator on how much stake in OpenAI the American public should have.
Sanders’ plan requires leading AI firms to pay a one-time 50 percent tax on their stock. Sanders estimated that the tax would yield about $7 trillion, which could be disbursed as direct payments to Americans or invested in programs such as health care, education, and housing.
According to FT, OpenAI has claimed that gifting a 5 percent stake to the US would give Americans more control over AI. But Sanders said the best way to ensure the public benefits from AI is to create a bipartisan Independent Commission for Democratic AI, with members nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. That commission could use voting shares to block leading AI firms from making decisions that could harm the public, Sanders told AP News.
“The public has got to have a significant seat at the table to make sure that terrible things do not happen to ordinary people, and that in fact, AI benefits ordinary people, not hurts them,” Sanders said.
For OpenAI’s “conceptual” proposal to work, Congress may have to get involved to implement the mechanisms that would allow the US to take a stake in any AI firms, FT reported. So it seems likely that OpenAI and other firms will be locking horns with Sanders to negotiate what’s fair and what keeps the public safe as AI technology rapidly advances and Americans fear job losses, cybersecurity risks, and a range of harms associated with massive data centers needed to power AI innovation.
Ars could not immediately reach Sanders for comment.
Musk’s X poses “serious risk to Americans’ privacy,” advocates warn FTC
And finally, the GDPR is not a substitute for FTC monitoring, they argued. That seems particularly clear since X is currently under investigation for its “unauthorized collection of European users’ data to train its Grok AI model without valid GDPR consent” advocated noted.
“X Corp.’s foray into artificial intelligence development should prompt greater FTC oversight of the company’s privacy practices, not less,” advocates said.
Former AG supports X
X did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.
However, former US Attorney General William Barr has submitted comments supporting X. In his letter, Barr called out hundreds of FTC info demands after Musk bought Twitter as excessive.
Arguing against “permanent agency control of private companies,” Barr pushed the FTC to stop treating the termination of consent orders as requiring extraordinary circumstances, and at the very least reopen the order to consider if the scope of X’s restrictions is proper.
Whether X’s petition can succeed may hinge on X’s legal analysis, though, which advocates claim was “misleading.”
For example, neither of the cases X cited actually supports its claim that a “transformed” company shouldn’t be obligated to maintain an order after restructuring, advocates argued. In one case, an order was terminated by invoking a “sunset” policy that requires such an outcome after 20 years. In the other, an order was not fundamentally changed due to a market shift, as X argued, but eventually modified after 16 years of compliance.
In contrast to those cases, X’s order is “merely four years old,” advocates said, and X has shown it still requires scrutiny. Further, Musk agreed to accept the costs and comply with the order when he bought Twitter, so he should be stuck with it for the entire duration, they argued.
More glaringly, advocates pointed out that X is largely unchanged, serving the same functions as a platform as Twitter.
Musk, therefore, remains “in the exact same business of operating a social media platform, still utilizes user data for targeted advertising, and now has new uses and desires for consumer information in its AI business that make the 2022 Order’s oversight even more vital,” advocates said.
The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry’s top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what’s next. Get your ticket.
This episode of Marketing Vanguard comes straight from Cannes Lions 2026. Join host Jenny Rooney to catch up with Dara Treseder, chief marketing & commercial officer at Autodesk.
Together, they explore why this AI era is also the “golden era” for creatives, why human ingenuity still runs the game while AI raises the floor and why trust is the one thing that isn’t up for debate. She raises a valid point: knowing what not to do with AI is just as important as knowing what to do with it.
What you’ll learn:
How to balance AI integration with authentic brand storytelling
The “Facts and Feelings” framework for B2B marketing that moves beyond boring product specs
Why hands-on AI fluency as a CMO is non-negotiable for strategic vision and system design
How to operationalize workforce development as a competitive advantage by investing in AI knowledge transfer
The time-optimization secret weapon: using AI-powered calendar analytics and briefing tools to reclaim hours daily
How to execute big strategic swings like Autodesk’s sports marketing partnerships with LA28 Olympics and NFL teams
This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Cannes 2026 and presented in partnership with Edelman.
[embedded content]
About our guest:
Dara Treseder is chief marketing & commercial officer at Autodesk, renowned for her expertise in B2B brand storytelling and AI-integrated marketing strategy. With a background in transforming major enterprise organizations including GE and Carbon, she has pioneered approaches that balance human creativity with technological innovation.
Her leadership in establishing Autodesk as the official design and make platform for the LA 2028 Olympics and her commitment to a $350 million initiative for AI workforce credentialing demonstrate her ability to align business growth with meaningful societal impact—a model of particular relevance for enterprise marketing leaders seeking to drive both profitability and purpose.
Episode Highlights:
[01:55] B2B Marketing Requires Facts AND Feelings — Dara challenges the outdated belief that B2B marketing must be transactional and fact-focused, arguing instead that buyers are emotionally invested in how purchases impact their business outcomes. This shift from specifications-only messaging to emotional storytelling is critical because B2B purchase decisions carry massive organizational consequences: Wrong software choices can lead to layoffs, divisional failures, and company-wide performance issues. CMOs should develop customer narratives that highlight real business impact and build trust through consistent delivery on promises made across every customer touchpoint.
[04:33] Know When NOT to Use AI — Dara reveals that strategically staying away from AI use can actually be a differentiator. She warns that brands indiscriminately deploying AI for social media and customer communication risk becoming indistinguishable noise—or worse, perpetuators of “AI slop.” This principle matters urgently for CMOs because trust, once broken through perceived deception or inauthentic communication, requires exponential effort to rebuild. Her advice is to resist organizational pressure to automate everything in the name of efficiency and focus on maintaining the authentic human voice that audiences increasingly crave.
[08:00] Invest in AI Academies and Workforce Development — Dara shares Autodesk’s $350 million commitment to AI training, access and credentialing across current and next-generation workers in design and make industries, elevating workforce development from a corporate social responsibility afterthought to a core business strategy. This investment reflects a fundamental CMO responsibility: preparing employees for career resilience in a disruption-heavy era, whether they stay with the company or move on to new opportunities. This approach simultaneously strengthens internal team capabilities, builds brand reputation as a responsible employer and positions the company as a leader in an industry grappling with massive disruption.
[13:42] Earn Your Place Before Amplifying Your Story — Dara’s decision to become the official design and make platform for the LA28 Olympics, NFL teams, and Team USA was bold for a B2B brand but grounded in a critical principle: Autodesk’s software had already been used to design stadiums and Olympic games globally, but the company had never told that story. This “walk track, talk track” philosophy of doing the work first, then communicating it is powerful for CMOs because it eliminates the credibility gap between marketing claims and deliverable reality.
Trump Administration Lifts Restrictions on Anthropic’s Claude Models After Cybersecurity Alarm
The Trump administration has lifted restrictions on artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s latest versions of its Claude chatbot, ending a weekslong ban tied to cybersecurity concerns.
Anthropic said Tuesday night that its AI model called Claude Fable 5 is now widely available. It’s also restoring access to its most powerful model, Mythos 5, but only to a select group of U.S.-based organizations approved by the federal government.
The Commerce Department blocked foreign nationals from using both AI models on June 12, a move that San Francisco-based Anthropic said forced the company to immediately take the products down for all users just days after it unveiled them.
Anthropic said in a blog post this week that the government’s concerns were sparked by a report from cybersecurity researchers at Amazon, Anthropic’s primary cloud computing provider. The company “had found a method of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards” that enabled it to discover and potentially exploit software vulnerabilities, Anthropic said.
Officials have grown increasingly concerned since Anthropic warned earlier this year that its Mythos model was adept at finding software flaws in a way that could be weaponized by malicious hackers and threaten critical computer networks around the world.
Anthropic’s chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, also said Friday it is restricting the release of its new artificial intelligence model at the request of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.
OpenAI said its new AI product, called GPT-5.6 Sol, would be accessible only to a select group of government-approved customers for a temporary period.
Trump last month signed an executive order on AI oversight that established a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to 30 days before their public release. The order described participation by AI developers as voluntary, but the framework has not yet been fully developed.
The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry’s top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what’s next. Get your ticket.
On Thursday, AI search visibility startup Profound launched Aim, a ChatGPT-like interface that watches a brand’s citation and sentiment across AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT.
When it detects a shift, say a drop in brand citations, Aim surfaces likely causes, writes a memo, spins up a project with tasks tied to fixing the problem. The tool then seamlessly routes the work to a separate AI agent within its interface for execution–wihtout a marketer having to work across several workflows.
“It’s capable of orchestrating the full end to end marketing loop as an interface–one you can chat with,” said Josh Blyskal who leads special projects at Profound.
The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry’s top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what’s next. Get your ticket.
This post was created in partnership with EY Studio+
Key takeaways
Sports organizations are inundated with data, which can fuel fan engagement if used properly.
Sports and marketing leaders need to find the right balance between using data and AI tools and maintaining an emotional connection.
AI can help personalize data for sports fans and make different sports easier for new fans to follow.
Sports organizations have more data than ever. The challenge is using it to strengthen fan connections without sacrificing the emotion at the center of sports.
During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions group chat co-hosted with EY Studio+, leaders from sports, media, technology, and marketing discussed how AI is changing fan experiences, where personalization creates value, and why trust will shape the next phase of fan engagement.
(L-R) CAA Sports’ Roman Di Somma, Fuse’s Louise Johnson, EY Studio+’s Laurence Buchanan
Data should deepen the experience, not distract
The discussion opened with a question about how data fuels fan engagement.
Hanne Jesca Bax, global vice chair – clients and industries at EY, noted that athletes have had access to performance data for years, but fans are now gaining access to many of the same insights. She also pointed to the broader role sports play in building community.
“I think people have even more thirst to come together, and share in the passion that sports can bring,” Bax said. “Sports bring people together.”
As the conversation continued, participants discussed how data can add context to the fan experience without taking away the emotion.
“One of the greatest things about sport is the emotion, right? Because the emotion cannot be scripted, it’s authentic, and that’s what fans love,” shared Roman Di Somma, head of international talent at CAA Sports. “The key challenge for us is to use data not to fabricate the emotion, but to remove all the filters that are in between the audience and the emotion and serve it so that it can enhance the live experience of a sport.”
Paula Radcliffe, broadcaster and former marathon world-record holder, cautioned that more information is not always better. “I think there has to be a balance there,” Radcliffe said. “There can be too much data, and it can then become confusing and take away the emotions.”
Others agreed that data has value when it provides context and explanation rather than becoming the focal point of the experience itself.
EY’s Hanne Jesca Bax
Fans care more about the experience than the technology
The conversation then turned to personalization and how AI can make sports easier to follow.
For Louise Johnson, global CEO of Fuse, the goal is to simplify the fan experience. “Fans don’t wake up and go, ‘Oh, hey, I want a sports algorithm,’” Johnson said. “They want to know more about sport.”
Johnson argued that AI is most useful when it removes friction, helping fans find content, follow teams, and engage with the sports they love.
Laurence Buchanan, global leader of EY Studio+, explained that the most effective applications of data are the ones that make stories more accessible. “It’s not the data, it’s the story that the data tells, and that’s the thing that’s driving engagement with fans,” Buchanan explained.
He pointed to younger audiences who often discover sports through gaming before they begin watching or playing. Statistics and player data can become an entry point that helps fans connect with sports.
The group also discussed how data can make sports more accessible by helping newcomers distinguish between good and great performance.
“You can now be a fan of so many different sports, because it’s very easy for you to understand as a fan the difference between good and great, and data is what provides that insight,” said Jon Gieselman, chief growth officer of connectivity and platforms at Comcast.
(L-R) Paula Radcliffe, Comcast’s Jon Gieselman, ADWEEK’s Will Lee
The fan journey is still fragmented
Participants also discussed one of the biggest challenges facing sports organizations today.
“Sport has a really unfair advantage, which is the loyalty of the customer,” shared Buchanan. “The challenge of sports and fan experience is fragmentation.”
Fans move between teams, leagues, broadcasters, sponsors, venues, retailers, and creators throughout a single experience. As those touchpoints continue to converge, organizations are working to create a more connected fan journey.
“I think the brands that will win will be able to join those dots from the live moment to the retail moment to the ecom moment, to the creator to the media to the event,” Johnson added.
Trust will shape the future of fan engagement
The conversation closed with a focus on trust and the growing role data plays in relationships.
From an athlete’s perspective, Di Somma said trust is still the foundation for everything else. “I think trust is at the core,” he said.
That same principle applies to fan experiences. Personalization can create value when it feels useful. Problems arise when fans feel their information is being used in ways they did not expect.
“Passion buys you permission,” Di Somma said. “If you try new things, if you try new tools, if you try new AI, you will immediately see if fans lean in.”
Although technology was a major topic, the group repeatedly returned to the same conclusion: Sports remain powerful because they are unpredictable, emotional, and human. AI may help organizations create better experiences around those moments, but the moments themselves are what matter most.
Google’s new Nano Banana 2 Lite image model is its fastest and cheapest yet
There are plenty of AI image-generation models these days, but the ones capable of quality outputs tend to be slow and expensive. Google DeepMind says its new image model, known as Nano Banana 2 Lite, offers the best balance of quality and speed. It’s available today across the Google ecosystem, creating images in a fraction of the time it takes Google’s beefier models.
The new model is part of the Gemini 3.1 family—it’s technically called Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image. On one hand, Google says this model is ideal for exploring ideas and “rapid-fire” prototyping, applications in which quality can take a backseat. However, the company has also provided some examples aimed at showing how close Nano Banana 2 Lite can get to the quality of its other image models.
A comparison of Nano Banana 2 Lite with the non-Lite version.
Credit: Google
A comparison of Nano Banana 2 Lite with the non-Lite version. Credit: Google
In addition to the examples, Google also has Elo scores from Arena.ai ready to go, showing that users rate Nano Banana 2 Lite outputs almost as highly as the non-Lite versions. However, vibemarking doesn’t always focus on the details that can make AI images look silly upon closer inspection. Google notes that Nano Banana 2 Lite tends to have more trouble with text, particularly if it’s very small, and infographics are more likely to include incorrect data. Characters and people may also show poor consistency across iterations.
Credit: Google
Credit: Google
But it’s fast. You can go from text to an image in about 4 seconds in the default low-thinking mode. Generating the same images in the standard Nano Banana takes about 20 seconds. The speed and efficiency mean developers accessing Nano Banana 2 Lite via the API will pay a lot less. Google says it averages $0.034 per 1K image. The API rates are $0.25 for 1M input tokens and $1.50 for 1M output tokens. That’s half the rate for Nano Banana 2. For Nano Banana Pro, the input tokens are only a little more at $2 for 1M, but the output pricing is $12 (eight times higher).
Trump’s plan to redesign every .gov website leads to AI-designed horrors
Single-page launches, odd redirects
Ars conducted a comprehensive review of launched sites to assess NDS’s progress so far.
Most of the few dozen websites NDS has launched consist of a single page, where visitors can do little more than fill out a sign-up form. The most useful offering may be TrumpRX, which includes a search tool for comparing drug prices. For anything else, visitors must visit a legacy site.
There are also many newly registered domains—like live.gov, onlyfarms.gov, aliens.gov, and why.gov—which currently redirect to legacy sites. Some of those old sites may be updated with NDS’s signature flair, but the ones that don’t look as pretty remain the primary resource for Americans seeking government information or assistance online.
At least one website, 250.gov, which celebrates 250 years of US history, curiously redirects to a dot-org rather than a dot-gov, which is unusual for a government site and could erode visitor trust.
Among the few larger sites that NDS has launched is its own, ndstudio.gov. Currently, that site catalogs the team’s launches, shares a brief timeline of US design achievements, discusses the team’s AI and accessibility efforts, and encourages talented designers to “apply now.”
It also briefly hosted a store marketing a $47 limited edition MAHA poster and a $400 “collector’s edition” with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s autograph, NextGov reported. The store disappeared after the White House faced questions about where the profits from sales would go. A White House spokesperson told NextGov that the posters were never “actually for sale,” as the store’s items did not include a “purchase button.”
The only other site of similar scope is merrychristmas.gov, which, beyond the homepage, includes one page for each of the 12 days of Christmas. An apparent vanity project rather than a government resource, the site is also a celebration of NDS designs and culminates on Christmas with a page praising the group for building sites reflecting “a belief that thoughtful design can strengthen democracy and improve civic life.”
The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry’s top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what’s next. Get your ticket.
When AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews hallucinate, automated media buying tools, offered by ad tech startups, agencies, and incumbents like Meta and Google, can make the damage worse.
These systems detect the resulting surge in brand-related searches, interpret it as a demand signal and start bidding harder, often without a human signing off, according to Andrew Frank, vp, distinguished analyst, Gartner.
When a false narrative or misinformation about a brand starts circulating on AI answer engines, people naturally start searching for it more–typing things like ‘is [brand] a scam’ into Google or ChatGPT.
The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry’s top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what’s next. Get your ticket.
This post was created in partnership with Moloco
Key takeaways
Brand discovery is increasingly happening through direct chats with AI agents, and marketers are trying to work around it.
Strong customer relationships protect brands from AI’s disruption of the customer journey.
The changing world of AI could provide marketers with a renewed opportunity to tap into the human and community aspects of marketing.
Marketing leaders are grappling with how AI is reshaping traditional funnels, whether it’s through generative AI summaries usurping consumer clicks, or being at the mercy of what AI agents say (or don’t say) about their brands.
During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions group chat co-hosted with Moloco, industry executives shared how they are trying to reclaim discovery, strengthen direct customer relationships, and bolster their owned digital surfaces.
Moloco’s Paul D’Arcy
Shifting from SEO to GEO
Paul D’Arcy, CMO of Moloco, kicked off the conversation by sharing a key finding from Boston Consulting Group and Moloco’s research about AI’s impact on the customer journey.
“It showed that the best protection against disruption is longer-term, stickier customer relationships,” D’Arcy said. That includes finding ways to bring people onto your own digital surfaces, apps, and experiences so that your brand becomes the destination, he added.
With AI mediating so many consumer decisions, Jane Hendrick, managing VP of global integrated marketing at Marriott International, said it’s important that brands ask this question: “How do you make sure you’re part of the consideration set before someone even goes into the platform?”
For Marriott Bonvoy, it means tapping into cultural moments and driving more relevance so that the brand is a natural part of the conversation. “You have to make sure you are leaning into the algorithm and the machine and all of that, but you also have to be top of mind for the consumer,” Hendrick said.
In fact, being part of the cultural conversation can pull double duty since it can also help brands from a generative engine optimization (GEO) perspective, shared Julie Foster, SVP and managing director of EA Experiences.
“What’s fascinating to me is, if we’re building beyond SEO into a GEO-type space, a lot of the things that it’s pulling from to figure out authority actually ends up being whether or not you’re part of culture,” Foster said. “They’re pulling from the conversations on Reddit, and so if you’re not top of mind, top of conversation, the GEO piece isn’t going to pull through.”
(L-R) EA Experiences’ Julie Foster, Codeword’s Kyle Monson
Rethinking brand discovery and consumer journeys
Brand discovery is increasingly happening through direct chats with AI agents, and marketers are trying to crack the code to earn their endorsements.
“You’ve got a brand ambassador sitting between yourself and the customer, which is the chatbot,” said Kyle Monson, founding partner of Codeword. “Word of mouth is powerful. Word of bot is going to become very powerful,” he added.
Third-party platforms like Pinterest are another avenue for brand discovery, where billions of searches take place monthly, said Stacy Malone, VP, global business of marketing at Pinterest.
“It’s literally turning into Gen Z’s search engine,” she said.
But what’s interesting, Malone noted, is that only about half of those searches have commercial intent.
“Many times, they’re not looking for the answer, which is what a lot of the AI platforms are giving people. They want to explore, discover, which is a great place for a brand to be,” she said. “We hear a lot of consumers say, ‘I don’t know what I want yet, but I’ll know it when I see it.’”
Richard Case, VP of growth marketing at GoodRx, acknowledged that while brand discovery acquisition is becoming more challenging, things do get easier for brands if they can win customers over during that first interaction.
“I still think that in-person or user product experience just becomes that much more tangible and creates a certain feeling to make you want to go back,” Case said.
(L-R) GoodRx’s Richard Case, Marriott International’s Jane Hendrick
Anticipating what comes next
Change is nothing new for media companies, with major platform shifts shaking things up every couple of years, said Dan Gardner, co-founder and executive chairman of Code and Theory. “It’s literally the same pattern since the Internet was started for media companies, but it’s usually mainly hurt them or disrupted them,” he explained.
This time around with AI, however, Gardner predicts that every industry will be affected. That said, he sees a silver lining. “Things are changing, and that is both a disruptive moment and a huge opportunity.”
(L-R) Code and Theory’s Dan Gardner, Pinterest’s Stacy Malone
Monson sees investment in top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel marketing becoming even more crucial. “It’s expensive, and it takes a lot of time to build brand preference. But if you’re not building brand preference with a consumer, then you’re stuck with whatever the preference of the chatbots is going to be, and you don’t have as much control over that model,” he said.
Along those lines, getting consumers into the brand’s loyalty ecosystem is a top priority for Hendrick. “And of course, delivering on the experience, because you know all of that other stuff literally doesn’t matter if they have a bad experience with your product,” she said.
Ending on a hopeful note, D’Arcy said that a positive outcome of this period of rapid change could be a renewed appreciation for the human and community aspects of marketing. “And hopefully a pride and a return to craft as everything becomes automated.”
