On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it’s widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections.

This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it’s often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year’s budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House’s Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.

From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing, because the Senate’s budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/budget-deal-puts-political-control-of-grants-on-hold-until-december/

The Federal Communications Commission today said it will create a robocall mitigation scorecard to rate phone companies on how effectively they block illegal spam calls.

The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk.

“The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers’ efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls,” the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice.

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/fcc-plans-robocall-scorecard-to-grade-phone-companies-on-spam-call-blocking/

Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.

In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.

“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/trump-may-be-forced-to-reveal-secret-rules-feds-use-for-ai-safety-testing/

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon yesterday, alleging that it has conducted a secret scheme to overcharge advertisers for seven years.

“Since 2019, Amazon.com, Inc. has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the ‘auctions’ that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform,” the lawsuit said. “Amazon represents, and advertisers believe, that competitive auctions set the prices for advertising on its leading e-commerce website. But, in reality, Amazon overrides and replaces the actual auction results with higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.”

The FTC said it obtained internal documents and messages that reveal how Amazon secretly inflated auction prices for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display advertisements that appear alongside results seen by consumers when they search for a product. The FTC investigation began in 2024.

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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/

Asking the 5th Circuit to reverse Boyle, X argued that advertisers colluded to boycott X, “eliminat[ing] the independent decision-making that would otherwise force each firm to weigh the competitive benefits of continuing to advertise on the platform, suppressing competitive rivalries and insulating the boycott from market forces. The group boycott targeting X thus distorts competition in multiple markets in clear contravention of the antitrust laws.”

X’s claims relate to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an initiative by the World Federation of Advertisers to define violent and obscene content and help advertisers create brand-safety guidelines. The ad industry shut down Garm after Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024, though law professors described X’s legal case as a weak one.

X’s filing yesterday said that GARM “exercised collective power through its rules for membership. As a condition of joining GARM, members agree[d] to adopt GARM solutions to improve business operations.’ For GARM’s advertiser and advertising agency members, that meant agreeing to enforce the implementation of the Brand Safety Standards by the social-media platforms from which they purchased advertising.”

X’s big ad revenue drop

X, then called Twitter, suffered a large drop in advertising revenue after Musk bought the company in October 2022 and made major changes to content moderation. Advertisers stayed away, worried that ads would appear next to antisemitic posts, misinformation, and other objectionable content.

Specific numbers on X ad revenue were hard to come by the past few years because Musk took the company private when he bought Twitter. But X Corp. is now a subsidiary of SpaceX, which recently went public and must report earnings.

SpaceX’s earnings report this week said the company made $367 million in advertising revenue in Q2 2026, down from $426 million in Q2 2025. For the first six months of 2026, ad revenue was $710 million, down from $870 million in the first six months of 2025.

Twitter reported much higher ad revenue before being bought by Musk. “X’s current quarterly ad revenue has dropped even more drastically compared to the last quarter before Musk bought the popular social-media platform,” MediaPost reported. “In the second quarter of 2022, Twitter reported $1.08 billion in ad revenue, roughly $713 million more than Q2 2026.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-x-isnt-done-suing-advertisers-asks-court-to-revive-boycott-case/

The Federal Communications Commission voted 2–1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago.

The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is replacing the rule with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger.

“This will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard,” Carr’s office said in a press release today. Without the 39 percent rule, broadcasters will be better able to compete against streaming companies that don’t face similar limits, Carr’s office said.

The change, if not stopped by courts, will make it easier for Carr to allow broadcast mergers that result in more favorable news coverage for President Trump. Carr has consistently threatened to revoke licenses from broadcasters who have drawn Trump’s ire, including by ordering an early license review of all ABC-owned stations.

Carr said local broadcast TV stations are becoming “undifferentiated passthroughs of national programming produced in Hollywood and New York,” and he justified repealing the ownership rule by arguing it will help the stations invest in local news.

“Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations”

“Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers,” Carr said at today’s meeting. “Increased scale will enable broadcasters to attract the capital and advertising revenue needed to sustain and produce trusted and community-focused news and programming.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-fcc-kills-tv-ownership-cap-claiming-authority-over-limit-set-by-congress/

The NAACP alleged that xAI and a subsidiary company built and operated 27 natural gas-fired turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, without the required Clean Air Act permits. The turbines generated electricity to power xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center. The NAACP alleged that the gas plant released harmful pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, which can increase rates of asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers.

Had xAI applied for a permit to operate the turbines under the Clean Air Act, the EPA would have required xAI to use the best available technology to reduce those emissions. But xAI never applied to the EPA for a permit.

A request from the federal government

In June 2026, the US Department of Justice asked the judge to dismiss the case, claiming, among other arguments, that citizen suits cannot proceed when the federal government does not oppose the polluting behavior.

The Justice Department’s court filing cited two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump within days of the start of his second term—one declaring a “national energy emergency” and the other seeking to support “American leadership in artificial intelligence.”

According to the Justice Department, the NAACP’s lawsuit threatens “artificial intelligence innovation” and national security. The government’s filing goes on to argue that citizen lawsuits were not intended to allow everyday citizens to enforce laws in ways that go against what the federal government deems is in the public interest.

Instead, the Justice Department claimed, citizen suits should be allowed by the court only when the government fails to enforce the statute, and not when the government has decided that executive branch policy means enforcement action is contrary to the public interest.

Conflict between the government and the public

This is the first time the Justice Department has taken this position in court. But defendants and judges have questioned the constitutionality of citizen suits in the past.

Some critics, including the Trump administration, view citizen suits as a way for citizens to usurp the executive branch’s prosecutorial authority. Supporters of the citizen suit provisions, on the other hand, say they allow regular people to exercise their statutory rights to advocate for a clean and healthy environment and enforce environmental laws when the government’s efforts fall short.

Regardless of how the court rules in the NAACP case against xAI, I believe the filing from the Trump administration is another step in a broader effort to consolidate government power in the executive branch.

Sarah J. Morath is professor of law and associate dean for international affairs at Wake Forest University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-wants-the-power-to-stop-the-public-from-suing-polluters/

The joint statement confirmed that GARM will remain inactive as a result of the WFA’s settlement with X. No other concessions were discussed.

The rest of the statement claims that the settlement “resets the relationship between the two organizations,” which are now supposedly “fully aligned in the view that brands, platforms, and consumers will all benefit from brand-safety innovation.”

Additionally, the WFA said it is aligned with X on “its commitment to freedom of speech,” which seems to be a nod to the controversial reports on X content that Musk said triggered his “war” with advertisers. Those reports found that as hateful content was increasing on the platform, X ad controls weren’t working to stop big brands’ ads from appearing next to posts touting Hitler and the Nazi Party.

It’s unclear why advertisers settled, since a court ruled in March that the ad boycott was perfectly legal and X’s antitrust claims fell apart without proof of consumer harm. The next month, X appealed, but it appeared to be dragging its feet in filing a brief as an appellant, asking the court for an extension until August.

Perhaps settlement negotiations were already underway.

For Musk, the settlement comes shortly after the launch of X Money, a payments product offered through his social media platform that he hopes will help X be less reliant on advertisers for revenue.

Whether X Money can succeed at the scale required to meaningfully rival X’s advertising business will likely depend on X removing barriers to adoption. Those include the possibility that X Money transactions could be declined if an automated support error mistakenly suspends a user’s X account without warning. There’s also the simpler problem that X Money isn’t available in all 50 states.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/musk-went-to-war-sought-jail-time-for-x-ad-boycotts-but-case-ends-with-a-whimper/

Comcast is likely to dispute the negligence claim and may dispute at least some of the factual allegations. Comcast provided a statement to Ars today in which it said it disagrees with the complaint, but did not provide any details. Comcast also did not say whether it still employs the manager.

“The Company has zero tolerance for harassment, humiliation, or any behavior that compromises a respectful and safe workplace,” Comcast said in the statement provided to Ars. “This matter is in litigation so we will not comment on the specific allegations, other than to say that we disagree with the claims in the complaint and its characterization of the alleged events, and intend to fully respond through the legal process.”

Figueroa is seeking compensatory damages for “past and future economic losses” and for emotional distress. The complaint was filed on July 9 in a Connecticut superior court and was described in articles published yesterday by Law360 and The Desk.

Peterson maintained a chart in the back office that ranked store sales staff and “identified the employees who either had been recently assaulted or were scheduled to be assaulted in this way,” the lawsuit said. The complaint includes a photo of what is said to be the chart, which includes people’s first names followed by a month and a “pie face” emoji.

Image from lawsuit against Comcast.

“An objective, reasonable person in Plaintiff’s position would have felt compelled to resign his employment as a result of this work atmosphere that Defendant—through its employees, servants, agents—created,” the lawsuit said. “As a result of the pervasive, repeated, and ongoing threats of violence—and actual violence inflicted on co-workers not meeting sales goals—Plaintiff resigned his position with Defendant, resulting in his constructive discharge from Defendant’s employment.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/comcast-store-punished-low-sales-by-smashing-pies-in-workers-faces-lawsuit-claims/

“A company whose users request just ten images in violation of the statute would face exposure up to $5 million in civil penalties alone. A company with a thousand violative images could be fined up to $500 million. And a business whose users created a hundred thousand images covered by [the law] (not at all unlikely for a publicly available program with millions of users generating billions of images) could owe an eye-popping $50 billion dollars.”

Additionally, the law gives victims a right to sue xAI over any individual output, which increases xAI’s financial risks.

The penalties are so severe, xAI said in its lawsuit that it was finally preparing to update Grok to block harmful outputs after more than six months of backlash and probes pressuring the firm to tighten its safeguards.

“Confronted with $500,000-per-image strict liability and no safe harbor, xAI has no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features in various ways when the statute takes effect on August 1, 2026,” xAI argued. “Protected speech freely available before the law takes effect will thus be chilled.”

However, xAI would prefer to leave Grok unchanged and continue relying on its terms of use stipulating that users could be banned for using Grok to make CSAM or other kinds of non-consensual intimate images (NCII), its complaint said.

“But for [the law] and its penalties, xAI would continue to offer the editing feature exactly as it does today,” xAI said.

Nudification law is unconstitutional, xAI says

To defend Grok, Musk’s firm is turning to the First Amendment, arguing that Minnesota’s law is a “clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification’” that “sweeps in a wide range of fully protected speech.” That includes nude images generated with “artistic, scientific, political, satirical, educational, medical, or religious value,” xAI argued.

Most egregiously, “liability attaches even if the depicted persons consented—or created the image themselves—and even if the image is never shared,” xAI emphasized in its complaint.

Minnesota has less restrictive means to block harms from nudification, xAI argued, while claiming that the Take It Down Act already protected users from harms of distribution.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/elon-musks-xai-is-trying-to-sue-its-way-out-of-a-grok-reckoning/