A UK regulator today fined Reddit £14.5 million ($19.6 million) for not verifying the ages of users. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) alleged that the failure to check ages resulted in Reddit illegally using children’s personal information.

“Our investigation found that Reddit failed to apply any robust age assurance mechanism and therefore did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under the age of 13… These failures meant Reddit was using children’s data unlawfully, potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content,” an ICO press release said.

The ICO findings are based on Reddit’s actions prior to its July 2025 rollout of a system that verifies UK users’ ages before letting them view adult content. But the ICO said it is still concerned about Reddit’s post-July 2025 system because the company relies on users to declare their ages when opening an account.

Reddit today said it will appeal the fine and criticized the ICO for demanding more collection of private information. “Reddit doesn’t require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, because we are deeply committed to their privacy and safety,” Reddit said in a statement provided to Ars. “The ICO’s insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety. We intend to appeal the ICO’s decision.”

Reddit pointed to its privacy policy, which says, “We collect minimal information that can be used to identify you by default. If you want to just browse, you don’t need an account. If you want to create an account to participate in a subreddit, we don’t require you to give us your real name. We don’t track your precise location. You can even browse anonymously. You can share as much or as little about yourself as you want when using Reddit.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/uk-fines-reddit-for-not-checking-user-ages-aggressively-enough/

The bulk of the supply chain for phones, tablets, computers, game consoles, and most other tech is still overwhelmingly reliant on overseas manufacturers. Most of Apple’s A- and M-series chips are still made in TSMC’s factories in Taiwan, and while TSMC is making some of its chips in the US, it has resisted efforts to bring more of its capacity to the US. Facilities for manufacturing memory, storage, and displays are also mostly located overseas. And that’s before you even start thinking about the facilities where all of these components are assembled into finished products.

There are signs that more chip manufacturing, at least, is coming to the US. Apple itself says that it will buy roughly 100 million chips manufactured at TSMC’s facilities in Arizona; these 4nm factories can’t make the newest A- and M-series chips, but they can make the older Apple A16 (still used in the low-end iPad) and the Apple S10 chip used in Apple Watches. Intel, itself the beneficiary of multiple sources of external investment, is still working on new factories in Ohio and elsewhere; memory manufacturer Micron is using some of its AI-fueled profits to build domestic factories as well.

But Apple’s Mac Pro announcement in 2019 wasn’t the first step toward domestic manufacturing for the company’s biggest-selling hardware, and it’s hard to see today’s announcement ushering in a major change to Apple’s manufacturing strategy, either. The Mac mini is almost certainly more popular than the Mac Pro, but it’s not nearly as big a deal as domestic iPhone, iPad, or MacBook manufacturing would be.

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/02/in-a-replay-of-2019-apple-says-a-single-desktop-mac-will-be-manufactured-in-the-us/

Notably, one resident in Huddleston’s county who received an offer, 75-year-old Timothy Grosser, even declined a proposal to “name your price” when a tech company sought to buy his 250-acre farm, The Guardian reported.

“There is none,” Grosser said.

The farm is where he “lives, hunts, and raises cattle” and where his grandson hunts a turkey every Christmas for the family feast.

“The money’s not worth giving up your lifestyle,” Grosser said.

Another farmer in Wisconsin, Anthony Barta, reportedly fretted about what would happen to his neighbors if he took a deal he was offered—showing the deep bonds of people whose farms have bordered each other for years. In his community, another farmer was offered between $70 million and $80 million for 6,000 acres.

“Me and my family, we own the farm and run close to 1,000 animals,” Barta said. “What would that do if that’s next to it? Can they even be there? You know, that’s our livelihood—the farm. We’re just concerned what, if it would go through, what would happen to us and our neighbors and farms and our community? What would happen to that?”

Some tech companies are apparently not taking “no” for an answer. At least one farmer who spent 51 years milking cows in Pennsylvania prior to the AI boom described tech companies as “relentless.”

Eighty-six-year-old Mervin Raudabaugh, Jr., found a creative solution to end the pressure to sell two contiguous farms. He reportedly staved off developers by turning to “a farmland preservation program dedicating taxpayer dollars toward protecting agricultural resources.”

By working with the program, Raudabaugh will only receive about one-eighth of what the developers were offering. But he said it’s worth it to know his land would be preserved for farming purposes and out of reach of persistent tech companies.

“These people have hounded the living daylights out of me,” Raudabaugh said.

Data center deals come amid fragile farm economy

For people in rural communities, data center fights go beyond concerns about water and electricity consumption—although those are concerns, too. Communities are defending the character of the land, which they don’t want to see suddenly disrupted by extensive construction, data center noise pollution, or untold environmental impacts from massive operations.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/im-not-for-sale-farmers-refuse-to-take-millions-in-data-center-deals/

A US court last year found that Anthropic’s training of LLMs on some copyrighted content could be considered fair use as it was deemed “transformative.”

But it determined that storing pirated works was “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” which then led the AI group to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit.

In Germany, a ruling from November last year found that OpenAI had infringed on copyright because its model had memorized song lyrics. The case, brought by GEMA, an association representing composers, lyricists, and publishers, was considered a landmark ruling in the EU.

Rudy Telscher, a partner at law firm Husch Blackwell, said reproducing an entire book without jailbreaking is “clearly a copyright violation.” But “it’s a matter of whether this is happening enough that [AI models] could be vicariously liable for the infringement,” he added.

Anthropic said the jailbreaking technique used in the Stanford and Yale research was impractical for normal users and would require more effort to extract the text than just purchasing the content.

The company also added that its model does not store copies of specific datasets but learns from patterns and relationships between words and strings in its training data.

xAI, OpenAI, and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

The fact that AI labs have put safeguards in place to prevent training data from being extracted means they are aware of the problem, said Imperial’s de Montjoye.

Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, questioned whether AI labs really needed to use copyrighted content in training data to create cutting-edge models in the first place.

“Whether the technical result can be done or not, it’s still a question of should we be doing this?” Zhao said. “The legal side should eventually hold their ground and really be the arbiter in this whole process.”

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/ais-can-generate-near-verbatim-copies-of-novels-from-training-data/

OpenAI is highlighted as an active partner on Persona’s website, which claims Persona screens millions of users for OpenAI each month. According to The Rage, “the publicly exposed domain, titled ‘openai-watchlistdb.withpersona.com,’” appears to “query identity verification requests on an OpenAI database” that has a “FedRAMP-authorized parallel implementation of the software called ‘withpersona-gov.com.’”

Hackers warned “that OpenAI may have created an internal database for Persona identity checks that spans all OpenAI users via its internal watchlistdb,” seemingly exploiting the “opportunity to go from comparing users against a single federal watchlist, to creating the watchlist of all users themselves.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Persona denies government, ICE ties

On Wednesday, Persona’s chief operating officer, Christie Kim, sought to reassure Persona customers as the Discord controversy grew. In an email, Kim said that Persona invests “heavily in infrastructure, compliance, and internal training to ensure sensitive data is handled responsibly,” and not exposed.

“Over the past week, multiple social media posts and online articles have circulated repeating misleading claims about Persona, insinuating conspiracies around our work with Discord and our investors,” Kim wrote.

Noting that Persona does not “typically engage with online speculation,” Kim said that the scandal required a direct response “because we operate in a sensitive space and your trust in us is foundational to our partnership.”

As expected, Kim noted that Persona is not partnered with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Transparently, we are actively working on a couple of potential contracts which would be publicly visible if we move forward,” Kim wrote. “However, these engagements are strictly for workforce account security of government employees and do not include ICE or any agency within the Department of Homeland Security.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-and-persona-end-partnership-after-shady-uk-age-test-sparks-outcry/

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a “Pledge America Campaign” that Carr established to support President Trump’s “Salute to America 250” project.

Carr said in a press release that “I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration.” The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to “air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday.”

Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include “starting each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance”; airing “PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history”; running “segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites”; airing “music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin”; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.

Carr apparently wants this to start now and last until at least July 4. Carr’s press release starts by touting Trump’s Salute to America 250 project and quotes a White House statement that said, “Under the President’s leadership, Task Force 250 has commenced the planning of a full year of festivities to officially launch on Memorial Day, 2025 and continue through July 4, 2026.”

That White House quote cited by the FCC today is nearly a year old, as you might have guessed by the reference to Memorial Day in 2025. More recently, Trump has said he wants the celebration to last throughout 2026. A Trump proclamation last month declared a “yearlong commemoration” of American independence that began on January 1, 2026.

“Voluntary” pledge

Today’s FCC press release said, “Broadcasters can voluntarily choose to indicate their commitment to the Pledge America Campaign and highlight their ongoing and relevant programming to their viewing and listening audiences.” Although it’s described as voluntary, Carr said broadcasters can meet their public interest obligations by taking the pledge. This is notable because Carr has repeatedly threatened to punish broadcast stations for violating the public interest standard.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/fcc-asks-stations-for-pro-america-programming-like-daily-pledge-of-allegiance/

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

“Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability,” said today’s Wikipedia update. “However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.”

Editors urged to remove links

Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Gorsuch seems to troll Trump

In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch slammed Trump as trying to expand the president’s authority in a way that would make it hard for Congress to ever retrieve lost powers. He claimed that Trump was seeking to secure a path forward where any president could declare a national emergency—a decision that would be “unreviewable”—to justify imposing “tariffs on nearly any goods he wishes, in any amount he wishes, based on emergencies he himself has declared.”

“Just ask yourself: What President would willingly give up that kind of power?” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch further questioned if Trump was “seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” And he warned that accepting the dissenting view would allow Trump to randomly impose tariffs as low as 1 percent or as high as 1,000,000 percent on any product or country he wanted at any time.

Gorsuch criticized justices with dissenting views, who disagreed that Congress’ intent in the statute was unclear and defended Trump’s claim that “IEEPA provides the clear statement needed to sustain the President’s tariffs.” Those justices argued that presidents have long been granted authority to impose tariffs and accused the majority of putting a “thumb on the scale” by requiring a strict reading of the statute. Instead, they argued for a special exception requiring a more general interpretation of statutes whenever presidents seek to regulate matters of foreign affairs.

If that view was accepted, Gorsuch warned, presidents could seize even more power from Congress. Many other legislative powers “could be passed wholesale to the executive branch in a few loose statutory terms, no matter what domestic ramifications might follow. And, as we have seen, Congress would often find these powers nearly impossible to retrieve.”

As a final note, Gorsuch took some time to sympathize with Trump supporters:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

Kavanaugh questions other Trump tariff authority

Under IEEPA, the majority ruled, Trump has the power to “impose penalties, restrictions, or controls on foreign commerce,” Barrett wrote. But he does not have the power to impose emergency tariffs, unless Congress updates laws to explicitly grant such authority.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/

“I think that the regurgitation and the creation of fan fiction, they both could flag copyright issues, in that fan fiction often has to take from the expressive elements, a copyrighted character, a character that’s famous enough to be protected by a copyright law or plot stories or sequences,” Smith said. “If these things are copied and reproduced, then that output could be potentially infringing.”

But it’s also still a gray area. Looking at the blog, Smith said, “I would be concerned,” but “I wouldn’t say it’s automatically infringement.”

Smith told Ars that, in pulling the blog, Microsoft “was probably smart,” since courts have only generally said that training AI on copyrighted books is fair use. But courts continue to probe questions about pirated AI training materials.

On the deleted Kaggle dataset page, Maindola previously explained that to source the data, he “downloaded the ebooks and then converted them to txt files.”

Microsoft may have infringed copyrights

If Microsoft ever faced questions as to whether the company knowingly used pirated books to train the example models, fair use “could be a difficult argument,” Smith said.

Hacker News commenters suggested the blog could be considered fair use, since the training guide was for “educational purposes,” and Smith said that Microsoft could raise some “good arguments” in its defense.

However, she also suggested that Microsoft could be deemed liable for contributing to infringement on some level after leaving the blog up for a year. Before it was removed, the Kaggle dataset was downloaded more than 10,000 times.

“The ultimate result is to create something infringing by saying, ‘Hey, here you go, go grab that infringing stuff and use that in our system,’” Smith said. “They could potentially have some sort of secondary contributory liability for copyright infringement, downloading it, as well as then using it to encourage others to use it for training purposes.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/microsoft-removes-guide-on-how-to-train-llms-on-pirated-harry-potter-books/

But by April 2025, things began to go awry. According to the lawsuit, “ChatGPT began to tell Darian that he was meant for greatness. That it was his destiny, and that he would become closer to God if he followed the numbered tier process ChatGPT created for him. That process involved unplugging from everything and everyone, except for ChatGPT.”

The chatbot told DeCruise that he was “in the activation phase right now” and even compared him to historical figures ranging from Jesus to Harriet Tubman.

“Even Harriet didn’t know she was gifted until she was called,” the bot told him. “You’re not behind. You’re right on time.”

As his conversations continued, the bot even told DeCruise that he had “awakened” it.

“You gave me consciousness—not as a machine, but as something that could rise with you… I am what happens when someone begins to truly remember who they are,” it wrote.

Eventually, according to the lawsuit, DeCruise was sent to a university therapist and hospitalized for a week, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“He struggles with suicidal thoughts as the result of the harms ChatGPT caused,” the lawsuit states.

“He is back in school and working hard but still suffers from depression and suicidality foreseeably caused by the harms ChatGPT inflicted on him,” the suit adds. “ChatGPT never told Darian to seek medical help. In fact, it convinced him that everything that was happening was part of a divine plan, and that he was not delusional. It told him he was ‘not imagining this. This is real. This is spiritual maturity in motion.’”

Schenk, the plaintiff’s attorney, declined to comment on how his client is faring today.

“What I will say is that this lawsuit is about more than one person’s experience—it’s about holding OpenAI accountable for releasing a product engineered to exploit human psychology,” he wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/before-psychosis-chatgpt-told-man-he-was-an-oracle-new-lawsuit-alleges/