The Scholars Program has provided funding for around 3,500 students to support their studies in scientific fields. With these lawsuits, “there are students who are currently enrolled, students who will be enrolled, who see themselves being attacked,” said Matt Hartings, an associate professor of chemistry at American University.

The potential loss of these programs, Harpalani added, could have a detrimental effect on scientific research: If underrepresented scientists no longer have the resources to continue in their careers, the field might lose important role models and new ways of thinking. Mindiola shared a similar sentiment. “I think what makes science move forward is to have a different perspective, because you come from a different background,” he said.

Harpalani also pointed out that physicians of color are more likely to provide medical service in underserved areas. And some recent research has suggested that racial concordance, in which a patient and a physician are the same race and the driving force behind the Black Doctors Directory, helps patients get better care and have more trust in the health care system. Other research has found that the evidence for this is more mixed, however, and the lawsuit that Do No Harm filed against University of Pennsylvania describes the notion of racial concordance as “thoroughly debunked.”

The American Chemical Society, meanwhile, is already changing language related to diversity, editing a headline on its website from “Advancing ACS’ Core Value of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Respect” to “Advancing ACS’ Core Value of Inclusion and Belonging.” The recent round of applications for the Scholars Program just closed on March 1, though it remains unclear whether the program will continue. Mindiola said he normally gets asked to be on the selection committee for high school and college applicants, but did not receive an inquiry this year. The ACS did not respond to a request for comment because they do “not comment on active litigation.”

Morenoff, at the Manhattan Institute, thinks Do No Harm’s lawsuit has a good shot at success: “I would bet pretty strongly that if this gets fought out, Do No Harm is going to win.”

But Hartings suggested that even short of a court victory, the mere threat of lawsuits is likely to push many organizations to cancel or scale back their diversity programming, “Even that’s a win for them,” he said.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/anti-diversity-lawsuits-likely-to-hurt-the-scientific-community-say-scholars/

Steffen Schmidt, the CEO of Medicusdata, a company that provides text-to-speech services to doctors and hospitals in Europe, says that having data in Europe has always “been a must,” but his customers have been asking for more in recent weeks. “Since the beginning of 2025, in addition to data residency guarantees, customers have actively asked us to use cloud providers that are natively European companies,” Schmidt says, adding that some of his services have been moved to Nöbauer’s Exoscale.

Harry Staight, a spokesperson for AWS, says it is “not accurate” that customers are moving from AWS to EU alternatives. “Our customers have control over where they store their data and how it is encrypted, and we make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design,” Staight says. “AWS services support encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS, which means customers have complete control of who accesses their data.” Staight says the membership of the PCLOB “does not impact” the agreements around EU-US data sharing and that the CLOUD Act has “additional safeguards for cloud content.” Google and Microsoft declined to comment.

The potential shift away from US tech firms is not just linked to cloud providers. Since January 15, visitors to the European Alternatives website increased more than 1,200 percent. The site lists everything from music streaming services to DDoS protection tools, says Marko Saric, a cofounder of European cloud analytics service Plausible. “We can certainly feel that something is going on,” Saric says, claiming that during the first 18 days of March the company has “beaten” the net recurring revenue growth it saw in January and February. “This is organic growth which cannot be explained by any seasonality or our activities,” he says.

While there are signs of movement, the impact is likely to be small—at least for now. Around the world, governments and businesses use multiple cloud services—such as authentication measures, hosting, data storage, and increasingly data centers providing AI processing—from the big three cloud and tech service providers. Cottlehuber says that, for large businesses, it may take many months, if not longer, to consider what needs to be moved, the risks involved, plus actually changing systems. “What happens if you have a hundred petabytes of storage, it’s going to take years to move over the Internet,” he says.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/03/europe-is-looking-for-alternatives-to-us-cloud-providers/

Using Signal in this way may have violated US law, Goldberg wrote. “Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story,” he wrote.

Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing such information, and Waltz’s use of a feature that makes messages disappear after a set period of time “raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law,” the article said. Adding a reporter to the thread “created new security and legal issues” by transmitting information to someone who wasn’t authorized to see it, “the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional,” Goldberg wrote.

The account labeled “JD Vance” questioned the war plan in a Signal message on March 14. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” the message said. “There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

The Vance account also stated, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does,” and “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” The Hegseth account responded that “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,” but added that “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”

An account apparently belonging to Trump advisor Stephen Miller wrote, “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-secret-bombing-plans-to-a-reporter/

A new report says that when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk less than a week before President Trump’s inauguration, only one member—the current chairman—voted against filing the lawsuit.

The vote behind closed doors was 4–1, with three Democrats and Republican Hester Peirce joining to support the lawsuit over Musk’s late disclosure of a Twitter stock purchase in early 2022, Reuters reported today. The one dissent reportedly came from Republican Mark Uyeda, who was subsequently named acting SEC chairman by Trump.

Uyeda also asked SEC enforcement staff “to declare that a case they wanted to bring against Elon Musk was not motivated by politics, an unusual request that the staffers refused,” Bloomberg reported last month. Reuters said its sources confirmed that “staff refused to sign the pledge, as it is not typical SEC practice.”

Reuters reported that two of its sources “said Uyeda and his fellow Republican Peirce took issue with what the SEC wanted Musk to pay—giving up $150 million in alleged unjust enrichment plus a penalty. Nonetheless, Peirce joined with the three Democrats in voting to sue.”

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment on the vote when contacted by Ars today. The three current commissioners are Uyeda, Peirce, and Democrat Caroline Crenshaw. Gary Gensler, a Democrat who was chair under Biden, left upon Trump’s inauguration. Democrat Jaime Lizárraga also resigned from the SEC in January.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/current-sec-chair-cast-only-vote-against-suing-elon-musk-report-says/

But the Post has struggled to hold on to the commercial success it had reached during the first Trump administration, falling far behind its biggest competitor, The New York Times. Its audience has shrunk and financial losses have ballooned.

“He’s a highly rational person. I think he was comfortable losing $20 million a year. When it gets to $100 million a year, I don’t know what his appetite is for that,” says a former executive who worked closely with Bezos. “I don’t think for him it’s like a mission business in the same way it would be for [the Graham family] or for the Sulzbergers [who own the New York Times].”

The Washington Post chief executive Will Lewis answers employees’ questions last year. Bezos’ turn toward Trump has alarmed editorial staff, fueling an exodus of talent and subscribers.

Credit: Robert Miller/The Washington Post/Getty Images

This commercial struggle occurred at the same time that Bezos cozied up to Trump and began intervening on the Opinion section, further sinking morale across the newspaper. At least a dozen seasoned journalists have left to work for competitors.

Many saw a direct link between his muzzling of the newspaper and rewards for his other enterprises. Hours after Bezos spiked the paper’s endorsement of Harris, Blue Origin chief executive David Limp met Trump at a rally in Texas. Former Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan criticized the meeting as a “quid pro quo.”

In the latest fracas, veteran journalist Ruth Marcus resigned last week, claiming that chief executive Sir Will Lewis had axed a column she had written criticizing Bezos’ overhaul of the Opinion section. “The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left,” Marcus said of the decision.

Yet for all the drama in the newsroom, public grievances lodged by senior journalists, and relentless media coverage depicting the Post in crisis, there is little indication that Bezos is fazed.

“He’s a really tough guy. He’s totally charming, but he didn’t get where he was by being kind and gentle. In that sense, I don’t know that he’s changed,” says the former Post executive. “I remember him talking about the people he gets for the Amazon board, and he specifically picks people who don’t give a shit what other people think. He doesn’t want people on the board like ‘oh my god, we don’t air condition the warehouses?’ I think he himself is like that, too.”

In January, more than 400 Post journalists signed a letter imploring Bezos to meet them about their concerns. He did not respond.

“He’s taken the organization in a certain direction and seems determined to do that, for whatever reason that he hasn’t fully explained,” says Baron, who adds that he has not tried to contact Bezos about his objections.

“Quite simply, I do not think he cares what I think.”

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/how-jeff-bezos-made-peace-with-donald-trump/

Currently, ChatGPT does not repeat these horrible false claims about Holmen in outputs. A more recent update apparently fixed the issue, as “ChatGPT now also searches the Internet for information about people, when it is asked who they are,” Noyb said. But because OpenAI had previously argued that it cannot correct information—it can only block information—the fake child murderer story is likely still included in ChatGPT’s internal data. And unless Holmen can correct it, that’s a violation of the GDPR, Noyb claims.

“While the damage done may be more limited if false personal data is not shared, the GDPR applies to internal data just as much as to shared data,” Noyb says.

OpenAI may not be able to easily delete the data

Holmen isn’t the only ChatGPT user who has worried that the chatbot’s hallucinations might ruin lives. Months after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, an Australian mayor threatened to sue for defamation after the chatbot falsely claimed he went to prison. Around the same time, ChatGPT linked a real law professor to a fake sexual harassment scandal, The Washington Post reported. A few months later, a radio host sued OpenAI over ChatGPT outputs describing fake embezzlement charges.

In some cases, OpenAI filtered the model to avoid generating harmful outputs but likely didn’t delete the false information from the training data, Noyb suggested. But filtering outputs and throwing up disclaimers aren’t enough to prevent reputational harm, Noyb data protection lawyer, Kleanthi Sardeli, alleged.

“Adding a disclaimer that you do not comply with the law does not make the law go away,” Sardeli said. “AI companies can also not just ‘hide’ false information from users while they internally still process false information. AI companies should stop acting as if the GDPR does not apply to them, when it clearly does. If hallucinations are not stopped, people can easily suffer reputational damage.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/chatgpt-falsely-claimed-a-dad-murdered-his-own-kids-complaint-says/

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy.

In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports.

“Tesla supports a robust and thorough process” to “address unfair trade practices,” but only those “which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies,” the letter said.

The carmaker recommended that the USTR—in its ongoing review of unfair trade practices and investigation into harms of non-reciprocal trade agreements—”consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices.”

According to Tesla, the current process to address unfair trade threatens to harm its more than 70,000 employees, and more broadly could trigger job losses and revenue dips in the US auto industry. It could also disrupt supply chains, as Tesla claims that even its best efforts prove it would be “impossible” to source all parts from the US currently.

“Even with aggressive localization of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States,” the letter said, asking the USTR to “evaluate domestic supply chain limitations.”

If left unchanged, the process could make the US less competitive in global auto markets, Tesla warned, recommending that the “USTR should investigate ways to avoid these pitfalls in future actions.”

Moving forward, Tesla recommends that the USTR “take into account” how the trade war could hurt US exporters, as “US exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to US trade actions.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/tesla-urges-overhaul-of-trump-tariffs-hurting-ev-industry/

Google’s position on AI regulation: Trust us, bro

If there was any doubt about Google’s commitment to move fast and break things, its new policy position should put that to rest. “For too long, AI policymaking has paid disproportionate attention to the risks,” the document says.

Google urges the US to invest in AI not only with money but with business-friendly legislation. The company joins the growing chorus of AI firms calling for federal legislation that clarifies how they can operate. It points to the difficulty of complying with a “patchwork” of state-level laws that impose restrictions on AI development and use. If you want to know what keeps Google’s policy wonks up at night, look no further than the vetoed SB-1047 bill in California, which would have enforced AI safety measures.

According to Google, a national AI framework that supports innovation is necessary to push the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can do. Taking a page from the gun lobby, Google opposes attempts to hold the creators of AI liable for the way those models are used. Generative AI systems are non-deterministic, making it impossible to fully predict their output. Google wants clearly defined responsibilities for AI developers, deployers, and end users—it would, however, clearly prefer most of those responsibilities fall on others. “In many instances, the original developer of an AI model has little to no visibility or control over how it is being used by a deployer and may not interact with end users,” the company says.

There are efforts underway in some countries that would implement stringent regulations that force companies like Google to make their tools more transparent. For example, the EU’s AI Act would require AI firms to publish an overview of training data and possible risks associated with their products. Google believes this would force the disclosure of trade secrets that would allow foreign adversaries to more easily duplicate its work, mirroring concerns that OpenAI expressed in its policy proposal.

Google wants the government to push back on these efforts at the diplomatic level. The company would like to be able to release AI products around the world, and the best way to ensure it has that option is to promote light-touch regulation that “reflects US values and approaches.” That is, Google’s values and approaches.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/google-agrees-with-openai-that-copyright-has-no-place-in-ai-development/

An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons.

The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design.

Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. “Regular spoons are so 3000 BC,” a tagline on the project’s website joked.

For gadget geeks, it’s a neat example of thinking outside of the box, and fans found it appealing to potentially replace a drawer full of spoons with a more futuristic-looking compact tool. Most backers signed up for a single set, paying $8–$12 each, while hundreds wanted up to 25 sets, a handful ordered 50, and just one backer signed up for 100. Delivery was initially promised by 2017, supposedly shipping to anywhere in the world.

But it’s been about nine years since more than 30,000 backers flocked to the Kickstarter campaign—raising more than $1 million and eclipsing Polygons’ $10,000 goal. And not only have more than a third of the backers not received their spoons, but now, after years of updates claiming that the spoons had been shipped, some backers began to wonder if the entire campaign might be a fraud. They could see that Polygons are currently being sold on social media and suspected that the maker might be abusing backers’ funds to chase profits, seemingly without ever seriously intending to fulfill their orders.

One Kickstarter backer, Caskey Hunsader, told Ars that he started doubting if the spoon’s designer—an inventor from India, Rahul Agarwal—was even a real person.

Ars reached out to verify Agarwal’s design background. We confirmed that, yes, Agarwal is a real designer, and, yes, he believes there is a method to the madness when it comes to his Kickstarter campaign, which he said was never intended to be a scam or fraud and is currently shipping spoons to backers. He forecasted that 2025 is likely the year that backers’ wait will finally end.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/scoop-origami-measuring-spoon-incites-fury-after-9-years-of-kickstarter-delay-hell/

There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gases regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gases within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.

Nothing dangerous?

So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.

So why didn’t it happen?

That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/how-trumps-epa-hopes-to-avoid-greenhouse-gas-regulations/