Marketplace Tech

This week, Taylor Swift trademarked her voice and image in what appears to be a bid to protect against AI misuse. Plus, a Japanese airline is experimenting with humanoid robots to help with baggage. But first, Google landed a deal with the Pentagon to let its AI models be used for classified work. A Google spokesperson told us in a statement that the company is proud to be providing its services f...

The war with Iran has upended supply chains including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use everyday, such as a certain kind of thermoplastic, copper, and helium. We are now dealing with shortages of all of them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst with the research firm IDC, to learn more.

There's been renewed interest in nuclear power in recent years, thanks in part to demand from tech companies in search of reliable energy to power their AI data centers. The startup Kairos Power has jumped on this opportunity. Its nuclear reactors are cooled by molten salt. They also use golf-ball sized nuclear fuel, instead of uranium rods cooled by water used by traditional reactors. Mike Laufer...

The International Math Olympiad is a yearly competition for students, most of them high school age, who compete to solve six difficult math problems. They're chosen from a pool of math problems submitted by different countries that participate in the competition. The problems that don't make the cut previously have mostly just been lost; there was no one place you could go to find them. But now a...

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows government agencies to collect information about foreign nationals located abroad. That surveillance can happen without a warrant and the government can order email providers to turn over any messages of a particular foreigner, including those with a U.S. citizen. Section 702 is set to expire this week. President Donald Trum...

This week, Meta is reportedly laying off 10% of its workers. But in the meantime, it's also capturing their mouse clicks to train its AI models. Plus, Roblox settles with states over child safety concerns. But first, Apple's CEO is stepping down. The company announced this week that CEO Tim Cook is moving on from that role after about 15 years. His successor is John Ternus, a senior vice president...

Lawmakers around the U.S. are moving to restrict data center development. Maine, for example, recently passed what's being called the country's first statewide ban on data centers. The measure would prohibit building any new data centers until late 2027. As of this taping, Maine's governor, Janet Mills, was reportedly still undecided on whether she'd sign the bill. And 13 other states are also con...

The social media company Snap recently announced it’s laying off about 1,000 workers — 16% of its employees. The company said these changes will reduce costs by more than half a billion dollars and help establish a path to net income profitability. This move comes after one of Snap's investors, Irenic Capital Management, wrote a public letter to the company outlining what it needs to do to “save”...

The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked ab...

California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code. That’s changing the construction industry even beyond the state border. More than a third of planet-warming emissions come from buildings and construction. Marketplace’s The rest of it is what’s called embodied carbon . That’s the emissions that it took to make the steel, concrete, glass and insulation, and put the...

This week, Spotify is letting its users buy physical books. Plus, Amazon acquires the satellite service provide Globalstar. But first, state lawmakers in Illinois are considering a bill that says developers of large AI models can’t be held liable for critical harms caused by those models, as long as the developer doesn't intentionally or recklessly cause the harm and has published a safety protoco...

The share of older workers is on the decline — about 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%. The pandemic chased some older workers out, and others can simply afford to retire. Another factor that's causing some to exit? The emergence of artificial intelligence. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even as a colleague, s...

Routers, computers, web cameras — they all connect to the internet. And they can be infected with malicious software that lets someone else take over. The device becomes a bot, essentially. A group of these devices networked together then becomes a botnet. And these botnets can then be used for nefarious purposes, like distributed denial of service attacks, without the device owners even knowing a...

State governments invest their money a lot like a person might. Some treasuries, some mutual funds, a dash of corporate bonds, all intended to grow over time. Now, some states are looking to cryptocurrency as an investment. In 2025, at least nineteen states considered laws allowing some state funds to be invested in digital assets. Three states — Texas, New Hampshire, and Arizona — actually passed...

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes was shopping recently with her seven-year-old who was drawn to a “Relaxolotl,” a tea infuser shaped like an axolotl. And it had a label: “designed in Rhode Island, by people.” Genuine Fred makes the relaxolotl. President Jason Amendolara told “Marketplace Tech” the company adopted the saying over a decade ago, before artificial intelligence was really in the conversa...

This week, a Wisconsin city votes to restrict future data center development. Plus, the astronauts on Artemis II take their journey to social media. But first, Anthropic announced this week it has a new AI model called Claude Mythos Preview. The company says it’s extremely good at finding security vulnerabilities. So good that Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public. Instead, it...

For years, consumers have worried about how the private sector — namely, big tech — handles their personal data. Now a new survey from the Center for Democracy & Technology suggests a large majority are also concerned about how the federal government uses their data. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at CDT, to learn more.

As humans have integrated artificial intelligence into their daily lives, there is growing concern that AI is doing the bulk of the thinking. According to the paper: “Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender,” by Gideon Nave and Steven Shaw of the Wharton School of Business, they’ve deemed it a “cognitive surrender.” “Marketplace...

In the U.S., battery electric and plug-in hybrid cars have been more expensive than their gasoline-powered counterparts, costing about $8,000 more on average. Experts say EVs are poised to achieve price parity with internal-combustion engine vehicles in just a few years though, because the single costliest part of an EV — the battery that powers it — is getting cheaper.

Four months after Australia’s landmark law that banned all minors under the age of 16 from creating or owning social media accounts, the California legislature is trying to follow suit. But free speech advocates worry that these laws will infringe on the First Amendment rights of many kids and even adults. However, Aaron Mackey, the free speech and transparency litigation director at the nonprofit...

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” Big Tech operations in the Middle East from companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft could be targeted by Iran. And California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a new AI executive order with a not-so-thinly veiled message to the Trump administration. But first, Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX reportedly took a first step towards a highly anti...

It is day 34 of the internet blackout in Iran. But while it is the longest in their history, it does not mean that Iranians are without internet. In Iran, there is the global internet, and then the intranet, or National Information Network, which is controlled by the Iranian government. Right now, only the NIN is available, and Iranians have been digitally isolated from the outside world, accordin...

In rare verdicts, juries in New Mexico and Los Angeles sided against multiple Big Tech companies last week. In Los Angeles, Meta and Youtube were found liable for intentionally creating addictive products, while in New Mexico, Meta was found to have violated state law and misled consumers on child safety guardrails. The result of these two cases will ripple to the thousands of pending cases agains...

The promise of artificial intelligence is that it will take on all the boring tasks we don’t want to do and free us up to do the fun, high-level work. But managing the AI tools can be its own kind of work. A new study from the Boston Consulting Group found that when workers have to closely monitor and manage their AI tools can cause cognitive exhaustion, which they dubbed “AI brain fry.” Marketpla...

In baseball, calling balls and strikes is a kind of art form. Now, a little more science is being added to the artistry. Major League Baseball has introduced the automated ball-strike, or ABS, challenge system. If a batter, catcher, or pitcher disagrees with the human umpire's call, he can tap his hat. Then, the ABS system uses cameras to say whether the pitch was indeed in the batter's strike zon...