Tech
How did the government decide OpenAI’s frontier model was safe to release?
OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced LLM, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered to be at least on par with Anthropic’s Fable, a model whose capabilities (or ownership) stressed out the White House enough that it was briefly banned from public access.
So how did these models get the OK for release? Short answer: Nobody’s quite sure.
“Frankly, I don’t have visibility into those exact processes, so yes, I don’t feel like I have enough information to say whether they’re adequate or not,” Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch. “Anthropic did say that they were in conversations with the government, and that they developed a classifier to detect jailbreak attempts, and they’ve implemented defense-in-depth strategies to prevent future jailbreaks, but exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear.”
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote that “nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed” in his newsletter last month.
Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he’s never spoken to anyone who understands the process, even employees at frontier labs. “It’s existentially a problem,” he tells TechCrunch. “Safety or not, it’s about who has the power to make decisions — who gatekeeps and decides on permissions?”
Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still little clarity about how to move forward, despite — or, some critics allege, because — of the industry figures setting policy. Last month, after weeks of infighting, an executive order was published laying out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, but the specifics have yet to be filled in, other than what won’t exist. “There will not be an FDA for AI,” Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who served as a senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month, told Financial Times.
Notably, there’s still no agreement on what kinds of models require government scrutiny, or what agency or agencies should perform those evaluations. For now, the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation seems to be taking the lead, but the executive order instructs six cabinet agencies to determine a final process by early August. What has emerged in the meantime is, at best, ad hoc.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on CNBC that the process involved conversations with the officials like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and U.S. national cyber director Sean Cairncross, but it’s not clear who the experts that tested the models were or how they did that. OpenAI declined to share details on the government’s process with TechCrunch, but pointed to the results of several external evaluations by organizations like U.K. AISI, SecureBio, and Irregular in the latest model’s safety card.
As with Anthropic’s Fable roll-out, OpenAI previewed the model for the government and select users ahead of wider release, but we don’t know who all of those users were or how they were chosen. In a late June blog post, the company said “we don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” saying it would work with the government to develop a different path forward.
The backdrop to those conversations, however, includes Altman reportedly offering as much as 5% to OpenAI’s equity for the administration’s so-called “Trump Accounts,” and OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s role as the largest publicly known donor to Trump’s mid-term political operation. It’s hard for outside observers to separate those activities from the government’s apparently lighter-touch approach to regulating Sol.
Anthropic’s Fable, on the other hand, was briefly pulled from wider access when the U.S. government forbade its use by foreign nationals, partly because of real concerns about users jail-breaking the model to access hacking capabilities and partly due to personality clashes between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The threat of an export ban may have also led OpenAI to be more cooperative with the government’s (unknown) requests.
From an industry perspective, a hands-off approach to regulation might be nice, but one that depends on personal connections to administration officials creates uncertainty and bad incentives.
Konwinski told TechCrunch that he worries true experts in this technology — “safety researchers, alignment researchers, interpretability researchers, but also data people, and people from all over the stack” — aren’t playing enough of a role in the model release process.
Konwinski argues that an “open commons” is the best way to actually balance safety and innovation. He points to models like the FDA, the NIH, or the national labs, which convene researchers, government officials, and private companies to reach a consensus on safety issues.
Some of that comes down to the incentives of capitalism that have motivated AI researchers for more than a decade, and played out in the court room during Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s corporate structure. Ball points out that the nature of the AI business requires companies to recoup much of their training costs shortly after their models are released and are further ahead of the competition.
“Even if their intentions are good, there’s very clear legal obligations and fiduciary responsibility that are built right into the operating procedures,” Konwinski points out.
Ball, in his post, argued that the way forward will depend on third-party auditing organizations, licensed by the government, that will evaluate frontier labs’ approach to safety. Konwinski, too, is bullish about new institutional formats like focused research organizations that could help more disinterested experts from academia and the nonprofit world access and evaluate frontier models.
For now, the secrecy around the development of AI isn’t going away, but it also will seed political challenges for an industry that Americans increasingly view with skepticism. “There’s not a sense that responsible people are driving forward these changes,” University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau said last week at the Open Frontier conference.
At the same event, David Siegel, the computer scientist who founded Two Sigma, one of the most successful quantitative hedge funds, asked attendees to “imagine a situation, which I think would be very bad, [where] a small number of firms control the technology; the government, in their secretive laboratories, is evaluating whether or not the technology is suitable for use; and the general public and scientific community doesn’t really have any access to any of that stuff.”
It seems like we don’t need to imagine it.
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Tech
After Apple, India’s smartphone manufacturing boom enters new phase with Vivo JV
India on Thursday approved a manufacturing joint venture between China’s Vivo and local manufacturer Dixon Technologies, a move that could mark the next phase of the country’s smartphone manufacturing boom after Apple helped turn India into a global smartphone production hub.
The approval allows Vivo to proceed with a long-delayed manufacturing partnership first announced in December 2024, after New Delhi cleared the investment under investment rules introduced in 2020 that require extra government scrutiny of investment from countries sharing a land border with India — a category that includes China. The joint venture will acquire certain manufacturing assets from Vivo, manufacture part of the company’s smartphone orders in India, and can also produce electronic products for other brands, according to a stock exchange filing by Noida-based Dixon.
The 51/49 venture — majority-owned by Dixon, with Vivo holding the remaining stake — reflects a broader shift in how Chinese smartphone brands are expanding manufacturing in India through local partnerships. For an industry watching how governments referee the relationship between Chinese capital and domestic manufacturing, the structure, analysts believe, could become a template for similar arrangements across the industry, helping broaden India’s smartphone manufacturing story beyond Apple.
Over the past few years, India has emerged as a major global smartphone manufacturing hub as Apple and its suppliers expanded iPhone production in the country while diversifying supply chains beyond China. Government incentives have also helped attract global electronics manufacturers, boosting the country’s role in global smartphone production.
Apple spent years building its manufacturing footprint in India and today accounts for 57% of the country’s smartphone exports by volume, according to Counterpoint Research’s data shared with TechCrunch. Chinese brands, on the other hand, dominate India’s smartphone market sales with 72% of the market, but contribute less than 10% of exports, a gap that shows how much upside is still on the table if they start exporting from India the way Apple does.
Apple’s India manufacturing expansion has largely been driven by suppliers such as Foxconn and Tata. Chinese smartphone brands, meanwhile, are increasingly exploring partnerships with Indian companies after New Delhi tightened investment rules for neighboring countries following the 2020 border clashes with China. Several of those companies, including Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, have also faced tax and regulatory investigations in India in recent years, which helps explain why ceding majority control to an Indian partner is now looking like the more sustainable path forward.
Local partnerships such as the Dixon-Vivo venture offer Chinese brands a more stable operating model, while aligning with India’s push for greater local participation in electronics manufacturing, said Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research.
“The approval of this joint venture creates a win-win for both players,” Pathak told TechCrunch. He added that the majority-Indian-owned structure provides Vivo with greater policy alignment while giving Dixon the scale to deepen local value addition and pursue exports.
Vivo has manufactured and exported smartphones from India for years, but the approved venture marks a shift toward a majority-Indian-owned manufacturing structure as the market leader deepens its footprint in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. The Chinese smartphone vendor retained the top spot in India’s smartphone market with a 23% shipment share in Q1, per Counterpoint.
For Dixon, India’s largest electronics manufacturing services company, the venture could add annualized manufacturing volumes of about 20 million to 22 million smartphones, based on Vivo’s current sales, according to comments by Managing Director Atul Lall during the company’s May earnings call. That’s a meaningful volume bump for a public company whose growth increasingly hinges on winning exactly these kinds of manufacturing contracts.
Dixon already manufactures smartphones for Xiaomi, suggesting the Vivo venture builds on an expanding role as a manufacturing partner for both global and Chinese smartphone brands in India, and reinforces its position as one of the more reliable bets in India’s electronics build-out.
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Tech
Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies
Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Thursday, noting that the government seized more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency and assets. Martino allegedly bought these assets, which include a food truck and a luxury fishing boat, with money stolen in the hacks.
Martino is the third person to be jailed for the scheme, following the earlier incarceration of cybersecurity professionals Kevin Martin and Ryan Goldberg. The trio, prosecutors say, worked together to deploy the BlackCat ransomware against companies in the United States throughout 2023. In one successful attack, the cyber professionals moonlighting as criminals extorted a company for about $1.2 million, which they then split three ways after laundering the funds.
The investigation highlights a rare case of security professionals working for malicious hackers while on the job. Governments have long advised victims of hacking and extortion not to pay any ransom and prevent cybercriminals from profiting, although some companies do so anyway in attempts to prevent their customers’ private data from being leaked.
Extortion attacks have helped create an entire insurance sub-sector in the U.S. for responding to ransomware and extortion attacks. Some companies in this space employ negotiators to try to bring down the cost of ransoms.
BlackCat (also known as ALPHV) is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that allows independent hackers, known as affiliates, to rent access to the gang’s file-encrypting malware in exchange for a cut of the profits from cyberattacks.
The group’s ransomware was famously used to steal highly sensitive medical and billing data of more than 192 million people in America during a hack at U.S. health technology giant Change Healthcare in February 2024, though the affiliate hackers responsible for the 2024 data breach were never identified.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
EU threatens Meta with fines over addictive features on Facebook and Instagram
The EU announced on Friday that Meta must overhaul Facebook’s and Instagram’s addictive design features or face a fine. The tech giant is in breach of the Digital Services Act by focusing on features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and highly personalized recommendation algorithms, the European Commission said.
The Commission says these features fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into “autopilot mode,” which contributes to unhealthy habits and compulsive use. It found that Meta failed to adequately assess the risks posed by the addictive design of its platforms to users’ physical and mental well-being, including minors and vulnerable adults.
The Commission also accused Meta of ignoring evidence about the amount of time minors spend on Instagram and Facebook at night and how features such as Reels and Stories could encourage excessive or compulsive use of the platforms.
“Evidence also shows that Meta’s current mitigation measures failed to effectively tackle the risks stemming from its addictive design,” the Commission wrote. “For example, Instagram’s and Facebook’s time management tools, including those activated by default for teens, can be easily dismissed and do not lead to a meaningful reduction and control of the usage of the service.”
It’s calling on Meta to disable key addictive features, such as autoplay and infinite scroll by default, and to introduce effective screen-time breaks, as well as modify its recommendation algorithm to make it less focused on user engagement.
The findings are not final, and Meta will now have the opportunity to review the evidence against it and submit a formal response. If the Commission’s findings are confirmed, Meta faces a fine of up to 6% of its total global annual turnover.
Meta did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Friday’s announcement marks the second time this year that the EU Commission has found Meta contravening its laws. In April, the Commission found that Meta was failing to prevent children under 13 from using Facebook and Instagram.
Meta has also been facing scrutiny in the U.S. for failing to protect young users on its platforms. Most recently, Meta said in a court filing on Monday that four U.S. states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties over claims that the tech giant designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users and that it misled the public about the platforms’ safety.
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Tech
How did the government decide OpenAI’s frontier model was safe to release?
OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced LLM, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered to be at least on par with Anthropic’s Fable, a model whose capabilities (or ownership) stressed out the White House enough that it was briefly banned from public access.
So how did these models get the OK for release? Short answer: Nobody’s quite sure.
“Frankly, I don’t have visibility into those exact processes, so yes, I don’t feel like I have enough information to say whether they’re adequate or not,” Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch. “Anthropic did say that they were in conversations with the government, and that they developed a classifier to detect jailbreak attempts, and they’ve implemented defense-in-depth strategies to prevent future jailbreaks, but exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear.”
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote that “nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed” in his newsletter last month.
Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he’s never spoken to anyone who understands the process, even employees at frontier labs. “It’s existentially a problem,” he tells TechCrunch. “Safety or not, it’s about who has the power to make decisions — who gatekeeps and decides on permissions?”
Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still little clarity about how to move forward, despite — or, some critics allege, because — of the industry figures setting policy. Last month, after weeks of infighting, an executive order was published laying out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, but the specifics have yet to be filled in, other than what won’t exist. “There will not be an FDA for AI,” Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who served as a senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month, told Financial Times.
Notably, there’s still no agreement on what kinds of models require government scrutiny, or what agency or agencies should perform those evaluations. For now, the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation seems to be taking the lead, but the executive order instructs six cabinet agencies to determine a final process by early August. What has emerged in the meantime is, at best, ad hoc.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on CNBC that the process involved conversations with the officials like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and U.S. national cyber director Sean Cairncross, but it’s not clear who the experts that tested the models were or how they did that. OpenAI declined to share details on the government’s process with TechCrunch, but pointed to the results of several external evaluations by organizations like U.K. AISI, SecureBio, and Irregular in the latest model’s safety card.
As with Anthropic’s Fable roll-out, OpenAI previewed the model for the government and select users ahead of wider release, but we don’t know who all of those users were or how they were chosen. In a late June blog post, the company said “we don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” saying it would work with the government to develop a different path forward.
The backdrop to those conversations, however, includes Altman reportedly offering as much as 5% to OpenAI’s equity for the administration’s so-called “Trump Accounts,” and OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s role as the largest publicly known donor to Trump’s mid-term political operation. It’s hard for outside observers to separate those activities from the government’s apparently lighter-touch approach to regulating Sol.
Anthropic’s Fable, on the other hand, was briefly pulled from wider access when the U.S. government forbade its use by foreign nationals, partly because of real concerns about users jail-breaking the model to access hacking capabilities and partly due to personality clashes between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The threat of an export ban may have also led OpenAI to be more cooperative with the government’s (unknown) requests.
From an industry perspective, a hands-off approach to regulation might be nice, but one that depends on personal connections to administration officials creates uncertainty and bad incentives.
Konwinski told TechCrunch that he worries true experts in this technology — “safety researchers, alignment researchers, interpretability researchers, but also data people, and people from all over the stack” — aren’t playing enough of a role in the model release process.
Konwinski argues that an “open commons” is the best way to actually balance safety and innovation. He points to models like the FDA, the NIH, or the national labs, which convene researchers, government officials, and private companies to reach a consensus on safety issues.
Some of that comes down to the incentives of capitalism that have motivated AI researchers for more than a decade, and played out in the court room during Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s corporate structure. Ball points out that the nature of the AI business requires companies to recoup much of their training costs shortly after their models are released and are further ahead of the competition.
“Even if their intentions are good, there’s very clear legal obligations and fiduciary responsibility that are built right into the operating procedures,” Konwinski points out.
Ball, in his post, argued that the way forward will depend on third-party auditing organizations, licensed by the government, that will evaluate frontier labs’ approach to safety. Konwinski, too, is bullish about new institutional formats like focused research organizations that could help more disinterested experts from academia and the nonprofit world access and evaluate frontier models.
For now, the secrecy around the development of AI isn’t going away, but it also will seed political challenges for an industry that Americans increasingly view with skepticism. “There’s not a sense that responsible people are driving forward these changes,” University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau said last week at the Open Frontier conference.
At the same event, David Siegel, the computer scientist who founded Two Sigma, one of the most successful quantitative hedge funds, asked attendees to “imagine a situation, which I think would be very bad, [where] a small number of firms control the technology; the government, in their secretive laboratories, is evaluating whether or not the technology is suitable for use; and the general public and scientific community doesn’t really have any access to any of that stuff.”
It seems like we don’t need to imagine it.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
After Apple, India’s smartphone manufacturing boom enters new phase with Vivo JV
India on Thursday approved a manufacturing joint venture between China’s Vivo and local manufacturer Dixon Technologies, a move that could mark the next phase of the country’s smartphone manufacturing boom after Apple helped turn India into a global smartphone production hub.
The approval allows Vivo to proceed with a long-delayed manufacturing partnership first announced in December 2024, after New Delhi cleared the investment under investment rules introduced in 2020 that require extra government scrutiny of investment from countries sharing a land border with India — a category that includes China. The joint venture will acquire certain manufacturing assets from Vivo, manufacture part of the company’s smartphone orders in India, and can also produce electronic products for other brands, according to a stock exchange filing by Noida-based Dixon.
The 51/49 venture — majority-owned by Dixon, with Vivo holding the remaining stake — reflects a broader shift in how Chinese smartphone brands are expanding manufacturing in India through local partnerships. For an industry watching how governments referee the relationship between Chinese capital and domestic manufacturing, the structure, analysts believe, could become a template for similar arrangements across the industry, helping broaden India’s smartphone manufacturing story beyond Apple.
Over the past few years, India has emerged as a major global smartphone manufacturing hub as Apple and its suppliers expanded iPhone production in the country while diversifying supply chains beyond China. Government incentives have also helped attract global electronics manufacturers, boosting the country’s role in global smartphone production.
Apple spent years building its manufacturing footprint in India and today accounts for 57% of the country’s smartphone exports by volume, according to Counterpoint Research’s data shared with TechCrunch. Chinese brands, on the other hand, dominate India’s smartphone market sales with 72% of the market, but contribute less than 10% of exports, a gap that shows how much upside is still on the table if they start exporting from India the way Apple does.
Apple’s India manufacturing expansion has largely been driven by suppliers such as Foxconn and Tata. Chinese smartphone brands, meanwhile, are increasingly exploring partnerships with Indian companies after New Delhi tightened investment rules for neighboring countries following the 2020 border clashes with China. Several of those companies, including Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, have also faced tax and regulatory investigations in India in recent years, which helps explain why ceding majority control to an Indian partner is now looking like the more sustainable path forward.
Local partnerships such as the Dixon-Vivo venture offer Chinese brands a more stable operating model, while aligning with India’s push for greater local participation in electronics manufacturing, said Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research.
“The approval of this joint venture creates a win-win for both players,” Pathak told TechCrunch. He added that the majority-Indian-owned structure provides Vivo with greater policy alignment while giving Dixon the scale to deepen local value addition and pursue exports.
Vivo has manufactured and exported smartphones from India for years, but the approved venture marks a shift toward a majority-Indian-owned manufacturing structure as the market leader deepens its footprint in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. The Chinese smartphone vendor retained the top spot in India’s smartphone market with a 23% shipment share in Q1, per Counterpoint.
For Dixon, India’s largest electronics manufacturing services company, the venture could add annualized manufacturing volumes of about 20 million to 22 million smartphones, based on Vivo’s current sales, according to comments by Managing Director Atul Lall during the company’s May earnings call. That’s a meaningful volume bump for a public company whose growth increasingly hinges on winning exactly these kinds of manufacturing contracts.
Dixon already manufactures smartphones for Xiaomi, suggesting the Vivo venture builds on an expanding role as a manufacturing partner for both global and Chinese smartphone brands in India, and reinforces its position as one of the more reliable bets in India’s electronics build-out.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies
Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Thursday, noting that the government seized more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency and assets. Martino allegedly bought these assets, which include a food truck and a luxury fishing boat, with money stolen in the hacks.
Martino is the third person to be jailed for the scheme, following the earlier incarceration of cybersecurity professionals Kevin Martin and Ryan Goldberg. The trio, prosecutors say, worked together to deploy the BlackCat ransomware against companies in the United States throughout 2023. In one successful attack, the cyber professionals moonlighting as criminals extorted a company for about $1.2 million, which they then split three ways after laundering the funds.
The investigation highlights a rare case of security professionals working for malicious hackers while on the job. Governments have long advised victims of hacking and extortion not to pay any ransom and prevent cybercriminals from profiting, although some companies do so anyway in attempts to prevent their customers’ private data from being leaked.
Extortion attacks have helped create an entire insurance sub-sector in the U.S. for responding to ransomware and extortion attacks. Some companies in this space employ negotiators to try to bring down the cost of ransoms.
BlackCat (also known as ALPHV) is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that allows independent hackers, known as affiliates, to rent access to the gang’s file-encrypting malware in exchange for a cut of the profits from cyberattacks.
The group’s ransomware was famously used to steal highly sensitive medical and billing data of more than 192 million people in America during a hack at U.S. health technology giant Change Healthcare in February 2024, though the affiliate hackers responsible for the 2024 data breach were never identified.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
EU threatens Meta with fines over addictive features on Facebook and Instagram
The EU announced on Friday that Meta must overhaul Facebook’s and Instagram’s addictive design features or face a fine. The tech giant is in breach of the Digital Services Act by focusing on features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and highly personalized recommendation algorithms, the European Commission said.
The Commission says these features fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into “autopilot mode,” which contributes to unhealthy habits and compulsive use. It found that Meta failed to adequately assess the risks posed by the addictive design of its platforms to users’ physical and mental well-being, including minors and vulnerable adults.
The Commission also accused Meta of ignoring evidence about the amount of time minors spend on Instagram and Facebook at night and how features such as Reels and Stories could encourage excessive or compulsive use of the platforms.
“Evidence also shows that Meta’s current mitigation measures failed to effectively tackle the risks stemming from its addictive design,” the Commission wrote. “For example, Instagram’s and Facebook’s time management tools, including those activated by default for teens, can be easily dismissed and do not lead to a meaningful reduction and control of the usage of the service.”
It’s calling on Meta to disable key addictive features, such as autoplay and infinite scroll by default, and to introduce effective screen-time breaks, as well as modify its recommendation algorithm to make it less focused on user engagement.
The findings are not final, and Meta will now have the opportunity to review the evidence against it and submit a formal response. If the Commission’s findings are confirmed, Meta faces a fine of up to 6% of its total global annual turnover.
Meta did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Friday’s announcement marks the second time this year that the EU Commission has found Meta contravening its laws. In April, the Commission found that Meta was failing to prevent children under 13 from using Facebook and Instagram.
Meta has also been facing scrutiny in the U.S. for failing to protect young users on its platforms. Most recently, Meta said in a court filing on Monday that four U.S. states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties over claims that the tech giant designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users and that it misled the public about the platforms’ safety.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
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