A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig—and he’s hiring. Anthony Jancso , cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he’s hiring for a “DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,” according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously.

We’ve identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,” he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn’t clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

One hundred days into the second Trump administration, many environmentalists’ worst fears about the new presidency have been realized—and surpassed.

Facing a spate of orders, pronouncements, and actions that target America’s most cherished natural resources and most vulnerable communities, advocates fear the Trump agenda, unchecked, will set the country back decades.

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The first production satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network launched earlier this week, but if you tuned in to the mission's official livestream, the truncated coverage had the feel of a spy satellite launch.

This changed with a video Amazon posted on social media Friday, giving space enthusiasts and prospective Kuiper customers their first look at the real satellites. The 40-second clip shows the Kuiper satellites separating from their launch vehicle in the blackness of space following liftoff Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Since Amazon unveiled Project Kuiper in 2019, officials at the retail giant have been shy about showing even the most basic imagery of their satellites. Images released by Amazon previously provided glimpses inside the company's satellite factory near Seattle, along with views of the shipping containers Amazon uses to transport spacecraft from Washington their launch base in Florida.

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Baxter International, a prominent health care and pharmaceutical manufacturer, reports that President Trump's tariffs will likely cost the company $60 million to $70 million this year, according to the Chicago Tribune .

The hefty toll was revealed by Baxter's executive vice president and chief financial officer, Joel Grade, during an earnings call Thursday.

"We are able to mitigate a portion of these impacts," Grade reportedly said in the call. "Currently a majority of Baxter’s products sold in the US are manufactured in the US and made largely from US-made components. However, international procurement is part of our business operations and as such we are impacted from the US and retaliatory tariffs that have been issued."

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We sometimes think of Google as a search company, but that's merely incidental—Google is really the world's biggest advertiser. That's why the antitrust case focused on Google's ad tech business could have even more lasting effects than cases focused on search or mobile apps. The court ruled against Google last month , and now both sides are lining up to present their proposed remedies in a trial later this year.

In today's hearing, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema set the beginning of that trial for September 22 of this year. Just like the search case , the Department of Justice (DOJ) is aiming to hack off pieces of Google to level the playing field. Specifically, the DOJ is asking the court to force Google to sell two parts of the ad business: the ad exchange and the publisher ad server. The ad exchange is the world's largest marketplace for bidding on advertising space. The ad server, meanwhile, is a tool that publishers use to list and sell ads on their sites.

While Google lost the liability phase of the case, it won on the subject of ad networks. The court decided that the government had not proven that Google's acquisition of ad networks like DoubleClick and Admeld had harmed competition. So, Google won't have to worry about losing those parts of the business.

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Over the last two weeks, in response to Executive Order 14035 , the National Science Foundation (NSF) has discontinued funding for research on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as support for researchers from marginalized backgrounds. Executive Order 14168 ordered the NSF (and other federal agencies) to discontinue any research that focused on women, women in STEM, gender variation, and transsexual or transgender populations—and, oddly, transgenic mice .

Then, another round of cancellations targeted research on misinformation and disinformation, a subject (among others) that Republican Senator Ted Cruz views as advancing neo-Marxist perspectives and class warfare .

During the previous three years, I served as a program officer at the NSF Science of Science (SOS) program. We reviewed, recommended, and awarded competitive research grants on science communication, including research on science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, and citizen engagement and participation in science. Projects my team reviewed and funded on misinformation are among the many others at NSF that have now been canceled (see the growing list here ).

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A judge who may be the first to rule on whether AI training data is fair use appeared skeptical Thursday at a hearing where Meta faced off with book authors over the social media company's alleged copyright infringement.

Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative use that only references books to create an entirely new work that doesn't replicate authors' ideas or replace books in their markets.

At the hearing that followed after both sides requested summary judgment, however, Judge Vince Chhabria pushed back on Meta attorneys arguing that the company's Llama AI models posed no threat to authors in their markets, Reuters reported .

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Microsoft says it’s making passwordless logins the default means for signing in to new accounts, as the company helps drive an industry-wide push to transition away from passwords and the costly security problems they have created for companies and their users.

A key part of the “passwordless by default” initiative Microsoft announced on Thursday is encouraging the use of passkeys—the new alternative to passwords that Microsoft, Google, Apple, and a large roster of other companies are developing under the coordination of the FIDO Alliance.

Going forward, Microsoft will make passkeys the default means for new users to sign in. Existing users who have yet to enroll a passkey will be presented with a prompt to do so the next time they log in.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating two leading toothpaste makers over their use of fluoride, suggesting that they are "illegally marketing" the teeth cleaners to parents and kids "in ways that are misleading, deceptive, and dangerous."

The toothpaste makers in the crosshairs are Colgate-Palmolive Company, maker of Colgate toothpastes, and Proctor & Gamble Manufacturing Co., which makes Crest toothpastes. In an announcement Thursday , Paxton said he has sent Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs) to the companies.

The move is an escalation in an ongoing battle over fluoride, which effectively prevents dental cavities and improves oral health. Community water fluoridation has been hailed by health and dental experts as one of the top 10 great public health interventions for advancing oral health across communities, regardless of age, education, or income. But, despite the success, fluoride has always had detractors—from conspiracy theorists in the past suggesting the naturally occurring mineral is a form of communist mind control, to more recent times, in which low-quality, controversial studies have suggested that high doses may lower IQ in children.

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