The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.

"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change," the Copyright Office said.

More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to "supercharge" research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public.

"This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives," OpenAI said.

The deal ensures that "approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines to advance our understanding of nature and the universe" will have access to OpenAI's latest reasoning models, the announcement said.

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Echoing Elon Musk's approach to thinning out Twitter's staff in 2022, Donald Trump's plan to significantly slash the government workforce now, for a limited time only, includes offering resignation buyouts.

In a Tuesday email that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to nearly all federal employees, workers were asked to respond with one word in the subject line—"resign"—to accept the buyouts before February 6.

"Deferred resignation is available to all full-time federal employees except for military personnel of the armed forces, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and those in other positions specifically excluded by your employing agency," the email said.

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Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit's CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were "a pain in the ass to block," despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect "no scraping" robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we'll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook's crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers "clobbering" websites that he told Ars he hoped would give "teeth" to robots.txt.

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It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump's efforts to make a deal to save TikTok.

Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to view a TikTok video content acquisition as a path to compete with major players like Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday, Perplexity AI submitted a revised merger proposal to TikTok-owner ByteDance, reviewed by CNBC, which sources told AP News included feedback from the Trump administration.

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The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.

According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckman—founder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)—and Valerie Lau Beckman—an attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wife—were charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.

If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.

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All federal agencies received a memo Wednesday requiring the termination of remote work options, with return-to-office plans due by end of day Friday.

In the memo, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, Charles Ezell, told the heads and acting heads of all departments and agencies that the change is due to Donald Trump's Return to In-Person Work presidential memorandum, which carved out space for some exemptions and ordered:

Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.

Empty offices a “national embarrassment”

According to the memo, "most federal offices presently are virtually abandoned," with "the vast majority of federal office workers" having "not returned to in-person work" after transitioning to remote work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has this "devastated" the local economy in Washington, D.C., the memo said, but having so many federal offices sitting empty also serves as a "national embarrassment."

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TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly still searching for non-sale options to stay in the US after the Supreme Court upheld a national security law requiring that TikTok's US operations either be shut down or sold to a non-foreign adversary.

Last weekend, TikTok briefly went dark in the US, only to come back online hours later after Donald Trump reassured ByteDance that the US law would not be enforced. Then, shortly after Trump took office, he signed an executive order delaying enforcement for 75 days while he consulted with advisers to "pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans."

Trump's executive order did not suggest that he intended to attempt to override the national security law's ban-or-sale requirements. But that hasn't stopped ByteDance, board member Bill Ford told World Economic Forum (WEF) attendees, from searching for a potential non-sale option that "could involve a change of control locally to ensure it complies with US legislation," Bloomberg reported.

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It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.

Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

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Apple must face a potential class action alleging that Apple had a policy of paying men higher salaries than women for similar work.

On Tuesday, California Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman filed an order that largely denies Apple's motions to strike the class allegations and suspend several class claims. This allows what one lawyer representing women suing, Joseph Sellers, said was "a very important case that impacts thousands of current and former female Apple employees."

Perhaps most significantly, Apple tried and failed to argue that pay disparities for individual female workers suing were "justified" and that their circumstances were not common to the 12,000 female employees who could be owed backpay if the class action is certified and Apple loses.

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The self-declared "pro-crypto president" Donald Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday.

Ulbricht, 40, was about 10 years into his life sentence for helming an online black market where drug dealers, money launderers, and traffickers used bitcoins to mask more than $214 million in illicit trades. (Ars thoroughly documented the Silk Road saga here.)

Trump had pledged at the Libertarian National Convention to set Ulbricht free while on the campaign trail, agreeing with supporters who believe that Ulbricht's long sentence was a harsh example of government overreach.

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TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump's inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration's divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down" and "essentially... stop operating." On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok's claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans' free speech rights did not supersede the government's compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

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Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is "the most apolitical social platform in China"—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app's Chinese users.

In the "TikTokCringe" subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

"RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area," the Reddit poster said. "I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, Chinese language, Chinese culture."

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments that could determine if a Texas age-gating law preventing kids from accessing pornography online is overly burdensome for adults. A ruling against Texas could put an end to allegedly invasive age-verification laws in nearly 20 states.

A decision isn't expected until summer 2025, so it's too soon to say which way the court is leaning.

The question before the court is whether the 5th Circuit was right to stay a preliminary injunction that had previously been blocking Texas from enforcing the law or whether that decision should be reversed and remanded based on the level of constitutional scrutiny that the 5th Circuit applied.

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Anticipating that 2025 will be an "intense year" requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting "lowest performers."

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta's internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to "move out low performers faster" so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

"I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management," Zuckerberg said. "We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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Chinese officials have reportedly discussed selling TikTok's US operations to Elon Musk as the threat of a US ban looms.

Sources "familiar with the matter" told Bloomberg that Chinese officials would "strongly prefer" that ByteDance remain in control of TikTok US, but if TikTok's bid to get the Supreme Court to block the ban fails, ByteDance wants to be prepared with "contingency plans."

One of those supposed contingency plans would apparently see Musk operating TikTok as part of X (formerly Twitter) operations. Under that scenario, Musk's X would control TikTok US, sources said, and thus gain access to a massive trove of TikTok data that the US has alleged poses a grave national security risk if left under a Chinese-owned company's control.

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Mastodon announced Monday that it's shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—"affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual."

This takes control of the social network away from its previous "ultimate decision-maker," Eugen Rochko. As founder, Rochko initially took the reins to ensure the decentralized platform would never be for sale and "would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual." His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta's decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called "property" and gay people to be called "mentally ill") by calling bans on such speech "out of touch with mainstream discourse."

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On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to decide whether to block lawsuits that Honolulu filed to seek billions in damages from oil and gas companies over allegedly deceptive marketing campaigns that hid the effects of climate change.

Now those lawsuits can proceed, surely frustrating the fossil fuel industry, which felt that SCOTUS should have weighed in on this key "recurring question of extraordinary importance to the energy industry" raised in lawsuits seeking similarly high damages in several states, CBS News reported.

Defendants Sunoco and Shell, along with 15 other energy companies, had asked the court to intervene and stop the Hawaii lawsuits from proceeding. They had hoped to move the cases out of Hawaii state courts by arguing that interstate pollution is governed by federal law and the Clean Air Act.

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Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.

According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."

It's another move by Meta that some view as part of the company's larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration's politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.

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At the end of 2024, a US court authorized the Department of Justice to sell 69,370 bitcoins from "the largest cryptocurrency seizure in history."

At bitcoin's current price, just under $92,000, these bitcoins are worth nearly $6.4 billion, and crypto outlets are reporting that DOJ officials have said they're planning to proceed with selling off the assets consistent with the court's order. The DOJ had reportedly argued that bitcoin's price volatility was a pressing reason to push for permission for the sale.

Ars has reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update the story with any new information regarding next steps.

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