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Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

  • “I wanted to be on it all the time,” plaintiff says in landmark social media addiction trial

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    A young woman who is battling against social media giants took the stand Thursday to testify about her experience using the platforms as she was growing up, saying she was on social media “all day long” as a child.

    The now 20-year-old, who has been identified in court documents as KGM, says her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Meta and YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled.

    The case, along with two others, has been selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies are likely to play out.

    Early social media user

    KGM, or Kaley, as her lawyers have called her during the trial, started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9.

    Kaley took the stand wearing a pink floral dress and a beige cardigan and said she was “very nervous” after her attorney, Mark Lanier, asked how she was doing Thursday morning.

    Lanier displayed childhood photos of Kaley and her family and asked about positive memories from her upbringing in a quiet cul-de-sac in Chico, California. She spoke of themed birthday parties, trips to Six Flags and her mom’s consistent efforts to make her childhood special.

    Still, Kaley’s relationship with her mother was challenging at times. Kaley said most of their arguments were over the use of her phone.

    Both the defendants and the plaintiff have pointed to a turbulent home life for Kaley. Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, but attorneys representing Meta and Google-owned YouTube have argued Kaley turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her mental health struggles.

    When asked about claims that her mother had hit her, abused her and neglected her, Kaley said “she wasn’t perfect, but she was trying her best,” and clarified that she doesn’t think she would label her mother’s past actions as abuse or neglect today. Kaley, who works as a personal shopper at Walmart, still lives with her mother in the home she grew up in.

    “It made me look popular”

    As a child, Kaley set up multiple accounts on both Instagram and YouTube so she could like and comment on her posts. She said she would also “buy” likes through a platform where she could like other people’s photos and get a slew of likes in return. “It made me look popular,” she said.

    Kaley was asked specifically about the features the plaintiffs argue are deliberately designed to be addictive, including notifications. Those notifications on both Instagram and YouTube gave her a “rush,” she said. She would receive them throughout the day and would go to the bathroom during school to check them — something she still does.

    Kaley said while she uses YouTube less often now, she believes she was previously addicted to it. “Anytime I tried to set limits for myself, it wouldn’t work and I just couldn’t get off,” she said.

    Filters on Instagram, specifically those that could change a person’s cosmetic appearance, have also loomed large in the case and were also a constant fixture of Kaley’s use. Lanier and his colleagues unfurled a nearly 35-foot-long canvas banner with photos Kaley has posted on Instagram. She said “almost all” of the photos had a filter on them.

    The jury was also shown Instagram posts and YouTube videos Kaley posted as a child and young teen. One video that tapped into the popular trend at the time, sharing a nighttime routine, showed a young Kaley scrolling on her phone, showering and taking off makeup and then returning to her phone to go on Instagram. Another video showed her saying she was “crying tears of joy” after surpassing 100 YouTube subscribers — but then she quickly turned to her looks, apologizing for her “ugly appearance.”

    “I look so fat in this shirt,” the young Kaley says in the video.

    Meta highlights mental health struggles

    Meta has argued that Kaley faced significant challenges before she ever used social media. The company’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, said earlier this month that the core question in the case is whether the platforms were a substantial factor in Kayley’s mental health struggles. 

    During opening arguments, he spent much of his time going through the plaintiff’s health records, emphasizing that she had experienced many difficult circumstances in her childhood, including emotional abuse, body image issues and bullying.

    Kaley said she did not experience the negative feelings associated with her body dysmorphia diagnosis before she began using social media and filters.

    Kaley was asked about her peak Instagram usage, which exceeded 16 hours one day. “I just felt like I wanted to be on it all the time, and if I wasn’t on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something,” she said.

    When she tried to stop using the platforms, she said she was often unsuccessful.

    “Every single day, I was on it all day long,” she said.

    Therapist’s testimony

    Victoria Burke, a former therapist Kaley worked with in 2019, testified on Wednesday, and Burke said her social media and her sense of self “were closely related,” adding that what was happening on the platforms could “make or break her mood.”

    Burke’s treatment of Kaley lasted about six months and that period took place seven years ago.

    The case has been the subject of intense interest among both advocacy groups lobbying for enhanced child safety protections and the tech world alike, with high-profile testimony from the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    During Zuckerberg’s testimony, when he was asked if people tend to use something more if it’s addictive, he said “I’m not sure what to say to that.”

    “I don’t think that applies here,” he continued. He said he believes in the “basic assumption” that “if something is valuable, people will use it more because it’s useful to them.” Mosseri also said he didn’t believe people could become clinically addicted to social media platforms.

    The case is expected to continue for several weeks, with a ruling potentially shaping the outcome of a slew of similar lawsuits against social media companies.

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  • Ruoming Pang, Meta’s $200M Superintelligence Hire, Jumps to OpenAI After Just 7 Months

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    Sam Altman reportedly courted Pang for months. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    Ruoming Pang, a prominent A.I. researcher recruited by Meta last year with a pay package reportedly worth more than $200 million, has left the company to join OpenAI, The Information reported yesterday (Feb. 25). His departure marks another setback for Mark Zuckerberg’s elite A.I. team and underscores the escalating A.I. talent war. Pang joined Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) in July after being poached from Apple. He remained at Meta for only seven months.

    Zuckerberg unveiled MSL in July 2025 as the centerpiece of Meta’s push to develop advanced A.I. systems. The lab quickly became the focus of an aggressive—and costly—hiring spree. Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, now leads the group as Meta’s A.I. chief after Meta acquired 40 percent of his startup. Within MSL, a smaller, more secretive unit known as TBD Lab is tasked with building next-generation foundation models.

    Pang was originally from Shanghai and earned his undergraduate degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Southern California and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2006. Over the course of his career, Pang has worked on some of the most consequential A.I. systems in the industry, making him one of the more sought-after engineers in the field.

    At Apple, he spent nearly four years as a “senior distinguished engineer,” leading development of the foundation models behind Apple Intelligence. Before Apple, Pang spent roughly 15 years at Google DeepMind as a principal software engineer, where he worked on large-scale machine learning systems, including privacy-preserving technologies and speech recognition.

    OpenAI has not disclosed Pang’s title, scope of responsibilities or the terms of his compensation. The Sam Altman-led company reportedly courted him for months, so the package is likely substantial. OpenAI employees earn roughly $1.5 million in annual salary and equity, according to the Wall Street Journal. Pang is widely expected to continue working on foundation models and superintelligence research.

    For Meta, Pang’s exit complicates Zuckerberg’s ambition to dominate the superintelligence race. The company has successfully recruited high-profile researchers from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, MSL has also seen a steady stream of departures in recent months.

    Among the most prominent was Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, who exited at the end of last year after more than a decade at the company. LeCun publicly criticized MSL chief Wang’s lack of experience with A.I. research. 

    Other departures have been quieter but telling. Ethan Knight joined MSL for only a few weeks before moving to OpenAI last August—a stint so brief it never appeared on his LinkedIn profile. Bert Maher, a software engineer, left after 12 years at Meta to join Anthropic. Avi Verma, who had been expected to join Meta from OpenAI, ultimately backed out.

    Pang’s move is the latest signal that Silicon Valley’s A.I. talent war is intensifying. Even as talk of an A.I. bubble grows louder and tech companies rely on increasingly complex financial structures to sustain lofty valuations, leaders like Zuckerberg, Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei show little sign of restraint. Instead, they are offering compensation packages worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to persuade top researchers that their vision for superintelligence will prevail.

    Ruoming Pang, Meta’s $200M Superintelligence Hire, Jumps to OpenAI After Just 7 Months

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    Rachel Curry

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  • Meta’s metaverse is going mobile-first

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    Meta is formally sectioning off Horizon Worlds, the closest thing it has to a metaverse, from its Quest VR platform, according to a new blog post from Samantha Ryan, Meta’s VP of Content, Reality Labs. While the decision runs counter to Meta’s original plan to own an immersive virtual world that could serve as the future home for all online interaction, it fits with the recent cuts it made to its costly Reality Labs division, and Mark Zuckerberg’s public commitment to focus the company on AI hardware like smart glasses going forward.

    “We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow,” Ryan writes in the blog post. “We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.”

    Meta has been developing mobile and web versions of Horizon Worlds in parallel with its VR app since at least 2023. Switching Worlds to being a mobile-first software platform isn’t good for VR diehards, but it does make it a more natural competitor to something like Roblox or Fortnite, which also offer user-created and monetizable worlds and games. It’s also a business Meta believes it can more easily scale because of its ability to connect games to “billions of people on the world’s biggest social networks.”

    While Meta shuttered several of its own VR game studios earlier this year, it still wants to support third-party developers publishing games on its platform. The company says new monetization tools, better discoverability, a “Deals” tab and more ways for developers to talk to their customers should help make a difference. Maintaining the Quest’s library of games could also be critical going forward. Business Insider reported in December 2025 that Meta was working on a gaming-focused Quest headset, and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed earlier this February that the company still had multiple Quest devices on its roadmap.

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    Ian Carlos Campbell

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  • Judge scolds Mark Zuckerberg’s team for wearing Meta glasses to social media trial

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    A California judge admonished members of Mark Zuckerberg’s team for wearing Ray Ban-Meta AI glasses, which are equipped with a camera, as they entered a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday for a landmark trial over the impact of social media on children.

    “The judge upbraided the Meta team and said if you guys have recorded anything, you have to dispose of it or I will hold you in contempt,” Jacob Ward, a technology journalist and the host of the Rip Current Podcast, told CBS News, calling the incident  “an extraordinary misstep” by Meta. 

    It’s unclear if Zuckerberg’s team had the glasses on inside the courtroom or how long they were wearing them. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The use of recording devices and cameras is generally banned in Los Angeles County Superior Court. 

    “Judicial officers have the discretion to place limitations on video recording and photography in their courtroom,” a Superior Court of Los Angeles County spokesperson told CBS News, citing local and state rules.

    Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is presiding over the trial, also ordered anyone in the courtroom wearing AI glasses to immediately remove them, noting that any use of facial recognition technology to identify the jurors was banned.

    “This is very serious,” she said. The court did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.

    Meta’s glasses, retail for between $299 and $799, are equipped with a camera that can take photos and record video.

    Zuckerberg was in court to testify as part of a trial over whether Meta and Alphabet-owned YouTube deliberately designed their social media platforms to encourage compulsive usage by young people. 

    The plaintiff behind the suit, identified only by her initials “KGM,” alleges that using social media from a young age caused her to become addicted and harmed her mental health.

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    Alain Sherter

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  • Zuckerberg defends social media platforms at landmark trial

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    Zuckerberg defends social media platforms at landmark trial – CBS News









































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    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified Wednesday in a civil case over social media addiction allegations that skyrocketing social media use shows how people value the sites and it’s not a strategy to keep users addicted. Jo Ling Kent reports.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg questioned on Meta’s under-13 users and usage goals in landmark social media trial

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    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced questioning in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday about Instagram’s under-13 users and Meta’s efforts to boost engagement, as a trial examines whether the company knowingly offered an addictive and harmful product to children and teens.

    The landmark trial against Meta and YouTube kicked off in late January. It centers on allegations brought by a plaintiff identified as “KGM,” who claims that using social media from a young age caused her to become addicted and harmed her mental health.

    KGM, who is now 20 years old, alleges that Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — with their recommendation algorithms and infinite scrolling — are designed to be addictive. 

    In the courtroom on Wednesday, Zuckerberg faced questions from KGM’s lawyer Mark Lanier over Meta’s policy for allowing children under 13 to access Instagram. KGM started using Instagram at 9 years old, according to Lanier.

    Zuckerberg said users under 13 are not allowed on the platform, but added that it is a difficult rule to enforce because there are “a meaningful number of people who lie about their age to use our services.”

    Lanier also pressed Zuckerberg about whether one of the company’s goals is to increase the time users spend on Instagram. Zuckerberg said Meta uses time spent on the app as a proxy to measure its performance against competitors like TikTok.

    “It’s different than us trying to just increase time,” he said. “Just us trying to see how we’re stacking up in the industry.”

    Zuckerberg also addressed Instagram’s beauty filters, which Meta temporarily shut down after concerns surfaced that they changed people’s appearance in a way that seemed to promote plastic surgery. Zuckerberg said the company decided to allow beauty filters in support of free expression, but said that “we shouldn’t create them ourselves or recommend them.”

    This marks the first time Zuckerberg is defending his company before a jury, although he has previously testified before Congress regarding youth safety on Meta’s platforms. 

    Trial carries implications for similar cases 

    The outcome of the lawsuit could shape how thousands of similar cases brought against social media giants play out. TikTok and Snapchat were originally part of the lawsuit, but they settled before the trial started. 

    Some experts have drawn comparisons between the social media trial and the tobacco industry lawsuits of the 1990s, which sought to hold companies accountable for their products and how they were marketed.

    “A trial like this one will hopefully uncover the disconnect between what companies say publicly to drive up business and engagement and what is actually going on behind the scenes,” UCLA law professor and tech justice attorney Melodi Dinçer told CBS News senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent.

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives at Los Angeles Superior Court on Feb. 18, 2026.

    Patrick T. Fallon /AFP via Getty Images


    Prior to Zuckerberg’s testimony, Meta told CBS News that it strongly disagrees with the allegations and that it is committed to supporting young people who use its platforms. The company also claims that KGM faced mental health struggles before she used social media. 

    A spokesperson from Google, the parent company of YouTube, also denied the allegations, calling them “simply not true.”

    Zuckerberg’s appearance in the LA courtroom follows that of Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who testified in the trial last week. While on the stand, Mosseri said he does not believe people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms, instead referring to what he calls “problematic use,” when people spend more time on Instagram than they feel good about.

    Prosecutors also pressed Mosseri over whether Instagram is prioritizing growth and profit over safety. In response, Mosseri said Instagram makes “less money from teens than from any other demographic on the app,” adding that teens don’t tend to click on ads.

    Edited by

    Aimee Picchi

    Emily Pandise,

    Jo Ling Kent and

    The Associated Press

    contributed to this report.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg faces intense questioning in social media addiction trial

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    Mark Zuckerberg faces intense questioning in social media addiction trial – CBS News









































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    Mark Zuckerberg took the stand on Wednesday to fight off allegations that Instagram was intentionally designed to be addictive, especially to kids. Jo Ling Kent was in the courtroom and has more on the landmark trial.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg testifies in social media addiction trial that Meta just wants Instagram to be ‘useful’

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    Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Wednesday in a high-profile jury trial over social media addiction. In an appearance that was described by NBC News as “combative,” the Facebook founder reportedly said that Meta’s goal was to make Instagram “useful” not increase the time users are spending in the app.

    On the stand, Zuckerberg was questioned about a company document that said improving engagement was among “company goals,” according to CNBC. But Zuckerberg claimed that the company had “made the conscious decision to move away from those goals, focusing instead on utility,” according to The Associated Press. “If something is valuable, people will use it more because it’s useful to them,” he said.

    The trial stems from a lawsuit brought by a California woman identified as “KGM” in court documents. The now 20-year-old alleges that she was harmed as a child by addictive features in Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. TikTok and Snap opted to settle before the case went to trial.

    Zuckerberg was also asked about previous public statements, including his remarks on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year that he can’t be fired by Meta’s board because he controls a majority of the voting power. According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg accused the plaintiffs’ lawyer of “mischaracterizing” his past comments more than a dozen times.

    Zuckerberg’s appearance in court also apparently prompted the judge to warn people in the courtroom not to record the proceedings using AI glasses. As CNBC notes, members of Zuckerberg’s entourage were spotted wearing Meta’s smart glasses as the CEO was escorted into the courthouse. It’s unclear if anyone was actually using the glasses in court, but legal affairs journalist Meghann Cuniff reported that the judge was particularly concerned about the possibility of jurors being recorded or subjected to facial recognition. (Meta’s smart glasses do not currently have native facial recognition abilities, but recent reports suggest the company is considering adding such features.)

    The Los Angeles trial has been closely watched not just because it marked a rare in-court appearance for Zuckerberg. It’s among the first of several cases where Meta will face allegations that its platforms have harmed children. In this case and in a separate proceeding in New Mexico, Meta’s lawyers have cast doubt on the idea that social media should be considered a real addiction. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri previously testified in the same Los Angeles trial that Instagram isn’t “clinically addictive.”

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    Karissa Bell

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  • Mark Zuckerberg is joining Jeff Bezos in Miami’s billionaire bunker: Take a look inside his portfolio | Fortune

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    Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly adding to his growing list of luxury homes with a waterfront property in the most in-demand section of one of most exclusive neighborhoods in America.

    The Meta CEO and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are reportedly purchasing a recently completed luxury mansion on Indian Creek Island, a 300-acre, man-made island near Miami with a mere 41 lots and approximately 84 residents, The Wall Street Journal reported. Home prices on the island start at about $60 million, and the market price for a property like Zuckerberg’s ranges from $150 million to $200 million, Mick Duchon, a Miami Beach-based real estate agent with the Corcoran Group who specializes in high-end waterfront properties, told Fortune.

    Even an undeveloped property can fetch big bucks on the island—one vacant lot of roughly the same size as Zuckerberg’s sold for a reported $105 million in 2025.

    The property Zuckerberg reportedly purchased at 2 Indian Creek Island Road puts him in the most coveted area of the already exclusive island, Duchon said. On the western side of the island, where Zuckerberg’s property is reportedly located, lots are about 80,000 square feet, compared to about 50,000 square feet on the east side, according to Duchon. On this side, where Amazon founder and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos also owns two lots, residents have better access to the open water of Biscayne Bay and a more expansive view with great sunsets, he added.  

    “That side of the island is perceived to be the most appealing,” Duchon said.

    Bezos has been buying up properties on Indian Creek Island since he announced in 2023 he was leaving Seattle, Wash. for Florida. The Amazon founder first purchased a $68 million home that would end up being just a few doors down from Zuckerberg in 2023. Near the end of that year, he paid another $79 million for a neighboring property with the intention of combining the lots into a single compound—a trend Buchon said is increasingly common among wealthy buyers because of the scarcity of truly expansive waterfront properties in the area. Meanwhile, Bezos is living in a third Mediterranean-style property also on Indian Creek Island, on the east side, which he snapped up for $87 million in 2024. Last year, Bezos sold one of his Seattle homes overlooking Lake Washington for a record $63 million, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported.

    Indian Creek Island operates as an independent municipality with its own government and private police who patrol by air, water, and sky. Access to the island is controlled by a single gated bridge, making safety and privacy a defining feature. Most of the interior of the island comprises an 18-hole golf course and the Indian Creek Country Club, with a limited number of members due, in part, to a difficult acceptance process and a $500,000 initiation cost.

    It’s unclear whether Zuckerberg’s deal has closed yet. Miami-Dade county property records note the owner as a land trust. One of Zuckerberg’s future neighbors, Irma Braman, the wife of billionaire car dealer Norman Braman, told WSJ Zuckerberg said he planned to move into the property by April. 

    Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

    Zuckerberg is the latest billionaire to pick up a Florida property, especially as a proposed ballot initiative gains steam in California that would impose a one-time 5% “billionaires tax” for any individual worth at least $1 billion dollars retroactive to Jan. 1, 2026. (To be sure, Zuckerberg still very much calls California home, having just invested $50 million through Meta for a Sacramento downtown revitalization and AI-focused project.) Google cofounder Larry Page also recently snagged a $173 million compound in Miami consisting of two waterfront lots in the city’s Coconut Grove area.

    Indian Creek Island, in particular, is home to a number of high profile names, who, besides Bezos, include the financier Carl Icahn and former NFL quarterback Tom Brady. 

    Zuckerberg’s reported newest property is just the latest addition to the tech CEO’s growing portfolio of luxury homes across the U.S.

    Palo Alto compound

    Zuckerberg’s home base remains Palo Alto, Calif., where, according to The New York Times, he owns 11 properties in the Crescent Park neighborhood. Over more than a decade, Zuckerberg has poured $110 million into buying adjacent properties, in some cases drawing complaints from his neighbors. 

    Vegetation covers the front of Facebook Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto, California, U.S. on Saturday, July 14, 2012

    Noah Berger—Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Hawaiian estate

    On the island of Kauai, about 100 miles northwest of Honolulu, Zuckerberg also owns a $300 million property commonly known as Koʻolau Ranch, spanning roughly 1,400 acres. He quietly added about 1,000 additional acres to the compound, last year, Architectural Digest reported, bringing his total Kauai holdings to more than 2,300 acres. 

    The ranch is one of Zuckerberg’s most secretive properties. Almost anyone who passes the compound security, including builders and other workers must sign non-disclosure agreements, Wired reported. The ranch reportedly includes a 5,000 square-foot underground shelter with its own energy source.

    The island of Kauai, where Zuckerberg is reportedly creating a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, lies about 100 miles northwest of Honolulu.

    DeAgostini—Getty Images

    Lake Tahoe retreat

    Zuckerberg created his own mountain compound in the Lake Tahoe area through the purchase of two adjacent estates in Tahoe City on the lake’s West Shore. Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada mountains between Nevada and California, has emerged as a popular destination for billionaires seeking a retreat, with both Google cofounder Sergey Brin as well as 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer owning homes there.

    Zuckerberg bought the properties—known as Carousel Estate and Brushwood Estate—for a total of $59 million, or $22 million and $37 million, respectively, according to multiple reports. The Brushwood Estate in particular, dates back to the early 1900s and has only ever had two other owners, according to SFGate. The property has six bedrooms, five full baths, and a 2,293-square-foot guesthouse.

    Zuckerberg created his own mountain compound in the Lake Tahoe area through the purchase of two adjacent estates in Tahoe City on the lake’s West Shore.

    Christian Petersen—Getty Images

    Washington, D.C. mansion

    As Meta and Zuckerberg have engaged more with policymakers in Washington, D.C. during the Trump administration, the tech CEO reportedly picked up a $23 million mansion in Washington D.C.’s exclusive Woodland Normanstone neighborhood, Politico reported. The 15,000-square-foot mansion is made of brick and limestone walls divided into three sections divided by glass enclosed “walkways.”

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Washington D.C. home is located in the Woodland-Normanstone neighborhood.

    Andrade-Rhoades—The Washington Post via Getty Images

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    Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

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  • The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut 70 jobs as the Meta CEO’s philanthropy goes all in on mission to ‘cure or prevent all disease’ | Fortune

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    The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is making big changes, and it started 2026 with some job cuts to recalibrate and refocus its efforts on AI-powered biomedical research. 

    The philanthropic organization, formed by Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is cutting about 70 jobs, or roughly 8% of its workforce, a CZI spokesperson confirmed to Fortune. The layoffs happened primarily at the organization’s Redwood City headquarters in San Mateo, Calif.

    In 2025, Zuckerberg and Chan laid the groundwork for remaking their philanthropic organization into one focused on AI-powered biomedical research, and its flagship Biohub network in particular. Their move extends a broader retreat from the couple’s earlier push into education and social-justice causes, although they’ll continue to make donations to local organizations. 

    “I feel like the science work that we’ve done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done,” Zuckerberg said during an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City in November, according to the Associated Press. “So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward.” The couple has dedicated, through the Giving Pledge, to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.

    Their massive move also underscores how big donors are racing to back science-heavy, tech-centric projects such as peers like the Gates Foundation. The philanthropy started by Bill and Melinda French Gates will shutter in 2045 and has plans to make a record $9 billion in donations this year while remaining primarily focused on health care and disease research. 

    Why CZI had layoffs and its pivot to Biohub

    Because the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has big plans to expand its biomedical and science focus and step a little further back from its original focus areas of education, criminal justice reform, housing, and community development, it now needs employees with expertise in their new coverage areas.

    While some were able to be assigned to other teams, the organization needed more research-heavy expertise to match the new mission, so some had to be laid off. They received a 60-day notice period and will get a severance package with 16 weeks of base pay, health insurance, and a $10,000 stipend to help with other needs.

    The layoffs came as part of a decision to concentrate resources on Biohub, a growing network of biomedical research institutes that aims to “cure or prevent all disease,” according to Zuckerberg and Chan. It currently operates as a collaborative network of nonprofit research centers, partnering with universities like UC San Francisco, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and Columbia. Biohub is focused on advancing biomedical science, engineering, and artificial intelligence to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases. CZI will continue to hire and grow its team, but with more science-focused roles like researchers, data scientists, computational biologists, and more.

    Since Biohub’s 2016 inception, the couple has donated $4 billion to basic science research, and is on track to double that amount during the next decade, according to the AP. The organization has an operating budget of about $1 billion per year.

    “We will continue our other philanthropic efforts as well, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will serve as infrastructure and support for our initiatives,” the couple wrote in a blog post in November. “There will be many challenges, but we believe that achieving some of humanity’s long-term dreams will also come within reach.”

    CZI’s shared AI obsession with Meta

    Like Zuckerberg’s $1.81 trillion tech company Meta, CZI is going all-in on AI-focused research and outcomes. Both his business and philanthropic efforts are now squarely focused on AI, with Meta committed to spending between $115 billion and $135 billion on building “superintelligent” agents for user needs across feeds, ads, and commerce. 

    CZI’s Biohub similarly is focused on “frontier AI” and “frontier biology,” using large-scale models for virtual cells, immune reprogramming, and disease prediction. With those efforts, Zuckerberg has framed 2026 as AI’s transformative year for work at both Meta and CZI. 

    “Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make,” Zuckerberg and Chan wrote in the November blog post. “So we’re going all in on AI-powered biology for our next chapter.”

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  • Meta burned $19 billion on VR last year, and 2026 won’t be any better | TechCrunch

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    Earlier this month, Meta laid off 10% of the staff for Reality Labs, its virtual reality unit, reportedly cutting as many as 1,000 employees. Now, in a development that seems directly related, the company has revealed that the unit lost many billions of dollars last year.

    On Wednesday, Meta’s earnings report showed that its embattled virtual reality business had lost some $19.1 billion in 2025, which is slightly more than it lost in 2024 (that year, the losses hovered around $17.7 billion). In its fourth quarter, the unit posted a loss of $6.2 billion, the report shows.

    Those losses stood against what the unit generated in sales: $955 million in Q4 and some $2.2 billion throughout 2025.

    During the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg struck a tone of optimism for his company’s VR team while noting that losses in 2026 are expected to be very much the same.

    “For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on Mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” Zuckerberg said, during the call. However, the CEO noted that losses were expected to continue. “I expect Reality Labs losses this year to be similar to last year,” Zuckerberg said, while noting that this year would “likely be the peak, as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward.”

    When Meta announced a pivot toward the “metaverse” in 2021, the move was regarded with a certain amount of skepticism and, during its first year of VR efforts, the company faced harsh criticism — even being referred to as an “international laughingstock.” Nearly half a decade later, that skepticism hasn’t exactly subsided. As the VR business continues to lose money and Meta continues an aggressive pivot away from VR and toward AI, it’s unclear what exactly will turn the ailing business around.

    Last week, CNBC reported that, in addition to the layoffs, Meta had plans to shutter a number of its VR studios — another sign that the company’s interest in virtual reality is waning. The company also recently announced that it would be retiring its standalone Workrooms app — which the company had pitched to office workers as a VR space that could be used to hold meetings.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg says Reality Labs will (eventually) stop losing so much money

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    Mark Zuckerberg says there’s an end in sight to Reality Labs’ years of multibillion-dollar losses following the company’s layoffs to the metaverse division earlier this year. The CEO said he expects to “gradually reduce” how much money the company is losing as it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from virtual reality.

    Speaking during Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was clear that the changes won’t happen soon, but sounded optimistic about the division that lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone. “For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” he said. “I expect Reality Labs losses this year to be similar to last year, and this will likely be the peak, as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward.”

    The company cut more than 1,000 employees from Reality Labs earlier this month, shut down three VR studios and announced plans to retire its app for VR meetings. Meta has also paused plans for third-party Horizon OS headsets. Instead, Meta is doubling down on its smart glasses and and wearables business, which tie in more neatly to Zuckerberg’s vision for creating AI “superintelligence.”

    During the call, Zuckerberg noted that sales of Meta’s smart glasses “more than tripled” in 2025, and hinted at bigger plans for AR glasses. “They [AI glasses] are going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you and help you as you go about your day and even show you information or generate custom UI right there in your vision,” he said.

    Zuckerberg has spent the last few years laying the groundwork for pivoting Meta’s metaverse work into AI. He offered one example if what the means for Meta’s Horizon app.

    “You can imagine … people being able to easily, through a prompt, create a world or create a game, and be able to share that with people who they care about. And you see it in your feed, and you can jump right into it, and you can engage in it. And there are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that. And Horizon, I think fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that.

    “But there’s definitely a version of the future where, you know, any video that you see, you can, like, tap on and jump into it and, like, engage and kind of like, experience it in a more meaningful way. And I think that the investments that we’ve done in both a lot of the virtual reality software and Horizon … are actually going to pair well with these AI advances to be able to bring some of those experiences to hundreds of millions and billions of people through mobile.”

    One thing Zuckerberg didn’t mention, though: the word “metaverse.”

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  • Mark Zuckerberg was initially opposed to parental controls for AI chatbots, according to legal filing

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    Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having “explicit” conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature.

    Reuters reported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off – but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision.” New Mexico is suing Meta on charges that the company “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children;” the case is scheduled to go to trial in February. We’ve reached out to Meta for comment and will update with any response.

    Despite only being available for a brief time, Meta’s chatbots have already accumulated quite a history of behavior that veers into offensive if not outright illegal. In April 2025, The Wall Street Journal released an investigation that found Meta’s chatbots could engage in fantasy sex conversations with minors, or could be directed to mimic a minor and engage in sexual conversation. The report claimed that Zuckerberg had wanted looser guards implemented around Meta’s chatbots, but a spokesperson denied that the company had overlooked protections for children and teens.

    Internal review documents revealed in August 2025 detailed several hypothetical situations of what chatbot behaviors would be permitted, and the lines between sensual and sexual seemed pretty hazy. The document also permitted the chatbots to argue racist concepts. At the time, a representative told Engadget that the offending passages were hypotheticals rather than actual policy, which doesn’t really seem like much of an improvement, and that they were removed from the document.

    Despite the multiple instances of questionable use of the chatbots, Meta only decided to suspend teen accounts’ access to them last week. The company said it is temporarily removing access while it develops the parental controls that Zuckerberg had allegedly rejected using.

    New Mexico also filed a lawsuit against Meta in December 2024 on claims that the company’s platforms failed to protect minors from harassment by adults. Internal documents revealed early on in that complaint revealed that 100,000 child users were harassed daily on Meta’s services.

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  • Meta, YouTube face trial over allegations their tech is addictive, as TikTok settles

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    Meta and YouTube are in court this week over allegations that their social media platforms can be addictive and harmful to children, while TikTok on Tuesday chose to settle the closely watched case. 

    At the heart of the case are allegations by a 19-year-old plaintiff, identified only as “KGM,” who claims that using social media from a young age caused her to become addicted to the technology, which led her to develop depression and suicidal thoughts. 

    TikTok was also scheduled to be part of the trial, but it has settled with the plaintiff, according to Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing KGM. 

    TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    A fourth company named in the lawsuit, Snapchat parent company Snap, also settled the case last week for an undisclosed sum.

    Potential bellwether

    Legal experts have said the trial could be a bellwether for more than a thousand similar cases brought against social media players in recent years. Depending on the outcome, tech giants could be forced to overhaul their platforms, CBS News Philadelphia reported.

    The trial will also serve as a test case to see what damages, if any, may be awarded to plaintiffs, said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow of technology policy studies at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute.

    The trial, which kicks off this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is the first time major social media companies will argue their case before a jury. The jury selection process is expected to take several days, with 75 potential jurors questioned each day. 

    KGM’s lawsuit alleges that the social media addiction and mental illness she suffered were caused by deliberate design choices made by companies that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits. This argument, if successful, could sidestep the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms.

    “Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, Defendants deliberately embedded in their products an array of design features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the lawsuit says.

    A Meta spokesperson said in a statement Monday that the company strongly disagrees with the allegations outlined in the lawsuit and that it’s “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”

    José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said Monday that the allegations against YouTube are “simply not true.” Google is the parent company of YouTube.

    “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” Castañeda added. 

    Zuckerberg expected to testify

    Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in healthcare costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.

    “Plaintiffs are not merely the collateral damage of Defendants’ products,” the lawsuit says. “They are the direct victims of the intentional product design choices made by each Defendant. They are the intended targets of the harmful features that pushed them into self-destructive feedback loops.”

    The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

    “Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” Meta said in a recent blog post. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal. Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges and substance abuse.”

    School lawsuits

    The case will be the first in a slew of cases beginning this year that seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being. A federal trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.

    In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.

    TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.

    In:

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  • Meta names Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump adviser, as president and vice chairman

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    Facebook owner Meta has named Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration adviser and longtime finance executive, as president and vice chairman of the tech giant.

    Powell McCormick previously served on Meta’s board of directors — where, the company notes, she was “deeply engaged” in accelerating its artificial intelligence push across platforms. In her new management role, Meta says Powell McCormick will help guide its overall strategy, including the execution of multi-billion-dollar investments.

    The news, announced Monday, quickly gained the applause of President Trump. In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, the Republican president said the move was a “great choice” by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and noted that Powell McCormick had “served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction.”

    Zuckerberg said in a statement that Powell McCormick’s experience in global finance, “combined with her deep relationships around the world,” made her “uniquely suited to help Meta” in its future growth.

    Powell McCormick is a veteran of two presidential administrations and the Republican National Committee. She worked as a national security adviser at the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, and also held roles in the White House and the Secretary of State’s office under President George W. Bush. 

    She is married to Sen. David McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who served in high-level positions in the Commerce and Treasury departments under Bush, before he joined hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and rose to become CEO.

    And Powell McCormick has a long background in finance. She spent 16 years in senior leadership at Goldman Sachs, but was most recently vice chair, president and head of global client services at merchant bank BDT & MSD Partners. She’s also held a handful of other corporate board positions — including at oil giant Exxon Mobil.

    According to a securities filing, Powell McCormick had previously resigned from Meta’s board in December, eight months after joining as a director.

    The addition of Powell McCormick to Meta’s management team arrived amid wider efforts from California-based Meta to boost its ties with Mr. Trump, who was once banned from Facebook. Like other powerful tech CEOs, Zuckerberg has dined with the president at the White House and doubled down on U.S. investment promises worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Last year, the company also appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to its board, another familiar figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg’s nonprofit cuts ties with the immigration advocacy group he co-founded

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    Behold Mark Zuckerberg: man of principle. Witness the Meta CEO’s dedication to the most high-minded of causes: “currying favor with whoever’s in charge.” In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, Zuckerberg co-founded FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group. For years, he vocally supported providing paths to citizenship for “the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.” Now, in 2025, with Donald Trump back in power and pushing draconian immigration policies, Zuckerberg’s philanthropy organization has officially cut ties with the group. Who says Big Tech executives don’t stand for anything?

    On Friday, Bloomberg reported on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) severing its ties with FWD.us. Zuckerberg’s group provided no funding to the advocacy group for the first time this year. Up to that point, over half of the roughly $400 million donated to the nonprofit since 2013 had come from CZI.

    In addition, CZI’s chief of staff, Jordan Fox, resigned from the FWD.us board. No one else at CZI will fill the vacant slot, another first for the pro-immigration and justice reform advocacy group.

    In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson for CZI said the change had been in the works for several years. “Nearly five years ago, we shared that we were focusing on our core work in science, education, and supporting our local communities,” the spokesperson said. “As part of that transition, we committed foundational funding to FWD.us to continue their bipartisan work. We have fulfilled that financial commitment and wound down our social advocacy funding.” She added that the couple’s Biohub initiative is currently their “primary philanthropy.”

    Mark Zuckerberg listens attentively to Stephen Miller at Trump’s January inauguration (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images)

    In late 2024, Zuckerberg met with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who reacts to brown-skinned humans being sent to foreign gulags the way my dog responds to a juicy steak. Among other topics during the exchange, Miller reportedly questioned Zuckerberg’s ties to FWD.us.

    Apparently, his words resonated with Zuckerberg’s principles. In January, before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Meta unleashed an overhaul that reads like a Miller wishlist. The company ended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. That same month, it ditched third-party fact-checkers, calling them “too politically biased.” It also changed its policies to allow for “insulting language” on topics of immigration and LGBTQ+ issues. The company even added Trump backer Dana White to its board.

    It fits a broader pattern of Big Tech bending the knee to Trump.

    “We’re in the middle of a pretty rapidly changing policy and regulatory landscape that views any policy that might advantage any one group of people over another as something that is unlawful,” Zuckerberg told the New York Times in January. “Because of that, we and every other institution out there are going to need to adjust.”

    “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad,” Zuckerberg said in a January investor call. “I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock, so this is going to be a big year.”

    What a big year indeed.

    NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - DECEMBER 5: U.S. Chief Border Patrol Agent, Gregory Bovino and other agents conduct an immigration enforcement operation in a neighborhood on December 5, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana This comes on the third day of the operation in Louisiana, 'Catahoula Crunch,' launched by the Department of Homeland Security as a part of an immigration crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)

    US Chief Border Patrol Agent, Gregory Bovino and masked ICE agents in New Orleans (Ryan Murphy via Getty Images)

    Now witness the contrasting words of one of Zuckerberg’s chief rivals in Silicon Valley. “When you meet these [immigrant] children who are really talented, and they’ve grown up in America, and they really don’t know any other country besides that, but they don’t have the opportunities that we all enjoy, it’s really heartbreaking, right?” the tech executive said. “That seems like it’s one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time.”

    That “rival,” of course, was Obama-era Mark Zuckerberg in 2013.

    Despite the funding setback, thanks to our principled hero, FWD.us will press forward. “We’re thankful to our donors, past and present, and so grateful to the many new donors who have stepped up in the past few years — and particularly the influx of new supporters we have seen this year,” FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement. “This allows us to fight for immigrants under attack today and to build a better approach to immigration and criminal justice reform for many, many years to come.”

    Update, December 19, 2025, 1:19PM PT: This story was updated to include a statement from a spokesperson for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

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  • Time’s 2025 Person of the Year goes to “the architects of AI”

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    Time magazine is spotlighting key players in the artificial intelligence revolution for its 2025 Person of the Year, the magazine announced Thursday. “The architects of AI” are the latest recipients of the designation, which for more than a century has been given out on an annual basis to an influential person, group of people or, occasionally, a defining cultural theme or idea. 

    Previous Person of the Year title-holders have held varying roles in a vast range of occupations, with President Trump taking last year’s cover and Taylor Swift capturing the one before. In 2025, 

    Time’s 2025 honorific was given to the minds and financiers behind AI’s rise to renown and notoriety, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and Baidu CEO Robin Li, who spoke directly with the magazine for its feature story.

    “Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” wrote Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor-in-chief, in an editorial piece about the magazine’s decision. “And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”

    Jacobs described 2025 as “the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out,” adding: “Whatever the question was, AI was the answer.”

    The magazine prepared two separate covers for the issue. In one, artist Jason Seiler painted an interpretative recreation of the iconic 1932 photograph “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” an image that depicted workers seated side-by-side on a steel beam hanging high above New York City during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which became a symbol of American resilience during the Great Depression. 

    A cast of tech industry characters at the forefront of AI development are perched on the beam in Seiler’s recreation. Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, Lisa Su, of Advanced Micro Devices, Elon Musk, of xAI, Sam Altman, of Open AI, Demis Hassabis, of DeepMind Technologies, Dario Amodei, of Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li, of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, are all pictured, along with Huang. 

    The second cover illustration, by artist Peter Crowther, places the same executives among scaffolding at what looks like a construction site for the giant letters “AI.”

    From left, cover art by Jason Seiler and Peter Crowther for TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year magazine spread.

    Jason Seiler/TIME; Peter Crowther/TIME


    “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Huang said of balancing the pressures to implement AI responsibly and deploy it to the public as quickly as possible. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”  

    Most of the industry figures pictured on Time’s cover did not speak to the magazine for the story, so this year’s spread mainly focuses on the implications — positive, negative and in between — of the companies they have built and the technology they continue forging. 

    AI often took center stage in 2025 in investigative news reports, economic and academic studies, and in Washington, D.C., as policymakers grappled with how to regulate its evolution while tech giants scrambled to trump their competitors’ inventions, as the use of some of them, like chatbots, grew to be commonplace, at times with tragic consequences.

    “For these reasons, we recognize a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse,” Jacobs wrote in his editorial. “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

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  • Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Drops As Meta’s AI Plan Spooks Investors

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    Mark Zuckerberg fell to fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — the lowest in nearly two years — as investors spooked by Meta Platforms Inc’s planned $30 billion debt sale sent the company’s shares spiraling amid a flurry of tech earnings shaking up the ranks of the world’s richest.

    Meta’s stock fell 11% — the most since 2022 — after the company said it was going to issue the biggest investment-grade bond offering of the year to boost spending on artificial intelligence research, dropping Zuckerberg’s net worth to $235.2 billion, according to the wealth index.

    He was leapfrogged by Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos and Alphabet Inc.’s Larry Page, who hadn’t been among the four-richest people since October 2023. Alphabet’s shares climbed 2.5% after it reported revenue that beat analysts’ expectations amid a surge in demand for its cloud and AI services.

    READ: Mark Zuckerberg vs Mark Zuckerberg: The Legal Battle Over A Name

    Zuckerberg’s $29.2 billion drop was the fourth-largest one-day market-driven decline ever recorded by Bloomberg’s wealth index.

    Meta’s stock had gained 28% this year before Thursday’s swoon, adding $57 billion to Zuckerberg’s fortune. But doubts over Meta’s ballooning AI budget gave investors pause, with at least two analysts downgrading the company’s shares after it said it expected to spend up to $118 billion in capital expenditures this year and possibly more in 2026.

    Amazon shares have gained more than 30% since a mid-April low. Investors have cheered its cloud-computing unit, which has steadily grown as it has signed splashy deals with AI firms including Anthropic. The company reported third-quarter sales and profit that topped estimates, sending shares surging in after-hours trading. 
     

    (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)


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  • Those Viral Photos of Elon and Zuck Are AI. But Google Launched a New Way to Check for Fakes

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    Photos appearing to show Elon Musk and several other Big Tech CEOs have gone viral in the past week on X and Bluesky. The mundane environments, including humble apartments and McDonald’s parking lots, should have given everyone a hint that they’re fake. But there’s a new way for the average person to check for themselves whether the images were made with AI. And it’s actually really useful.

    Right off the bat, it should be said that the vast majority of AI image detectors are not reliable. Many people think you can use tools that are openly available on the web and figure out if a given image is AI. But they’re not good. For example, people often ask Grok on X whether a photo was created with generative artificial intelligence. And it frequently gets the answer wrong. Sometimes in amusing ways.

    Google developed an AI watermark called SynthID a couple of years ago, but the company didn’t allow the average user to check whether an image had the watermark. That changed just a few days ago. Now anyone can upload an image to Gemini and ask if it has the SynthID watermark, which is invisible to the naked eye.

    The watermark is embedded in the pixels and every image created with Google’s AI creation tools will have it. Checking for the watermark is now easy for anyone who opens up Gemini.

    From Google’s announcement:

    If you see an image and want to confirm it has been made by Google AI, upload it to the Gemini app and ask a question such as: “Was this created with Google AI?” or “Is this AI-generated?”

    Gemini will check for the SynthID watermark and use its own reasoning to return a response that gives you more context about the content you encounter online.

    Obviously Gemini is less equipped to tell you if an image is AI if it wasn’t made with Google tools like Nano Banana Pro. And that’s the entire reason the company appears to be launching SynthID detection in Gemini in this moment. Nano Banana Pro launched last week and it’s allowing users to make incredibly realistic images, including images of Elon Musk and other tech CEOs that look very real.

    Some of those images have recently gone viral, like one that racked up nearly 9 million views on X before migrating to other platforms like Bluesky. The image shows Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all standing together in a small apartment.

     

    Other versions of the image include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, with the men standing around in a parking lot, pictured at the top of this article. For some reason, Musk is seen smoking a cigar in a couple of them. Another image showed the men in the parking lot from a different angle. And still another had the men eating McDonald’s on the ground with a Cybertruck in the background.

    If you run any of these images through Gemini it confirms they all have the SynthID watermark. If you’re wondering whether an image appears too weird to be true, it’s probably a good idea to check with Gemini.

    Did you see that viral image of President Donald Trump with Bill “Bubba” Clinton in a very compromising position? Running that image through Gemini confirms it was made with Google’s AI image generator. Gemini won’t necessarily be able to ID every AI image with certainty. But if you run an image through Gemini and it tells you the “photo” has the SynthID watermark, you know it’s not real.

    Fake images are still going to be everywhere in the current social media environment. But at least Google has given the average user a new tool to identify at least some of the fakes for themselves. It’s only going to get harder and harder to recognize AI-generated content as the years progress. Sometimes you just need to apply some common sense. For example, do you think Elon Musk and Sam Altman would be hanging out in a parking lot together? Given their very public conflicts, that seems very unlikely.

    Then again, it seemed very unlikely that Musk and President Trump would become friendly again after the Tesla CEO accused Trump of being in the Epstein files. Weirder things have happened when billions of dollars are at stake.

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  • Meta Buried ‘Causal’ Evidence of Social Media Harm, U.S. Court Filings Allege

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    Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.

    In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

    Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

    Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing.

    “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

    Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls.

    In a statement Saturday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was stopped because its methodology was flawed and that it worked diligently to improve the safety of its products.

    “The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens,” he said.

    Plaintiffs allege product risks were hidden

    The allegation of Meta burying evidence of social media harms is just one of many in a late Friday filing by Motley Rice, a law firm suing Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat on behalf of school districts around the country. Broadly, the plaintiffs argue the companies have intentionally hidden the internally recognized risks of their products from users, parents and teachers.

    TikTok, Google and Snapchat did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Allegations against Meta and its rivals include tacitly encouraging children below the age of 13 to use their platforms, failing to address child sexual abuse content and seeking to expand the use of social media products by teenagers while they were at school. The plaintiffs also allege that the platforms attempted to pay child-focused organizations to defend the safety of their products in public.

    In one instance, TikTok sponsored the National PTA and then internally boasted about its ability to influence the child-focused organization. Per the filing, TikTok officials said the PTA would “do whatever we want going forward in the fall… (t)hey’ll announce things publicly, their CEO will do press statements for us.”

    By and large, however, the allegations against the other social media platforms are less detailed than those against Meta. The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege:

    1. Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth.

    2. Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold.”

    3. Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway.

    4. Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to act.

    5. In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Nick Clegg, Meta’s then-head of global public policy, to better fund child safety work. Meta’s Stone disputed these allegations, saying the company’s teen safety measures are effective and that the company’s current policy is to remove accounts as soon as they are flagged for sex trafficking.

    He said the suit misrepresents its efforts to build safety features for teens and parents, and called its safety work “broadly effective.”

    “We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions,” Stone said.

    The underlying Meta documents cited in the filing are not public, and Meta has filed a motion to strike the documents. Stone said the objection was to the over-broad nature of what plaintiffs are seeking to unseal, not unsealing in its entirety.

    A hearing regarding the filing is set for January 26 in Northern California District Court.

    Reporting by Jeff Horwitz in San Francisco; Editing by Nick Zieminski and David Gregorio

    The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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