Category: Technology News

LONDON (AP) — Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Friday that it will stop all political advertising in the European Union by October, blaming legal uncertainty over new rules designed to increase transparency in election campaigns.

The social media giant said in a blog post that it will no longer allow ads for political, electoral and social issues on its platforms, which also include Threads, starting in early October.

The company said it was making the decision because of the 27-nation EU’s “unworkable” Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulations.

The rules introduce “significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties,” Meta said.

It’s not the first Big Tech company to make such a move. Google said last year that it would stop serving EU users political ads before the rules take effect, in an announcement that cited similar reasons.

Under the regulations, which are set to take effect on Oct. 10, platforms will have to label political ads, disclosing who paid for them, and what campaign, referendum or legislative process they’re connected to. Ads will have to be preserved in a database, and they can only be targeted to users under strict conditions.

The rules introduce “significant, additional obligations to our processes and systems that create an untenable level of complexity and legal uncertainty for advertisers and platforms operating in the EU,” Meta said.

Violations can be hit with fines worth up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.

The rules are part of Brussels’ wider efforts to counter foreign influence and manipulation in elections, and dovetail with the bloc’s other regulations designed to protect citizens’ privacy and hold platforms more accountable for internet users’ online safety. But those moves clash with President Donald Trump’s administration, which has lashed out at the EU’s digital rulemaking.

Meta said its decision won’t affect users who want to debate politics on its platforms or prevent politicians, candidates and officer holders from “sharing political content organically.”

“They just won’t be able to amplify this through paid advertising,” it said.

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian parliament’s upper house on Friday quickly approved a bill that punishes online searches for information officially branded “extremist,” the latest in a series of moves by authorities to tighten control of the internet.

The legislation makes what it describes as “deliberately searching for and accessing extremist materials” online punishable by a fine of up to the equivalent of $64.

The bill, which was endorsed by the lower house earlier this week, is now set to be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

The official definition of extremist activity is extremely broad and includes opposition groups like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, created by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the “international LGBT movement.”

It’s not clear how authorities will track down violators.

Officials and lawmakers said ordinary internet users won’t be affected and only those who methodically seek outlawed content will be targeted. They didn’t explain how authorities would differentiate between them.

Russians widely use VPN services for access to banned content, but authorities have sought to tighten restrictions and close the loopholes. The state communications watchdog has increasingly used technology to analyze traffic and block specific VPN protocols.

Russian authorities have ramped up their multipronged crackdown on dissent after sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

Since then, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments have soared.

Multiple independent news outlets and rights groups have been shut down, labeled as “foreign agents” or outlawed as “undesirable.” Hundreds of activists and critics of the Kremlin have faced criminal charges.

Intel Corp. is shedding thousands of workers and cutting expenses as its new CEO works to revive the fortunes of the struggling chipmaker that helped launch Silicon Valley but has fallen behind rivals like Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

In a memo to employees Thursday, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel plans to end the year with 75,000 “core” workers excluding subsidiaries, through layoffs and attrition. That’s down from 99,500 core employees at the end of last year. The company previously announced a 15% workforce reduction.

“I know the past few months have not been easy. We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization, drive greater efficiency and increase accountability at every level of the company,” Tan wrote.

In addition, Intel will scrap previously planned projects in Germany and Poland and also move assembly and test operations in Costa Rica to larger sites in Vietnam and Malaysia. Costa Rica will remain a “home to key engineering teams and corporate functions,” Tan said in the memo.

In the U.S., the company said it will “further” slow construction of a semiconductor plant in Ohio.

Founded in 1968 at the start of the PC revolution, Intel missed the technological shift to mobile computing triggered by Apple’s 2007 release of the iPhone, and it’s lagged more nimble chipmakers. Intel’s troubles have been magnified since the advent of artificial intelligence — a booming field where the chips made by once-smaller rival Nvidia have become tech’s hottest commodity.

The Santa Clara, California-based company’s market cap was $98.71 billion as of the market close on Thursday, compared with Nvidia’s $4.24 trillion.

Tan said Intel is focusing on its “core product portfolio” and artificial intelligence offerings to better serve customers.

“There are no more blank checks,” Tan wrote. “Every investment must make economic sense.”

For the second quarter, Intel reported a loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, down from a loss of $1.6 billion, or 38 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the company posted a loss of 10 cents a share.

Revenue was flat at $12.9 billion. Analysts, on average, were expecting adjusted earnings of 1 cent per share on revenue of $12 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

President Donald Trump’s plan to boost artificial intelligence and build data centers across the U.S. could speed up a building boom that was already expected to strain the nation’s ability to power it.

The White House released the “AI Action Plan” Wednesday, vowing to expedite permitting for construction of energy-intensive data centers as it looks to make the country a leader in a business that tech companies and others are pouring billions of dollars into.

The plan says to combat “radical climate dogma,” a number of restrictions — including clean air and water laws — could be lifted, aligning with Trump’s “American energy dominance” agenda and his efforts to undercut clean energy.

Here’s what you need to know.

What AI means for the environment

Massive amounts of electricity are needed to support the complex servers, equipment and more for AI. Electricity demand from data centers worldwide is set to more than double by 2030, to slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today, the International Energy Agency said earlier this year.

In many cases, that electricity may come from burning coal or natural gas. These fossil fuels emit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane. This in turn is tied to extreme weather events that are becoming more severe, frequent and costly.

The data centers used to fuel AI also need a tremendous amount of water to keep cool. That means they can strain water sources in areas that may have little to spare.

What Big Tech is saying and doing about finding all that power

Typically, tech giants, up-and-comers and other developers try to keep an existing power plant online to meet demand, experts say, and most existing power plants in the U.S. are still producing electricity using fossil fuels — most often natural gas.

In certain areas of the U.S., a combination of renewables and energy storage in the form of batteries are coming online.

But tapping into nuclear power is especially of interest as a way to reduce data center-induced emissions while still meeting demand and staying competitive.

Amazon said last month it would spend $20 billion on data center sites in Pennsylvania, including one alongside a nuclear power plant. The investment allows Amazon to plug right into the plant, a scrutinized but faster approach for the company’s development timeline.

Meta recently signed a deal to secure nuclear power to meet its computing needs. Microsoft plans to buy energy from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, and Google previously signed a contract to purchase it from multiple small modular reactors in the works.

What’s at stake in the kind of energy that powers data centers

Data centers are often built where electricity is cheapest, and often, that’s not from renewables. And sometimes data centers are cited as a reason to extend the lives of traditional, fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

But just this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on the world’s largest tech players to fuel their data center needs entirely with renewables by 2030. It’s necessary to use fewer fossil fuels, he said.

Experts say it’s possible for developers, investors and the tech industry to decarbonize.

However, though industry can do a lot with clean energy, the emerging demands are so big that it can’t be clean energy alone, said University of Pennsylvania engineering professor Benjamin Lee.

More generative AI, ChatGPT and massive data centers means “relying on wind and solar alone with batteries becomes really, really expensive,” Lee added, hence the attention on natural gas, but also nuclear.

What does AI growth mean for my electricity bills?

Regardless of what powers AI, the simple law of supply and demand makes it all but certain that costs for consumers will rise.

New data center projects might require both new energy generation and existing generation. Developers might also invest in batteries or other infrastructure like transmission lines.

All of this costs money, and it needs to be paid for from somewhere.

“In a lot of places in the U.S., they are seeing that rates are going up because utilities are making these moves to try to plan,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist at research organization Project Drawdown.

“They’re planning transmission infrastructure, new power plants for the growth and the load that’s projected, which is what we want them to do,” she added. “But we as ratepayers will wind up seeing rates go up to cover that.”

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

President Donald Trump’s plan to boost artificial intelligence and build data centers across the U.S. could speed up a building boom that was already expected to strain the nation’s ability to power it.

The White House released the “AI Action Plan” Wednesday, vowing to expedite permitting for construction of energy-intensive data centers as it looks to make the country a leader in a business that tech companies and others are pouring billions of dollars into.

The plan says to combat “radical climate dogma,” a number of restrictions — including clean air and water laws — could be lifted, aligning with Trump’s “American energy dominance” agenda and his efforts to undercut clean energy.

Here’s what you need to know.

What AI means for the environment

Massive amounts of electricity are needed to support the complex servers, equipment and more for AI. Electricity demand from data centers worldwide is set to more than double by 2030, to slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today, the International Energy Agency said earlier this year.

In many cases, that electricity may come from burning coal or natural gas. These fossil fuels emit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane. This in turn is tied to extreme weather events that are becoming more severe, frequent and costly.

The data centers used to fuel AI also need a tremendous amount of water to keep cool. That means they can strain water sources in areas that may have little to spare.

What Big Tech is saying and doing about finding all that power

Typically, tech giants, up-and-comers and other developers try to keep an existing power plant online to meet demand, experts say, and most existing power plants in the U.S. are still producing electricity using fossil fuels — most often natural gas.

In certain areas of the U.S., a combination of renewables and energy storage in the form of batteries are coming online.

But tapping into nuclear power is especially of interest as a way to reduce data center-induced emissions while still meeting demand and staying competitive.

Amazon said last month it would spend $20 billion on data center sites in Pennsylvania, including one alongside a nuclear power plant. The investment allows Amazon to plug right into the plant, a scrutinized but faster approach for the company’s development timeline.

Meta recently signed a deal to secure nuclear power to meet its computing needs. Microsoft plans to buy energy from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, and Google previously signed a contract to purchase it from multiple small modular reactors in the works.

What’s at stake in the kind of energy that powers data centers

Data centers are often built where electricity is cheapest, and often, that’s not from renewables. And sometimes data centers are cited as a reason to extend the lives of traditional, fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

But just this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on the world’s largest tech players to fuel their data center needs entirely with renewables by 2030. It’s necessary to use fewer fossil fuels, he said.

Experts say it’s possible for developers, investors and the tech industry to decarbonize.

However, though industry can do a lot with clean energy, the emerging demands are so big that it can’t be clean energy alone, said University of Pennsylvania engineering professor Benjamin Lee.

More generative AI, ChatGPT and massive data centers means “relying on wind and solar alone with batteries becomes really, really expensive,” Lee added, hence the attention on natural gas, but also nuclear.

What does AI growth mean for my electricity bills?

Regardless of what powers AI, the simple law of supply and demand makes it all but certain that costs for consumers will rise.

New data center projects might require both new energy generation and existing generation. Developers might also invest in batteries or other infrastructure like transmission lines.

All of this costs money, and it needs to be paid for from somewhere.

“In a lot of places in the U.S., they are seeing that rates are going up because utilities are making these moves to try to plan,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist at research organization Project Drawdown.

“They’re planning transmission infrastructure, new power plants for the growth and the load that’s projected, which is what we want them to do,” she added. “But we as ratepayers will wind up seeing rates go up to cover that.”

___

Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

___

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: proving their chatbots aren’t “woke.”

President Donald Trump’s sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving “global dominance” in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home.

But one of Trump’s three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI.

Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order — products like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot — have so far been silent on Trump’s anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules.

While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump’s broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle — or try their best to quietly avoid it.

“It will have massive influence in the industry right now,” especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology.

The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems.

“First off, there’s no such thing as woke AI,” Montoya-Boyer said. “There’s AI technology that discriminates and then there’s AI technology that actually works for all people.”

Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they’re built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They’ve been trained on most of what’s on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who’ve posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online.

“This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with,” said former Biden administration official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of President Joe Biden’s AI industry initiatives. “Large language models reflect the data they’re trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language.”

Tech workers also have a say in how they’re designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people.

Trump’s order targets those “top-down” efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the “destructive” ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including “concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.”

The directive has invited comparison to China’s heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China’s playbook in “using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints.”

The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.

Trump’s order doesn’t call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots.

“The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage,” Secreto said. “That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government’s good graces and keep the money flowing.”

The order’s call for “truth-seeking” AI echoes the language of the president’s one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who has made it the mission of the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI.

But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen.

Despite a “rhetorically pointed” introduction laying out the Trump administration’s problems with DEI, the actual language of the order’s directives shouldn’t be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.

“It doesn’t even prohibit an ideological agenda,” just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. “Which is pretty light touch, frankly.”

Chilson disputes comparisons to China’s cruder modes of AI censorship.

“There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output,” he said. “It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments.”

With their AI tools already widely used in the federal government, tech companies have reacted cautiously. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with Trump’s directive.

Microsoft, a major supplier of online services to the government, declined to comment.

Musk’s xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump’s AI announcements but didn’t address the procurement order. xAI recently announced it was awarded a U.S. defense contract for up to $200 million, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler.

Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday.

The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump’s top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign last year. Their ire centered on Google’s February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product.

Google later explained that the errors — including generating portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show American Founding Fathers — were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems.

Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product.

“It’s 100% intentional,” said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. “That’s how you get Black George Washington at Google. There’s override in the system that basically says, literally, ‘Everybody has to be Black.’ Boom. There’s squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems.”

Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order.

“When they asked me how to define ‘woke,’ I said there’s only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it’s law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI,” Sacks wrote on X.

Rufo responded that he helped “identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems.”

But some who agreed that Biden went too far promoting DEI also worry that Trump’s new order sets a bad precedent for future government efforts to shape AI’s politics.

“The whole idea of achieving ideological neutrality with AI models is really just unworkable,” said Ryan Hauser of the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank. “And what do we get? We get these frontier labs just changing their speech to meet the political requirements of the moment.”

The data nerds are fighting back.

After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely.

Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don’t have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics.

“There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,” Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference.

The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said.

“There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can’t even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. … But right now, they’re sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,” Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU).

‘Gender’ switched to ‘sex’

In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance” before access was restored.

Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been “substantially altered,” with the majority having the word “gender” switched to “sex,” they wrote this month in The Lancet medical journal.

One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what’s been changed since many of the alterations weren’t recorded in documentation.

Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children’s Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed.

“It’s the one thing my team didn’t have,” Jarosz said at this week’s APDU conference. “And they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.”

Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are dataindex.us, which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library’s Data Mirror website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified — a job also being done by the American Statistical Association.

The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public.

“You can’t trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,” said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project.

Experts’ committee unofficially revived

Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March.

Census Bureau officials won’t be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee’s re-emergence, even if it’s outside official channels.

“We will send them recommendations but we don’t expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,” said Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans. “They just aren’t getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.”

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This story has been updated to correct the website address for dataindex.us

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social

Instagram parent company Meta has introduced new safety features aimed at protecting teens who use its platforms, including information about accounts that message them and an option to block and report accounts with one tap.

The company also announced Wednesday that it has removed thousands of accounts that were leaving sexualized comments or requesting sexual images from adult-run accounts of kids under 13. Of these, 135,000 were commenting and another 500,000 were linked to accounts that “interacted inappropriately,” Meta said in a blog post.

The heightened measures arrive as social media companies face increased scrutiny over how their platform affects the mental health and well-being of younger users. This includes protecting children from predatory adults and scammers who ask — then extort— them for nude images.

Meta said teen users blocked more than a million accounts and reported another million after seeing a “safety notice” that reminds people to “be cautious in private messages and to block and report anything that makes them uncomfortable.”

Earlier this year, Meta began to test the use of artificial intelligence to determine if kids are lying about their ages on Instagram, which is technically only allowed for those over 13. If it is determined that a user is misrepresenting their age, the account will automatically become a teen account, which has more restrictions than an adult account. Teen accounts are private by default. Private messages are restricted so teens can only receive them from people they follow or are already connected to. In 2024, the company made teen accounts private by default.

Meta faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

No question is too small when Kayla Chege, a high school student in Kansas, is using artificial intelligence.

The 15-year-old asks ChatGPT for guidance on back-to-school shopping, makeup colors, low-calorie choices at Smoothie King, plus ideas for her Sweet 16 and her younger sister’s birthday party.

The sophomore honors student makes a point not to have chatbots do her homework and tries to limit her interactions to mundane questions. But in interviews with The Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they are increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship.

“Everyone uses AI for everything now. It’s really taking over,” said Chege, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. “I think kids use AI to get out of thinking.”

For the past couple of years, concerns about cheating at school have dominated the conversation around kids and AI. But artificial intelligence is playing a much larger role in many of their lives. AI, teens say, has become a go-to source for personal advice, emotional support, everyday decision-making and problem-solving.

‘AI is always available. It never gets bored with you’

More than 70% of teens have used AI companions and half use them regularly, according to a new study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using screens and digital media sensibly.

The study defines AI companions as platforms designed to serve as “digital friends,” like Character. AI or Replika, which can be customized with specific traits or personalities and can offer emotional support, companionship and conversations that can feel human-like. But popular sites like ChatGPT and Claude, which mainly answer questions, are being used in the same way, the researchers say.

As the technology rapidly gets more sophisticated, teenagers and experts worry about AI’s potential to redefine human relationships and exacerbate crises of loneliness and youth mental health.

“AI is always available. It never gets bored with you. It’s never judgmental,” says Ganesh Nair, an 18-year-old in Arkansas. “When you’re talking to AI, you are always right. You’re always interesting. You are always emotionally justified.”

All that used to be appealing, but as Nair heads to college this fall, he wants to step back from using AI. Nair got spooked after a high school friend who relied on an “AI companion” for heart-to-heart conversations with his girlfriend later had the chatbot write the breakup text ending his two-year relationship.

“That felt a little bit dystopian, that a computer generated the end to a real relationship,” said Nair. “It’s almost like we are allowing computers to replace our relationships with people.”

How many teens are using AI? New study stuns researchers

In the Common Sense Media survey, 31% of teens said their conversations with AI companions were “as satisfying or more satisfying” than talking with real friends. Even though half of teens said they distrust AI’s advice, 33% had discussed serious or important issues with AI instead of real people.

Those findings are worrisome, says Michael Robb, the study’s lead author and head researcher at Common Sense, and should send a warning to parents, teachers and policymakers. The now-booming and largely unregulated AI industry is becoming as integrated with adolescence as smartphones and social media are.

“It’s eye-opening,” said Robb. “When we set out to do this survey, we had no understanding of how many kids are actually using AI companions.” The study polled more than 1,000 teens nationwide in April and May.

Adolescence is a critical time for developing identity, social skills and independence, Robb said, and AI companions should complement — not replace — real-world interactions.

“If teens are developing social skills on AI platforms where they are constantly being validated, not being challenged, not learning to read social cues or understand somebody else’s perspective, they are not going to be adequately prepared in the real world,” he said.

The nonprofit analyzed several popular AI companions in a “ risk assessment,” finding ineffective age restrictions and that the platforms can produce sexual material, give dangerous advice and offer harmful content. The group recommends that minors not use AI companions.

A concerning trend to teens and adults alike

Researchers and educators worry about the cognitive costs for youth who rely heavily on AI, especially in their creativity, critical thinking and social skills. The potential dangers of children forming relationships with chatbots gained national attention last year when a 14-year-old Florida boy died by suicide after developing an emotional attachment to a Character. AI chatbot.

“Parents really have no idea this is happening,” said Eva Telzer, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “All of us are struck by how quickly this blew up.” Telzer is leading multiple studies on youth and AI, a new research area with limited data.

Telzer’s research has found that children as young as 8 are using generative AI and also found that teens are using AI to explore their sexuality and for companionship. In focus groups, Telzer found that one of the top apps teens frequent is SpicyChat AI, a free role-playing app intended for adults.

Many teens also say they use chatbots to write emails or messages to strike the right tone in sensitive situations.

“One of the concerns that comes up is that they no longer have trust in themselves to make a decision,” said Telzer. “They need feedback from AI before feeling like they can check off the box that an idea is OK or not.”

Arkansas teen Bruce Perry, 17, says he relates to that and relies on AI tools to craft outlines and proofread essays for his English class.

“If you tell me to plan out an essay, I would think of going to ChatGPT before getting out a pencil,” Perry said. He uses AI daily and has asked chatbots for advice in social situations, to help him decide what to wear and to write emails to teachers, saying AI articulates his thoughts faster.

Perry says he feels fortunate that AI companions were not around when he was younger.

“I’m worried that kids could get lost in this,” Perry said. “I could see a kid that grows up with AI not seeing a reason to go to the park or try to make a friend.”

Other teens agree, saying the issues with AI and its effect on children’s mental health are different from those of social media.

“Social media complemented the need people have to be seen, to be known, to meet new people,” Nair said. “I think AI complements another need that runs a lot deeper — our need for attachment and our need to feel emotions. It feeds off of that.”

“It’s the new addiction,” Nair added. “That’s how I see it.”

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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s antitrust watchdog has proposed labeling Google’s and Apple’s mobile ecosystems with “strategic market status,” which would mandate changes at the Big Tech companies to improve competition.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s announcement Wednesday follows separate investigations it opened at the start of the year into Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, using newly acquired digital market regulations designed to protect consumers and businesses from unfair practices by Big Tech companies.

The watchdog said Apple and Google hold an “effective duopoly,” with 90-100% of mobile devices in Britain running on either mobile platform. Its investigation found a range of concerns affecting businesses and consumers such as unpredictable app reviews, inconsistent app store search rankings and commissions on in-app purchases of as much as 30%.

The CMA also unveiled separate “roadmaps” for each company outlining possible measures to improve competition, including “fair and transparent” app reviews and app store rankings to give British app developers “certainty.”

The watchdog also recommends letting app developers “steer” users to channels outside of app stores where users can make purchases, mirroring similar efforts by the European Union.

Google called the watchdog’s decision “disappointing and unwarranted,” and said Android has saved app developers money because they didn’t have to adapt to different operating models for each smartphone.

It’s “crucial that any new regulation is evidence-based, proportionate and does not become a roadblock to growth in the U.K.,” the company’s senior director of competition, Oliver Bethell, said.

Apple said it was worried the CMA’s moves could pose increase risks for users and jeopardize the U.K.’s “developer economy.”

“We’re concerned the rules the U.K. is now considering would undermine the privacy and security protections that our users have come to expect, hamper our ability to innovate, and force us to give away our technology for free to foreign competitors,” Apple said in a statement. “We will continue to engage with the regulator to make sure they fully understand these risks.”

The regulator is seeking feedback on its proposal and has until Oct. 22 to make a final decision.