Category: Technology News

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is gearing up for the release of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, a document expected to address artificial intelligence and insist on an ethics-based approach to the technology that prioritizes human dignity, social relationships and peace.

Vatican officials said Leo signed the document Friday, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or Of New Things. That document addressed the rights of workers, the limits of capitalism and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was under way.

It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope has already cited it in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the church’s social teaching, which also covers issues such as labor, justice and peace.

“I think that the Catholic Church in many ways is going to be the adult in the room on some of these debates about how we are going to integrate AI into the rest of our society,” said Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who directs its ethics institute. “For sure, the pope is going to be one of the most forceful advocates for human dignity in these discussions.”

Just days after his 2025 election, Leo told the cardinals who made him pope that the Catholic Church owed it to the world to offer the “treasury of her social teaching” to confront the challenges posed by AI on “human dignity, justice and labor.”

The American pope, a math major who is known to spend time scrolling on his phone, will likely refer to the issue this weekend, since the Vatican on Sunday marks its social communications day with a message dedicated to the human cost of the AI race. In the message, released earlier this year, Leo warned of the need to preserve real human relationships in the face of chatbot “friends,” human genius in the face of AI-powered music and video, and human reality in the face of generative AI deepfakes.

The public release of the encyclical, expected in coming weeks, will likely become a new flashpoint between the Chicago-born Leo and the Trump administration, which has made the rapid development of AI a matter of vital national economic and security strategy. The U.S. has strongly rejected international regulatory efforts to rein in AI, and domestically, the Trump administration has removed bureaucratic roadblocks slowing its development.

The document was signed as U.S. President Donald Trump wrapped up a visit to China that included AI business. Traveling with Trump on Air Force One were, among others, Elon Musk, whose social media platform X features his AI chatbot Grok, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently secured federal approval to sell H200 AI chips to Chinese buyers.

The Vatican wants its voice and values in the AI debate

Since the AI boom kicked off with ChatGPT’s debut, the technology’s breathtaking capabilities have amazed the world. Tech companies have raced to develop better AI systems even as experts warn of its risks, from existential but far-off threats like rogue AIs running out of control to everyday problems like bias in algorithmic hiring systems.

The United Nations last year adopted a new governance architecture to rein in AI after previous multilateral efforts, including AI summits organized by Britain, South Korea and France resulted only in nonbinding pledges. The EU in 2024 adopted its own Artificial Intelligence Act, applying a risk-based approach to its AI rules.

The Vatican has sought to add its voice to the debate, offering ethical guidelines for the application of AI in sectors from warfare to education and healthcare. The underlying call has been that the technology must be used as a tool to complement, and not replace, human intelligence.

The Vatican has also warned of the environmental impact of the AI race, recalling the “vast amounts of energy and water” needed for AI data centers and computational power.

“There are almost a billion and a half Catholics in the world, so that alone is reason to pay attention,” said Thomas Harmon, theology professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. “But beyond the numbers, the Catholic Church has a deep and sophisticated tradition of thinking through what it means to be human.”

The Vatican in 2020 enlisted tech companies to sign onto an AI pledge, known as the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which among other things boiled down some core principles for AI regulation, including inclusiveness, accountability, impartiality and privacy. Microsoft, IBM and Cisco were among the private sector companies that signed on.

In his final years, Pope Francis called for an international treaty to regulate AI, saying the risks of technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness were too great to merely trust in the morality of AI researchers and developers.

He also brought his authority to bear on the Group of Seven, addressing a special session on the perils and promises of AI in 2024. There, Francis said politicians must take the lead in making sure AI remains human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools always remain made by humans. He called ultimately for a ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons, colloquially known as “killer robots.”

Pope Leo is AI-savvy and concerned with peace, truth and human relations

In-house, Leo has warned priests against using AI to write their homilies, but he has also raised his voice on the broader implications of AI on world peace, labor and the very meaning of reality.

For the Augustinian pope, generative AI’s ability to misinform and deceive through deepfake imagery is particularly worrisome, given that the search for truth is a fundamental element of his religious order’s spirituality.

In a June 2025 speech to an AI conference, Leo acknowledged generative AI’s contributions to healthcare and scientific discovery. But he questioned “its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, on our distinctive ability to grasp reality.”

Leo, who has emphasized a constant appeal for peace, has also called for monitoring how AI is being used and developed in warfare in the Middle East and Ukraine, where automated weapons systems are using everything from aerial drones and maritime and ground platforms.

“What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and in Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation,” he said this past week at La Sapienza, Europe’s largest university.

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AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed from Providence, R.I.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Social media CEOs once again are being called to testify before the Senate in light of mounting legal and public pressure to protect young users on their platforms.

The leaders of Meta, Alphabet, TikTok and Snap were invited to testify next month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a committee spokesperson confirmed Friday.

The hearing comes at an inflection point for social media as court cases, proposed legislation and increased advocacy place mounting pressure on the tech companies behind these platforms to protect children and teens who use them by making material changes to how they operate.

“Americans are realizing more and more every day that they cannot trust the CEOs at the helms of these companies because they do not put our safety first,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of watchdog group The Tech Oversight Project. “If it feels like the pace is accelerating, it’s because it is.”

The CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X and other social media companies were last called to testify before the same committee in January 2024, when lawmakers grilled them on questions about the exploitation of children on their platforms and social media’s effects on young people’s lives.

The June 23 hearing is titled “Examining Tech Industry Practices and the Implications for Users and Families: Is This Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment?” The executives were invited by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Google, which owns YouTube, Shou Zi Chew of TikTok and Evan Spiegel of Snap received the invitations for the upcoming hearing. Meta declined to comment. Representatives from the other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a hearing on Wednesday held by the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, senators heard from advocates and experts on children’s social media use, including parents who have lost their children to social media-related harms.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. said at the hearing, “I think it’s time for us, on a bipartisan basis, to call these CEOs back and to ask them what’s happened in two years, to talk to them about the losses that have occurred and ask them what they’re doing.”

Social media companies have disputed allegations that they harm children’s mental health through deliberate design choices that addict kids to their platforms and fail to protect them from sexual predators and dangerous content. This year, several state and federal court cases are heading to trial, and while the details of each case vary, they are seeking to hold companies responsible for what happens on their platforms.

Two court case verdicts that came days apart in March held social media companies, and Meta in particular, accountable for harm to children using its services. A California jury determined that both Meta and YouTube designed their platforms to hook young users without concern for their well-being. TikTok and Snap were also named defendants in that case, but they settled before the trial began.

The day before the California verdict was reached, a New Mexico jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

The date of the hearing has significance for advocates. In 2024, Senators Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced a resolution to designate June 23 as Social Media Harms Victim Remembrance Day. The resolution encouraged the “government, industry and community stakeholders to take action to prevent social media-related harm.”

The remembrance day was put forward by families who trace the death of their children to social media harms. The mothers of Carson Bride and Alexander Neville, who both died on June 23, lead the initiative. Carson died by suicide at age 16 after severe cyberbullying and Alex was 14 when a drug dealer connected with him on Snapchat and sold him the pill that killed him.

LONDON (AP) — Elon Musk’s social media platform X has pledged to crack down on hate and terrorist content in Britain, the country’s media regulator said Friday.

Ofcom said X’s public commitments include restricting access in the U.K. to accounts operated by or on behalf of terrorist groups that the country has banned.

The platform also promised to review suspected illegal terrorist and hate content within 24 hours on average, and to assess 85% of the material no more than 48 hours after users have flagged it, officials said.

A spokesperson for X in the U.K. did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to concerns from some civil society groups that X failed to follow up after illegal content was flagged by users, X will engage with experts on how to improve its reporting systems, Ofcom said. X will submit quarterly performance data over a 12-month period so the regular can compare its performance against these targets.

The regulator said there’s evidence that terrorist content and illegal hate speech is “persisting” on social media sites and that it expects tech companies to take “firm action.”

“This is of particular importance in the U.K. following a number of recent hate motivated crimes suffered by the country’s Jewish community,” Oliver Griffiths, director of Ofcom’s online safety group, said.

Britain’s Jewish community, which numbers about 300,000 people, has faced growing attacks online and in the streets, including a string of arson attacks and a double stabbing that have sparked fear and anger among Jews.

X and Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok faced intensifying global scrutiny earlier this year over after Grok, which can be accessed through X, pumped out nonconsensual deepfake images.

Ofcom responded by launching an investigation into whether Grok failed to protect users from illegal content, which Griffiths said was ongoing.

The Grok controversy also resulted in European Union regulators targeting X over whether it has done enough to contain the spread of illegal content. French prosecutors, meanwhile, sought charges last week against Musk and X including denial of crimes against humanity.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their final arguments Thursday in the landmark trial whose outcome could shape the future of artificial intelligence.

Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, which started in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. His lawsuit filed in 2024 accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of betraying a plan to keep it as a nonprofit and shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.

The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that increasingly has raised fears about its potential impacts on the economy, society and even humanity’s survival. Scrutiny of Altman’s leadership comes at a crucial time for the company and its competitors, Musk’s own AI firm and Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders.

All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be among the largest ever. Musk is seeking damages and changes to OpenAI’s business structure, as well as Altman’s ouster from company leadership. If Musk wins, it could derail OpenAI’s IPO plans.

Timing of lawsuit is key question

One of the jury’s tasks is to decide if Musk filed his lawsuit in time. Much of the testimony has centered on OpenAI’s early years after its founding, but there’s a relatively short timeline to allege the claims Musk is making of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.

OpenAI has argued that Musk waited too long and cannot claim harms that occurred before August 2021.

The judge wrote in a court filing last month that “if the jury finds that Musk failed to file his action within the statute of limitations, it is highly likely” that she will “accept that finding and direct verdict to the defendants.”

If the jury decides the lawsuit was filed in time, it then has to decide if OpenAI had a “charitable trust” that was broken by OpenAI and its executives. Musk’s other claim means jurors must determine whether Altman, Greg Brockman — co-founder and president — and OpenAI unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense.

For Microsoft, a co-defendant in the trial, the jury has to decide whether the company aided and abetted that breach. Musk invested $38 million in OpenAI during its first years, and Microsoft became OpenAI’s biggest investor after Musk’s departure.

Musk lawyer focuses on Altman’s credibility

Altman and Brockman were in the courtroom Thursday, while Musk was in China with President Donald Trump and other prominent tech executives.

Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, told jurors the Tesla CEO was “sorry he could not be here.”

In his closing arguments, Molo doubled down on claims of Altman’s untrustworthiness, pointing to testimony from witnesses who called the OpenAI CEO a “liar.”

“I confronted Sam Altman with the fact that five witnesses in this trial, all people that he’s known for years and worked with, called him a liar under oath. Liar’s a very powerful word in a courtroom,” Molo said.

Those five people were Musk and another co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s chief scientist, as well as OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati and two ex-board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley.

“Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue in this case. He’s the defendants’ main witness. The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him, if you don’t believe him, they cannot win. It’s that simple,” Molo said.

Because Musk, Altman and Brockman never signed a contract that could show they had a charitable trust that OpenAI then broke, Musk’s side has made the case that jurors should consider emails and other communication between them — along with everything from OpenAI’s website to press interviews — as constituting such a trust.

A question of money

In a terse exchange while jurors were out of the room, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sharply criticized Musk’s attorney for suggesting to jurors Thursday that Musk wasn’t seeking any money in the lawsuit.

While Musk, before the trial, abandoned a bid for damages for himself, he is still seeking an unspecified amount of money to be paid to fund the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm.

Musk is seeking “billions of dollars of disgorgement,” the judge said, ordering Molo to either retract his statement or “drop your claim for billions of dollars.” They later agreed that the judge would correct the statement to jurors.

OpenAI says Musk has no evidence

Sarah Eddy, a lawyer for OpenAI, said it was Musk who has misrepresented details surrounding OpenAI’s nonprofit founding and his subsequent falling out with the other co-founders.

“Mr. Molo says that Sam Altman can’t be trusted,” she said. “Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every other witness.”

As OpenAI has argued throughout the trial, Eddy said Musk knew of and supported plans for OpenAI to form a for-profit company that would still support its mission to benefit humanity.

“Mr. Musk, he has tried to persuade you that his years-ago donations to OpenAI came with specific strings attached, that these strings were strong enough to last forever to tie OpenAI up in knots as it tries to pursue its mission, and that these strings gave Mr. Musk perpetual rights over OpenAI,” Eddy said. “But Mr. Musk has come nowhere close to making that case.”

She brought up testimony that Musk had discussed his children inheriting control of OpenAI.

“He wanted dominion over AGI,” she said, referring to artificial general intelligence, a term for advanced AI technology that surpasses humans at many tasks. “That’s why this was such a high stakes conversation. Mr. Musk wanted total control. Maybe, maybe he’d give it up over time, or maybe not. But it was up to him and that was the problem.”

Protesters outside court bash both sides

Outside the courthouse, more than a dozen protesters bashed both parties as billionaires who were eroding the environment, workforce and people’s mental health and whose industry would wipe out humanity.

There were signs that read “Stop replacing healthcare workers with chatboxes!” and “No future for workers in Musk-Altman fascist world.”

It doesn’t matter which side wins in court, said Saru Jayaraman, who is part of a campaign to push a $30 hourly wage on election ballots this fall.

“The thing is, we’re all losing, that’s the main point. Who’s really winning? The two of them,” she said, referring to Altman and Musk.

Phoebe Thomas Sorgen, a peace activist from nearby Berkeley, said there needs to be a global ban on artificial intelligence and used a slang term to say everyone is awful here, except for the jurors and activists.

“Both parties in this trial are completely hypocritical. They both claim that they’re developing AI for the benefit of humanity and that’s a lie. They’re developing it for greed.”

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Associated Press Writer Janie Har contributed to this story. O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI began closing arguments Thursday in the landmark trial whose outcome could shape the future of artificial intelligence.

Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. After Musk invested $38 million in its first years, his lawsuit filed in 2024 accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.

The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that is increasingly feared as a threat to humanity’s survival. Scrutiny of Altman’s leadership comes at a crucial time for the company and its competitors, Musk’s own AI firm and Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders.

All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be among the largest ever. In addition to damages, Musk is seeking Altman’s ouster from OpenAI’s board. If Musk wins, it could derail OpenAI’s IPO plans.

Timing of lawsuit is key question

One of the jury’s tasks is to decide if Musk filed his lawsuit in time. Much of the testimony has centered on OpenAI’s early years after its 2015 founding, but there’s a relatively short timeline to allege the claims Musk is making of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.

OpenAI has argued that Musk waited too long and cannot claim harms that occurred before August 2021.

The judge wrote in a court filing last month that “if the jury finds that Musk failed to file his action within the statute of limitations, it is highly likely” that she will “accept that finding and direct verdict to the defendants.”

If the jury decides that the lawsuit was filed in time, they then have to decide if OpenAI had a “charitable trust” and that OpenAI and its executives broke that trust. Musk’s other claim means jurors must determine whether Altman, Greg Brockman — co-founder and president — and OpenAI unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense.

For Microsoft, a co-defendant in the trial, the jury has to decide whether the company aided and abetted that breach.

Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, told jurors Thursday morning that the Tesla CEO is “sorry he could not be here.”

Musk is in China with President Donald Trump and other prominent tech executives.

Musk lawyer focuses on Altman’s credibility

Molo began making his case doubling down on claims of Altman’s untrustworthiness, pointing to testimony from five witnesses who called the OpenAI CEO a “liar.”

“I confronted Sam Altman with the fact that five witnesses in this trial, all people that he’s known for years and worked with, called him a liar under oath. Liar’s a very powerful word in a courtroom.”

Those five people were Musk and another co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s chief scientist, as well as OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati and two ex-board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley.

“Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue in this case. He’s the defendants’ main witness. The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him, if you don’t believe him, they cannot win. It’s that simple,” he said.

Because Musk, Altman and Brockman never signed an actual contract that could show they had a charitable trust that OpenAI then broke, Musk’s side has made the case that jurors should consider emails and other communication between them — along with everything from OpenAI’s website to press interviews — that constituted such a trust.

“The evidence proves Elon donated those funds for a specific charitable purpose,” he said, adding that this purpose was to create a nonprofit for the development of safe AI that would be open-source when applicable.

A question of money

In a terse exchange while jurors were out of the room, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sharply criticized Musk’s attorney for suggesting to jurors in his closing arguments that Musk wasn’t seeking any money in the lawsuit.

While Musk, before the trial, abandoned a bid for damages for himself, he is still seeking an unspecified amount of money to be paid to fund the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm.

Musk is seeking “billions of dollars of disgorgement,” the judge said, ordering Molo to either retract his statement or “drop your claim for billions of dollars.” They later agreed that the judge would correct the statement to jurors.

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Thursday denounced how investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weaponry were leading the world into a “spiral of annihilation,” as he called for peace in the Middle East and Ukraine during a visit to Europe’s largest university.

Leo’s speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University marked the first time a pope has visited the campus since Pope Benedict XVI called off a planned speech there in 2008 in the face of protests from faculty and students.

The American pope was warmly welcomed on Thursday, including by some of Sapienza’s newest students: Young Palestinians who arrived in Italy this week on a “humanitarian corridor” from Gaza to continue their studies at the university. The Italian government, working with Catholic organizations, has brought hundreds of Palestinians to study and receive medical care in Italy since the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza began in 2023.

Leo met some of the Gaza students during a brief greeting at the campus chapel, and again after his speech in the main lecture hall of the university, which was founded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303.

In his speech, Leo denounced how military spending had increased dramatically this year, especially in Europe, at the expense of education and healthcare, while “enriching elites who care nothing for the common good.”

He called for better monitoring of how AI was being developed and used in military and civilian contexts “so that it does not absolve humans of responsibility for their choices and does not exacerbate the tragedy of conflicts.”

“What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, and in Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation,” he said.

The pope said education and research must move instead in the opposite direction that values life “the lives of peoples who cry out for peace and justice!”

Leo has identified AI as one of the most critical matters facing humanity, especially its application in warfare and everyday life. They are themes he’s expected to explore more fully in his first encyclical, due to be released in the coming weeks.

Nada Rahim Jouda, 19, was one of the Gazans who met Leo, just two days after she arrived in Italy. She was still marveling at her new life studying business science in Rome, a city that she said was “like heaven for me.”

“Everything here is green and it’s not gray and troubles everywhere and miserable people in the streets,” she said.

But Jouda remains concerned for the family she left behind: her mother, recovering from leukemia, and younger sisters aged 17 and 13. Over the course of the war in Gaza, the family was forced to move four times, and her mother was unable to receive care or check-ups for her cancer.

“They all rely on me. I’m the only hope that they have,” she said.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

ARDMORE, Pa. (AP) — For high school senior Aliyah Pack, getting distracted during school is the norm. Kids in her Pennsylvania school district use iPads starting in kindergarten, switch to Chromebooks in second grade and get their own MacBooks in eighth grade.

Aliyah said she has difficulty focusing, and she finds it hard to concentrate when she’s learning from a screen. She’ll watch Netflix in class on her school laptop, hiding her earbuds behind her long, curly hair.

“It’s very hard to get into the mindset of being in school,” Aliyah said.

Aliyah’s mother saw her grades were falling and asked the school to take away her laptop. But she was told that wasn’t possible.

Across the country, parents are voicing concerns about excessive screen time in schools and lobbying educators to go back to pencil and paper. In places like Lower Merion Township, where Aliyah goes to high school, some are taking it even further. Over 600 people in the affluent Philadelphia suburb have signed a petition asking to preserve parents’ ability to opt their children out of using digital devices during the school day. The public school district has pushed back, saying it’s not feasible to let hundreds of students opt out of technology that is essential to the curriculum.

Disagreement over how tech is used in the classroom

At a meeting Monday night, school board members said they were considering many ways to respond to parental concerns about technology, but allowing opt-outs was not one of them.

“There is not an option for us to not have technology in schools,” said Lower Merion School Board member Anna Shurak.

The board was meeting to discuss updates to the district’s technology policies, including repealing a policy that allows opt outs. Over 100 people showed up to protest, many wearing buttons that said “Screens Down, Pencils Up.”

Many emphasized they’re not anti-tech — in fact, most parents agree that learning how to responsibly use computers is an essential life skill. They just don’t want tech to dominate the classroom.

“Teaching how to use technology is not the same thing as using technology to teach everything else,” said Sara Sullivan, a parent.

Technology has become inescapable at schools

The debate in Lower Merion raises the question of whether technology has become so intertwined with learning that it’s impossible to opt out. Kids use devices to play educational games, submit their homework, access online resources and write essays — but parents are questioning the value of gamified edtech software.

Subashini Subramanian said the software her second-grade daughter uses for math, DreamBox, incentivizes rushing through levels to gain points. When she encouraged her daughter to think through the problems methodically, the 8-year-old said, “If I go through all the steps, it’s slowing me down. I have to click, click, click.”

At the school board meeting, many parents said they were exhausted from battling their kids over screen time. Adam Washington says his son struggles with screen addiction, so sometimes he takes away his phone or TV — only to find him watching YouTube on the school laptop instead.

“The screen is killing him. It is killing me, and him, together with our relationship,” Washington said.

Another parent at the meeting questioned what students would do instead of using their computers.

“Opting out is not a solution. It’s avoiding the hard work of finding a solution,” Seth Ruderman said.

Parental pushback on edtech has led to change

The pushback on technology in the classroom has gained steam around the country. At least 14 states have proposed laws to limit screen time in schools, according to Ballotpedia, with four states — Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Iowa — passing such legislation.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district said it will ban screens until second grade, require daily caps for screen time per grade, ban YouTube and require an audit of all education technology contracts.

In Vermont, proposed legislation would allow not just parents but also teachers to decline to use classroom tech. Democratic State Rep. Angela Arsenault, a bill co-sponsor, said she’s responding to parents’ worries about edtech.

“Parents in many districts and states just aren’t being listened to or not being heard when they ask that their students not be forced to use these products,” Arsenault said.

The Lower Merion school district said it’s listening to community concerns and has already made changes, including blocking some problematic websites flagged by parents.

“We have wonderful teachers who have continuously prioritized human interaction and relationships,” Superintendent Frank Ranelli wrote in a letter to parents. He declined to comment to the AP for this story.

The district said it is looking into possible changes, including stronger cellphone restrictions, not allowing the youngest students to take devices home and installing software to monitor students in class.

However, surveillance software can bring its own problems and poses risks to student privacy. In 2010, the Lower Merion School District paid $610,000 to settle lawsuits by two students who alleged the district had spied on them via the webcam on their school-issued laptops.

Kids want ways to hold themselves accountable

High school student Mia Tatar, 16, raised concerns at the board meeting that there’s been an unintended consequence to the anti-tech backlash. The internet filters on school computers are now so strict, she said she’s been blocked while doing research on appropriate topics for school, like breast cancer.

Mia said students need to learn how to responsibly use technology, and adding filters or getting rid of laptops won’t do that.

“It doesn’t teach kids how to hold themselves accountable and how to be responsible for regulating their own screen time once they’re in the world,” Mia said in an interview.

Her friend Elliot Campbell, 15, said there should be strict limits on screen use in the youngest grades, but students should get more freedom as they get older.

“If we lose our laptops or if we lose the partial freedom we have on them, it’s not going to prepare us for college,” Elliot told board members at the hearing.

Fellow high schooler Joaquin Imaizumi takes a different view. He said it’s “completely unfair” to expect children to regulate their usage of devices that even adults find addictive.

“This isn’t about learning to constrain yourself,” he said in an interview. “We don’t give someone drugs and say, ‘OK, now learn how to deal with this.’”

His biggest concern is that devices make it far too tempting to access AI tools like ChatGPT, which he sees eroding his classmates’ ability to think for themselves.

“I’ve seen the atrophy of my peers’ thinking, which is existentially concerning,” Joaquin said.

The influence of AI starts early. A second-grader named Lillian Keshet, who got up to speak at the board meeting, said Google Docs will give her “suggestions” about what to write in class.

“I’m a pretty good writer by myself,” Lillian said. “I don’t need your suggestions, Google!”

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Associated Press writer Jocelyn Gecker contributed to this report from San Francisco.

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The Associated Press’ education 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.

LONDON (AP) — Meta Platforms said Wednesday it’s rolling out an “incognito” mode for WhatsApp users to have private conversations with its AI chatbot, a move intended to ease privacy concerns about sensitive information that users share in chats.

The social media company said in a blog post that incognito chat mode provides a way to have private, temporary conversations with Meta AI, its artificial intelligence assistant that’s been available on WhatsApp for a few years.

Messages will be processed in a “secure environment” that even Meta can’t access, won’t be saved by default and will disappear when exiting a session, Meta said.

Generative AI systems have been dogged by privacy concerns because the large language models that underpin these systems are trained on vast troves of data, sometimes including personal information provided by users themselves in their conversations with AI chatbots.

Rival chatbot makers already have some privacy features. Google’s Gemini chatbot has the option to disable chat history and opt out of allowing one’s data to be used in training its AI models. ChatGPT has similar controls.

Meta says it’s rolling out incognito chats because users often ask chatbots sensitive questions or include private financial, personal, health or work data in their questions.

“We’re starting ask a lot of meaningful questions about our lives with AI systems, and it doesn’t always feel like you should have to share the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, told reporters.

Incognito chat mode has safety features to prevent the chatbot from answering questions about harmful topics, Cathcart said.

It will “steer the user towards helpful information if it can and then refuse (to answer) and eventually even just stop interacting with the user completely,” Cathcart said.

Users will only be able to type in questions and get text responses; they won’t be able to upload or generate images. They’ll also have to confirm their age because Meta doesn’t allow users under 13 on its platforms.

HONG KONG (AP) — China’s Alibaba said that growth accelerated for both its artificial intelligence and cloud businesses in the latest quarter, driven by the AI boom, even though overall revenue rose just 3% to 243 billion yuan ($36 billion).

Revenue from its Cloud Intelligence Group, which focuses on cloud computing and AI developments, jumped 38% in the January-March quarter from a year ago to 41.6 billion yuan ($6.1 billion). That was faster than the 36% and 34% growth in the previous two quarters, respectively.

However, Alibaba recorded an overall of 848 million yuan ($125 million) loss from operations for the quarter, a key measure of profitability of its core operating businesses, which was down sharply from a 28.5 billion yuan gain the same period last year.

Growing technological investment was one of the main reasons for rising expenses that weighed on profitability, as technology companies globally race to invest to boost infrastructure in supporting the ballooning AI demand.

The Hangzhou-based company, which has about 130,000 employees, last year pledged investments of at least 380 billion yuan over three years in cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

This week, Alibaba said it has fully connected its flagship Qwen AI app to its e-commerce platform Taobao, allowing users to “browse, compare, place orders, and manage deliveries through natural conversation” in hopes of driving up demand. It launched its “agentic” AI tool Wukong in March in expanding its products for commercial customers, and raised prices for some AI services.

“Alibaba’s AI has moved beyond the initial investment phase and progressed commercialization at scale,” said CEO Eddie Wu on Wednesday in prepared remarks during an earnings call.

Alibaba’s U.S.-traded shares jumped more than 7% after Wednesday’s results announcement.

Many technology companies are now facing the challenge of boosting AI-related revenue and proving that the huge investment costs can pay off. For Alibaba, “we should expect AI-related growth to accelerate further,” said Jacob Cooke, CEO of Beijing-based consultancy WPIC Marketing + Technologies.

In March, Alibaba pledged a goal of surpassing $100 billion in annual AI and cloud revenue within the next five years.

Tencent, a key rival of Alibaba in AI, on Wednesday also reported weaker-than-expected revenue for the January-March quarter. Net profit was up 21%, which fell short of expectations, although some analysts believe its AI investments were also starting to deliver return.

Capital expenditure across Chinese AI companies is likely to remain elevated as the “investment phase is far from over,” wrote Chelsey Tam, an analyst at Morningstar, in a recent research note, while the AI firms are going to increasingly pivot from user acquisition to monetization.

The company that operates online learning system Canvas said it struck a deal with hackers to delete the data they pilfered in a cyberattack that created chaos for students, many of them in the middle of finals.

Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said in an online post that it “reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident.”

The company didn’t provide any details on the agreement, including whether it involved a payment, and didn’t elaborate who was behind the hack. Instructure temporarily took the system offline while it investigated, locking out students and faculty.

A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for last week’s breach, threatening to leak data involving nearly 9,000 schools worldwide and 275 million individuals if schools did not pay a ransom by May 6. The group then extended the deadline, indicating some schools had engaged with them to negotiate.

ShinyHunters also was behind a smaller breach of Infrastructure last year. A lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Utah alleged Instructure did not do enough to protect the platform used by millions of students and made itself “easy prey for cybercriminals.”

As part of the deal, the data was returned to Instructure. The company said Monday that it also received “digital confirmation” that the hackers destroyed any remaining copies, in the form of “shred logs.”

The company acknowledged that there was no way to be sure that the data was erased for good, and said it took action because of concerns about potential publication of the data.

“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” Instructure said.

Cybersecurity experts were skeptical it was the end of the attack. Cynthia Kaiser, a former deputy director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said the reported deal suggests that a ransom was likely paid.

“What victims must understand is that payment does not end the threat,” Kaiser, now the senior vice president of the Halcyon Ransomware Research Center, said in a written statement. “Stolen data will be used against clients and users for as long as it remains profitable to do so.”

The data breach appeared to involve student ID numbers, email addresses, names and messages on the Canvas platform, Instructure’s chief information security officer, Steve Proud, said earlier this month. The company found no evidence that passwords, dates of birth, government identification or financial information were compromised, it said.

The company said it was working with “expert vendors” to do a forensic analysis, “further harden” its systems, and carry out a “comprehensive review of the data involved.”

The disruption caused panic last week among students and faculty members when they were locked out of a platform they rely on to manage grades and access course notes and assignments.

Schools and universities use Canvas to manage nearly all aspects of instruction. The platform acts as a gradebook, a hub for digital lectures and course materials, a discussion board for classroom projects, and a messaging platform between students and instructors.

Some courses also give quizzes and exams on the platform, or use it as a portal where final projects and papers are submitted on deadline.

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Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this report.