Two former executives for the now-shuttered classified site Backpage.com are scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in Phoenix for conspiring to facilitate prostitution by selling sex ads.
A prosecutor has recommended five years of probation and restitution payments for former CEO Carl Ferrer and sales director Dan Hyer, both of whom pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2018. The prosecutor said both men acknowledged their crimes and cooperated with authorities by testifying against a company founder during the 2023 trial.
Backpage founder Michael Lacey was convicted of a single count of international concealment money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison and fined $3 million, though he remains free while he pursues an appeal. Chief financial officer John Brunst and executive vice president Scott Spear are each serving 10-year sentences for conspiracy and money laundering convictions.
Prosecutors had argued that Backpages operators ignored warnings to stop running prostitution ads, some involving children. The operators were accused of giving free ads to sex workers and cultivating arrangements with others who worked in the industry to get them to post ads with the company.
Backpages operators said they never allowed ads for sex and made an effort to try to delete such ads by assigning employees to remove them and creating automated tools. Their legal team maintained the content on the site was protected by the First Amendment.
In pleading guilty, Ferrer acknowledged knowing a majority of Backpages revenues came from escort ads, conspiring to sanitize ads by removing photos and words that were indicative of prostitution and publishing a revised version of the notices.
In sentencing memos, both the prosecutor and Ferrers attorneys say he helped shut down the site through his cooperation.
His lawyers say Ferrer provided evidence linking defendants to the criminal enterprise and testified that Backpages increase in revenue stemmed mostly from prostitution.
Hyer has previously participated in a scheme to give free ads to sex workers in a bid to draw them away from competitors and win over their future business.
His attorney said her client is sincerely remorseful for his actions and contributed directly to the convictions of other defendants.
Laceys first trial in 2021 ended in a mistrial when another judge concluded prosecutors had too many references to child sex trafficking in a case where no one faced such a charge.
Before launching Backpage, Lacey founded the Phoenix New Times weekly newspaper with James Larkin, who was charged in the case and died by suicide in 2023 just before the second trial against Backpages operators was scheduled to begin.
Lacey and Larkin held ownership interests in other weeklies such as The Village Voice and ultimately sold their newspapers in 2013. But they held onto Backpage, which authorities say generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until 2018, when the government shut it down.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in June 2021 said the FBIs ability to identify victims and sex traffickers had decreased significantly after Backpage was seized by the government, because law enforcement was familiar with the site and Backpage was generally responsive to requests for information.
The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.U.S. companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behavior. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.For example, the AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome, according to thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by AP and revealed here for the first time. IBM and other companies that responded said they fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls governing business in China, past and present.Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.Some tech companies even specifically addressed race in their marketing. Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell’s official WeChat account in 2019. And until contacted by AP in August, biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.”While the flood of American technology slowed considerably starting in 2019 after outrage and sanctions over atrocities in Xinjiang, it laid the foundation for China’s surveillance apparatus that Chinese companies have since built on and in some cases replaced. To this day, concerns remain over where technology sold to China will end up.For example, 20 former U.S. officials and national security experts wrote a letter in late July criticizing a deal for NVIDIA to sell H20 chips used in artificial intelligence to China, with 15% of revenues going to the U.S. government. They said no matter who the chip is sold to, it will fall into the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services.NVIDIA said it does not make surveillance systems or software, does not work with police in China and has not designed the H20 for police surveillance. NVIDIA posted on its WeChat social media account in 2022 that Chinese surveillance firms Watrix and GEOAI used its chips to train AI patrol drones and systems to identify people by their walk, but told the AP those relationships no longer continue. The White House and Department of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.Thermo Fisher and hard drive maker Seagate promoted their products to Chinese police at conferences and trade shows this year, according to online posts. Officers stroll the streets of Beijing with Motorola walkie talkies. NVIDIA and Intel chips remain critical for Chinese policing systems, procurements show. And contracts to maintain existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and gear remain ubiquitous, often with third parties.What started in China more than a decade ago could be seen as a cautionary tale for other countries at a time when the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rising sharply, including in the United States. Emboldened by the Trump administration, U.S. tech companies are more powerful than ever, and President Donald Trump has rolled back a Biden-era executive order meant to safeguard civil rights from new surveillance technologies.As the capacity and sophistication of such technologies has grown, so has their reach. Surveillance technologies now include AI systems that help track and detain migrants in the U.S. and identify people to kill in the Israel-Hamas war. China, in the meantime, has used what it learned from the U.S. to turn itself into a surveillance superpower, selling technologies to countries like Iran and Russia.The AP investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show. Their sales pitches made both publicly and privately cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons,” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield.”Other companies, like Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies. Four practicing lawyers said sales like those uncovered by AP could potentially go against at least the spirit, if not the letter, of U.S. export laws at the time, which the companies denied.American technology made up nearly every part of China’s surveillance apparatus, AP found:MILITARY AND POLICE: In 2009, Chinese defense contractor Huadi worked with IBM to build national intelligence systems, including a counterterrorism system, used by the Chinese military and China’s secret police, the Ministry of State Security. Chinese agents sold IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to the same ministry and to Chinese police, including in Xinjiang, through the 2010s, leaked emails and marketing posts show. IBM said it has no record of its i2 software ever having been sold to the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.SURVEILLANCE: NVIDIA and Intel partnered with China’s three biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to camera systems used for video surveillance across China, including Xinjiang and Tibet, until sanctions were imposed. NVIDIA said in a post dating to 2013 or later that a Chinese police institute used its chips for surveillance technology research.ETHNIC REPRESSION: IBM, Oracle, HP, and ArcGIS developer Esri sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of geographic and mapping software to Chinese police that allows officers to detect when blacklisted Uyghurs, Tibetans or dissidents stray out of provinces or villages. As late as 2019, with detentions in Xinjiang well underway, Dell hosted an industry summit in its capital. Dell and then-subsidiary VMWare sold cloud software and storage devices to police and entities providing data to police in Tibet and Xinjiang, even in 2022 after abuses there became widely known.IDENTIFICATION: Huadi worked with IBM to construct China’s national fingerprint database; IBM told AP it never sold “fingerprinting-specific product or technology” to the Chinese government “in violation of US law.” HP and VMWare sold technology used for fingerprint comparison by Chinese police, while Intel partnered with a Chinese fingerprinting company to make their devices more effective. IBM, Dell, and VMWare also promoted facial recognition to Chinese police. China’s police and police DNA labs bought Dell and Microsoft software and equipment to save genetic data on police databases.CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL: In 2016, Dell boasted on its WeChat account that its services assisted the Chinese internet police in “cracking down on rumormongers.” Seagate said on WeChat in 2022 that it sells hard drives “tailor made” for AI video systems in China for use by police to help them “control key persons,” despite facing backlash for selling drives in Xinjiang.For extended findings, click here.“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate.Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and tech conglomerate Broadcom, which acquired VMWare and cloud company Pivotal in 2023, did not comment on the record; HP, Motorola and Huadi did not respond, and Esri denied involvement but did not reply to examples. Microsoft told AP it found no evidence that it “knowingly sold technology to the military or police” as part of the “Golden Shield” update.Some U.S. companies ended contracts in China over rights concerns and after sanctions. For example, IBM said it has prohibited sales to Tibet and Xinjiang police since 2015, and suspended business relations with defense contractor Huadi in 2019.However, sanctions experts noted that the laws have significant loopholes and often lag behind new developments. For example, a ban on military and policing gear to China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre does not take into account newer technologies or general-use products that can be applied in policing.They also noted that the law around export controls is complicated. Raj Bhala, an expert in international trade law at the University of Kansas, said the issues the AP described fell into “the kind of gray area that we put in exams.”“It would raise concerns about possible inconsistencies, possible violations,” said Bhala, who emphasized he was speaking generally and not about any specific company. “But I really stress ‘possible.’ We need to know more facts.”While German, Japanese and Korean firms also played a role, American tech firms were by far the biggest suppliers.The Xinjiang government said in a statement that it uses surveillance technologies to “prevent and combat terrorist and criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and legal rights and that it does not target any particular ethnicity. The statement said Western countries also use such technology, calling the U.S. “a true surveillance state.” Other government agencies did not respond to a request for comment, including China’s police and authorities in the Yangs’ province.This technology still powers the police database that controls the Yangs and other ordinary people. An estimate based on Chinese government statistics found at least 55,000 to 110,000 were put under residential surveillance in the past decade, and vast numbers are restricted from travel in Xinjiang and Tibet. China’s cities, roads and villages are now studded with more cameras than the rest of the world combined, analysts say one for every two people.“Because of this technology we have no freedom at all,” said Yang Guoliang’s elder daughter, Yang Caiying, now in exile in Japan. “At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
Selling surveillance superpowers
Back when China was emerging from the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, three in four Chinese were farmers, including the Yangs. They lived in a three-room home of tiles and pounded earth nestled among the lush, humid fields of the Yangtze River delta.After Chairman Mao Zedong’s death that year, Beijing’s new leaders opened China to the world, and American tech firms like HP and IBM rushed in. But there were hard limits on how much change the government would accept. In 1989, the Tiananmen pro-democray protests rattled Beijing, which sent tanks and troops to shoot students.Soon after, Beijing began planning the “Golden Shield,” aimed at digitizing China’s police force.In 2001, the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks turbocharged interest in surveillance technology. One researcher claimed authorities could have foiled the attack by unearthing connections between hijackers through public information in databases.American companies cashed in, selling the U.S. billions of dollars in surveillance technologies they said could prevent crime and terror attacks.They spotted the same sales opportunity in China. Researchers warned surveillance technologies would be “instruments of repression” in the hands of authoritarian states. Yet IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and other American companies clinched orders to supply Beijing’s “Golden Shield.”“China didn’t have this kind of thing before,” said Wang, a former Chinese police official in Xinjiang who asked to be identified only by last name for fear of retaliation. “These concepts all came from the West.”Soon, disturbing stories emerged. Chinese police blocked sensitive news, pinpointing dissidents with unnerving precision. They stalked adherents of the Falun Gong sect banned by authorities. Congress demanded explanations from tech companies.In 2008, documents leaked to the press showed Cisco saw the “Golden Shield” as a sales opportunity, quoting a Chinese official calling the Falun Gong an “evil cult.” A Cisco presentation reviewed by AP from the same year said its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web. Followers sued Cisco, which is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the lower court ruling that allowed the lawsuit.At a human rights conference in February, then-Cisco lawyer Katie Shay said companies had a responsibility to understand how customers might misuse their technology for “surveillance and censorship.”“A lot of people have suffered at the hands of their government, and I want to acknowledge that pain,” said Shay, who left Cisco in June. “I also will say that Cisco disputes the allegations of Cisco’s involvement.”Cisco told the AP it is committed to human rights, but the court allegations may “open the floodgates for suits against U.S. corporations merely for legal exports of off-the-shelf goods and services.”As Cisco was summoned before Congress, IBM partnered with a Chinese defense contractor on Phase Two of China’s “Golden Shield.”Classified government blueprints obtained by AP show that in 2009, IBM worked with Huadi, the state-owned subsidiary of China’s biggest missile military contractor spun off from China’s Ministry of Defense, to build out predictive policing.“Consolidate Communist Party rule,” read the Huadi blueprint, which showed the databases would track hundreds of thousands of people online.In response to AP’s questions, IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”:” If older systems are being abused today and IBM has no knowledge that they are the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.”Back in 2009, Beijing needed the technology urgently to quash critics bonding online. Among them were the Yangs.In April that year, local authorities ordered the Yangs and more than 300 other families in their village off their land. Developers coveted their prime lakefront property for “Western-style” apartments and villas, with fountains, football fields and shopping centers.The Yangs had no idea police were installing systems that could target families like theirs. They just knew their land was being seized in return for just a unit in a five-floor walk-up, too many stairs for their elderly mother to climb.The Yangs and other farmers across China filed complaints.“I discovered the way the government took our land was illegal,” Yang Caiying said. “They cheated us.”
Predict and prevent
In July 2009, three months after the Yang land was seized, riots erupted on the other side of the country in Xinjiang. Gory images of a Uyghur lynched at a toy factory spread online, angry Uyghurs took to the streets, and hundreds were killed.Once again, American firms pitched their technology as the solution.The government sent troops and cut Xinjiang’s phone and internet connections. In secret meetings, officials concluded that police had failed to spot the danger signs because they couldn’t identify Uyghurs deemed separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists, three engineers then working for the Xinjiang government told AP.At the time, Xinjiang police and data systems were already running on American technology including IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft, the engineers said, which AP verified by reviewing government contracts. But the databases were unconnected.So Xinjiang launched an ambitious initiative to fuse data from all available sources, including banks, railways, and phone companies, into a central database. Officials demanded complete information on all suspicious individuals and their relatives going back three generations, according to the engineers, who described specific meetings in which they participated. Two asked to remain anonymous, fearing for their family in China; the third, Nureli Abliz, is now in Germany.Soon, lucrative contracts went up for bidding. Among those seeking to profit was IBM.“Prevent problems before they happen,” IBM promised Chinese officials. In an August 2009 pamphlet, IBM cited the Xinjiang riots and said its technology could help the government “ensure urban safety and stability.”IBM executives fanned out across the country to court Chinese officials. In December 2009, they set up a new “IBM Institute for Electronic Governance Innovation” in Beijing. In 2011, IBM acquired i2, a software program designed to prevent “terrorist threats.” IBM touted i2’s ability to analyze Chinese social media and licensed a Shanghai-based firm called Landasoft to sell it to China’s police, corporate records show.Chinese police purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of products from companies like IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft to upgrade the “Golden Shield” policing systems, a leaked accounting ledger acquired by AP from a whistleblower shows.In the confrontation between the Chinese state and its critics, American technology tipped the scales of power.In 2011, thieves ransacked the Yangs’ house, hunting for their property deed. They didn’t find it.Two years later, bald men with tattoos and gold chains smashed down their door, shattered windows and flipped furniture to bully them out of their home anyway. Yang’s mother dropped to the floor in terror. Doctors diagnosed a heart attack, but the Yangs didn’t have money for a pacemaker.Furious, the Yangs sued local police. In June 2015, a judge ruled their land had been seized illegally. The Yangs celebrated.But just weeks after the ruling, officers identified human rights lawyers through the “Golden Shield” technology, cuffed hundreds of them and pressed them into police vans across China. One lawyer later recalled how police monitored his messages on human rights in WeChat before they grabbed him, shackled him to a chair, and tortured him.Overnight, China’s budding rights-defense movement was dealt a fatal blow and with it, the Yangs’ case. The Yangs wre called in and curtly told the judgment was being overturned, their lawsuit dismissed without trial.“We really had too much faith in the law, you know?” Yang Guoliang said, his hands clenched in fists. “It turned out to be worthless.”
Technologies of terror
In the meantime, Beijing was transforming Xinjiang into the most heavily surveilled place on earth, sweeping around a million people into camps and prisons.When bombs tore through a train station in Xinjiang’s capital hours after a visit by leader Xi Jinping in 2014, Xi demanded a crackdown.“He was super angry,” said Abliz, one of the engineers with the Xinjiang government. “They concluded they weren’t surveilling Uyghurs closely enough.”The next year, in April 2015, Abliz attended a closed-door exposition in Xinjiang. A booth ran by Landasoft, the former IBM partner, caught his eye.After years as a vendor of IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to Xinjiang police, Landasoft had struck out on its own, touting i2-like software it said could detain extremists before they caused trouble. The similarity was no coincidence: Landasoft’s software was copied from i2, according to leaked emails and records.“The platform is developed based on i2,” a Landasoft project manager wrote in an email.It used a proprietary data visualization system developed by i2. The software powered what was called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, with the authority to trigger arrests.Abliz went numb.“I thought then that this was the end of humanity,” he said.Landasoft did not respond to repeated requests for comment. IBM said it cut ties with Landasoft in 2014 and was not aware of any interaction between Landasoft and the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.In the autumn of 2015, months after the Xinjiang expo, Landasoft signed contracts with Xinjiang police, emails show. Workers installed millions of cameras and wired over 7,000 police outposts, often built just hundreds of meters apart. Nearly 100,000 officers were recruited to pound on doors and collect names, addresses, fingerprints and face-scans.Though Chinese hardware was favored, foreign software was irreplaceable for its performance and compatibility with China’s American-built systems, engineers told AP. That included server and database software from Oracle and Microsoft and cloud software from VMWare, which Dell acquired in 2016.In late 2016, the crackdown began. Internal documents, a leaked copy of the Landasoft software and interviews with 16 former Xinjiang police officers, officials and engineers reveal how the system worked.Landasoft’s software combined data fed into a central police database to compile a dossier on vast swaths of Xinjiang’s population, tagging them with categories like “went on pilgrimage” or “studied abroad.” Administrators then questioned them, computed risk scores and decided who to detain.Hundreds of thousands of people were tagged “untrustworthy”, leaked messages show. Leaked documents show the IJOP flagged 24,412 people as “suspicious” in just one week in 2017, leading to most being detained.“They thought it better to grab thousands of innocents than let a single criminal slip free,” Abliz said.The technology was crude and flawed. Landasoft emails show engineers frantically fixing a software bug to release hundreds of people categorized as high-risk. And surveillance cameras often misidentified people, a former Xinjiang police officer found when he checked their ID cards.Yet officers were told “computers cannot lie” and that the IJOP’s listed targets were “absolutely correct,” Abliz said. The software’s orders were often obeyed fearfully, unquestioningly.“The tech companies told the government their software is perfect,” Abliz said. “It’s all a myth.”
Minority report
The all-encompassing surveillance forced total compliance: Officers arrested colleagues, neighbors informed on each other.In May 2017, Kalbinur Sidik, a teacher now in the Netherlands, was summoned to her district government office in a yellow brick apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital. A young Uyghur woman, fresh from college, rose and introduced herself as a local official. Sidik, the woman explained, was being appointed as the head of her building, responsible for collecting information on neighbors.“What’s this data going to be used for?” Sidik asked.The woman looked at a computer, with a Landasoft program running and lists of names and tags: “Goes out at night,” “Overseas phone,” “unemployed.” One button stood out: “Push Alert.”The woman clicked it, and the screen filled with names. These people, the woman explained, would be detained and interrogated for suspected ties to terrorism. Sidik’s eyes widened.“I hated her for what she was doing,” Sidik said. “I knew those people would disappear.”Xinjiang officials issued arrest quotas, Sidik and five other former officers and administrators said. Sidik watched with horror as the number of people who attended her compound’s weekly mandatory flag-raising ceremony shrank, from 400 to just over 100, as residents were arrested.At the district office, she observed the logos popping up on screens: Oracle, Microsoft, Intel. The AP found evidence of products from all three companies used in Xinjiang’s policing and data systems during the crackdown, along with Esri, Seagate, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Thermo Fisher, and VMWare, then owned by Dell, which advertised cooperation with Xinjiang authorities on its website.Sidik asked her neighborhood official where it all came from.“We’ve spent a lot of money to import foreign technology,” she recalls the official telling her.Among those caught in the digital dragnet was Parida Qabylqai, an ethnic Kazakh pharmacist at a military hospital in Xinjiang.In February 2018, Qabylqai was flagged by the IJOP for visiting her parents in Kazakhstan. At first, her boss thought it was a mistake.“You’re a good person, you shouldn’t be listed,” she recalled him saying. Then he checked the IJOP and spotted her name.“It’s really serious! You’re going to end up in the camps,” he blurted out in shock.An officer pressed a confession into her hands.“What did I do wrong?” Qabylqai asked.“Just sign!” the officer shouted.Qabylqai was cuffed, hooded, and whisked to a camp, where cameras watched her day and night, even peering at her naked body in the toilet. Guards barking over speakers ordered her not to speak or even to move.“They did things to us that no human being should ever have to experience,” she said. “But they said my name was listed by the IJOP, so they didn’t need to explain anything.”Even enforcers of the system weren’t spared.In 2018, Liu Yuliang, a civil servant in Xinjiang, was ordered to the home of a young police officer in his village. He and dozens of others stood, silent, as the officer embraced his sobbing, pregnant wife.The officer had forced many people into the camps. Then he himself was flagged for detention.Too fearful to resist, Liu went along with the arrest, just as the young officer had done before him.Landasoft software alerted police when flagged people did anything labeled suspicious, like going out at night or logging on the internet repeatedly. Liu was sent to knock on doors, questioning residents whose “eyes filled with fear.”As police swept Xinjiang, Landasoft purchased software from Pivotal, a cloud company later acquired by Broadcom, emails show. And Landasoft registered accounts on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in 2018, seeking to expand cloud offerings to police clients, emails show.AWS said Landasoft “consumed very limited cloud services for a brief period” and not for software in the Xinjiang crackdown. Microsoft said Landasoft used Azure services through a self-service portal retired in 2021, and that any Landasoft data was deleted.The Xinjiang government told the AP: “There is absolutely no such thing as ‘large-scale human rights violations.'”Liu eventually resigned and returned to his hometown in eastern China, trying to forget what he had seen and done. But he noted with unease the new cameras and checkpoints being installed around his home.Four days later, state security called and summoned him for questioning. The all-seeing surveillance apparatus had followed him home.“The Xinjiang model is being copied everywhere, in every city in China,” Liu said.In 2024, Liu left China, ignoring an airport officer who warned that wherever he went, he would be watched.“This technology has no emotions,” Liu said. “But in the hands of a government that doesn’t respect the law, it becomes a tool for evil.”
Automated autocracy
The Yangs are still trapped by U.S. technology. IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, and Seagate servers, switches and drives power police systems targeting them, maintenance contracts dating to this year show. Intel and NVIDIA chips process data. Oracle and VMWare software run the database.But the harder the Yangs push, the harder the system pushes back.In February 2023, they went to the National Public Complaints Administration in Beijing with a letter. Two days later, police grabbed them from their hotel and drove them home.The Yangs persisted, trying to plead their case to Beijing. In the following months, they were seized at bus and train stations, beaten at a hospital and abducted by ambulance.Last July, Yang’s mother tried again. She carried a letter for Chinese leader Xi Jinping:“They’re using violence and kidnapping to bar me from petitioning and seeking medical treatment We beg you, General Secretary, to save us.”Outside Beijing’s leadership compound, burly men in black tackled Yang’s mother to the ground. She was jailed for over a month, questioned, strip-searched, force-fed medication and deprived of food and water. In October, she and Yang’s sister disappeared.The Yangs’ house is now the last left standing. The father lives alone.His relatives have cut contact, unnerved by the flock of police that tail him. Thousands of pages of documents stashed in drawers, stuffed in bags, and piled in boxes in a bathtub chronicle every step of their 16-year quest for justice.In April, Yang was sent criminal charges showing how much police had spent to stop the family’s “abnormal petitioning.”The cost: About $37,000.Yael Grauer is an independent investigative tech reporter. AP journalists Garance Burke in San Francisco, Larry Fenn in New York and Byron Tau in Washington contributed to this report, along with Myf Ma, an independent investigative journalist, researcher and programmer in New York covering China. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
Dake Kang and Yael Grauer, Associated Press
At a Home Depot parking lot, a man patrols on a bicycle for federal immigration agents, toting a megaphone on his hip so he can blast a warning to day laborers waiting to land a landscaping or construction job.The workers from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere carry whistles to also sound the alarm, while activists swap details over two-way radios about whether cars whizzing by could be unmarked vehicles carrying officers preparing for a raid.Their work is cut out for them. Agents have raided the lot outside the 108,000 square-foot Home Depot store in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles at least five times this summer, rounding up some immigrants and sending others running in search of safety.Home Depot stores in Southern California have long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers in the country both legally and illegally. Now the locations have become a prime target for immigration agents.In fact, Home Depot was reportedly mentioned as a target for immigration raids by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, earlier this year.At least a dozen Home Depot stores have been targeted, some of them repeatedly, in Southern California since the administration stepped up its immigration crackdown this summer.Immigrant advocates sued over the raids but on Monday the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue conducting sweeping immigration operations for now in Los Angeles, the latest victory for the Trump administration at the high court. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it “a win” for the rule of law, while advocates swiftly criticized the ruling.“When you undermine the civil rights of those who are more vulnerable, you undermine the civil rights of everyone else,” Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said Monday during a press conference held near a Home Depot.Last month, outside a Home Depot in Monrovia, a man ran onto a nearby freeway to flee immigration authorities, and was struck and killed.The Van Nuys location has been hit particularly hard.
Escaping three raids
Javier, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in U.S. states spanning from California to Kansas over the past three decades, said he narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck, peeling off in his car and dashing inside among the busy shoppers.“They come in big vans and they all go out to chase people,” he said in Spanish, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of government reprisal.The store sits on property near the Van Nuys Airport that is owned by Los Angeles World Airports, a department in a city whose policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that her office supports the litigation against the sweeps and has trained city workers to prepare for immigration enforcement on city-owned properties.City councilperson Ysabel Jurado has voiced opposition to a plan for a new Home Depot in her district, contending the company hasn’t done enough to fight the raids.Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said “these locations should be protected by the city to the same degree the public libraries are.”The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Contractors make up about half its business
Immigrant advocates say the country’s largest big-box home improvement retailer benefits from having an ample labor pool at the ready for contractors and should do more to protect customers, employees and day laborers.The Atlanta-based company, with nearly $160 billion in annual sales through Feb. 2, counts on contractors and professionals for about half its business and that’s a key draw for largely immigrant-day laborers. Its second-ranked competitor, Lowe’s, gets about 30% of its business from contractors, relying more heavily on homeowners and DIY enthusiasts, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.“So if you’re going for the volume, if you’re going where people are, and you can enforce things, you go to Home Depot,” Saunders said.The raids haven’t hurt overall sales, but the disruptions could affect specific stores by making some customers afraid to shop there, Saunders said.In the Los Angeles area, the company’s stores saw a 10.7% decline in foot traffic in June from a year ago and a 10% decline in July, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage. That’s a larger drop than the 3.8% and 2.7% declines reported at stores nationwide for the same months.
Home Depot says it is not alerted to raids
Home Depot has repeatedly denied being involved in immigration enforcement operations. The company’s late co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump, though a Home Depot political action committee has donated to both Democrats and Republicans.The company said it isn’t told if a raid is going to take place at any of its roughly 2,300 stores.“We tell associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement activity immediately and not engage with the activity for their safety,” said Beth Marlowe, a company spokesperson, adding that if employees feel uneasy after a raid, they can go home for the rest of the day with pay.In Van Nuys, witnesses said federal agents have arrested those in the lot before appearing to ask about their immigration status. Local managers have shut the store’s automated glass doors to keep agents out, they said.“They’re just fishing,” said Luis, a 37-year-old day laborer who is a legal resident and grew up in the United States after arriving from Mexico as a child. He declined to use his last name fearing government reprisal.
‘Home Depot is not an innocent bystander’
The trend of workers gathering outside Home Depot began with the rise of the home improvement retail store that allowed people, including contractors, to price shop and buy materials directly, said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.“The basis of competition began to shift and what distinguishes a contractor from getting the bid or not more and more has to do with labor costs,” Theodore said. “Home Depot is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Their sources of success were instrumental in catalyzing this change.”As the trend grew so did complaints about workers congregating in store parking lots, and in 2008 Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring similar retailers opening up to adopt plans to provide relief, such as a seating area, bathrooms and trash facilities.In the parking lot in Van Nuys, a non-profit runs a labor center that takes workers’ names and tracks employers who fail to pay as promised. That’s one reason workers said they keep returning even after the repeated raids.Theother is community.Since the raids, Javier said he’s started considering returning to Mexico to wait out the Trump administration. In the meantime, he said he’ll keep coming to Van Nuys to find work.“It’s a place that becomes familiar,” he said. “Here, all of us together, we’ve become friends.”
D’Innocenzio reported from New York. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
Amy Taxin and Anne D’Innocenzio, Associated Press
In the early 2000s, fashion brands had a realization: They could throw their inventory up on a website and ask customers to sift through it to find what they were looking for. Two decades later, the fundamental structure of e-commerce hasn’t changed much. Shopping is a drag that involves endlessly scrolling for merchandise.
[Image: Ralph Lauren]
But change is in the air. AI is about to transform everything about online shopping. Consumers are already turning to chatbots to find and compare products, and to platforms like Daydream that are designed specifically for shopping for clothes. Now, we’re about to see how fashion labels themselves can use AI to make shopping on their sites less laborious and more delightful.
Today, Ralph Lauren launches Ask Ralph, an AI stylist in the brand’s mobile app. The 58-year-old fashion brand has partnered with Microsoft to create an AI agent that mimics the experience of speaking with an stylist. You begin by expressing exactly what you’re looking for. Depending on the day, it might be specific like, “I’m looking for a black cardigan for the fall,” or open-ended like, “I’m moderating a panel at a big conference and I have no idea what to wear.”
[Image: Ralph Lauren]
Then, rather than sifting through rows of products, the app does the searching for you. It delivers fully styled looks from the current Ralph Lauren collection that you can shop immediately. And through the process, as you figure out what you’re looking for (say, cropped cardigans made of cashmere), the AI adapts to your preferences. “We’re trying to recreate the experience of working with a well-trained Ralph Lauren salesperson,” says David Lauren, chief branding and innovation officer at Ralph Lauren, and son of the founder. “We’ve taken all of our own best practices and built them into the AI.”
[Image: Ralph Lauren]
An Early Adopter
This isn’t Ralph Lauren’s first partnership with Microsoft. Twenty-five years ago, David appeared on stage with Bill Gates to unveil Polo.com, the very first Ralph Lauren website. This was a time when few other fashion brands had any online presence at all.
David has always been interested in adopting new technologies early. Shortly after the new website debuted, David partnered with NBC to build an online magazine full of videos and articles to blend content with commerce; in the following years, it would become common for brands to launch blogs on their website. And Ralph Lauren was among the first fashion brand to place QR codes in billboard and print ads to send consumers to its website. “We did this before most phones were able to read QR codes,” says David. “But people quickly caught up.”
Ralph Lauren has been toying with the idea of a digital stylist for a long time. In the early 2000s, that early version of the e-commerce website had an “Ask Ralph” feature, where you could read content about how to put a Ralph Lauren look together, and even a video streaming service where you could talk to a salesperson in a showroom. “What we didn’t have at the time was AI,” David says. “We realized that AI could help us realize many of the concepts we had dreamt about back then.”
To train the Ask Ralph model, Microsoft used data from Ralph Lauren’s archives and current collections to help identify the brand’s distinct aesthetic. Ralph Lauren’s creative team, from designers to in-store stylists, participated in the process to make sure that the app would create highly curated looks that reflect the brand’s take on styling.
Then, members of the in-store team were asked to contribute insights about how they work with a customer to help them find pieces. Once they had created a beta version of the app, they asked employees to use it and offer feedback.
The final version of the app uses conversational AI and natural language processing to understand open-ended prompts from the user. It also incorporates the customer’s shopping history, so that it can understand their preferences and pick pieces that match what they already have in their closet.
The app can interpret context: It can identify whether the customer is trying to quickly buy a shirt to match an existing blazer, or whether they are just playing around to find new ideas for outfits. It also only shows pieces of clothing that are currently available for purchase, and over time, the app will adapt to the user.
[Photo: Ralph Lauren]
The Industry Shift
While Ralph Lauren is an early adopter of AI technology, many fashion brands are building their own apps, says Shelley Bransten, corporate VP of global industry solutions at Microsoft. She says that the fashion industry is now shifting from “scroll-based” shopping, which involves looking through rows of thumbnails, to “goal-based” shopping, which deploys AI to surface results based on the customer’s specific needs at that moment. “The shopping experience is going to be more personalized, relevant, and more tied to the customer’s intent,” she says.
Bransten says that many consumers have gotten so used to using AI agents like ChatGPT that they no longer remember how to use search boxes on websites. Instead, they type out full queries into search boxes, only to confuse the system. But companies that have made the leap to using AI on their e-commerce sites are already seeing more success. “They’re seeing higher conversion rates, units per transaction, and consumer happiness scores,” she says.
[Photo: Ralph Lauren]
At the same time, we should expect more general AI agents to improve. I recently wrote about Daydream, a shopping platform that allows you to describe what it is you’re looking for, then searches for pieces from hundreds of brands. It will tailor the results to your size, personal preferences, and budget. Soon, platforms like this are likely to replace searching for clothes on Google, but David believes that some customers will still want to search directly on brand websites. “We have loyal, long-term customers who trust us,” he says. “Ask Ralph is another way to deepen this relationship.”
Ask Ralph is designed to make shopping less time-consuming for the customer, but David also believes it is an opportunity for Ralph Lauren to stand out by emphasizing the brand’s unique point of view. The app will curate looks that are very carefully aligned with the distinct Ralph Lauren aesthetic, and in doing so, will allow customers to enter the brand’s universe. “Our customers come to us because they like our point of view,” David says. “We can help them create the look that they want more directly.”
The app could also be a way to bring new customers in. While it is designed to make the purchasing process easier, David hopes that it is also a useful free tool for anyone looking for help to get dressed in the morning. If you already have a blue blazer and turn to the Ask Ralph app for interesting ways to style it, the app will curate looks drawn from Ralph Lauren’s archives and style guide.
“People still read fashion magazines and blogs to look for tips about how to dress,” David says. “I think of the Ask Ralph app as a kind of style book. It helps you figure out how to put a look together in the morning.”
Weve had branded entertainment since Proctor and Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But as media fragmentation has gone into hyperdrive over the past two decades, brands have been forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. Its no longer viable or effective to overly depend on traditional paid media tools.
Marketers can create content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy themand drive results. Some of the best examples of this is what we call brand entertainment. Brands of all stripes talk about it, but it is the exceptions that truly invest in making actual entertainment.
Of course, theres box office hits like Barbie, The Lego Movie, and Super Mario Bros, but theres also classics like BMWs The Hire (2002), Red Bull “Stratos” from 2012, and the 2014 Patagonia doc DamNation.
Dicks Sporting Goods has been funding and producing award-winning content for years. Over the past decade, the retailer has built an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries. Its 2014 doc We Could Be King premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, streamed on Netflix, and won the 2015 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. It won its second Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround last year.
In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: The Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand.
On this months episode of Brand New World, Im talking to Dicks chief marketing officer Emily Silver about why now is the perfect time for an in-house studio, how they measure success on projects, and where it all goes from here.
How the new in-house studio will impact how it invests in entertainment: First, you’ll see us take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content we put out. Two, it helps us brand the studio so that we start to build more of a name for ourselves in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects, which is already happening. And three, it gives us the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content we want to produce and where we want to lean in to help build for the long term. It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future.
How the brand evaluates potential entertainment projects:
For us, it’s really making sure that the story that we’re going to tell, or whoever we’re partnering with is going to tell, really fits with our values and our point of view on sports, which is the power to change lives and build community. It really has to click those two boxes, and we want to tell transformative stories that highlight grit and raw humanity and heartbreak in the lessons learned behind sports.Advice for marketers curious about entertainment:
There’s a lot of money out there and you can see how this can go very wrong and very commercial very quickly. My advice would be to hold to your creative standards, and find people who think similarly to you about creative excellence. It really is about finding that match of people that you’d want to write with, and want to produce, and direct with. Making sure that your vision, and the mission of the company and the team align. Because there’s endless content out there. As we all know, the trick is getting people to care and to watch it.
Nebius Group said on Monday it will provide Microsoft with GPU infrastructure capacity, in a deal worth $17.4 billion, over a five-year term, sending its shares soaring over 47% after the bell.
The deal underscores the surging demand for high-performance AI computers, as companies invest heavily to bolster their AI infrastructure.
Microsoft may also acquire additional services capacity under the deal, bringing the total contract value to about $19.4 billion.
Nebius’ core business involves providing Nvidia graphic processing units and AI cloud as services. Nebius offers AI developers the computing, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their AI models, with the help of its cloud software architecture and in-house designed hardware.
Nebius will provide Microsoft access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity from its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey, starting later this year.
“The economics of the deal are attractive in their own right, but, significantly, the deal will also help us to accelerate the growth of our AI cloud business even further in 2026 and beyond,” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said.
Microsoft is the largest customer of CoreWeave one of Nebius’ competitors which earlier this year denied media reports that said it had seen contract cancellations from the hyperscaler.
Amsterdam-based Nebius Group emerged from a deal to split the assets of Russian tech giant Yandex.
Juby Babu, Reuters
A space that once held 5,000 tons of corn, grains, and wheat has just undergone a surgical transformation that’s turned it from an industrial complex into a new hotel. Now open in Bremen, Germany, the John & Will Silo Hotel is a unique repurposing of the silos of a former Kellogg’s cereal factory. Hulking concrete structures that enabled decades of breakfast cereal production are now luxe, if quirky, accommodations for travelers.
It’s a strange second life for a former cereal factory, but its also part of a 600-acre urban redevelopment project in the industrial area of Bremen, located along the Weser river. The former Kellogg’s factory, with a silo-topping sign that’s become a local landmark, is the project’s visual centerpiece.
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
The design comes from Vienna-based Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA), who worked with the project’s developer to preserve and reuse the factory as part of a new commercial and residential district known as Überseestadt.
[Photo: courtesy DMAA]
“The possibility of demolishing the building was never up for discussion,” says Eva Schrade, senior project manager at DMAA. She says the idea of converting the structure into a hotel came during an evening brainstorming session with the client, which was considering turning the silos into some kind of sports center, like a climbing gym. The architects offered a more challenging alternative. “The structure of the round rooms is unusual for a hotel, but the task was all the more exciting,” Schrade says.
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
The 130-foot silo shells now contain 117 circular and semicircular hotel rooms. Winding interior hallways run along their curves inside the structure, and the round walls of the silos frame bedrooms, seating areas, and even showers. Horizontal bands of windows have been cut through the silo walls to give hotel guests wide views of the river and city beyond. The raw concrete of the silo structure lent itself to the minimalist interior design of the hotel, with spare furnishings and steel-framed fixtures.
It’s not the first time grain silos have found new purpose. Grain silos in Cape Town, South Africa, have been used for a contemporary art museum. Some DIY designers have even turned smaller-scale grain silos into boutique hotel suites.
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
The Bremen project is on a much larger scale, and therefore involved a bigger lift. Physically carving up the building was labor-intensive. The concrete walls of the silos are more than 6 inches thick. To keep the building structurally sound, the architects had to preserve a significant amount of the structure of the silos themselves, both their exterior shells and the partition walls between them. Bracing wall had to be added inside smaller rooms, as well as the insulation that the silos previous life holding corn and grain did not require.
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
Despite the significant changes to the structure, the architects sought to ensure the silos still presented as silos. “Inside, all interventions were to remain visible as far as possible. The raw concrete floors were only cleaned and the cuts were left visible,” Schrade says.
[Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA]
Beyond the hotel rooms, many of the building’s original details were kept intact, including steel bracing inside a penthouse bar and the original funnel-shaped outlets of the silos, which hang overhead in the hotel lobby. Another original feature no one wanted to lose is the building’s towering Kellogg’s sign on the roof. “Many Bremen residents have a long-standing connection with the company,” Schrade says. The hope is the hotel conversion will give Bremen a new kind of connection with this building.
Spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are used worldwide to organize and analyze data, but getting the right information into them isnt always straightforward.
Businesses often need engineers to write code that pulls information from cloud systems and databases, then clean and process it before its ready for Excel.
AI spreadsheet company Sourcetable is trying to simplify that process with what it calls Superagents: AI tools that connect to different systems across the internet, fetch relevant data, and make it ready for analysis. Technically, Superagents manage a collection of AI agents that link to databases and cloud services like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Stripe.
Once connected, Sourcetables agents can answer questions directly, such as analyzing customer spending data from Stripe or website traffic from Google Analytics. They can insert raw or processed data into a Sourcetable spreadsheet, which users can work with just like Excel. To do this, the system can run Python number-crunching libraries on a virtual machine, avoiding the math errors that generative AI often produces.
“There’s a full Python ecosystem under the hood,” says Sourcetable cofounder and CEO Eoin McMillan. “Basically every data science library you could possibly want or ask for is just embedded in the product, just rolled in for free.”
McMillan says the idea came from his experience at startups, where accessing and analyzing data was always a heavy lift.
“The conclusion that I came to was that everybody was trying to patch a broken ecosystem for data, and the reason for this was because Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets were not built correctly for the modern information environment,” he says.
Despite its advanced features, Sourcetable still looks like a traditional spreadsheet and supports hundreds of familiar formula functions. It can import and export Excel files, too. Earlier this year, the company launched an autopilot mode that lets users ask the AI to answer questions, generate graphs, or build visualizations. McMillan says this helps spreadsheet users who’ve struggled with more complex features, like those pesky pivot table operations and VLOOKUP, or vertical lookup, functions.
“Most people in the world use spreadsheets, but they don’t know how to use VLOOKUP or pivots, and having a spreadsheet that can combine data, and summarize data, and analyze data for them is a huge unlock in terms of this new capability they have,” he says.
For power users, the built-in Python libraries can replace hours of manual spreadsheet work or external coding, producing results in seconds. While the product is most popular with operations and analysis teams, McMillan says its also used for everything from scientific research to fantasy football, where Sourcetable even built specialized tools.
In a demo for Fast Company, McMillan showed how Sourcetable could pull data from the web, downloading and processing a sitemap file listing each of the Sourcetable website’s individual pages, then visiting each page and cataloging page titles and descriptions in a spreadsheet. While the platform includes prebuilt connectors for popular cloud services and databases, the AI can also fetch data from other systems using standard API documentation.
Generally, connections to outside services cost $100 each per month, though one per organization is included with Sourcetable’s $20-per-user-per-month “Pro” plan and five per organization with a $200-per-user-per-month “Max” plan. A promotion celebrating the launch of Superagents makes connectors added the week of September 8 free forever.
Currently, users can edit the SQL code Sourcetable generates but can only viewnot rewritethe Python scripts. McMillan says that will likely change in the future. For now, if Python doesnt produce the desired results, users must re-prompt the AI.
The AI also asks permission before overwriting spreadsheet contents. It can, in some cases, push data back to cloud systems, but McMillan stresses thats still a beta feature. In the future, Sourcetable will likely allow outside systemsincluding other AI agentsto connect proactively as well.
Sourcetable, which has raised $5.5 million in funding, isn’t the only company trying to use AI to modernize the spreadsheet (Excel and Google Sheets each offer their own AI features). But McMillan says Sourcetable has an advantage in being created with AI and integration with online data in mind, rather than having such features added on well into the product’s life.
However, he says, the AI chat interface alone is unlikely to replace the tabular spreadsheet format that people have been using for thousands of years.
“The reason why Sourcetable is powerful, McMillan says, is because you have this Excel-like spreadsheet interface, which is the data tool that everyone knows how to use.
Aven, a fintech startup known for its home-equity-backed credit cards, has raised $110 million in Series E financing at a $2.2 billion post-money valuation. The San Francisco-based company is one of a growing number of startups focused on helping U.S. consumers take advantage of the estimated $35 trillion in wealth tied up in their homes.
The latest round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing backers General Catalyst, Caffeinated Capital, GIC, Electric Capital, and Founders Fund. In July 2024, Aven raised $142 million in Series D financing at a $1 billion valuation.
Avens primary product is a secured credit card designed for prime and super-prime homeowners. The card offers consumers interest rates in line with that of a home-equity line of credit, or HELOC, with the ease of a credit card experience. Aven says it has issued $3 billion in aggregate credit lines and has saved consumers more than $215 million in interest costs.
Our core product is really working, says CEO Sadi Khan, who cofounded the company in 2019. His team plans to use the financing round to hit the gas pedal hard, he says.
We have the ability to be cash-flow positive, Khan says, citing Avens unit economics. But we decided that investing in our growth and investing in more products is the right decision.
Aven delivers lower rates by streamlining the HELOC application and administration processes. The company has even gone so far as to develop a patented robotic arm that it uses as part of its digital notary workflow. A traditional HELOC application process can take 42 days; Avens process can take as little as 15 minutes.
Shortening the timelines and lowering the costs associated with home-equity-secured credit make the model more attractive to consumers, who are using Aven for debt consolidation, home improvement, summer camp, and more. Over the past 12 months, Avens customer base has tripled in size.
Other companies are chasing homeowners, too. In just the past week, my own household received HELOC offers in the mail from Figure, Alliant, and Rate. (Direct mail is also an important marketing channel for Aven.) Overall, HELOC balances today stand at around $400 billion, an increase of 27% above pandemic-level borrowing.
As with any kind of secured debt, borrowers risk losing the underlying asset. Khan says that Avens delinquency and default rates are in line with that of traditional HELOCs. Just 0.87% of HELOC balances were more than 90 days delinquent in Q1 2025, versus over 10% of credit cards, according to the Federal Reserve.
This financing round will also position Aven to expand its product portfolio. Up first is a move into mortgage refinancing.
Our goal is very simple, Khan says. Its to be able to build a mortgage product that [could] do a cash-out refinance in as fast as 10 days.
Aven is running live tests on mortgage refinancing and expects to roll out the product over the next six months.
Wall Street inched higher early Tuesday ahead of a government data revision that economists expect will reveal that the U.S. labor market was sputtering well before President Donald Trump rolled out tariffs on the nation’s trading partners this spring.Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq each ticked up 0.1% before the bell, while futures for the S&P 500 were unchanged.Later Tuesday, the U.S. government will release preliminary revisions for job growth numbers reported for the 12 months through March of this year. Analysts are forecasting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will revise job gains for that period down by as much as 900,000. If the figures are revised sharply lower, it could halve the job growth that had been thought to have occurred.“That would mean that private-sector employment actually shrank, on average, in the past three months and that job creation earlier in the year was weaker than currently reported,” said Fed Gov. Christopher Waller, two weeks ago at the Economic Club of Miami.Waller, a candidate to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, said then that he expected a downward revision of 60,000 per month.There has been mounting evidence that uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs has kept business from hiring as actively as they had been when the U.S. rapidly rebounded from the COVID-19 recession. The U.S. economy is creating fewer than 75,000 jobs a month so far this year, less than half the 2024 average of 168,000 and not even a quarter of the 400,000 jobs added monthly in the hiring boom of 2021-2023.When the Labor Department put out a disappointing July jobs report that also included downward revisions for previous months, an enraged Trump responded by firing the BLS economist in charge of compiling the numbers and nominating a loyalist to replace her.While inflation still remains above the Fed’s 2% target, most economists think the central bank will cut its benchmark lending rate at its meeting next week to help support the flagging U.S. labor market.Reports on inflation will follow on Wednesday and Thursday.Also Tuesday, Apple will unveil the next line-up of iPhones amid a global trade war that’s added a potential price increase to the company’s marquee product. Apple shares were unchanged before the opening bell Tuesday.Shares of Fox Corp. tumbled 4.7% in premarket after Rupert Murdoch’s family said they’ve reached a deal on control of the 94-year-old mogul’s media empire after his death. The agreement ensures that there will be no change in direction at Fox News, the most popular network for President Donald Trump and conservatives.The deal creates a trust establishing control of the Fox Corp. for Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s chosen heir who has been running Fox in recent years, along with his younger sisters, Grace and Chloe.Elsewhere, in Europe at midday France’s CAC 40 rose 0.3%, the German DAX fell 0.5% and Britain’s FTSE 100 gained 0.2%.In Asia, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 erased earlier gains to finish 0.4% lower at 43,459.29, as political uncertainty continued after Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said over the weekend that he planned to step down. Who will replace him is still uncertain and may take weeks to decide. The benchmark had momentarily surpassed the 44,000 mark.Anticipation over one of the likely candidates, Sanae Takaichi, a hawkish legislator, sent defense issues higher in Tokyo trading. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rose 0.3%, IHI added 1.0% and Kawasaki Heavy 0.4%. Veteran ruling party legislator Toshimitsu Motegi has indicated he wants to run, and other expected contenders include Farm Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi. All are members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which will need coalition partners to stay in power.Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.6% to 8,793.60. South Korea’s Kospi climbed 1.3% to 3,260.05. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng surged 1.2% to 25,938.13, while the Shanghai Composite fell 0.5% to 3,807.29. The mixed trading followed a stronger opening in Asia.“Asian markets opened Tuesday with momentum, riding Wall Street’s conviction that Fed cuts are no longer a question of if but how many. Nearly three reductions are now being priced before year-end. That expectation is washing through global markets like a spring tide,” said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.
Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott, AP Business Writers
