If youve been caught up in the cottage cheese craze, take heed: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that you toss tubs of cottage cheese purchased from Walmart stores in 24 states because of concerns the ingredients werent fully pasteurized.
The FDA issued an alert Thursday of a voluntary recall of Great Value brand cottage cheese made by Saputo Cheese USA, though no illnesses or hospitalizations associated with the recalled dairy products have been reported. The recall affects Great Value cottage cheese products with milkfat content of 0%, 2%, and 4%, various curd sizes, and containers ranging from 16 ounces to 3 pounds that were distributed to Walmart stores earlier this month.
The issue was discovered by Saputo Cheese, the manufacturer, during pasteurizer troubleshooting exercises and the impacted pasteurizer was subsequently fixed and returned to normal function, according to the recall details. The FDA is recommending that people not eat the affected Great Value cottage cheese and either throw away the tub or return it to the Walmart store where you purchased it.
Consuming products that are not fully pasteurized can pose a significant health risk, especially to the young and elderly or immunocompromised individuals, the FDA advisory cautions.
The affected products have best if used by dates in early April and were sold at Walmart stores in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
A lack of full pasteurization is a very atypical reason for an FDA recall. In fact, Thursdays cottage cheese recall is the first instance among 850-plus recalls since March 2023 in which the reason cited was not fully pasteurized.
COTTAGE CHEESE CRAZE
Cottage cheese has become a favorite among social media foodie types in recent years thanks to its high protein content. Americans consumed roughly 2.4 pounds of cottage cheese in 2024, the most in 15 years, according to the latest figures on per-capita dairy consumption released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While cottage cheese is having a renaissance of sorts, it hasnt yet returned to its 1970s glory days when Americans were eating 4.6 pounds, on average.
In January, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced new dietary guidelines that redesigned the food pyramid and encouraged Americans to consume more dairy, and particularly full-fat dairy, than in the recent past.
Thursdays recall announcement and the FDAs warning about consuming food that isnt fully pasteurized might seem at odds with some additional rhetoric from the Trump administration. Before he was appointed Health Secretary Kennedy posted on X in October 2024 that he intended to end what he termed the FDAs war on public health and called out the administrations aggressive suppression of a variety of products including raw milk, which is unpasteurized.
The FDA falls under the Department of Health and Human Services and is led by Dr. Marty Makary, the commissioner. Any progress on creating standards for raw milk, as advocates were banking on, hasnt happened yet and isnt among the dozens of accomplishments that Makary touts on his X account for his first year as commissioner.
Neither Makary nor Kennedy have publicly commented about the cottage cheese recall.
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Since the 2008 housing bust and subsequent Great Financial Crisis (GFC), mortgage lending has steadily shifted away from big banks. In the years that followedamid tighter regulations, higher capital requirements, and elevated litigation riskmany large banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, reduced their mortgage footprint. In that void, nonbank lenders, also known as independent mortgage banks (IMBs), such as Rocket Mortgage, United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), and LoanDepot, gained market share.
Now, a top Federal Reserve official is openly questioning whether policy and regulation went too farand is signaling that a policy shift may be coming.
In a February 16 speech at the American Bankers Associations Community Bankers Conference, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman, pointed to what she described as a significant migration of mortgage origination and servicing out of the banking sector over the past 15 years.
According to Bowman:
In 2008, banks originated around 60% of mortgages and held the servicing rights on about 95% of mortgage balances.
In 2023, banks originated around 35% of mortgages and held the servicing rights on about 45% of mortgage balances.
Thats pretty in line with the data ResiClub pulled from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
During her speech, Bowman suggested that post-2013 capital rulesparticularly the treatment of mortgage servicing rights (MSRs)* under Basel standards**may have contributed to the mortgage retreat by banks. MSRs, which represent the expected value of servicing income when loans are sold into securitizations, were assigned higher risk weights and subject to deduction thresholds after the crisis. While regulators tightened those rules over concerns about valuation volatility and model risk, the capital treatment also made servicing and, by extension, mortgage origination less economically attractive for banks.
The result, Bowman implied, is a mortgage market increasingly concentrated in nonbank firms that lack deposit funding and operate under different supervisory and resolution frameworks. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Bowman said, borrowers with bank servicers were more likely to receive forbearance than those serviced by nonbankshighlighting structural differences that can matter during stress periods, she says.
Bowman previewed potential changes now under consideration, including removing the deduction requirement for MSRs and making mortgage capital rules more sensitive to loan-to-value (LTV) ratios rather than applying a uniform risk weight. Such changes would not unwind post-crisis reforms but could modestly improve the economics of bank mortgage activity, Bowman says.
Here’s what Bowman said in her February 16 speech:
Two regulatory proposals will soon be introduced that, among other broader changes to the regulatory capital framework, would increase bank incentives to engage in mortgage origination and servicing. First, the proposals would remove the requirement to deduct mortgage servicing assets from regulatory capital while maintaining the 250% risk weight assigned to these assets. We will seek comment on the appropriate risk weight for these assets. This change in the treatment of mortgage servicing assets would encourage bank participation in the mortgage servicing business while recognizing uncertainty regarding the value of these assets over the economic cycle.
“Second, the proposals would also consider increasing the risk sensitivity of capital requirements for mortgage loans on bank books. One approach would be to use loan-to-value ratios to determine the applicable risk weight for residential real estate exposures, rather than applying a uniform risk weight regardless of LTV. This change could better align capital requirements with actual risk, support on-balance-sheet lending by banks, and potentially reverse the trend of migration of mortgage activity to nonbanks over the past 15 years.
James Kleimann, founder of The Mortgage Scoop, writes in a recent newsletter:
This stuff is quite complicated, but basically, the Fed is weighing a plan to remove the rule that banks must deduct MSR assets from regulatory capital while maintaining a 250% risk weight for those assets. In plain English, that means regulators treat $1 of MSRs like $2.50 of risky assets. What the appropriate risk weight level should be remains the central question, but this potential change is something the MBA [Mortgage Bankers Association] has been arguing in favor of for years.
Big picture: If adopted, the proposals could mark the beginning of a gradual rebalancing in housing financeone that brings more mortgage origination and servicing back inside the traditional banking system after more than a decade of migration outward.
For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States.
Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesnt include listening to music on the radio), with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio, according to Edison Researchs Share of Ear survey.
Researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade. In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent listening to spoken-word audio. At the time, podcasts accounted for just 10%.
Year over year, that gap has slowly closed, as podcasts boomed in popularity, increasingly keeping us company on daily commutes and during menial tasks. Over half of Americans, 55%an estimated 158 million peoplelisten to a podcast monthly, and 40%, or 115 million, listen every week.
This year, the scales finally tipped.
Although the difference is only 1 percentage point, this is the first time podcast listenership has surpassed radio. Whether the gap continues to widen remains to be seen.
Watching podcasts has become a growing trend over the past year, perhaps shifting the balance in podcasts favor. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours of podcasts each month in 2025 on living room devices like TVs, up from 400 million the previous year.
Streaming platforms like Netflix have inked deals with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports to bring podcasts to their services. Daytime talk shows have also suffered blows, including the recent cancellations of both Kelly Clarksons and Sherri Shepherds TV talk shows.
Apples audio-only app has taken a hit as well, falling from 15.7% of monthly podcast listeners preferred platform in 2022 to 11.3% in 2025.
But audio-only isnt going anywhere, at least for now. According to Triton Digitals annual podcasting report, only 7% of audiences exclusively watch their favorite podcasts, while 13% exclusively listen. The remaining 80% alternate between the two.
The meaning of the word podcast has vastly expanded and grown increasingly diffuse as our media habits shift, Joe Berkowitz recently wrote for Fast Company.
As for the future of podcastingnot talk radio, not TV chat show, but instead a secret third thing.
eBay is laying off about 800 employees, or 6% of its full-time workforce, saying the move is a push to align with its strategic priorities. It comes a week after the company announced it was acquiring second-hand clothing app Depop from rival Etsy for $1.2 billion.
Depop is popular with millennials and Gen Z, and is part of eBay’s bid for younger consumers, who are gravitating to second-hand shopping online for sustainability and financial reasons.
eBay Inc. (EBAY) was trading up 3.3% in midday trading at the time of this writing.
This is eBay’s third round of layoffs since 2023. The online second-hand retailer cut 1,000 jobs in 2024 (9% of its workforce), after it cut 500 jobs in 2023 (or 4% of its workforce), per TechCrunch.
We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce,” a spokesperson for eBay tells Fast Company. “We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect.
The Silicon Valley-based online retailer has also been heavily investing in artificial intelligence. The eBay spokesperson said the cuts are not AI-related.
eBay financials
This latest round of layoffs comes just two weeks after eBay reported strong fourth-quarter earnings for 2025, with revenue coming in at $2.97 billion, beating estimates of $2.88 billion; and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.41, beating estimates of $1.35.
“2025 was a milestone year for eBay, and our results reflect the strength of our strategy and the disciplined execution behind it,” eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said in that earnings release. “As we continue to harness AI to elevate thecustomer experience worldwide, eBay is in the strongest position it has been in years.”
eBay has a current market capitalization of $40.2 billion.
AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong.
Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value.
Analytics tests whether what you believed would happen actually did, and to inform what you do next. When treating analytics as a decision engine rather than a reporting layer, it fundamentally changes how teams operate.
ANALYTICS SPRAWL REDUCES CLARITY
Across nearly every organization I have worked in, regardless of size or industry, one pattern shows up with remarkable consistency: analytics sprawl.
Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, and Pendo are all excellent tools, adopted with good intent to solve real problems. However, when allor even severalcoexist within a single organization, they often create fragmentation that undermines decision-making. The issue is not the tools themselves, but the absence of a clear leadership decision to standardize.
When analytics lives across multiple platforms, each with its own methodology and definitions, even basic questions become difficult to answer. AI magnifies that problem. Ask a simple question like, How many monthly unique visitors do we get? With data spread across multiple analytics platforms, there is no clean answer. You cannot aggregate the numbers. There is no deduplication. Slight differences in definitions erode trust. Teams stop discussing insights and start debating whose data is correct.
That is not a tooling failure. It is a decision-making failure.
INCONSISTENT DATA SCALES CONFUSION
This challenge matters even more in an AI-driven world because AI depends on coherence. Models train on ambiguous metrics. If foundations are inconsistent, AI will scale confusion faster than any human ever could.
Especially in organizations with multiple business units and products, analytics must start before dashboards, instrumentation plans, or AI ambitions. It starts with clarity. This comes from understanding what decisions must be made with confidence and what questions must be answered consistently across teams.
Once that is established, everything else follows. Selecting the right product analytics platform is based on business requirements, not convenience. That platform may differ by context. In fact, I have yet to implement the same analytics tool twice. What stays the same is the discipline required to make analytics and AI effective at scale. Instinct may start the journey, but data must validate it. Tool sprawl is a leadership choice rather than a technical inevitability, and shared definitions matter far more than dashboards or models.
Analytics and AI only matter when they improve decisions. When that foundation exists, AI becomes a true force multiplier, and organizations gain speed, trust, and the ability to scale. Insights surface faster, patterns emerge sooner, and teams spend far less time reconciling data and far more time acting on it. Leaders move from reacting to signals to shaping outcomes. Without that foundation, AI simply makes bad analytics louder.
A SIMPLE CHALLENGE FOR LEADERS
If you lead product, technology, or digital teams, here are three simple questions to consider:
How many analytics tools does your organization use across your products?
Do your teams share the same definitions for basic metrics?
Can you answer a question once and trust the answer everywhere?
If those answers vary, the issue is not analytics or AI. It is decision-making. If your AI strategy is ahead of your analytics foundations, you are scaling uncertainty, not intelligence.
Darren Person is EVP and chief digital officer of Cengage Group.
The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate slipped this week below 6% for the first time since late 2022, good news for home shoppers as the spring homebuying season gets rolling.
The benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate fell to 5.98% from 6.01% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.76%.
The average rate has been hovering close to 6% this year. This latest dip, its third decline in a row, brings it closer to its lowest level since Sept. 8, 2022, when it was 5.89%.
Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserves interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.
The 10-year Treasury yield was at 4.02% at midday Thursday, down from around 4.07% a week ago.
Mortgage rates have been trending lower for months, helping drive a pickup in home sales the last four months of 2025, but not enough to lift the housing market out of its slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows.
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes remained stuck last year at 30-year lows. And more buyer-friendly mortgage rates this year werent enough to lift home sales last month. They posted the biggest monthly drop in nearly four years and the slowest annualized sales pace in more than two years.
Still, with the average rate on a 30-year mortgage now below 6% as the annual spring homebuying season begins, it could encourage prospective home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates to shop for a home this spring.
Assuming rates stay below 6%, buyers and sellers are going to start getting back into the market, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. March is when the spring homebuying season typically begins to ramp up and with rates at a three-and-a-half year low, it could be a barn burner of a spring homebuying season.
Alex Veiga, AP business writer
When Dr. Wendy Ross logged on for a Zoom meeting in early 2024, she wasnt sure who to expect on the other side of the call.
It was a digital writers’ room, Ross tells Fast Company, “and in the upper left-hand cornerI’ll never forget itwas Noah Wyle.
Ross, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician and the director of Jefferson Center for Autism & Neurodiversity in Philadelphia, had received a request to lend her expertise to the writers of a new medical seriesbut they told her only that it was set in an emergency room and would potentially feature an autistic doctor. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I thought it sounded kind of cool, she says.
That show went on to become HBO’s hit drama The Pitt, which won three Emmy Awards and averaged 10 million viewers an episode in its first season. Wyle is an executive producer and a star of the show, making his return to medical dramas 30 years after his breakout role on ER. (Ross recalls that show airing at the same time she was first studying medicine: In my fangirl world, we went to medical school together, she saysthough when meeting him over Zoom, she kept her cool.)
From the get-go, Ross says, The Pitts writers were very serious about not portraying a stereotypical situation regarding autism. “That was in the original request that was posed to me,” she says.
Her advice eventually helped shape fan-favorite character Dr. Mel King (played by Taylor Dearden), a bright-eyed resident new to the ER in the show’s first season.
[Photo: HBO]
Mel exhibits many autistic-coded traits, like self-soothing, the occasional dropped social cue, and a knack for repetitive, focused tasks. But notably, shes never confirmed on the show to be diagnosed as neurodivergent. Instead, viewers get to see many sides of Mel as the season unfolds: her compassion as she comforts a child losing her sister, her earnestness as she befriends her fellow doctors, her eccentricity as she calms herself by repeating Megan Thee Stallion lyrics like a mantra.
The decision not to confirm a diagnosis onscreen was a recommendation from Ross.
I suggested that it not be clear whether or not this character knew she was on the spectrum, but that some of these characteristics unfold subtly and naturally, as they do in real life, she says. Autistic women are often diagnosed later in life than autistic men; Ross even points out that many women dont receive diagnoses themselves until their children are diagnosed, prompting them to recognize shared traits. Mel stands in for these women, whose autistic traits could pass for neurotypical if unexamined.
You see her sometimes do these quirky, unexpected, very enthusiastic things that are kind of subtle, Ross says, but for people who know, you know.
A difficult reality
The year prior to being tapped by The Pitts writers room, Ross co-authored an article on the experiences of autistic doctors in the workplace in collaboration with Autistic Doctors International.
The data in that article was very disconcerting and, frankly, a little bit sad, she says. Ross and her fellow researchers found that of the 225 autistic doctors surveyed, 77 percent had considered suicide, while 24% had attempted it. 80% of respondents said theyd worked with another doctor they suspected was autistic, but only 22% had worked with a doctor they knew was autistic.
There’s a lot of anxiety and depression related to being an autistic doctor, Ross says. Part of it is, its a don’t ask, dont tell kind of situation, because people are afraid of the stigma, and by the time they do disclose, they’ve had so many challenges that things quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Banishing stereotypical mythology
Ross work with autistic doctors caught the attention of The Pitt‘s development team, who contacted her through the University of Southern Californias Hollywood, Health & Society program, a service that connects the entertainment industry with experts in medicine and safety.
“I think that this is an extremely sincere group of people that is motivated by more than the popularity of a show, and I think that’s really special, says Ross.
Ross advised The Pitt to avoid overused tropes of autistic characters on televisionparticularly, what she calls the stereotypical mythology of autistic people being savants.
While there are some autistic savants, many autistic individuals have varying levels of cognitive abilities like the rest of us, she says, noting that their actual super strength is in dealing with other neurodivergent individuals in stressful situations (like being in an emergency room).
Its really important that we understand all kinds of minds, that we understand that everyone has strengths that they bring to the table,” Ross says. “They don’t have to be savants to provide added value.”
Ross also recommended that The Pitt cast a neurodivergent actress in the role, which she says lends a level of authenticity to any portrayal of autism.
[Photo: HBO]
The Pitt did so in casting Dearden, who shared that she has ADHD after the first season aired.
Dearden, for her part, has shared the importance of bringing authenticity to her performance as Mel: Im really sick of what people usually do on TV, she said in an interview with Variety. I feel like every time its ever been portrayed, its usually complete robots or completely dysfunctional and cant survive at all. Its ridiculous.
The value of authentic representation
Now airing its second season, The Pitt has garnered massive critical acclaim not only for its portrayal of Mel, but for tackling themes like gun violence, substance abuse, and burnout in the healthcare industry. Beyond its stellar cast and writing, Ross attributes the shows success to its focus on empathy.
“That’s a pervasive theme that expands well beyond the autistic characters, she says. This idea of having authentic representations of people, of accepting all kinds of people, and understanding that we all have strengths and challenges that we engage with is really critically important.
Ross hopes that on-screen portrayals like The Pitts can inspire the real-world healthcare industry to do better by neurodivergent folksnot only patients, but doctors and other healthcare professionals. She compares it to the implementation of ramps for wheelchair users: Though designed for the needs of a specific demographic, they improve the lives of all people with mobility issues.
The strategies that we deploy for this population are things that all of our patients and colleagues benefit from, Ross says. This kind of care is the kind that some people really have to have, but that all of us ultimately deserve.
Time capsules are designed to be resilient by nature. But no time capsule has survived as long as designers hope Americas Time Capsule will.
The time capsule, designed for the semiquincentennial of the U.S. founding, is being created by America250, the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated group organizing commemorations for this year. The plan is to bury the time capsule underground in Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park on July 4, and for it to be opened in another 250 years, in 2276.
[Photo: Courtesy of America250]
The problem is time capsules, which are typically buried underground, and exposed to the elements, don’t really last that long. “We’ve unburied some time capsules that are more than 200 years old and the contents haven’t fared well,” says Tony Medema, a special advisor and project manager for the time capsule, during a press conference Wednesday.
When a time capsule is buried in a building cornerstone, or stored in a climate-controlled space as is the Bicentennial time capsule (it’s stored on a shelf in the National Archives), it’s easier to preserve whatever is inside. Outside, though, it’s exposed to the elements and could get wet and deteriorate.
“The biggest risk to a time capsule is water,” says Jacob Ricker, an engineer for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a Commerce Department agency that standardizes weights and worked on the time capsule.
[Photo: Courtesy of America250]
The design team is taking several precautions to ensure the time capsule remains protected from water. They made the 36-inch-tall vessel tubular to reduce structural vulnerabilities. The capsule has three inner layers that lock in its contents and protect them from outside elements, followed by an outer stainless-steel finish that covers the entire time capsule.
Inside, design decisions were both functional and organizational. A metal bell jar cover creates an air pocket. There are also stacks of interior shelves that will eventually house things like a flag, items from the 2026 Rose Parade, and submissions from all 50 states, five territories, and Washington, D.C. Paper documentsits most delicate contentswill be secured inside an inner chamber.
Earlier plans for the time capsule imagined it embedded in a 46-foot-long sculpture of Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 “Join or Die” political cartoon showing a snake made up of pieces representing the then-British colonies. The sculpture is expected to be completed this fall. Organizers, however, determined that for longevity’s sake, it would be better to bury the time capsule underground.
[Photo: Courtesy of America250]
Independence National Historical Park is about 30 feet above sea level, so rising sea levels shouldn’t be a problem for 250 years, Ricker says, but the time capsule was also designed to withstand flooding.
“Because we’re underground, we do get rain and things like that and it is possible that the burial area could get flooded with water. Our design is accounting for that,” he says. “So it shouldn’t see water, even if we get torrential rains or anything like that, which would flood the burial site. It should be 100% sealed just with that outer shell.”
NIST scientists helped develop the time capsule alongside preservation experts at the Library of Congress and in coordination with the National Park Service, America250 says. A replica will be displayed at the White House Visitor Center, however, time to see the real thing is limited: the actual time capsule will be briefly displayed in early June in Philadelphia before it’s buried.
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here.
Anthropics stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future
Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military cant use the AI companys models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be able to use the Anthropic models for all lawful purposes.
Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon for a Tuesday morning meeting, in which he reportedly gave Anthropic until 5:01 p.m. Friday to comply with the Pentagons demand. If Anthropic fails to do so, Hegseth threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel the AI company to supply its models with no guardrails. Hegseth also said the government would declare Anthropic models to be a supply chain risk, meaning that all government suppliers would be directed to avoid or discontinue use of Anthropic models.
Amodei said in an interview after the Hegseth meeting that his company has no intention of complying with Hegseths demands. (Hes got a strong case: After all, government officials agreed to the terms.) Amodei explained that the military relies on human judgement to avoid violating peoples constitutional rights. If AI is making the decisions, there will be no human being to object.
Amodei is right, and his companys willingness to stand up for its values is laudable. The trouble is, were rapidly heading for a future where autonomous systems become the norm in warfare.
For years, the defense establishment talked about keeping the human in the loop in AI weapons systems. Often that human is a government lawyer who can make calls on rules-of-engagement issues on the battlefield. Today the Pentagon is talking more about fully autonomous weapons that can manage more of the kill chain, or the series of communications and decisions around the destruction of a target. Military leaders often say that whoever can use technology to shorten the kill-chain will win wars.
Things like electronic warfare (cyberwar), hypersonic missiles, and drone swarms are making war faster and response times shorter. This may eventually preclude the opportunity for human review and decision-making. Increasingly, the U.S. military may be forced to take humans out of the loop in order to stay competitive with its adversaries.
So the result of Anthropics standoff with the Pentagon may be that a safety-conscious AI lab is forced out, and a generally less scrupulous company like xAI is chosen as the alternative.
Trump rips off Mark Kellys idea for powering new data centers
In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump spent a few minutes on the subject of new data centers for AI, which has over the past few months become a hot button issue for voters. While the tech industry says it needs hundreds of new data centers to support all the AI it’s building, a growing number of voters now understands that the power grid improvements needed to power the data centers may increase their energy bills. I have negotiated the new Ratepayer Protection Pledge, Trump crowed. We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs.
Politicos might recognize that message, as it closely echoes what Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, has been saying for months now. Kellys AI for America plan would create an industry-financed AI Horizon Fund to pay for energy-grid upgrades and workforce reskilling.
According to Kellys plan, Congress could require data center developers to buy or lease enough land to contain both their facilities and the renewable energy infrastructure to power and cool them. The data center operators could also be required to pay to connect the renewable sources to the local grid, should the power they generate go unutilized.
Trumps idea is more of a suggestion. As of now its non-binding, just words. And there was no mention of how the tech companies would generate their own power. Elon Musks xAI, for example, brought its own power to its massive Colossus data center in Memphis. Unfortunately, they were dirty methane-powered turbines, and the facility quickly became one of the areas biggest polluters.
High numbers of young tech job seekers AI-cheated on skills tests
Cheating on technical hiring assessments went through the roof in 2025, with fraud attempts more than doubling, according to new research from CodeSignal, which runs a developer-skills evaluation platform used in hiring software engineers. The research found that 35% of proctored assessments showed signs of cheating or fraud last year, up from just 16% in 2024. The biggest culprits? Plagiarism, having someone else take the test for you, and sneaking in AI tools that aren’t allowed.
The jump was especially noticeable among entry-level candidates. Fraud rates for junior roles nearly tripled year over yeargoing from 15% to 40%making early-career hiring a particularly vulnerable spot in the recruiting pipeline. In a press release accompanying the report, CodeSignal CEO and cofounder Tigran Sloyan partly blamed the normalization of AI tools, noting that 80% of Gen Z reportedly uses AI in daily life, which has made the line between acceptable help and outright cheating much blurrier. Accessibility to AI also makes unauthorized assistance harder to detect and raises the stakes for maintaining fair and reliable skill evaluation, he noted.
CodeSignal’s detection systemswhich combine AI analysis, human review, and digital monitoringidentified a few common patterns across flagged assessments. About 35% of candidates frequently looked off-screen, suggesting they were consulting outside resources during the test. Another 23% showed unusually linear typing patterns, where complex solutions just appeared with barely any pauses or debugging. And 15% had answers that looked a lot like known solutions or leaked content. (It’s worth noting that these numbers reflect attempts that were actually caught, not cases where someone successfully slipped through.)
The data also surfaced some geographic and procedural gaps. Fraud attempt rates hit 48% in the Asia-Pacific region, compared to 27% in North America. Testing conditions made a big difference, too: Candidates in unproctored environments shoed score jumps more than four times larger than those being actively monitored, which pretty clearly shows that proctoring works as a deterrent.
As for how CodeSignal catches all this: the company says it’s spent a decade building out its fraud-prevention infrastructure, which it’s now applied across millions of assessments. It uses a proprietary “Suspicion Score” and leak-resistant test design to flag things like plagiarism, proxy test-taking, unauthorized AI use, and identity fraud.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
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He built a hit podcast about the Epstein files. Its entirely AI-generated
What if the SaaSpocalypse is a myth?
This AI note-taking startup thinks its building the steering wheel for chatbots
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Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday announced another quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity.The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three years ago.Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73% from the previous year to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion, or $1.76 per share.“No quarter has had more riding on it than this one,” said Jake Behan, head of capital markets for the investment firm Direxion. “The AI trade needed some positive news and Nvidia’s earnings report brought plenty of it.”The Santa Clara, California, company also provided a forecast exceeding analyst projections while its CEO Jensen Huang reinforced the demand for the company’s chips is still “skyrocketing.” That description feeds into Huang’s thesis that the AI boom is still in the early stages of a buildout that will reshape society. If Nvidia hits its revenue target for the February-April period, it will translate into a 77% increase from last year a sign that the company’s already phenomenal growth rate is still accelerating.“AI is here, AI is not going to go back,” Huang said during a conference call with analysts. “AI is only going to only get better from here.”Despite the stellar results and still-rosy outlook, many investors still evidently are worried about a jarring comedown after a three-year boom that has seen Nvidia’s market value soar from $400 billion at the end of 2022 to nearly $4.8 trillion now. After initially rising 4% in extended trading after the latest quarterly numbers came out, Nvidia’s stock price backtracked and was slightly down following Huang’s upbeat conference call.Nvidia has regularly cleared the bar set by analysts in the past three years, often by a wide margin, but that hasn’t always been enough to satisfy investors who have become increasingly skeptical about whether AI will justify the trillions of dollars that are being spent to develop the technology.After Nvidia delivered a stellar performance that far exceeded analyst forecasts in its last quarterly report, its stock price still fell by 3% during the next day’s trading.The AI fervor has escalated again during the past month as the four companies leading the AI charge Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta Platforms collectively made commitments to spend about $650 billion this year ramping up their AI computing power.A significant amount of the money is expected to be earmarked to buy more Nvidia chips required to power their AI factories, just as has been the case for much of the past three years as Nvidia’s annual revenue soared from $27 billion to $216 billion. Analysts expect the chipmaker’s revenue to surpass $330 billion during the company’s next fiscal year, a more than 50% increase from the past year.“We want to take the great opportunity that we have as we’re in the beginning of this new computing era, this new computing platform shift, to put everybody on Nvidia,” Huang said.
Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
