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The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Thursday that it is opening an investigation into 2.88 million Tesla vehicles equipped with its Full Self-Driving system over more than 50 reports of traffic-safety violations and a series of crashes. The auto safety agency said FSD an assistance system that requires drivers to pay attention and intervene if needed has “induced vehicle behavior that violated traffic safety laws.” The agency said it has reports of Tesla vehicles using FSD driving through red traffic lights and driving against the proper direction of travel during a lane change. RECALL COULD FOLLOW IF NHTSA FINDS SAFETY RISKS In total, NHTSA is reviewing 58 reports of issues involving traffic safety violations when using FSD, including 14 crashes and 23 injuries. The new investigation comes amid growing scrutiny of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system from Congress and weeks after a new NHTSA administrator was confirmed. Tesla, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, issued a software update to FSD this week. NHTSA said it has six reports in which a Tesla vehicle, operating with FSD engaged, “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection.” NHTSA said four crashes resulted in one or more injuries. The investigation – a preliminary evaluation – is the first step before the agency could seek a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety. A driver in Houston in 2024 told NHTSA that FSD “is not recognizing traffic signals. This results in the vehicle proceeding through red lights, and stopping at green lights.” The complaint added: “Tesla doesn’t want to fix it, or even acknowledge the problem, even though they’ve done a test drive with me and seen the issue with their own eyes.” NHTSA also said it will review FSD behavior when approaching railroad crossings. Last month, Democrat Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal cited a growing number of reported near-collisions in urging the agency to investigate. Tesla’s FSD, which is more advanced than its Autopilot system, has been under investigation by NHTSA for a year. In October 2024, the agency began an inquiry into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD after four reported collisions in conditions of reduced roadway visibility, such as sun glare, fog or airborne dust, including a 2023 fatal crash. Tesla says FSD “will drive you almost anywhere with your active supervision, requiring minimal intervention” but does not make the car self-driving. Tesla’s other automated vehicle features have also drawn agency scrutiny. In January, NHTSA opened an investigation into 2.6 million Tesla vehicles over reports of crashes involving a feature that lets users move their cars remotely. NHTSA is also reviewing Tesla’s deployment of self-driving robotaxis in Austin, Texas, launched in June. David Shepardson, Reuters
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on how generative AI and agents might radically change websites. I also look at the circular arrangements that are financing the AI boom, and at Blackrocks big move into data centers. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. How AI and agents could completely change websites At OpenAIs developer event this week, the company had a lot to say about autonomous agents, the AI-powered helpers that can understand what a user needs (sometimes proactively) and then do the work of getting it. The common narrative this week based on OpenAIs announcements is that the company is building a platform around ChatGPT and people will use the chatbot as a gateway to all sorts of web content. Freestanding websites (like Fast Company) will likely still exist, but they might look and work very differently when powered by large language models and agents. How might they change? A new UX. Right now, we use a mouse or a touchscreen to peruse menus, tap buttons, and scroll. We do all this either to see what the publisher has on offer, or to find the specific content we want within the virtual layers of information on the website. The only intelligence guiding that process is the descriptive language in the menus and buttons. AI models could inject much more intelligence into the experience. Users might be able to just talk to the interface and let the website gather the most relevant information in real timesimilar to the way AI search engines like Perplexity form a custom package of multimedia information after a user enters a query. And all that information might change in front of the users eyes as they give the AI more instructions. In other words, websites may no longer have a standard structure dictating how and where content is displayed. It may depend entirely on what the user is looking for and how they describe their need. Agent, my agent. At OpenAIs developer event on Monday, Christina Huang, one of the companys execs, used the platforms new Agent Builder tool to create an agent (live, onstage, in under eight minutes) that would act as a sort of concierge to help users at a standard web page the company built about the event. It showed developers the agent builder was the main point, but it also gave a glimpse of how OpenAI is thinking about the future of websites. Website visitors could tell the agent what they hoped to learn at the conference, and the agent would assemble a schedule full of the best panels and work groups to suit that end. The agent also had its own personality and visual style. The user interacted with it by typing, but it could easily have been a voice interaction between user and agent, which would have added a new dimension to the agents vibe. An intelligent UX and agents might play key roles in the websites of the future, or at least in the first phase of AI influencing how we access information online. From there, it could evolve to types of interaction that are hard to imagine right now. We should also remember that it may not be all about us (humans). Researchers are already trying to understand how websites might be coded differently for when most of the sites visitors are AI agents. AIs incestuous funding circle A growing number of people are voicing concern that just a few well-monied individuals and companies will control the AI that powers much of business and personal life, along with unprecedented amounts of personal information willingly fed into it by consumers. But the risks of AIs small circle of big players may run deeper than that. AIs biggest players are investing in each other, which some fear could be artificially inflating the stock prices and valuations of the whole group, as Bloombergs Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh point out. For example, Nvidia announced a $100-billion investment in OpenAI, which will buy about 2% equity in the company. Notably, the Nvidia investment will time the release of the funds according to the pace at which OpenAI buys the chips: Nvidia gets guaranteed chip sales and a 2% share of OpenAI. [T]hese investments might be circular and raise related party concerns, as Nvidia may own shares in a customer that will likely use such funds to buy more Nvidia gear, writes Morningstar equity analyst Brian Colello in a research brief. OpenAI struck a similar agreement with Microsoft when it took a $10-billion investment from the software giant, then used the money to buy its Azure cloud computing services. After facing criticism for the circular nature of the Nvidia deal, OpenAI doubled down and struck a similar deal with AMD, a rival AI chipmaker. OpenAI will buy large quantities of AMDs Instinct AI chips on a set schedule over the next decade. If it keeps to the schedule, itll get the option of taking a 10% stake in AMD. The deal gives OpenAI a solid second source for AI chips, and could give AMD the stamp of approval it needs to become a legit challenger to Nvidia. AMD CEO Lisa Su called the arrangement a virtuous, positive cycle. OpenAIs Sam Altman said during a meeting with reporters this week that the industry is still experimenting with the right financial models to pay for AIs immense development and hosting costs. On Tuesday, reports said Nvidia will buy a stake of up to $2 billion in Elon Musks xAI, which is now raising a $20 billion round. The financing includes equity and debt and is tied to the purchase of Nvidia GPUs for xAIs Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. The return on these big bets depends on how quickly AI can bring broad new efficiencies to big business, and, perhaps, find new ways to pry more dollars from consumers. There just isn’t much real evidence that these things are about to happennot yet. As Bloomberg puts it, AI remains an untested technology in business. So all the funding and equity and chip contracts flying back and forth between these companies are, in a sense, just promises among a relatively small group of people that AI indeed will pass the tests that lay ahead. Thats why the word bubble is on everybodys lis. Blackrock is moving hard on data centers and energy The big money is moving into AI data centers. Blackrock, the worlds largest asset manager, is reportedly in advanced talks to spend almost $40 billion to buy Aligned Data Centers, which owns 78 data centers across the U.S., Canada, and South America. That news came two days after reports that Blackrock is also in advanced talks to buy the utility company AES in a deal said to be worth $38 billion. Massive amounts of investment are pouring into the data center space, fueled by a belief that AI models will soon power many business and personal computing functions. Among the biggest barriers to such a transformation is a dearth of both AI computing power and the electricity needed to power it. M&A in both the data center and energy spaces has surged. Blackrock is doing the deals through its Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) subsidiary. The Aligned Data Center deal, which was reported Friday by Financial Times and confirmed by others, could close any day now. MGX, an Abu-Dhabi AI investment firm backed by Mubadala/G42, may also participate independently in the deal, the reports say. The deal would be one of the biggest acquisitions of the year. Earlier this year, Aligned raised $5 billion in equity and more than $7 billion in debt financing to expand its global footprint. GIP, which Blackrock bought in early 2024, already co-owns another data center group called CyrusOne, which it bought for $15 billion in 2021. Tech companies and data center developers will likely break ground or advance several hundred new data center projects by the end of 2025. A ConstructConnect report found that data center construction starts reached $12.9 billion by the end of June (with $2.4 billion in June alone), a 48% increase from the prior year. OpenAIs Stargate project alone will build massive data centers on five new sites. The big money behind that project comes from Oracle, Softbank, OpenAI, MGX, and Nvidia. Blackrock, with more than $10 trillion under management is often called a shadow bank because it manages funds for governments, pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, and corporations, as well as for individual investors. More AI coverage from Fast Company: How to figure out if an executive is AI fluent Trumps coal bailout wont solve the data center power crunch Sanders: AI may take 100 million jobs in the next 10 years What can the rise and fall of NFTs teach us about the AI bubble? Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney raised the prospect of reviving the contentious Keystone XL pipeline project with U.S. President Donald Trump during his White House visit this week, a government official familiar with the matter said Wednesday. A Canadian company pulled the plug on it four years ago after the Canadian government failed to persuade then-President Joe Biden to reverse his cancellation of its permit on the day he took office. It was to transport crude from the oil sand fields of western Canada to Steele City, Nebraska. Trump previously revived the long-delayed project during his first term after it had stalled under the Obama administration. It would have moved up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude daily, connecting in Nebraska to other pipelines that feed oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The Canadian government official said Trump was receptive to the idea when it was talked about during their White House meeting Wednesday. The official said Carney linked energy cooperation to Canadas steel and aluminum sectors, which are subject to 50% U.S. tariffs. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Carney mentioned building major projects and unleashing Canadian energy” in a live video call with business leaders in Toronto on Wednesday. Biden canceled Keystone XL’s border crossing permit in 2021 over longstanding concerns that burning oil sands crude could make climate change worse and harder to reverse. A spokesperson for South Bow Corp., the oil pipeline operator that owns the existing Keystone pipeline system, said they are not privy to the ongoing discussions between the Canadian and U.S. governments. South Bow is supportive of efforts to find solutions that increase the transportation of Canadian crude oil. We will continue to explore opportunities that leverage our existing corridor with our customers and others in the industry, the spokesperson said in an email. Carney is under pressure from the oil-rich province of Alberta to get a pipeline built. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said building a new pipeline to increase oil shipments to the U.S. Gulf Coast would be the cheapest, fastest, and least complicated route for a major oil pipeline. Strategically, this would increase, not decrease our dependance on the US export market. But it would be a brilliant judo move to find common ground with the Trump Administration, and help him to realize that the US benefits from and needs its privileged relationship to Canada, and access to our resources, Kenney posted on social media. Played smartly, Canadas cooperation could be strong leverage to push for reductions in Trump tariffs, he added. Carney mentioned Wednesday in the call that tariffs on Canada’s aluminum exports are not wise, noting the country provides 60% of the aluminum the U.S. needs. For the U.S. to produce that much aluminum, it would need the equivalent of the energy of 10 Hoover Dams, Carney said. Is making aluminum really the first best use of that power at a time when youve got the AI revolution, and youre reassuring manufacturing that you want to keep peoples electricity costs down at home. Carney also reiterated that Canadas relationship with the U.S., which led to increasing integration over many years, has changed. Our relationship will never again be what it was,” Carney said. We understand America first. Rob Gillies, Associated Press
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