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Surveillance startup Flock Safety is offering employee buyouts, and the language in that offer is notably blunt — without enough takers, the company says layoffs are almost certainly coming. It's a rare moment of candor from a startup, and a sign that even well-funded AI-adjacent companies are feeling the squeeze right now.
Shifting to Washington, President Trump has announced plans to create something he's calling an AI Force, a new agency he says will be led by an AI czar to be named soon. He also suggested rebranding artificial intelligence entirely, and claimed — without any supporting evidence — that public skepticism around AI is a Democratic hoax. It's a lot of language in search of a policy.
And finally, a developer has built AI agents designed to submit data deletion requests to companies on your behalf, automating a legal right that most people never actually exercise. The result was striking but unsurprising — most companies simply never responded. It's a quiet reminder that privacy rights on paper and privacy rights in practice are still very different things.
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