Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our world.
OpenAI has fired three safety researchers, calling it a breach of trust. The researchers fired back, accusing the company of prioritizing commercial interests over safety. It's a pattern critics have warned about for years — as AI capabilities race ahead, the people asking hard questions keep finding themselves on the outside.
On the political side of tech money, Senator Richard Blumenthal is pressing Cantor Fitzgerald for records on its relationship with crypto firm Tether, and specifically how much Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's family has profited from the arrangement. With Lutnick now shaping trade and commerce policy, the question of financial entanglement is not going away quietly.
And in a story that is really about the limits of data, a century-old miscalculation in the water estimates used to divide up the Colorado River has come back to haunt the American West. Engineers in the nineteen twenties measured flow during unusually wet years, and seven states have been overallocating that water ever since. The river is now paying the price.
Those are the stories worth watching today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
