AI Ethics, Global Rivalry, and Startup Scandal Dominate Tech Week

One outlet's investigation revealed that Phia, the AI-driven shopping extension created by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, engaged in cookie stuffing for seven months, hijacking checkout pages to insert its own referral code and falsely claim sales it did not generate. The company has since disabled the feature, begun reversing erroneous transactions, and announced the recruitment of a chief compliance officer. At the same time, the U.S. State Department is drafting a notice to the 35 nations that signed its AI Opportunity Statement, telling them they must pick either the Washington-led Pax Silica coalition or Beijing's alternative AI framework, with the threat of being barred from the U.S. group if they hedge.

This diplomatic push aims to limit China's access to chips, models, and critical minerals. In the AI landscape, Alibaba's open-weight Qwen series recorded more than 3 billion downloads within half a year, dwarfing Meta's 227 million and Google's 418 million, according to a Hugging Face report, cementing its dominance in open-source AI. Additional tech news included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei defending his firm against trust criticisms, Nvidia's disclosed stakes in SpaceX and Intel, Amazon reinstating an arbitration clause, Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, and new watermarking features to meet EU AI regulations.