Chicago — Five secretaries of state are urging Elon Musk to fix an AI chatbot on the social media platform X, saying in a letter sent Monday that it has spread election misinformation.

The top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington told Musk that X’s AI chatbot, Grok, produced false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.

While Grok is available only to subscribers to the premium versions of X, the misinformation was shared across multiple social media platforms and reached millions of people, according to the letter. The bogus ballot deadline information from the chatbot also referenced Alabama, Indiana, Ohio and Texas, although their secretaries of state did not sign the letter. Grok continued to repeat the false information for 10 days before it was corrected, the secretaries said.

The letter urged X to immediately fix the chatbot “to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.” That would include directing Grok to send users to CanIVote.org, a voting information website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State, when asked about U.S. elections.

“In this presidential election year, it is critically important that voters get accurate information on how to exercise their right to vote,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said in a statement. “Voters should reach out to their state or local election officials to find out how, when, and where they can vote.”

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Grok debuted last year for X premium and premium plus subscribers and was touted by Musk as a “rebellious” AI chatbot that will answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

Social media platforms have faced mounting scrutiny for their role in spreading misinformation, including about elections. The letter also warned that inaccuracies are to be expected for AI products, especially chatbots such as Grok that are based on large language models.

“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the secretaries wrote in the letter.

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X, watchdog groups have raised concerns over a surge in hate speech and misinformation being amplified on the platform, as well as the reduction of content moderation teams, elimination of misinformation features and censoring of journalists critical of Musk.

Experts say the moves represent a regression from progress made by social media platforms attempting to better combat political disinformation after the 2016 U.S. presidential contest and could precipitate a worsening misinformation landscape ahead of this year’s November elections.
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Washington — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies.

The highly anticipated decision issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta comes nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting the U.S. Justice Department against Google in the country’s biggest antitrust showdown in a quarter century.

After reviewing reams of evidence that included testimony from top executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple during last year’s 10-week trial, Mehta issued his potentially market-shifting decision three months after the two sides presented their closing arguments in early May.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling.

It represents a major setback for Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc., which had steadfastly argued that its popularity stemmed from consumers’ overwhelming desire to use a search engine so good at what it does that it has become synonymous with looking things up online.

Google’s search engine currently processes an estimated 8.5 billion queries per day worldwide, nearly doubling its daily volume from 12 years ago, according to a recent study released by the investment firm BOND.

Google almost certainly will appeal the decision in a process that ultimately may land in the U.S. Supreme Court.

For now, the decision vindicates antitrust regulators at the Justice Department, which filed its lawsuit nearly four years ago while Donald Trump was still president and has been escalating it efforts to rein in Big Tech’s power during President Joe Biden’s administration.

The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically has thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centerpiece of a digital advertising machine that generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year. Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while also enjoying the luxury of having to invest more time and money into improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that hurt consumers.

As expected, Mehta’s ruling focused on the billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets. In 2021 alone, Google spent more than $26 billion to lock in those default agreements, Mehta said in his ruling.

Google ridiculed those allegations, noting that consumers have historically changed search engines when they become disillusioned with the results they were getting. For instance, Yahoo — now a minor player on the internet — was the most popular search engine during the 1990s before Google came along.

Mehta said the evidence at trial showed the importance of the default settings. He noted that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has 80% share of the search market on the Microsoft Edge browser. The judge said that shows other search engines can be successful if Google is not locked in as the predetermined default option.

Still, Mehta credited the quality of Google’s product as an important part of its dominance, as well, saying flatly that “Google is widely recognized as the best [general search engine] available in the United States.”

Mehta’s conclusion that Google has been running an illegal monopoly sets up another legal phase to determine what sorts of changes or penalties should be imposed to reverse the damage done and restore a more competitive landscape.

Besides boosting Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the outcome could hurt Google at a critical pivot point that is tilting technology in the age of artificial intelligence. Both Microsoft and Google are among the early leaders in AI in a battle that now could be affected by Mehta’s market-rattling decision.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was one of the Justice Department’s star witnesses during the testimony that covered his frustration with Google deals with the likes of Apple that made it nearly impossible for the Bing search engine to make any headway, even as Microsoft poured more than $100 billion in improvements since 2009.

“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Nadella said at one point in his testimony. “Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web.”

Nadella also expressed fear that it might take an antitrust crackdown to ensure the situation didn’t get worse as AI becomes a bigger force in search.

Google still faces other legal threats besides this one, both in the U.S. and abroad. any antitrust lawsuits brought against Google domestically and abroad. In September, a federal trial is scheduled to begin in Virginia over the Justice Department’s allegations that Google’s advertising technology constitutes an illegal monopoly.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to propose barring Chinese software in autonomous and connected vehicles in the coming weeks, according to sources briefed on the matter.

The Biden administration plans to issue a proposed rule that would bar Chinese software in vehicles in the United States with Level 3 automation and above, which would have the effect of also banning testing on U.S. roads of autonomous vehicles produced by Chinese companies.

The administration, in a previously unreported decision, also plans to propose barring vehicles with Chinese-developed advanced wireless communications abilities modules from U.S. roads, the sources added.

Under the proposal, automakers and suppliers would need to verify that none of their connected vehicle or advanced autonomous vehicle software was developed in a “foreign entity of concern” like China, the sources said.

The Commerce Department said last month it planned to issue proposed rules on connected vehicles in August and expected to impose limits on some software made in China and other countries deemed adversaries.

Asked for comment, a Commerce Department spokesperson said on Sunday that the department “is concerned about the national security risks associated with connected technologies in connected vehicles.”

The department’s Bureau of Industry and Security will issue a proposed rule that “will focus on specific systems of concern within the vehicle. Industry will also have a chance to review that proposed rule and submit comments.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment but the Chinese foreign ministry has previously urged the United States “to respect the laws of the market economy and principles of fair competition.” It argues Chinese cars are popular globally because they had emerged out of fierce market competition and are technologically innovative.

On Wednesday, the White House and State Department hosted a meeting with allies and industry leaders to “jointly address the national security risks associated with connected vehicles,” the department said. Sources said officials disclosed details of the administration’s planned rule.

The meeting included officials from the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Germany, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom who “exchanged views on the data and cybersecurity risks associated with connected vehicles and certain components.”

Also known as conditional driving automation, Level 3 involves technology that allows drivers to engage in activities behind the wheel, such as watching movies or using smartphones, but only under some limited conditions.

In November, a group of U.S. lawmakers raised alarm about Chinese companies collecting and handling sensitive data while testing autonomous vehicles in the United States and asked questions of 10 major companies including Baidu, Nio, WeRide, Didi Chuxing, Xpeng, Inceptio, Pony.ai, AutoX, Deeproute.ai and Qcraft.

The letters said in the 12 months ended November 2022 that Chinese AV companies test drove more than 450,000 miles in California. In July 2023, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his department had national security concerns about Chinese autonomous vehicle companies in the United States.

The administration is worried about connected vehicles using the driver monitoring system to listen or record occupants or take control of the vehicle itself.

“The national security risks are quite significant,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in May. “We decided to take action because this is really serious stuff.”
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Taipei, Taiwan — Concern is rising among China’s more than 1 billion internet users over a government proposal portrayed as a step to protect their personal information and fight against fraud. Many fear the plan would do the opposite.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration issued the draft “Measures for the Administration of National Network Identity Authentication Public Services” on July 26.

According to the proposal, Chinese netizens would be able to apply for virtual IDs on a voluntary basis to “minimize the excessive collection and retention of citizens’ personal information by online platforms” and “protect personal information.”

While many netizens appear to agree in their posts that companies have too much access to their personal information, others fear the cyber ID proposal, if implemented, will simply allow the government to more easily track them and control what they can say online.

Beijing lawyer Wang Cailiang said on Weibo: “My opinion is short: I am not in favor of this. Please leave a little room for citizens’ privacy.”

Shortly after the proposal was published, Tsinghua University law professor Lao Dongyan posted on her Weibo account, “The cyber IDs are like installing monitors to watch everyone’s online behavior.”

Her post has since disappeared, along with many other negative comments that can only be found on foreign social media platforms like X and Free Weibo, an anonymous and unblocked search engine established in 2012 to capture and save posts censored by China’s Sina Weibo or deleted by users.

A Weibo user under the name “Liu Jiming” said, “The authorities solemnly announced [the proposal] and solicited public opinions while blocking people from expressing their opinions. This clumsy show of democracy is really shocking.”

Beijing employs a vast network of censors to block and remove politically sensitive content, known by critics as the Great Firewall.

Since 2017, China has required internet service and content providers to verify users’ real names through national IDs, allowing authorities to more easily trace and track online activities and posts to the source.

Chinese internet experts say netizens can make that harder by using others’ accounts, providers, IDs and names on various platforms. But critics fear a single cyber ID would close those gaps in the Great Firewall.

Zola, a network engineer and well-known citizen journalist originally from China’s Hunan province, who naturalized in Taiwan, told VOA “The control of the cyber IDs is a superpower because you don’t only know a netizen’s actual name, but also the connection between the netizen and the cybersecurity ID.”

Mr. Li, a Shanghai-based dissident who did not want to disclose his full name because of the issue’s sensitivity, told VOA that the level of surveillance by China’s internet police has long been beyond imagination. He said the new proposal is a way for authorities to tell netizens that the surveillance will be more overt “just to intimidate and warn you to behave.”

Some netizens fear China could soon change the cyber ID system from a voluntary program to a requirement for online access.

A Weibo user under the name “Fang Zhifu” warned that in the future, if “the cyber ID is revoked, it will be like being sentenced to death in the cyber world.”

Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Public Security and Cyberspace Administration say they are soliciting public opinion on the cyber ID plan until August 25.
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A California company is developing a material that can cool things by sending heat into deep space. Matt Dibble has our story in this week’s edition of LogOn.
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New York — A manipulated video that mimics the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.

The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.

The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic president nominee, released last week launching her campaign. But the video swaps out the voice-over audio with another voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.

“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate,” the voice says in the video. It claims Harris is a “diversity hire” because she is a woman and a person of color, and it says she doesn’t know “the first thing about running the country.” The video retains “Harris for President” branding. It also adds in some authentic past clips of Harris.

Mia Ehrenberg, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in an email to The Associated Press: “We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”

The widely shared video is an example of how lifelike AI-generated images, videos or audio clips have been utilized both to poke fun and to mislead about politics as the United States draws closer to the presidential election. It exposes how, as high-quality AI tools have become far more accessible, there remains a lack of significant federal action so far to regulate their use, leaving rules guiding AI in politics largely to states and social media platforms.

The video also raises questions about how to best handle content that blurs the lines of what is considered an appropriate use of AI, particularly if it falls into the category of satire.

The original user who posted the video, a YouTuber known as Mr Reagan, has disclosed both on YouTube and on X that the manipulated video is a parody. But Musk’s post, which has been viewed more than 123 million times, according to the platform, only includes the caption “This is amazing” with a laughing emoji.

X users who are familiar with the platform may know to click through Musk’s post to the original user’s post, where the disclosure is visible. Musk’s caption does not direct them to do so.

While some participants in X’s “community note” feature to add context to posts have suggested labeling Musk’s post, no such label had been added to it as of Sunday afternoon. Some users online questioned whether his post might violate X’s policies, which say users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

The policy has an exception for memes and satire as long as they do not cause “significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.”

Musk endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, earlier this month. Neither Mr Reagan nor Musk immediately responded to emailed requests for comment Sunday.

Two experts who specialize in AI-generated media reviewed the fake ad’s audio and confirmed that much of it was generated using AI technology.

One of them, University of California, Berkeley, digital forensics expert Hany Farid, said the video shows the power of generative AI and deepfakes.

“The AI-generated voice is very good,” he said in an email. “Even though most people won’t believe it is VP Harris’ voice, the video is that much more powerful when the words are in her voice.”

He said generative AI companies that make voice-cloning tools and other AI tools available to the public should do better to ensure their services are not used in ways that could harm people or democracy.

Rob Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, disagreed with Farid, saying he thought many people would be fooled by the video.

“I don’t think that’s obviously a joke,” Weissman said in an interview. “I’m certain that most people looking at it don’t assume it’s a joke. The quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. And precisely because it feeds into preexisting themes that have circulated around her, most people will believe it to be real.”

Weissman, whose organization has advocated for Congress, federal agencies and states to regulate generative AI, said the video is “the kind of thing that we’ve been warning about.”

Other generative AI deepfakes in both the U.S. and elsewhere would have tried to influence voters with misinformation, humor or both.

In Slovakia in 2023, fake audio clips impersonated a candidate discussing plans to rig an election and raise the price of beer days before the vote. In Louisiana in 2022, a political action committee’s satirical ad superimposed a Louisiana mayoral candidate’s face onto an actor portraying him as an underachieving high school student.

Congress has yet to pass legislation on AI in politics, and federal agencies have only taken limited steps, leaving most existing U.S. regulation to the states. More than one-third of states have created their own laws regulating the use of AI in campaigns and elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Beyond X, other social media companies also have created policies regarding synthetic and manipulated media shared on their platforms. Users on the video platform YouTube, for example, must reveal whether they have used generative artificial intelligence to create videos or face suspension.
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WASHINGTON — In a fresh broadside against one of the world’s most popular technology companies, the Justice Department late Friday accused TikTok of harnessing the capability to gather bulk information on users based on views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion and religion.

Government lawyers wrote in a brief filed to the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.

TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.

One of Lark’s internal search tools, the filing states, permits ByteDance and TikTok employees in the U.S. and China to gather information on users’ content or expressions, including views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported TikTok had tracked users who watched LGBTQ content through a dashboard the company said it had since deleted.

The new court documents represent the government’s first major defense in a consequential legal battle over the future of the popular social media platform, which is used by more than 170 million Americans. Under a law signed by President Joe Biden in April, the company could face a ban in a few months if it doesn’t break ties with ByteDance.

The measure was passed with bipartisan support after lawmakers and administration officials expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or sway public opinion towards Beijing’s interests by manipulating the algorithm that populates users’ feeds.

The Justice Department warned, in stark terms, of the potential for what it called “covert content manipulation” by the Chinese government, saying the algorithm could be designed to shape content that users receive.

“By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm; China could for example further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions,” the brief states.

The concern, they said, is more than theoretical, alleging that TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called “heating” in which certain videos are promoted in order to receive a certain number of views. While this capability enables TikTok to curate popular content and disseminate it more widely, U.S. officials posit it can also be used for nefarious purposes.

Justice Department officials are asking the court to allow a classified version of its legal brief, which won’t be accessible to the two companies.

Nothing in the redacted brief “changes the fact that the Constitution is on our side,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement.

“The TikTok ban would silence 170 million Americans’ voices, violating the 1st Amendment,” Haurek said. “As we’ve said before, the government has never put forth proof of its claims, including when Congress passed this unconstitutional law. Today, once again, the government is taking this unprecedented step while hiding behind secret information. We remain confident we will prevail in court.”

In the redacted version of the court documents, the Justice Department said another tool triggered the suppression of content based on the use of certain words. Certain policies of the tool applied to ByteDance users in China, where the company operates a similar app called Douyin that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.

But Justice Department officials said other policies may have been applied to TikTok users outside of China. TikTok was investigating the existence of these policies and whether they had ever been used in the U.S. in, or around, 2022, officials said.

The government points to the Lark data transfers to explain why federal officials do not believe that Project Texas, TikTok’s $1.5 billion mitigation plan to store U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by the tech giant Oracle, is sufficient to guard against national security concerns.

In its legal challenge against the law, TikTok has heavily leaned on arguments that the potential ban violates the First Amendment because it bars the app from continued speech unless it attracts a new owner through a complex divestment process. It has also argued divestment would change the speech on the platform because a new social platform would lack the algorithm that has driven its success.

In its response, the Justice Department argued TikTok has not raised any valid free speech claims, saying the law addresses national security concerns without targeting protected speech, and argues that China and ByteDance, as foreign entities, aren’t shielded by the First Amendment.

TikTok has also argued the U.S. law discriminates on viewpoints, citing statements from some lawmakers critical of what they viewed as an anti-Israel tilt on the platform during its war in Gaza.

Justice Department officials disputes that argument, saying the law at issue reflects their ongoing concern that China could weaponize technology against U.S. national security, a fear they say is made worse by demands that companies under Beijing’s control turn over sensitive data to the government. They say TikTok, under its current operating structure, is required to be responsive to those demands.

Oral arguments in the case is scheduled for September. 
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washington — This week, as Taiwan was preparing for the start of its Han Kuang military exercises, its air defense system detected a Chinese drone circling the island. This was the sixth time that China had sent a drone to operate around Taiwan since 2023.

Drones like the one that flew around Taiwan, which are tasked with dual-pronged missions of reconnaissance and intimidation, are just a small part of a broader trend that is making headlines from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait and is changing the face of warfare. 

The increasing role that unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, play and rising concern about a Chinese invasion of democratically ruled Taiwan is pushing Washington, Beijing and Taipei to improve the sophistication, adaptability and cost of drone technology.

‘Hellscape’ strategy

Last August, the Pentagon launched a $1 billion Replicator Initiative to create air, sea and land drones in the “multiple thousands,” according to the Defense Department’s Innovation Unit. The Pentagon aims to build that force of drones by August 2025.

The initiative is part of what U.S. Admiral Samuel Paparo recently described to The Washington Post as a “hellscape” strategy, which aims to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan through the deployment of thousands of unmanned drones in the air and sea between the island and China.

“The benefits of unmanned systems are that you get cheap, disposable mass that’s low cost. If a drone gets shot down, the only people that are crying about it are the accountants,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University. “You can use them at large amounts of scale and overwhelm your opponents as well as degrade their defensive capabilities.”

The hellscape strategy, he added, aims to use lots of cheap drones to try to hold back China from attacking Taiwan.

Drone manufacturing supremacy

China has its own plans under way and is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones. In a news briefing after Paparo’s remarks to the Post, it warned Washington that it was playing with fire. 

“Those who clamor for turning others’ homeland into hell should get ready for burning in hell themselves,” said Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese defense ministry.

“The People’s Liberation Army is able to fight and win in thwarting external interference and safeguarding our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Threats and intimidation never work on us,” Wu said.

China’s effort to expand its use of drones has been bolstered, analysts say, by leader Xi Jinping’s emphasis on technology and modernization in the military, something he highlighted at a top-level party meeting last week.

“China’s military is developing more than 50 types of drones with varying capabilities, amassing a fleet of tens of thousands of drones, potentially 10 times larger than Taiwan and the U.S. combined,” Michael Raska, assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told VOA in an email. “This quantitative edge currently fuels China’s accelerating military modernization, with drones envisioned for everything from pre-conflict intel gathering to swarming attacks.”

Analysts add that China’s commercial drone manufacturing supremacy aids its military in the push for drone development. China’s DJI dominates in production and sale of household drones, accounting for 76% of the worldwide consumer market in 2021.

The scale of production and low price of DJI drones could put China in an advantageous position in a potential drone war, analysts say.

“In Russia and Ukraine, if you have a lot of drones – even if they’re like the commercial off-the-shelf things, DJI drones you can buy at Costco – and you throw hundreds of them at an air defense system, that’s going to create a large problem,” said Major Emilie Stewart, a research analyst at the China Aerospace Studies Institute.

China denies it is seeking to use commercial UAV technology for future conflicts.

“China has always been committed to maintaining global security and regional stability and has always opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA. “We are firmly opposed to the U.S.’s military ties with Taiwan and its effort of arming Taiwan.”

Drone force

With assistance from its American partners, pressure from China and lessons from Ukraine, Taiwan has been pushing to develop its own domestic drone warfare capabilities.

The United States has played a pivotal role in Taiwan’s drone development, and just last week it pledged to sell $360 million of attack drones to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, or TECRO, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington.

“Taiwan will continue to build a credible deterrence and work closely with like-minded partners, including the United States, to preserve peace and stability in the region,” TECRO told VOA when asked about the collaboration between Taipei and Washington. “We have no further information to share at this moment.”

The effort to incorporate drones into its defense is crucial for Taiwan, said Eric Chan, a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.

“The biggest immediate effects of the U.S. coming into this mass UAV game is to give Taiwan a bigger advantage to be able to, first, detect their enemy and, second, help them build a backstop to their own capabilities as well,” Chan said.

With the potential for China to consider using drones in an urban conflict environment, Taiwan is recognizing the importance of stepping up its counter-drone defense systems.

“After multiple intrusions of Chinese drones in outlying islands, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense now places great emphasis on anti-drone capabilities,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, chief executive of Tron Future, an anti-drone company working with the Taiwanese military.

The demand is one that Wang said his company is willing and ready to fill.
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LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. 

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement. 

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said. 

Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.” 

“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said. 

A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said. 

“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh. 

Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers. 

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. 

The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012. 

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union. 

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
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AUSTIN, Tex. — Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, are back in operation as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong. 

A defective software update sent by CrowdStrike to its customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical services Friday, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The painstaking work of fixing it has often required a company’s IT crew to manually delete files on affected machines. 

CrowdStrike said late Sunday in a blog post that it was starting to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem. 

Shares of the Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped nearly 30% since the meltdown, knocking off billions of dollars in market value. 

The scope of the disruptions has also caught the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcers, though it remains to be seen if they take action against the company. 

“All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers,” said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in a Sunday post on the social media platform X. “Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.” 
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NEW DELHI — Byju Raveendran, an Indian mathematics whiz who soared from teacher to startup billionaire before his education-technology company imploded this year, now faces his biggest test.

The future of Raveendran’s eponymous Byju’s online coaching firm rests with India’s courts after the country’s biggest startup, once loved by global investors who valued it at $22 billion, crashed below $2 billion in valuation.

The 44-year-old founder last week lost control of the company as a tribunal kick-started an insolvency process.

Accused of “financial mismanagement and compliance issues,” the son of a family of teachers from a small village in south India faces a reckoning that will test the ingenuity that made him a poster child for India’s startups.

His formerly high-flying company was eventually brought low when it could not pay $19 million in sponsorship dues to India’s cricket federation, prompting a tribunal to suspend Byju’s board and make Raveendran report to a court-appointed restructuring expert.

An appeals tribunal is expected to hold a hearing on Monday on whether Byju’s insolvency process should be quashed after the former billionaire argued in court his company is solvent and that insolvency could shut it down and cost the jobs of 27,000 staff, including teachers. Insolvency also would not bode well for Byju’s backers, such as Dutch technology investor Prosus.

Raveendran denies the allegations of mismanagement and wrongdoing at his firm, which has in recent months faced lawsuits over unpaid loans and boardroom battles with foreign investors that went public.

Potential insolvency is a dramatic turn of events for an entrepreneur described by one person who has worked with him as an extremely passionate and goal-oriented person who might adopt “an abrasive approach” in a crisis.

Raveendran presented a “suave, nice and polished” image, appearing to heed advice, but “eventually there was a trust deficit,” said another executive who quit last year as a Byju’s senior vice president.

“He said things are improving, don’t worry, we have the money,” the former executive said.

Raveendran and a Byju’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Byju’s downfall: ‘Our fair share of mistakes’

An engineer by training, he started Byju’s in 2011 with physical classes after friends urged him to go into teaching.

Raveendran, who aced a premier Indian management exam “with a score of 100 percentile, not once but twice,” according to the company website, started what would become his empire with his wife Divya Gokulnath, 38, a former student of his.

In education-obsessed India, Raveendran hit gold by offering online teaching programs priced from $100 to $300. He got a mammoth boost when the COVID-19 pandemic sent students indoors. At the height of his fame in 2021, he and his wife had a net worth of $4 billion, Forbes reckoned.

Now all that is in tatters.

Behind the reversal of Byju’s meteoric success, say executives and advisers who worked with Raveendran, is that he overruled associates and expanded the business through expensive acquisitions, splurging on marketing and being slow to address problems such as sales agents adopting aggressive tactics to mis-sell courses that damaged the company’s reputation.

With the backing of investors like General Atlantic, Prosus and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy venture, Raveendran spent millions on acquisitions, and the company says it has 150 million students in over 100 countries.

“While growing fast, as I’ve accepted multiple times, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes,” Raveendran told an interviewer last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

As he battled crises, the CEO also said decisions to lay off some of its then-50,000 employees and slash branding expenses would help strengthen loss-making Byju’s and turn its cashflow positive.

“Every country needs a Byju’s,” he said.
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BENGALURU, India — At a Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of Chennai in southern India, a giant battery powers machinery day and night, replacing a diesel-spewing generator. It’s one of just a handful of sites in India powered by electricity stored in batteries, a key component to fast-tracking India’s energy transition away from dirty fuels.   

The country’s lithium ion battery storage industry — which can store electricity generated by wind turbines or solar panels for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing — makes up just 0.1% of global battery storage systems. But battery storage is growing fast, with around a third of India’s total battery infrastructure coming online just this year.   

“Our orders are growing exponentially,” said Ayush Misra, CEO of Amperehour Energy, the company that installed the batteries at the Chennai factory. “It’s a really exciting time to be a battery storage provider.”   

Businesses invest in industry

India currently has around 100 megawatts of storage capacity from batteries, with another 3.3 gigawatts of clean energy storage coming from hydropower. The Indian government estimates that the country will need about 74 gigawatts of energy storage from batteries, hydropower and nuclear energy by 2032, but experts think the country actually needs closer to double that amount to meet the country’s energy needs. 

Some customers are still wary of using battery technology for storage, and the storage systems can be seen as more expensive than the more commonly used coal. The supply chain of batteries is also concentrated in China, meaning the sector is vulnerable to geopolitical volatility. 

But markets don’t think customers will be hesitant about batteries for long, with major Indian businesses announcing significant investments in the industry.   

In January this year, energy giant Reliance Industries said it will build a 5,000-acre factory in Jamnagar, Gujarat. And in March, Goodenough Energy said it will spend $53 million by 2027 to set up a 20 million kilowatt-hour battery factory in the northern region of Jammu and Kashmir.   

Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an independent energy analyst based in Bengaluru, said upping storage capacity should be done alongside ramping up renewables. 

“Clean energy combined with adequate storage can be an alternative to coal. Not in the future but right now,” he said. He added that it’s a “myth” that clean energy is more expensive than coal, as current prices of renewable energy combined with storage is cheaper than new coal.   

Global battery costs are declining faster than expected, and experts say that if costs continue to plummet, energy storage systems can better compete with both coal and clean energy sources like hydropower and nuclear energy that can also control their supply to meet demand. 

“Battery storage is now the largest resource to meet California’s evening peak electricity requirements. It’s more than gas, nuclear or coal,” he said. This is being replicated in the U.K., China and even smaller nations like Tonga. “There’s no reason why this can’t happen in India too,” he said.   

India’s energy needs grow

One of India’s unique challenges is that energy needs are growing more rapidly than most nations: the population is increasing and extreme heat fueled by climate change means more and more people are using energy-guzzling air conditioning. India’s electricity demand grew by 7% last year and is expected to grow by at least 6% every year for the next three years, according to the International Energy Agency. 

“The country needs to quadruple its renewable energy deployment just to meet demand growth,” said Hogeveen Rutter. 

Ankit Mittal, co-founder of Sheru, a software company that offers energy storage and management solutions, said that making battery storage sites more flexible can help the industry ramp up quickly.   

Mittal said battery storage sites should be more accessible to the national energy grid, so they can provide electricity to whichever regions need the extra boost of energy most. Currently, battery storage sites in India only power up more local sites.   

To encourage further growth of the battery sector, the Indian government announced last year a $452 million effort to support an additional four gigawatts of battery storage by 2031. But the government also provides subsidies for coal plants, making the electricity generated there a cheaper bet for some utility companies. 

Future government policy could level the playing field. The country is set to announce a new national budget later in July that industry leaders hope will contain incentives for clean energy storage. 

Akshat Singhal, co-founder of the Bengaluru-based battery tech startup Log 9 Materials, thinks that better government support can help the country meet growing energy demands “the right way,” with clean energy. 

“One significant policy change can kickstart the entire ecosystem,” he said. 
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sydney — Australia’s cyber intelligence agency said on Saturday that “malicious websites and unofficial code” were being released online claiming to aid recovery from Friday’s global digital outage, which hit media, retailers, banks and airlines. 

Australia was one of many countries affected by the outage that caused havoc worldwide after a botched software update from CrowdStrike. 

On Saturday, the Australian Signals Directorate — the country’s cyber intelligence agency — said “a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident.” 

On its website, the agency said its cyber security center “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only.” 

Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X on Saturday that Australians should “be on the lookout for possible scams and phishing attempts.” 

CrowdStrike — which previously reached a market cap of about $83 billion — is a major cybersecurity provider, with close to 30,000 subscribers globally. 
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WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A global technology outage grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack — and that a fix was on the way. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

But hours after the problem was first detected, the disarray continued — and escalated.

Long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services at a time when many travelers are heading away on summer vacations. News outlets in Australia — where telecommunications were severely affected — were pushed off air for hours. Hospitals and doctor’s offices had problems with their appointment systems, while banks in South Africa and New Zealand reported outages to their payment system or websites and apps.

Some athletes and spectators descending on Paris ahead of the Olympics were delayed, but Games organizers said disruptions were limited and didn’t affect ticketing or the torch relay.

DownDectector, which tracks user-reported disruptions to internet services, recorded that airlines, payment platforms and online shopping websites across the world were affected — although the disruption appeared piecemeal and was apparently related to whether the companies used Microsoft cloud-based services.

Cyber expert James Bore said real harm would be caused by the outage because systems we’ve come to rely on at critical times are not going to be available. Hospitals, for example, will struggle to sort out appointments and those who need care may not get it.

“There are going to be deaths because of this. It’s inevitable,” Bore said. “We’ve got so many systems tied up with this.”

Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

CrowdStrike said in an emailed statement that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

It said: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

The Austin, Texas-based company’s Nasdaq-traded shares were down nearly 15% in premarket trading early Friday.

A recording playing on its customer service line said, “CrowdStrike is aware of the reports of crashes on Microsoft ports related to the Falcon sensor,” referring to one of its products used to block online attacks.

Meanwhile, governments, officials and companies across the world scrambled to respond.

New Zealand’s acting prime minister, David Seymour, said on X that officials in the country were “moving at pace to understand the potential impacts,” adding that he had no information indicating it was a cybersecurity threat.

The issue was causing “inconvenience” for the public and businesses, he added.

On Friday morning, major delays reported at airports grew, with most attributing the problems in booking systems of individual airlines.

In the U.S., the FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded.

Airlines and railways in the U.K. were also affected, with longer than usual waiting times.

With athletes and spectators arriving from around the world for the Paris Olympics, the city’s airport authority said its computer systems were not affected by the outage, but that disruptions to airline operations was causing delays at two major Paris airports. The Paris Olympics organizers said the outage affected their computer systems and the arrival of some delegations and their uniforms and accreditations had been delayed.

But the impact was limited, the organizers said, and the outages had not affected ticketing or the torch relay.

In Germany, Berlin-Brandenburg Airport halted flights for several hours due to difficulties in checking in passengers, while landings at Zurich airport were suspended and flights in Hungary, Italy and Turkey disrupted.

The Dutch carrier KLM said it had been “forced to suspend most” of its operations.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport warned that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The chaotic morning coincided with one of the busiest days of the year for Schiphol.

Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled — although flights were still operating.

In India, Hong Kong and Thailand, many airlines were forced to manually check in passengers. An airline in Kenya was also reporting disruption.

While the outages were being experienced worldwide, Australia appeared to be severely affected by the issue. Disruption reported on the site DownDetector included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.

National news outlets — including public broadcaster ABC and Sky News Australia — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels for hours. Some news anchors went on air online from dark offices, in front of computers showing “blue screens of death.”

Hospitals in several countries also reported problems.

Britain’s National Health Service said the outage caused problems at most doctors’ offices across England. NHS England said in a statement said the glitch was affecting the appointment and patient record system used across the public health system.

Some hospitals in northern Germany canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, but emergency care was unaffected.

Israel said its hospitals and post office operations were disrupted.

In South Africa, at least one major bank said it was experiencing nationwide service disruptions as customers reported they were unable to make payments using their bank cards in stores. The New Zealand banks ASB and Kiwibank said their services were down as well.

Shipping was disrupted too: A major container hub in the Baltic port of Gdansk, Poland, the Baltic Hub, said it was battling problems resulting from the global system outage.
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Nairobi, Kenya — Experts say Africa needs to invest in robust infrastructure if the continent is to have reliable internet after recent outages due to underwater cable failures highlighted the continent’s reliance on single-path connectivity.

Disruptions in March and May caused online banking problems and communication delays. Businesses experienced interruptions in many countries.

In March, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, four submarine cables that deliver the internet to at least 17 countries went offline.

Less than two months later, Eastern and Southern Africa experienced outages after two undersea cables were damaged. In Tanzania, the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam closed for two days due to the disruption.

Ben Gumo, a Kenyan who relies on the internet to sell clothes, shoes and children’s wares, said he lost business during the May disruption.

“Someone … puts stuff in the [online] basket, but because of the outage he cannot complete the sale, so he cancels,” Gumo said, adding that he couldn’t update his website with new products.

According to the telecommunications research company Telegeography, over 100 cable cuts occur globally each year. Experts blame undersea volcanic activity, rock falls, recent rainfall and currents in rivers that are much stronger than when some of the cables were built.

Manmade activities also cause disruptions. According to one report, a ship was attacked in the Red Sea and drifted, its anchor pulling up three underwater cables.

Mike Last works with the West Indian Ocean Cable Company, which operates in 20 African countries and has built 36 data centers. He said recent disruptions prompted government officials and businesspeople to recognize the need for better internet infrastructure.

“What it made people realize is that you have to invest in a reliable network, you have to invest in redundancy,” Last said, meaning that internet service is provided by more than one source. “We’ve seen a real boom in clients coming to us wanting connectivity on the new subsea systems.”

Some countries can stay online when one internet source is cut off, although service is often slow and not stable, because service providers and telecommunication carriers invested in more than one international connection.

According to the World Bank, sub-Saharan Africa’s digital infrastructure coverage, access and quality are far behind those of other regions.

However, Africa is embracing the digital future. According to the Submarine Cable Networks, 37 countries have at least one subsea cable connection, and 20 countries have more than two subsea cables.

Last said cables planned by Google and Meta will improve connectivity.

One of the new cables, he said, has a high capacity. Another new cable — named 2Africa and led by Meta, the parent company of Facebook — is being built all the way around Africa.

“It brings a lot of capacity to Africa, and that will help,” Last said.

Experts warn that disparities in connectivity across Africa are expected, but that the development of infrastructure, government policies and private sector investments can accelerate growth.
…

Northern Ukraine — Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelming odds and uneven international assistance, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or a factory basement.

An ecosystem of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops is leveraging innovation to create a robot army that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians.

Defense startups across Ukraine — about 250 according to industry estimates — are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops.

Employees at a startup run by entrepreneur Andrii Denysenko can put together an unmanned ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days at a shed used by the company. Its most important feature is the price tag: $35,000, or roughly 10% of the cost of an imported model.

Denysenko asked that The Associated Press not publish details of the location to protect the infrastructure and the people working there.

The site is partitioned into small rooms for welding and body work. That includes making fiberglass cargo beds, spray-painting the vehicles gun-green and fitting basic electronics, battery-powered engines, off-the-shelf cameras and thermal sensors.

The military is assessing dozens of new unmanned air, ground and marine vehicles produced by the no-frills startup sector, whose production methods are far removed from giant Western defense companies.

A fourth branch of Ukraine’s military — the Unmanned Systems Forces — joined the army, navy and air force in May.

Engineers take inspiration from articles in defense magazines or online videos to produce cut-price platforms. Weapons or smart components can be added later.

“We are fighting a huge country, and they don’t have any resource limits. We understand that we cannot spend a lot of human lives,” said Denysenko, who heads the defense startup UkrPrototyp. “War is mathematics.”

One of its drones, the car-sized Odyssey, spun on its axis and kicked up dust as it rumbled forward in a cornfield in the north of the country last month.

The 800-kilogram (1,750-pound) prototype that looks like a small, turretless tank with its wheels on tracks can travel up to 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) on one charge of a battery the size of a small beer cooler.

The prototype acts as a rescue-and-supply platform but can be modified to carry a remotely operated heavy machine gun or sling mine-clearing charges.

“Squads of robots … will become logistics devices, tow trucks, minelayers and deminers, as well as self-destructive robots,” a government fundraising page said after the launch of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. “The first robots are already proving their effectiveness on the battlefield.”

Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister for digital transformation, is encouraging citizens to take free online courses and assemble aerial drones at home. He wants Ukrainians to make a million of flying machines a year.

“There will be more of them soon,” the fundraising page said. “Many more.”

Denysenko’s company is working on projects including a motorized exoskeleton that would boost a soldier’s strength and carrier vehicles to transport a soldier’s equipment and even help them up an incline. “We will do everything to make unmanned technologies develop even faster. [Russia’s] murderers use their soldiers as cannon fodder, while we lose our best people,” Fedorov wrote in an online post.

Ukraine has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI and the combination of low-cost weapons and artificial intelligence tools is worrying many experts who say low-cost drones will enable their proliferation.

Technology leaders to the United Nations and the Vatican worry that the use of drones and AI in weapons could reduce the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts.

Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups are calling for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision making, a concern echoed by the U.N. General Assembly, Elon Musk and the founders of the Google-owned, London-based startup DeepMind.

“Cheaper drones will enable their proliferation,” said Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Their autonomy is also only likely to increase.”
…

MOUNT STORM, West Virginia — Down a long gravel road, tucked into the hills in West Virginia, is a low-slung building where researchers are extracting essential elements from an old coal mine that they hope will strengthen the nation’s energy future.

They aren’t mining the coal that powered the steel mills and locomotives that helped industrialize America — and that is blamed for contributing to global warming.

Rather, researchers are finding that groundwater pouring out of this and other abandoned coal mines contains the rare earth elements and other valuable metals that are vital to making everything from electric vehicle motors to rechargeable batteries to fighter jets smaller, lighter or more powerful.

The pilot project run by West Virginia University is now part of an intensifying worldwide race to develop a secure supply of the valuable metals and, with more federal funding, it could grow to a commercial scale enterprise.

“The ultimate irony is that the stuff that has created climate change is now a solution, if we’re smart about it,” said John Quigley, a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The technology that has been piloted at this facility in West Virginia could also pioneer a way to clean up vast amounts of coal mine drainage that poisons waterways across Appalachia.

The project is one of the leading efforts by the federal government as it injects more money than ever into recovering rare earth elements to expand renewable energies and fight climate change by reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

For the U.S., which like the rest of the West is beholden to a Chinese-controlled supply of these valuable metals, the pursuit of rare earth elements is also a national security priority.

Those involved, meanwhile, hope their efforts can bring jobs in clean energy to dying coal towns and clean up entrenched coal pollution that has hung around for decades.

In Pennsylvania alone, drainage from coal piles and abandoned mines has turned waterways red from iron ore and turquoise from aluminum, killing life in more than 8,000 kilometers of streams. Federal statistics also show about 1,200 square kilometers of abandoned and unreclaimed coal mine lands host more than 200 million tons of coal waste.

The metals that chemists are working to extract from mine drainage here are lightweight, powerfully magnetized and have superior fluorescent and conductive properties.

One aim of the Department of Energy is to fund research that proves to private companies that the concepts are commercially viable and profitable enough for them to invest their own money.

Hundreds of millions of dollars from President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law is accelerating the effort.

Department officials hope that by the middle of the 2030s this infusion will have spawned full-fledged commercial enterprises.

The two most advanced projects funded by the department are the one in West Virginia treating mine drainage and another processing coal dug up by lignite mining in North Dakota.

The first could be an important source of a number of critical metals, such as yttrium, neodymium and gadolinium, used in catalysts and magnets. The latter could be a major source of germanium and gallium, used in semiconductors, LEDs, electrical transmission components, solar panels and electric vehicle motors.

Researchers at each site are designing a commercial-scale operation, based on their pilot projects, in hopes of landing a massive federal grant to build it out.

The alternative would be to develop new mines, disturb more land, get permits, hire workers, build roads and connect power supplies, tasks that take years.

“With acid mind drainage, that’s already done for you,” said Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute at West Virginia University.

Ziemkiewicz began the mine drainage project almost a decade ago, helped by federal subsidies. He had envisioned it as a way to treat runoff, recover critical minerals and raise money for more mine cleanups in West Virginia.

But the Biden administration’s ambitious funding for clean energy and a domestic supply of critical minerals broadened that goal.

At the facility, drainage from a one-time coal mine — now closed and covered by a grassy slope — emerges from two pipes, and dumps about 3,028 liters per minute into a retention pond.

From there the water is routed through massive indoor pools and a series of large tanks that, with the help of lime to lower the acidity, separate out most of the silicate, iron and aluminum. That produces a pale powdery concentrate that is about 95% rare earth oxides, plus water clean enough to return to a nearby creek.

The Department of Energy is funding research on coal wastes in various states.

“There are literally billions of tons of coal ash and coal waste lying around, across the country. And so if we can go back in and remine those, there’s decades worth of materials there,” said Grant Bromhal, the acting director of the Department of Energy’s Division of Minerals Sustainability.

Not only coal, but old copper and phosphate mines also hold potential, Bromhal said.

The country won’t be able to recover metals from all of them right away, but technologies the department is helping develop can satisfy a substantial part of demand in the next 20 to 30 years, Bromhal said.

“So if we get into the tens of percents or 50%, I think that’s in the realm of possibility,” he said.

Other solutions to obtain more of these metals are retrieving them from discarded devices and shifting sourcing to friendly nations and away from geopolitical rivals or unstable countries, analysts say. For now, there is only a handful of critical or rare earth mineral mines in the United States, although many more are being proposed.

One final subsidy will be required from the federal government: buy the reclaimed metals at a price that guarantees a commercially viable operation, Ziemkiewicz said.

That way China can’t simply buy up the product or use its market dominance to drive down prices and scare away private investors, he said.

Quigley, a former environmental protection secretary of Pennsylvania and a one-time small-city mayor in coal country, hopes to see a facility like Ziemkiewicz’s come to the Jeddo mine tunnel system in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The Jeddo has defied decades of efforts to treat its flow, which drains a vast network of abandoned underground mines.

It is a massive source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, producing an estimated 114,000 to 151,000 liters per minute.

Bringing the Little Nescopeck Creek back to life could put people to work cleaning up the stream and creating recreational opportunities from a newly revived waterway, Quigley said.

“This could mean a lot to coal communities, to a lot of people in the coal region,” Quigley said. “And to the country.”
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