The company is still paying for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Last month, we shared word of a Stanford study that found entry-level employment in so-called “AI-impacted” occupations lagging well behind that in other fields. Now, a new working paper from economics researchers at Munich’s CESifo finds the opposite, arguing point blank that “there is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates in absolute or relative levels.”

In “The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates,” researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates “because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring.” As AI gets good enough to at least perform the “relatively standardized tasks” in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.

There’s some reason to believe 2026’s graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms “replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI” in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.

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Free speech and media advocacy groups urged a judge to block a California settlement with Paramount Skydance that would let the company finalize its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Twelve states led by California sued to block the deal in July and were able to delay it when US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that Paramount combining with Warner Bros. would likely reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws. Despite that initial victory, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a settlement with Paramount earlier this week and the other states involved in the lawsuit signed on to the deal.

Martínez-Olguín must decide whether to approve the settlement. A coalition of free speech and media advocacy groups told the judge in a filing yesterday that the deal will give residents of the states that sued Paramount “virtually nothing.” The filing was submitted by the Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Future Film Coalition, and International Documentary Association.

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Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what’s going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when last month’s data was released, so this will be a seven-month update on 2026 trends.

The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as headlines about data centers might lead people to believe. Beyond data centers, there’s a growing electrification—things like EVs and heat pumps—that is shifting energy demands onto the grid. Despite all of this, electricity use has risen by only 2 percent compared to the same period last year. At this time the previous year, demand had risen by 3 percent compared to the year prior.

Some of this may be due to continued improvements in efficiency, which had largely kept electricity demand stable throughout the early 2000s. And some of it may be because more data centers are generating their own power so that demand doesn’t show up on the grid. So far, the growth in demand hasn’t reached apocalyptic levels.

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Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally.

But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week.

Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+ PCs” despite meeting the label’s requirements.

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Imagine starting a space company in October 2019 with the aim of changing the world. Then, a few months later, a global pandemic shuts the world down.

“Little did we know what the world had in store for us,” said Trevor Bennett, an engineer who co-founded Starfish Space after a few years at Blue Origin. “But that’s kind of become part of our story, showing some resilience along the way.”

At Blue Origin, he saw, up close, the ambitions of billionaires to build big rockets and put massive numbers of satellites into orbit. Bennett and his co-founder, another engineer from Blue Origin named Austin Link, began to think about the implications. How would humanity deal with that increased volume of satellites in orbit? Could low-Earth orbit be preserved?

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Hype merchants have a habit of overdoing it, but there’s no denying that China is making the US look more than a little antiquated when it comes to electric vehicles. Some of that is due to a deep integration of connected services and an extension of the car as part of the owner’s digital life—think additional infotainment screens and AI personal assistants, but with an Android phone-maker’s cadence of updates rather than that of a traditional car company. Other advances sound more appealing. China’s OEMs are in a battle over who can charge the fastest, and this week, Geely fired its latest salvo.

China might have a much younger driving culture than North America or Europe, but it has still been long enough to condition those drivers to how long it takes to fill a tank of gas. For all their many improvements over internal combustion engine vehicles—far greater efficiency, instant torque, very little NVH, more reliabiity, and so on—EVs do still take longer to recharge than it takes to refuel a car with a liquid.

At least until now, it seems.

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The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week.

The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA’s Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency’s space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost “Explorer-class” missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred million dollars, or flagship observatories like the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which came with a price tag of some $4.3 billion.

With the Probe Explorers, NASA officials seek to find a better balance between the smaller Explorer missions and multibillion-dollar flagships. NASA has studied potential Probe Explorer mission concepts for several years after an independent panel of scientists recommended the new mission category. But it wasn’t clear until recently whether NASA’s science budget, which is under pressure from the Trump administration, would be sufficient to actually start developing one.

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The Trump administration is seeking to join Elon Musk’s appeal against a €120 million EU fine of the billionaire’s social media platform X, the latest escalation in the transatlantic clash over Brussels’ efforts to rein in US tech companies.

The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an application to intervene in a pair of cases brought by Musk and X seeking annulment of the penalty, which will be heard at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg.

“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” assistant attorney general Brett Shumate said.

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In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.

Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program “a disgrace to the human race” and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.

Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.

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Welcome to Edition 9.12 of the Rocket Report! The big story in the global launch industry remains SpaceX’s plans to wind down Falcon 9 operations for commercial launches, possibly within the next two or three years. That has created a scramble among satellite operators and some positioning among up-and-coming launch providers. Notably, in this week’s newsletter, there’s a story about how Firefly expects launch to become more expensive, and that customers got too used to rapid, reliable launch with the Falcon 9. I’m not sure that philosophy will work out long term.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

The best-named rocket in the world is sadly delayed. French launch startup HyPrSpace announced that it has pushed the inaugural flight of its Baguette One suborbital rocket to 2027, European Spaceflight reports. The 10-meter Baguette One rocket is a single-stage vehicle is capable of carrying up to 300 kg. It is powered by the company’s hybrid propulsion system, which combines liquid oxygen with solid polyethylene fuel.

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Surely my sticker budget will break even eventually.

That’s one way to topple a King.

As Apple’s Tim Cook era draws to a close, we’re seeing more experimentation with the iPhone’s design than we’ve seen in a long time, but you wouldn’t know it from the iPhone 18 Pro. This absurdly fast, full-featured handset might be eclipsed by the hype around the iPhone Duo this year, but it’s still just as good as its immediate predecessor.

Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 17 Pro. There’s the new variable aperture and other camera controls for those who want to get granular with their mobile photography, a welcome addition given the iPhone’s reputation for inflexibly opinionated computational photography.

Beyond that, though, all the most important changes are under the hood: a new chip, better battery life, and much-improved thermals that both give the phone better sustained performance and make it cooler to the touch in many situations.

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Prime Day is usually a great time to score a good deal on a Kindle device, but in the lead-up to Amazon’s “Prime Big Deal Days” event, taking place Oct. 6-7, I would like to redirect your attention to another category of e-readers entirely. Tiny e-ink devices—I’m talking credit card-sized, with screens that measure around 4 inches—are all the rage in 2026, and if you too can see the appeal of carrying all of your books with you on a device so small you’ll forget it’s even in your pocket, it’s not a bad time to jump in: One of the best options on the market, the recently released Xteink X4 Classic, is 15% off ahead of the big sale.

SPONSORED

Xteink X4 Classic Pocket E-Reader

$75.99
at Amazon

$89.00
Save $13.01

$75.99
at Amazon

$89.00
Save $13.01

Xteink is a Chinese startup that shook up the e-reading world last year with the launch of the X4, a super bare-bones device that made up for its lack of features and usability with a cheap sub-$70 price point. Since then, a huge online community of fans has formed around the device, sharing tips on Reddit and even coming together to crowdsource an alternate operating system that fixes a lot of its early problems. Xteink quickly followed up the X4 with a slate of other devices, including the even smaller X3 and the X4 Pro, which adds a front light and touchscreen (at the cost of screen clarity and two physical buttons).

The X4 Classic was released earlier this month, replacing the original X4 and adding in some of the quality-of-life improvements that were made with subsequent devices, including a larger battery, relocated page-turn buttons, a real-time clock, USB drive support, and a tilt-to-turn-page feature. The X4 Classic is also 6g lighter and a millimeter thinner than the X4, though there is a trade-off involved there with the latter’s USB-C charging port swapped out for magnetic pogo pins that require a separate cable or adapter.

These upgrades also increased the cost: The X4 Classic retails for $89, $20 more than the discontinued X4 and only $10 less than the X4 Pro. But right now on Amazon, the Classic has dropped in price by 15% to $75.99—its lowest price ever—in advance of Prime Big Deal Days. It’s a good option for those who prioritize crisp, readable text above the conveniences of a built-in light or touchscreen, as those add extra layers between the inner screen and outer glass, and provided you understand what you’re getting into: These devices support only e-books without Digital Rights Management (DRM), which means you can’t use them to read your existing library of Kindle books.