OpenAI is asking the U.S. government to make it easier for AI companies to learn from copyrighted material, citing a need to “strengthen America’s lead” globally in advancing the technology. The proposal is part of a wider plan that the tech company behind ChatGPT submitted to the U.S. government on Thursday as part of President Donald Trump’s coming “AI Action Plan.” The administration solicited input from interested parties across the private sector, government and academia, framing the future policy as a shift that would “prevent unnecessarily burdensome requirements from hindering private sector innovation.” In its proposal, OpenAI urged the federal government to enact a series of “freedom-focused” policy ideas, including an approach that would no longer compel American AI developers to “comply with overly burdensome state laws.” Copyright in particular is an issue that has plagued AI developers, as many continue to train their models on human work without informing the original creators, obtaining consent or providing compensation. OpenAI has been sued by several news outlets including the Center for Investigative Reporting, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News over claims of copyright infringement. Several authors and visual artists have also taken legal action against the company over unauthorized use of their copyrighted content. Still, OpenAI said it believes its strategy — the encouragement of “fair use” policies and fewer intellectual property restrictions — could “[protect] the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security.” It did not elaborate on the former. Many leaders in the AI industry and members of the Trump administration have framed America’s dominance in AI advancements as a matter of national security, comparing it to a high-stakes arms race. “The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material,” OpenAI’s proposal states, using an abbreviation for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China. Shortly after he took office, Trump issued an executive order that revoked former President Joe Biden’s policies on AI, stating the United States’ previous directives acted “as barriers to American AI innovation.” Biden’s “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” executive order, issued in October 2023, stated that “irresponsible use [of AI] could exacerbate societal harms,” including threats to national security.

Tariff threats. Growing uncertainty about the economy. And a push for much lower oil prices. For all of their bravado about U.S. energy dominance and enthusiasm for deregulation, American energy executives are beginning to worry about President Trump’s agenda. Their concerns crept into conversations in hotel meeting rooms and over private meals this week in Houston, where industry magnates gathered for their most important annual conference. Surely, some hoped, the president would cut oil and gas companies a break on tariffs. Surely, the administration was not serious about pushing oil prices down another 25 percent. Surely, the turmoil of the last two months would soon pass. And just as soon as those glimmers of frustration or doubt slipped out, they were gone, overshadowed by praise for Mr. Trump, his cabinet and the administration’s aim to unshackle American energy companies — at least the ones in the business of producing oil, natural gas and nuclear power. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Such is the energy industry’s delicate dance these days. Companies are trying to balance fighting for their interests, which often include free trade, with a strong desire not to offend the president. The oil and gas industry spent more than $75 million to elect Mr. Trump. “We’re hopeful that as we continue these conversations on trade, that the energy dominance agenda becomes more important than the tariff agenda,” Mike Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main trade group, said in an interview at the conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global. Oil and gas executives are set to meet with Mr. Trump at the White House next week. “There’s a lot of uncertainty right now — I understand the angst about all that,” Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary, said in an interview with The New York Times after he had meetings with energy executives this week. “But I think we’re going to get to a very good place.” Just this week, 25 percent tariffs took effect on imported aluminum and steel, both used widely by the energy industry. Mr. Trump also said he would impose heftier fees on metals purchased from Canada, only to backtrack hours later after securing a concession. Worries about tariffs and the economy were the main reasons that the S&P 500 index slid into a correction on Thursday, down 10.1 percent from a recent high. U.S. oil prices settled at $66.55 a barrel, down nearly 15 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office. Peter Navarro, a White House aide who has long advised Mr. Trump on trade, has been publicly musing about crude prices dropping to $50 a barrel, saying such a tumble would tame inflation. In most U.S. oil fields, companies generally need prices above $60 a barrel to make money on new wells, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “You’re not going to find anybody in the industry to criticize the Trump administration,” said Scott Sheffield, who last year sold his large oil company, Pioneer Natural Resources, to Exxon Mobil. Instead, Mr. Sheffield posed questions for Mr. Trump: “Does he really want $50 oil? Does he know the impact? What it’ll do to the industry?” Executives who are still managing companies or representing them were generally not as blunt. Many heaped praise on Mr. Trump and his cabinet choices, expressing support for an “all of the above” approach to developing energy. “It’s refreshing,” Toby Rice, chief executive of natural gas producer EQT, said after attending a dinner that Mr. Wright and Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, had with energy executives. “It’s very clear that this administration is focused on lowering energy bills for consumers.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT At times, people sprinkled in gentle requests for more certainty and less volatility. “I’m going to say this in about two and a half seconds and move on: We need a common-sense trade policy,” Jay Timmons, chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers, said over breakfast near the conference. Many laughed as Mr. Timmons quickly returned to more comfortable territory. His trade group has asked the White House for more predictability and time to adjust to new trade policies. Many manufacturers are growing concerned about rising costs because they often rely on imports for parts or raw materials and are worried about tariff retaliation by other countries. Ryan Lance, chief executive of ConocoPhillips, one of the largest U.S. oil and gas producers, said he viewed energy as a “poster child” for Mr. Trump’s efforts to create jobs and return manufacturing to the United States. “I hope they take that into mind as they think about what they’re going to do on the tariff side,” Mr. Lance said. “Whether you exempt energy or not I think is something people ought to look at.” Mr. Trump has gone back and forth on plans to tax energy from Mexico and Canada. The United States relies heavily in particular on Canadian oil, which refineries combine with domestic crude to make gasoline and diesel fuel. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Other executives were more sanguine about trade policy. “There is anxiety around the tariffs,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, who leads the Solar Energy Industries Association. “But it is not full-fledged panic like it was in the beginning of the first Trump administration.” In 2018, during his first term, Mr. Trump placed a 30 percent tariff on imported solar cells and modules, which are the building blocks for panels that turn sunlight into electricity. Like other renewable energy leaders, Ms. Hopper sought to frame her sector in terms that might resonate with the Trump administration. “There’s nothing unique about solar manufacturing,” Ms. Hopper said. “It’s just like if you were manufacturing pencils. If nobody needs pencils anymore, then the pencil manufacturer is going to go out of business.” Many energy companies have set their sights on lowering barriers to securing permits for pipelines, power lines and other infrastructure that can be very difficult to build in many places. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Alan S. Armstrong, chief executive of a pipeline company, Williams, said that tariff-related price increases paled in comparison to the costs and risks associated with permitting. “If we could pay 25 percent on the pipe to get the permitting, we would take that trade all day long,” Mr. Armstrong said.

Artificial intelligence technology is becoming increasingly integral to everyday life, with an Elon University survey finding that 52% of U.S. adults have used AI large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot. The survey, conducted in January by the Imagining the Digital Future Center at the university in North Carolina, found that 34% of its 500 respondents who had used AI said they use large language models (LLMs) at least once a day. Most popular was ChatGPT, with 72% of respondents reporting they have used it. Google’s Gemini was second, at 50%. It has become increasingly common for people to find themselves developing personal relationships with AI chatbots. The survey found that 38% of users said they believe LLMs will “form deep relationships with humans,” and over half reported having had spoken conversations with chatbots. Around 9% of users said the main purpose they use the models for is “social kinds of encounters like casual conversation and companionship.” The respondents found that the models can express a variety of personality traits, including confidence, curiosity and even senses of humor. “These findings start to establish a baseline for the way humans and AI systems will evolve together in the coming years,” Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, told NBC News in a statement. “These tools are increasingly being integrated into daily life in sometimes quite intimate ways at the level of emotion and impact. It’s clearly shaping up as the story of another chapter in human history.” That is consistent with an overall trend that found that 51% of respondents use LLMs for personal endeavors, rather than work-related activities. When it comes to using the models for work purposes, respondents reported that they have used them with work-related apps such as Slack, PowerPoint and Zoom. They have also used the models to do such things as write emails, research ideas and summarize documents. Over 50% of respondents said the models have helped them improve their productivity. Many respondents reported having anxieties about the technology. Sixty-three percent thought the models could replace a significant amount of human-to-human communication, and 59% thought they could cause a significant number of job losses. AI technology is becoming more popular as President Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing for increased investment in AI technology.

Meta’s upcoming Community Notes feature for monitoring misinformation through crowdsourcing will use some technology developed by Elon Musk’s X for its similar service. On Thursday, Meta revealed in a blog post more details of its new content moderation tool, and said it incorporates the same open-source algorithm that powers X’s Community Notes. Meta said that over time it plans to modify the algorithm to better serve its Facebook, Instagram and Threads apps. “As X’s algorithm and program information is open source — meaning free and available for anyone to use— we can build on what X has done, learn from the researchers who have studied it, and improve the system for our own platforms,” Meta said in the post. “As our own version develops, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched Community Notes in January as the company’s preferred replacement in the U.S. for third-party fact-checking, which he shuttered as part of a broader policy change that also relaxed certain content moderation guidelines. The company will begin testing Community Notes next week in the U.S. Last month, Meta said that users can apply to become contributors as long as they meet certain requirements, including being over 18 and having a verified phone number. Contributors will not be able to submit Community Notes on advertisements, but will be able to do so on “almost any other forms of content, including posts by Meta, our executives, politicians and other public figures,” the blog post said. Posts hit with Community Notes can’t be appealed, but there’s also no additional penalty for content that’s flagged. A community note on a Facebook post. A community note on a Facebook post.Meta “Notes will provide extra context, but they won’t impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared,” the blog post said. Meta doesn’t plan to open source or publicly release more technical details about its Community Notes system, but is considering the option for the future, Rachel Lambert, director of product management at Meta, said in a media briefing. So far, about 200,000 people have signed up to become Community Notes contributors “and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the program,” the company’s blog post said. Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor and expert in how misinformation and hate speech spread online, told CNBC in February that a Community Notes program can help provide context for online content, but is not a substitute for “formal fact-checking.” Johnson characterized a Community Notes model as an “imperfect system” that can potentially be exploited by large groups or organizations with their own agendas. Meta said in the blog post that “publishing a note requires agreement between different people,” a policy that helps “safeguard against organized campaigns attempting to game the system and influence what notes get published or what they say.” The company said the model will be expanded across the country “once we are comfortable from the initial beta testing that the program is working in broadly the way we believe it should, though we will continue to learn and improve it as we go.

President Trump’s cabinet has been busy rolling back regulations that will make it far easier to extract and produce fossil fuels. But who will buy them? Nearly everyone, it turns out, particularly under the threat of tariffs. At an annual energy-industry conference in Houston, executives spoke openly about how companies from around the world are seeking to buy American liquefied natural gas as a way of placating Mr. Trump’s demands to either balance trade or face punitive measures. Nations with a trade imbalance with the U.S. are “all asking themselves, ‘What can we do to try to level the playing field?’” said Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Woodside Energy, Australia’s biggest oil and gas company. They are cutting deals now, she said, in large part “so their government can say, ‘We’re taking action. We hear you, Mr. President.’” Her characterization was echoed by Ryan Lance, chief executive at ConocoPhillips, one of the largest U.S. oil and gas producers, and other speakers at the conference, known as CERAWeek by S&P Global. Since President Trump took office, oil and gas companies from nearly every continent have dangled the possibility of investing billions of dollars in the United States. This month Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean companies revived a $44 billion idea — long considered all but financially impossible — to build pipelines and a giant terminal in Alaska that would export natural gas to Asia. Ukraine, eager to preserve its weapons supply from Washington, has signaled it will buy more American gas. South Africa, its aid frozen by Mr. Trump, is trying to cut a deal to expand U.S. companies’ drilling rights in its waters. Whether all this will translate into firm deals is not yet clear. But the potential deals would lock in decades of investment in fossil fuels at a time when the global energy transition to cleaner energy sources is faltering. The burning of fossil fuels is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet. South Africa, which had its U.S. aid frozen by an executive order that accused it of discriminating against its white citizens, is trying to negotiate a new trade deal with Washington. In that deal, the United States would get more access to gas exploration in the region, and South Africa would buy more of its gas from America, according to a government spokesman. Ukraine, which is desperately trying to gain Mr. Trump’s support as negotiations for a peace deal with Vladimir Putin develop, is signaling to Washington that it will buy U.S. gas in addition to trying to cut a deal on mineral revenues. Ukraine’s moves mirror a wider push in Europe to buy more gas from the U.S. as Mr. Trump engages the European Union in tit-for-tat tariffs. The state-owned gas company in India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets for gas, said it would either buy a stake in an American L.N.G. plant or enter into a new contract for long-term supply. Speaking at the conference in Houston, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan al Jaber, who just a year and a half ago presided over the annual climate-change negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, said his company would also soon announce a major investment in U.S. gas production. “Make energy great again,” he told a room full of oil and gas executives. The negotiations Mr. al Jaber shepherded in 2023 were the first in which all nations agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels by midcentury. But a key clause in the agreement noted that “transitional fuels” — widely acknowledged as a euphemism for gas — would be key to making the transition “orderly.” The potential deals pit climate concerns against foreign-policy strategy. Expanding gas consumption — purchasing contracts are usually for decades worth of fuel — would in many cases complicate carbon-neutrality pledges that companies and countries have made. Gas emits less carbon dioxide than oil and coal when burned, but is nearly entirely made up of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. U.S. methane emissions have been steadily rising as its gas industry has grown to dominate the world’s trade in the fuel. The new U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. In an interview in Houston he said the Biden administration’s temporary pause in early 2024 on federal approvals for new export terminals had made countries wary of investing in U.S. gas, despite the fact that L.N.G. exports soared under President Biden. Mr. Wright said he had been meeting with prospective buyers in Europe and Asia and they had all been asking him, “Can you assure me that the United States is going to be a long-term reliable supplier?” Xi Nan, who heads Rystad Energy’s L.N.G. research team, said that because of the long timelines for developing any gas project, announcements shouldn’t be taken as inevitabilities. “Fundamentally, our forecasts haven’t changed in terms of long-term L.N.G. demand,” Ms. Xi said. “What’s changed is that the forecast for renewable energy demand is lower.” As a result, the energy transition “is going to take longer than we thought,” she said.

President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom Tuesday in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO. Tesla delivered five of its vehicles to the White House and parked them on a driveway for Trump to personally inspect, hours after he said on Truth Social that he planned to buy a Tesla to demonstrate his support for Musk and for the slumping company. With Musk beside him, Trump declared the vehicles “beautiful” and in particular praised the company’s unusually designed Cybertruck. “As soon as I saw it, I said, ‘That is the coolest design,’” Trump said. Though Trump frequently attacked electric vehicles during last year’s campaign, he told reporters that he had heard good things about Teslas from his friends. He sat in the driver’s seat of a sedan, with Musk seated beside him, and said he planned to buy one. “The one I like is that one, and I want the same color,” he said, pointing to a red Model S. The vehicle is listed on the Tesla website for $73,490, or $88,490 for the all-wheel-drive Model S Plaid. He did not take a test drive but said he might “another time.”

If there was one thing President Donald Trump was supposed to represent to many voters, it was the prospect of an upturn in their economic fortunes. Yet, less than three months into his second administration, Americans are being asked to reset their expectations about the trajectory of the U.S. economy — in the near term and beyond. Rather than reignite the economy, Trump’s unusual and unprecedented economic policies, like tariffs, tax cuts and spending reductions, are raising the specter of not only a recession, but also stagflation: sustained price increases, but no growth to go along with it. It would be the worst of both worlds: Consumers get hit with higher costs alongside declining employment and wages. Investors, not to mention electoral pollsters who were active in the 1970s, remain scarred by the stagflation that took root during that decade. It caused both inflation and unemployment to average around 6% for the decade, setting the stage for a period of economic “malaise” in America that helped cost Democratic President Jimmy Carter a second term in the White House. The lackluster economic conditions lasted well into the first term of Carter’s opponent, Ronald Reagan. Indeed, at least one commentator is already positing an analogy between Reagan and Trump as two presidents who inherited flagging economies. Charles Gasparino, a business columnist for the New York Post and a Fox News contributor, expressed the argument recently. “Ignore the puke,” he wrote Monday, referring to the significant market sell-off over the past week or so. Fiscal and monetary stimulus, he said, has become like “heroin” to the economy, Gasparino said. He compared the adjustment the United States is undergoing to the early years of Reagan’s presidency.

Price growth cooled more than expected in February, a welcome sign for markets that have been spooked by the specter of persistent inflation, though evolving U.S. trade policies complicate the outlook. The consumer price index rose 2.8% in February from the year before, less than forecast and slower than the 3% annual rate in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Inflation climbed 0.2% from January to February, down from January's 0.4% monthly rate and beating expectations of 0.3%. The decline was led by a sharp decrease in airfares, which fell 4%, and new vehicle prices, down a modest 0.1%. Housing costs saw the smallest 12-month increase since December 2021, rising 4.2%. Egg prices were up 58% from a year earlier but have already begun falling this month. Stock futures initially surged on the report, then retreated. And demand for government Treasury bonds actually weakened despite the better-than-expected CPI reading. Analysts cautioned that the cooler inflation data isn't likely to spur the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates at its meeting next week. That means high borrowing costs for everything from auto loans to credit cards could stay put for a while — while also keeping a lid on any stock gains.

NEW YORK — Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, will host a new weekly podcast series starting this month featuring a special guest pulled from the world of entertainment, sports, health and business. "IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson" will address "everyday questions shaping our lives, relationships and the world around us," according to a press release. IMO is slang for "in my opinion." Some of the guests slated to speak to the former first lady and Robinson, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, include the actors Issa Rae and Keke Palmer and psychologist Dr. Orna Guralnik. Other guests include filmmakers Seth and Lauren Rogan; soccer star Abby Wambach; authors Jay Shetty, Glennon Doyle and Logan Ury; editor Elaine Welteroth; radio personality Angie Martinez; media mogul Tyler Perry; actor Tracee Ellis Ross; husband-and-wife athlete and actor Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union; and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. The first two episodes — the first is an introductory one and the second features Rae — will premiere Wednesday. New episodes will be released weekly and will be available on all audio platforms and YouTube. "With everything going on in the world, we’re all looking for answers and people to turn to," Michelle Obama said in a statement. "There is no single way to deal with the challenges we may be facing — whether it’s family, faith, or our personal relationships — but taking the time to open up and talk about these issues can provide hope." Michelle Obama has had two other podcasts — "The Michelle Obama Podcast" in 2020 and another in 2023, "The Light We Carry." Her husband, former President Barack Obama, offered a series of conversations about American life between him and Bruce Springsteen. The new podcast is a production of Higher Ground, the media company founded in 2018 by the former president and first lady.

The U.S. power grid added more capacity from solar energy in 2024 than from any other source in a single year in more than two decades, according to a new industry report released on Tuesday. The data was released a day after the new U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, strongly criticized solar and wind energy on two fronts. He said on Monday at the start of CERAWeek by S&P Global, an annual energy conference in Houston, that they couldn’t meet the growing electricity needs of the world and that their use was driving up energy costs. The report, produced by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, said about 50 gigawatts of new solar generation capacity was added last year, far more than any other source of electricity. Mr. Wright and President Trump have been strongly critical of renewable energy, which former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. championed as a way to address climate change. The energy secretary, Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have pledged to undo many of Mr. Biden’s climate and energy policies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” said Mr. Wright, who was previously chief executive of an oil and gas production company. Yet solar energy and battery storage systems appear to have significant momentum and may not be easily thwarted. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is part of Mr. Wright’s department, said last month that it expected solar and batteries to continue leading new capacity installations on U.S. electric grids this year. Proponents of clean energy celebrated the milestone for solar power as the world moves to increase electricity production to meet the needs of energy-hungry data centers to support the growth of artificial intelligence. “There’s wild agreement that in order to do that, we have to have enough electricity, and there are facts that show that the fastest way to do that and the cheapest way to do that is through the deployment of solar and storage,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and chief executive of the solar association, said in an interview at CERAWeek. In a panel discussion, the leader of one of the nation’s largest utility companies acknowledged solar’s ability to deliver new electricity generation quickly and cheaply. “Renewables are ready to go right now because they’ve been up and running,” said John Ketchum, president and chief executive of NextEra Energy, the largest U.S. producer of renewable energy and the parent company of Florida Power & Light, a utility that owns power plants that burn natural gas. But Mr. Wright said the growing use of solar and wind power was driving up the cost of electricity, which has steadily increased the last couple of years. Some of that increase has been due to the sharp jump in the costs of oil and natural gas after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and to upgrades to grids that experts say utilities had put off for many years. “Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3 percent of global primary energy,” Mr. Wright said. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down.” Electricity rates across the country reached their highest levels in 2024, rising an average of 4 percent nationally to $162.60 a month in December for the typical 1,000 kilowatt-hours of usage, up from $156.90 a year earlier, according to the latest federal data. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Even as prices rise, electricity demand is expected to increase drastically. Mr. Ketchum projected a 55 percent increase in electricity demand over the next 20 years, almost a fifth of that related to the growth of data centers, with manufacturing and industrial growth accounting for much of the rest. Given the projections for the increased electricity demand, energy experts said governments should focus on affordability, reliability and safety of domestic and global energy while not losing sight of concerns about climate change. “There’s going to be bumps in the road,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary in the Obama administration, said on a panel discussion at CERAWeek. “We are moving to this low-carbon future.”