Magazine

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — A U.S. judge on Tuesday denied Elon Musk’s request to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit business in a loss for the Tesla tycoon amid his feud with Sam Altman. 

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Musk and his xAI startup failed to prove an injunction against OpenAI was necessary as the case heads to trial. 

Musk sued in California federal court to stop OpenAI from transitioning from a nonprofit to a for-profit business, arguing the startup violated antitrust law and betrayed his trust in their mission as a co-founder of OpenAI. 

The judge wrote that, while Musk did not prove the need for an injunction, she is prepared to expedite a trial on that claim later this year. 

The ruling leaves OpenAI free to continue its transition from nonprofit to for-profit enterprise. 

Musk’s injunction bid argued that OpenAI’s co-founders, including chief executive Altman, “took advantage of Musk’s altruism in order to lure him into funding the venture,” according to court documents. 

Musk contended in filings that it was clear his backing of OpenAI was contingent on it remaining a nonprofit, offering a few email exchanges to support the claim. 

“Whether Musk’s emails and social media posts constitute a writing sufficient to constitute an actual contract or charitable trust between the parties is debatable,” the judge said in her ruling. 

OpenAI’s board chairman in February rejected a Musk-led offer to buy the valuable artificial intelligence company for $97.4 billion. 

“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition,” OpenAI Board Chair Bret Taylor said in a statement posted by the company on Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter. 

OpenAI currently operates in a hybrid structure, as a nonprofit with a money-making subsidiary. 

The change to a for-profit model, one that Altman says is crucial for the company’s development, has exacerbated ongoing tensions with Musk. 

Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015, with the former providing initial funding of $45 million.  

Three years later, Musk left the company, with OpenAI citing “a potential future conflict for Elon … as Tesla continues to become more focused on AI.” 

Musk established his own artificial intelligence company, dubbed xAI, in early 2023 after OpenAI ignited global fervor over the technology. 

The massive cost of designing, training, and deploying AI models has compelled OpenAI to seek a new corporate structure that would give investors equity and provide more stable governance. 
…

Ukrainians in Czechia raised nearly 19,000 dollars to help a Ukrainian war veteran and dancer get back on the floor. Yevhen Skripnichuk lost his leg while fighting the Russians. Omelyan Oshchudlyak has the story. Camera:  Yuriy Dankevych     
…

MELBOURNE, Australia — James Harrison, whose blood plasma donations are credited with An Australian man credited with saving 2.4 million babies through his record-breaking blood plasma donations over six decades, has died at 88, his family said Tuesday.

James Harrison, a retired state railway department clerk, died in a nursing home on the central coast of New South Wales state on Feb. 17, according to his grandson, Jarrod Mellowship.

Harrison had been surprised to be recognized by Guinness World Records in 2005 as the person who had donated the most blood plasma in the world, Mellowship said.

Despite an aversion to needles, he made 1,173 donations after he turned 18 in 1954 until he was forced to retire in 2018 at age 81.

“He did it for the right reasons. As humble as he was, he did like the attention. But he would never do it for the attention,” Mellowship said.

The record was beaten in 2022 by American Brett Cooper from Walker, Michigan.

Australian Red Cross Blood Service pays tribute to donor

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service said Harrison was renowned as the “Man with the Golden Arm.”

He was credited with saving the lives of 2.4 million babies through his plasma donations, the national agency responsible for collecting and distributing blood products, also known as Lifeblood, said in a statement.

Harrison’s plasma contained a rare antibody known as anti-D. The antibody is used to make injections that protect unborn babies from hemolytic disease of the newborn, in which a pregnant woman’s immune system attacks her fetus’ red blood cells. The disease is most common when a woman has an Rh negative blood type and her baby’s is Rh positive.

Australia has only 200 anti-D donors who help 45,000 mothers and their babies annually.

Lifeblood chief executive Stephen Cornelissen said Harrison had hoped that someone in Australia would one day beat his donation record.

“James was a remarkable, stoically kind and generous person, who was committed to a lifetime of giving, and he captured the hearts of many people around the world,” Cornelissen said in a statement.

“It was James’ belief that his donations were no more important than any other donors’ and that everyone can be special in the same way that he was,” Cornelissen added.

Antibody helps donor’s family

Mellowship said his mother, Tracey Mellowship, Harrison’s daughter, needed the treatment when he and his brother Scott were born.

Jarrod Mellowship said his own wife, Rebecca Mellowship, also needed the treatment when three of their four children were born.

There is speculation that Harrison developed a high concentrations of anti-D as a result of his own blood transfusions during major lung surgery when he was 14 years old.

“After the surgery, his dad Reg told grandad, you’re only really alive because people donated blood,” Jarrod Mellowship said. “The day he turned 18, he started donating.”

The application of anti-D in fighting hemolytic disease of the newborn was not discovered until the 1960s.

Harrison was born in Junee in New South Wales. He is survived by his sister Margaret Thrift, his daughter, two grandsons and four great grandchildren.
…

Chinese tech firms and state media have spotlighted humanoid robots, which have grown in popularity since the Unitree G1 appeared to run, jump, dance and perform martial arts-like movements in a recent demonstration.

Both the United States and China are leaders in humanoid robot technology. But industry analysts believe that the United States is superior in AI technology, which is responsible for the robot’s “brain,” while Chinese technology companies have flourished in the hardware manufacturing capabilities of the robot’s “body.”

Click here for the full story in Mandarin.
…

The United States may become the second country after Australia to ban China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence on government devices.

U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Darin LaHood introduced a bipartisan bill proposing the ban.

In their letter to 47 U.S. governors and the mayor of Washington, the congressmen warned that DeepSeek could pose security risks to sensitive government data and cybersecurity and Americans’ privacy, NBC News reported on March 3.

China denies the allegations. However, concerns highlighted by the U.S. lawmakers and state officials are not without merit, experts say.

The Chinese government has reportedly also used AI models like DeepSeek for mass surveillance, including the collection of biometric data and social media listening models that report to China’s security services and the military, as well as for information attacks on U.S. and Chinese dissidents abroad.

At least three leading Chinese surveillance and security companies — TopSec, QAX and NetEase — announced the integration of DeepSeek to enhance their services. 

All three companies provide services to the Chinese government, and some made it clear that DeepSeek will improve their cyber censorship and surveillance capabilities. This includes AI-driven biometric data capturing, face recognition and surveillance technologies such as “smart cities,” the Skynet Project, and the Xueliang Project, which can monitor all aspects of an individual’s public life, Wenhao Ma of VOA’s China Division reported.

In January, Canadian cybersecurity firm Feroot Security uncovered a code imbedded in DeepSeek’s login processes that shares user information with Chinese state-owned communication company China Mobile, AP reported.

The Associated Press described the code as a “heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile.”

The U.S. banned China Mobile in 2019 following intelligence reports that it serves as the Chinese military’s spy arm.

China-based actors have been using ChatGPT along with DeepSeek models to generate phishing email and disinformation attacks on the U.S. “on behalf of unspecified clients in China,” OpenAI said in its February report.

OpenAI identified and blocked a cluster of China-originated accounts involved in malicious activities, such as Qianyue Overseas Public Opinion AI Assistant, reportedly designed to ingest and analyze posts and comments related to Chinese politics and human rights from platforms such as X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram and Reddit.

The purpose of the operation was reportedly “to feed the resulting insights to the Chinese authorities” such as “Chinese embassies abroad, and to intelligence agents monitoring protests in countries including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom,” OpenAI said.

A set of ChatGPT accounts that OpenAI banned in February had been involved in Chinese influence operations focused on generating short comments in English and long-form Spanish-language articles critical of the United States published in local and national media outlets across Latin America and Spain.

One of the Chinese companies planting the articles in the Spanish-language outlets was Jilin Yousen Culture Communication Co., a subsidiary of the government-tied Beijing United Publishing House.

VOA reviewed nine of the Chinese AI-generated articles published in Spanish-language media between October and November 2024 as identified by OpenAI.

Two — in Mexico’s El Universal and Peru’s El Popular — criticized the United States’ use of sanctions targeting foreign governments and individuals.

The El Universal op-ed described the U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil industry for Tehran’s backing of terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as exposing the U.S.’ “impotence” in dealing with global politics and the “rapid decline” of its “moral standing.”

Similarly, El Popular painted U.S. sanctions on a Hamas affiliate as “insane” and an “attack on the rights of Palestinian people.”

An article in Peru’s La Republica presented the U.S. as the biggest beneficiary of the Russian war in Ukraine, replicating the Kremlin’s key narrative. It criticized the U.S. for providing military aid to Kyiv, framing the American support as an escalation of the war.

China, however, has been a key provider of military technologies and weapons to Russia, which Moscow uses in daily attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

Another China-planted piece in La Republica described U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy as “undermining U.S. global leadership position.”

Three pieces in Peru’s Wapa, El Popular and El Plural exploited the issues of homelessness, child nutrition and crime in the U.S. — all presented as extremely acute and dangerous.

For example, the child nutrition piece claimed that most children in the U.S. “go hungry on weekends and holidays” due to the government’s neglect of children’s food security.

While the topics of these articles vary from human rights and social issues in the U.S. to foreign and domestic politics, they all paint a picture of a dysfunctional state with failing moral values and declining international influence, matching Beijing’s standard narrative.
…

WASHINGTON — Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced on Monday plans to make an additional $100 billion investment in the United States and build five additional chips factories in the coming years.

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei announced the plan in a meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump.

“We must be able to build the chips and semiconductors that we need right here,” Trump said. “It’s a matter of national security for us.”

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is a leading supplier to major U.S. hardware manufacturers.

The $100 billion outlay, which would boost domestic production and make the United States less reliant on semiconductors made in Asia, is in addition to a major prior investment announcement. TSMC agreed in April to expand its planned U.S. investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona factory by 2030.

With his Nov. 5 election victory largely driven by voters’ economic concerns, Trump has stepped up efforts to bolster investments in domestic industries to create jobs.

The TSMC announcement is the latest in a string of such developments. In February, Apple said it would invest $500 billion in the next four years. Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani and SoftBank also have promised multibillion-dollar investments in the U.S.

TSMC said on Monday it looks “forward to discussing our shared vision for innovation and growth in the semiconductor industry, as well as exploring ways to bolster the technology sector along with our customers.”

The U.S. Commerce Department under then President Joe Biden finalized a $6.6 billion government subsidy in November for TSMC’s U.S. unit for semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona.

Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act legislation in 2022 to provide $52.7 billion in subsidies for American semiconductor production and research.

Taiwan’s dominant position as a maker of chips used in technology from cellphones and cars to fighter jets has sparked concerns of over-reliance on the island, especially as China ramps up pressure to assert its sovereignty claims.

China claims Taiwan as its territory, but the democratically elected government in Taipei rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims.

Under Biden, the Commerce Department convinced all five leading-edge semiconductor firms to locate factories in the U.S. as part of the program to address national security risks from imported chips.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers last month that the program was “an excellent down payment” to rebuild the sector, but he has declined to commit grants that have already been approved by the department, saying he wanted to “read them and analyze them and understand them.”

A TSMC spokesperson said last month the company had received $1.5 billion in CHIPS Act money before the new administration came in as per the milestone terms of its agreement.

TSMC last year agreed to produce the world’s most advanced 2-nanometer technology at its second Arizona factory expected to begin production in 2028. TSMC also agreed to use its most advanced chip manufacturing technology called “A16” in Arizona.

TSMC has already begun producing advanced 4-nanometer chips for U.S. customers in Arizona.

The TSMC award included up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans.

 
…

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 360,000 kilometers away.

“We’re on the moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable.”

A smooth, upright landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the 2-meter-tall lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 3 meters below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 4-meter-tall craft built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 160 kilometers from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

“Every time we go up, we’re learning from each other,” Kim said. 
…

KAMPALA, UGANDA — A second Ebola patient, a 4-year-old child, has died in Uganda, the World Health Organization said, citing the country’s health ministry.

The fatality brings the number of confirmed cases in Uganda to 10.

The East African country declared an outbreak of the highly infectious and often fatal hemorrhagic disease in January after the death of a male nurse at the Mulago National Referral Hospital in the capital of Kampala.

The WHO’s Uganda office posted late on Saturday on X that the ministry had reported “an additional positive case in Mulago hospital of a 4 1/2-year-old child, who tragically passed away” on Tuesday.

Mulago is the country’s sole national referral hospital for Ebola cases.

The ministry said on Feb. 18 that all eight Ebola patients under care had been discharged but that at least 265 contacts remained under strict quarantine in Kampala and two other cities.

Ebola symptoms include fever, headache and muscle pains. The virus is transmitted through contact with infected bodily fluids and tissue. 
…

SEATTLE — President Donald Trump’s plan to pull federal funding from institutions that provide gender-affirming care for transgender youth will remain blocked on a long-term basis under a federal judge’s ruling in Seattle late Friday. 

U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King previously granted a two-week restraining order after the Democratic attorneys general of Washington, Oregon and Minnesota sued the Trump administration — Colorado has since joined the case. 

King’s temporary order expired Friday, and she held arguments that day before issuing a preliminary injunction blocking most of Trump’s plan pending a final decision on the merits of the case. 

The judge found the states lacked standing on one point: the order’s protections against female genital mutilation. Female genital mutilation is already illegal in the four states that are part of the lawsuit, and the judge said the record “is bereft of any evidence” that the plaintiffs plan to perform such procedures. 

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown praised the ruling. An email message was sent to the White House seeking comment. 

Two of Trump’s executive orders are at issue in the case. 

One, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,” calls for stripping federal money from programs that “promote gender ideology.” 

The other, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” calls for the federal government to cut off research and educational grants for institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, that provide gender-affirming care to people under age 19. Several hospitals around the country ceased providing care, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments, following the order. 

Medicaid programs in some states cover gender-affirming care, and Trump’s “Protecting Children” order suggests that practice could end. It also raises the prospect that medical professionals could be criminally charged for providing gender-affirming care under a law that bans medically unnecessary genital mutilation of underage females — a notion that the states suing Trump call repugnant and legally unsupportable. 

Young people who persistently identify as a gender that differs from their sex assigned at birth — a condition called gender dysphoria — are far more likely to suffer from severe depression and to kill themselves if they do not receive treatment, which can include evaluation by a team of medical professionals; a social transition, such as changing a hairstyle or pronouns; and eventually puberty blockers or hormones. Surgery is extremely rare for minors. 

In her ruling Friday, the judge said the order was not limited to children or to irreversible treatments and that it doesn’t target medical interventions performed on cisgender children. 

“In fact, its inadequate ‘means-end fit’ would prevent federally funded medical providers from providing necessary medical treatments to transgender youth that are completely unrelated to gender identity,” she wrote. “For example, a cisgender teen could obtain puberty blockers from such a provider as a component of cancer treatment, but a transgender teen with the same cancer care plan could not.” 

In his arguments Friday, Washington Assistant Attorney General William McGinty stressed the urgency of the issue. 

“There are going to be young people who are going to take their lives if they can no longer receive this care,” he said. 

King, the judge in Seattle, grilled Justice Department attorney Vinita Andrapalliyal in court about the meaning and effect of Trump’s executive orders. 

The judge continued to press, saying she was “looking for a legitimate government interest” that would justify Trump’s orders. 

The four Democratic attorneys general suing in Seattle argued that the orders violate equal rights protections, the separation of powers and the states’ right to regulate issues not delegated to the federal government. 

The Trump administration disputed those claims in court filings. “The President’s authority to direct subordinate agencies to implement his agenda, subject to those agencies’ own statutory authorities, is well established,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. 
…