Internal documents reveal that Microsoft plans to temporarily suspend individual account signups to its GitHub Copilot coding product, as it transitions from requests (single interactions with Copilot) towards token-based billing.

The documents reveal that the weekly cost of running Github Copilot has doubled since the start of the year.

Microsoft also intends to tighten the rate limits on its individual and business accounts, and to remove access to certain models for those with the cheapest subscriptions.

President Donald Trump has now been in office for about 15 months, and his numbers keep getting worse. Our latest Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted April 10–14, finds just 35% of U.S. adults approving of his job performance, with 61% disapproving — a net approval rating of -26. That’s a new low in our poll, down from -23 last month and a steep fall from (an already poor) -16 when we first began tracking this question in May 2025.

This deterioration has been driven largely by his handling of the economy and prices. Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation has fallen to -46 — the worst rating on any single issue in the history of our poll, and a stunning 6-point drop from March’s already record-low -40. Nearly three-quarters of Americans (72%) now disapprove of the way Trump is handling prices.

Here are the poll’s headline findings:

Headline poll findings

• Job approval: 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance; 61% disapprove (net -26, down from -23 in March)
• Generic ballot: Democrats lead Republicans 50% to 43% among registered voters, a 7-point margin
• Direction of the country: 55% say things are going poorly and major changes are needed, a new high. Just 8% say things are going well
• Prices: Trump’s net approval on prices/inflation has fallen to -46, the worst rating on any issue we have ever recorded
• Border security: The one bright-ish spot — border security bounced back to net +1, making it once again the only issue where Trump is not underwater
• Iran: 64% of Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth the cost, up from 58% in March. 48% say the U.S. should never have gone to war in the first place

Monterey Park, a small city seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles, became the first in California to pass a measure permanently banning the construction of data centers. The city council voted unanimously on three overlapping ordinances that officially label data centers a public nuisance, and “prohibit all data centers within city limits.”

The vote came after an hours-long public comment period, in which dozens of Monterey Park residents spoke out against the prospect of new data center construction, and after months of community organizing galvanized opposition to the project. No Data Centers Monterey Park (NDCMP), a small band of concerned citizens, and the San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, a local activist group, made headlines earlier this year when they successfully pushed the city to halt a proposed data center project.

But the organizers weren’t done. They pushed city council to take up an ordinance installing a permanent ban, and to put a measure to voters to enshrine it at the ballot box, ensuring the ban could only be overturned by another such democratic vote. The ordinance passed on April 20th, and the ballot measure is up for a vote on June 2nd.

Most of us, we would like to think, would help out a relative, a friend and perhaps even a stranger in need. Maybe giving directions or lending a few quid. But how many of us would donate one of our organs to someone we will never meet?

That is exactly what Tom Cledwyn did in 2012. Since then, his life has been shaped by acts of generosity towards strangers, culminating in Drop Dead Generous, a social experiment giving 1,000 people $500 (£378) each to spend on helping others in creative ways. Backed by an anonymous philanthropist, the project is part grant scheme, part provocation: what happens if you trust people to be generous?

Cledwyn donated his kidney at 25, after reading about Kay Mason, the first person in the UK to give a kidney to a stranger.

“It was an honour to be able to do it. And the same applies to all forms of giving. It doesn’t have to be a kidney. It can be a smile, some time, or being there when someone is struggling,” he says. “The experience of giving is the closest thing I’ve experienced to something that really matters.

“I knew I’d get minimal feedback and would never meet the recipient. That felt important too, doing something without seeing the outcome.”

After the operation, he set up a blog called The Free Help Guy, trawling Gumtree and offering anonymous help to people who needed it, whether that meant moving house or fixing things around the home. Demand grew quickly, until the money ran out.

A stint at Meta followed, where he rose to become a senior executive, but after seven years he left, pulled back towards the idea that generosity could be scaled.

Together with co-founder John Sweeney, he launched Drop Dead Generous, with a $500,000 (£378,000) fund. At the time of writing, 266 grants have been awarded across 21 countries.

Applicants are asked two simple questions: who needs help, and what would you do with $500 to “blow their socks off”?

Whether the first hundred days become a foundation or a high-water mark depends partly on Albany. The budget gap Mamdani inherited from previous city and state administrations constrains new investment, and his largest revenue proposal, the wealth tax, requires the governor and state legislature to act. But the trajectory is already set. By fall, 2,000 two-year-olds will have full-day, full-year childcare seats that did not exist in January. By 2027, a city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem selling subsidized food on the same spot where LaGuardia built one ninety years ago. Those cost money the way fire departments and public schools cost money: because delivering the service is the point.

Your city and state can do everything mentioned here and even more.

You can go find your city councilmember and state house representative. Tell them what you want, in person, persistently, and specifically.

This is a weird time to be alive.

I grew up on Asimov and Clarke, watching Star Trek and dreaming of intelligent machines. My dad’s library was full of books on computers. I spent camping trips reading about perceptrons and symbolic reasoning. I never imagined that the Turing test would fall within my lifetime. Nor did I imagine that I would feel so disheartened by it.

Around 2019 I attended a talk by one of the hyperscalers about their new cloud hardware for training Large Language Models (LLMs). During the Q&A I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Since then, friends have been asking me what I make of all this “AI stuff”. I’ve been turning over the outline for this piece for years, but never sat down to complete it; I wanted to be well-read, precise, and thoroughly sourced. A half-decade later I’ve realized that the perfect essay will never happen, and I might as well get something out there.

This is bullshit about bullshit machines, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play.

Some of these ideas felt prescient in the 2010s and are now obvious. Others may be more novel, or not yet widely-heard. Some predictions will pan out, but others are wild speculation. I hope that regardless of your background or feelings on the current generation of ML systems, you find something interesting to think about.

On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away.

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.

Little is known about the motives of Tom or Hussein, or the politics of the Indianapolis shooter, but reporters and the online commentariat quickly dredged up Moreno-Gama’s Discord chats and Substack posts. He was a reader of rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues, as the title of his last book puts it, if Silicon Valley builds a “superintelligent” AI, “everyone dies.” Per the San Francisco Chronicle:

Online records show Moreno-Gama published multiple essays and forum posts warning that AI could lead to human extinction, calling AI models deceitful and misaligned with human interests. He accused tech leaders, including Altman, of lacking morals and being willing to gamble with humanity’s future, and adopted the alias “Butlerian Jihadist,” referencing a fictional anti-AI crusade from the 'Dune' series. His writings grew more urgent over time, with some posts edging toward calls for extreme action despite community moderators warning against violence.

According to the SFPD, after attacking Altman’s house, Moreno-Gama went to OpenAI’s offices, where he was arrested while banging the front doors with a chair, threatening to burn the office down and kill everyone inside. He had a jug of kerosene and a list of other AI leaders names and addresses, police said.

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Legislators in Maine on Tuesday passed the nation’s first statewide ban on large data centers, part of a growing backlash to the energy-intensive facilities that fuel the rise of artificial intelligence.

The measure would block the creation of new data centers that draw more than 20 megawatts of power until the fall of 2027 and establish a mechanism to study their impact on the electrical grid. Maine’s moratorium was approved in final votes Tuesday by both houses of the state legislature. The bill will now go to Gov. Janet Mills (D) for signature.

A spokesman for Mills did not immediately respond to a query about whether she plans to approve the legislation. Mills has said she wants an exception for a data center on the site of a defunct paper mill, but legislators earlier rejected such an amendment.

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In March, the Governors Highway Safety Association announced that some 3,2024 people died while walking in the US during the first half of 2025, a drop of almost 11% from 2024. It’s a welcome dip, but the GHSA quickly put the figure in perspective, noting that footgoer fatalities remain 2.5% higher than in 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic coincided with a surge in traffic deaths.

Moreover, the country remains a grim outlier when it comes to pedestrian safety: Between 2013 and 2022, deaths rose by half in the US, even as 27 other rich nations saw an average 25% decline.

The New York Times, Vox, and NPR are among the many media outlets that have asked why walking became so deadly for Americans, and they’ve found plenty of possible answers, including street lighting and roadway design as well as driver distractions from smartphones and vehicle infotainment systems. Another frequently cited culprit: the expanding size of trucks and SUVs, also known as car bloat. The debate continues to rage.

Nick Ferenchak, a professor of engineering at the University of New Mexico, has had a unique vantage on this conversation. He leads the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety, a federal cross-university research program that investigates the dangers that vulnerable street users face and identifies ways to mitigate them. Supported by $10 million in funding from the US Department of Transportation, it’s the first University Transportation Center to focus specifically on pedestrians and cyclists.

At a research conference earlier this year, Ferenchak sat down with Bloomberg CityLab contributor David Zipper to discuss what academics have learned about the US pedestrian safety crisis as well as the questions that continue to puzzle them. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

For our new BBC podcast, Top Comment, we spoke to a representative of Explosive Media, one of the key accounts generating these clips. He wanted us to refer to him as Mr Explosive.

He's a savvy social media operator who initially denies working for the Iranian government. In previous interviews the outlet has said it is "totally independent". But upon further questioning, Mr Explosive admits the regime is a "customer" - something he's never before confirmed publicly.

The overriding message of these videos is that Iran is resisting what it sees as an almighty global oppressor: the United States.

The clips are garish and not subtle at all - but that hasn't put a dent in how vigorously people are sharing and commenting on them.

AI has enabled Iran and others to communicate directly with Western audiences more effectively than ever before, Briant says. They are using tools largely trained on Western data, making them ideal for creating "culturally appropriate" content.

This is what "authoritarian countries wanting to target the West have lacked in the past".

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This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They're able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they're blocking access,” Graham says.

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.