There’s a great debate these days about what the current crop of AI chatbots should and shouldn’t do for you. We aren’t wise enough to know the answer, but we were interested in hearing what is, apparently, Microsoft’s take on it. Looking at their terms of service for Copilot, we read in the original bold:

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

While that’s good advice, we are pretty sure we’ve seen people use LLMs, including Copilot, for decidedly non-entertaining tasks. But, at least for now, if you are using Copilot for non-entertainment purposes, you are violating the terms of service.

Legal

While we know how it is when lawyers get involved in anything, we can’t help but think this is simply a hedge so that when Copilot gives you the wrong directions or a recipe for cake that uses bleach, they can say, “We told you not to use this for anything.”

It reminds us of the Prohibition-era product called a grape block. It featured a stern warning on the label that said: “Warning. Do not place product in one quart of water in a cool, dark place for more than two weeks, or else an illegal alcoholic beverage will result.” That doesn’t fool anyone.

We get it. They are just covering their… bases. When you do something stupid based on output from Copilot, they can say, “Oh, yeah, that was just for entertainment.” But they know what you are doing, and they even encourage it. Heck, they’re doing it themselves. Would it stand up in court? We don’t know.

Others

Now it is true that probably everyone will give you a similar warning. OpenAI, for example, has this to say:

• Output may not always be accurate. You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional advice.
• You must evaluate Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including using human review as appropriate, before using or sharing Output from the Services.
• You must not use any Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or material impact on that person, such as making credit, educational, employment, housing, insurance, legal, medical, or other important decisions about them.
• Our Services may provide incomplete, incorrect, or offensive Output that does not represent OpenAI’s views. If Output references any third party products or services, it doesn’t mean the third party endorses or is affiliated with OpenAI.

Notice that it doesn’t pretend you are only using it for a chuckle. Anthropic has even more wording, but still stops short of pretending to be a party game. Copilot, on the other hand, is for fun.

Your Turn

How about you? Do you use any of the LLMs for anything other than “entertainment?” If you do, how do you validate the responses you get?

When things do go wrong, who should be liable? There have been court cases where LLM companies have been sued for everything, ranging from users committing suicide to defaming people. Are the companies behind these tools responsible? Should they be?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.

They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.

Carr’s latest effort: he rubber stamped Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna behind closed doors. Carr let the merged companies ignore our remaining media consolidation limits, which prevent one company from being the primary broadcast news voice for more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent).

Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS.

Carr’s been on a campaign to ensure these right-wing loyal companies have more power in their dealings with their national counterparts (remember how they helped Carr censor Jimmy Kimmel?). The efforts come as local Americans increasingly live in “local news deserts” where quality local journalism simply no longer exists.

Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat left at the FCC (Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), didn’t have nice things to say about Carr’s decision to ignore the public interest protections without a transparent, public vote (indicating Carr very clearly knew this would be very unpopular):

As always, Carr’s order approving the merger leverages all manner of pseudo-legalistic sounding bullshit to justify ignoring Congress and the law. And he parrots a bunch of completely empty promises by Nexstar that they’ll ramp up the production of more “local news”:

“We note that Nexstar has made significant commitments in the agency’s record as well,
further ensuring that this transaction promotes the public interest. To further serve its local communities, Nexstar commits to expanding its investment in local news and programming, including increasing the amount of local news it provides in acquired markets.”

Except again, by “news” we mean right wing propaganda. And Brendan Carr never meaningfully holds corporate power accountable for anything, unless it involves a comedian making fun of the president or companies not being suitably racist enough for the president’s liking.

Eight states have already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the decision. The lawsuits understandably focus heavily on the competition impacts, and the likely higher cable TV prices that will result for most of you:

“By consolidating with a major competitor, Nexstar would likely acquire the power to charge MVPDs higher retransmission consent fees for Big 4 station content. In turn, those MVPDs would likely pass on the increased retransmission consent fees, in large measure, to their subscribers in the form of substantially higher cable and satellite bills.”

California regulators attempted to slow the process down by proposing a standard timing agreement with Nexstar, where the company would suspend its acquisition of Tegna until the state completed its investigation. 

But something of particular note: on pages 16-17 of the states’ amended complaint, it becomes clear that Nexstar completely ignored the State AGs for 8 days, then ignored their lawsuit for another 18 hours, and then told the state AGs “The relief sought in your Complaint is no longer available.”

In other words, what passes for some of the only real antitrust enforcement we have (a scattered coalition of states) have to fight both consolidated corporate power and the authoritarian, corrupt government simultaneously to make any inroads in the public interest.

“This is completely unprecedented,” Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss troll farm) Research Director S. Derek Turner told me via email. “Nexstar and the Trump DOJ and FCC seem to have acted in concert to deprive the citizens of of these 8 states their rights to have our AG enforce the antitrust laws on our behalf.”

If Carr succeeds here, I suspect it won’t be long before you see Sinclair and this new combined company merge. Carr is also fielding requests by the big four national broadcasters to eliminate restrictions preventing them from merging as well (one of many reasons they’ve been so feckless). After that, you’ll likely see more consolidation across telecom, tech, and media.

It is, just in case we’ve forgotten, the complete opposite of the “antitrust reform populism” Trump, and a long line of useful idiots, promised last election season.

While this is certainly an act of some desperation (less than 20% of all U.S. TV viewing is now broadcast), claiming this doesn’t matter because this is “just local broadcasting” and the “future is the internet” (something I see often) is a violent misread of the dire stakes of the situation. This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).

This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate. Right wingers will continue to engage in this quest to dominate the entirety of U.S. media (following in the steps of Victor Orban in Hungary) until they run into something other than the political and policy equivalent of soft pudding.

Filed Under: agitprop, autocracy, brendan carr, fcc, journalism, local news, media consolidation, propaganda, tv

Companies: nexstar, tegna

Isaiah Taylor was sixteen when he decided the nuclear industry had a size problem. Not that reactors were too dangerous or too expensive, though they are both, but that they were simply too big. The multi-gigawatt monuments to Cold War-era engineering that still dot the American landscape were designed for a grid that moved power in one direction: from a distant plant to a distant city. They were never meant to sit behind a hyperscaler’s fence line, feeding a cluster of GPU racks whose appetite doubles every eighteen months.

Taylor, now 27, founded Valar Atomics in 2023 to build something different. On Tuesday, the El Segundo, California-based startup announced it has raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. The round comprises $340 million in equity and $110 million in debt, and it lands barely five months after a $130 million Series A that valued the company at a fraction of its current price.

The backers read like a roster of the American defence-tech establishment that has lately been writing enormous cheques. Palmer Luckey, the Anduril Industries founder whose company was recently reported to be pursuing a $4 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation, is an investor. So is Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir Technologies. The earlier Series A was led by Snowpoint Ventures, the firm co-founded by Doug Philippone, Palantir’s former head of global defence, alongside Day One Ventures and Dream Ventures. Lockheed Martin board member and former AT&T chief executive John Donovan also participated.

Valar’s pitch is built around what it calls “gigasites”, sprawling industrial campuses that would host hundreds or even thousands of small, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors operating in concert. Each unit uses helium as a coolant and TRISO fuel encased in graphite, a combination that allows the reactors to run at significantly higher temperatures than conventional light-water designs. The company says these clusters can deliver dense, steady, carbon-free power tailored to the load profiles of AI data centres, industrial manufacturers, and grid-constrained regions.

It is an audacious answer to an increasingly urgent question: where will the electricity come from? The International Energy Agency projects that data-centre power consumption will double by 2026. Goldman Sachs estimates that 85 to 90 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity will eventually be needed to help fill the gap. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all signed nuclear power agreements in recent months, but the reactors those deals depend on do not yet exist at commercial scale.

Valar claims a meaningful head start. In November 2025, the company announced that its NOVA Core achieved zero-power criticality at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Criticality Experiments Research Centre, making it what the Breakthrough Institute described as the first company to reach that milestone under the US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Programme. Zero-power criticality — a self-sustaining chain reaction of uranium-235 without reaching full operating temperatures — is a necessary validation step, not a working power plant, but it is further than most of Valar’s competitors have publicly demonstrated.

The company is now preparing its Ward250 reactor, a 100-kilowatt thermal high-temperature gas-cooled unit, for power operations at the Utah San Rafael Energy Research Centre. In February 2026, the reactor was airlifted from California to Utah aboard three C-17 Globemaster military cargo aircraft in a joint operation between the Departments of Defence and Energy — a logistical stunt that doubled as a proof of concept for rapid reactor deployment. Valar is targeting operational status before 4 July 2026, the deadline the DOE set for three reactors in its pilot programme to achieve criticality.

Taylor’s trajectory has been unconventional even by deep-tech standards. A self-taught coder who launched his first venture as a teenager, he comes from a family with nuclear roots: his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. The Ward250 reactor carries Schaap’s name. Taylor has assembled a leadership team that includes Mark Mitchell, the former president of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, and Muhammad Shahzad, the former president and chief financial officer of Relativity Space.

The competitive field is crowded and well-funded. TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, broke ground on a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming last year. Kairos Power is building a molten-salt demonstration plant in Tennessee. X-energy has a partnership with Dow Chemical for an industrial HTGR. Oklo, which went public via a SPAC in 2024, is developing a fast-neutron microreactor. None has yet delivered commercial power from an advanced design.

Valar has also taken a combative approach to regulation that few young companies would risk. In April 2025, the startup sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, arguing that the agency’s licensing framework unlawfully restricts small-scale reactor innovation by requiring the same approval process for low-power test reactors as for full-scale commercial plants. The lawsuit, filed alongside the states of Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, as well as fellow reactor startups Last Energy and Deep Fission, seeks to shift regulatory authority for small reactors to individual states. The case has since been paused amid the Trump administration’s broader executive order to overhaul the NRC.

The $2 billion valuation places Valar among the most richly valued nuclear startups in the United States, a distinction that would have seemed absurd five years ago. Whether the premium reflects genuine confidence in the technology or the gravitational pull of AI-adjacent capital is a question the next eighteen months should begin to answer. If the Ward250 reaches power operations in Utah this summer, Valar will have done something no advanced-reactor startup has managed: moved from incorporation to criticality to grid-connected electricity in roughly three years. If it does not, $2 billion will buy a very expensive physics experiment in the desert.

As generative AI matures from a novelty into a workplace staple, a new friction point has emerged: the “shadow AI” or “Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI)” crisis. Much like the unsanctioned use of personal devices in years past, developers and knowledge workers are increasingly deploying autonomous agents on personal infrastructure to manage their professional workflows.

“Our journey with Kilo Claw has been to make it easier and easier and more accessible to folks,” says Kilo co-founder Scott Breitenother. Today, the company dedicated to providing a portable, multi-model, cloud-based AI coding environment is moving to formalize this “shadow AI” layer: it’s launching KiloClaw for Organizations and KiloClaw Chat, a suite of tools designed to provide enterprise-grade governance over personal AI agents.

The announcement comes at a period of high velocity for the company. Since making its securely hosted, one-click OpenClaw product for individuals, KiloClaw, generally available last month, more than 25,000 users have integrated the platform into their daily workflows.

Simultaneously, Kilo’s proprietary agent benchmark, PinchBench, has logged over 250,000 interactions and recently gained significant industry validation when it was referenced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote at the 2026 Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California.

The shadow AI crisis: Addressing the BYOAI problem

The impetus for KiloClaw for Organizations stems from a growing visibility gap within large enterprises. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Kilo leadership detailed conversations with high-level AI directors at government contractors who found their developers running OpenClaw agents on random VPS instances to manage calendars and monitor repositories.

“What we’re announcing on Tuesday is Kilo Claw for organizations, where a company can buy an organization-level package of Kilo Claws and give every team member access,” explained Kilo co-founder and head of product and engineering Emilie Schario during the interview.

“We can’t see any of it,” the head of AI at one such firm reportedly told Kilo. “No audit logs. No credential management. No idea what data is touching what API”.

This lack of oversight has led some organizations to issue blanket bans on autonomous agents before a clear strategy on deployment could be formed.

Anand Kashyap, CEO and founder of data security firm Fortanix, told VentureBeat without seeing Kilo’s announcement that while “Openclaw has taken the technology world by storm… the enterprise usage is minimal due to the security concerns of the open source version.”

Kashyap expanded on this trend:

“In recent times, NVIDIA (with NemoClaw), Cisco (DefenseClaw), Palo Alto Networks, and Crowdstrike have all announced offerings to create an enterprise-ready version of OpenClaw with guardrails and governance for agent security. However, enterprise adoption continues to be low.

Enterprises like centralized IT control, predictable behavior, and data security which keeps them compliant. An autonomous agentic platform like OpenClaw stretches the envelope on all these parameters, and while security majors have announced their traditional perimeter security measures, they don’t address the fundamental problems of having a reduced attack surface. Over time, we will see an agentic platform emerge where agents are pre-built and packaged, and deployed responsibly with centralized controls, and data access controls built into the agentic platform as well as the LLMs they call upon to get instructions on how to perform the next task. Technologies like Confidential Computing provide compartmentalization of data and processing, and are tremendously helpful in reducing the attack surface.”

KiloClaw for Organizations is positioned as the way for the security team to say “yes,” providing the visibility and control required to bring these agents in-house.

It transitions agents from developer-managed infrastructure into a managed environment characterized by scoped access and organizational-level controls.

Technology: Universal persistence and the “Swiss cheese” method

A core technical hurdle in the current agent landscape is the fragmentation of chat sessions.

During the VentureBeat interview, Schario noted that even advanced tools often struggle with canonical sessions, frequently dropping messages or failing to sync across devices.

Schario emphasized the security layer that supports this new structure: “You get all the same benefits of the Kilo gateway and the Kilo platform: you can limit what models people can use, get usage visibility, cost controls, and all the advantages of leveraging Kilo with managed, hosted, controlled Kilo Claw”.

To address the inherent unreliability of autonomous agents—such as missed cron jobs or failed executions—Kilo employs what Schario calls the “Swiss cheese method” of reliability. By layering additional protections and deterministic guardrails on top of the base OpenClaw architecture, Kilo aims to ensure that tasks, such as a daily 6:00 PM summary, are completed even if the underlying agent logic falters.

This is critical because, as Schario noted, “The real risk for any company is data leakage, and that can come from a bot commenting on a GitHub issue or accidentally emailing the person who’s going to get fired before they get fired”.

Product: KiloClaw Chat and organizational guardrails

While managed infrastructure solves the backend problem, KiloClaw Chat addresses the user experience. Schario noted that “Hosted, managed OpenClaw is easier to get started with, but it’s not enough, and it still requires you to be at the edge of technology to understand how to set it up”. Kilo is looking to lower that barrier for the average worker, asking: “How do we give people who have never heard the phrase OpenClaw or Claudebot an always-on AI assistant?”.

Traditionally, interacting with an OpenClaw agent required connecting to third-party messaging services like Telegram or Discord—a process that involves navigating “BotFather” tokens and technical configurations that alienate non-engineers.

“One of the number one hurdles we see, both anecdotally and in the data, is that you get your bot running and then you have to connect a channel to it. If you don’t know what’s going on, it’s overwhelming,” Schario observed.

“We solved that problem. You don’t need to set up a channel. You can chat with Kilo in the web UI and, with the Kilo Claw app on your phone, interact with Kilo without setting an external channel,” she continued.

This native approach is essential for corporate compliance because, as she further explained, “When we were talking to early enterprise opportunities, they don’t want you using your personal Telegram account to chat with your work bot”. As Schario put it, there is a reason enterprise communication doesn’t flow through personal DMs; when a company shuts off access, they must be able to shut off access to the bot.

Looking ahead, the company plans to integrate these environments further. “What we’re going to do is make Kilo Chat the waypoint between Telegram, Discord, and OpenClaw, so you get all the convenience of Kilo Chat but can use it in the other channels,” Breitenother added.

The enterprise package includes several critical governance features:

• Identity Management: SSO/OIDC integration and SCIM provisioning for automated user lifecycles.

• Centralized Billing: Full visibility into compute and inference usage across the entire organization.

• Admin Controls: Org-wide policies regarding which models can be used, specific permissions, and session durations.

• Secrets Configuration: Integration with 1Password ensures that agents never handle credentials in plain text, preventing accidental leaks.

Licensing and governance: The “bot account” model

Other security experts note that handling bot and AI agentic permissions are among the most pressing problems enterprises are facing today

As Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and co-founder of AI infrastructure and identity management company Teleport told VentureBeat without seeing the Kilo news: “The potential impact of OpenClaw as a non-deterministic actor demonstrates why identity can’t be an afterthought. You have an autonomous agent with shell access, browser control, and API credentials — running on a persistent loop, across dozens of messaging platforms, with the ability to write its own skills. That’s not a chatbot. That’s a non-deterministic actor with broad infrastructure access and no cryptographic identity, no short-lived credentials, and no real-time audit trail tying actions to a verifiable actor.”

Kilo is proposing to solve it with a major change in organizational structure: the adoption of employee “bot accounts”.

In Kilo’s vision, every employee eventually carries two identities—their standard human account and a corresponding bot account, such as scott.bot@kiloco.ai.

These bot identities operate with strictly limited, read-only permissions. For example, a bot might be granted read-only access to company logs or a GitHub account with contributor-only rights. This “scoped” approach allows the agent to maintain full visibility of the data it needs to be helpful while ensuring it cannot accidentally share sensitive information with others.

Addressing concerns over data privacy and “black box” algorithms, Kilo emphasizes that its code is source available.

“Anyone can go look at our code. It’s not a black box. When you’re buying Kilo Claw, you’re not giving us your data, and we’re not training on any of your data because we’re not building our own model,” Schario clarified.

This licensing choice allows organizations to audit the resiliency and security of the platform without fearing their proprietary data will be used to improve third-party models.

Pricing and availability

KiloClaw for Organizations follows a usage-based pricing model where companies pay only for the compute and inference consumed. Organizations can utilize a “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) approach or use Kilo Gateway credits for inference.

The service is available starting today, Wednesday, April 1. KiloClaw Chat is currently in beta, with support for web, desktop, and iOS sessions. New users can evaluate the platform via a free tier that includes seven days of compute.

As Breitenother summarized to VentureBeat, the goal is to shift from “one-off” deployments to a scalable model for the entire workforce: “I think of Kilo for orgs as buying Kilo Claw by the bushel instead of by the one-off. And we’re hoping to sell a lot of bushels of of kilo claw”.

If you’re looking for a powerful laptop for creative work, multitasking, or everyday productivity, I’ve found a huge deal on the Nimo N159 (2026) Laptop, which is now $859 (was $2100) at Amazon.

That’s a massive $1250 saving on a machine packed with serious hardware. At the center of the Nimo N159 is an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor paired with Radeon 680M graphics which delivers nippy performance across demanding tasks, creative workflows, and heavy multitasking.

Backing that up is 32GB of DDR5 RAM, giving the system plenty of headroom for running multiple applications.

A large 1TB NVMe SSD provides fast boot times, quick app launches, and enough space for projects, media libraries, and everyday files.

The 15.6-inch Full HD IPS display promises clear visuals with wide viewing angles, making it comfortable to use for long sessions. A nearly 180-degree hinge adds flexibility when sharing content or adjusting the screen to suit different working positions.

While the integrated graphics card is going to limit use for video editing, the high-performance Ryzen 7 processor coupled with 32GB DDR5 RAM is an essential for photo editing, particularly if you’re creating images for online. I can’t see color gamut listed here or on the official website, so I can’t recommend it for print-ready content creation.

A built-in fingerprint reader allows quick sign-ins, and a physical webcam privacy switch gives direct control over camera access when you’re not using it.

It’s powered by a 54Wh battery paired with 100W USB-C fast charging support. The laptop includes HDMI and five USB ports, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.

At just $859, the Nimo N159 with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD is a solid deal you won’t want to miss out on.

For more choices, look at our round up of the best business laptops you can buy.

But dig a little deeper and the JBL Live 780NC start to shine. The feature set rivals that of the best wireless headphones out there like the Sony WH-1000XM6. Sure, most wireless headphones now come with active noise cancellation and an ambient mode, but many don’t come with Auracast, as powerful of an EQ (and personalized EQ), or Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res support. At least, not at this price.

I’ll throw in the obligatory these-aren’t-perfect counterpoints — and there are a few. The bass can sometimes get a little out of control to the point where I usually had the bass cut through the EQ when listening. And the Dolby Atmos feature is a bit underwhelming for music, not to mention that only a handful of streaming services provide Dolby Atmos content. Still, the JBL Live 780NC get high marks from me. And if you give them a chance, you’ll probably feel the same.

JBL Live 780NC: Price and release date