Corporate Corruption News Articles

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Across the world, over 800 million people spend their days hungry. More than 2 billion have limited access to food. Yet today's global food system produces enough to feed every person on the planet. To account for these trends, we need to look at market concentration, and how a small number of very big companies have come to dominate the production and supply of the food we all eat. The global food system has become much more concentrated in recent years, partly through an increase in mergers and acquisitions, where large firms buy up rival companies until they completely dominate key areas. High levels of market concentration mean less transparency, weaker competition, and more power in the hands of fewer firms. And our research reveals that a rise in the number of mergers and acquisitions is taking place at all stages of the global food system – from seeds and fertilisers to machinery and manufacturing. This is all part of food being increasingly seen as a source not only of human sustenance, but as a profitable investment – or what is known as the "financialisation of food". Just four firms control 44% of the global farm machinery market, two companies control 40% of the global seed market, and four businesses control 62% of the global agrochemicals market. This trend is matched in food retail, with four firms – Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons – estimated to control over 64% of the UK grocery market.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the food system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

Toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" used in lithium ion batteries essential to the clean energy transition present a dangerous source of chemical pollution that new research finds threatens the environment and human health. The multipronged, peer-reviewed study zeroed in on a little-researched and unregulated subclass of PFAS called bis-FASI that are used in lithium ion batteries. Researchers found alarming levels of the chemicals in the environment near manufacturing plants, noted their presence in remote areas around the world, found they appear to be toxic to living organisms, and discovered that waste from batteries disposed of in landfills was a major pollution source. PFAS are a class of about 16,000 human-made compounds most often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The paper notes that few end-of-life standards for PFAS battery waste exist, and the vast majority ends up in municipal dumps where it can leach into waterways, accumulate locally or be transported long distances. It looked at the presence of the chemicals in historical leachate samples and found none in those from prior to the mid-1990s, when the chemical class was commercialized.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

After government officials like former White House advisers Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt repeatedly harangued platforms such as Facebook to censor Americans who contested the government's narrative on COVID-19 vaccines, Missouri and Louisiana sued. They claimed that the practice violates the First Amendment. Following years of litigation, the Supreme Court threw cold water on their efforts, ruling in Murthy v. Missouri that states and the individual plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government for its actions. The government often disguised its censorship requests by coordinating with ostensibly "private" civil society groups to pressure tech companies to remove or shadow ban targeted content. According to the U.S. House Weaponization Committee's November 2023 interim report, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requested that the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory create a public-private partnership to counter election "misinformation" in 2020. This consortium of government and private entities took the form of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). EIP's "private" civil society partners then forwarded the flagged content to Big Tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter. These "private" groups ... receive millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Science Foundation, the State Department and the U.S Department of Justice. Legislation like the COLLUDE Act would ... clarify that Section 230 does not apply when platforms censor legal speech "as a result of a communication" from a "governmental entity" or from an non-profit "acting at the request or behest of a governmental entity."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable sources.

A Supreme Court ruling against the opioid company Purdue Pharma ... substantially raised the bar for executives and owners trying to shield their wealth. Johnson & Johnson, Boy Scouts of America and Rite Aid are among the entities trying to handle a vast number of lawsuits in bankruptcy court, seeking to resolve all claims in a single settlement. These proceedings have echoes of the Purdue Pharma case decided by the Supreme Court on Thursday, in which the Sackler family, which owns the bankrupt opioid-maker, offered plaintiffs about $6 billion of the $11 billion they extracted from the company. In exchange, family members would have received immunity from future lawsuits, without filing for bankruptcy themselves. A 5-4 Supreme Court held that settlement was inadequate. Its ruling threw the massive bankruptcy case against Purdue Pharma into doubt after years of court battles over the company's role in the nation's opioid epidemic. The decision also adds a fresh wrinkle to a controversial legal strategy, called the Texas two-step, in which companies use a Texas law to split into separate companies and shift a large volume of legal claims onto the newly created entity. In the second step, the entity carrying the lawsuits files for bankruptcy and seeks to release its parent organization from all liability in exchange for a payout. Johnson & Johnson transferred some of its assets and all of the legal claims against it over asbestos-tainted talcum powder into a new legal entity that filed for Chapter 11. Boy Scouts of America ... agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle claims of sexual abuse in bankruptcy court, a deal that shields from future litigation insurance companies as well as schools, churches and community organizations involved with the nonprofit.

Note: For more like this, read about how powerful corporations use the bankruptcy system to dodge lawsuits over sexual abuse and deadly products. Along US opioid industry lines, read how the industry operated like a drug cartel. Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the deadly War on Drugs protects the activities of the rich and powerful: military-intelligence interests within the US government, big banks, Big Pharma, and drug cartels.

Americans are paying too much for prescription drugs. Pharmacy benefit managers ... are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government. The three largest pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, act as middlemen overseeing prescriptions for more than 200 million Americans. They are owned by huge health care conglomerates – CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group – and are hired by employers and governments. The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees. Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M. The P.B.M. negotiates with drug companies, pays pharmacies and helps decide which drugs patients can get at what price. In theory, everyone saves money. But those savings appear to be largely a mirage, a product of a system where prices have been artificially inflated so that major P.B.M.s and drug companies can boost their profits while taking credit for reducing prices.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

Twenty years ago, FedEx established its own police force. Now it's working with local police to build out an AI car surveillance network. The shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least four multi-billion dollar private companies. Some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx – a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus. Such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock's car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Jay Stanley ... at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was "profoundly disconcerting" that FedEx was exchanging data with law enforcement as part of Flock's "mass surveillance" system. "It raises questions about why a private company ... would have privileged access to data that normally is only available to law enforcement," he said. Forbes previously found that [Flock] had itself likely broken the law across various states by installing cameras without the right permits.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

A global network of powerful entities, fueled in part by Wall Street, is buying up land and water around the world. This global land rush has led to wrecked wells and lost farms from Arizona to Zambia – and it risks sowing the seeds for future global conflict, according to "The Grab," a new documentary out today from Gabriela Cowperthwaite. The film follows a seven-year investigation by producer and journalist Nathan Halverson of The Center for Investigative Reporting. In part, "The Grab" argues that power is being exercised over individual landowners by a convoluted and opaque network of sovereign wealth funds, national governments and Wall Street. One critical focus of this push is Africa. Halverson interviewed Brig Siachitema, an activist in the Zambian town of Serenje, where he says foreign investors have been buying up the ancestral land of villagers and kicking them off it. Late in the movie, he presents La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin with evidence that the Arizona State Retirement System – her own pension fund – is invested in the project that is draining the aquifer beneath the county. Rather than fighting to protect U.S. land and food from other multinational corporations, "the governments are working for the corporations." There are enough calories worldwide to feed a growing global population, even with climate change, and even in 2050. The race to lock down resources, and governments' panic over the unrest caused by spiking food prices, risks scaling up to a war between great powers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the financial system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

Ask Google if cats have been on the moon and it used to spit out a ranked list of websites so you could discover the answer for yourself. Now it comes up with an instant answer generated by artificial intelligence - which may or may not be correct. "Yes, astronauts have met cats on the moon, played with them, and provided care," said Google's newly retooled search engine. It added: "For example, Neil Armstrong said, ‘One small step for man' because it was a cat's step. Buzz Aldrin also deployed cats on the Apollo 11 mission." None of this is true. Similar errors – some funny, others harmful falsehoods – have been shared on social media since Google this month unleashed AI overviews, a makeover of its search page that frequently puts the summaries on top of search results. It's hard to reproduce errors made by AI language models – in part because they're inherently random. They work by predicting what words would best answer the questions asked of them based on the data they've been trained on. They're prone to making things up – a widely studied problem known as hallucination. Another concern was a deeper one – that ceding information retrieval to chatbots was degrading the serendipity of human search for knowledge, literacy about what we see online, and the value of connecting in online forums with other people who are going through the same thing.Those forums and other websites count on Google sending people to them, but Google's new AI overviews threaten to disrupt the flow of money-making internet traffic.

Note: Read more about the potential dangers of Google's new AI tool. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on artificial intelligence controversies from reliable major media sources.

Automated fast food restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy, in Pasadena, Calif., opened in January to considerable hype due to its robot burger makers, but the restaurant launched with another, less heralded innovation: the ability to pay for your meal with your face. CaliExpress uses a payment system from facial ID tech company PopID. It's not the only fast-food chain to employ the technology. Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success – 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. As stores implement biometric technology for a variety of purposes, from payments to broader anti-theft systems, consumer blowback, and lawsuits, are rising. In March, an Illinois woman sued retailer Target for allegedly illegally collecting and storing her and other customers' biometric data via facial recognition technology without their consent. Amazon and T-Mobile are also facing legal actions related to biometric technology. In other countries ... biometric payment systems are comparatively mature. Visitors to McDonald's in China ... use facial recognition technology to pay for their orders.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

Corporations across the food system increasingly have the power, by virtue of their size, market domination, political connections, and deep pockets, to set prices, meddle with science, evade regulation, and write the rules to benefit themselves. "Big Ag" and "Big Food" are shorthand for a sprawling collection of giant, often multinational corporations that wield enormous market power throughout our food system. Some of these companies are household names–for example, Tyson Foods, John Deere, and General Mills–while others are virtually unknown to consumers. Those lesser-known companies tend to operate up the supply chain, and include Bayer and Syngenta, which sell the seeds farmers need and the pesticides they've come to rely on, and Nutrien and CF Industries Holdings, which manufacture synthetic fertilizers. The consequences of extreme agriculture and food industry concentration ... include supply chain instability, unsafe working conditions and downward pressure on wages, and higher food prices for consumers. Some 40% of farmland nationally is owned, in ever-larger tracts, by absentee landlords who don't farm but rent to others (in the Corn Belt bullseye of Iowa, it's more than half). Billionaires, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are among the largest private owners of US farmland. And corporations and investment funds like Nuveen and Manulife are buying up farmland at a rate that should alarm you.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers. According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document ... two of Israel's leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon's contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren't laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza. Project Nimbus ... has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company's New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees. Emaan Haseem, [was] a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest. "A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies," she said. "Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I'm any better than Raytheon?"

Note: When Google employees protested Project Maven, a DoD drone program that used Google technology, the Big Tech giant dropped the contract with the Pentagon in 2018. Read about how Silicon Valley has been infiltrated by intelligence agencies.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America's leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option. Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There's a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness–it dies behind paywalls. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have "a fair amount" or a "a great deal" of trust that the news is fair and accurate. Part of the problem ... is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year ... Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic.

Note: It's ironic that this story is behind a paywall. Read the complete article here using Textise, an excellent tool that converts most webpages into text-only versions. For a powerful reflection on the rise of paywalls and online ads in news outlets, read this Substack piece written by our news editor Mark Bailey. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.

Forever chemicals, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are a pervasive group of compounds that have been linked to a number of cancers and other illnesses. The toxic substances have become widespread in the air, soil and water via industrial discharge and are found in a number of common household items, from cookware to dental floss to stain-resistant furniture. And many of the products in which they have been detected – including waterproof makeup, workout leggings and period products – are primarily marketed toward women. In May 2022, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts-based Silent Spring Institute published a study ... looking at the presence of PFAS in underwear and several other consumer items. Among those products was menstrual underwear. Research released in August ... also found indicators of PFAS in some period products, including wrappers for several pads and some tampons and outer layers of menstrual underwear. A 2021 study ... tested 231 makeup products and found that 63 percent of the foundations, 58 percent of the eye products, 55 percent of the lip products and 47 percent of the mascaras it looked at contained high levels of fluorine. The Environmental Working Group has identified 300 cosmetic products from 50 different popular brands that contain PFAS in its Skin Deep database. The advocacy organization found that 200 of these products contain PTFE, which is also used in Teflon pans.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. There is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same "solution" is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being "overrun", such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices. This "solution" is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. Global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world ... seek both to restrict the extent of people's freedom of movement and to surveil people's movements ... through the global implementation of digital identity. The defense tech firm Anduril ... is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. Anduril will create "a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees." While Anduril is one of the main companies building the "virtual wall," they are not alone. General Dynamics, a defense firm deeply connected to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed several hundred remote video surveillance systems (RVSS) towers for CBP while Google, another Big Tech firm with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used in conjunction with Anduril's towers, which also utilize Anduril's own AI operating system known as Lattice.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Axon, maker of Tasers and police body cameras, has acquired a surveillance company that allows police to tap into camera networks in schools, retail stores, and other locations in cities and towns across America and apply AI technology to the footage. Axon acquired Fusus for an undisclosed sum. Fusus operates what it calls "real time crime centers (RTCC)" which allow police and other public agencies to analyze a wide array of video sources at a single point and apply AI that detects objects and people. These centers are reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security's Fusion Centers–where intelligence from a diverse number of sources is collected and shared among agencies–and have already expanded to over 250 cities and counties. Last week, Axon announced a new line of cameras called Axon Body Workforce designed to be worn by workers in retail and in healthcare. Despite pushing the cameras as deterrents, data shows no evidence that they've been effective in reducing police violence or increasing transparency. The rise of Fusus is concerning to rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has raised alarm over the expansion of law enforcement's ability to easily surveil Americans. Notably, the concept behind Fusus' solution is similar to technology that has been deployed in South Africa for years, and which experts have said exacerbates inequality in the country.

Note: Axon has ties to paid experts who are used to exonerate police after deaths in custody. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Mental health apps have become increasingly common over the past few years, particularly due to the rise in telehealth during the coronavirus pandemic. However, there's a problem: Data privacy is being compromised in the process. In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission ordered the mental health platform BetterHelp, which is owned by Teladoc (TDOC), to pay a $7.8 million fine to consumers for sharing their mental health data for advertising purposes with Facebook (META) and Snapchat (SNAP) after previously promising to keep the information private. Cerebral, a telehealth startup, admitted last year to exposing sensitive patient information to companies like Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta, TikTok, and other third-party advertisers. This info included patient names, birth dates, insurance information, and the patient's responses to mental health self-evaluations through the app. Overall, according to the Mozilla Foundation's Privacy Not Included online buyer's guide, only two out of the 27 mental health apps available to users met Mozilla's privacy and security standards in 2023. A December 2022 study of 578 mental health apps published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 44% shared data they collected with third parties. A February 2023 report from Duke University found that out of 37 different data brokers that researchers contacted ... firms "were ultimately willing and able to sell the requested mental health data."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Poison control centers across the US say they are seeing a steep increase in calls related to semaglutide, an injected medication used for diabetes and weight loss, with some people reporting symptoms related to accidental overdoses. Some have even needed to be hospitalized for severe nausea, vomiting and stomach pain, but their cases seem to have resolved after they were given intravenous fluids and medications to control nausea. From January through November, the America's Poison Centers reports nearly 3,000 calls involving semaglutide, an increase of more than 15-fold since 2019. In 94% of calls, this medication was the only substance reported. In most of the calls, people reported dosing errors, said Dr. Kait Brown, clinical managing director of the association. "Oftentimes, it's a person who maybe accidentally took a double dose or took the wrong dose," Brown said. Semaglutide was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2017. It is sold as Ozempic when used for diabetes and Wegovy when used for weight loss. Even when used as directed by a doctor, people can have stomach and bowel side effects, including nausea, vomiting and constipation, especially when they start the drugs. After celebrities began openly embracing Ozempic on social media in 2022 as a way to lose weight, demand overwhelmed supply. There's no specific antidote for a semaglutide overdose.

Note: The money behind the makers of weight-loss drugs is staggering, with the economic value of Wegovy's Novo Nordisk soaring to over $420 billionexceeding the entire GDP of Denmark, its home country. Read more on the significant adverse effects associated with these drugs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

New Yorkers may have noticed an unwelcome guest hovering round their parties. In the lead-up to Labour Day weekend the New York Police Department (NYPD) said that it would use drones to look into complaints about festivities, including back-yard gatherings. Snooping police drones are an increasingly common sight in America. According to a recent survey by researchers at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, about a quarter of police forces now use them. Among the NYPD's suppliers is Skydio, a Silicon Valley firm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make drones easy to fly. The NYPD is also buying from BRINC, another startup, which makes flying machines equipped with night-vision cameras that can smash through windows. Facial-recognition software is now used more widely across America, too, with around a tenth of police forces having access to the technology. A report released in September by America's Government Accountability Office found that six federal law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Secret Service, were together executing an average of 69 facial-recognition searches every day. Among the top vendors listed was Clearview AI. Surveillance capabilities may soon be further fortified by generative AI, of the type that powers ChatGPT, thanks to its ability to work with "unstructured" data such as images and video footage. The technology will let users "search the Earth for objects", much as Google lets users search the internet.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The Washington Post has published at least four long articles dismissing the censorship revealed by the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, which is headed to the Supreme Court. By contrast, in its story on the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices, the Washington Post expresses great skepticism of Big Tech and sympathy for the people censored – the exact opposite of how it treated the issue when it was non-Leftists who were being censored. To be sure, there has been a concerning increase in demands for censorship and blacklisting since the October 7 Hamas attacks. New York University appears to be investigating a student who said, "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." But the alarm that the news media are raising is in striking contrast to the indifference ... to the evidence of governmental and nongovernmental censorship of a variety of disfavored views and voices relating to climate change, Covid, Ukraine, and the Biden family's influence-peddling. Media outrage about censorship of pro-Palestinian voices sent social media platforms scrambling in order to end the censorship. The Washington Post's queries forced at least one social media company to stop censoring. "After The Washington Post sent questions to TikTok about the video, the sound was restored." A Meta spokesperson said a "bug" had caused some of the trouble. "We fixed a problem that briefly caused inappropriate Arabic translations in some of our products," the statement said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.

There's a lot of money in AI. Economists are predicting a massive boom in productivity as AI use takes off, buoyed by empirical research showing tools like ChatGPT boost worker output. Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, sold his company to Google in 2014 only after the latter agreed to an independent ethics board that would govern how Google uses DeepMind's research. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is structured as a nonprofit that owns a for-profit arm. Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude, is divesting control over a majority of its board to a trust composed not of shareholders, but independent trustees meant to enforce a focus on safety ahead of profits. Those three companies, plus Microsoft, got together ... to start a new organization meant to self-regulate the AI industry. There are three broad ways the profits reaped by AI companies could make their way to a more general public. The first ... is taxes. The second, considerably less important, is charity. The third is if the companies themselves decide to donate a large share of their profits. This was the key proposal of a landmark 2020 paper called "The Windfall Clause." The idea is simple: The clause is a voluntary but binding commitment that AI firms could make to donate a set percentage of their profits in excess of a certain threshold to a charitable entity. They suggest the thresholds be based on profits as a share of the gross world product (the entire world's economic output).

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.