America
US government shutdown pauses major antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Apple
Antitrust lawsuits in the US against tech giants Amazon and Apple have been paused due to the government shutdown.
The lawsuits against the four major tech giants—Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon—are among the most closely watched cases in Washington and the business world.
Additionally, these cases are among the most politically sensitive, as the companies’ CEOs have sought to build closer relationships with Donald Trump and the White House.
The cases against Google and Meta are proceeding during the federal government shutdown. Both companies are near a resolution, with one judge set to finalize a decision in one of Google’s cases and another expected to rule on Meta soon.
On the other hand, the lawsuits that threaten to break up Amazon and Apple were suspended last week. Amazon’s trial will not be heard until February 2027, and Apple’s discovery and deposition processes will continue until January 2027.
The judges in both cases approved the government’s request to suspend the proceedings until federal funding is restored.
How much the shutdown will affect the cases will likely depend on how long the government remains closed. A work stoppage of a few days or weeks is unlikely to cause a major disruption, but a longer delay could postpone the trial dates scheduled for 2027.
Judges also have broad discretion on whether to suspend a case. Even during a shutdown, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) are still obligated to proceed with a case if ordered by the court.
Both the Google and Meta cases have reached their final stages. In one of the lawsuits concerning Google’s search engine empire, the government requested a suspension until it reopens.
However, Washington D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled for the case to continue, noting that antitrust cases proceeded during the 2019 shutdown.
Mehta will hold a hearing on October 8 to finalize a damages ruling in which he declined to break up Google for monopolizing the online search market.
In the DOJ’s other case against Google, which targets the company’s monopoly in the online advertising market, the government did not request a suspension, but the department’s lawyers asked for a stay in court this week and were denied. That case has been in a settlement hearing since last week.
The FTC did not request to suspend its case against Meta’s acquisition of Instagram. That case is awaiting a judge’s decision after going to trial this spring.
In Washington state, District Judge John Chun granted the FTC’s request to suspend the trial in its case against Amazon. This lawsuit concerns allegations that the company prioritizes its own products in its online store. Chun ruled that ongoing depositions may continue.
A day later, District Judge Leda Dunn Wettre approved a similar request from the Department of Justice in New Jersey in a case concerning Apple’s monopoly in the smartphone market.
The federal judiciary announced that courts will remain open until at least October 17, using court fee balances and other funds not affected by the appropriations lapse. The judiciary remained operational throughout the entire five-week shutdown in 2018.
The FTC and DOJ are continuing to accept premerger notification filings during the current shutdown.
America
Federal filing reveals Trump earned over $1 billion from crypto businesses
US President Donald Trump earned more than $1 billion from his cryptocurrency ventures over the past year, according to a federal financial disclosure released on Tuesday.
During his second term in office, Trump and his family have invested heavily in digital assets and a range of cryptocurrency businesses.
Trump said earlier in 2025 that he wanted the United States to become the “crypto capital of the world.”
The president’s cryptocurrency earnings come in addition to profits generated through legal settlements, real estate holdings and royalty agreements.
Most of Trump’s crypto ventures were newly established companies when he took office. They have since grown to generate more income than much of the vast real estate portfolio he spent decades building.
The surge was fueled by billionaire investors and by Trump’s efforts to dismantle the federal crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry.
According to the mandatory annual financial disclosure filed with the government ethics office for 2025, Trump earned more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial, his flagship cryptocurrency company, which sells new crypto products including governance tokens.
The report also disclosed that CIC Digital LLC, another cryptocurrency company, generated more than $600 million in revenue from sales of commemorative meme coins bearing Trump’s image. The tokens were launched just days before his inauguration.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said:
“Neither the President nor his family has ever had or will ever have a conflict of interest. Through executive actions, support for legislation such as the GENIUS Act, and other common-sense policies that promote innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans, President Trump has proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world.”
Kelly also maintained that Trump and his administration had taken every action “in the best interests of the American people.”
Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures, including his tokens and meme coins, have declined in value since their launch.
In another unprecedented move for a sitting president, Trump also earned millions of dollars last year from the sale of Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other merchandise.
The president earned $4.7 million from Trump-branded watches alone.
The rise of Trump’s cryptocurrency business is particularly notable compared with his real estate operations, even as he earned tens of millions of dollars from fees and licensing agreements tied to new hotels, resorts and residential developments overseas.
Many of those countries were simultaneously engaged in negotiations with the United States over tariffs, military assistance and other major issues.
A real estate project in the United Arab Emirates generated $10.4 million in income.
In Saudi Arabia, a property developed by a real estate company closely linked to the ruling family generated $9 million for Trump’s business.
Properties in Bucharest, Romania, and Qatar each generated $5 million for Trump.
The disclosure also detailed that the president received more than $86 million through five separate legal settlements involving ABC, CBS, YouTube, Meta and X.
America
US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s Claude 5 models after security upgrade
Anthropic has announced that the US government has lifted export controls on its newest artificial intelligence models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, paving the way for the high-profile systems to return to active use.
The AI research and development company had temporarily suspended access for all users following the June 12 imposition of the restrictions, which blocked foreign nationals both inside and outside the US from accessing the models. Anthropic stated that the complete suspension was necessary because it was unable to perform real-time nationality verification. With the lifting of the export controls, the access restrictions have now been terminated.
Anthropic announced that Claude Fable 5 will be made available for global general availability starting Wednesday, July 1, across the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Users on Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans will be permitted to use Fable 5 for up to 50% of their weekly usage limits at no additional cost until July 7.
After that date, access will be transitioned to a usage-credit basis. The company is also working to restore access via Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, access to Claude Mythos 5—a model designed for defense-oriented cybersecurity work that operates with fewer safety constraints—was restored to select US entities following approval from the US government on June 26.
The company stated that it continues to work in coordination with the US government to expand access to domestic and international partners under its Glasswing program.
The cybersecurity report that triggered export restrictions
According to the timeline disclosed by the company, the export controls were instituted on June 12, just three days after the models’ June 9 launch. The regulatory intervention was triggered by a report from Amazon researchers who successfully bypassed the safety guardrails of the Fable 5 model to identify specific software vulnerabilities.
The report highlighted a single instance where the model generated code demonstrating how the vulnerability in question could be exploited. Anthropic collaborated with the US government and partners, including Amazon, over a two-week period. During subsequent testing, Anthropic confirmed that lower-capacity models—such as Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—were also capable of identifying the same vulnerabilities.
Furthermore, the tests revealed that the code demonstrating how to exploit the vulnerability could be generated by all tested models, including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, and Kimi K2.7.
Anthropic maintained that the bypass technique did not expose any unique offensive cyber capabilities at the Mythos level, describing it instead as a borderline case involving routine defensive activities.
Nevertheless, in cooperation with the US government, the company trained an advanced safety classifier targeting the behavior identified in the report, which it claims blocks the exploit with a success rate of over 99%.
When cybersecurity-related queries directed at Fable 5 are blocked by this system, users will be notified and their prompts will be automatically redirected to the Opus 4.8 model.
Anthropic acknowledged that the new safety mechanism carries the risk of triggering more frequent false positives—blocking harmless queries during routine coding and debugging—but said it is optimizing the system to reduce these occurrences.
The company noted that Claude Mythos 5 is more capable of finding and exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities than any actor other than high-level human experts, making it an attractive target for malicious actors.
In contrast, Claude Fable 5 does not possess these offensive cyber capabilities. Anthropic stated that it doubled its staffing resources in the month leading up to the launch to implement its most robust cybersecurity measures to date on the model.
This approach, termed “defense-in-depth,” combines training the model to reject dangerous requests with the deployment of automated cybersecurity classifiers.
These classifiers, which function as smaller auxiliary AI systems, detect and block suspicious requests during cybersecurity operations. To counter the risk of “jailbreaking”—where users manipulate the system to bypass safety rules—Anthropic expanded its safety margins significantly.
While the company acknowledged that this conservative posture leads to the blocking of some harmless queries, it stated that the trade-off was necessary to prevent offensive cyber exploits.
Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Innovation (CAISI), an agency under the US Department of Commerce, also evaluated the new measures and confirmed that the cybersecurity guardrails are highly robust.
A call for industry-wide safety standards
Pointing to a lack of objective, industry-wide standards to evaluate the severity of safety guardrail bypasses, Anthropic announced that it has begun developing a consensus-based framework alongside Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Glasswing partners.
The proposed cybersecurity assessment framework aims to score the severity of vulnerabilities based on four distinct criteria:
- Capability gain: The degree to which a vulnerability empowers a user beyond currently available tools.
- Scope of capability gain: The number of different offensive tasks that can be executed using the same bypass technique.
- Ease of weaponization: The level of human effort required to convert the method into an active exploit.
- Discoverability: How easily the technique can be identified and acquired.
Additionally, the company is launching a new HackerOne bounty program where security researchers can report cybersecurity vulnerabilities they discover within the Fable 5 model.
Deepening cooperation with the US government
Over the past ten weeks, Anthropic has worked closely with cybersecurity and national security agencies under the framework of the June 2 US Executive Order on “Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security.” The company announced it will further deepen its public-sector collaboration.
Under this expanded partnership, Anthropic will provide early, pre-launch access to critical national security-relevant models to government partners for independent testing.
The company has pledged to share information rapidly if vulnerabilities or abuse patterns are detected, and to submit newly developed safeguards to state agencies for evaluation.
Furthermore, Anthropic will establish dedicated internal teams focused on joint AI safety research and will allocate significant computing resources to support government-backed testing initiatives.
The company emphasized that transparent, permanent, and robust legal regulations applied equally to all frontier model developers are critical for the future of cyber defense.
America
Twenty-five US states sue Trump administration over Medicaid work-requirement exemptions
A coalition of 25 US states and the District of Columbia has filed a joint lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging a new regulation that restricts work-requirement exemptions for medically frail individuals under Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income populations.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleges that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) violated statutory protections established by Congress through its issuance of an interim final rule governing who qualifies for exemptions from the new work mandates.
In their joint complaint, the states argue that the newly adopted rule “dramatically narrows the work exemption boundaries legally secured by Congress for some of the most vulnerable members of the Medicaid program.”
The states contend that the regulation will cause a significant number of individuals who are currently working or who legitimately qualify for exemptions to lose their health coverage or be denied access to these vital services.
“This regulation introduces new rules that restrict who should be exempted due to their medically frail status, forcing these vulnerable individuals who require healthcare services to navigate unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to obtain and maintain their vital health coverage,” the lawsuit states.
The rule, published earlier this month, serves as implementation guidance for how the work requirements enacted under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will be applied across 42 states and the District of Columbia.
Republican lawmakers and administration officials have defended the policy, characterizing it as a mechanism to combat waste, fraud, and abuse within the Medicaid program.
Under the new rules, which are scheduled to take effect in January, beneficiaries enrolled in expanded Medicaid programs must work, participate in volunteer activities, attend an educational institution at least part-time, or take part in job training programs for at least 80 hours per month to maintain their insurance coverage.
While the statutory text of the legislation outlines various exceptions for specific vulnerable groups—explicitly exempting “medically frail” individuals from the mandate—the statute did not provide a precise definition for the term.
The administration’s new rules narrow the definition of medical frailty by tying it directly to an individual’s capacity to work. Under the new regulation, to qualify for an exemption, a beneficiary must prove that their medical condition completely prevents them from working.
State governments state that they had spent months negotiating implementation plans with CMS prior to the publication of the regulation, but were caught unprepared by this highly restrictive definition, which they argue was not present in the legislative text.
State officials emphasize that individuals who are legally entitled to protection risk losing their health coverage because they will be unable to overcome the bureaucratic barriers imposed to prove their exempt status.
“These changes flagrantly ignore the concrete evidence that the agency was required to consider, or which was already before it,” the complaint states regarding the agency’s decision-making process. “Reasonable alternatives and potential major adverse consequences were not adequately evaluated, nor was it clarified what exactly is being demanded of the plaintiff states.”
The plaintiff states point out that Congress deliberately kept the scope of the exemptions broad when drafting the legislation.
Stressing that the broad exemptions in the law are well-founded, the complaint states: “Individuals with disabilities, patients undergoing cancer treatment, or people battling serious and complex health conditions must not be placed at risk of losing this vital care that helps them maintain their health.”
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