Marketplace Tech

There’s a race going on among tech firms — big and small — to join in the construction of what President Trump has dubbed the Golden Dome, a missile defense system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome. Tens of billions of dollars in military contracts are at stake. In fact, the total cost might be in the trillions and the project could stretch a decade.

The technology and scale needed to make this all happen is, so far, larg...

Here’s cautionary tale for you, out of China, about a young woman who says she fell in love with an artificial intelligence chatbot. There have been well-publicized instances of people seeking companionship from chatbots and it leading to tragedy. In this instance, it caused heartbreak. The story involves the Chinese AI firm Deepseek which, earlier this year, launched a chatbot that's almost as good as its American rivals....

During the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry, including political action committees, accounted for nearly half of all of the corporate money going into the election, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. That spending helped make Congress and the Trump administration more friendly to the crypto industry.

Now, in the run-up to the midterms, the AI industry wants to replicate the crypto sector’s succe...

There’s a new class action lawsuit against Amazon Prime Video that’s once again elevating the question of ownership in the digital age: Who actually owns a movie, a song, a video game?Buy a physical copy, like a CD or DVD, and the answer is obvious. But buy a digital copy, and the answer gets very complicated.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and autho...

The Trump family took their digital token public this week. Plus, artificial intelligence is generating angst in Silicon Valley.

But first, Google’s antitrust case over its search business ended this week with a punishment far short of what the government sought. Google could have been forced to sell off its Chrome browser or stop paying Apple and others to make it the default search engine. Instead, a federal judge sa...

Axon, a company that makes policing equipment, developed new software called Draft One that takes recordings from police cameras and uses artificial intelligence to summarize them into incident reports.

Many police departments trying out the tool are not disclosing that they're using AI to write reports, according to a Mother Jones investigation. That potentially leaves both prosecutors and defense attorneys in the bl...

Big Tech companies have been in an all-out bidding war to capture top AI researchers and engineers. Companies like Meta have reportedly been offering compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They're the kind of eye-watering sums you usually only hear about in pro sports. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino explores whether this strategy of collecting expensive superstars will pay off for Big Tech firms...

More and more people are using generative AI to “resurrect” deceased loved ones. There are tools that can turn an old photograph into a short animation or create entire "AI clones" trained on old audio, video or written diaries. These technological advancements are taking memorializing the dead to a whole new level, but is it healthy? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to psychologist Elaine Kasket, who specializes ...