Apple is the latest Silicon Valley giant to get in line with the White House’s voluntary commitments on AI safety as the iPhone maker readies its big Apple Intelligence release.

The company joins a slew of peers, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, in agreeing to ground rules around AI development, testing, and transparency, though experts have been skeptical about the pledges’ lack of teeth.

As for potentially more concrete rules, the White House also released an update last week on the deadlines it hit around the rollout of President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which the federal government has been gradually implementing for around nine months now.

Ben Buchanan, the White House’s special advisor for AI, told Tech Brew that Apple’s commitment is a sign of the wide acceptance of these guidelines in the tech world.

“As [Apple] did their rollout of their big AI products and services in June, this was a natural outgrowth of that,” Buchanan said. “It shows that these commitments have really become the cornerstone of responsible AI innovation.”

Keep reading here.—PK

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Charter Communications will pay $15 million to settle an investigation into multiple network outages that occurred last year, the Federal Communications Commission said in an announcement shared first with Tech Brew.

As part of the settlement, Charter acknowledged violating the FCC’s rules, including one instance of failure to notify more than 1,000 emergency call centers of a disruption that affected 911 calls last year, the agency said.

Communications providers are obligated to notify 911 call centers when network outages lasting longer than a half-hour might affect those centers. They must also make timely regulatory filings to the FCC “when outages reach a certain severity threshold.” Under the settlement, Charter admits that it violated the FCC’s rules on notifying public safety officials and the agency.

“A 911 call is likely the most important call a person will ever make. Public safety officials need to be able to inform the public of alternate ways to reach emergency services in the event of an outage,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement.

Keep reading here.—KG

The way the Federal Communications Commission has been managing its broadband subsidy programs is unconstitutional, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last week in a decision that upends decades of telecom policy.

The 71-page decision finds fault with the FCC’s delegation of rate-setting authority to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which the majority of judges characterized as a “private company” managed by “interest groups.” The FCC describes it as “an independent, not-for-profit corporation designated as the administrator of the federal Universal Service Fund.”

According to the opinion, USAC determines how much carriers must pay into the fund on a quarterly basis to support services ranging from school wi-fi to rural broadband infrastructure, and most of those costs are then passed on to end subscribers. The opinion criticized this approach as being necessarily self-serving.

“In other words, the contribution amount ultimately derives from the universal service demand projections of private, for-profit telecommunications carriers, all of whom have ‘have financial incentives’ to increase the size of universal service programs,” according to the majority opinion.

The “contributions” that USAC sets amount to a tax that the FCC improperly delegated, the court said, ordering the FCC to revisit its rate-setting.

However, several judges across two dissents said the decision breaks with “three sister circuits” that already addressed constitutional challenges to the FCC’s delegation and found “this program collects administrative fees and not taxes.”

Keep reading here.—KG

Advancing in the AI age. We’re a year and half into the generative AI era, and new developments are dropping daily. To see how companies are building strong foundations for an AI-powered future, Snowflake looked at how 9k+ customers are putting AI to work in the Data Trends Report 2024. Read it here.