🚨 The people building AI want to slow down

📱 Apple launches device leasing program

🧠 Zuckerberg says AI should be open to everyone

🤖 US bans foreign-made humanoid robots

⚖️ The UAE is putting AI inside its courts

+ 📊 Daily poll and results

+ 📈 Trending tools and resources

More than 1,100 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and other frontier labs signed the Pacing the Frontier letter on Tuesday, asking Washington to back international tools for deliberately pacing AI development.

The letter targets automated AI research, where models improve other models and push progress past human oversight. It requests no pause, only the ability for governments and labs to slow down later.

Earlier AI warning letters came mostly from academics and departed staff. This one lists Dario Amodei, Jakub Pachocki and Shengjia Zhao, which makes it harder to dismiss as outsider noise.

Apple launched Apple Upgrade in the US on Tuesday, a Klarna-backed leasing program covering iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It retires both the iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments.

Klarna handles the soft credit check and billing, with iPhones from $17.99 a month. Apple raised Mac and iPad prices last month as memory chip shortages pushed component costs up.

The old program bundled AppleCare+ and ended with you owning the phone. Apple Upgrade charges extra for AppleCare and wants the device back, so cheaper here means renting.

Mark Zuckerberg published a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday titled "The AI Future Is for Everyone," arguing that spreading access to superintelligence beats locking it inside a handful of institutions.

He organized the piece around three principles: individual empowerment, invention over automation, and balance of power. He also questioned why developers who expect AI to erase most jobs keep racing to build it.

Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao signed this week's Pacing the Frontier letter asking Washington for tools to slow AI down, so Meta is arguing both sides at once.

The FCC added foreign-made humanoid robots, robot dogs and connected power inverters to its Covered List on Tuesday, blocking new models from the equipment authorization they need to reach the US market.

A White House-convened interagency body ruled the devices create supply chain and cybersecurity risks. The order follows the same FCC playbook used on foreign drones in December and consumer routers in March.

China builds roughly 85% of the world's humanoid robots, so a ban that never names China lands almost entirely on China, weeks before Xi Jinping meets Trump in September.

UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed announced an AI judicial platform on Tuesday, with the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department running the rollout. The first phase starts in September and phases in over 18 months.

The system reads case files, pulls relevant legislation and precedents, drafts legal memoranda and court documents, and generates analytical reports. Officials stress it only assists, and judges still make every final ruling.

The UAE calls this a world first, though that framing comes from the government itself. The notable part is the drafting and recommendation work, which sits much closer to judging than to filing paperwork.

A) Yes - 31%

B) No - 69% 🏆