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Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sits in his seat inside a bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum for all U.S. senators hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 2023.

Leah Millis | Reuters

While Republican and Democratic lawmakers appear more incapable than ever of working together to pass legislation, they largely agree on one thing: Meta’s negative impact on children and teens.

A bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general filed a joint federal lawsuit on Tuesday, accusing Faceboook‘s parent of knowingly implementing addictive features across its family of apps that have detrimental effects on children’s mental health and contribute to problems like teenage eating disorders.

Another nine attorneys general are also filing lawsuits in their respective states.

“Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health and social media companies like Meta are to blame,” Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti noted that polarization in politics is unlike anything this country has seen “since the Civil War.” Yet Skrmetti is firmly in James’s camp when it comes to Meta.

“For all of the attorneys general from both parties, people who frequently disagree very vocally and very publicly, to all come together and to move in the same direction, I think that says something,” Skrmetti said at a press conference after the lawsuit was filed.

The political dysfunction is most acute right now in the House of Representatives, which has been without a Speaker for three weeks after a small band of eight hardline conservative Republicans joined all Democrats to approve a “motion to vacate” introduced by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

California’s Kevin McCarthy, who was booted as speaker, angered some members of his party by working with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown, even though he bowed down to many of those same lawmakers in September in instructing Republican-led committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sits with fellow lawmakers as the House of Representatives votes for the third time on whether to elevate Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to Speaker of the House in the U.S. Capitol on October 20, 2023 in Washington, DC. 

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

When it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, legislators seem to find common ground. In 2020, for instance, a group of attorneys general from 48 states and territories filed two separate antitrust-related lawsuits against the company.

Despite their general disapproval of Facebook, Instagram and company leadership, party leaders don’t necessarily have the same specific criticisms of Meta.

Democrats like to focus on the company’s history of data privacy scandals. In July, for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other Democratic lawmakers called on the Biden administration to follow up on their probe showing how tax-preparation companies share sensitive taxpayer data with tech giants like Meta and Google.

“The sharing of taxpayer data with Meta has put taxpayer privacy at risk and appears to represent a violation of taxpayer privacy laws,” the Warren-led group wrote in a report titled “Attacks on Tax Privacy.”

Leading Republicans have focused more on Meta’s content moderation policies, which they say unfairly censor conservative views. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has accused Zuckerberg and Meta of working with the White House to censor voices and posts that expressed disagreement with the Biden Administration.  

Jordan’s committee was even considering holding Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress until Meta provided the lawmakers with documents they were seeking as part of their censorship investigation. Democrats were notably silent over the Republicans’ censorship claims.

Where the parties converge is in seeing the harmful effects on kids.

Dave Yost, Ohio’s Republican attorney general, said in a statement that the bipartisan lawsuit is needed to “compel the company to change its ways” because parents are letting kids use Meta’s apps.

“Given that children, when they’re on these platforms, become vulnerable to cyberbullying and online predators, Meta has added insult to injury, further injuring our children,” Yost said.

On the other side of the aisle, Pennsylvania’s Democratic AG Michelle Henry said, “The time has come for social media giants to stop trading in our children’s mental health for big profits.”

In citing the lawsuit, Henry said in a press release that “Meta not only targets young minds with addictive, harmful, trap-door content – it also lies to the public and parents about how their platforms are safe.”

Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement that the company has introduced more than 30 tools “to support teens and their families.”

“We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” he said.

Additional reporting by Lauren Feiner

WATCH: Dozens of bipartisan state attorneys general sue Meta for addictive features targeting kids

Meta sued by 33 state AGs for addictive features targeting kids

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Companies are blaming AI for job cuts. Critics say it’s a ‘good excuse’

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Companies are blaming AI for job cuts. Critics say it’s a 'good excuse'

More companies are announcing AI-driven layoffs from Salesforce to Accenture.

Twenty20

From tech to airlines, large global companies have been slashing staff as the real-world impact of artificial intelligence plays out, spooking employees. But critics say AI has become an easy excuse for firms looking to downsize.

Last month, tech consultancy firm Accenture announced a restructuring plan that includes quick exits for workers that aren’t first able to reskill on AI. Days later, Lufthansa said it was going to eliminate 4,000 jobs by 2030 as it leans on AI to increase efficiency.

Salesforce also laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, saying that AI can do 50% of the work at the company. Meanwhile, fintech firm Klarna has reduced staff by 40% as it aggressively adopts AI tools.

Language-learning platform Duolingo has stated that it will gradually stop relying on contractors and use AI to fill the gaps.

The headlines are grim, but Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, said there might be more to job cuts than meets the eye.

Previously there may have been some stigma attached to using AI, but now companies are “scapegoating” the technology to take the fall for challenging business moves such as layoffs.

“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s rather really a projection into AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,'” Stephany said in an interview with CNBC.

Companies can essentially position themselves at the frontier of AI technology to appear innovative and competitive, and simultaneously conceal the real reasons for layoffs, according to Stephany.

“There might be various other reasons why companies are having to get rid of part of their workforce … Duolingo or Klarna are really prime candidates for this because there has been overhiring during Corona [Covid-19 pandemic] as well,” the professor said.

Some companies that flourished during the pandemic “significantly overhired” and the recent layoffs might just be a “market clearance.”

“It’s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long term perspective and instead of saying “we miscalculated this two, three years ago, they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying ‘it’s because of AI though,'” he added.

This pattern has sparked conversation online. One founder, Jean-Christophe Bouglé even said in a popular LinkedIn post that AI adoption is at a “much slower pace” than is being claimed and in large corporations “there’s not much happening” with AI projects even being rolled back due to cost or security concerns.

“At the same time there are announcements of big layoff plans ‘because of AI.’ It looks like a big excuse, in a context where the economy in many countries is slowing down, despite what the incredible performance of stock exchanges suggest,” said Bouglé, who co-founded Authentic.ly.

Feeding the fear of AI

Jasmine Escalera, a careers expert, said this concealment is “feeding the fear of AI” with employees globally concerned about their jobs being replaced as a result of AI.

“So we already know that employees are scared because companies are not being honest, open and communicative about how they’re implementing AI,” Escalera told CNBC Make It. “Now companies are openly stating ‘We’re doing this [layoffs] because of AI’ so it’s feeding the frenzy.”

Escalera said big companies need to be more responsible as they set the tone for what’s the norm in business decision making and avoid greenlighting “bad behavior.”

A Salesforce spokesperson clarified to CNBC that the company deployed its own AI agent, Agentforce, which reduced the number of customer support cases and eliminated the need to “backfill support engineer roles,” they said.

View taken inside a Lufthansa Airbus A350 airplane on March 19, 2025.

Lufthansa to cut 4,000 jobs as airline turns to AI to boost efficiency

“We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success,” the Salesforce spokesperson added.

Klarna directed CNBC to its co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s comments on X where he explained that the company shrank its workforce from 5,500 to 3,000 people in two years but “AI is only part of that story.”

Siemiatkowski linked the workforce reduction to slimming down its analytics team to one “success team,” with many then leaving by natural attrition as well as the reduction of the company’s customer success team.

Lufthansa and Accenture declined to comment on the matter and did not share any further details on their AI restructuring strategy. Duolingo did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Mass AI layoffs are not here

The Budget Lab, a non-partisan policy research center at Yale University, released a report on Wednesday which showed that U.S. labor has actually been little disrupted by AI automation since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

The lab examined U.S. labor market data from November 2022 to July 2025 using a “dissimilarity index” which measured how much the occupational mix—the share of workers in different jobs—has shifted since AI’s debut and compared it to other technological shifts such as the introduction of computers and the internet. It found that AI hasn’t yet caused widespread job losses.

Additionally, New York Fed economists released research in early September which showed that AI use amongst firms “do not point to significant reductions in employment” across the services and manufacturing industry in the New York–Northern New Jersey region.

It found that 40% of service firms said they were using AI this year, up from 25% last year, while manufacturing firms saw a similar jump from 16% last year to 26% this year, but very few were using AI to layoff workers.

Only 1% of the services firm reported AI as the reason for laying off workers in the past six months, down from 10% that had laid off workers using AI in 2024. Meanwhile, 12% of services firms said AI made them hire less workers in 2025.

By contrast, 35% of services firms have used AI to retrain employees and 11% have hired more as a result.

Stephany said there isn’t much evidence from his research that shows large levels of technological unemployment due to AI.

“Economists call this structural unemployment, so the pie of work is not big enough for everybody anymore and so people will lose jobs definitely because of of AI, I don’t think that this is happening on a mass scale,” he said.

He added that concerns about technology putting an end to human work can be seen throughout history.

“It reoccurred this century alone a dozen times, you can go back to ancient times where Roman emperors put hold to certain machines because they were worried about this and always the contrary happened. The machine made companies, industries more productive.

“It allowed for the emergence of entirely new jobs. If you think about the internet 20 years ago, nobody would have known what a social media influencer is, what an app developer is because it didn’t exist.”

Read more about companies conducting AI layoffs below:

A logo sits illuminated at the Accenture booth in Mobile World Congress 2025 on March 03, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.

Accenture plans on ‘exiting’ staff who can’t be reskilled on AI amid restructuring strategy

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Close to half of Kalshi user base experienced glitches, delays during Saturday college football games

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Close to half of Kalshi user base experienced glitches, delays during Saturday college football games

The Kalshi logo arranged on a laptop in New York, US, on Monday, Feb. 10, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Close to half of Kalshi’s user base experienced glitches and delays on Saturday during college football games, a major source of trades, as some said they were temporarily unable to process orders.

In a message sent to a user obtained by CNBC, the predictions market service’s website apologized for any inconvenience and said it was “looking into” the issues traders were experiencing. 

“The Exchange is experiencing temporary delays,” the message read. “Balances and positions may not be accurately reflected at this time.” 

One user shared a screen recording and screenshots with CNBC that showed they were unable to see their balance or bets while the issues persisted.

A number of users on X reported the website was down when they were trying to place bets on college football games, with some saying they had open orders that wouldn’t process. When CNBC visited the website, it wouldn’t load, showing only a green K with a spinning circle around it for more than 20 minutes. The platform later loaded.

“Earlier today, Kalshi experienced minor glitches that temporarily affected some user experiences. No exchange outage occurred, no funds were affected, and the issues are now resolved,” the company said in a statement.

Earlier, a spokesperson denied there was an outage and said the exchange “never stopped functioning properly.” He added that there has been no impact on clearing, advanced trading, or institutional trading.

“There were some glitches and delays on our web and app product, which affected less than half of our user base,” the spokesperson said. 

A little over a week ago, Kalshi announced a $300 million Series D funding round that valued the company at $5 billion, more than double its $2 billion valuation in June after its Series C round. 

The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Paradigm. Additional backers included Coinbase Ventures, General Catalyst, Spark Capital and CapitalG. 

The company, founded in 2018, rose to prominence by offering bettors the ability to trade on a wide range of real-world events, from football games to who President Donald Trump could pardon this year.

WATCH: Kalshi CEO on $2B valuation: We’re one of the fastest growing companies in America

Kalshi CEO on hitting $2B valuation: We're one of the fastest growing companies in America

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AI headshots are changing the way job seekers are seen and get hired in tough labor market

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AI headshots are changing the way job seekers are seen and get hired in tough labor market

AI headshots are becoming popular on LinkedIn and in professional portfolios as job seekers look for affordable profile pictures to give them an edge.

Since first impressions happen almost entirely through a screen, a clean, appealing photo is as important as a strong resume. And in a competitive job market, a good headshot can make a big difference. But professional photography has long been a financial barrier for many job applicants with an average starting cost for a professional headshot in the U.S. that can easily run up to hundreds of dollars.

Now job seekers are using fast and inexpensive AI tools to replace costly studio sessions.

“When I was at Yale, it was $200 for a 15-minute session for students,” said Melanie Fan, head of growth at Plush, an AI-powered online search platform for personalized shopping. “It was really expensive. The process of getting the pictures back, rendering them, looking at which ones I looked the best in, and then sending it back to the photographer for edit.”

This frustration has fueled the explosion of AI headshot tools like InstaHeadshots, PhotoPacksAI, HeadshotPro and Aragon AI, services that promise a professional image in minutes starting at under $50. Users simply upload selfies, pick a background, and receive dozens and no photographer is needed.

“After I changed my LinkedIn photo, the amount of inbound I’ve been getting from companies has skyrocketed,” Fan said. “Three to four times more messages from companies.”

Design company Canva recently launched its own AI headshot feature, with the goal of offering users a quick way to create realistic headshots and still be able to retouch or restyle them.

According to a recent Canva job market research report, 88% of job seekers believe a polished digital presence influences hiring decisions, which is up 45% from the year before. This is in line with the general uptick in use of AI as part of the application and hiring process, with 90% of hiring managers saying they have used AI to help with the hiring process, and 96% of job seekers who used AI in the application process saying they received callbacks.

Danny Wu, Canva’s head of AI products, said the goal wasn’t to replace real photography, but to make high quality imagery attainable to everyone no matter the budget or location. Once a user uploads an image, Canva can use AI for adjusting or changing the background, placing something in a different place, and for styling. “This is just a more accessible way to get professional and unique headshots,” Wu said.

Risks and questions about authenticity among HR recruiters

Anyone with a phone can get a LinkedIn-ready headshot, but the technology’s rapid adoption has created new questions about ethics and trust. Many candidates fear looking fake or deceptive and recruiters are on the lookout for AI-generated portraits that look overly smooth or stylized, saying authenticity matters the most.

“It is perceived as risky to use an AI headshot,” said Sam DeMase, ZipRecruiter career expert. “While recruiters accept them, a bad AI-generated headshot will put off most recruiters,” DeMase said. “A poorly done AI-generated headshot is easily recognized, reads as inauthentic, and can hurt the candidate’s chances of being selected.”

However, recruiters are struggling to tell if a headshot is AI produced, and the technology will only get better. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to tell whether a headshot has been enhanced or generated by AI,” DeMase added.

Chris Bora, founder and principal AI architect of Bora Labs and a former Meta engineer, said he built his own headshot generator, Nova Headshot, after being disappointed by existing options. “Some made me look taller and skinnier,” Bora said. “The other ones, they made me look lighter, so it wasn’t really me,” he said. “You don’t need to spend thousands to look professional anymore. You just need a tool that makes you look like yourself on your best day. With Nova, it takes less than ten minutes,” Bora said.

Amber Collins, an AI headshot user, said she still feels uneasy about it, especially since not every app gets it right. “There are a lot of bad apps out there,” Collins said. “Seven fingers, half a necklace, and the rest of it is gone from your neck. I feel guilty using AI. There’s a stigma. I’d 100% prefer to get actual get headshots done,” Collins said.

But ultimately, she says, the benefits outweighed the risks. “In this economy, you have to be mindful of where you’re going to put your money. I don’t need to have my face out there excessively, but having a couple of really good, solid, professional looking headshots is worth it to me,” Collins said.

Wu said the goal for job applicants seeking a headshot should be to use Canva’s tool to balance realism and creativity without losing their identity.

The tension between tech innovation and accessibility on the one hand, and authenticity on the other, will remain.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told CNBC what while the platform does allow the use of tools, including AI, to enhance or create profile photos, “the photo must reflect your likeness.”

“Profile photos that don’t comply with our user agreement or professional community policies may be removed,” the LinkedIn spokesperson said.

DeMase noted that many job candidates remain hesitant to use an AI headshot. “A headshot is one of the few places you can inject humanity into the job search,” he said.

But with job seekers now able to provide the appearance they had access to the same studio lighting, camera, and editing team as the pros, the trend is unlikely to stop.

A recent survey found that headshot use among job seekers is the highest within the Gen Z and millennial generations. And while recruiters may say they still prefer real photos, AI headshots are becoming harder to spot, and less likely to even be reviewed by humans in the first stages of the application process. A recent study from the HR trade group SHRM found that 66% of human resource professionals are using AI to generate their job descriptions, and 44% are using the technology to review or screen applicant resumes.

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