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Vinod Khosla and Jacob Helberg.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Investor Vinod Khosla and Palantir advisor Jacob Helberg penned an open letter Thursday calling on senators to pass a bill that would force the divestiture of Bytedance-owned TikTok in the U.S.

Describing the social media platform as “a weapon of war,” Helberg and Khosla compared the bill with decades-old restrictions on foreign ownership of U.S. media outlets.

“Would you let North Korea or Iran own a broadcast channel that 67% of teens spend almost two hours a day on?” the two wrote.

Some critics have compared the ban to a bill of attainder, given it singles out one company. In an interview with CNBC, Helberg said the comparison did not apply.

“We have a long tradition in American policymaking — sometimes we do target individual companies, when national security is at stake,” Helberg said. The bill, which was overwhelmingly passed by the House in March, would demand that Bytedance either find a buyer for TikTok or else face a ban in the U.S.

Bytedance is not sitting on the sidelines, however. The company mobilized its user base to oppose the House bill, urging its millions of users to call their congressional representatives and voice their opposition. The in-app notifications prompted a flood of phone calls that overwhelmed some congressional offices.

Helberg said the effort was a prime example of the risk TikTok posed. “It was a live demo of precisely the kinds of concerns that we have been trying to highlight to elected officials,” he told CNBC. “All of these concerns that before were theoretical were highlighted in full Technicolor for everyone to see.”

Khosla is founder of Khosla Ventures and was co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Helberg is a senior advisor at Palantir, an artificial intelligence firm that does extensive government contracting work, including with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Both are also deeply involved with the Hill and Valley Forum, a working group first convened in 2023 to combat the influence of the Chinese government and TikTok in the U.S. Hill and Valley is slated to reconvene in May.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has also been lobbying D.C. lawmakers against a ban, meeting with Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in March.

Battle lines drawn

Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, speaks to reporters outside the office of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) at the Russell Senate Office Building on March 14, 2024 in Washington, DC. The House of Representatives voted to ban TikTok in the United States unless the Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance sells the popular video app within the next six months.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

While the letter was addressed to all senators, Helberg said that he hoped in particular that Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would take notice. Schumer is Senate majority leader and Cantwell is the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee.

But TikTok has seemingly received apparent support from an unexpected source: former President Donald Trump. One week after Trump met with top Republican donor and Bytedance investor Jeff Yass, the former president indicated he was opposed to a TikTok ban, saying it would give too much advantage to Meta, which owns Instagram.

Helberg said that he didn’t think Trump was fully opposed to Khosla and his efforts. “If you look at his statements, he has expressed very strong concerns about bias and censorship against conservative voices online,” Helberg told CNBC. Trump is the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee for president.

Nonetheless, Trump’s commentary, paired with opposition from China’s Foreign Ministry, has raised questions about whether a divestiture is even feasible. China has said that it is completely opposed to the sale of TikTok, which would require an export license from the government. That opposition, Khosla and Helberg wrote, “tells you what you need to know: TikTok is a ‘key political asset,’ not a commercial enterprise.”

Top investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, are among those circling the app, which would likely carry a price in the tens of billions of dollars.

When asked what the odds between a divestiture and a ban would be, Helberg demurred.

“If the Chinese Communist Party operates in good faith and lives up to its claims, a divestiture will happen in an orderly manner,” he said. “There are lots of willing buyers in the United States.”

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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