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Chelsea Manning: Censorship still a dominant threat

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.

Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.

Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.

“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.

“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.

“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”

Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.

“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.

‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’

Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.

She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”

She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.

“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.

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Brad Gerstner on OpenAI’s dealmaking with AMD, Nvidia: ‘The best chips will win’

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Brad Gerstner on OpenAI's dealmaking with AMD, Nvidia: 'The best chips will win'

Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Founder and CEO, speaks at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York City on Sept. 28, 2023.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Investor Brad Gerstner cautioned Monday that OpenAI‘s deals with Nvidia and AMD are purely announcements, not deployments.

“Now we will see what gets delivered,” the Altimeter Capital founder told CNBC. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”

OpenAI’s megadeal with AMD and its relentless push to expand artificial intelligence capabilities underscores the intensifying competitive landscape.

Gerstner said the deals provide “more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online.”

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Experts say it’s also another validation of the AI arms race heating up, with AI a key element in the geopolitical race between the U.S. and China.

OpenAI’s Chinese rival DeepSeek sent shockwaves last year when it claimed to have a lower-cost AI model than its U.S. peer. And Deepseek has continued to innovate, delivering new open-sourced models using domestically made AI chips.

Last week, the U.S. government issued a report warning of DeepSeek’s national security concerns, Axios reported.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation said DeepSeek provides Chinese Communist Party views more frequently than U.S. models, according to Axios.

OpenAI’s partnership with AMD is raising hopes that it is taking the right steps to increase production and build more complex AI models.

“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity, because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, and not just from OpenAI, really from the whole ecosystem,” OpenAI President told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday. “And so that’s why it’s just so important for this whole industry to come together.”

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AppLovin stock tanks on report SEC is investigating company over data-collection practices

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AppLovin stock tanks on report SEC is investigating company over data-collection practices

The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.

The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.

An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.

“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”

The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.

AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.

Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.

AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.

In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.

Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from MetaSnap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.

Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.

After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO on company’s bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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Figma’s stock pops 7% after OpenAI CEO Altman touts ChatGPT integration

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Figma's stock pops 7% after OpenAI CEO Altman touts ChatGPT integration

Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.

Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.

“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”

In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.

The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.

Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.

Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.

Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.

Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.

WATCH: Figma shares slide on revenue growth rate outlook

Figma shares slide on revenue growth rate outlook

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