Tesla Supercharger stations are seen in a parking lot in Austin, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Tesla is being sued by the family of a driver who died in a 2023 collision, claiming that the company’s “fraudulent misrepresentation” of its Autopilot technology was to blame.
The Tesla driver, Genesis Giovanni Mendoza-Martinez, died in the crash involving a Model S sedan in Walnut Creek, California. His brother, Caleb, who had been a passenger at the time, was seriously injured.
The Mendoza family sued Tesla in October in Contra Costa County, but in recent days Tesla had the case moved from state court to federal court in California’s Northern District. The Independent first reported on the venue change. Plaintiffs generally face a higher burden of proof in federal court for fraud claims.
The incident involved a 2021 Model S, which smashed into a parked fire truck while the driver was using Tesla’s Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
Mendoza’s attorneys alleged that Tesla and Musk have exaggerated or made false claims about the Autopilot system for years in order to, “generate excitement about the company’s vehicles and thereby improve its financial condition.” They pointed to tweets, company blog posts, and remarks on earnings calls and in press interviews.
In their response, Tesla attorneys said the driver’s “own negligent acts and/or omissions” were to blame for the collision, and that “reliance on any representation made by Tesla, if any, was not a substantial factor” in causing harm to the driver or passenger. They claim Tesla’s cars and systems have a “reasonably safe design,” in compliance with state and federal laws.
Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment about the case. Brett Schreiber, an attorney representing the Mendoza family, declined to make his clients available for an interview.
There are at least 15 other active cases focused on similar claims involving Tesla incidents where Autopilot or its FSD — Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash. Three of those have been moved to federal courts. FSD is the premium version of Tesla’s partially automated driving system. While Autopilot comes as a standard option in all new Tesla vehicles, owners pay an up-front premium, or subscribe monthly to use FSD.
The crash at the center of the Mendoza-Martinez lawsuit has also been part of a broader Tesla Autopilot investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, initiated in August 2021. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes to its systems, including with a myriad of over-the-air software updates.
The agency has opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of Autopilot around stationary first responder vehicles had been effective.
Tesla is currently rolling out a new version of FSD to customers. Over the weekend, Musk instructed his 206.5 million-plus followers on X to “Demonstrate Tesla self-driving to a friend tomorrow,” adding that, “It feels like magic.”
Musk has been promising investors that Tesla’s cars would soon be able to drive autonomously, without a human at the wheel, since about 2014. While the company has shown off a design concept for an autonomous two-seater called the CyberCab, Tesla has yet to produce a robotaxi.
Meanwhile, competitors including WeRide and Pony.ai in China, and Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. are already operating commercial robotaxi fleets and services.
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”