Bipartisan bill would require parental consent for minors to use social media
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A new bipartisan bill unveiled Wednesday would require parental consent for anyone under 18 to use social media.
The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would also bar platforms from using algorithms to feed content to minors and would set the minimum age to use the platforms to 13. It also would create a pilot program for a new, age-verification credential that could be used to enroll on social media platforms.
This latest push from legislators to build new guardrails for kids’ online safety is occurring as similar actions are being taken at the state level. Some state laws — like one in Utah that would give parents access to kids’ private messages — have raised concern among some civil society groups for potentially putting kids further in harm’s way depending on their family situations.
The new proposal, backed by Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., would give parents across the country profound new control over their kids’ access to social networking services like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Snap’s Snapchat and TikTok.
Still, while many parents have pleaded for lawmakers to give them more tools to protect their kids online, many also feel that monitoring their children’s online behavior has become overly burdensome for them.
In addition to parental consent to use social media, the bill requires such companies to “take reasonable steps beyond merely requiring attestation” to verify users’ ages. That is likely to raise privacy concerns given that it can be difficult to narrow a user’s age without some sort of government ID or facial scan.
The bill says that “existing age verification technologies” should be taken into account and that information collected for age-verification purposes shouldn’t be used for anything else.
While age-verification tools are still somewhat limited, the bill also aims to expand them through a pilot program to explore free “secure digital identification” credentials for U.S. citizens.
The program would be run by the Commerce Department and would seek to create a new, highly secure credential tool based on government-issued documents that once issued could be used to verify users’ ages for enrolled social media platforms, or their parent/guardian relationship to a minor user.
Soon after the bill was announced, tech-backed industry group NetChoice, which has sued California over its Age-Appropriate Design Code, slammed the legislation in a statement, saying it “would require massive, widespread data collection and retention, undermining Americans’ privacy and security. It would also deprive parents of their constitutional right to make decisions about what’s best for their kids online.”
UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (R) welcomes his US counterpart Donald Trump upon arrival at the presidential terminal in Abu Dhabi on May 15, 2025.
Giuseppe Cacace | Afp | Getty Images
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Deep in the oil-rich deserts of the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates is on a mission to establish supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence.
Seven thousand miles across the planet, the United States, led by President Donald Trump, wants American firms to dominate the global AI race.
While their goals may be separated by continents, their ambitions are strikingly aligned.
The U.S. currently makes the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, while the UAE and neighboring Gulf countries have the abundant, cheap energy needed to power enormous AI data centers. The two countries have been allies for half a century, and Abu Dhabi embraced Trump during the U.S. president’s visit this month with unprecedented fanfare and investment pledges, many of which focused on tech and AI.
In the eyes of many investors, financial leaders, and political powers players from Silicon Valley and Washington to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two countries’ ever-strengthening AI alliance — to which hundreds of billions of dollars have already been committed — is a match made in heaven.
“Energy‑rich Gulf nations join the roster of trusted partners just as U.S. data‑center grids hit their physical limits,” Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, told CNBC.
At the same time, “the UAE gains access to advanced compute and talent, helping it pursue its own sovereign AI goals,” Xie said. “The Middle East, flush with cheap energy and capital, is poised to become the next regional AI hub.”
In the UAE, the developments are part of a long-term strategy by the Gulf sheikhdom to position itself as a global leader in AI. This, the country’s leadership holds, will enhance its geopolitical influence, diversify its economy beyond crude oil dependency, and assert itself as a technological powerhouse.
The goal for Washington is clear: to ensure American companies lead the global AI race with China and spread American tech around the world.
Trump’s Middle East visit in mid-May — which featured stops in Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi — saw the announcement of over $200 billion in commercial deals between the U.S. and the UAE. This brought the total of investment agreements in the Gulf region, including those from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to over $2 trillion.
As part of the Abu Dhabi deals, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco Systems announced that they will help build Stargate UAE AI campus launching in 2026. The Stargate Project is a $500 billion private sector AI-focused investment vehicle, announced by OpenAI in January in partnership with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX and Japan’s SoftBank.
The companies said an initial 200-megawatt AI cluster should launch in Abu Dhabi next year. And the AI campus deal means the UAE gets access to many of Nvidia’s latest chips, American technology and software.
It’s the kind of agreement that would have faced restrictions under the previous U.S. administration, but Trump has looked to change the way is approaching tech export restrictions.
His administration plans to rescind a Biden era “AI diffusion rule,” which imposed strict export controls on advanced AI chips even to U.S.-friendly nations. that doing away with these limits could open the door for the sensitive American technology to end up in the hands of rivals like China — a topic of ongoing debate among U.S. lawmakers and security professionals.
‘Compute, not crude’
Once known primarily as a partnership centered around oil exports and weapons purchases, the pillars of the U.S.-Gulf relationship are changing, says Mohammed Soliman, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.
“Compute, not crude, is going to be the central pillar of the U.S.-Gulf relationship,” Soliman said. “Moving forward, it’s no longer going to be only about energy policy; it is going to be about compute and how we and the Gulf are building an AI ecosystem that’s able to service third markets, emerging markets.”
Compute, in the context of AI, refers to the computational resources, like hardware and processing power, needed to train and run AI models.
“And this is a huge inflection point for the relationship [compared to] where we were a few years ago,” Soliman said, speaking on a Middle East Institute podcast recorded on May 19. “Moving forward, the relationship is going to be much more impactful on technical questions around AI, data centers, and chips than ever before.”
Notably, the UAE has bet fully on a U.S.-led AI future — a particularly salient point within the context of U.S.-China competition.
Emirati AI company G42, which has major partnerships with OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft, to name a few, has fully divested from Chinese companies — including an estimated $100 million stake in TikTok owner ByteDance — to avert U.S. Commerce Department sanctions and retain access to Nvidia chips and other U.S. technology that powers AI applications.
“So far right now, we are racing to have the best large language model and ultimately to have AGI (artificial general intelligence),” said Baghdad Gherras, a UAE-based venture partner at Antler, which invests in early-stage AI ventures.
AGI generally refers to artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans, though definitions vary.
“For the UAE, if they want to be a leader in the AI race, the first thing that they have to secure is compute. If you don’t have compute, you won’t have a seat in terms of AI leadership,” Gherras told CNBC.
He added that the UAE “decided to re-shift the geo-economic focus from China to the U.S., because they understood that Nvidia makes by far the best chips for AI, but also the entire semiconductor supply chain is mostly in Taiwan.”
Still, Gherras noted, China “is catching up really fast, crazy fast.”
‘Tremendous level of influence’
The UAE’s development of its own large language model (LLM), Falcon AI, represents a major step for the region in AI development — but it also provides the foundation for the country’s geopolitical and economic ambitions to dominate the AI market within the next decade.
Such a position would also enhance the Emirates’ diplomatic leverage, allowing it to play a more influential role in global tech governance and policy discussions.
“If those ambitions become reality, you might see the Gulf acting as a region that offers compute as a service for the rest of emerging markets,” the Middle East Institute’s Soliman said.
“Think about the Gulf as a place that houses large language models in Swahili, in Hindi, in these languages, and they are able to offer housing data, training data, inference for all these economies, because they have the infrastructure,” he added. “So they become their AI leader for the emerging markets.”
“And this is a tremendous, tremendous level of influence, tremendous level of development,” Soliman emphasized. “Where they used to serve as energy producers, to become a back-end for AI applications — this is really, really massive.”
U.S. pushes American AI
Part of the U.S.’s push in the UAE and the broader region comes down to a desire for American technology to establish supremacy globally and push back the advances of China.
On the one hand, U.S. export curbs have restricted access for companies like Nvidia to sell advanced technology to China. It has also stopped China access some technology to advance its own development in areas like semiconductors and AI.
At the same time, Washington is opening up new markets, like the Middle East, to its biggest tech companies.
“The move has a political angle, as it bolsters the U.S. compute supply chains while constraining China. It grants the U.S. an edge in the AI arms race, positioning the country for continued leadership,” David Meier, economist at Julius Baer, said in note earlier this month.
Beijing and Chinese companies have been trying to access new markets to push their technology across the globe, especially in areas like AI. But the U.S. has been working to entrench itself first and strike partnerships with governments to do so.
“The race is on to diffuse U.S.-based AI into every part of the world,” Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, told CNBC on Tuesday.
American companies have taken up the call. OpenAI, which struck a deal with the UAE last week to build AI infrastructure and roll out ChatGPT nationwide, has positioned itself as a countermeasure to China and as the business able to deliver U.S. artificial intelligence to countries around the world.
In February, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told CNBC that the company sees a world in which there are two major AI models — one led by China’s Communist Party and a U.S.-led “small ‘d’ democratic” AI.
“If you’re a country and you’re looking to build your own AI ecosystem, your own AI hub, you’re building developers in your country which are going to be some version of the companies of the future, I think you would prefer to be seeing that built on a democratic AI system because it is going to facilitate your country being able to use this technology for your own nation building purposes,” Lehane said.
— CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this report.
Getty Images’ logo seen displayed on a smartphone with an AI chip and symbol in the background.
Budrul Chukrut | Sopa Images | Lightrocket via Getty Images
LONDON — Getty Images is spending millions of dollars to take on a “world of rhetoric” through its Stability AI suit, the photo licensing company’s boss Craig Peters says.
Peters told CNBC in an interview that both Stability AI — the U.K.-based startup best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion — and other AI labs are stealing copyright-protected material to train their AI models for commercial gain.
These firms, he said, are taking copyrighted material to develop their powerful AI models under the guise of innovation and then “just turning those services right back on existing commercial markets.”
“That’s disruption under the notion of ‘move fast and break things,’ and we believe that’s unfair competition,” Peters added. “We’re not against competition. There’s constant new competition coming in all the time from new technologies or just new companies. But that’s just unfair competition, that’s theft.”
Peters said the AI industry is making the argument that if developers are forced to pay for access to creative works, this will “kill innovation.”
“We’re battling a world of rhetoric,” the CEO told CNBC.
Getty is suing Stability AI in both the U.K. and U.S. over allegations that the company copied 12 million images without permission or compensation “to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.”
Stability AI has contested the legal action, saying it doesn’t consider Getty’s claims to have merit. The company acknowledges some images from Getty Images websites were used to train its Stable Diffusion model. However, the firm denies it’s liable in respect to any of the claims Getty has made.
Stability AI declined to comment on this story when contacted by CNBC.
The firm has previously argued its use of copyright-protected material online is sound under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances — such as “transformative” uses that add new expression or meaning to original works.
‘Our case is very strong’
Technology startups like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral have flourished by taking vast amounts of data from the open web and using it to train their foundational AI models, which can produce lifelike texts, images and videos.
However, the strategies of these firms have raised concerns over their use of copyrighted material. Several lawsuits have targeted AI firms over alleged copyright infringements from The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI to several U.S. record labels’ claims against AI music generation services Suno and Udio.
Part of the reason Getty Images is pursuing legal action specifically against Stability AI and not other firms is because such legal pursuits are “extraordinarily expensive,” Peters added. “Even for a company like Getty Images, we can’t pursue all the infringements that happen in one week.”
“We can’t pursue it because the courts are just prohibitively expensive,” he said. “We are spending millions and millions of dollars in one court case.”
AI startups are being funded to the tune of several billions of dollars to develop their foundational models, with tech heavyweights like Microsoft, Google and Amazon ploughing cash into the field.
Nevertheless, Peters acknowledges that it’s not been an easy fight. “I think our case is very strong. But I’m going to caveat that: we had to file in the U.S. and the U.K., and to be candid, we didn’t know where this training took place,” he said.
“There are elements where we have to go through and then we’ve got to spend money for due diligence, and they resist and we’ve got to fight, and we go back and forth,” Peters added.
“The facts in aggregate at a global scale I think are absolutely in our favor. How they manifest themselves around the geographic and legal constructs that are there I think is still stuff that we’re going to have to continue to play out.”
The case is set for an initial trial to determine liability from June 9.
Matt Farrah of Newcastle, Australia views SpaceX’s next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its Super Heavy booster is prepared for launch on its ninth test at the company’s launch pad in Starbase, Texas, U.S., May 27, 2025.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket exploded during a test flight on Tuesday, the third consecutive setback for Elon Musk’s company.
Tuesday’s un-crewed mission was the ninth test flight. The system suffered prior explosions in January and March. Together, the Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster are around 400 feet tall when stacked for a launch.
SpaceX has been developing the Starship system to transport people and equipment around Earth, and to the Moon. Musk also wants SpaceX to use Starship to colonize Mars.
A livestream of Tuesday’s test flight, which ran on the SpaceX website and on social media, showed the first-stage booster exploding and the second-stage Starship spacecraft undergoing a major fuel leak, then spinning out of control and blowing up during reentry.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in an emailed statement on Tuesday that the agency, “is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starship Flight 9 mission that launched on Tuesday, May 27, from Starbase, Texas, and is actively working with SpaceX on the event. The agency said there were “no reports of public injury or damage to public property at this time.”
Musk, who is CEO of SpaceX and the world’s wealthiest person, wrote on X that, “Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent.”
He added that “leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase” of the rocket. Musk vowed that SpaceX would increase its Starship launch cadence with upcoming flights at a rate of about one very three to four weeks.
SpaceX was previously restricted to five Starship launches per year from its spaceport in Texas but gained a key approval from the FAA to increase its launch cadence earlier this month.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” the company wrote in a post on X.
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for additional information on Tuesday following what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
In addition to running SpaceX, Tesla and artificial intelligence startup xAI, Musk leads the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk and DOGE have implemented sweeping reductions to the federal workforce, and slashed financial and other resources of federal agencies, including the FAA, Environmental Protection Agency and others responsible for oversight of the billionaire’s companies.
SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from the federal government since 2008 and is poised to take in several billion dollars annually for years to come, according to research by FedScout.
SpaceX and two of its partners are frontrunners to win a big chunk of President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, Reuters previously reported.
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