President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs.
Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht’s mother and the Libertarian movement.
In 2015, a federal judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison for operating Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” But last May, while on the 2024 campaign trail, Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s life sentence while speaking to the Libertarian National Convention.
Ulbricht started Silk Road as a Libertarian experiment, and the party has been lobbying to exonerate Ulbricht of his crimes for years now. Within the Libertarian Party, many viewed Ulbricht’s life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
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One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was an executive order that could kill the nascent offshore wind industry in the United States.
Trump’s order, signed Monday, halted federal leases for offshore wind development on the outer continental shelf — a location far enough from shore that wind speeds are consistently higher, but near enough that it’s readily accessible.
“This withdrawal does not apply to leasing related to any other purposes such as, but not limited to, oil, gas, minerals, and environmental conservation,” the order states.
The order does not halt work on projects that have signed leases, though it does direct the Secretary of the Interior to review existing contracts for ways to terminate or amend them.
Offshore wind has had a rough go of it in the United States. There are just a handful of operating offshore wind farms in American waters, amounting to just 174 megawatts of capacity at the end of May, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s a fraction of a percent of the worldwide total of 68 gigawatts, most of which are in Europe and China.
The sector’s prospects were starting to improve, though, with 4.1 gigawatts under construction, another 3.4 gigawatts approved, and another 19.8 gigawatts moving through the permitting process. Altogether, that would have helped reach the Biden Administration’s goal of boosting offshore wind capacity to 30 gigawatts by the end of the decade.
While offshore wind is still expensive compared with other sources of power, its relative consistency and proximity to major population centers — and data centers — has made it attractive. In Europe, data centers operators have been keen to sign deals. Last year, Google agreed to buy 478 megawatts of offshore wind power to supply two data centers in the Netherlands.
In the U.S., offshore wind has been hampered by public resistance, a lack of infrastructure required to build and install the turbines. The availability of cheap, windy land in the interior of the country has also tilted the scales in favor of onshore turbines.
Since the majority of offshore wind development occurs in other countries, Trump’s executive order won’t kill offshore wind entirely. Instead, the sector is likely to mature in other countries, where companies can gain expertise, waiting for the U.S. market to reopen.
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Alongside its big public push for AI investments, the U.K. government is also playing a virtual card to catapult itself into the 21st century. Today it announced plans to launch a secure digital wallet to manage government-issued credentials, alongside a chatbot — built in collaboration with OpenAI — to interact with the main GOV.UK portal. Today, it dubbed the chatbot ‘chat-uk’ and said it will be a part of a wider portal and app.
The first two cards it plans to add to its wallet will be a virtual driver’s license, and a virtual veteran card for people who have served in the military. It plans to launch the service later this year, it said in a press conference today. The GOV.UK portal will be online in 2025, but it has already started testing the chat service, and it’s also already opening up for ordinary users to test it, said Peter Kyle, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for technology — even if some of the responses a little odd.
“It is really important the public start to understand that increasingly, in an online world, and government is moving to an online world, that we will interact at an earlier stage so that we can use the power, the insight, and the volume of interactions that the public can provide in testing,” Kyle said in a press conference today in London. “So yes, the chat system did start talking French midway through a testing series, but it was a mistake we learned from.”
The developments come at a crossroads for AI advances.
On one hand, the Labour government has doubled down on the idea of building out an AI economy in the country. Partnerships with private AI companies to invest more in their operations here, more infrastructure such as data centres and a supercomputer to support AI services, and a big commitment from the government to invest in AI services itself. First up, today it unveiled a raft of new AI tools, all still in development: a multi-functional AI assistant for government employees called “Humphrey”; a push to build more consumer-facing AI tools; and more data sharing between government departments to help them build and run AI services.
On the other hand, there remain many questions about how AI services will work in the years ahead. It was only a year ago that the U.K. took a leading role only a year ago in a wider global conversation about AI safety: how the new wave of services being built by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and many others will impact jobs, user privacy and data protection, copyright, and how AI might get misused for nefarious purposes such as to create misinformation, in aid of malicious hacking, and more.
Today, Kyle claimed that in its testing of its new chatbot, there “hasn’t been a single instance” of the chatbot yet being “jailbroken” or returning false information in its “heavy” testing so far.
A push for more digital services in the U.K. comes at the same time as the U.S. is also doubling down on the role tech will be playing in that country. Yesterday, President Trump, on his first day in office, made official his new government “efficiency” effort, dubbed DOGE and led by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk. Trump also repealed an executive order from his predecessor President Joe Biden that sought to reduce AI risks to government, consumers, and businesses. That means that setting up and running safety tests around AI systems are no longer required.
The government said that its new GOV.UK Wallet allows users to securely store government-issued documents on their phone and use them easily when needed, it said. This could be more convenient when, say, you are on the move, and you want to only have a phone and no physical wallet.
The digital driving license, Kyle said today, will also be used to improve online and offline safety. In one example, he described how digital IDs could be used to provide age verification for certain online services, which has been problematic to secure to date. Notably, the U.K. is not exactly ahead of the game here. France has been offering a digital identity app since 2022.
“The technology will make use of security features that are built into modern smartphones, including facial recognition checks similar to those used when people pay using a digital bank card,” it said. “It means that digital documents will be more secure, even if a device is lost.”
There are no plans to make its digital wallet or other digital services compulsory, Kyle added, but he said they are working on the “compelling” and “desirable” nature of the services to get people to use them.
“Why can’t we aspire to have a satisfactory experience where people engage at the moment,” he said.
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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory commission spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk recommending deep cuts to federal agencies, could soon become more official, should an executive order signed by President Donald Trump pass legal muster.
On Monday evening, Trump signed an order that renames the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which was created in 2014 by former President Barack Obama to “change [the] government’s approach to technology,” as the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS). (Note the identical acronyms.)
The USDS is set to have around 20 employees, Trump said during the executive order signing ceremony. Despite its name, it isn’t a federal executive department, which would require an act of Congress to create.
The executive order instructs U.S. agency heads to consult with USDS to form “DOGE Teams” of “at least” four employees within their agency within 30 days. Teams will typically include a DOGE Team lead, engineer, HR specialist, and attorney, per the executive order, and work with the USDS and agency in which they’re housed to implement Trump’s DOGE plan.
Among other things, the executive order establishes a “software modernization” plan to improve government network infrastructure and IT systems, and gives the USDS access to “unclassified” agency records, software systems, and IT systems “consistent with law.”
The executive order also creates a temporary organization, the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, dedicated to “advancing [President Trump’s] 18-month DOGE agenda.” The organization is set to terminate on July 4, 2026.
Trump previously said that DOGE’s work must be completed by “no later” than July 4, 2026 — before the Ohio gubernatorial election in November 2026.
It remains to be seen whether the executive order survives coming courtroom battles. No fewer than three lawsuits have been filed in federal court alleging that the Musk-led DOGE violates the transparency requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), a 1972 law that requires federal advisory committees to hold meetings publicly and represent “balanced” perspectives.
Trump announced DOGE, which was to be co-led by Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, late last year. Ramaswamy has since left DOGE after reportedly clashing with Musk, and is said to be planning to announce a run for Ohio governor next week.
Musk has suggested that DOGE could help to cut the U.S. federal budget by up to $2 trillion through measures such as reducing waste, abolishing redundant agencies, and downsizing the federal workforce. He has since backtracked on that goal, however, and many experts believe it to be unrealistic.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump team and officials from DOGE have inquired about abolishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and combining and restructuring the FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Federal Reserve. Separately, Musk has also proposed eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency charged with implementing and enforcing consumer protection laws and issuing guidance for consumer financial institutions.
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During his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked a 2023 executive order signed by former President Joe Biden that sought to reduce the potential risks AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security.
Biden’s executive order directed the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to author guidance that helps companies identify — and correct for — flaws in models, including biases. The executive order also required developers of AI systems to share the results of safety tests with the U.S. government before they were released to the public.
Critics allied with Trump argued that the executive order’s reporting requirements were onerous and effectively forced companies to disclose their trade secrets. During his campaign, Trump promised policies that would “support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing” — but declined to go into detail.
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A week after the U.K. government announced a sweeping plan to make big investments into AI, it’s laying out more details around how this will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data-sharing deals across siloed departments; and a new set of AI tools — dubbed “Humphrey” after a character on an old U.K. TV political sitcom — to speed up the work of civil servants.
The plans will be formally unveiled at a press conference Tuesday headed up by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social Care.
Per the U.K. government’s AI site, the projects’ progress appears to be in the very early stages. For example, a plan to bring more AI services into the customer-facing side of the NHS are only at the stage of a “charter” committing to the concept. Other projects include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work to date.
It’s not clear how many people in total are working on these projects nor what third-party tools, such as LLMs, are being used. (We have asked these questions and will update readers when we learn more.)
At their heart, the projects are all about efficiency. The government, DSIT said, currently spends some £23 billion annually on technology, and the idea will be to redeploy that money in a more modern way.
“Sluggish technology has hampered our public services for too long, and it’s costing us all a fortune in time and money… Not to mention the headaches and stresses we’re left with after being put on hold or forced to take a trip to fill out a form,” said Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for DSIT, in a statement. “My Department will put AI to work… We will use technology to bear down hard to the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves.”
The plans include a new team within DSIT to head the projects, a little like DOGE in the U.S. but conceived of and run by government people rather than tech moguls.
DSIT is honing in on three areas initially:
1. The work of government employees. Humphrey, named after the wry, clever assistant played by the late Nigel Hawthorne in “Yes, Minister” and then “Yes, Prime Minister,” is a set of apps aimed at reducing the typical daily workload of civil servants, much of it centered around vast amounts of data that they are required to read and process.
“Consult” is designed to read and summarise “thousands” of responses to consultations in hours. (Responses, which can be lengthy and numerous, are a central part of how the government takes feedback from stakeholders and the public into account.) “Parlex” will let government employees query and read conversations in Parliament that are relevant to bills or other policy documents they are working on. “Minute” is a secure transcription service to take notes from meetings. “Redbox” helps prepare briefings and policy documents. And “Lex” is focused on helping government workers find relevant legal data.
2. Another strand of the efficiency push will be around speeding up public-facing services. The idea here is to take aim at legacy bureaucracy, of which there is a lot in the U.K., such as the 100,000 calls that the tax authorities get daily, or the need for people to appear in person to register a death, or, bizarrely, posting ads in local papers as part of the process of getting a license to drive a truck.
DSIT’s thinking is that overhauling processes like these with more AI-fueled automation could save £45 billion annually. It’s not clear if that estimate is before or after deducting the cost of building and running the AI services.
3. A final area will be focused on more collaboration between departments in aid of sharing data to speed up how services are procured, and then how they work.
Taken together, the various projects are a signal that the government means business on its new AI push. But they also raise a number of questions.
For example, in the case of data sharing, DSIT says the operating idea here will be “a common-sense approach to sharing information.” Central government departments, like HMRC (revenue and customs) and the Department for Business and Trade, could, for example, share data with each other and local councils in fraud investigations. But what happens to data protection for individuals when data is shared in unintended ways?
Another possible question is around Humphrey: right now, DSIT said that some of the early apps are in testing phases only, but the big question will be how far will the government go in trusting some of the AI’s conclusions.There will also be more human challenges. As one former civil servant who now works for an AI company notes, past efforts to create programs that cut across departments have not always worked. Collaboration, money and authority are ultimately the levers that will make or break any of these plans.
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