Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
Bukele and Musk team up
Last week, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele promoted a collaboration with Elon Musk to bring the X owner’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, to El Salvador’s public schools.
You may be thinking to yourself: Wait, isn’t Bukele the violent authoritarian known for receiving American tax dollars to house deported immigrants in his country’s notoriously brutal gulag?
And the answer is yes.
You may also be thinking: Wait, isn’t Grok the AI chatbot known for spewing bigoted bile, fantasizing about rape and powering those weird, flirty AI “companions” that some have characterized as disturbingly “childlike”?
The answer to that is also yes.
But fret not, because Bukele — the self-styled “coolest dictator” in the world — has the perfect salve for your concerns. In a post on X, he wrote that Salvadoran children “won’t use @grok the way we use it” and shared an image saying the initiative would be “developed so that every child in El Salvador has a proactive and personalized tutor (using Grok’s ‘brain’), from first grade through high school, adapted to their abilities, skills, and knowledge.”
Who better to help shape the minds of Salvadoran children than Bukele and Musk? What’s the worst that could happen?
Speaking of Grok …
A new study from Global Witness, a human rights and environmental research firm, shows the ways popular chatbots can become vectors for climate-related disinformation — and identified Grok as one of the primary culprits. The study, which coincided with the United Nations’ COP30 annual climate change conference, found that while various AI chatbots helped spread climate disinformation, Grok’s behavior was most glaring.
“Grok shared climate conspiracy tropes, recommended that we follow climate disinformers, and offered to make anti-COP social media posts more “violent” to boost engagement,” the report read.
The parent company behind Grok, xAI, did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Read more at Global Witness.
The FBI’s AI announcement
FBI Director Kash Patel announced that his agency has launched a “technology working group” to assess how it should use artificial intelligence in its work. He said the group is being led by outgoing FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a fellow conspiracy theorist and former influencer.
The move comes as the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to hire tech employees to aid its efforts to deploy AI across government agencies. The administration has partnered with tech companies whose products have been used, for example, to target journalists and immigrant advocates.
TikTok deal appears done
TikTok officially signed a deal to hand over its U.S. operations to a consortium led by pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump has effectively ignored a bipartisan law requiring that the app be banned in the country unless TikTok sold its U.S. business to an American buyer. It appears that the delay has helped a close ally of Trump’s gain control of one of the world’s most popular (and propaganda-filled) social media platforms.
Read more at NPR.
AI extremism
The Guardian highlighted a new report from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology that documents the trend of neo-Nazi networks relying on generative AI tools to create voice clones that mimic the voices of major figures in their movement.
Read more at The Guardian.
Trump’s new ethics debacle
Trump’s self-enriching tech-based ventures are rolling right along while he’s in office — ethics be damned. My colleague Sydney Carruth wrote about the latest one: a $6 billion merger with a Google-backed fusion power company. In other words, Google, a company financially tied to the federal government, has found a way to shower the president and his family’s private business with money.
Read more at MS NOW.
CISA leader failed a polygraph test
The nation’s acting cybersecurity chief failed a polygraph test in July after he sought access to highly sensitive files shared with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The Department of Homeland Security said the test given to Madhu Gottumukkala, CISA’s acting director, was “unsanctioned” — and that an investigation has been launched into the people believed to have been involved.
Read more at Politico.
Trade groups warn Trump
The U.S. Travel Association, a trade group representing more than 1,000 member organizations, issued a dire warning that the Trump administration could destroy the tourism industry with its newly announced proposal to require some immigrants to turn over five years of social media history.
Read more in my post at MS NOW.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.