White House threatens to veto House GOP defense spending bill

President Joe Biden would veto a right-wing defense funding bill that's slated to be considered on the House floor this week, his administration said Monday.

The White House declared it "strongly opposes" the Pentagon spending measure in a statement outlining its objections, dinging Republicans for loading the bill with conservative policy riders, including on abortions and transgender troops.

"Including divisive policy provisions within an appropriations bill also dramatically increases the threat of a continuing resolution, which would further damage America’s national security," the administration argued.

The administration further criticized House GOP appropriators for scaling back a Pentagon push for multi-year contracts to boost missile production, among other gripes.

Background

House Republicans included provisions in the bill to block funding for the Pentagon's policy of allowing troops to travel for abortions as well as surgery and hormone treatments for transgender military personnel. The defense bill also includes provisions to limit diversity and climate change-fighting programs at the Pentagon.

Party-line bill

The rightward tilt of the spending bill means Democrats won't support it, so Speaker Kevin McCarthy can only afford to lose a few GOP votes. That may mean adding even more conservative proposals to shore up support on his right flank.

If it passes, the bill is a nonstarter with Senate Democrats. Senate appropriators have advanced their own bipartisan Pentagon bill.

Abortion

The White House ripped a provision that blocks funding to implement Pentagon policies for reimbursing travel costs for troops to seek abortions. The administration argued the policy is critical for readiness and that it is "in full accordance with the law," countering GOP arguments that it contravenes a ban on taxpayer funding for abortions.

Missiles

The administration also slammed House appropriators for their revisions to the Pentagon's first-ever request for multi-year procurement authority for munitions. Appropriators granted the authority for five of seven missile systems sought by the administration, but rejected two others.

Lawmakers also trimmed a large portion of the $1.9 billion Pentagon request to support bulk purchases, known as economic order quantities — funding the White House argued is needed to generate savings and boost production.

Other objections

The Biden team said it opposes an ambitious House plan to significantly raise junior enlisted military personnel pay before an upcoming four-year military compensation review, fearing the unfunded cost it would incur.

The White House rebuffed a move, touted by House Republicans, to cut just over $1 billion from the administration's budget for funding the Pentagon civilian workforce — warning it could impact defense operations and harm civilian recruitment and retention.

The administration also assailed provisions in the bill that block the Navy from retiring certain ships, which the Pentagon sought to do to save money.

What's next

The House Rules Committee meets Tuesday to review amendments, and floor debate on the legislation is expected to begin Wednesday.

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Biden inches toward decision on long-range missiles as Ukraine ups pressure

The Biden administration is in active conversations about whether to send long-range missiles to Ukraine amid an intense campaign for the U.S. to transfer the weapon, according to two U.S. officials and a person close to the Ukrainian government.

It’s unclear if a decision memo has reached President Joe Biden’s desk. The officials said a final call would be made with Ukraine’s input, but Washington and Kyiv aren’t engaged in discussions about an announcement or a rollout of Army Tactical Missile Systems.

Ukraine is pushing the U.S. to greenlight the delivery of ATACMS by next week’s U.N. General Assembly attended by Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Officials in Kyiv said they’re expecting some good news on that front after the Ukrainian leader touches down in New York City.

But U.S. officials say that timeline is too tight. A decision by Biden on sending ATACMS for Ukraine’s use against Russian forces would almost certainly come after the annual Turtle Bay confab.

Asked about the prospect of delivering ATACMS, deputy national security adviser Jon Finer said the White House hasn’t taken anything off the table. “Our position all along has been we will get Ukraine the capabilities that will enable it to succeed on the battlefield,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the G20 summit in India. “We will continue to assess the situation on the ground and make decisions based on that.”

If Biden signs off on the transfer, he will provide a weapon for which Ukraine has clamored since the earliest days of the 18-month war. ATACMS, which can travel up to 190 miles, would give Ukraine’s forces the ability to strike far beyond Russia’s defensive positions inside Ukraine and, possibly, deep into Russian sovereign territory.

Ukraine already has received some long-range missiles, such as the U.K.-donated Storm Shadow that can travel over 150 miles. The Storm Shadow is launched from Ukrainian Soviet-era jets, while the ATACMS can be fired from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System already in Ukraine, which would allow the Ukrainians much more flexibility in where and how they launch the missile.

Those launchers normally fire rockets that travel about 50 miles, though the U.S. has also promised to send the ground-launched small diameter bomb by the end of the year, which can hit targets over 90 miles away.

As its ground forces launch attacks against well-defended Russian trench lines and heavily fortified positions, Ukraine has prioritized hitting Russian logistics nodes and transportation hubs well behind the front lines. The Storm Shadow missiles have also targeted ammunition dumps in Crimea.

ABC News first reported that the U.S. was nearing a decision on sending ATACMS. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Monday he had nothing to announce on ATACMS and declined to discuss U.S. inventory levels.

Zelenskyy told CNN on Sunday that he is planning to speak with Biden about the issue, and “I think he can change this page and this war. Once he did it with the HIMARS — it was very important, these HIMARS.”

On talks to get ATACMS into Ukrainian hands, “we are moving. I hope we'll get it in autumn,” Zelenskyy said. “For us, it's very important not to do the pause in this counteroffensive and I need it very much.”

The administration has long been skeptical of providing ATACMS to Ukraine. Last year, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told an Aspen Security Forum audience that Biden wanted “to ensure that we don’t get into a situation in which we are approaching the Third World War.” Sending missiles that Ukraine could launch into Russia would increase that risk, he said.

But in July, Sullivan told the same conference that the administration was “prepared to take risks, and we will continue to be prepared to take risks to provide support to Ukraine.” The strong statement came after the United Kingdom and France both sent long-range weapons of their own to Ukraine, leading to criticism of the U.S. for not following suit.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has been hesitant to send ATACMS because of concerns over how many missiles the U.S. has in its inventory. DOD officials previously told their Ukrainian counterparts that the U.S. didn’t have any ATACMS in its stockpile to spare. The weapons’ manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, currently makes about 500 ATACMS a year, though they’re all slated for sale to Poland, Finland, Romania, the UAE and Taiwan, which have ordered the missile system in recent years.

The Army hasn’t purchased new ATACMS in several years, though it has upgraded them with better guidance systems. The service is also preparing to move past the ATACMS, and beginning this year will start the transition to the new Precision Strike Missile, which can travel at least 310 miles, vastly outranging the ATACMS’ 190 miles.

The Army will start receiving deliveries of the new missile this year, which could make more ATACMS available to transfer to other countries.

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The 2024 candidate-bots are here

Watch out! The AI “clones” of politicians are coming. And they’re not half bad.

In June, the AI avatars of Joe Biden and Donald Trump engaged in a marathon session of profane trash-talking broadcast on Twitch, offering a surreal glimpse at one potential future of political debate. Then a super PAC supporting the (since-scuttled) presidential bid of Miami’s mayor launched an AI Francis Suarez bot to answer voters’ questions, which offered a more polished vision of a politician’s avatar.

Now a project called Chat2024 has soft-launched a much broader multi-candidate platform — a slick, Silicon Valley venture-backed version of what has so far just been a set of lighthearted experiments.

On Wednesday, the project will officially unveil the AI-powered avatars of 17 leading presidential candidates. Each one is a chatbot trained on reams of data generated from at least a hundred sources, like candidates’ video appearances and writings. Users can query the bots individually, ask the same question of all 17 at once, or set any two of them against each other in one-on-one debates directed by user input.

Based on DFD’s preliminary testing of the avatars on Chat2024.com, which has gone live ahead of the project’s official launch, the bots aren’t exactly the AI overlords that some tech critics fear could soon rule humanity. But credible AI replicas of society’s would-be leaders do amount to a step in that direction.

The project is a creation of Dara Ladjevardian, the co-founder of AI startup Delphi, which is designed to create AI avatars of anyone, not just politicians (tagline: “clone yourself”).

The project amounts to a PR stunt for Delphi’s services, of course, but Ladjevardian — who studied computer science at Georgetown — argues it that it offers civic value, too. He thinks AI avatars have a prominent role to play in the future of campaigning, governing and public opinion-tracking.

He said the project was inspired by his experience knocking on doors in the Houston area to support a losing congressional bid by his mother, Democrat Sima Ladjevardian, who ran to unseat Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw in 2020. He found that most voters learned about candidates from snippets of television coverage, and argues that chatbots provide a more engaging, in-depth alternative. He hopes the presidential bots will attract the attention of campaigns up and down the ballot and entice them to pay to host the avatars on their own websites.

In addition to providing campaigns with a new way to show off their candidates, Ladjevardian said he intends to sell them on the idea that they can analyze the queries voters send to chatbots to better understand public opinion.

So … how’d they do? Based on our short interactions, their imitations of the candidates are pretty good.

The Cornel West bot evokes the flowery rhetorical style of the Green Party candidate, beginning its response to a question about a potential spoiler role with “My dear interlocutor.” A culture war question to the Desantis bot elicited a vow to “wage a war on the woke.”

Set to debate against each other, the bots often draw accurate contrasts with their opponents, though (like many of their real-life counterparts) their back-and-forths tend to devolve into repetitions of the same few talking points until a human moderator intervenes to guide the conversation forward with a new question.

In a debate I set up between the two leading candidates, the Biden bot invoked his “career fighting for the middle class” while the Trump bot boasted, “I’ve seen it all, I’ve done it all.”

When the two pet candidates of the very-online tech world — Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were set against each other to debate tech policy, the Ramaswamy bot pointed out that unlike his opponent, he has founded a tech company while Kennedy linked his support for free speech to the open values needed to nurture innovation.

The bots haven’t yet achieved a perfect imitation. While the livestreamed Twitch debate and AI Suarez both included AI-generated visual avatars, Chat2024 is currently text-and-voice-only.

The AI voice generation feature, which reads responses aloud, captures something of Ramaswamy’s dramatic cadences, and Kennedy’s gravelly voice, but AI Kennedy raced through its spoken answer at an unnaturally fast clip.

Ladjevardian said his team is monitoring the progression of AI-generated video to determine when it will become advanced enough to generate visual avatars. “It’s almost at the creepy point right now,” he said. “It’s not good enough where it feels realistic.”

One thing the avatars clearly share with real-life politicians: a capacity to contradict their own previous public statements.

Asked to debate social media policy, the AI Kennedy defended the right of social platforms to refuse to publish content as they see fit, even though the flesh-and-blood Kennedy called on Congress to prohibit censorship by platforms in June testimony before the House.

The project touts its ability to provide sourcing for its bots’ statements, but two days before official launch, the in-line citations to sources brought up empty dialog boxes in debate mode. In one-on-chat mode, however, users can view the sources behind the responses, which, in DFD’s testing, consisted overwhelmingly of YouTube videos featuring the candidates.

Ladjevardian said that Chat2024 manually compiled media reports and text created by the candidates to provide training data for the avatars. Soon, he said, the software behind the avatars will be able to automatically monitor the internet for new content and add it to the training data.

He said the bots rely on several different models — including ones from OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Anthropic — to perform different functions, like determining a question’s intent, providing context and engaging in reasoning.

While candidate chatbots are still vulnerable to the classic political charge that they “lack authenticity,” Chat2024 illustrates just how rapidly the gap between the most charismatic AI bots and the most wooden human politicians is closing.

And based on the current clip of development, Ladjevardian predicted that the artificial imitators will improve drastically by Election Day 2024. “These things are going to figure themselves out very fast,” he said.

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FDA greenlights updated mRNA Covid vaccines

The FDA on Monday cleared two updated mRNA Covid-19 shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, paving the way for an early fall rollout. It will be the first updated shots offered to the public in a year and since the public health emergency ended in May.

The new shots target the XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron, following the FDA's June recommendation. Both companies said their shots generate substantial antibodies against the XBB subvariants of the virus, as well as the newer EG.5 and FL.1.5.1 subvariants, which now make up more than 30 percent of cases in the U.S.

Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna said their updated shots provide additional neutralizing antibodies against BA.2.86, a variant the World Health Organization is monitoring because the variant's high number of mutations could mean it can evade existing immunity. The variant was first detected in Denmark in July and in the U.S. in August.

The FDA approved shots from Pfizer-BioNTech for those 12 years and older as a single shot rather than the two-dose regimen approved previously. It also approved Moderna's shot for those 18 and older as a single dose, when it had previously consisted of two doses.

The agency also updated authorizations for shots from both Moderna and Pfizer so that a child 5 years old and older can receive either shot in a single dose, as long as it has been two months since their previous shot. Children 6 months through 4 years old who have been previously vaccinated can receive one or two doses of an updated vaccine, depending on their last shot, and those who have never been vaccinated can receive three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, or two doses of the Moderna shot.

"Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality. We very much encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated.”

Novavax asked the FDA to authorize its updated shot earlier this summer, but has not yet received a decision from the FDA. The company said it has received shipments of the vaccine in the U.S. that are ready to go. If it receives authorization, it will be the only non-mRNA vaccine option available.

What's next: The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will meet on Tuesday to discuss endorsing and deciding who should receive the updated shots. The panel will also hear from all three vaccine manufacturers, as well as updates on current Covid spread and data on vaccine effectiveness.

Once the agency's director, Mandy Cohen, signs off on ACIP's recommendations for the two shots just approved, they have a clear path to reach the public. Makers of all the shots have said they're prepared to deliver shots in the coming weeks.

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Biden admin takes its first big shot at Big Tech

The Biden administration’s push to check the power of the tech giants gets its first big test Tuesday in a Washington courtroom where the Department of Justice will kick off a case designed to curb Google’s dominance in online search.

The trial against the $1.7 trillion company will be “the most significant U.S. monopoly case in a generation,” said Bill Baer, a fellow with the Brookings Institution and former DOJ antitrust head under President Barack Obama.

The DOJ’s suit against Google claims the company has become the overwhelmingly most-used search engine not because of a superior product but because it illegally uses its money to box out its competitors.

With other federal investigations looming into Amazon, Apple, Ticketmaster and others, it could have broad implications for the government’s concerns that modern companies are using their money and power to forge new kinds of monopolies at the expense of competitors and customers.

The trial also marks a key moment for Jonathan Kanter, the attack-dog attorney who President Joe Biden installed as the head of the DOJ’s antitrust division and who helped build the case, initially filed under former President Donald Trump's administration. The DOJ is hoping to succeed where the Obama Administration took a pass in 2013 when enforcers considered evidence that Google was becoming a digital behemoth, and chose not to sue.

The case centers on a series of revenue-sharing agreements, worth tens of billions of dollars annually, that Google has with Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and others to be the default search engine on web browsers and mobile phones, as well as its control of the ads that populate search results. Google does not disclose the exact value of the deals. The DOJ says these contracts have hindered the ability of rivals to compete and deprived consumers of the benefits of high quality, innovative services that only competition can foster.

According to some estimates, including those cited in the DOJ’s lawsuit, Google controls about 90 percent of the search engine market in the U.S. and globally.

A court loss for Google could force major changes to its business arrangements and even the potential sale of key parts of the company. It would also put Google’s fellow internet giants on edge, as they face their own investigations and lawsuits.

A loss for the Biden administration could cause it to rethink its legal strategy in other pending tech cases. And while they wouldn’t necessarily pull back completely, enforcers could take a more conservative approach.

“How it goes has significance for how U.S. courts and enforcers will treat behavior by dominant companies that entrenches their monopoly power,” said Baer.

According to court filings, the DOJ is expected to argue that Google’s business moves have hurt internet users by restricting their choices: For example, had there been a more competitive search engine market, consumers could have a wider array of privacy protections. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine whose selling point is that it doesn’t mine consumers’ data for ads, is a long-time Google antagonist.

Google argues in court filings that its agreements with suppliers and platforms are not exclusive and that the default setting can easily be changed to use rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing. It says that it competes vigorously to win those contracts and that it succeeds because it has the best product.

Spokespeople for the DOJ and Microsoft did not have a comment ahead of the trial.

The case will be decided in a non-jury trial by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed by Obama in 2014.

Long road to a decision

Over the next eight to 10 weeks top executives from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and other companies will testify about benefits and drawbacks of Google’s outsized role in the internet — arguing over whether the company is an aggrieved innovator being punished for its success or has intentionally stifled competition for its own financial gain.

It will however likely take years before a winner is declared. The trial starting Tuesday is centered solely on whether Google broke the law, and Mehta is not expected to rule until the spring. A ruling against Google would result in a second trial to determine an appropriate remedy. After that would come appeals that could ultimately end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, potentially adding several more years of litigation.

During that time, Google will also face another trial, expected in 2024, in which the Justice Department is challenging its online advertising business. The DOJ is also investigating whether Google violated antitrust law with its market-leading mapping service.

In an interview last week, Google’s top lawyer, Kent Walker, said that the default setting for search engines does not ultimately determine Google’s success. “I think everyone will say that the default position is valuable, again that's why we pay for it. But people are not locked in, and if there was a better search engine, a better browser that came along tomorrow, people would switch quickly.”

Walker said Google is faced with competition from all sides in the search market, including from Amazon, where he says consumers are increasingly turning to for product search queries. “It’s frustrating, maybe it’s ironic, that we’re seeing this backward-looking case and really unprecedented, forward-looking innovation.”

Google points to Mozilla switching its default search engine from Google to Yahoo! and back to Google as evidence that its market-leading role stems from a superior product.

In an exchange in court earlier this year, Mehta asked Google whether the default spot is akin to a 200-meter head start in a 400-meter race. “There's certainly no factual dispute that the default is a 200-meter advantage,” Google lawyer John Schmidtlein responded. But Google began signing these agreements in 2002, long before it was the dominant search engine, Schmidtlein said. “Google was 350 meters behind in 2008 when it introduced Chrome after years and years of monopoly behavior by Microsoft on Internet Explorer. Google was 350 meters behind in a 400-meter race, and they came around and they surpassed them.”

Regardless of what happened in the past, DOJ maintains that antitrust laws place an obligation on Google to not abuse its dominant position. The default position enables the company to scale its business in a manner unavailable to its rivals, the government says. Being the default browser on so many devices generates a “feedback loop,” giving it access to more users, which then generates more data that’s used to further improve the product and, increasingly, its ability to retain customers.

The DOJ cites the failure of Neeva, a search engine founded by a former top Google executive that shut down earlier this year, as evidence of the inability of competitors to gain traction in the market.

“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “That Google is long gone.”

Google contends that when considered in the broader context of how consumers find information online, it has no monopoly, and argues there are “diminishing returns” to scale.

Looking ahead to the AI landscape

As the world moves to new computing platforms underpinned by artificial intelligence, the DOJ is expected to argue that its search dominance will give Google a leg up at its rivals' expense.

As the world’s primary search engine, Google is one of the few companies with access to the massive data sets needed for the large language models underpinning chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools. While Google points to OpenAI as a key example of the intense competition it faces, the DOJ is expected to argue that Google is one of only a few companies with a high chance of success in AI.

On Friday, Mehta rejected the DOJ’s arguments around a related emerging technology, voice assistants. The DOJ had said Google’s restrictive conduct extended to “emerging search access points, such as voice assistants,” but Mehta said the DOJ offered no evidence to support that.

Several dozen state attorneys general, which filed a similar lawsuit in December 2020, will also try their case alongside the DOJ. The states are also challenging Google’s default position and also separately argued that Google designs its search pages to discriminate against more specialized rivals like Yelp for local businesses, or Expedia for travel. Last month, however, Mehta threw out the latter argument, saying the AGs offered no evidence that Google’s conduct harmed the specialized search market.

While the DOJ did not bring similar allegations related to the specialized search market, it still intends to discuss at trial the impact of Google’s conduct on those companies.

A Microsoft reunion

The DOJ’s lawsuit leans heavily on its antitrust case against Microsoft from the late 1990s. There the government accused the software giant of monopolistic behavior in making Internet Explorer the default browser in its Windows operating system, using the dominance of Windows to crush potential competitors such as Netscape.

The government initially won that case in district court, including a ruling breaking up the company. That was reversed on appeal, and the case ultimately ended in a settlement where Microsoft agreed to not block rival software companies in its contracts with computer makers.

A number of state attorneys general objected to the settlement, saying it did not go far enough, but were overruled.

It’s a case that Google’s lawyers are well acquainted with. Walker was Netscape’s deputy general counsel from 1997 to 2001, while Google’s longtime outside counsel, Susan Creighton of the tech-focused law firm Wilson Sonsini, authored a prominent white paper outlining the antitrust case against Microsoft.

Schmidtlein, Google's lead trial lawyer from the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly, represented state AGs in their case against Microsoft, and Mark Popofsky, another outside lawyer for Google from the law firm Ropes & Gray, was on the DOJ team.

Kenneth Dintzer, the 30-year DOJ veteran leading the department at trial, also did early investigative work into Microsoft in the mid-1990s. Other current DOJ lawyers were involved in the Microsoft case as well.

The case remains a key legal precedent limiting how companies can leverage their dominance in one market to gain market share in a separate market. If Mehta follows that precedent from Microsoft, the DOJ believes it will prevail.

“I think the DOJ case asserts law and facts consistent with the Microsoft opinion from [the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals] 22 years ago,” Baer said.

Palpable tension

Though the search case was initially filed during the Trump administration, current DOJ antitrust head Kanter has built a long legal career representing the company’s competitors, including Microsoft, and played a key role in shaping the search case first from outside the department.

Google has argued that Kanter should recuse himself, saying the DOJ’s current posture toward the company stems in large part from Kanter’s bias.

The DOJ, meanwhile, has said Google has sought to stymie its investigation and lawsuit at every turn. And while bare-knuckle tactics are common in every courtroom, the government says Google destroyed a great deal of evidence in the form of deleted internal instant messages and abused its legal privilege to withhold other documents. The trial will be peppered throughout with disputes over missing evidence, and Mehta could ultimately sanction the company if he finds it acted nefariously.

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Britain's Sunak hopes AI could be his legacy

The prime minister believes his drive for AI governance can leave a lasting impact on the world stage.

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Putin wants more land. The European Union is racing to get there first.

EU expansion is back on the agenda for Ursula von der Leyen but rapid growth is going to hurt.

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