Alabama was supposed to put TikTok on trial today over allegations that it designed addictive features for children and misled the public about their safety. Instead, the state announced a settlement Friday: at least $100 million and a set of protections for young users in Alabama, including a two-hour daily limit and interruptions to the endless scroll. Whether those measures work will depend on how TikTok puts them into practice, but for once, the people who built the app have been given some of the work of helping children put it down.
President Trump spent Sunday night on a rather different approach to technology. He had a private dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, two days after a federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon’s decision to exclude Anthropic’s Claude from its supply chain. The dispute centered in part on the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or lethal autonomous warfare. The software couldn’t stay in the Pentagon’s supply chain, but its CEO could come to dinner.
I’ve spent my morning making the sort of plans a parent makes when a child’s needs have to fit around an appointment time. Ezra’s MRI is scheduled for 2 p.m. in Portland, and his instructions say he can’t have food or a bottle after 8 a.m. There is a car ride between those two times, which seems like the sort of detail that should have received more consideration from anyone who has met a baby. I’m deeply grateful he has the appointment. I also expect the drive to give us all an intimate understanding of six hours.
I’ve ordered clothes without buttons or glitter, as instructed, and mentally packed our daughter’s things for Grammy’s house: pajamas, school clothes, ballet clothes, and something to occupy her when Grammy needs to work. After Ezra’s MRI, we’ll go to the hotel, find some takeout, and take it easy. We’ll be gone until Thursday, when my bonus son usually comes back for his week with us. His mom will keep him until we return, and I’m grateful we can work together when a week asks a little more of everyone.
That work is what caught my attention in Alabama’s settlement. The state alleged that TikTok’s design harmed young users’ mental well-being; TikTok has said that providing a safe, positive place for them has always been a priority. A settlement resolves those claims without a jury deciding them. What it does establish is a list of changes TikTok agreed to make for young users in Alabama: pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use, overnight access restrictions, stronger age checks, more parental controls, and limits on how adults can find teen accounts.
A pause after 15 minutes will not raise anybody’s child for them. It does, however, interrupt a product whose principal talent is making sure the next video arrives before you’ve had time to wonder where the last hour went. Parents still have to do the parenting, but the company will have to do more than hand them a pamphlet about screen time while its app auditions another 400 videos.
Yesterday, my husband and I were doing our own less consequential version of discovering that a plan needed work. We repainted the house the wrong color on purpose because we only had enough expensive primer for part of it. Painting Cedar Path over both the primer and the original color risked giving us two different looking walls. Halfway through, we realized the Element Guard paint we’d used in May was self-priming on wood, meaning at least some of our primer detour had probably been unnecessary. I was involved in this project, in case the sequence of events had not already made that obvious.
The wrong paint sprayer we received twice finally had its moment. It’s the refillable kind, which let my husband take it onto the roof without hauling a paint bucket along. We’re more or less back where we stood two weeks ago, except now the house is ready for its new color. Cedar Path will get its turn, and our little woodland getaway is inching closer to the mystical place we keep imagining.
For Oregon families waiting on solar power, getting back to the starting point is considerably less charming. On September 18, a federal judge ruled that the EPA unlawfully terminated the $7 billion Solar for All program and vacated that decision. Oregon had been awarded $86.6 million for a program intended to reach more than 8,000 lower-income households with home and community solar benefits. The ruling gives the grants a legal path forward, but Oregon’s Department of Energy still says residents cannot access the program. A decision on paper has not yet become a smaller electric bill.
Then there is Trump’s dinner, which raises a question beyond the seating arrangement. Anthropic held to contractual limits on two uses of Claude: mass surveillance of Americans and lethal autonomous warfare. The appeals court found that the Pentagon had grounds to exclude the product under the procurement law; it did not decide that either of those uses would be a good idea. Trump said before dinner that he and Amodei would talk about AI regulation, but the White House has not said what they actually discussed, and the meal is no evidence that either side changed its position.
Still, I wish I could see the place cards. Did his say Dario Amodei, or did someone use the Pentagon’s label, Supply Chain Risk, in tasteful gold lettering? Trump previously called Anthropic’s leaders “leftwing nut jobs,” so I hope the evening at least began with a thorough check of the guest list. The funny part is the dinner. The serious part is that the public still needs to know what limits its government is willing to accept when it puts powerful AI to work.
After all that, I went out to see what the vegetables had managed without me. They’ve been grossly neglected while we’ve dealt with lead exposure, this trip, the house, and the revolving door of national nonsense, but the tomatoes offered us a good harvest anyway. We picked our first cucamelon, which tasted exactly like a cucumber despite being the size of a small grape, and I finally planted the cool season vegetables.
My husband even gave me something else to look forward to. I told him how a kind pottery teacher noticed that I hated getting my hands gooey, showed me her beautiful pastel drawings, and suggested charcoal pencils when I struggled with pastels. He surprised me with pastels, a giant sketchbook, and wooden boxes for my supplies. I’m excited to make something for him with the art supplies that brought that childhood memory back to me.
Our house is full of unfinished projects with their own budgets and demands, and we are getting somewhere, even when we have to paint a wall twice. What matters is that we can see the result, admit when the plan needs changing, and keep doing the work. The families waiting for meaningful protections online or for a promised energy program should be able to expect that same follow-through from institutions with far more resources than a family buying primer.
If you know someone who has ever completed an entire project only to find themselves back at step one, please restack this piece and bring them into the conversation.
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This week those adventures include getting Ezra to Portland, preparing our house for Cedar Path, and finding out what I can make with the pastels my husband gave me. It’s a crowded season, but there are tomatoes on the counter, a tiny cucamelon worth celebrating, and people helping us carry the complicated parts. We’re grateful you’re here.
Calling an A.I. company "left-wing nut jobs" because they refuse to allow their product to surveill or wage war, is about the usual level of discourse from this loathsome regime. I am so sorry, on a deep visceral level, that my generation is leaving this disgraceful state of affairs to your generation.
Praying that all goes well with Ezra's MRI!