Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

During the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry, including political action committees, accounted for nearly half of all of the corporate money going into the election, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. That spending helped make Congress and the Trump administration more friendly to the crypto industry. Now, in the run-up to the midterms, the AI industry wants to replicate the crypto sector’s success. AI companies are amassing millions of dollars to help candidates that favor light regulation over AI. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Amrith Ramkumar, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who recently wrote about this new pro-AI PAC network.

There’s a new class action lawsuit against Amazon Prime Video that’s once again elevating the question of ownership in the digital age: Who actually owns a movie, a song, a video game?Buy a physical copy, like a CD or DVD, and the answer is obvious. But buy a digital copy, and the answer gets very complicated. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book “The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy,” to learn about the current state of digital ownership.

A recent report put out by the tech giant claims its AI model consumes very little electricity and water for a single query. Emma Strubell, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute, says that might not tell the whole story. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

Borders may be invisible to most shoppers, but for businesses, they often mean delays, extra costs, and reams of paperwork. And amid Trump’s trade war, global trade is now faster and more complex than ever. Those new pressures have sparked a boom in new "customs tech" companies promising to speed things up. The BBC’s Leanna Byrne reports.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to discuss all these topics and more. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

It’s challenging for parents to get access to their kids’ data to look out for online harms. In Congress, there's a bipartisan push to change that with a bill called Sammy's Law, named after a teen who died of fentanyl poisoning in 2021. He purchased drugs on social media.Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, who’s been monitoring the bill's progress.

Fifteen years ago, then-CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. His vision was for a lean-back device used mostly to consume content. Now, with the latest iPadOS 26, the device is evolving into something different — and perhaps something more useful. Craig Grannell got early access to iPadOS 26 and wrote about the system's laptop-like qualities in Wired magazine.

A lot of people are eligible to have their criminal records expunged. And there are tens of millions of such files out there for things like misdemeanors, low-level felonies such as drug offenses and even just arrests. LegalEase, a justice-tech startup is streamlining the process through the use of artificial intelligence.

Video gaming can be an expensive hobby. Nintendo’s latest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart World, released in June, costs $80, and it’s widely expected that Grand Theft Audio VI, coming out next year, will top $100. So are games becoming unaffordable … or do gamers not know how good they’ve got it? The BBC’s Will Chalk breaks it down.

The Trump family took their digital token public this week. Plus, artificial intelligence is generating angst in Silicon Valley.But first, Google’s antitrust case over its search business ended this week with a punishment far short of what the government sought. Google could have been forced to sell off its Chrome browser or stop paying Apple and others to make it the default search engine. Instead, a federal judge said all the company has to do is share some of its search data with rivals.Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, a reporter at The Information, to discuss all of this and more.

Axon, a company that makes policing equipment, developed new software called Draft One that takes recordings from police cameras and uses artificial intelligence to summarize them into incident reports. Many police departments trying out the tool are not disclosing that they're using AI to write reports, according to a Mother Jones investigation. That potentially leaves both prosecutors and defense attorneys in the blind — despite safeguards Axon built into its software to prevent this very scenario, and to remove errors or AI hallucinations. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with investigative journalist Takendra Parmar who reported the story for Mother Jones.

Big Tech companies have been in an all-out bidding war to capture top AI researchers and engineers. Companies like Meta have reportedly been offering compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They're the kind of eye-watering sums you usually only hear about in pro sports. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino explores whether this strategy of collecting expensive superstars will pay off for Big Tech firms looking to win the AI race.

More and more people are using generative AI to “resurrect” deceased loved ones. There are tools that can turn an old photograph into a short animation or create entire "AI clones" trained on old audio, video or written diaries. These technological advancements are taking memorializing the dead to a whole new level, but is it healthy? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to psychologist Elaine Kasket, who specializes in mental health issues and technology, for some answers.

Endometriosis is a condition in which the tissue that typically lines the uterus grows outside of it instead, often causing intense pain and infertility. MIT researchers are studying that living tissue on plastic chips in the lab, with bioengineer Linda Griffith leading the effort.

Chipmaker NVIDIA reported quarterly earnings this week and they were strong - better than expected, even. NVIDIA's sales rose last quarter by over 50% though its data center business was a little softer than expected. So why did share prices fall? Plus, OpenAI says it's updating ChatGPT to better handle mental distress. And Spotify is sliding into our DMs. The music streamer has launched a messaging system on its platform. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about all these headlines for this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

President Donald Trump called out countries trying to regulate U.S. tech companies earlier this week, warning they could face new tariffs. The White House has struck a provisional trade deal with the European Union, but tensions remain over the bloc's sweeping tech laws, like the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to moderate illegal content and disinformation.

Job growth in the economy has slowed, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed are growing. It makes the indignities of the modern hiring process even more frustrating for those in the market. Job-seekers are navigating a gauntlet of automated application systems set up to whittle down the hundreds — sometimes thousands — of applicants. Only for many to never hear from a human. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino has more from the front lines of algorithmic application hell. 

Across Europe, postal services are grappling with declining letter volumes, amid a rise in digitalization. In Demark, where the decline has been particularly steep, the publicly-owned national postal service, PostNord, is bringing an end to 400 years of letter deliveries, to focus solely on parcels from 2026. And while a private firm will step into the gap, letters are a shrinking business. So as digitalization grows, do letters have a future? The BBC’s Adrienne Murray reports from the Danish capital with more details.

A survey of about 1,500 workers showed AI has been a useful tool for repetitive work. But some respondents want more — sometimes, more than the technology is capable of.In this episode, Marketplace’s Meghan Mccarty Carino speaks with Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson about the disconnect between workers' wants and AI's current role in the workplace.

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” Meta is under scrutiny on Capitol Hill after an investigation revealed troubling policies about how the company's chatbots can interact with children. Plus, the White House has officially joined TikTok, despite a looming deadline next month in the on-again-off-again effort to force the app's Chinese owners to divest or face a nationwide ban. But first, the Trump Administration itself is looking to claim a 10% equity stake in a different tech company - the chipmaker Intel. That stake would be in exchange for the grant money it was promised under the Biden Administration's CHIPS act. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to learn more.