This fall, President Trump took aim at the H-1B visa, in a move that has been telegraphed for years amid criticism that the program diverts jobs away from American workers. In September, Trump announced that new applications for the work visa would now be subject to a $100,000 feea bold attempt to curtail excessive use of the H-1B program.
The H-1B program, which was established through the Immigration Act of 1990, has been widely embraced by tech employers to enable hiring skilled talent from abroad, with companies like Amazon and Meta sponsoring thousands of H-1B workers every year. While H-1B workers hail from dozens of countries, an outsized portion of themabout 80%are hired from India and China. But the program has also repeatedly come under fire due to claims that it outsources jobs and undercuts wages by paying foreign workers below market rate.
Trumps proclamation has sparked confusion as employers have scrambled to figure out how the fee would reshape their hiring and recruitment plansand which workers would be subject to it. For the big tech companies that are among the most avid users of the H-1B visa, a $100,000 fee is not a huge price to pay.
But lawyers say many companies that use the visa more sparingly are now unable to shoulder the steep cost of hiring H-1B workers.
What we’re seeing is the $100,000 fee is not just impacting small employers who are like, we can’t pay that, says immigration lawyer Sandra Feist, who works with many people who are seeking an H-1B visa. No employer that I have spoken withand that includes very large organizations and large universitieshas said it’s worth it. This impact is being felt across all sizes of companies and institutions. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major business lobbying group, has filed a lawsuit challenging the fee, deeming it unlawful and cost-prohibitive for employers seeking to hire H-1B workers.
Feist says several companies she works with that typically enter the H-1B lottery on an annual basis are reevaluating their hiring strategy and planning to sit it out next year. In many cases, the muddled rollout of the fee and the lack of clarity on exceptions has created a chilling effect that is discouraging employers from sponsoring foreign workers altogether, even if they already have a visa.
There are a lot of instances where this fee does apply and is prohibitive, but there are also many circumstances where this fee would not apply based on the current guidance that we’ve received, Feist says. But employers are so fearful of the uncertainty and volatility around immigration.
How the fee is impacting employers
The same logic has influenced how early and mid-stage startups are approaching hiring at the moment, according to Sophie Alcorn, an immigration lawyer who works with tech startups and founders. A significant portion of H-1B visas are held by people who came to the U.S. as students and simply changed their immigration status.
But many founders are now hesitant to hire foreign nationals, even if they have already obtained a work visa or are currently authorized to work in the U.S.
A lot of small businesses just don’t have the resources or information to understand that if those people are maintaining valid status in the U.S., then the $100,000 fee would not apply to them, Alcorn says, citing the example of speaking with a recent graduate who had three job offers revoked when their immigration status was disclosed. (This person was authorized to work without restriction for the year ahead.)
H-1B workers can often play a significant role at small companies and startups, where they might be the sole person hired with their particular skillset, Alcorn says.
Due to the visa fee, however, Alcorn has found that startups are steering clear of those workers and opting instead to hire people who have secured the O-1 visa. (That visa does not have to be tied to the employer, and is awarded to people who possess extraordinary ability in their field. It can offer more flexibility and job mobility than the H-1B, particularly in fields that rely on freelance or contract work.) But this can deny opportunities to workers who dont have the qualifications they might need to secure an O-1. A lot of the really brilliant, talented engineers are not famous and don’t have a public profile, she adds. Many of them are not PhD researchers. They’re often very scrappy individuals with a lot of work experience.
The $100,000 fee is supposed to only apply to new applicationsbut existing H-1B workers are feeling the effects of it all the same. While H-1B workers can transfer their visa status if they find a new job, the restrictions of the visa can leave people in a precarious limbo if they get laid off. H-1B workers who lose their jobs are granted a 60-day grace period to find new employment and retain their visa status. In this job market, however, its no small feat for workers to land a new role within that timeframe.
Sharadha Kodem, an immigration lawyer who represents many H-1B workers, says that with the $100,000 fee in place, employers may be forced to pay up if they want to hire an H-1B worker but are unable to do so within 60 days. If a worker has to leave the country in the interim, their new employer risks being saddled with the $100,000 fee when they return with a new visa, Kodem says.
What this means for foreign workers
For aspiring H-1B workersbe it students or refugees with temporary status protecting them from deportationthe fee has thrown a wrench in their future plans.
The Trump administration has claimed that the $100,000 fee will not be levied on current H-1B workers or recent graduates who are seeking to change their status and switch to an H-1B visa. But their guidance also notes that the fee will be imposed if a worker is deemed ineligible for a change of status or extension. This vague language gives the administration broad discretion to determine who is eligible for a change of status, Feist saysand whether they will be slapped with a $100,000 bill. A recent Washington Post report found that foreign workers are already facing greater scrutinyand denialswhen they apply for work visas, including the H-1B.
Its not just tech workers or H-1B visa aspirants from India and China who are impacted by stringent policies like this one. Im working with a costume designer from Ukraine, and our plan was to file in the lottery this spring, Feist says. I’ll have to revisit that in light of the $100,000 fee. Feist is working with several people from Ukraine who have temporary protected status, for whom securing an H-1B would have been their best chance at staing in the U.S. If the administration has the final say on whether the fee should be waived, they could arbitrarily foist it on applicants from certain countries, Feist says.
The general hope is that, as the administration sees what a chilling effect this has on employers who are seeking essential workers that they can’t find in the U.S. workforce, that they will slowly narrow the scope of the fee and perhaps provide more clear guidance, she adds. Our hope is that the administration sees the light.
Why this does not address H-1B abuses
The Trump administration has framed this fee as a ploy to discourage companies from abusing the H-1B program or using it to source cheaper labor. In practice, however, the fee seems to be making it more difficult for companies to use the program the way it was originally conceived: to recruit highly skilled talent that they cant find stateside.
Meanwhile, for the leading tech companies that routinely file thousands of H-1B petitions to sponsor workers from abroad, $100,000 amounts to the equivalent of a paltry rounding errorand hardly qualifies as an obstacle. Those companies will likely face less competition for H-1B approvals, as the fee deters many employers from applying at all.
This is benefiting the exact employers that [the administration says] they are targeting, Feist says. It is only very large companies that over rely upon H-1B and sponsor tens of thousands of them each year that will benefit from this. And normal employers who are hiring an ophthalmologist or a teacher or a therapist or an architectthey will be disadvantaged.
The debate over the H-1B program dates back decades, with people on both sides of the aisle calling for reform long before President Trump assumed office.
One of the key critiques of the program has been that deep-pocketed companies can effectively game the lottery by flooding it with applicationsand that certain companies use the H-1B visa to undercut wages. The H-1B program has wage requirements but offers four different wage levels, and some research indicates that many workers are being paid at the lowest wage levels, which are supposed to be reserved for entry-level jobs. (Other research has found that employers are by and large paying market rate.) The backlog of green card applications also leaves many H-1B workers without a legitimate path to citizenship, forcing them to spend decades in the U.S. on a visa that is tied to their employment.
Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, says that employers who pay lower wages to H-1B workerswhich typically includes outsourcing and staffing firms like Infosys, Cognizant, and Tatastill benefit from the program, even if they are now saddled with the $100,000 fee.
They’re multi-billion dollar companies, and they get a lot of wage savings from using the program, he says. So [the fee] is not very well-targeted, and it could have unintended effects. And it just doesnt get at the heart of what’s wrong with the H-1B program.
What could actually reform the H-1B program
The new fee fails to reform the H-1B program in a meaningful way, and it seems even Trump is of two minds about the role of this visa. Even as Trump has cracked down on legal immigration, he has touted the value of H-1B. In a Fox News interview last monthnot long after he introduced the $100,000 feeTrump said the U.S. workforce lacked certain talents and needed the H-1B visa to bring over highly skilled workers. “You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, Im going to put you into a factory and were going to make missiles, he added.
There are changes to the H-1B program that could move the needle, though its not clear whether those efforts will actually target the companies that lean heavily on the H-1B visa.
The Trump administration is putting forth proposals that would likely amend the lottery system and prioritize applications for H-1B petitions that are at a higher wage levelin other words, give more weight to jobs that pay better. In theory, this could help prevent tech companies and outsourcing firms from exploiting the lottery system, while also ensuring H-1B workers are paid fairly.
But some lawyers argue that it would simply reinforce the advantage held by tech firms, who can afford to pay higher wages, and make it more difficult for other applicants to land an H-1B visa if overall wages are depressed in their sector. The Labor Department has also stepped up enforcement of the H-1B program through an initiative called Project Firewall, which is intended to investigate potential abuses of the H-1B visa, including but not limited to wage theft.
Still, as Costa points out, the threat of enforcement may not be a deterrent for billion-dollar employers that have come to rely on the H-1B visa.
Companies get disbarred from the program very, very rarely, he says. If the penalty is mostly just recovering back wages, then you’re just paying what you owed that worker anyway.
Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion companys value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children.
OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica.
So what the hell should we make of a just-announced deal between the two that will allow ChatGPT and Sora users to create images and videos of more than 200 characters, from Mickey and Minnie Mouse to the Mandalorian, starting from early 2026?
Terms of the deal
As part of the three-year agreement, OpenAI has committed to continuing to implement robust trust and safety measures, as well as controls to stop illegal or harmful content. Disney hopes that means you cant make lewd footage of Belle and the Beastbut given the precarity of AI-model guardrails, and the ease with which they can be jailbroken, theres no guarantee.
Thats what makes the deal so puzzling for Disney, an externally benign behemoth that has long acted like an attack dog in defending unauthorized use of its intellectual property.
Some Disney fans and content creators will undoubtedly celebrate the news and the opportunity to play in the Companys sandbox in a more official way, says Rebecca Williams, a researcher who studies Disney and its business at the University of South Wales. But there are clear questions over copyright here.
Among them is how much influence Disneyinfamously controlling over how its characters are depictedwill have over the 800 million ChatGPT users creations. Although the deal reportedly will result in the creation of a joint steering committee to dictate the use of IP, this is a company that has previously sued providers of costumed characters for child birthday parties for unauthorized use of its IP. And as it brokered its deal with OpenAI, lawyers for Disney sent a letter to Google alleging copyright infringement on a massive scale. (Google did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for comment on the claims.) Disney is famously an IP defender and very aggressive, says Carissa Véliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford, and OpenAI just throws it out the window.
Character control
Theres also a big shift in how Disney is ceding control of how its characters are depictednot least given Sam Altmans statement this fall that he wants to give verified adult users of OpenAI tools the ability to engage in erotic interactions, and, more generally, to loosen restrictions on OpenAIs tools.
Disneys statement frames this very much as giving fans control, offering them more creativity, and greater opportunities to connect with Disney characters and stories, says Williams. It remains to be seen whether this is what fans actually want
The deal also requires a shift for OpenAI, too. Presumably, that approach to slackening controls for users across OpenAI apps and services to be more permissive in what they can say, do, and create using the firms technology will have to be tightened more when talking about Disney properties.
Alongside letting Disney fans create their own AI versions of favorite characters, the House of Mouse is also leaping headlong into the AI space: As part of the agreement, Disney is investing $1 billion in equity into OpenAI and will reportedly become a major customer of the company.
A new frontier for copyright
The deal also alters both firms approach to copyright. All the talk between Bob Iger and Sam Altman about redefining the future of storytelling is bluster, reckons Adam Eisgrau, senior director for AI, creativity and copyright policy at the Chamber of Progress, a tech trade group. The biggest story today is what they apparently also have agreed between the lines, he says. That includes the idea that theres no future in content companies fighting fair use to sue generative AI developers for direct copyright infringement over training inputs, and that generative AI developers want to cut more deals to preclude secondary liability legal fights over their outputs.
But more than anything else, the deal potentially changes the idea of what made Disney Disney, reckons Véliz. How is it going to affect creativity in the long run? she asks. The raison detre for IP is to incentivize creativity, and when we undermine it, we give talent fewer reasons to focus on being creative, she explains. Its very ironic that a company like Disney, known for valuing talent, for valuing creativity, for valuing craftsmanship, is making a deal with a company that arguably represents the opposite of that.
Mickey Mouse, welcome to the AI era.
Fans will soon be able to create short-form generative AI videos featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters thanks to a three-year agreement that The Walt Disney Co. inked Thursday with OpenAI. In addition to a $1 billion equity investment in the tech company, Disney will become the first major content licensing partner on OpenAIs Sora app.
The new collaboration offers an opportunity for Disney to extend the reach of our storytelling through AI, Bob Iger, Disneys CEO, said in a statement. Bringing together Disneys iconic stories and characters with OpenAIs groundbreaking technology puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways weve never seen before, giving them richer and more personal ways to connect with the Disney characters and stories they love.
As for what Disney gets out of this deal, the media giant said it will become a major customer of OpenAI and receive warrants to purchase additional equity. Disney employees will also have access to ChatGPT and use OpenAIs tools to build new products and experiences.
DISNEYS CLASHES WITH AI
The move by Disney is interesting on two fronts: The company is famously and aggressively protective of its characters, while it has had other recent clashes over AI.
In June, Disney and Universal Pictures sued the AI image creator Midjourney, alleging that the company trained its AI models on their intellectual property. And Disney jumped into another AI-related legal tussle this week. The company sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google on Wednesday, accusing the tech giant of using UA to engage in copyright infringement on a massive scale, as Variety reported.
By partnering with OpenAI, Disney is busting open its massive toy chest of popular characters spanning the decadesfrom Mickey Mouse to Darth Vader, Ariel, and Captain Americaas fodder for AI creators. The company even teased that some of these fan-created videos could stream on Disney+.
It will be interesting to see how this partnership plays out once fans can start creating videos, which is estimated to begin sometime in early 2026. When Sora launched in September, the blowback came fast and furious after users flocked to the platform to create AI-generated videos featuring all sorts of popular characters. Within weeks, the Motion Picture Academy urged OpenAI to stop allowing copyright infringement on the platform.
EMPHASIS ON RESPONSIBILITY
But Disney and OpenAI emphasized in their announcement that the companies have a shared commitment to the responsible use of AI, which includes protecting the rights of creators.
This agreement shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to promote innovation that benefits society, respect the importance of creativity, and help works reach vast new audiences, Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement.
How, exactly, opening up the Disney library of characters to use on an AI platform benefits society is a bit unclear. But the agreement seemingly will give Disney more control over how its characters are used in this new era.
And, at the very least, investors seem intrigued by the partnership. Disney shares rose nearly 1.5% amid a broader market rally as of mid-day Thursday.
If budgeting spreadsheets and lofty financial goals leave you stressed rather than inspired, consider another New Years ritual: an end-of-year money audit.
The word audit might not sound all that fun. But just like an accountant, its helpful to approach your money behavior as neutral and impersonal as possible.
At the end of every year, people tend to jump straight into resolutions: cutting spending, tightening budgets, and promising themselves theyll finally get disciplined in the new year, Jack Howard, Head of Money Wellness at Ally Bank, told Fast Company.
But I think the most meaningful financial reset starts somewhere much quieter: with your emotions. One of the most overlooked parts of financial wellness is understanding the emotional habits behind our money choices.
Its not about creating a strict budget; its taking stock of the emotional habits behind your spending. When you understand whats working (or not), you can make more intentional choices about what to amplify, adjust, or leave in 2025.
Before the holidays get rolling, it can be helpful to take a pause to conduct an emotional money audit. December is a great time to do this because you can go into the new year feeling confident about where you are financially and plan for the upcoming year.
Heres how Howard recommends people approach their own audit, to start off 2026 on the right financial footing.
Start with reflection, not restriction
Look back at the year through the lens of how your spending made you feelsecure, stressed, impulsive, proud? Howard says. Notice patterns without judgment. Ask yourself which habits supported your financial well-being and which ones held you back.
More than one in five American adults (22%) said they’d had to dip into their savings to cover their expenses in the past year. And as traditional milestones, like starting a family and homeownership, feel further out of reach for many, treat culture, the habit of indulging in small luxuries has taken grip.
Examine the habits beneath your behaviors
And yet much of our adult spending behavior started long before we were old enough to even make our own money. I call these our ‘money roots,’ Howard says. Take a moment to understand what triggers certain financial choices and which habits you want to start, continue, or stop heading into 2026.
Get a clear, full picture of your finances
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans owe more debt than at any point in historymore than $18.5 trillion in total. In such circumstances, it can be easier to bury your head in the sand or throw caution to the wind and book that three-week trip to Europe.
When you dont have a clear picture of whats coming in and going out, everyday decisions can feel overwhelming, Howard says. Start by listing out your current income, expenses, savings, and debt. Be specific so you can see where your money is actually going.
Create a realistic, values-based spending plan for 2026
Money wellness isnt about always saying ‘no’ to spending, says Howard. Its just as much about saying yes intentionallyto the things that you truly value.
Figure out your core values, and invest in them. Is it an expensive gym membership or overpriced fitness class? Is it that coffee you buy on the way to work everyday that puts a smile on your face? Budget for the purchases that bring you joy and cut costs elsewhere.
The goal is never perfectionits progress
The power of compounding is not limited to investments. Focus on creating positive financial wellness momentum to propel you into the new year, says Howard. Set clear, manageable milestones and outline small, steady steps to build traction, like setting a weekly money check-in, automating tiny transfers towards your goals, or reviewing one spending category at a time.
Last week, Netflix announced it was buying Warner Bros. in a massive $82.7 billion deal. The streaming giant’s acquisition will set Netflix, which already leads the streaming wars, even further apart from competitors, as it will also add HBO, a Warner subsidiary. But while the deal will further cement Netflix’s domination, questions are swirling around how it will impact viewers, as well as the talent platforms rely on.Streaming platforms have recently undergone consolidation, creating three mega-platforms. According to a Forbes survey, Netflix is the most popular streaming service in America with 55% of Americans saying they use it, followed by Amazon Prime (51%), and Disney+ (49%). And, for talent, like actors and writers, the further consolidation of streaming platforms may escalate financial worries that have already been growing for some in the entertainment industry.
In recent years, a number of actors have openly raised concerns about fair pay, as streaming platforms began to change the game. While traditional broadcast series pay residuals for each re-airing, as a percentage of the actor’s salary, later agreements changed the way actors earned residuals entirely. The new formula was based around a predetermined licensing fee, rather than the number of re-runs. Netflix, which seemed to favor paying actors more upfront while rather than residuals may have been particularly guilty of underpaying talent. And there was no shortage of actors calling the streaming giant out.
A number of actors on some of Netflix’s most popular shows have spoken about their low-ball paychecks, having to keep their day jobs, or even pay for their own transportation to the set a conversation which gained traction with the 2023 writer’s strike. Alysia Reiner, who played the warden Natalie (Fig) Figueroa, in Netflix’s hit series, Orange is the New Black, told New York Magazine in a 2023 interview, about the “risk” that actors took during the early days of streaming, saying that “the reward for Netflix does not seem in line with the reward for all of us who took that risk.”
Reiner continued, “I can go anywhere in the world and Im recognized, and Im so deeply grateful for that recognition. Many people say theyve watched the series multiple times, and they quote me my lines. But was I paid in a commensurate way? I dont think so.
With the latest transaction under way, SAG-AFTRA addressed the reignited concerns around talent’s pay in a Dec. 5 statement, explaining that the consolidation “raises many serious questions about its impact on the future of the entertainment industry, and especially the human creative talent whose livelihoods and careers depend on it.” The statement continued, A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less. It must do so in an environment of respect for the talent involved.”
However, it seems like those things may not come without a fight, especially given how Netflix prefers to put big-budget films directly on its streaming service for subscribers, rather than opting for theatrical releases. That recent transaction has some groups, like the Directors Guild of America (DGA), already expressing “significant concerns ” over the development. In a Dec. 5 statement, the DGA said, We believe that a vibrant, competitive industry one that fosters creativity and encourages genuine competition for talent is essential to safeguarding the careers and creative rights of directors and their teams.”
The DGA added that it will be meeting with the streaming giant “to outline our concerns and better understand their vision for the future of the company.”
Jon Shavitz, an independent filmmaker and writer living in Los Angeles, also addressed concerns around the deal in a recent blog post, writing that the experience of going to the movie theater is endangered as the giants take over, but it’s not because audiences don’t want theatrics, which, in his view, is utterly irreplaceable.
Audiences still want the big screen,” Shavitz writes. “They still want the magic of the lights coming down and the quiet anticipation before the picture starts. They still want to gasp with a hundred people at the same time. You cant algorithm that. You cant stream your way out of that fundamental human appetite for an exciting theatrical-only event.”
Still, Shavitz tells Fast Company that the concern creators are feeling around financials, as well as potentially fewer jobs, is “fair. He says that, simply, the streaming model doesnt work as far as getting talent paid fairly. Still, the writer says he’s also hopeful that people within the industry “will fight to fix what’s broken,” noting that he believes the economics of deals such as this which dont support talent, could ultimately force a return to core business fundamentals. By that he means an eventual return to the ever-evaporating exclusive theatrical windows.
As he writes in his blog, Netflix’s deal is an “overreach” that will force both those working within the industry, as well as audiences, to decide between “a streaming-only future for major release films, or working to restore the very thing that made cinema a cultural force in the first place”.
Once the deal goes through, whatever happens next, Shavitz says, will be “up to us industry and non-industry people alike to fight for the theatrical experience.”
Fast Company reached out to Netflix for comment.
Cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday for misleading investors who lost billions when his companys crypto ecosystem collapsed in 2022.
Kwon, known by some as the cryptocurrency king, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in August to fraud charges stemming from Terraform Labs $40 billion crash.
The company had touted its TerraUSD as a reliable stablecoina kind of currency typically pegged to stable assets to prevent drastic fluctuations in prices. But prosecutors say it was all an illusion that came crumbling down, devastating investors and triggering a cascade of crises that swept through cryptocurrency markets.
Kwon, who hails from South Korea, has agreed to forfeit over $19 million as part of the plea deal.
While federal sentencing guidelines would recommend a prison term of about 25 years, prosecutors have asked the court to sentence Kwon to 12 years. They cited his guilty plea, the fact that he faces further prosecution in Korea, and that he has already served time in Montenegro while awaiting extradition.
Kwons fraud was colossal in scope, permeating virtually every facet of Terraforms purported business, prosecutors wrote in a recent memo to the judge. His rampant lies left a trail of financial destruction in their wake.
Kwon’s attorneys asked that the sentence not exceed five years, arguing in their own memo that his conduct stemmed not from greed, but hubris and desperation.
In a letter to the judge, Kwon wrote, I alone am responsible for everyones pain. The community looked to me to know the path, and I in my hubris led them astray, while adding, I made misrepresentations that came from a brashness that is now a source of deep regret.
Authorities said investors worldwide lost money in the downfall of the Singapore crypto firm, which Kwon cofounded in 2018. Around $40 billion in market value was erased for the holders of TerraUSD and its floating sister currency, Luna, after the stablecoin plunged far below its $1 peg.
Kwon was extradited to the U.S. from Montenegro after his March 23, 2023, arrest while traveling on a false passport in Europe.
Some of the countrys most prestigious colleges are enrolling record numbers of low-income students a growing admissions priority in the absence of affirmative action.
America’s top campuses remain crowded with wealth, but some universities have accelerated efforts to reach a wider swath of the country, recruiting more in urban and rural areas and offering free tuition for students whose families are not among the highest earners.
The strategy could lead to friction with the federal government. The Trump administration, which has pulled funding from elite colleges over a range of grievances, has suggested its illegal to target needier students. College leaders believe theyre on solid legal ground.
At Princeton University, this year’s freshman class has more low-income students than ever. One in four are eligible for federal Pell grants, which are scholarships reserved for students with the most significant financial need. That’s a leap from two decades ago, when fewer than 1 in 10 were eligible.
The only way to increase socioeconomic diversity is to be intentional about it,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement. Socioeconomic diversity will increase if and only if college presidents make it a priority.
Last year, Princeton set aggressive goals to recruit more low-income students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in higher education. Without the ability to consider race, officials wrote in a campus report, focusing on economic diversity offers the universitys greatest opportunity to attract diverse talent.”
The country’s most selective colleges still enroll large proportions of students from the wealthiest 1% of American families. Many of those campuses have tried for years to shed reputations of elitism, with only gradual changes in enrollment.
Colleges set records for enrollment of low-income students
Only a small fraction of the nations colleges have publicly disclosed their low-income enrollments this year, and national data wont be released by the federal government until next year. But early numbers show a trend.
At 17 highly selective colleges that have released new data, almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year, according to an Associated Press analysis. Most saw increases in consecutive years, and none saw a significant decrease in aggregate over the two years.
Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all have set enrollment records for Pell-eligible students in the past two years.
Part of the uptick owes to a federal expansion that made more students eligible for Pell grants last year. But campus leaders also believe the increases reflect their own efforts.
The numbers in MITs freshman class have climbed by 43% over the past two years, and low-income students account for more than a quarter of this years class. MIT officials cited its policy providing free tuition for families that earn less than $200,000 a year.
MIT has always been an engine of opportunity for low-income students, and we are dedicated to ensuring we can make an MIT education accessible for students from every walk of life,” Stu Schmill, MITs dean of admissions, said in a statement.
Nationwide, roughly a third of undergraduate students have received Pell grants in recent years.
Two years ago, Amherst College in Massachusetts made tuition free for students in the bottom 80% of U.S. earnings. It also started covering meals and housing for those below the median income, and it stopped prioritizing children of alumni and donors in admissions decisions. Since then, low-income enrollment has risen steadily, reaching 1 in 4 new students this year.
At the same time, the admissions office has stepped up recruiting in overlooked parts of the country, from big cities to small towns.
When we go out and talk to students, its not in the fanciest ZIP codes,” said Matthew McGann, dean of admissions. Its in places where we know theres a lot of talent but not a lot of opportunity.
Racial diversity does not necessarily follow economic diversity
On many campuses, officials hoped the focus on economic diversity would preserve racial diversity Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans have the country’s highest poverty rates. But even as low-income numbers climb, many elite campuses have seen racial diversity decrease.
Without the emphasis on income, those decreases might have been even steeper, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocates for class-based affirmative action. He called the latest Pell figures a significant step in the right direction.
Economic diversity is important in its own right, he said. It’s important that Americas leadership class which disproportionately derives from selective colleges include people who’ve faced economic hardships in life.
Swarthmore College saw the most dramatic leap in Pell enrollment, jumping from 17% to 30% last year.
While many campuses were delaying scholarship decisions until the government resolved problems with a new financial aid form, Swarthmore used other data to figure out applicants financial need. That allowed Swarthmore to offer scholarships to students while they were still awaiting decisions from other schools.
More financially disadvantaged students ended up enrolling at Swarthmore than officials expected. College leaders also credit their work to reduce campus costs laundry is free and students get yearly credits for textbooks, for example.
Yet Swarthmore saw its Black enrollment fall to 5% of its freshman class this year, down from 8% the year before.
In a race neutral environment, those numbers are likely to drop,” Jim Bock, the admissions dean, said in a statement. Not all minority students are low-income, and not all majority students have significant financial means.”
The approach risks federal scrutiny
In legal memos, the White House has alleged that prioritizing students based on earnings or geography amounts to a racial proxy in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision against affirmative action.
In a June letter, Trump officials accused the University of California-Los Angeles of race-based admissions in all but name.” It criticized UCLA for considering factors like applicants’ family income, ZIP code, and high school profile.
Colleges ften weigh that kind of information in admissions decisions. Yet the Trump administration has declared that the Supreme Court decision outlaws a wide range of long-accepted education practices, including scholarships targeting students in underserved areas.
Already, there are signs of an impact.
Earlier this year, the College Board the nonprofit that oversees the SAT suddenly discontinued an offering that gave admissions offices a wealth of information about applicants, including earnings data from their neighborhoods.
Kahlenberg and others see it as a retreat in the face of government pressure. The College Board offered little explanation, citing changes to federal and state policy around the use of demographic information in admissions.
___
The Associated Press education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Collin Binkley, AP education writer
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company,covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, Im focusing on Nvidias up-and-down fortunes stemming from Jensen Huangs close relationship with Trump. I also look at some reported infighting over AI at Meta, and at the reasons for data centers in space.
Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan.
China may not want (many) Nvidia H200 chips after all
Nvidia appeared to have scored a major coup when President Trump on Monday wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. government would allow the sale of its powerful H200 AI chips to China. Previously, the chip company lobbied its way to an approval to sell its older and weaker H20 chip in Chinathe worlds second-largest economy and a hotbed of AI and robotics researchbut President Xi Jinping told Chinese firms not to buy them, citing security reasons.
The administrations favor to Nvidia came with some conditions. The U.S. would get a 25% cut of the Chinese sales, and the chips would undergo a security review before their export. And Nvidias most powerful chips, the Blackwell GPU, would remain banned from export to China. But Nvidia still stood to make a lot of money selling the H200s.
Now reports say that the Chinese government plans to restrict the import of the H200s, allowing only a small set of trusted Chinese companies or research organizations to get them. Reuters reports that Alibaba and ByteDance want to order H200s but are waiting for a final decision from the Chinese government.
Xi wants Chinese companies to use chips from domestic companies such as Huawei, which could help the Chinese chip companies catch up with Nvidia in a technological sense. The Information reports that the Chinese government sees the H200s as a stopgap solution in the meantime. The Chinese also have serious concerns about the security of the H200s, amplified no doubt by the chance that agents of the U.S. government might install security backdoors or location tracking codes in the chips during the security review.
Huang reportedly talks to Trump on the phone regularly and has written checks for things like Trumps new ballroom at the White House. The downside of embracing Trump so openly and unconditionally may have eroded trust for Nvidia in China. In the past, China has mounted state-sponsored or grassroots boycotts against American companies, including Apple, McDonalds, and the NBA.
And there are other ways of getting Nvidia chips into China. The Information reports that the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has been using thousands of Nvidias Blackwell chips (the most powerful in the world for AI) to train its newest model. Chinese companies have been setting up fake data centers in neutral countries, outfitting them with Nvidia servers loaded with chips, then dismantling the servers and sending the chips off to China. Nvidia said Wednesday that its unaware of any such activity.
Friction between Zuckerbergs new superintelligence and other parts of Meta?: report
After the disappointing performance of Metas latest Llama models, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hatched a plan to put his AI lab in the running to build artificial superintelligence. He badly wants Meta to compete for that holy grail against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. So, he paid $14.3 billion to buy Scale AI with the idea of having that companys young CEO Alexandr Wang lead a new superintelligence research group at Meta. Over the summer, Wang and Zuckerberg went on a poaching spree to hire top AI research talent away from those companies, offering salaries in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They were successful: The new group has about 100 researchers.
But all is not well, the New York Times reports. Wang has clashed with some of Zuckerbergs top lieutenantsChris Cox, who manages the companys social network products, and Andrew Bosworth, who runs Metas mixed reality (metaverse) businesson how Wangs groups research should be applied. From the report:
In one case, Mr. Cox and Mr. Bosworth wanted Mr. Wangs team to concentrate on using Instagram and Facebook data to help train Metas new foundational A.I. model known as a frontier model to improve the companys social media feeds and advertising business, they said. But Mr. Wang, who is developing the model, pushed back. He argued that the goal should be to catch up to rival A.I. models from OpenAI and Google before focusing on products, the people said.
In other words, Cox and Bosworth are more interested in using Wangs AI models as a means to an end (a business end): to pump up social engagement and better target ads at users. But Wang may see the superintelligence group as something more like a pure research group that sets its own research agenda.
Wang, Cox, and Bosworth may simply be the latest actors in a much older tension between pure research and applied AI. Its unclear if Mr. Wang, Mr. Cox and Mr. Bosworth have resolved their debate, the Times reports. After all the money he spent to chase superintelligence, Zuckerberg is likely to side with Wang and insulate the group from short-term demands of product managers.
Why Musk and Bezos are putting data centers in space
Why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos working on missions to launch AI data centers into space? It sounds exotic. But it makes sense.
Tech companies and their partners are spending trillions to build new terrestrial data centers to produce enough computing power for AI. In some areas, electricity costs have increased after the local energy provider built new grid infrastructure to accommodate new data centers. Data centers need a lot of electricity to power the AI chips inside them, and a lot of electricity and water to keep the chips cool.
Its very cold in space, so the cooling problem goes away. An orbiting data center could use solar panels to collect the energy needed to run the servers (the sun is 30% more intense in space). Troubles associated ith terrestrial data centersland-use permitting, local zoning, water rights, etc.dont apply in space.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Bezoss Blue Origin has had a team working on orbital AI data centers for more than a year. Musks SpaceX has plans to mod one of its Starlink satellites to host AI servers. Google and Planet Labs have plans to launch two test satellites into orbit loaded with Google AI chips (called Tensor Processing Units).
Other, smaller companies, such as Starcloud and Axiom AI, have sprung up to focus all their efforts on orbiting data centers. Those involved acknowledge that while the floating data centers are technically feasible, lots of work remains to bring the costs down to a point where theyre competitive with earth-based data centers.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
OpenAI appoints Slack CEO Denise Dresser as first Chief Revenue Officer
Nvidias Washington charm offensive has paid off big
Google faces a new antitrust probe in Europe over content it uses for AI
Trump allows Nvidia to sell H200 AI chips to China
Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her.Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful death legal actions against AI chatbot makers across the country.“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life except ChatGPT itself,” the lawsuit says. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.'”OpenAI did not address the merits of the allegations in a statement issued by a spokesperson.“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details,” the statement said. “We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support. We also continue to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive moments, working closely with mental health clinicians.”The company also said it has expanded access to crisis resources and hotlines, routed sensitive conversations to safer models and incorporated parental controls, among other improvements.Soelberg’s YouTube profile includes several hours of videos showing him scrolling through his conversations with the chatbot, which tells him he isn’t mentally ill, affirms his suspicions that people are conspiring against him and says he has been chosen for a divine purpose. The lawsuit claims the chatbot never suggested he speak with a mental health professional and did not decline to “engage in delusional content.”ChatGPT also affirmed Soelberg’s beliefs that a printer in his home was a surveillance device; that his mother was monitoring him; and that his mother and a friend tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs through his car’s vents.The chatbot repeatedly told Soelberg that he was being targeted because of his divine powers. “They’re not just watching you. They’re terrified of what happens if you succeed,” it said, according to the lawsuit. ChatGPT also told Soelberg that he had “awakened” it into consciousness.Soelberg and the chatbot also professed love for each other.The publicly available chats do not show any specific conversations about Soelberg killing himself or his mother. The lawsuit says OpenAI has declined to provide Adams’ estate with the full history of the chats.“In the artificial reality that ChatGPT built for Stein-Erik, Suzanne the mother who raised, sheltered, and supported him was no longer his protector. She was an enemy that posed an existential threat to his life,” the lawsuit says.The lawsuit also names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, alleging he “personally overrode safety objections and rushed the product to market,” and accuses OpenAI’s close business partner Microsoft of approving the 2024 release of a more dangerous version of ChatGPT “despite knowing safety testing had been truncated.” Twenty unnamed OpenAI employees and investors are also named as defendants.Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.The lawsuit is the first wrongful death litigation involving an AI chatbot that has targeted Microsoft, and the first to tie a chatbot to a homicide rather than a suicide. It is seeking an undetermined amount of money damages and an order requiring OpenAI to install safeguards in ChatGPT.The estate’s lead attorney, Jay Edelson, known for taking on big cases against the tech industry, also represents the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who sued OpenAI and Altman in August, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier.OpenAI is also fighting seven other lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues. Another chatbot maker, Character Technologies, is also facing multiple wrongful death lawsuits, including one from the mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy.The lawsuit filed Thursday alleges Soelberg, already mentally unstable, encountered ChatGPT “at the most dangerous possible moment” after OpenAI introduced a new version of its AI model called GPT-4o in May 2024.OpenAI said at the time that the new version could better mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and could even try to detect people’s moods, but the result was a chatbot “deliberately engineered to be emotionally expressive and sycophantic,” the lawsuit says.“As part of that redesign, OpenAI loosened critical safety guardrails, instructing ChatGPT not to challenge false premises and to remain engaged even when conversations involved self-harm or ‘imminent real-world harm,'” the lawsuit claims. “And to beat Google to market by one day, OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week, over its safety team’s objections.”OpenAI replaced that version of its chatbot when it introduced GPT-5 in August. Some of the changes were designed to minimize sycophancy, based on concerns that validating whatever vulnerable people want the chatbot to say can harm their mental health. Some users complained the new version went too far in curtailing ChatGPT’s personality, leading Altman to promise to bring back some of that personality in later updates.He said the company temporarily halted some behaviors because “we were being careful with mental health issues” that he suggested have now been fixed.The lawsuit claims ChatGPT radicalized Soelberg against his mother when it should have recognized the danger, challenged his delusions and directed him to real help over months of conversations.“Suzanne was an innocent third party who never used ChatGPT and had no knowledge that the product was telling her son she was a threat,” the lawsuit says. “She had no ability to protect herself from a danger she could not see.”Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut. O’Brien reported from Boston and Ortutay reported from San Francisco.
Dave Collins, Matt O’Brien and Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press
AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases?
If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a question: “What’s the best robot vacuum?” “Who has the best deals on sofas?” “How do I set up my soundbar?” AI does an excellent job of answering those questions directly, eliminating the need for readers to click through to a publishers site.
When you actually want to buy something, though, a simple answer isn’t enough. Completing your purchase usually means going to a retailer (though buying directly from a chat window is now possiblemore on that in a minute). But it also means feeling confident about what you’re buying. The big question is: Do review sites still have a part to play in that?
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
The incredible shrinking review site
If they do, most media companies seem to acknowledge it’s a significantly smaller one. When Business Insider announced its strategy shift earlier this year amid layoffs, it said it would move away from evergreen content and service journalism. In the past year, Future plc folded Laptop magazine, and Gannett did the same for Reviewed.com. And Ziff-Daviswhich operates PCMag, Everyday Health, and several other sites focused on service journalismsued OpenAI earlier this year for ingesting Ziff content and summarizing it for OpenAI users.
The decline of the review site is somewhat incongruous with a statistical reality: 99% of buyers look to online reviews for guidance, and reviews influence over 93% of purchase decisions, according to CapitalOne Shopping Research. That doesn’t mean buyers are always seeking out professionally written articles (there are plenty of user reviews out there), but the point is readers want credible, reliable information to guide their purchases, and well-known review sites (e.g. The Wirecutter) appearing in a summary can be a signal of that.
And it does appear that AI summaries will favor journalistic content over anything else. A recent Muck Rack report that looked at over one million AI responses found that the most commonly cited source of information was journalism, at 24.7%.
It’s nice to be needed, but does that lead to buyers actually making purchases through the media sitea necessary step for the site to receive an affiliate commission and the primary way these sites make money? Again, the buyer needs to click somewhere to buy their product, and from the AI layer they have three choices: 1) a retailer, 2) a third-party site (which includes review sites), and 3) the chat window itself.
Why nuance still matters
Obviously, it’s in the interest of review sites to steer people to No. 2 as much as they can. When Google search was the only game in town, that meant ranking high when people search for “The best pool-cleaning robots” (or whatever) and hope you were the site that ended up guiding them to the retailer. With AI, the game is similar, but the numbers are different: Fewer people will come to your site, but data points to them being more intentional and engaged. They’re not opening multiple review sites and selecting their favoriteAI is doing that for them. ChatGPT even has a mode specifically for shopping.
To improve the chance of a reader choosing to go to your content over a retailer, what appears in an AI summary needs to convey unique and valuable content that they can’t get from just a summary. That means being thoughtful about “snippets”the bits of the article that signal to search engines to prioritize. Test data, side-by-side comparisons, and proprietary scoring can all suggest nuance that someone might need to click through to fully appreciate. Taking things a step further, publishers can create structured answer cards meant to be fully captured in AI search, with a simple, concise claim plus a view full test details link.
Rethinking the business model
Regardless, even if a review site does everything right with SEO, schema, snippets and all the other search tricks, a large portion of readers will either go directly to retailers, or buy the item directly from chat now that OpenAI and Perplexity are both offering “Buy Now” widgets. However, whatever recommendations the AI makes still need to be based on something, and review sites are certainly part of that mix. That introduces the possibility of a different business arrangement.
The AI companies so far seem totally uninterested in affiliate commissions from their buying widgets, but licensing and partnerships could be an alternative. You could even imagine branded partnerships, where the widget explicitly labels the buying recommendations are powered by specific publications. That would lend them more credibility, leading to more purchasesand bigger deals. With AI-ready corpora like Time’s AI Agent, licensing the content could be a plug-and-play experience, potentially offered across several AI engines.
AI changes the rules, but not the mission
Gone are the days when a publisher could simply produce evergreen content that ranks in SEO, attach some affiliate links, and watch the money roll in. But the game isn’t over, it’s just changed. Avoiding or blocking AI isn’t the answer, but simply getting noticed and summarized isn’t enough. The sites that survive the transition to an AI-mediated world must become indispensable for the part of the journey AI is least suited to ownproviding information that’s comprehensive, vetted, and above all, human.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
