Blog

Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s…

As BMW car bodies glided down an assembly line in Munich recently, showered by sparks from robotic welders, it was hard to tell which vehicles would be powered by batteries, fuel-burning engines or both. In the view of many analysts, that is not a good thing.The German automaker’s electric vehicles are made on the same assembly line as gasoline cars and look similar from the outside. That approach, using the same basic body for electric, hybrid, gasoline and diesel cars, has been viewed as an awkward and inefficient compromise some established carmakers have deployed as they struggle to compete with…

Washington lawmakers introduced a bill this week calling for TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States. When many users opened the popular app on Thursday, the company greeted them with a message to oppose the legislation, prompting a flood of phone calls to several Capitol Hill offices.“Stop a TikTok shutdown,” the message on the app read. It included a button for people to call their representatives, saying: “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”By noon, the phone lines for members of Congress were…

OpenAI, in its first public comments about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab, said that Mr. Musk tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the organization in early 2018.The comments, made in a blog post published on Tuesday evening, are part of an escalating feud between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industrywide A.I. boom. The company said it intended to move to dismiss all the claims in Mr. Musk’s suit.Mr. Musk filed the suit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam…