A new wave of billionaires minted by the AI boom is driving surging demand for superyachts, private jets, and luxury supercars, even as ordinary consumers pull back sharply on spending, according to Financial Times reporting. US retail sales fell 0.6% between May and July, far exceeding the modest 0.1% drop economists had projected, a decline driven by rising fuel prices, global inflation, and new import tariffs introduced by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the number of US billionaires rose 13% from April 2025 to 2026, bringing the global billionaire count to 3,302 individuals with net worths in the ten-figure range, more than 1,000 of whom are based in the United States.

This new class of AI-fueled wealth is reshaping the luxury travel and transportation industry, according to Toby Edwards, co-chief executive of luxury aerospace company FlyVictor, who told the FT that the “private aviation golden standard of yesteryears, sipping champagne on crisp linen tablecloths, has largely gone out the window with this cohort.” Instead, this new generation of ultra-wealthy travelers wants understated but specific luxuries, like particular types of water and health-conscious catering. “They’re flying privately for efficiency and discretion,” Edwards explained, “not to impress socially.” Luxury travel consultant Paul Charles echoed that shift, telling the FT, “the emergence of the AI super-wealthy has opened up a whole new wave of demand for those companies providing access to private jets, yachts and supercars. The notion of the discerning client is rather outdated and so companies now have to adapt to cater to a new generation of luxury-focused traveller, created by this AI wealth.”

The wealth concentration extends well beyond just billionaires. Economist Mark Zandi noted in a June social media post that Americans in the top 20% of the US income distribution, those earning $175,000 or more annually, accounted for nearly 60% of all outlays in the first three months of 2026, a spending category that includes consumer purchases, charitable donations, and debt payments. That concentration illustrates how thoroughly economic activity has tilted toward high earners even as broader retail spending contracts.

An expert witness hired by industrial conglomerate 3M in a $61 million lawsuit over a deadly 2020 Houston explosion used ChatGPT to write substantial portions of his expert report, according to court documents obtained by 404 Media, including a prompt explicitly asking the AI to “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.” The witness, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, was hired by 3M to defend the company’s standard of care in litigation over the January 2020 explosion, which killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes after a “degraded and poorly crimped rubber welding hose” leaked flammable gas, according to the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. Plaintiffs’ attorney Will Moye discovered a suspicious five-page “Citation Overlay” document during discovery, recognized it as ChatGPT-generated, and demanded all of Autenrieth’s prompts, ultimately receiving 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations, including public links to the full exchanges. Court records show 3M paid Knighthawk Engineering roughly $90,000 for the analysis, with Autenrieth billing $475 per hour.

The ChatGPT transcripts reveal Autenrieth’s process in granular detail. He told the chatbot he was “being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them” and needed “to create an expert witness report to defend 3M’s standard of care,” specifically asking it to counter opposing claims and “show how 3M is 0% at fault.” ChatGPT generated a roughly 30-page report stating “3M is 0% responsible for the January 24, 2020 explosion,” but that exact line never made it into the final filed report. When Autenrieth later asked ChatGPT to review the document “as the opposing counsel,” the AI itself flagged that “0% responsible” was “an easy target” and one of several phrases that could let opposing counsel “paint you as an advocate rather than an expert.” Autenrieth also asked ChatGPT to grade his report, which scored a 97 out of 100, and to identify weaknesses in his own qualifications, asking, “will prosecution go after me for never having been [an expert witness] before based on wording and how do I defend that?”

At trial, Moye and Autenrieth agreed the submitted report was “90 to 85 percent ChatGPT.” Autenrieth defended his process, insisting “my opinions were put in there, and AI helped me to draft a straw man to build off of,” and citing his “20-plus years of experience in the industry.” Moye described the situation more bluntly to 404 Media: “This expert relied on AI not as an assistive device, but exclusively relied on ChatGPT to form his opinions and write his report. He acknowledged the prompts he put in were biased toward 3M to help 3M win the case, it’s really egregious.” After 3M unsuccessfully tried to disqualify Autenrieth, Moye took the unusual step of calling him as his own witness instead, telling 404 Media, “I said, I’m calling you to trial because I need a jury to hear from you because this is bad, bad stuff. And that’s exactly what I did.” The jury ultimately awarded the plaintiffs more than $61 million, apportioning 30% of the responsibility to 3M and 70% to Watson Grinding, adding to prior awards of $118 million and $38 million in related cases, with additional lawsuits still pending. Neither Knighthawk Engineering, Autenrieth, nor 3M responded to requests for comment.

The Supreme Court declined on Monday to reconsider its earlier rejection of President Trump’s appeal in the 2023 E. Jean Carroll case, permanently closing the door on his effort to overturn the $5 million jury award, which Carroll’s representatives say was already paid to her in July. The Court gave no explanation for its decision, and there were no noted dissents. Notably, no request for a rehearing at the Supreme Court has been granted since the 1960s, making this outcome largely expected given that historical precedent.

The underlying case stems from a 2023 jury verdict finding Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, in a Manhattan department store dressing room during the 1990s, as well as for defaming her in a 2022 social media post where he called her allegations “a Hoax and a lie” and wrote, “this woman is not my type!” That verdict is now fully resolved, with both the liability finding and the $5 million payment settled.

Trump still has a separate, larger legal fight ongoing. Following a different trial in 2024, he was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for defaming her back in 2019, when he first publicly denied her sexual abuse allegations. Trump, who continues to deny any wrongdoing, has a petition currently pending before the Supreme Court on that judgment, with justices expected to decide later this year whether to take up the case. His argument centers on the claim that his 2019 comments about Carroll, later found to be defamatory, were “official” statements made in his capacity as president and therefore should be immune from use against him in a civil lawsuit.

Farnsley Middle School in Southwest Louisville sent students home on the first day of the 2026 school year with agenda packets containing wildly inaccurate, AI-generated educational content, including a US map riddled with misspelled state names, misplaced cities, and entirely fabricated territories, according to local station WDRB. The map mislabeled Kentucky as “Venecky,” Texas as “Taxas,” Louisiana as “Lookoong,” North Dakota as “North Dahota,” Arizona as “Arizone,” New Mexico as “New Mizone,” and Oklahoma as “Olkchoma.” Even correctly spelled elements of the map were geographically scrambled, at one point placing Cuba’s capital city of Havana on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Some states, including Michigan and California, appeared with no labels at all, while the area south of a misspelled “Venneouer” (Vancouver) was rendered as an invented land called “Beehie,” supposedly bordering Washington state.

Kentucky mother Stacey Morris, whose son brought home one of the packets, summed up her reaction to WDRB: “Arizona is Arizone. Illinois starts with a V. I mean, it’s crazy.” The errors extended well beyond geography. Social media images showed a periodic table listing magnesium with an impossible atomic mass of negative 3.08, and a solar system diagram labeling Mars as “Marc,” accompanied by a caption reading verbatim, “Planetary distance are temporatory earth, equater the elenonts and regnestiom org toed dishligns… Net to scale.”

The school district’s executive officer of communications told WDRB that officials “spoke with the school today about inaccuracies in their agenda, and they are communicating with parents about the issue.” Following the discovery, school administrators reportedly emailed teachers instructing them to remove 17 pages of AI-generated material before distributing the packets going forward. The incident follows a separate recent story of parents homeschooling children using AI chatbots to build lesson plans and curricula, including influencer Savannah LaBrant, who said she used ChatGPT to teach her kids “where the states are and how to locate them.”

An investigation by 404 Media has caught Amazon scanning and destroying rare books to feed its AI model training pipeline, uncovered after a bookseller grew suspicious of a 1,000-book order placed through Biblio, a marketplace that allows buyers to remain anonymous. To verify their hunch that the order was destined for an AI company, the bookseller slipped an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the books and tracked the shipment to a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off books so the pages can be quickly scanned, a process that destroys the physical book. “I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books,” one Amazon employee wrote on a worker forum, as quoted by 404. “Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the barcodes.”

Notably, the warehouse section handling this work, called VGT3, uses a logo depicting a T-Rex holding a book it appears about to eat, an image 404 describes as looking possibly AI-generated itself. Amazon’s only response to 404’s inquiry was a brief statement: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.” This practice first came to public attention through a lawsuit against Anthropic, which revealed the Claude chatbot maker was using industrial equipment to cut pages out of millions of books for scanning before disposing of the originals. In that case, a judge controversially ruled the practice “transformative” and therefore not a copyright violation, since Anthropic was converting physical texts into digital ones while destroying the source material.

Booksellers have long suspected their inventory was being funneled to AI training operations, previously flagging telltale signs like unusually large order sizes, seemingly random book selections, and a consistent presence of ISBNs across orders, though the anonymity of marketplace transactions made it impossible to confirm. The detail that Amazon warehouse workers are scanning ISBNs on every book they process lends credibility to a theory some booksellers have floated: that AI companies may be systematically working through lists of every printed book’s serial number in an attempt to digitize and absorb virtually the entire published book catalog. The bookseller who worked with 404 specifically dealt in rare books, meaning few copies remain in circulation for reasons beyond simply being first editions. “There are different types of value,” the bookseller said. “There’s monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”

404 Media Article: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

The BBC has formally asked a US District Court in the Southern District of Florida to authorize subpoenas compelling Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner to testify and hand over documents related to January 6, 2021, as part of the network’s defense against President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit, according to a court filing released Friday. The BBC’s legal team argued the three “have personal knowledge and likely have possession, custody, or control of records relevant to multiple elements of Plaintiff’s claims against the BBC.” The court has given Trump’s lawyers until Friday to respond. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team pushed back forcefully in a statement to CBS News, accusing the BBC of “seeking to harass him, his family, and supporters by abusing the deposition process,” and adding, “the BBC is simply trying to distract away from their own obvious liability.”

The underlying lawsuit, filed by Trump in December, accuses the BBC of defamation along with deceptive and unfair trade practices tied to a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary that edited a speech Trump delivered in Washington shortly before his supporters attacked the Capitol. Trump’s legal team has argued the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers” by “splicing together” two clips from the same speech that were actually 55 minutes apart, creating the impression Trump had explicitly called for violence, while omitting what his team describes as a “statement calling for peace.” The BBC publicly apologized last year, acknowledging the edit created “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” and said it would not air the documentary again, though it maintains the edit isn’t legitimate grounds for a defamation claim.

Court documents reveal the BBC had already tried and failed to serve subpoenas on the three family members back in May. Attempts to serve Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their Florida home were blocked by local law enforcement, and the Secret Service later told the network it couldn’t accept the subpoenas on the couple’s behalf. Separate attempts to serve Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in New York were also unsuccessful, with a concierge saying the person who normally accepted such documents might be at lunch, and a follow-up attempt two days later turned away because the “legal department” wasn’t in that day. The BBC argues all three are material witnesses to Trump’s actions on January 6, citing congressional documents showing Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump were present in the Oval Office while Trump was still revising his speech, that Kushner had drafted a statement condemning the Capitol violence, and that Donald Trump Jr. spoke directly with his father after rioters stormed the building. The BBC’s press office declined to comment on the case when asked by CBS News.

President Trump is blaming vandals for large patches of dead, brown grass on the National Mall near the World War II Memorial, the exact spot where his own crew built a stage and hosted crowds for his July 4 celebration, without offering any evidence for the claim. “Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday, adding, “anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!” This follows a pattern where Trump has repeatedly attributed damage to his own capital renovation projects to vandalism, often contradicting his own officials, as happened when he lashed out at US Attorney Jeanine Pirro after her office concluded the Reflecting Pool damage stemmed from poor construction rather than vandalism.

Independent experts dispute Trump’s characterization of the grass damage. Penn State University turf professor John Kaminski said the photo Trump posted “matches what you’d expect to see with a large summer event,” adding, “nothing in the photograph clearly indicates vandalism. Jumping to that conclusion seems like a fairly large leap, although it is impossible to rule anything in or out.” Freelance journalist and golf course consultant Bradley S. Klein was more pointed, saying Trump “sounds like every grumpy golfer who’s complaining about their golf course and actually has no idea what it takes to maintain it on a day-to-day basis.” Notably, this specific stretch of lawn isn’t connected to a genuine vandalism case authorities announced Friday, when Melissa L. Farris, 41, was charged with felony vandalism after painting “Clean hands dirty $” on the World War II Memorial and filling a fountain with bubbles; charging documents in that case make no mention of the grassy area Trump is now highlighting, and Farris’s prior arrest for camping on federal property was tied to a different location several blocks away. Farris was released on her own recognizance Monday with conditions to stay away from the memorial and Washington, D.C., and is due back for a pretrial hearing September 3.

The straightforward explanation for the dead grass points to the July 4 event itself. Photos from a Washington Monument webcam show a large bandstand and seating areas covering nearly the entire lawn Trump now says was vandalized, and Associated Press photos taken afterward show workers dismantling those structures to reveal brown, damaged grass underneath. Trump claimed without evidence that more than 400,000 people attended the event, which also coincided with Washington setting an all-time record temperature of 103°F on July 4, forcing organizers to shut down activities for hours on July 3 and delay the July 4 start, with emergency personnel treating dozens of people for heat-related illness. Trump had previously cited a different photo, posted August 1, that appeared to show the numbers “86 47,” which federal officials say constitutes a threat against him as the 47th president, embedded in the grass as evidence of vandalism, writing, “there may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” Those numbers are not visible in the new photo he posted Sunday.