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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hollywood’s actors’ union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Llama Productions on Monday, alleging the company replaced actors’ work by using artificial intelligence to generate Darth Vader’s voice in Fortnite without notice.

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists said Llama Productions, a subsidiary of gaming giant Epic Games, “failed and refused to bargain in good faith with the union” in the last six months. The company made unilateral changes to the terms and conditions of employment “without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain” by using AI-generated voices to replace bargaining unit work, SAG-AFTRA said.

Epic Games did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SAG-AFTRA called a strike against major game companies in July after more than a year of negotiations around the union’s interactive media agreement broke down over concerns around the use of unregulated artificial intelligence.

In a statement, SAG-AFTRA said the union supports the rights of members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas.

“However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader’s iconic rhythm and tone in video games,” the union said.

Biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is buying 23andMe for $256 million, two months after the genetic testing company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

In March 23andMe said that it was looking to sell “substantially all of its assets” through a court-approved reorganization plan. Its co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki also resigned from the top post, but remained as a board member.

23andMe has faced an uncertain future for some time. Beyond battles to go private, the company struggled to find a profitable business model since going public in 2021. Privacy concerns related to customers’ genetic information have also emerged, notably spanning from a 2023 data breach — along with questions around what new ownership could mean for users’ data.

The proposed transaction with Regeneron includes 23andMe’s personal genome service and total health and research services. It does not include the Lemonaid Health subsidiary, a telehealth services provider which 23andMe plans to wind down.

“We believe we can help 23andMe deliver and build upon its mission to help people learn about their own DNA and how to improve their personal health, while furthering Regeneron’s efforts to improve the health and wellness of many,” Regeneron co-founder, board co-chair and Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos said in a statement.

Regeneron said Monday that it will comply with 23andMe’s privacy policies and applicable law, process all customer personal data in accordance with the consents, privacy policies and statements, terms of service, and notices currently in effect and have security controls in place designed to protect such data.

“We are pleased to have reached a transaction that maximizes the value of the business and enables the mission of 23andMe to live on, while maintaining critical protections around customer privacy, choice and consent with respect to their genetic data,” said Mark Jensen, chair and member of the special committee of 23andMe’s board.

Regeneron will be keeping all of 23andMe’s employees, Jensen added.

As part of the court-supervised sale process, 23andMe required all bidders to guarantee that they will comply with its privacy policies and applicable law.

Regeneron said that its proposed deal aligns with 23andMe’s privacy statement, but that a court-appointed, independent consumer privacy ombudsman will also examine the transaction and any potential impact on consumers’ privacy. The ombudsman will present a report to the court by June 10.

A court hearing to consider approval of the transaction is currently scheduled for June 17. The deal, which still needs approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, is expected to close in the third quarter.

Shares of Regeneron fell slightly before the market open.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street cruised to the finish of its strong week on Friday, as U.S. stocks glided closer to the all-time high they set just a few months earlier, though it may feel like an economic era ago.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% for a fifth straight gain and closed out its third winning week in the last four. It’s rallied back within 3% of its record set in February after briefly dropping roughly 20% below last month, thanks to building hopes that President Donald Trump will lower his tariffs against other countries after reaching trade deals with them.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 331 points, or 0.8%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5%.

Trump’s trade war had sent financial markets reeling worldwide because of twin dangers. On one hand, tariffs could slow the economy and drive it into a recession. On the other, tariffs could push inflation higher.

This week featured some encouraging news on each of those fronts. The United States and China announced a 90-day stand-down in most of their punishing tariffs against each other, while a couple reports on inflation in the United States came in better than economists expected.

It was “a week to remember,” according to economists at Bank of America led by Claudio Irigoyen and Antonio Gabriel. But they also said they’re not expecting a significant drop in volatility, and they’re not changing big-picture forecasts.

“There is still huge uncertainty regarding the impact of tariffs on economic activity and inflation,” they said in a BofA Global Research report.

That uncertainty has been hitting U.S. households and businesses, raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans in response, which would hurt the economy. The latest reading in a survey of U.S. consumers by the University of Michigan showed sentiment soured again in May, though the pace of decline wasn’t as bad as in prior months.

Perhaps more worryingly, expectations for coming inflation keep building, and U.S. consumers are now bracing for 7.3% in the next 12 months, according to the University of Michigan’s preliminary survey results. That’s up from a forecast of 6.5% a month before.

When everyone expects inflation to be high, it could kick off a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation.

To be sure, only some of the University of Michigan’s survey responses for the preliminary May reading came after the United States and China announced their 90-day truce.

On Wall Street, Charter Communications rose 1.8% after it said it agreed to merge with Cox Communications in a deal that would combine two of the country’s largest cable companies. The resulting company will change its name to Cox Communications and keep Charter’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

CoreWeave jumped 22.1% after Nvidia disclosed that it had increased its ownership stake in the company, whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads. Nvidia now owns 7% of CoreWeave, up from its nearly 6% stake before CoreWeave’s initial public offering of stock in March.

Novo Nordisk’s stock that trades in the United States fell 2.7% after the Danish company behind the Wegovy drug for weight loss said that Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen will step down as CEO and that the board is looking for his successor. The company cited “recent market challenges” and how the stock has been performing recently.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 41.45 points to 5,958.38. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 331.99 to 42,654.74, and the Nasdaq composite gained 98.78 to 19,211.10.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.44% from 4.45% late Thursday and from more than 4.50% the day before that. Lower bond yields can encourage investors to pay higher prices for stocks and other investments.

The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for action by the Federal Reserve, rose to 3.99% from 3.96%. It had been as low as 3.93% earlier in the morning, before the release of the University of Michigan’s survey.

Hope remains that this week’s better-than-expected signals on inflation could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates later this year if high tariffs drag down the U.S. economy.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose modestly in Europe after finishing mixed in Asia.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 inched down by less than 0.1% after the government reported that Japan’s economy contracted at a faster rate than expected in the first quarter of the year.

___

AP Writers Jiang Junzhe and Matt Ott contributed.

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.

His company, xAI, said Thursday night that an “unauthorized modification” to the chatbot was the cause.

That means someone — the company didn’t say who — made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said.

A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.

One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”

“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. ”Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”

The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”

Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday night, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.

Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.

Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.

“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.

Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.

Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Monday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.

In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.

Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.

“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”

Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”

Noting that its existing code review process had been circumvented, it also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — For decades, a carveout in New York’s child labor laws allowed kids as young as 11 to legally partake in the time-honored tradition of a paper route.

Flipping papers into suburban hedges, bicycling through snow squalls, dodging dogs and getting stiffed for tips became a rite of passage for generations of youths.

But a change to the law quietly made via the state budget this month makes clear the job is now not allowed for anyone under 14 years old. The move was first reported by Politico.

The change comes even though paper boys and girls have mostly gone the way of phone booths, mimeograph machines and their urban “newsie” forebears who shouted “Extra! Extra!” on street corners.

While many teens used to take on paper routes as after-school jobs, that became rarer decades ago as more daily newspapers switched to early morning deliveries. Newspapers are now increasingly online and tend to rely on adults with cars to make home deliveries, according to industry watchers.

“The need for a workforce of kids to go throwing newspapers on stoops is just a thing of the past,” said attorney Allan Bloom, an employment law expert with the Proskauer firm.

Lawmakers made the change as part of a broader update of child labor laws. Bloom likened it to a “cleanup” as lawmakers streamlined the process for employing minors and increased penalties for violating child labor laws.

Diane Kennedy, president of the New York News Publishers Association, said she was not aware of any newspapers in New York using youth carriers.

Christopher Page recalled buying his first guitar on earnings from a paper route started in the late ’70s in suburban Clifton Park, north of Albany.

“I just had a 10-speed that I destroyed,” said Page. “It was truly rain or shine, I’m out there riding the bike. Or even in the winter, I would still ride the bike in the snow through all the potholes and the ice.”

When dogs chased him on his bike, Page would ward them off with his shoulder bag full of newspapers.

At age 13, Jon Sorensen delivered the Syracuse Herald-American on Sunday with his 11-year old brother in the Finger Lakes town of Owasco from the back of their mother’s Chevy station wagon.

“That was back when papers were papers — a lot of sections and a lot of weight,” recalled Sorensen, now 68 and Kennedy’s partner. “I can remember trudging through the snow. ... I don’t think I ever dropped one, because if you did you had to be heading back to the car and pick up another copy.”

Sorensen stayed in the newspaper business as an adult, covering state government and politics for papers including New York Daily News and The Buffalo News.

“The hardest part of the job wasn’t delivering the paper, it was collecting,” Sorensen recalled. “It wasn’t always easy to get people to pay up.”