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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google has offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce across several key divisions in a fresh round of cost cutting coming ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire. The Mountain View, California, company confirmed the streamlining that was reported by several news outlets.

It’s not clear how many employees are affected, but the offers were made to staff in Google’s search, advertising, research and engineering units, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google employs most of the nearly 186,000 workers on the worldwide payroll of its parent company, Alphabet Inc.

“Earlier this year, some of our teams introduced a voluntary exit program with severance for U.S.-based Googlers, and several more are now offering the program to support our important work ahead,” a Google spokesperson, Courtenay Mencini, said in a statement.

“A number of teams are also asking remote employees who live near an office to return to a hybrid work schedule in order to bring folks more together in-person,” Mencini said.

Google is offering the buyouts while awaiting for a federal judge to determine its fate after its ubiquitous search engine was declared an illegal monopoly as part of nearly 5-year-old case by the U.S. Justice Department. The company is also awaiting remedy action in another antitrust case involving its digital ad network.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing a government proposal seeking to ban Google paying more than $26 billon annually to Apple and other technology companies to lock in its search engine as the go-to place for online information, require it to share data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. The judge is expected to rule before Labor Day, clearing the way for Google to pursue its plan to appeal last year’s decision that labeled its search engine as a monopoly.

The proposed dismantling coincides with ongoing efforts by the Justice Department to force Google to part with some of the technology powering the company’s digital ad network after a federal judge ruled that its digital ad network has been improperly abusing its market power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers.

Like several of its peers in Big Tech, Google has been periodically reducing its headcount since 2023 as the industry began to backtrack from the hiring spree that was triggered during pandemic lockdowns that spurred feverish demand for digital services.

Google began its post-pandemic retrenchment by laying off 12,000 workers in early 2023 and since then as been trimming some divisions to help bolster its profits while ramping up its spending on artificial intelligence — a technology driving an upheaval that is starting to transform its search engine into a more conversational answer engine.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Elon Musk says Tesla is “tentatively” set to begin providing robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on June 22.

In a post on his X social media platform, Musk said the date could change because Tesla is “being super paranoid about safety.”

Investors, Wall Street analysts and Tesla enthusiasts have been anticipating the rollout of the driverless cabs since Musk said earlier this year that the service would launch in Austin sometime in June.

Last month, Musk told CNBC that the taxis will be remotely monitored at first and “geofenced” to certain areas of the city deemed the safest to navigate. He said he expected to initially run 10 or so taxis, increase that number rapidly and start offering the service in Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco and other cities.

Musk has been promising fully autonomous, self-driving vehicles “next year” for a decade, but the pressure is on now as Tesla actually begins to operate a self-driving taxi service. Sales of Tesla’s electric vehicles have sagged due to increased competition, the retooling of its most popular car, the Model Y, and the fallout from Musk’s turn to politics.

The Austin rollout also comes after Musk had a public blowup with President Donald Trump over the administration’s tax bill. Some analysts have expressed concern that Trump could retaliate by encouraging federal safety regulators to to step in at any sign of trouble for the robotaxis.

NEW YORK (AP) — Disney and Universal have filed a copyright lawsuit against popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney on Wednesday, marking the first time major Hollywood companies have enter the legal battle over generative AI.

Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute “endless unauthorized copies” of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and the Minions from Despicable Me.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” the companies state in the complaint.

The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation.

Midjourney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.

“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”

The Recording Industry Association of America, which is engaged in its own legal battles against generative AI companies, came out in support of Disney and Universal’s lawsuit.

“This action by Disney and Universal represents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation,” RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. But the music industry representative did point out that there are paths forward through partnerships that can advance both sectors.

Major AI developers don’t typically disclose their data sources but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law.

The studio’ case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI platforms — such as OpenAI, Anthropic — in San Francisco and New York.

Meanwhile, the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry is underway in London, pitting Getty Images against artificial intelligence company Stability AI.