Facing renewed competition from Microsoft and OpenAI, Google is reportedly “racing” to build an “all-new” AI-powered search engine. According to The New York Times, the company is in the early stages of creating a search service that will attempt to anticipate what you want from it in hopes of offering “a far more personalized experience.” The project has “no clear timetable.” However, knowing that Google is also developing a suite of new AI features for its existing search engine under the codename “Magi.”

Among the features Google is developing is a chatbot that can answer software engineering questions and generate code snippets. The company has also experimented with a feature that would allow people to search for music through a chatbot conversation. According to The Times, the company has assigned more than 160 employees to the redesign.

Other new additions “in various stages of development” include a Chrome feature dubbed "Searchalong." It would allow a chatbot to scan the webpage you’re reading to offer contextual information. For example, if you were looking for a place to stay on Airbnb, you could ask the chatbot to tell you what to see and do near your planned accommodations. “GIFI” and “Tivoli Tutor,” another pair of experimental features, would allow users to prompt Google Image Search to generate images and converse with a chatbot to learn a new language. It’s worth noting many of these are features that Google has either demoed in the past or exist on other platforms like Duolingo. For instance, image generation is already available in Slides.

Google reportedly plans to announce Magi next month before introducing additional new features sometime in the fall. That timing suggests the project will make an appearance at I/O 2023. The company plans to offer Magi’s features to one million people in the US before expanding availability to 30 million users by the end of the year.

“We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget when asked about the report. “We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information. Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.”

Underscoring the importance of Magi for Google, Samsung reportedly told the company last month it was considering making Bing the default search on its devices. The declaration reportedly sent Google into a “panic.” The company’s search agreement with Samsung is worth approximately $3 billion annually. This year, its lucrative search agreement with Apple, the subject of frequent antitrust scrutiny, is also up for renewal.

One of the most notorious ransomware gangs appears to have recently begun targeting Mac computers for the first time. In a series of tweets spotted by 9to5Mac, a group of security researchers known as the MalwareHunterTeam said on Saturday they recently found evidence of a Lockbit ransomware build designed to compromise macOS devices. As far as the group is aware, Saturday’s announcement marks the first public notice that Lockbit’s ransomware could be used against Apple computers, though it appears the gang has offered that capability since last fall.

“I think this is the first time one of the major ransomware players has taken aim at Apple’s OS,” security analyst Brett Callow said, pointing to the significance of the disclosure. As 9to5Mac notes, the LockBit gang has historically focused on Windows, Linux and virtual host machines. The reason being those operating systems are overwhelmingly used by the businesses the group’s partners target. For those who don’t know, the Lockbit gang runs what’s known as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation. The group doesn’t directly involve itself in the business of extracting ransoms from businesses. What it does do is build and maintain the malware affiliates can pay to use against an organization. According to an indictment the US Department of Justice unsealed last fall, LockBit is “one of the most active and destructive ransomware variants in the world." As of late 2022, the software has infected the computer systems of at least 1,000 victims, including a Holiday Inn hotel in Turkey. It’s believed the gang’s partners have claimed tens of millions of dollars from victims.

One detail that's often omitted from modern founders myths is whether or not said scion of capitalist success actually invented the thing they're famous for inventing. Just like Elon Musk didn't invent electric vehicles so much as be the first to successfully market them to the American public, Thomas Edison's contributions to the advent of electrified lighting too might be overstated. In the excerpt below from his latest book, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans, Dr. Bill Hammack, YouTube's "The Engineer Guy," recounts the tale of Hiram Maxim, an irrepressible engineer and inventor whose novel filament production method would have made him a household name — had Edison not reportedly made "a clean steal" of his revolutionary technology.   

Sourcebooks Inc

Excerpted from The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans by Bill Hammack, PhD. © 2023 by Bill Hammack, PhD. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.

In November 1880, the reading room of the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, located in the basement of one of the first skyscrapers, glowed with the light of a four-bulb chandelier and six bulbs in fixtures spaced along the walls. An observer characterized this electric light as “very much like that of a first-class oil lamp, steadier than gas, and of a yellow, clear pleasant quality” — nothing like the “ghastly blue” of a “flickering” arc light, nor was there the odor of burning gas; instead, the room’s atmosphere “remain[ed] perfectly cool and sweet.” His only complaint was that the bulbs flickered slightly with every stroke of the engine that powered the generator. This first commercial installation, a spectacular achievement, featured no bulbs manufactured by Thomas Edison, although he had proudly announced his invention of the light bulb only a few months earlier to great press attention. The bulbs at the Mercantile Company were those of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a company driven forward by their irrepressible and energetic engineer, Hiram Maxim. Edison called Maxim’s bulb “a clean steal” of his lamp. Yet Maxim had seventeen patents on incandescent lamps, and his company controlled the patents of several other inventors, also contemporary to Edison. Maxim thought of himself as the inventor of the commercial light bulb. “Every time I put up a light,” he complained, “a crowd would gather, everyone asking, ‘Is it Edison’s?’” This so irritated Maxim, who noted that Edison at the time “had never made a lamp,” that he considering killing “on the spot” the next person to ask him “Is it Edison’s?”

That the first commercialized light bulbs were not Edison’s surprises because we love stories of sole inventors whose spark of inspiration revolutionized the world. They give us narratives that are neat, tidy, and digestible but incomplete. These stories hide the engineering method; they bury the creativity of engineers, smooth over struggles, and sanitize choices that reflect cultural norms. Perhaps no story persists more than Edison and his light bulb, yet Edison was the tail end of a long list of light bulb innovators in a process of invention similar to that of the steam turbine in the next century.

In the forty years before Edison’s first successful prototype, at least twenty people presented, patented, and demonstrated incandescent lamps—using electricity to heat a filament until it glowed. The first recorded attempt was in 1838 (almost a decade before Edison’s birth) by a Belgian inventor whose bulb used a strip of carbon as a filament. A fair assessment of history would call these men inventors of the light bulb comparable to Edison, especially in a world where Edison, the so-called inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was forty years late to the idea of incandescent lighting. But unlike with Edison, we don’t remember the names of these men, because most of their bulbs burned for only a few seconds. They had the necessary but thankless job of creating links in a chain of incremental advances that didn’t yet produce an applicable or reproducible solution to the problem of darkness, which so far could only be dispelled with fire, until Edison created one of the links that did, transforming from method into narrative. Although Edison and his bulb end that length of the chain of innovators, his link was no more an exercise or example of the engineering method than those that came before; it only overcame a circumstantial threshold of usefulness.

In 1878, Edison focused the energy of his staff at the bustling Menlo Park Research Laboratory on finding a long-lasting filament for the incandescent light bulb. The staff worked to the rhythms of Edison, “the central originating and guiding mind and personality,” as one worker noted, describing work there as “a strenuous but joyful life for all physically, mentally, and emotionally.” Edison set the tone with long work hours into the night. He often napped on the workbenches in Menlo Park and ate sparingly in increments of small snacks he thought were better for digestion, although for his workers, he had brought in, often at midnight, hamper baskets loaded with hot dinners of meat, vegetables, dessert, and coffee. But when Edison stood, stretched, hitched up his waistband, and sauntered away, all knew that dinner was over and work should resume.

In the late 1870s, Edison and his staff produced bulbs that looked much like a modern bulb: a glass envelope fastened to a wooden base covered with copper strips, and, at its center, a thin, long, delicate spiral of platinum. Yet these bulbs failed. Some yielded light as bright as a small bundle of today’s Christmas lights for a few hours, but most burned out quickly. As Edison learned, the temperature for the incandescence of platinum wire was near that of its melting point—any fluctuations in the current and the platinum would melt. Edison and his team tested an astonishing array of materials, by some count sixteen hundred types. They tested metals like platinum, iridium, ruthenium, chromium, aluminum, tungsten, molybdenum, palladium, manganese, and titanium; elements that sometimes behaved like metals, including silicon and boron; then a grab bag of materials—cork, wax, celluloid, and the hair from his employees’ beards. After these, his team moved to slivers of wood, broom corn, and paper. Tissue paper covered with lampblack and tar and rolled into a rod glowed astonishingly well and for a good amount of time. Edison refined this idea by “carbonizing” cotton thread, heating it without oxygen until the length of thread was blackened throughout. From this thread, he formed a long filament. On October 21, 1879, a bulb with a filament of this thread, with all the air removed from the glass enclosure, burned for more than half a day. They were approaching the beginning of the commercial light bulb.

Seven months after that bit of carbonized thread showed promise, they tried a piece of bamboo: a six-inch strip burned for three hours and twenty-four minutes at seventy-one candlepower (about the brightness of a standard sixty-watt bulb today). “The best lamp ever yet made,” an Edison associate noted, “here from vegetable Carbon.” From there, Edison’s team tested two hundred species of bamboo until they found a variety that was the best for manufacturing carbon filaments, grown near Yawata, Japan, where Edison is still celebrated with a street named “Edison-dori,” a bust of Edison in the town center, and, near a shrine, a large monument dedicated to Edison. With his specialized bamboo supply and method of manufacturing in place, Edison was ready to light the world, but Hiram Maxim beat him out of the gate.

Maxim’s bulbs, installed at the Equitable Life Building, out-classed Edison’s. “They have a rich golden tint, resembling that of a wax taper,” said one reporter. Another noted that Maxim “has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.” When comparing the lamps, reporters noted that Edison’s had lower brightness than Maxim's, or, when of the same intensity as Maxim’s, they burned out in only a few hours. By Maxim’s own estimate, the filaments in his bulbs could last forty days. The dimness and shorter life of Edison’s bulbs were the same thing: Edison’s bulbs could not tolerate as much current as Maxim’s, so if run at the same current, Edison’s bulbs would burn out quickly, and to make them last longer, Edison’s were run at a lower current and thus were dimmer.

That Maxim could achieve this was unbelievable to Edison’s staff—an outraged member of the Menlo Park staff ranted that it must be apparent to “any sane person that” Maxim’s bulb must be “but a copy” of Edison’s. Surely, thought Edison’s employees, only a well-oiled machine like that of Menlo Park could produce a light bulb. Inside Menlo Park, glassblowers, machinists, engineers, chemists, and physicists churned out inventions like appliances on an assembly line, while Maxim’s ham-handed U.S. Electric Lighting Company struggled to find enough resources to survive; employees thought it likely to shut at any minute, and even its own president described it as “helpless.” Their technical expertise was so low that they could not figure out, as one employee later noted, what “size wire would carry a certain number of lamps without overheating,” adding that “a number of mysterious fires about this time were probably the fruits of our ignorance.” Compared with Edison’s factory-line Menlo Park model, Maxim’s method of invention seemed scattershot.

Maxim was the classic American tinkerer, once describing himself as a “chronic inventor.” Although self-taught—one biographer describes him as “semiliterate”—over his lifetime, he invented an astonishing array of tools and toys. Maxim developed methods to separate metals from their ores, instruments to measure wind velocities, vacuum cleaners, novelty items that produced “illusionary effects”—a rotating sphere with concave paraboloidal floor, mirrors, and a bicycle track, presumably to create the illusion of riding a bike long distances—gear to prevent the rolling of ships, riveting machines, feed water check valves, steam generators, wheels for railroads and tramways, an inhaler to treat bronchitis, boot and shoe heel protectors, hair curling irons, a method for demagnetizing watches, a type of pneumatic tire, a coffee substitute, a method for extinguishing fires in theaters, and most surprising of all, new advertising methods—a rotating sign that works “even in very light airs.” And near the end of his life, he invented the world’s first successful machine gun.

Maxim’s contribution to the light bulb was to improve the manufacture of filaments. Filaments, whether of bamboo or cardboard, as in Maxim’s case, were converted to carbon by heating at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen until the cellulose in the material broke down, leaving a hard carbon skeleton, but uneven carbonization caused thinner sections to become much hotter when lit with an electrical current and burn out more quickly. Maxim’s insight was to place a carbonized filament into a hydrocarbon atmosphere, then pass through it an electrical current that heated the filament to a bright red. The thinner and hotter parts of the filament would break down the vaporous hydrocarbon surrounding them and deposit pure carbon on the filament, building up layers of carbon on the thinner parts and resulting in a filament of uniform thickness and greater life span. As Maxim gloated, “it is absolutely impossible by mechanical means to make a carbon filament that is of uniform resistance” without his patented method, adding that Edison “had to use my process or give up the job.”

Maxim’s attitude was prompted by the rivalry that burned between the many engineers competing in a world eager for the magic of electrical lighting, but it also shows us the problem with crediting any individual with the complete “invention” of any technology. We tend to tell the stories of inventors who, through their unique intellect and drive, produce an equally unique marvel at the climax of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. That is often how this book has told it, out of deference to individual humans’ need to relate to the stories of other individual humans. But the engineering method is uninterested in this “great men” historical framework. It cares only about the accumulated knowledge, heuristics, rules of thumb, intuition, and anything else that drives problems in the direction of solutions as fast as possible, the sum of which, even for a single solution, is beyond unthinkable for a lone person to create themselves. This web of information is so vast, incomprehensibly vast, so we make it comprehensible and moving by telling the stories of individual inventors, even if this distorts the unknowable true web of invention.

Maxim is likely unrecognized as an inventor today because he lacked Edison’s agile self-promotion and because, in a sense, Edison “won” and thus told the story of the light bulb’s invention. But did Edison “invent” a light bulb when his company produced a brilliantly glowing but short-lived electric light? Perhaps. When we think of an invented technology, we typically imply technology that not only exists but is reproducible in a way that can fulfill the needs of those whose problem it solves. That is, it can be manufactured or mass-produced. A handful of working light bulbs in the late 1800s is a marvel, but it doesn’t light the world. In this sense, the invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that can be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone. To tell only a “great man” story hides the contributions of others who were essential to a technology’s development. We can see that in the evolution of the manufacturing techniques of Maxim’s light bulbs: he had on staff an artistic draftsman turned engineer whose contributions to reliable manufacturing have long been overlooked.

The 128GB model of Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro is back down to $1,000 at Amazon, matching the lowest price we've tracked. It's listed at $1,049, but an additional coupon for $49.01 will be applied at checkout. For reference, Apple typically sells the tablet for $1,099, though we've periodically seen it drop to $1,049 since it launched last October.

The iPad Pro is the top choice in our guide to the best tablets, and the 12.9-inch model specifically is the "best for power users" pick in our breakdown of the best iPads. To be clear, this is more tablet than most people need, as the iPad Air or entry-level iPad are much better values for those just looking for browse the web, read e-books, stream video and do some basic work on a tablet. But for those who have cash to burn and want the biggest and most powerful iPad Apple makes, this is it.

The iPad Pro's M2 chip is the same as the one in the latest MacBook Air, and its display is the most advanced of any iPad, with a 120Hz refresh rate and mini-LED backlighting that allows for better contrast and brightness. (The latter feature isn't available on the 11-inch Pro.) Compared to the Air, its speakers are more robust, it has a faster Thunderbolt USB-C port and its camera system is more advanced, with a flash and ultrawide lens. All told, we gave the tablet a review score of 87 last year.

It's still best to look at this as a premium tablet than a universal laptop replacement, as iPadOS can still make multitasking and other basic PC tasks more convoluted than they could be. That said, its spacious display, fast chip and Apple Pencil support can make it a powerful tool for creative types in particular. If you've been thinking about taking the plunge, this deal makes the device at least a little more affordable. If you don't need the latest and greatest chip, meanwhile, note that a 256GB cellular model of the previous-generation iPad Pro is down to the same price at Best Buy.

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Ahead of its April 19th release date, Sony and Guerrilla Games on Friday shared a new trailer for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. The DLC is set to tell the next chapter of Aloy’s story. The trailer offers a fresh look at the Burning Shores, a volcanic archipelago that was once home to Los Angeles. We also get a closer look at the Metal Devil boss fight that was teased at the end of the announcement trailer Sony and Guerrilla released last year.

That battle is one of the reasons Horizon Forbidden West:Burning Shores won’t be available on PlayStation 4, even though you can play the original game on Sony’s last generation console. “The cityscape ruins of LA and its surroundings are highly detailed and require a lot of processing power as well as fast streaming technology to run properly,” Horizon Forbidden West Game Director Mathijs de Jonge told the PlayStation Blog last month. He went on to add there’s “a particular battle scene that requires a LOT of memory and processing power.”

The Federal Aviation Administration has given SpaceX final regulatory approval to carry out Starship’s first orbital flight test. Per Ars Technica, the FAA on late Friday afternoon issued the company a license to launch its next-generation rocket from South Texas. “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement. “The license is valid for five years.”

As of Friday, SpaceX said it would attempt to carry out the long-awaited test on Monday morning, with the launch window opening at 7AM local time. Per Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, the forecast for the Monday launch attempt looks ideal, with moderate winds and clear skies expected. If SpaceX calls the test off, the company has backup opportunities available on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Getting to this point has been a long road for SpaceX. In addition to all the technical hurdles it has had to overcome, the FAA put the company’s Boca Chica facility through a comprehensive environmental assessment. Located near the Gulf of Mexico, the launch site is surrounded by wetlands that are home to hundreds of thousands of shorebirds. Last June, the FAA gave SpaceX a list of 75 actions it had to complete to protect the local wildlife around the facility. With those out of the way, now all the company needs to worry about are any remaining technical issues affecting Starship. 

Apple’s forthcoming 15-inch MacBook Air will feature a processor “on par” with the company’s current M2 chip. According to Bloomberg, Apple recently began testing the laptop to ensure its compatibility with third-party App Store apps, something the company does in the lead-up to the release of a new device.

Developer logs shared with the outlet show the machine was configured with a chipset that featured an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, along with 8GB of RAM. Those specs suggest the 15-inch MacBook Air, referred to as “Mac 15,3” in the logs, will ship with an M2 chipset, not Apple’s next-generation chip, as some past reports had suggested. “Bigger changes to the Mac will come later with the release of an M3 chip,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes. The new machine was spotted running macOS 14, which Apple is expected to announce at WWDC 2023

About the most interesting detail revealed by the logs is that the 15-inch MacBook Air features a display resolution “equal” to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. That means the new MacBook Air features a less dense display. It’s unclear when Apple plans to release the new laptop. The company announced the M2 MacBook Air at WWDC 2022. Gurman previously reported the 15-inch MacBook Air would arrive sometime between late spring and this summer.

Elon Musk, who’s been vocally critical about artificial intelligence lately, seems to be planning something AI related. According to The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, Musk has founded a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp. Based on a state filing from last month that the sources have viewed, the new company is incorporated in Nevada and lists Musk as the sole director, as well as Jared Birchall, the director of his family’s offices, as the secretary. The multi-company executive is known to have a special affinity for the letter ”X” and has even recently renamed Twitter, Inc. as X Corp.

Musk is no stranger to AI projects. He co-founded OpenAI before leaving the company almost a decade ago. After ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity, though, Musk advocated for the technology’s regulation and signed an open letter that urged tech leaders to put a six-month pause on its development. The Journal says Musk thought ChatGPT was politically biased — he once commented on the “danger of training AI to be woke” — and that he’s looking create AI models that are “truth-seeking.”

At this point, though, Musk’s plans for X.AI Corp and whether he’s looking to build a veritable ChatGPT rival remains unclear. While details are still scarce, previous reports provide clues on how Musk’s AI efforts are progressing. He reportedly hired two former DeepMind researchers in March, including scientist Igor Babuschkin, who’s believed to be helming the new project. Musk also reportedly purchased 10,000 GPUs for AI development at one of Twitter’s data centers. In addition, according to The Times, he’s already in talks with Tesla and SpaceX investors to put money into his new venture.

If you haven’t heard of Virginia Norwood, it’s about time you did. An aerospace pioneer whose career would have been historic even without its undercurrent of triumph over misogynistic discrimination, she invented the Landsat satellite program that monitors the Earth’s surface today. Norwood passed away on March 27th at the age of 96, as reported by NASA and The New York Times.

She achieved all this despite significant pushback from the male-dominated industry before and after her rise. Despite her obvious talent, numerous employers declined to hire her after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For example, Sikorsky Aircraft told her they would never pay her requested salary, equivalent to the lowest rank in the civil service. Another food lab she applied for asked her to promise not to get pregnant as a condition of her employment. (She withdrew her application.) Finally, the gun manufacturer Remington appreciated her “brilliant” ideas in an interview but told her they were hiring a man instead.

Her career finally progressed after landing jobs with the US Army Signal Corps Laboratories (where she designed a radar reflector for weather balloons) and Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs (where she set up the company’s first antenna lab). Norwood began working in the 1950s as one of a small group of women at Hughes Aircraft Company, where she gained a reputation as a resourceful problem-solver. “She said, ‘I was kind of known as the person who could solve impossible problems,’” her daughter, Naomi Norwood, told NASA. “So people would bring things to her, even pieces of other projects.”

Hughes Aircraft / NASA

In the late 1960s, the director of the Geological Survey wanted to take photographs of the Earth from space to help manage land resources; partnering with NASA, a plan was hatched to send satellites into space. Then working on an advanced design team in Hughes’ space and communications division, Norwood formed the idea that would define her legacy. She gathered feedback from agriculture, meteorology and geology experts to develop a scanner to record different light and energy spectra. Although it used existing technology made for (lower-altitude) agricultural observations, she adapted the tech to meet the Geological Survey’s and NASA’s goals.

However, she faced numerous obstacles in securing a spot for her Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) on the launch satellite. It was already hauling an enormous three-camera system developed by RCA using television tube technology, which the agencies viewed as the primary imaging source. To get the MSS onboard, Norwood was tasked with scaling back its size to no more than 100 lbs, a significant downsizing; the RCA system took up most of the satellite’s 4,000 lb. payload.

She reduced the device to recording only four energy bands (down from its original seven) to ensure it would make the trip as a secondary measurement system. The satellite launched on July 23rd, 1972, and the MSS captured its first images — of Oklahoma’s Ouachita Mountains — two days later. The results exceeded all expectations, forcing a quick reevaluation of the satellite payload’s hierarchy. Norwood’s system performed better and was more reliable than the clunky RCA project, which caused power surges and had to be shut down for good two weeks into the mission.

Landsat quickly became the de facto method of surveying the Earth’s surface. Norwood continued to improve the system, leading the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Landsat 8 and 9, the current versions monitoring the effects of climate change today, are still based on her initial concept. Her other projects included leading the microwave group in Hughes Aircraft’s missile lab and designing the ground-control communications equipment for NASA’s Surveyor lunar lander.

She reportedly had no issue with the “the mother of Landsat” moniker her peers gave her. “Yes, I like it, and it’s apt,” she said. “I created it, I birthed it, and I fought for it.”

Montana is poised to become the first state to ban TikTok. The state’s legislature passed a bill requiring app stores to block the app in the state. The bill will now head to Republican Governor Greg Gianforte, who previously banned the app from state-owned devices.

The ban is slated to go into effect in 2024, though it will likely face legal challenges well before then. Still, the bill has been closely watched as pressure ramps up on TikTok. CEO Shou Chew testified at a Congressional hearing last month where he tried, largely unsuccessfully, to downplay the company’s ties to ByteDance and China.

Meanwhile, the United States government is trying to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok entirely. As The New York Timespoints out, Montana’s ban could serve as a kind of template for the rest of the country, even though it’s unclear whether such bans will hold up to legal challenges.

Like federal lawmakers, the Montana bill claims that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance puts US users personal data at risk because the company could be compelled to turn over information to the Chinese government. TikTok has long denied these claims, and has committed more than a billion dollars to Project Texas, a project meant to address national security concerns.

TikTok has previously said that the proposed ban would hurt small businesses that rely on the app. In a statement following the bill's passage, a TikTok spokesperson called it "egregious government overreach" and said it planned to "fight" the measure. 

“The bill's champions have admitted that they have no feasible plan for operationalizing this attempt to censor American voices and that the bill's constitutionality will be decided by the courts. We will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach.”

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