Tech’s biggest stories today show an industry pushing forward on new products even as legal and geopolitical pressure keeps mounting. Meta is reportedly building a points-based prediction markets app, a low-stakes bet that public forecasting could become the next engagement engine without inviting the regulatory headaches of real-money gambling. In workplace AI, Anthropic is embedding Claude directly into Slack as an always-on “coworker,” underscoring how quickly chatbots are moving from tools to participants in office life. But the courts and governments remain just as central to the sector’s future: Alibaba is suing the Pentagon over its inclusion on a blacklist of firms allegedly tied to China’s military, while the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowed the path for human-rights lawsuits against American companies over conduct abroad, siding with Cisco. And YouTube’s quiet settlement in a child mental-health case highlights the widening legal reckoning facing major platforms.