Your next toy or game may be able to converse with you.

Mattel, the El Segundo toy maker behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, said Thursday that it’s teaming up with OpenAI, which created popular chatbot ChatGPT, to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences.”

The companies are planning to unveil their first product later this ...Read more

A federal judge in Minneapolis said Thursday he would approve a $69 million settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging UnitedHealth Group depressed the retirement savings of workers for years by selecting poorly performing investment options in the company 401(k) plan.

The litigation alleged “the fix was in” to retain investment funds ...Read more

Baltimore jurors erred by awarding too much money to the city in its verdict against two drug manufacturing titans last November, a judge ruled Thursday.

The verdict determined McKesson and AmerisourceBergen unreasonably shipped huge sums of painkillers to the Baltimore area and fueled the city’s opioid epidemic. Jurors found these two ...Read more

Seattle is on track to ban landlords' use of controversial rent-setting software that has been under legal fire for years.

A Seattle City Council committee on Wednesday advanced a bill to bar landlords from subscribing to software platforms that compile rental information to recommend rent prices. The proposal targets the platform RealPage, ...Read more

A Boeing 787 with at least 240 people on board crashed shortly after takeoff Thursday in the northwestern Indian city of Ahmedabad.

The Air India passenger plane bound for London crashed into a nearby medical college. The dead might include both passengers and those on the ground, the city police chief told reporters.

It’s too soon to know ...Read more

General Motors Co.'s $4 billion reshoring plan announced this week sketches a blueprint for the Detroit automaker's long-term strategy: ramp up production of the hulking gas-powered vehicles Americans love while growing its expanding fleet of electric vehicles.

The investment to shift production of popular models from Mexico to three U.S. ...Read more

While economists and the general public are preoccupied with the threat to U.S. economic growth stemming from Donald Trump's tariff policies, serious as that is, they may be overlooking another serious threat.

This one comes from Trump's approach, abetted by Republicans in Congress, to the student loan crisis.

It's not a trivial matter. Nearly...Read more

Pleasant Hill, California, technology and staffing company Epik Solutions — a federal contractor certified as a “small disadvantaged business” — has agreed to pay a $72,000 fine after allegedly getting caught advertising jobs open only to foreign workers on the controversial H-1B visa.

“A top priority of the Justice Department’s ...Read more

Dozens of states have filed a joint lawsuit against the bankrupt DNA-testing company 23andMe to block the company's sale of its customers' genetic data without explicit consent.

The suit, filed this week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, comes months after 23andMe began a court-supervised sale process of its assets. ...Read more

If U.S. trade policy seems to shift by the week, the economic costs for trade-dependent states like Washington are steadily piling up.

At the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, inbound container traffic dropped substantially in May as heavy U.S. tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere led to mass cancellations of shipments.

Tourism in Washington...Read more

The price of used Teslas dropped faster than any other auto brand in the past year, a new report says.

ISeeCars.com — trackers of used-car sales — says the average price paid for a used Tesla was down 8% to $30,708. The next most significant price drops were Chrysler, off 7% to $25,632, Dodge, off 6% to $33,763, Genesis, off 5% to $33,769, ...Read more

Companies are eliminating the grunt work that used to train young professionals — and they don’t seem to have a clear plan for what comes next.

AI is analyzing documents, writing briefing notes, creating Power Point presentations or handling customer service queries, and — surprise! — now the younger humans who normally do that work ...Read more

Just a week after the Fed removed Wells Fargo’s $1.95 trillion asset cap punishment over its fake sales scandal, the bank’s CFO detailed new growth plans.

Over the past five years, risk and control work was the bank’s top priority and took up a significant amount of time, Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said at Tuesday’s ...Read more

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang projected that Europe’s artificial-intelligence computing capacity will increase by a factor of ten over the next two years, with more than 20 so-called AI factories in the works.

“Europe has now awakened to the importance of these AI factories,” said Huang, whose company is supplying ...Read more

Early this year, private equity firm Blackstone bet big on the future of artificial intelligence by investing $300 million in a Los Angeles company that’s been around for more than two decades.

The company, DDN, helps businesses store and manage the massive trove of data that powers AI systems — the lifeblood needed for chatbots, self-...Read more

Underlying U.S. inflation rose in May by less than forecast for the fourth month in a row, suggesting companies are largely holding back on passing higher tariff costs through to consumers.

The consumer price index, excluding the often volatile food and energy categories, increased 0.1% from April, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data ...Read more

The U.S. and Mexico are closing in on a deal that would remove President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on steel imports up to a certain volume, according to people familiar with the matter, a revamp of a similar deal between the trade partners during his first term.

Trump hasn’t been directly involved in the negotiations and would need to ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — After four days of protests, shopkeepers in downtown Los Angeles began on Tuesday to sweep up glass, board up windows and try to make sense of the violence that erupted during the demonstrations against immigration raids near the heart of the city.

Around Little Tokyo and other downtown Los Angeles neighborhoods, workers and ...Read more