What's up: Meta is delaying the rollout of its flagship AI model and battling an ‘epidemic of scams’; Silicon Valley’s new hold on Washington; Trump chides Apple's Tim Cook.

Good morning, CIOs. The obsession with humanoid robots notwithstanding, the future may belong to the weirder varieties, as the WSJ’s Isabelle Bousquette discovered on a recent trip to MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Think soft and squish robots. Flexible robots. Even edible ones capable of performing surgery.

“I really wanted to broaden our view of what a robot is,” MIT CSAIL Director Daniela Rus tells the WSJ. “So if you have a mechanism that’s made out of paper and that moves, is that a robot or not? If you have an origami flower that you attach to a motor, is that a robot or not? To me, it’s a robot.”

A tour of the labs confirmed this decidedly post-humanoid view of the field, where the WSJ encountered “bubble” robots and a swimming, sea-turtle-like robot in rapid succession.

Now creative new uses of artificial intelligence are pushing her work to a new level. Rus, a recent recipient of the IEEE’s Edison Medal, last year helped spin out a company, Liquid AI, that used technology modeled on the neural activity of worms.

Rus and her team have also designed a special AI system trained on the laws of physics that suggests robot designs from a prompt. It’s called “text to robot.” Read the story.

Company engineers at Meta Platforms are struggling to significantly improve the capabilities of its “Behemoth” large-language model, slated internally for an April release. The WSJ reports that senior executives are frustrated at the performance of the team that built the Llama 4 models and blame them for the failure to make progress.

But Meta’s is not alone. Its recent challenges mirror stumbles or delays at other top AI companies that are trying to release their next big state-of-the-art models. Some researchers see the pattern as evidence that future advances in AI models could come at a far slower pace than in the past, and at tremendous cost.

With phony offers of mouthwatering bargains often seeded by overseas crime networks, Meta Platforms is increasingly a cornerstone of the internet fraud economy, according to regulators, banks and internal documents reviewed by the WSJ. The company accounted for nearly half of all reported scams on Zelle for JPMorgan Chase between the summers of 2023 and 2024, according to a person familiar with the service.

But current and former employees say Meta is reluctant to add impediments for ad-buying clients who drove a 22% increase in its advertising business last year to over $160 billion.

A Meta spokesman said that the company is working to address “an epidemic of scams” that has grown in scale and complexity in recent years, driven by cross-border criminal networks.

Elon Musk, his companies and key allies are not only increasingly securing more tax-payer dollars for their government contracts--about $6 billion since Trump’s inauguration--but they are staffing the agencies meant to regulate them, the WSJ reports.

Since January, more than three dozen employees and associates of Musk and fellow tech titans Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Anduril Industries Co-Founder Palmer Luckey have been tapped for roles at federal agencies critical to their businesses, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

President Trump chided Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook this week, saying he didn't want the iPhone maker to produce more of its devices for the U.S. market in India. "I said to him, Tim, you're my friend. I treated you very good. You're coming here with $500 billion but now here you are building all over India," he said, speaking in Qatar. Apple shares barely budged after the incident.

Taiwan's GlobalWafers, the world’s third-largest silicon wafer supplier, said it plans to invest an additional $4 billion in the U.S. as it seeks to strengthen local supply, in line with the Trump administration’s efforts to boost manufacturing.

Applied Materials reported higher profit and revenue in the latest quarter as demand for its semiconductor equipment remains stable. The Santa Clara, Calif., company on Thursday posted a profit of $2.14 billion compared with $1.72 billion a year earlier.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global said Thursday that it has refused to pay a $20 million ransom demand from cybercriminals who bribed the company’s overseas customer support agents to steal customer information. The stolen data included names and addresses, masked Social Security and bank-account numbers, and government‑ID images. 

The newly appointed head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency acknowledged in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn’t yet have a fully formed disaster-response plan. (WSJ)

On Thursday, the retail giant Walmart said that the cost of tariffs was forcing the company’s hand, and that it would hike prices on all sorts of goods later this month and into the summer. (WSJ)

The Department of Homeland Security is considering being part of a television show in which immigrants would compete for potential U.S. citizenship. (WSJ)

Global stocks were mixed and U.S. stock futures pointed to an unchanged open after a strong start to the week that was boosted by the U.S.-China trade truce. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.