Meta has agreed to pay more than $18 billion to resolve litigation over youth online safety, while adding time limits, nighttime lockouts and parental controls to Facebook and Instagram for users under 18. The catch is geographic: the new safeguards currently apply only to users in the United States. According to Bloomberg reporters Newley Purnell and Gian Volpicelli, Meta said it will monitor how the rules work and stay in contact with governments in other countries, but it gave no timetable for a broader rollout. The payment structure also stands out. About 70% of the settlement, roughly $12.7 billion, would be paid over 10 years, while the remaining roughly $5.3 billion is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar protections for minors. British official Pat McFadden criticized the U.S.-only scope, and former Meta executive Zvika Krieger questioned whether age verification is strong enough to stop teens from bypassing the restrictions by registering adult accounts.

Several Silicon Valley private schools are doing more than running annual fundraisers. According to Fortune, Crystal Springs Uplands School, Saint Francis High School, and Menlo School have each built venture-style investment programs that draw on the expertise, access, and capital of parents and alumni. The most striking example came from Saint Francis, which invested $15,000 in Snap before it went public and later generated more than 2,000 times its original stake, or about $34 million, based on selling at the IPO price. The report also outlined how these schools structure the effort. Crystal Springs said its Crystal Growth Fund is funded by separate donations from parents and alumni rather than tuition or operating money, with investment opportunities sourced by members of the school community tied to firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Notable Capital, and Sequoia Capital. By June 2025, about $1.75 million of Crystal Springs’ roughly $61.1 million portfolio had been allocated to private equity. Menlo School has also built exposure to venture funds and early-stage companies, while public records do not show that The Nueva School has set up a directly comparable fund. The broader point in Fortune’s report is that some schools in Silicon Valley are turning parent networks and investing know-how into a long-term institutional asset.

Ethena Foundation has unveiled a broad overhaul of ENA’s token economics, combining supply-side changes with a proposed demand mechanism tied to USDe growth. The foundation said it has bought out the remaining locked tokens held by certain major seed investors that had been selling ENA over the past nine months, effectively ending the monthly VC token unlock overhang. Team tokens, however, will continue to vest on the original schedule. At the same time, ENA holders are voting on a Snapshot proposal known as a fee switch. If approved, and if USDe circulation returns to the first threshold of $7.5 billion, 95% of Ethena brand business net revenue would be used for programmatic ENA buybacks, with the remaining 5% allocated to ecosystem growth. Ethena Labs and the foundation have also reached an agreement in principle under which most of the protocol’s intellectual property and economic rights would belong to the foundation and the ecosystem rather than Ethena Labs equity holders, with a formal agreement expected in October. The move comes as USDe supply has fallen from nearly $15 billion at its peak in October 2025 to below $5 billion, making future USDe growth central to whether the new buyback model can take effect.

Ethena Foundation has opened a Snapshot governance vote on a proposal to send all net revenue generated across Ethena-branded businesses into programmatic ENA buybacks. The Foundation said the proposal, approved by Ethena’s Risk Committee, went live on Thursday, Aug. 27, though it did not disclose a voting deadline. In a separate update, the Foundation said it purchased all remaining locked ENA from certain major seed investors that sold the token during the previous nine months, but did not name the investors or disclose the amount of tokens, the purchase value, or the buyout price. The announcement also outlined a Master Framework Agreement between Ethena Labs and the Foundation that assigns protocol intellectual property and ownership of value accrued by the protocol exclusively to the Foundation. According to the Foundation, those assets would be governed by ENA holders, while Labs equity investors would keep no residual claim on protocol cash flow. The Foundation also said it and lead investors agreed to eliminate future monthly venture-investor unlocks by releasing unvested investor tokens, while team tokens remain on their original vesting schedule.

An opinion article published by MarsBit and credited to the WeChat account "AI价值官" argues that the current artificial intelligence boom has become a high-stakes capital wager shaped not only by business competition, but also by legal uncertainty, funding pressure and time constraints. The piece points to Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness, which allegedly expanded from about $200 million to roughly $45 billion before suffering a reported $35 billion loss in a month after a sharp sell-off in AI-linked memory names such as SanDisk, Micron and SK Hynix. The article also highlights a shift in U.S. legal practice around platform and algorithm liability. It cites the rapid expansion of youth social media addiction litigation, pre-trial settlements involving Snap, TikTok and YouTube, and a jury decision in Los Angeles that found Meta and Google negligent in certain design choices. In the author’s framing, these developments matter for AI because companies may find it harder to shield themselves behind earlier arguments about platform neutrality or algorithmic non-liability. It then turns to spending and balance-sheet strain, listing heavy capital expenditure plans at Google, debt forecasts from UBS, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan, and long-term funding targets at OpenAI and Anthropic. The article’s core argument is that AI remains deeply dependent on continuous capital inflows, while the clock on profitability keeps ticking.

Meta has agreed to a settlement with attorneys general from 52 U.S. states and territories that could cost the company up to $18 billion over 10 years, while forcing major changes to how Instagram and Facebook operate for teenage users. The deal ranks among the largest civil settlements ever reached with a technology company and is being described as a defining legal turning point for social media platforms accused of designing products that hook children. The case had only recently gone to trial. A multistate federal lawsuit led by California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Kentucky opened on Aug. 18, with plaintiffs seeking $1.4 trillion. They alleged that Meta knowingly built features such as infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and frequent notifications to keep teens engaged, concealed mental health risks, and unlawfully collected data from children under 13 in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The settlement goes far beyond money. It imposes hard requirements on time limits, overnight access, school-hour notifications, visibility of likes, age verification, and independent auditing. It also includes a condition tied to whether TikTok and YouTube accept similar restrictions and payments. The article frames the agreement as a possible "tobacco moment" for social media, with legal concepts such as public nuisance now being applied to platform design and youth harm.

Meta has agreed to a multistate settlement valued at up to $17.1 billion to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed in ways that addicted teenagers, according to The New York Times. The deal would end a closely watched trial underway in federal court in Oakland, California, where attorneys general had accused the company of using addictive product features, misleading the public about platform safety, and unlawfully collecting minors’ data without parental consent in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Under a statement from the Connecticut attorney general’s office, Meta would pay as much as $12.19 billion over the next 10 years, with the total potentially rising to $17.1 billion if rivals such as TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat accept similar safety reforms and financial terms. The agreement also requires broad changes for users under 18, including a combined default daily limit of two hours across Instagram and Facebook, forced pauses after 15, 60, or 90 minutes of continuous use, overnight restrictions from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., and muted notifications during school hours on weekdays. The settlement still requires a judge’s approval, and thousands of related lawsuits across the US remain active.

Meta is now at the center of a major U.S. state lawsuit that reaches far beyond a single social media case. A bipartisan coalition of 29 state attorneys general sued the company in 2023, and on Aug. 18, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey opened the first trial in federal court in Oakland. The case targets two main issues: alleged deception over platform safety and allegedly addictive design features for children and teens on Instagram and Facebook, plus alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, tied to the collection of data from children under 13 without parental consent. State experts said about 4.6 million children under 13 used Instagram during the review period, while another 3.9 million used Facebook. The states’ headline number is a theoretical maximum of $1.4 trillion, calculated by multiplying alleged violations by per-violation penalties under state law. Even so, public court records cited in the source indicate the states themselves suggested a more realistic figure could be closer to $200 billion. The broader significance lies elsewhere: the case tries to sidestep Section 230 by arguing that Meta should be held responsible for its own product design, including recommendation systems, infinite scroll, and like-driven feedback loops. That approach, if upheld, could shape future litigation against other platforms and even products beyond social media.