(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has disrupted global trade and roiled markets in an effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Some of his top tech allies, however, have backed ventures that replace human workers with robots.

Elon Musk, a top donor and adviser to Trump, has touted humanoid robots as a future growth area for electric-carmaker Tesla. “You can produce any product,” Musk said of the robots’ potential capacity during a February interview with Dubai’s World Governments Summit.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who Trump last month called “terrific,” has invested in several advanced robotics firms.

Bezos last year poured funds into Figure, a humanoid robot company that says its initial rollout will focus on manufacturers and warehouses, among other business applications. “We believe humanoids will revolutionize a variety of industries,” the company says on its website.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – both of whom joined Trump on his recent trip to the Middle East – helmed their respective companies as each invested in Figure. OpenAI ended its partnership with Figure last year.

“Trump is talking about bringing back the jobs, and he’s not understanding the tension between that goal and automation, which the tech bros have enthusiasm for,” Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told ABC News. “There’s a fundamental conflict between those goals.”

Musk did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment made through Musk-owned firm SpaceX. Neither Bezos, Huang nor Altman responded to ABC News’ request.

Speaking at a conference in April, Huang said the onset of artificial intelligence would fuel “new types of factories,” which in turn would create jobs in construction and steelmaking, as well as in trades such as plumbing and electricity.

Even more, Huang said, AI is set to trigger a surge in productivity at companies that adopt the new technology, allowing them to add employees as the firms increase output and revenue.

“New jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, every job will be changed,” Huang said. “Remember, it’s not AI that’s going to take your job. It’s not AI that’s going to destroy your company. It’s the company and the person who uses AI that’s going to take your job. And so that’s something to internalize.”

Even after a rollback of some levies, consumers face the highest overall average effective tariff rate since 1934, the Yale Budget Lab found earlier this month.

A key reason for the tariffs, White House officials say: Reshoring factories and rejuvenating employment in the manufacturing industry.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this month in an interview with Fox News that Trump’s vision for ushering in a “golden age” for America involved enticing manufacturers to open factories and build in the United States.

“We’re going to have huge jobs in manufacturing. You’ve heard the president talk about trillions and trillions of factories being built in America,” he said in the interview on May 11.

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, White House Spokesperson Kush Desai said “the importance of President Trump’s push to reinvigorate American industry goes beyond creating good-paying jobs for everyday Americans.”

“Supply chain shocks of critical pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and semiconductors during the COVID era prove that America cannot rely on foreign imports. The Trump administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security with a multifaceted approach of tariffs, tax cuts, rapid deregulation, and domestic energy production,” Desai added.

The share of U.S. workers in manufacturing has plummeted for decades. Roughly 8% of U.S. workers currently hold positions in manufacturing, which marks a steep decline from about a quarter of all employees as recently as 1970.

Researchers attribute such decline to overlapping trends, including the offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage markets overseas and the adoption of labor-saving technology throughout the sector.

Long before current advances, automation significantly increased productivity in U.S. factories, meaning the same number of workers could produce many more goods, researchers at Ball State University found in 2015. As a result, they said, manufacturing employment stagnated for decades even as output climbed.

“Automation is something we’ve seen for a long time,” Philipp Kircher, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, told ABC News.

Some of Trump’s tech allies have backed firms that seek to further automate manufacturing, touting a new wave of artificial-intelligence equipped robots as a replacement for some workers and salve for labor shortages.

Robotics outfit Vicarious boasts $250 million in investments from a set of backers that includes Bezos, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – all of whom flanked Trump during his inauguration.

On a webpage displaying photos of robots for use in warehouse settings, Vicarious tells potential clients that the products can “reduce both your costs and person-hour needs.”

In 2022, Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet-backed robotics software firm Intrinsic. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also sat alongside tech leaders at Trump’s inauguration.

Alphabet did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment. Meta declined to comment.

Yong Suk Lee, a professor of economics and technology at the University of Notre Dame, described the views on automation among Trump’s tech allies and some of his trade advisers as “opposed.”

The tech position, Lee said, would likely win out, even if some firms do open plants in the U.S.

“If you want to reshore, are you going to pay the same wages as Vietnam? Probably not,” Lee said. “Companies are faced with higher labor costs. In that case, they’ll probably automate.”

Discordant views among some tech leaders and White House officials surfaced in April, when Musk sharply criticized tariff-advocate Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro, Musk said, is “truly a moron.”

In an interview with CNBC, Navarro responded, saying Musk “isn’t a car manufacturer — he’s a car assembler.”

To be sure, analysts said, automation in manufacturing would likely continue regardless of support from Trump’s tech allies, since producers are locked in a competition to lower costs and increase output. The precise outlook for manufacturing employment is unclear, they added, since additional technology may add jobs for those maintaining and optimizing the machinery.

“Whether it’s the companies that currently support the U.S. president or not, somebody would be doing this innovation, maybe slightly slower,” Kircher said.

Even at current employment levels, a labor shortage bedevils U.S. manufacturers. Roughly one of every five U.S. factories that failed to produce at full capacity cited a shortage of workers, Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, found in a January study analyzing government data.

Agility Robots, an Amazon-backed firm building humanoid robots, identifies the current push for rejuvenated U.S. manufacturing as an opportunity for greater adoption of technology.

“Manufacturing companies are seeing a massive reshoring movement spanning various industries,” Agility Robots says on its website. “Adding a humanoid robot to your manufacturing facility is a great way to stay on the leading edge of automation.”

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previous remarks about robotics made by a company executive.

“Our goal is to ensure these systems improve safety and productivity. Technology should be used to help us retain and grow our talent through skill development and reimagining how we make our workplace better, both in productivity and safety. If we do this well, we’re certain to always innovate for our customers,” Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said in a September blog post.

Amazon has “created more U.S. jobs in the last decade than any other company,” Amazon said this month.

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Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and a growing range of powerful models, is quickly becoming one of Europe’s most talked-about tech startups. While its global market share remains small compared to giants like OpenAI, it’s seen by many as the continent’s best chance at competing in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence. That status was further confirmed when French President Emmanuel Macron publicly recommended Mistral’s chatbot over its American rival ChatGPT, just ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris.

A closer look at Mistral AI and its growing tech offerings

Founded in 2023, Mistral AI entered the scene with a clear goal: to make advanced AI widely accessible. Its slogan, “Put frontier AI in the hands of everyone,” captures its mission to promote openness and independence in the AI space. Although it doesn’t name OpenAI directly, the message is clear—it’s offering an alternative vision for how AI can be shared and used.

One of Mistral AI’s most recognisable offerings is its chatbot, Le Chat. The app has seen strong adoption since launching on iOS and Android, with over 1 million downloads in just two weeks. It shot to the top of the iOS free app chart in France, a sign of strong local support.

But Mistral’s ambitions don’t stop at chat apps. The company has rolled out several advanced AI models for various tasks. Mistral Large 2 replaced its first large model as the main language tool. In 2024, Mistral unveiled Pixtral Large, a model that understands both text and visuals. May 2025 brought the release of Mistral Medium 3, aimed at providing efficiency without losing performance—particularly useful for coding and STEM-related tasks.

Another key model, Devstral, is open and available under the Apache 2.0 licence, making it free even for commercial purposes. This contrasts with earlier tools like Codestral, which couldn’t be used for business. Mistral’s “Les Ministraux” family of models is designed for devices like phones, while Mistral Saba focuses on Arabic language use. In March 2025, Mistral added Mistral OCR to its portfolio—a tool that can convert any PDF into readable text, making it easier for AI to process.

Founders, funding, and business strategy

Mistral AI was founded by three experienced researchers: CEO Arthur Mensch, formerly of DeepMind; CTO Timothée Lacroix; and chief scientist Guillaume Lample, who came from Meta. Alongside them are key advisors like Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and Charles Gorintin of health-tech firm Alan, as well as former digital minister Cédric O. His involvement caused some debate due to his previous government role, but he remains closely tied to the startup’s direction.

Although Mistral offers several free tools, the company also focuses on generating income. In February 2025, it launched a paid version of Le Chat, called the Pro plan, which costs US$14.99 monthly. On the business-to-business side, companies can pay to access Mistral’s best-performing models through API use or full licensing agreements. Despite its modest scale compared to US firms, Mistral AI’s revenue has already reached the eight-digit mark, according to reports.

Big-name partnerships and plans for the future

The company’s partnerships are helping it expand quickly. In 2024, Microsoft invested €15 million and agreed to distribute Mistral’s models through its Azure cloud platform. Though the deal was small enough to avoid an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, it still sparked a conversation within the European Union about tech influence.

More recently, Mistral AI teamed up with Agence France-Presse (AFP), giving Le Chat access to AFP’s full-text archive from 1983 onwards. This makes the chatbot one of the few with access to such a large, trusted news database.

Other strategic partners include the French army, France’s job agency, major shipping firm CMA, German defence startup Helsing, IBM, telecom provider Orange, and carmaker Stellantis. In May 2025, the company revealed it would join a national initiative to create an AI Campus in the Paris area, marking another step in its efforts to shape the future of AI in France and across Europe.

Mistral AI may not yet be a global household name. Still, it’s quickly gaining ground with its fresh take on AI development, open model strategy, and support from both government and industry leaders. If you’re watching the AI space, it’s one company you’ll want to keep an eye on.

The connected fitness leader is hitting the fairway with golf-focused fitness programming with one of the largest golf club operators in the U.S.

iFIT, the connected fitness company behind NordicTrack and Freemotion Fitness, is taking a swing at golf fitness through a newly announced partnership with Arcis Golf, which operates 70 private, resort and public golf facilities in the U.S.

The collaboration comes as global interest in golf continues to rise, with more than 531 million rounds played in 2023, according to the National Golf Foundation.

Golf enthusiasts can expect game-elevating content spanning golf workouts, performance training and on-course strategy sessions on iFIT-enabled equipment and mobile devices.

“This global partnership aligns perfectly with the health-and-wellness goals that are so important to our membership,” Arcis Golf founder, CEO and chairman Blake Walker said. “The collaboration with iFIT will expand our brand awareness to new audiences as we lead in golf fitness, best-in-class instruction and technology. We look forward to seeing the positive impact it will bring.”

Staying true to the immersive experience iFIT is known for, the programming will be produced at Arcis properties and introduce its golf brand to iFIT’s more than six million users.

“This partnership positions us to make an immediate and meaningful impact in the fast-growing golf fitness space by partnering with a premier golf and lifestyle brand like Arcis Golf,” iFIT Commercial CEO Mark Watterson said. “Their exceptional portfolio of beautiful golf courses, top-tier facilities equipped with Freemotion equipment, and industry leadership gives us a powerful foundation for long-term success.”

Zooming out, golf is increasingly being treated as a sport that demands year-round training for its avid players. This month, the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) launched a reimagined Golf Fitness Specialization program designed for golf pros, personal trainers and coaches to help players enhance their game, reduce injury risk and reach peak physical condition with assessment protocols and progressive programming strategies. And for those who want to be fashion-forward on the green, Reebok recently launched Reebok Golf, a new footwear line anchored by its flagship product, the Nano Golf shoe.

Arcis Golf is one of several recent partnerships for Utah-based iFIT. Earlier this year, the fitness company teamed up with cardio gaming content provider Ergatta to bring a gamified, virtual racing experience to its NordicTrack and ProForm lines of treadmills and rowers. iFIT also launched the world’s first officially licensed Tour de France indoor bike, accompanied by exclusive content featuring professional coaches and cyclists.

Performance apparel brand 2XU and race organizer Motiv Sports have recently announced a three-year partnership that promises to enhance runner experiences through innovative gear and community-focused events. This collaboration will position 2XU as the exclusive compression technology partner across Motiv Sports’ 11 premier races, including notable events like the Long Beach Marathon and Bay to Breakers 12K.

The collaboration emphasizes practical athlete support through specialized products like the 2XU Long Run Tee — a durable, performance-oriented alternative to standard race shirts. The two companies also host educational initiatives about compression benefits for those leading active lifestyles.

Phyllis Blanchard, VP of Commercial Partnerships for Motiv Sports, shared about the partnership: “2XU understands what it means to back athletes, not just through words but through design, detail, and credibility. Their presence will enhance the participant experience at every level, and we’re excited to see what we can create together.”

Image Credit: 2XU x Motiv Sports

Brendan Ruberry: How has the status quo on sports betting changed since the Murphy v. NCAA Supreme Court decision?

Jonathan D. Cohen: Until May 14, 2018, there was no prospect of any state legalizing sports betting, and now 38 states and Washington, DC have legal sports gambling. [Among those states,] 30 allow you to gamble on any device with internet access. And that has, over the last seven years, birthed a $120 billion per year market. Before, if you wanted to bet on sports, you had to do it in Vegas, or you could do it illegally. And now you can, in most states, do it from the touch of your phone. 

Ironically, we are currently building the setup that is being taken down in other countries, because other countries are now seeing all the problems that result from online gambling, and they are pulling back and adding regulations. And we’re rushing headlong into the deregulated space that they are vacating as quickly as possible.

Who is Kyle and why is his story central to the state of play in the industry right now?

Kyle is illustrative as a 26-year-old white man, which speaks to the demographics of sports betting. But he’s also illustrative in that he was someone who had gambled before it became legal first in Colorado and then in Kansas, where he lives. But he had never run into trouble, had always sort of gambled within his means when he was at a casino or when he had been placed a few bets on sports in college. And it was only because of its online availability that he gambled above his means and couldn’t pay his rent for one month, that he lost his job, that he found himself up at three in the morning betting on minor league British darts, that he had to call the Colorado Problem Gambling hotline, that he moved back in with his parents because he ran out of money. Now, every time there’s a major tennis tournament, he just disappears for 40 consecutive hours gambling on sports. Not that every single person who’s gambling on sports is having experiences like his, but he’s the kind of person who never would have run into trouble gambling, but for the fact that it appeared one day on his phone and without guardrails to stop him from running into trouble.

He might not be the typical gambler, as we see it, but he is typical of how these companies make their money.

Yes, the business model basically writes off 60%-plus of players. At least 60% of NFL bettors account for a total of 1% of sportsbook revenue, and as much as 80% of revenue for these companies comes from a core group of 3% of gamblers. There’s lots of products like this, where a small group of people account for a huge share of profits. But fundamentally, it’s not an accident that someone like Kyle loses too much money. It is sort of baked into the way these companies operate, that there are going to be a small subset of people from whom they can extract a lot of money and a large share of their revenue.

You profile Colorado in particular. What’s illustrative about how Colorado approached legalizing sports gambling?

So after the Murphy decision, it wasn’t inevitable that we’d have so many states go all in so quickly, right? It wasn’t organic. It was in Colorado, DraftKings and FanDuel in particular [were] showing up, helping to write the legislation to govern gambling once that passed, helping to basically astroturf the ballot referendum that passed sports betting. And then sitting in the room with the regulators, helping them craft the regulations that would govern the sports folks’ own behavior. So not only would sports betting not have passed as quickly were it not for the companies’ political involvement, but the all the harms and issues that we have from sports betting now are, in part, resultant of the fact that the foxes were inside the hen house, playing with all the hens while the regulations were being developed.

You say at one point that these are more like tech companies than traditional sportsbooks or casinos.

This is a huge branding operation with a seamlessly designed app. What they have to offer is all this specialized software under the hood that lets them, at every second of every baseball game, change the odds of whether the next pitch is going to be 88 miles an hour, so that you can bet on that. They can have the most efficient line possible developed in a fraction of a second. And the other way they’re like tech companies is mimicking all the addictive and troublesome aspects of social media apps, for example, just like the endless scroll and the endless short options for dopamine hits. And the seamless app interfaces they’ve learned at the feet of these other borderline addictive companies and products, and they are now to offer an actual addictive product, of gambling.

And I would assume, like other tech companies, they deal in data, and data is sort of their critical resource. What do we know about how much data these companies have and how they’re using it?

This is what’s most frustrating to me, as someone who wants to advocate for a change: These companies have more data on gamblers than any gambling operation in recorded human history, right? Vegas casinos of the 1950s would kill for the kind of information that DraftKings and FanDuel have. And there’s a really revealing video from a Fanatics executive who talks about how easy it is for them to spot problem gambling. They have all this data on player behavior. The question is how they’re using it. It seems like they’re using it to identify problem gamblers and make money from them; or identify losers and make money from them, rather than cut off people who have obvious gambling problems and stop them from gambling. This is anecdotal, they claim that it’s all trade secrets, and they won’t give up any of their data. But again, like a tech company rather than a sportsbook, it is their primary resource. Whenever you sign into the app, and you see a customized parlay, that’s like, ‘wow, that looks perfect for me’ — no sh*t, it is perfect for you. They built it for you. And because they know what teams you like, and they know what you like to bet on.

The fear [with AI is] that they can get even better at these sorts of micro transactions, at the fast betting, and then they can super-customize it to make it even more enticing than it already is. Good luck to all of us.

There’s an observation in the book about how professional gamblers are trying to circumvent some of these pattern-recognition abilities that these companies have. Could you talk about that?

I’m drawing on the work of a professional gambler I talked to named Isaac Rose-Berman, who, from his own conversations with professional gamblers, basically realized that the apps don’t want to shut off losers. They don’t want to shut off anyone who’s bad at betting, and they really don’t want to shut off anyone who’s going to lose a lot of money. So the longer that professional gamblers can make the apps think that they are just a stupid, lucky bettor on a hot streak, the better chance they have of betting for longer and making money before they finally get caught. So Isaac has described betting on Aaron Judge to hit a home run — which is like the most vanilla bet you can possibly make — so that he looks like a normie, so he doesn’t look like a professional bettor. Because, again, they don’t want professional bettors on their apps, but they do want losers, and they do want the kind of people who place a bet on Aaron Judge to hit a home run. (No offense to Yankees fans — well, some offense to Yankees fans.) On the one hand, professional gamblers are [a small percentage] of the bettors. But on the other hand, the fact that they get cut off so quickly and so aggressively, to me, reveals that this whole thing is a house of cards; that they only actually want you if you’re a loser. And that second that you can make money, the second that you’re better than them, they stop you from doing it. So on the one hand, who cares? It’s a small, small group of people. But I think it’s really revealing of the fundamental issues behind the whole enterprise.

Tell me a little bit about the responsible gambling framework as it exists, and how you find fault with that.

There’s a lot of comparisons made of the gambling industry to tobacco and alcohol. A difference in this case is that the gambling industry doesn’t deny that problem gambling exists in the way that the tobacco industry denied any connection between lung cancer and cigarettes. But what they’re doing instead is this campaign for what they call ‘responsible gaming,’ or ‘responsible gambling,’ putting the onus of play on the individual in an attempt to ward off intrusive regulation or the need for guardrails. What they say is, ‘please play responsibly.’ They tell players to play responsibly, to call the hotline, while, of course, not actually providing any structure by which it would be easier for someone to play responsibly. They don’t stop anyone from betting three mortgage payments over the course of 35 seconds, if that is how they choose to play. Because what is responsible? Responsible is in the eye of the beholder. So responsible gaming is, in many ways, a beard for the industry. And the way that they can say, ‘oh, if someone runs into trouble on our app, it’s because they were gaming irresponsibly, and it’s their fault. We provided tools, this player didn’t take advantage of them. We would have cut them off if they had set a deposit limit or a time limit.’ But someone who’s addicted to gambling or has trouble gambling, they’re not going to set a deposit limit or do any of that. At some point, people who are addicted to gambling are not choosing to gamble.

The responsible gaming model is like, ‘hey, there’s a river over there. Don’t fall in.’ Whereas the public health model would be like, ‘hey, let’s build a fence around the river to stop people from falling in in the first place.’ And so my vision for a safer sports betting setup would have basically a bunch of speed bumps on the hill to stop people from rolling down and collecting steam and sort of developing an addiction and developing unsafe practices. If I were going to summarize it in a single word, it would be ‘friction’: If you deposit money, you can’t gamble with it for 12 to 24 hours. If you lose, and you are chasing your losses, then you can’t place another deposit. You can only place a certain number of deposits in the span of a day or a few days — anything to slow down the process.

I don’t want to make it so that it’s impossible for someone to place an innocent bet and augment their sports viewing experience. But I do want to make it impossible, or almost impossible, that someone placing an innocent $5 bet for fun can be the start of a dangerous journey that leads them into addiction or other kinds of harm.

Why should FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Fanatics, or whomever care about someone falling into the river, if the river is where all the profits are?

You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only slaughter it once. And so the market, the competition, is so fierce right now among the firms that there’s this perception that there’s always more efficiency. That we can always just find more bettors, especially when Texas, California, Minnesota, Georgia, and other states legalize sports betting, which they probably will at some point — not to mention the fact that if one of those companies were to cut you off from gambling, you can just run to a competitor. There’s no collaboration in place right now between the companies to remove the incentive to slaughter every sheep that shows up at their door. But that would be the long-term incentive. Yes, you’re making money right now, but in what I would call a fundamentally extractive business model, where at some point you’re going to run out of gamblers. Or at some point, the political winds are going to turn against you because of your irresponsible behavior, and over the long term, it’s not going to be a good look, and it’s not going to work. And I know it’s not going to be as profitable, but you should want a sustainable business model where people don’t tap out of sports betting because they keep having bad experiences And they become sort of long-term casual players who won’t lose that much money, but they’ll lose enough to keep your lights on.

I don’t know why any state needs to offer a market on Malaysian women’s doubles badminton. Those markets are basically just a trap door for gamblers who are looking for something to bet on at three in the morning, and that’s the only thing that’s available on the app — so in addition to [that], changing some of the ways people can interact with the app, fundamentally look at the app interface and design and remove some of the more sort of lizard brain, addictive, dopamine-providing aspects of the apps themselves.