Hello, welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. First off, a bit of housekeeping: I’m taking a couple weeks off for the holidays, so Lately will be back in your inboxes on Jan. 9.

Secondly, it’s time for Lately’s annual (slash second-ever) year-end round-up. So let’s dive into the biggest stories that shook the online world in 2025, from a new tech broligarchy to the rise of the sloposphere.

In the past 12 months, families have been increasingly speaking out about the dangers of AI chatbots, especially for young people. Various lawsuits against Character.AI, OpenAI and Microsoft filed in the past year by families allege that the AI companies’ chatbots encouraged suicide and led to the deaths of their children. At the same time, as more people turn to chatbots as friends, therapists or confidantes, there has also been greater awareness of users forming unhealthy relationships with the technology. People have shared stories about developing “AI psychosis,” in which chatbots, known to be sycophantic to keep users locked into long conversations, support delusional and paranoid thoughts.

While these lawsuits make it through the courts, some AI companies have already made changes to address concerns: Character.AI announced in the fall that it would ban teenagers from using its chatbot. Online safety experts have welcomed the decision, but stress that the chatbots should never have been available to young people to begin with.

The first sign of a rising broligarchy was Donald Trump’s inauguration, when tech CEOs of the once proudly left-leaning Silicon Valley were seated side by side, front and centre. There was Elon Musk, of course, but also Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and OpenAI’s Sam Altman were also in attendance.

Throughout 2025, tech leaders have cozied up with Trump, realizing the easiest way to get policies, government contracts and other perks would be through camaraderie with the President. Early on in 2025, Meta relaxed its content moderation policies around controversial issues such as gender identity and immigration, and TikTok sent out a push notification that thanked Trump for saving the app.

Maintaining a friendly relationship with the President has already reaped benefits for tech companies. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order aimed at pre-empting any state-level regulation on artificial intelligence, something that all the tech companies – which have invested billions in AI – have been pushing for. This week Trump’s media empire, Truth Social, announced its merger with a Google-backed nuclear fusion company in a US$6-billion deal. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have all touted fusion technology as a way of powering the energy-hungry data centres needed to build and run their AI products.

Then on Thursday night, the TikTok deal to keep the app operating in the U.S. was finally sealed, with parent company ByteDance selling just over 80 per cent of the company’s U.S. assets to American investors, including Oracle. Oracle, which was co-founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, is also a part of the President’s US$500-billion “Stargate” AI infrastructure project, along with OpenAI and SoftBank.

Of course, Trump’s feelings about someone can turn at any moment. It appears that the tech bosses are in his good books for now, but who knows what 2026 will bring.

This was the year that AI-generated content broke into the mainstream, and most troublingly, started to look very realistic. Google, OpenAI and Meta all released new generative AI tools, allowing users to turn a brief prompt – such as, say, a video of Steve Irwin rapping about crocodiles – into an astoundingly impressive video in just a few seconds, or minutes.

Meta and OpenAI created standalone apps, Vibes and Sora, respectively, for AI-generated content, but these videos have started to flood Instagram and TikTok. This type of AI content has been dubbed “slop” – at times entertaining, but also concerning as more people become distrustful of what they see online.