Marketplace Tech

California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code. That’s changing the construction industry even beyond the state border.

More than a third of planet-warming emissions come from buildings and construction. Marketplace’s The rest of it is what’s called embodied carbon. That’s the emissions that it took to make the steel, concrete, glass and insulation, and put them all together. Caleigh Wells looked into what California’s new regulations could mean for builders in this episode of Marketplace Tech, hosted by Stephanie Hughes.

This week, Spotify is letting its users buy physical books. Plus, Amazon acquires the satellite service provide Globalstar. But first, state lawmakers in Illinois are considering a bill that says developers of large AI models can’t be held liable for critical harms caused by those models, as long as the developer doesn't intentionally or recklessly cause the harm and has published a safety protocol on its website.

A representative from OpenAI testified in favor of the bill; meanwhile, Wired reported this week that Anthropic is pushing for either major changes to the legislation, or for it to be killed completely. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, about all these headlines for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

The share of older workers is on the decline — about 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%.

The pandemic chased some older workers out, and others can simply afford to retire. Another factor that's causing some to exit? The emergence of artificial intelligence. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even as a colleague, seems like a headache to some. So, they’re choosing retirement instead.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber, who’s been covering the phenomenon.

Routers, computers, web cameras — they all connect to the internet. And they can be infected with malicious software that lets someone else take over. The device becomes a bot, essentially.

A group of these devices networked together then becomes a botnet. And these botnets can then be used for nefarious purposes, like distributed denial of service attacks, without the device owners even knowing about it.

Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs recently wrote about several large botnets including one called Kimwolf that compromised more than three million devices.

State governments invest their money a lot like a person might. Some treasuries, some mutual funds, a dash of corporate bonds, all intended to grow over time. Now, some states are looking to cryptocurrency as an investment. In 2025, at least nineteen states considered laws allowing some state funds to be invested in digital assets. Three states — Texas, New Hampshire, and Arizona — actually passed laws around this, according to a review by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this interest from states with Liz Farmer, senior officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, who explained why crypto is appealing to some state investors.