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EA's takeover, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, and "vanity mega projects": Human Rights Watch assesses the impact of gaming's latest controversy
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EA’s takeover, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, and “vanity mega projects”: Human Rights Watch assesses the impact of gaming’s latest controversy

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Earlier this week, history was made in both the world of video games and private equity. The trio of Affinity Partners, Silver Lake, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced a plan to take EA private for $55bn. This leveraged buyout would be the largest in history and, if approved, will mean the industry giant would be a private company in 2027.

This immediately raised concerns throughout the industry. Despite a statement by EA CEO Andrew Wilson saying the company’s values would remain the same, many were concerned at the $20bn of debt the company would be saddled with. Would EA still support studios like Bioware to make the games it wants to make? Among all this, there were also concerns of a moral nature, due to the involvement of Saudi Arabia’s government in the deal.

Eurogamer spoke to Human Rights Watch’s Saudi Arabia researcher, Joey Shea, to discuss the ethical dilemma at the heart of the buyout. Human Rights Watch – which has yet to issue a comment on the deal – has comprehensively covered the ongoing human rights abuses taking place in Saudi Arabia, and how the Public Investment Fund is directly tied to such abuses.

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“We have found that the public investment fund has contributed to, and is responsible for, human rights abuses” states Shea. “This is a trillion dollars in Saudi state wealth that should be invested to realise the economic and social rights of Saudi citizens. We’ve found it’s been invested in vanity mega projects inside and outside of the country.

“We see this as a deliberate attempt to distract from the country’s human rights abuses […] MBS himself wields enormous power over what is effectively public funds, and he wields this power in a highly arbitrary and personalised manner, rather than the benefit of the Saudi people more broadly. Effectively, Saudi Arabia’s vast fossil fuel-derived state wealth is controlled by one person, which isn’t good for human rights, or business either.”

Saudi Arabian investment through the Public Investment fund is generally broken into two categories: investments to improve the standing of Saudi Arabia worldwide, and investments to bring foreign business and investment to Saudi Arabia itself. According to Shea, video games fall inside the former category as sports entertainment.

“Vision 2030 (a major Saudi government investment plan) is the core economic diversification plan for Saudi Arabia, and within the earliest versions of this plan it explicitly stated that these large investments in sports entertainment options was part of a strategy to enhance the reputation of the country nationally.”

After SNK was bought by Saudi Arabia, Fatal Fury City of the Wolves was used to help promote the state and its other investments. | Image credit: SNK

Some have argued that accepting Saudi Arabian investment through the PIF can be separated from the actions of its government, that no country is innocent and everything is tainted. However, according to Shea, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund is directly linked to its human rights abuses. The money used for the EA buyout may itself be attached to these acts.

Shea explains: “In a report we released last year, we documented how the PIF itself has benefited from Human Rights abuses. For example, if we go back to 2017 and the notorious corruption crackdown and the Ritz Carlton, we found that assets that were seized outside of any recognisable legal process wound up in the PIF. Your investment vehicle contains assets that were stolen – that’s a problem!

“We also found that one of those assets that were seized illegally was a company called Sky Prime aviation. This is the company that owned the planes that transferred the hit squad to Istanbul where they murdered Jamal Khashoggi. So if one of the assets your investment fund owns is committing transnational murder in a consulate… that’s pretty outrageous.

“Our call is never ‘don’t invest in Saudi Arabia, don’t invest in Saudi Arabia’. We don’t have a standing boycott. But businesses have a responsibility under the UN guiding principles of Business and Human Rights to do due diligence assessments before engaging in a business relationship, to assess whether that relationship will lead to human rights harm. If it does you should, of course, not engage in that relationship.”

Once the deal goes through, all of EA’s games will be connected to the Saudi state and its human rights abuses. | Image credit: EA

One important detail within the announcement of EA’s leveraged buyout is that it’s pending regulatory approval, which some experts believe won’t be much of a hurdle due to US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s involvement with Affinity Partners. When asked whether a deal like this has any chance of being stopped by US regulators, Shea had little hope due to the current political climate in the region and America’s strategic partners there, Saudi Arabia included.

“I don’t see it coming under scrutiny. I think there was a moment in 2023 before October 7th, when there was some political will from some senators in the US to scrutinise Saudi investments through the PIF in the USA. There was some hope that these investments would come under greater scrutiny rather than just for national security impacts – that’s basically the only standard to which foreign investments will be scrutinised, mostly foreign investments from China.”

“We had hoped this could be broadened to include human rights concerns, but at this point, globally, I don’t personally have that much hope.”

Eurogamer contacted EA for comment on matters regarding the private buyout from Affinity Partners, Silver Lake, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.



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Product Reviews

US labor board drops allegation that Apple’s CEO violated employees’ rights

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The National Labor Relations Board has withdrawn “many of the claims” it made against Apple in relation to cases brought in 2021 by former employees, according to Bloomberg. In particular, it dismissed an allegation that Apple CEO Tim Cook violated workers’ rights when he sent an all-staff email that year, which said “people who leak confidential information do not belong” in the company. Cook also said in the email that Apple was “doing everything in [its] power to identify those who leaked” information from an internal meeting the previous week, wherein management answered workers’ questions about pay equity and Texas’ anti-abortion law.

Apple didn’t “tolerate disclosures of confidential information, whether it’s product IP or the details of a confidential meeting,” Cook wrote at the time. The NLRB has now withdrawn some of the claims made in complaints by former employee Ashley Gjøvik, including that Apple told employees not to disclose company communications, and that it had suspended Gjøvik in retaliation and fired her unlawfully. But, not all of the allegations have been withdrawn. Apple settled a separate case with Gjøvik back in April, which she announced as a win for workers, as the settlement required Apple to revise rules around employee agreements and discussions of company information to clarify “that employees can talk about their pay, working conditions, and union organizing without retaliation,” and speak to the press, among other things.

In addition dropping its claim that Cook’s email violated workers’ rights, the labor board is also withdrawing its allegation that the firing of activist Janneke Parrish, one of the leaders of the #AppleToo movement, broke the law. It’s dismissing its previous allegations that Apple broke the law by imposing confidentiality rules and surveilling workers or making them think they were under surveillance, as well. After an investigation, NLRB previously came to the conclusion that Cook’s email and Apple’s overall behavior were “interfering with, restraining and coercing employees in the exercise of their rights.”

Bloomberg says this is just one instance of the NLRB being more friendly to companies under President Trump. It’s not quite clear if the labor board has withdrawn all allegations against Apple related to the complaint or just some of them, but we’ve reached out for clarification.

Correction, September 27, 2025, 6:42PM ET: This story incorrectly stated that the NLRB had withdrawn claims made against Apple in complaints filed by employees including Cher Scarlett. Scarlett’s charges against Apple, which relate to pay equity, suppression of wage discussions and constructive discharge, have not been withdrawn or dismissed.

This article has also been updated to include additional information about allegations by former employee Ashley Gjøvik that have been withdrawn, and about Apple’s previous settlement with Gjøvik.



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Kraken Donates $1M to Pro-Trump PAC to Support Crypto Privacy Rights

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In brief

  • Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi announced $1 million donation to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC and increased the commitment to America First Digital to $1 million.
  • Arjun Sethi said crypto embodies “the right to self-determination” and warned of “attempts to criminalize infrastructure.”
  • Winklevoss twins previously donated over $21 million in Bitcoin to launch the explicitly pro-Republican Digital Freedom Fund PAC.

Crypto exchange Kraken said Tuesday it will donate $2 million to a pro-Trump crypto group as the platform mobilizes in “a fight for the core rights of individuals in a digital age.”

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi announced a $1 million donation to the Freedom Fund PAC and said the company would also raise its 2025 commitment to the pro-Trump group America First Digital to $1 million.

“The fight for crypto in the United States is far from over,” Sethi tweeted Tuesday.

He warned crypto’s foundational principles face threats from “regulatory uncertainty,” “enforcement by headline,” “attempts to criminalize infrastructure,” and “bans on privacy tools,” calling these “constitutional questions about how financial freedom fits into a free society.”



Sethi tied Bitcoin’s origins to “a peaceful revolution” and noted how that crypto’s ideals are “the right to self-determination” and “extensions of the Bill of Rights, rendered in code.”

America First Digital is led by Jason Thielman, former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and senior advisor Kristin Walker, a former chief of staff to Senator Cynthia Lummis, who reintroduced the BITCOIN Act in March to authorize $80 billion in Bitcoin purchases for a strategic reserve.

“By explicitly tying campaign financing to the ideals of ‘financial freedom,’ crypto leaders are no longer content with defensive lobbying,” Raj Kapoor, founder and CEO of the India Blockchain Alliance, told Decrypt. “They are moving into ideological territory, aligning digital assets with constitutional values.”

Federal authorities have recently targeted the founders of Bitcoin mixer Samourai Wallet and Ethereum privacy protocol Tornado Cash, with developers facing criminal charges for allegedly facilitating money laundering.

With the donation, Sethi said Kraken backs the right to “self-custody” assets, building decentralized systems “without permission,” opting out of “surveillance-based finance,” and accessing “open, composable infrastructure.”

The announcement drew immediate support from crypto industry figures, including Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss, who welcomed Kraken’s participation.

It was the Winklevoss twins who contributed over $21 million in Bitcoin last month to launch the Digital Freedom Fund.

Unlike other crypto PACs that maintain nonpartisan facades, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss explicitly stated their PAC will work to support Republicans, defeat Democrats, and advance Trump’s crypto agenda in the 2026 midterms.

Meanwhile, Fairshake, crypto’s largest super PAC, raised nearly $300 million in 2024 from Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz, spending across both parties to keep digital assets from becoming a partisan wedge issue.

“Such political donations are common in the U.S., and these funds are expected to increase industry influence, as crypto leaders push for more pro-friendly policies from the current administration,” Sudhakar Lakshmanaraja, founder of blockchain education platform Digital South Trust, told Decrypt. 

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Cindy Cohn Is Leaving the EFF, but Not the Fight for Digital Rights
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Cindy Cohn Is Leaving the EFF, but Not the Fight for Digital Rights

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After a quarter century defending digital rights, Cindy Cohn announced on Tuesday that she is stepping down as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cohn, who has led the San Francisco–based nonprofit since 2015, says she will leave the role later this year, concluding a chapter that helped define the modern fight over online freedom.

Cohn first rose to prominence as lead counsel in Bernstein v. Department of Justice, the 1990s case that overturned federal restrictions on publishing encryption code. As EFF’s legal director and later executive director, she guided the group through legal challenges to government surveillance, reforms to computer crime laws, and efforts to hold corporations accountable for data collection. Over the past decade, EFF has expanded its influence, becoming a central force in shaping the debate over privacy, security, and digital freedom.

In an interview with WIRED, Cohn reflected on EFF’s foundational encryption victories, its unfinished battles against National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, and the organization’s work protecting independent security researchers. She spoke about the shifting balance of power between corporations and governments, the push for stronger state-level privacy laws, and the growing risks posed by artificial intelligence.

Though stepping down from leadership, Cohn tells WIRED she plans to remain active in the fight against mass surveillance and government secrecy. Describing herself as “more of a warrior than a manager,” she says her intent is to return to frontline advocacy. She is also at work on a forthcoming book, Privacy’s Defender, due out next spring, which she hopes will inspire a new generation of digital rights advocates.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: Tell us about the fights you won, and the ones that still feel unfinished after 25 years.

CINDY COHN: The early fight that we made to free up encryption from government regulation still stands out as setting the stage for a potentially secure internet. We’re still working on turning that promise into a reality, but we’re in such a different place than we would’ve been in had we lost that fight. Encryption protects anybody who buys anything online, anyone who uses Signal to be a whistleblower or journalists, or just regular people who want privacy and use WhatsApp or Signal. Even the backend-certificate authorities provided by Let’s Encrypt—that make sure that when you think you’re going to your bank, you’re actually going to your bank website—are all made possible because of encryption. These are all things that would’ve been at risk if we hadn’t won that fight. I think that win was foundational, even though the fights aren’t over.

The fights that we’ve had around the NSA and national security, those are still works in progress. We were not successful with our big challenge to the NSA spying in Jewel v. NSA, although over the long arc of that case and the accompanying legislative fights, we managed to claw back quite a bit of what the NSA started doing after 9/11.



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Should AI Get Legal Rights?
Gaming Gear

Should AI Get Legal Rights?

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In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there, you can then figure out if other computational systems, such as a chabot, have indicators of sentience similar to those of a human.

Eleos AI said in the paper that “a major challenge in applying” this approach “is that it involves significant judgment calls, both in formulating the indicators and in evaluating their presence or absence in AI systems.”

Model welfare is, of course, a nascent and still evolving field. It’s got plenty of critics, including Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, who recently published a blog about “seemingly conscious AI.”

“This is both premature, and frankly dangerous,” Suleyman wrote, referring generally to the field of model welfare research. “All of this will exacerbate delusions, create yet more dependence-related problems, prey on our psychological vulnerabilities, introduce new dimensions of polarization, complicate existing struggles for rights, and create a huge new category error for society.”

Suleyman wrote that “there is zero evidence” today that conscious AI exists. He included a link to a paper that Long coauthored in 2023 that proposed a new framework for evaluating whether an AI system has “indicator properties” of consciousness. (Suleyman did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.)

I chatted with Long and Campbell shortly after Suleyman published his blog. They told me that, while they agreed with much of what he said, they don’t believe model welfare research should cease to exist. Rather, they argue that the harms Suleyman referenced are the exact reasons why they want to study the topic in the first place.

“When you have a big, confusing problem or question, the one way to guarantee you’re not going to solve it is to throw your hands up and be like ‘Oh wow, this is too complicated,’” Campbell says. “I think we should at least try.”

Testing Consciousness

Model welfare researchers primarily concern themselves with questions of consciousness. If we can prove that you and I are conscious, they argue, then the same logic could be applied to large language models. To be clear, neither Long nor Campbell think that AI is conscious today, and they also aren’t sure it ever will be. But they want to develop tests that would allow us to prove it.

“The delusions are from people who are concerned with the actual question, ‘Is this AI, conscious?’ and having a scientific framework for thinking about that, I think, is just robustly good,” Long says.

But in a world where AI research can be packaged into sensational headlines and social media videos, heady philosophical questions and mind-bending experiments can easily be misconstrued. Take what happened when Anthropic published a safety report that showed Claude Opus 4 may take “harmful actions” in extreme circumstances, like blackmailing a fictional engineer to prevent it from being shut off.



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Product Reviews

Atari now owns the rights to five Ubisoft games: Cold Fear, I Am Alive, Child of Eden, Grow Home, and Grow Up

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Ubisoft has reached into the back of the cupboard, grabbed the intellectual property rights for five games it wasn’t doing anything with, and sold them to Atari. The five games are Cold Fear (which is basically Resident Evil on a boat), I Am Alive (a post-apocalyptic survival platformer), Child of Eden (a psychedelic rhythm game), and both Grow Home and its sequel Grow Up (which are physics-based climbing games where you’re a cute robot).

“Ubisoft and Atari both have a legacy of crafting worlds that players can fall in love with—games that resonate with generations of players not just for how they played, but for how they made us feel,” Wade Rosen, chairman and CEO of Atari, said in a joint statement. “We’re excited to reintroduce these titles while also exploring ways to expand and evolve these franchises.”

While Atari may just be planning ports for Switch 2 and the like for this bundle of games, given that the publisher also owns Nightdive—the studio responsible for projects like the System Shock remake and more recently the re-release of Hexen and Heretic—there’s reason to hope at least some of these games will receive more high-effort revivals.


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I’d personally love to see a remake of Cold Fear, a survival horror game set on a whaling ship during a storm. Original developer Darkworks put a lot of effort into modeling the constant heaving of the sea, making the deck of the ship shift beneath you while you were trying to shoot zombie parasites. A short, self-contained experience, it caught some flak for being about five hours long at release, but honestly that sounds ideal for a haunted-house survival horror game.

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Product Reviews

Microsoft’s CEO of artificial intelligence believes advocating for ‘rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship’ will become ‘a dangerous turn in AI progress’

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If you are familiar with AI, there’s a good chance flickers of I, Robot, Blade Runner, or even Cyberpunk 2077 flash up in your mind. That’s because the philosophy and ethics of what AI could be are more interesting than the thing that makes AI overviews give you the wrong search results.

In a recent blog post (via TechCrunch), Microsoft’s CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, penned his thoughts on those advocating for conscious AI and the belief that one day, people would be advocating for its rights.

He builds on the belief that AI can embolden a specific type of psychosis. “Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship.” He continues, “This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.”


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For some, AI is a worrying development, partly due to how confident it is in its statements. To the layman, it’s not only always correct but always open to conversation, and this (as Suleyman’s link to Copilot suggests) can result in users deifying the “chatbot as a supreme intelligence or believe it holds cosmic answers”.

This is an understandable concern. We need only look at the recent case of a man giving himself an incredibly rare ailment after consulting ChatGPT on how to cut down his salt intake for an idea of what Suleyman is talking about.

AI’s value is precisely because it’s something so different from humans. Never tired, infinitely patient, able to process more data than a human mind ever could. This is what benefits humanity. Not an AI that claims to feel shame, jealousy, fear + so on.📝https://t.co/WsEcvNQgoC pic.twitter.com/DA9lGchjXaAugust 21, 2025

Suleyman argues AI should never replace a person, and that AI companions need “guardrails” to “ensure this amazing technology can do its job.” He elaborates that “some academics” are exploring the idea of model welfare. This is effectively the belief that we owe some moral duty to beings that have a chance of being conscious. Suleyman states, “This is both premature, and frankly dangerous.”

Suleyman says, “We need to be clear: SCAI [seemingly conscious AI] is something to avoid.” He says that SCAI would be a combination of language, empathetic personality, memory, a claim of subjective experience, a sense of self, intrinsic motivation, goal setting and planning, and autonomy.

He also argues that this will not naturally come out of these models. “It will arise only because some may engineer it, by creating and combining the aforementioned list of capabilities, largely using existing techniques, and packaging them in such a fluid way that collectively they give the impression of an SCAI.”

“Our sci-fi inspired imaginations lead us to fear that a system could—without design intent—somehow emerge the capabilities of runaway self-improvement or deception. This is an unhelpful and simplistic anthropomorphism.”

Suleyman warns, “someone in your wider circle could start going down the rabbit hole of believing their AI is a conscious digital person. This isn’t healthy for them, for society, or for those of us making these systems.”

It’s all a rather self-reflective blog post, even starting with the title: “We must build AI for people; not to be a person”. And I think this hits at some of the tension I feel around these tools. Suleyman starts his post with “I write, to think”, and this is the most relatable part of the whole post. I also write to think, and I don’t plan on letting an AI bot replace that part of me. I may have a contractual obligation not to use it, but more importantly, I want my words to be mine, no matter how good or bad they are.

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