Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday has put Florida and Texas social media laws on hold, sending both cases back to lower courts for more review. -
The U.S. Supreme Court returned challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that restrict the power of social media companies to moderate content, back to the lower courts. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that neither the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals nor the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals properly analyzed the First Amendment Challenges to the laws in both states.
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The controversial practice dates back to the 1990s when Apple introduced a service called Watson that critics say ripped off another company’s tool. Since then, small apps have said it has become a pattern. -
It’s been described as Apple’s “kiss of death.” When the tech giant reaches out to app developers, many fear that Apple is really looking to copy their product. At its annual developers’ conference this year, Apple was accused of just that.
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The image, with over 50 million shares, is considered the most viral ever AI-generated photo. Tracing the image’s history has revealed a rift over its true creator. -
A new lab analysis conducted for NPR by Arizona State University data scientists shows that OpenAI's "Sky" voice is more similar to Johansson's than hundreds of other actors analyzed. -
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is confronting fresh questions about how seriously it treats AI safety. Former employees and others say the company should not be trusted with governing itself.
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Online publishers fear the rise of AI search will lead to a drastic drop in traffic to websites, fundamentally disrupting how the internet economy operates.
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Johansson says she was approached multiple times by OpenAI to be the voice of ChatGPT, and that she declined. Then the company released a voice assistant that sounded uncannily like her. -
The Justice Department is expected to argue that its clamp down on TikTok is about national security, but Constitutional lawyers say there is no way around grappling with the free speech implications.
