Lyft has agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the ride-hailing company of violating California law by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, instead of employees.

The company said in a regulatory filing that it believes the settlement will allow it to avoid the “costs and distraction of protracted litigation and enable management to maintain its focus on executing its business objectives.”

Lyft could not be reached for comment.

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by the California Labor Commissioner’s Office in August 2020 that accused Lyft of treating drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees, as required under state law at the time.

The lawsuit alleged that drivers were denied minimum wage and overtime as well as other benefits and protections provided to employees, including paid sick leave and timely wage payments.

“This settlement is about the workers who came forward and spoke up. Their voices made this outcome possible,” California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in a statement, adding that the LCO will forgo its share of the settlement and direct those funds to drivers who filed wage claims.

The settlement, which still must be approved by a judge, covers alleged violations from April 6, 2016 to December 15, 2020 — a period California was grappling with whether workers in the booming gig economy were independent contractors or an employees.

Today, drivers for app-based transportation services like Lyft and Uber are classified as contractors after voters passed ballot measure Proposition 22 in 2020. The ballot measure provided a carve-out from Assembly Bill 5, a state law passed in 2019 that required companies like DoorDash, Lyft, and Uber to classify gig workers as employees, entitling them to minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and other benefits. 

Even after AB 5 took effect, Lyft, Uber, and other companies that relied on gig workers continued to classify their drivers as contractors. That eventually led to legal action from the LCO, California Attorney General and the City Attorneys of Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, as well as private actions filed under California’s Private Attorneys General Act. The cases were coordinated in San Francisco Superior Court in September 2021.

The settlement closes this legal chapter, at least for Lyft. Uber still faces an LCO lawsuit that makes similar allegations.

Kevin Mandia, best known as the founder of cybersecurity startup Mandiant that sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has raised $255.5 million for his latest startup, Armadin, at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion, the company announced on Thursday. 

The Series B round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins, and Menlo Ventures joining in.

The new round comes just six months after Armadin raised a $190 million Series A in March. It has now raised more than $445 million.

Armadin is offering enterprises a new kind of always-on security by reimagining defense testing for the AI era. Instead of traditional penetration tests, where hired guns attempt to break in and report on the weaknesses they find, Armadin runs always-on agentic swarms, who chain together vulnerabilities to hack in. The idea is to help organizations find and seal holes before any bad guys (or even AI labs with rogue agents), can use use agentic tech against them.

In December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump had a secret meeting with Elon Musk, Time magazine reports. This was roughly seven months after Musk left his role in the Trump administration at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

During this meeting, Trump “spent hours” talking to Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, a source told Time. Just a few months earlier, in September, Trump began ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats that Trump alleged were involved in drug trafficking.

People had apparently been turning to Grok asking about the boat strikes and political climate in Venezuela, as the Atlantic reported at the time. So Grok told Trump that Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall,” Time reported.

When such celebrations indeed happened after the U.S. invaded on January 3, Trump apparently “came away thinking Grok was ingenious,” that source told Time.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that in June of this year, the Pentagon’s head of AI said that the military used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War.

While Grok isn’t the only AI model serving the DoD (OpenAI also has an agreement and Anthropic has been in a back-and-forth over how its models can be used for military intelligence and in modern warfare), Grok may become an even bigger favorite under this administration. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study about how advanced technology is, and can be, used in battlefields.