• New York health regulators say Tiger Medical smuggled alloClae into the state and lied about it.
• A court filing includes photos of boxes piled in the driveway of a New Jersey nurse who regulators allege drove the product to NYC.
• Tiger says only the FDA, not New York State, can regulate alloClae, and denied wrongdoing.

On a blustery December day, nine large white cardboard boxes sat stacked next to a garbage can in the driveway of a New Jersey nurse as a man packed them into the bed of a pickup truck.

Other than a manufacturer's label in the corner and a note that the contents were perishable and shouldn't be frozen, there was no indication they held thousands of dollars' worth of processed cadaver fat. Inside the boxes, state regulators allege, was alloClae, a hot new injectable filler derived from the fat of dead people and headed to high-end cosmetic surgeon practices in New York City.

Photos of the boxes were part of a recent court filing by New York State health officials, who have accused Tiger Medical Holdings, which manufactures and sells alloClae with its affiliates, of "smuggling" the product into New York.

Tiger has said only the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate alloClae, and that FDA rules don't require premarket approval. New York is one of a handful of states that issues permission to store and distribute human tissue, and it claims that Tiger violated those rules by bringing alloClae to market without waiting for approval.

Recent court filings reveal that the state obtained FedEx records, including photos, in an attempt to prove that Tiger organized a scheme to smuggle hundreds of boxes of the product — possibly over $1 million worth — into New York.

The dispute could affect the availability of a product that lets busy C-suiters get a boob job during a lunch break or a butt lift between meetings. Doctors have said the injectable is flying off the shelves, and some have continued to administer it during the state investigation.

Tiger co-CEO Oliver Burckhardt said in a filing on Wednesday that 60 doctors have contacted the company about the fat spat with New York — some worried about the case, but most wanting to buy more alloClae.

Tiger hasn't disputed shipping alloClae through New Jersey, though it has called the state's evidence "unreliable" and "self-serving," and said the allegation of "smuggling" is baseless and inflammatory.

It said the health department kept asking for more information without signaling concerns until last month, and that the company submitted testing data as recently as January to show that alloClae was safe.

Tiger's lawyer, Larry Wood Jr., did not address specific questions from Business Insider, referring a reporter to Tiger's court filings.

Building buzz for alloClae while dealing with regulators

AlloClae hit the market in 2024. It didn't take long for plastic surgeons on Manhattan's Tribeca and Upper East Side to realize the appeal. Their patients wanted a quick touch-up and were willing to pay for the convenience. In small quantities, the product can be injected for under $10,000; in other cases, it can cost up to $100,000 per procedure.

The product is a good fit for "the CEOs, COOs, CCOs that don't want to be away from the boardroom," Douglas Steinbrech, who practices in New York City, Beverly Hills, and Chicago, told Business Insider last year. "They have to go to a lot of meetings that just pop up, and they cannot control when they're going to happen. They can't just clear their schedule to recover for a surgery."

AlloClae was advertised on social media and websites: "Revolutionary," said one clinic. "Pure Gold. On Demand," said another.

In a video posted by a Texas plastic surgery practice, audio of Oprah gifting cars to a screaming audience was dubbed over a man in scrubs pretending to dole out alloClae boxes to employees who wriggled with excitement.

Tiger, which is privately held, said this month that alloClae is experiencing "rapid growth" and the company plans to build a 200-person sales force by the end of 2027 to sell alloClae and a similar product in development, dermaClae, to surgeons, med spas, and other buyers.

When Business Insider spoke to Tiger Aesthetics at the end of last year, the company said it was struggling to keep up with demand. Behind the scenes, it was grappling with more than a shortage.

The company was engaged in a back-and-forth with New York's health department. Between October 2024 and May 2025, the agency sent three letters saying that it could not grant Tiger permission to distribute alloClae in the state.

In July 2025, a health inspector visited two Tiger tissue facilities in Pennsylvania and asked why New York doctors were advertising alloClae. Monica Garcia, the COO of Tiger Aesthetic's parent company, said she was unaware of any shipments to the state and asked what the consequences would be if there were, according to a sworn statement from Joseph Giovannetti, the agency's top investigator.

Garcia, in a sworn statement, said the exchange took place at a Tiger affiliate where employees familiar with alloClae weren't present. She said the inspector didn't ask for follow-up information about alloClae distribution to New York, disputing one of Giovannetti's claims.

Giovannetti said the inspection prompted Tiger to stop shipping alloClae directly to New York and start going through New Jersey and Connecticut.

Despite the letters and inspection, Caroline Van Hove, the president of Tiger Medical Holdings affiliate Tiger Aesthetics, provided reassurances about alloClae to at least one New York plastic surgeon. "We can confirm that the New York Department of Health has not reached out to us in connection with our alloClae product," she wrote in an April 2026 letter seen by Business Insider.

Boxes of alloClae were piled up in a New Jersey driveway

Every week or two, starting no later than September 2025, a new set of white boxes would appear at the clapboard, shuttered home of Robert McGee, a nurse who lived on a cul-de-sac in the central New Jersey town of Tinton Falls, according to FedEx records and a state investigator's statement.

The boxes of alloClae would be stacked next to duffle bags and trash cans in McGee's driveway or on his front porch, according to delivery photos and Giovannetti.

Between September 2025 and April 2026, the company sent over 330 boxes of alloClae to McGee, who loaded them in his pickup, drove them the 50 miles into Manhattan, and dropped them off at more than three dozen plastic surgeons and med spas, Giovannetti said.

McGee did not respond to requests for comment.

In January 2026, the state said in a filing that an unidentified "whistleblower" told regulators what was happening. Three months later, health investigators made an "unannounced inspection" at the office of Dr. Adam Schaffner, a Manhattan plastic surgeon.

Schaffner's paper trail laid out a shift in Tiger's shipping processes. Invoices from July 2025 showed Tiger had sent alloClae directly to his Fifth Avenue office. But starting in August, the month after the inspection, the products were mailed to homes and offices in New Jersey and Connecticut, and employees or Ubers would courier them across state lines, the health department said.

Schaffner, who declined to comment, received at least $95,000 worth of alloClae initially shipped to addresses outside of New York, according to invoices filed in court records.

Some boxes went to the New York City office of plastic surgeon Matthew Schulman, the FedEx records show. In a YouTube video posted last fall, he gleefully unpacked 287.5 cubic centimeters of alloClae as the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" played in the background. Schulman's name, with McGee's home address, was visible on a shipping label.

If Schulman's boxes were typical — as a review of more than a dozen plastic surgeons' unboxing videos on Instagram suggests — a total of 15,840 cubic centimeters of alloClae could have been sent via McGee's home. The prices on 11 of Schaffner's invoices filed in court average $86.29 per cubic centimeter; at that price, more than $1.3 million worth of alloClae could have been shipped through McGee.

Schulman did not respond to requests for comment.

Tiger has asked that the state's allegations be struck from the court record because, among other things, they argue, the health department could be cherry-picking from its investigative file to benefit their case.

Some New York surgeons are still using alloClae

Doctors who received alloClae say they ordered the product from Tiger and didn't know the route it took.

"He had no idea that this was a challenge, or how stuff was showing up, or any of that," said Ken Sterling, an attorney for Dr. Jason Emer. Sterling said Emer has not been contacted by medical authorities.

Samira Shamoon, a publicist for Dr. Darren Smith, said in an email that "when Dr. Smith was using AlloClae, he purchased it directly from the company and had no knowledge of irregularities." Smith is no longer offering the product, she said.

ME Plastic Surgery, which has locations on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and in Queens, recently updated a blog post to say that it is not offering alloClae.

Several New York doctors said in early June that they're still using alloClae. Tiger has said it's suspending distribution to New York, but the product can still be "legally sold." In the meantime, doctors in the state continue to promote it.

Emer posted an Instagram video on June 12 showing himself injecting alloClae into a patient's buttocks.

"Don't be left behind," the caption reads, along with a peach emoji. The geotag: New York City.

Last June, fashion models for the fashion retailer Rainbow received a warning: AI was ramping up, and the number of workers needed would be ramping down.

"You may have already seen some changes taking place both within the studio and on the site," wrote Rainbow's studio manager, Phil Caraway. The company had started "styling certain products, and generating avatars, with the assistance of A.I," he explained, and while he couldn't say for certain whether any freelancers would lose their jobs, he wanted them to "plan accordingly."

"Fewer people will be needed in the long term," Caraway wrote in the previously unreported email. "It is very likely that this Fall will see a huge increase in A.I. use."

Thus began what several models described as a year of anxiety and, later, anger. They could see the company using AI to create synthetic models within view of where they worked, the models told Business Insider. At the same time, the models' days in the New York office began to dwindle, they said, leaving many without work. Nearly a year after that June email, Rainbow has begun rehiring some models — though many remain out of work.

In March of this year, the models began noticing Rainbow marketing images that looked like them, but posed in positions or locations that differed from the photo shoots they had participated in. Many suspected the doppelgängers were the result of AI. The lookalike models cropped up across Rainbow's site, social media, and newsletters. A flurry of emails to Rainbow followed, along with a lawsuit by one model.

As AI technologies improve, workplaces across the country are experimenting with how to use them — and navigating the thorny question of their impact on human jobs. Creative industries like modeling are especially exposed as AI-generated photos and videos improve in quality.

AI is growing more common within the fashion industry. In a 2025 study from the Worker Institute at Cornell University ILR School and Data & Society in partnership with the Model Alliance, researchers said that e-commerce gigs were "more vulnerable to displacement by AI technologies."

Business Insider spoke to multiple Rainbow employees and contractors, all of whom requested anonymity, and also reviewed dozens of email exchanges and images, as well as modeling contracts.

"Rainbow is responsibly evaluating emerging AI technologies in the marketplace, and has and is committed to doing so in a proper manner," David Cost, Rainbow's chief digital officer, wrote in a statement to Business Insider.

In a follow-up email, Cost wrote that "Rainbow's dealings with its employees and independent contractors are private" and that the company disagreed with "much of the purported 'facts.'" He declined to comment on specific questions sent by Business Insider. "Rainbow has acted appropriately and in accordance with its commitments, including contracts signed by models," he added.

Here's how Rainbow's AI model experiment got messy, according to its workers — from a slowdown on human modeling work to contract disputes and hiring some of the models back.

Rainbow, founded in Brooklyn over 90 years ago, has over 800 stores nationwide and is privately owned. The retailer caters to thrifty consumers with steep discounts, similar to Fashion Nova or PrettyLittleThing. It also operates the similar brand KissDon'tTell.

For its e-commerce shoots, the Rainbow team looked for models without agency connections, one former stylist who helped recruit models said. Two models said that they were found on Instagram and had little paid modeling experience. Fees varied by model, though many said they made around $50 an hour.

Three models said that one Rainbow employee told them to be available for five days of work a week. The former stylist said that Rainbow asked its freelancers to be available Monday through Friday, but that it wasn't written into their contracts. Two models said they left their prior jobs for the company.

Partway through 2025, the models began to notice something different in the studio: AI training. Employees would lay out the clothes on a flat board, take photos, and upload them to an AI program called Lica, one employee said. Lica generated fully synthetic AI models — not duplicates of human models — for Rainbow, the employee said.

The AI training caused significant anxiety among the models, they said. Trying to lighten the mood, some models said they would crack dark jokes about the system replacing them. Two models said that they recalled instances where the fit of a garment on their body was compared to an AI avatar, pointing out where the avatar needed to be more realistic.

After Carraway's June email a year ago, the models braced for their work to drop off. For months, several models said that they continued to get consistent bookings. Then, they slowed down, the models said, and by mid-March of this year, the work dried up. Some models submitted their availability but said they received no response.

During that period, two Rainbow employees who are not models said that they went weeks without seeing any human models in the studio.

Meanwhile, the models started spotting their doppelgängers on Rainbow's social media.

The models had previously participated in product shots wearing Rainbow apparel, such as a long floral dress, while photographed in front of plain backgrounds.

The doppelgängers they later noticed looked strikingly similar — the same builds, facial features, and outfits they had worn — but were pictured with their bodies in entirely different positions. The models texted these images back and forth in a group chat. Business Insider viewed over a dozen such images.

The second clause of the contracts many of the models had signed allowed Rainbow to use their images "whether intact or in part, composite or distorted in character or form, cropped or altered, without restrictions as to changes or transformations."

One image that sparked conversation in the group chat showed what the models suspected was an AI lookalike that altered the model's original skin tone. The model and the suspected AI lookalike had some similarities — the hairstyle and placement of the hair part, as well as the accessories and shoes — but also some differences, such as the nose shape.

None of the employees Business Insider spoke to had directly seen the creation or editing of these doppelgängers.

Several of the models who suspected that Rainbow was modifying their likenesses with AI raised issues with the company via email.

One of the models, Francheska Pujols, sued Rainbow on May 22, alleging the images defamed her and caused confusion over her endorsement of the company's products, among other allegations.

Pujols wrote in an affidavit that her contract only covered images captured in photo shoots, and "does not in any way authorize the creation of entirely new images, scenes, poses, or compositions that did not exist in the original content."

Rainbow posted photos of what Pujols said is her AI doppelgänger; in one, she straddles a barstool. Another shows her seated, wearing a short skirt, with one leg raised.

Pujols wrote to Business Insider that she would "never pose with my legs open or position myself in a sexualized manner for the world to see."

"I am extremely emotional and have many sleepless nights with the thought of the altered images of me," Pujols wrote. "I sought a professional aide to help with sleep and reconciliation."

Pujols withdrew her suit on May 29 to pursue a private settlement, her attorney wrote in an affidavit. She refiled the lawsuit on Monday.

"As Rainbow has stated previously in relation to this matter, Ms. Pujols' images were used properly and in accordance with the agreement she signed," Joan McGillycuddy, Rainbow's chief legal officer, wrote in a statement to Business Insider. "There is no violation of her rights."

Rainbow's contracts said the models would receive double their day rate for image use outside that second clause. Some models requested compensation for the suspected AI images but were turned down, according to their messages, which were viewed by Business Insider.

Then, the contract back-and-forth began.

On March 10, amid the work slowdown, Caraway sent an email to the models. "To account for today's rapidly-changing technology and expectations of use, Rainbow has come up with an updated Model Release," Caraway wrote.

One clause in the new contract was particularly controversial — one that the models interpreted as granting Rainbow sweeping AI rights.

The new clause allowed Rainbow to use "various technologies, tools, or production methods now known or later developed, including automated or computer-assisted techniques." The clause should be interpreted "broadly" as long as the company was not "materially misrepresenting the model," the contract read.

Some of the models said they refused to sign it. On March 28, Carraway emailed the models that Rainbow agreed to remove a non-compete clause, but the technology usage clause was presented as a dealbreaker.

"Rainbow cannot adjust the AI clause," Caraway wrote. "In order to continue to be hired, this must be agreed to."

It's not clear if the contract negotiations contributed to or prolonged the work slowdown.

Cost, Rainbow's CDO, hyped up the AI program Lica in an April video reposted by the startup's cofounder.

"It's amazing what the people at Lica have been able to do," he said. "We're using them for product photography. We're also using them for editorial or things that you'd see on a homepage or in an email."

Two staffers said the tool was buggy. Some of the synthetic models' legs were too short, one said; the AI repeatedly generated one synthetic model with a white cardigan over her clothes. Creating an AI image would also take long stretches of re-prompting, they said, often around 15-30 minutes.

Rainbow is no longer using Lica, one staffer said. Lica told Business Insider in a statement that it is "focused on foundational AI research for multimodal design models."

"As part of our research efforts, we provided interested enterprise partners with early access to emerging AI capabilities and model technologies," a Lica representative wrote. "We do not direct, supervise, or control our customers' implementation decisions, and we do not publicly comment on specific customer use cases."

Rainbow began bringing some of its human models back at the end of April, employees said.

This time around, some of the models received an agreement with the following clause: "Company will not create digital replicas, train AI on Model likeness, or generate synthetic images not based on original Content."

Rainbow is still producing images of the AI avatars, one staffer said, but not with Lica.

Cost, the company's chief digital officer, referenced the state of AI experimentation at Rainbow in his LinkedIn job description.

"Every experiment designed to replace a person with AI failed," Cost wrote. "Every experiment designed to give a talented person more capability won, and won bigger than expected."

• A new study tracked the "biological age" of people who swapped some of their meat for more veggies.
• Eating more vegetables and complex carbohydrates seemed to improve basic health metrics.
• Importantly, people didn't lose strength when they cut back on animal protein, from 50% to 30%.

Pump up the veggies, beans, and nuts, and pare down the meat, just a little bit.

That appears to be the takeaway from a new study tracking how changes to the typical "Western" diet, subbing in more vegetables and lowering saturated fat content, might contribute to healthy aging.

The study, conducted in Australia, fed roughly 100 healthy adults aged 65 to 75 a rotating menu of freshly prepared, unprocessed meals for one month, only changing up how much fat, meat, and carbohydrates different people ate on different diets.

The study was short, but on both functional measurements like grip strength, as well as clinical tests and measures of an emerging health metric called "biological age," people appeared to derive a slight health benefit from replacing some of their daily meat with plant proteins, and replacing saturated fat with more complex carbohydrates.

"What we wanted to do was a study that actually provided some real information about the causal relationship between macronutrients and health in old age," senior study author Alistair Senior, a nutrition scientist at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, told Business Insider.

The results lend more evidence to the idea that cutting back on, but not necessarily eliminating, meat can be good for a person's long-term health.

"Even our vegetarian diets weren't 100% vegetarian," Senior said. "They aim for about 70% of the protein coming from plant sources, and 30% from animal sources."

Three diet tweaks made a typical 'Western' diet healthier

For the study, researchers split participants into four different groups. They were instructed to only eat the food given to them during weekly meal deliveries for a full month. No alcohol, no extra sweets, no ultra-processed snacks.

"It's not perfect, people cheat, people might not be reporting everything they eat, but I think we did as good as is feasible," Senior said.

There were two "omnivore" diets:

• Diet 1: 14% protein, ~40% fat, ~40% carbohydrates

A meal on this plan was the closest to a standard, "Western" diet, with half of the protein intake coming from animal products.

For example: chicken tikka masala with white rice and green beans.

• Diet 2: 14% protein, ~30% fat, ~50% carbohydrates.

Similar to the first diet, with half of the protein from animal sources. This diet includes more carbohydrates from whole grains and vegetables, and has a lower fat content, with ingredients like brown rice and quinoa included more often.

And there were two "pro-veg" diets:

• Diet 3: 14% protein (less meat), ~40% fat, ~40% carbohydrates

For example: yellow coconut curry with rice, veggies and tofu.

• Diet 4: 14% protein (less meat), ~30% fat, ~50% carbohydrates.

A meal on this plan includes more carbohydrates like potatoes.

For example, a veggie-heavy cottage pie, with peas and carrots on the side, was on the menu.

People on diets 2, 3, and 4 all ended the month with measurable improvements to their "biological age," as measured with the Klemera-Doubal Method, which includes data from regular blood tests a doctor might order at an annual exam, like blood pressure, cholesterol, and creatinine levels. People who ate diet No. 1, the high-fat pro-meat "Western" diet, saw no change on their "biological age" tests. All four diet groups lost about the same amount of weight, an average of roughly four pounds, three of those being fat (this may just be a result of the nature of the trial, as a no-junk-food, no alcohol plan).

The study, while still preliminary, suggests older adults don't have to load up on meat to maintain their muscles and strength as they age.

Why meat may be bad for longevity

When people reduce their meat and saturated fat intake, they change the forces that are acting on their cells.

Senior says the amino acids in animal proteins turn on pro-growth pathways that tell our cells to grow and reproduce. Too much cell growth in old age can be a bad thing, propelling disease processes like cancer. Longevity scientists are also studying how the opposite of cellular growth and proliferation, what's called autophagy, the process by which starving cells eat and recycle themselves, may be a longevity-booster.

Meat consumption also amps up oxidative stress on cells, and can increase chronic inflammation, which is linked to many age-related chronic diseases, like high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. In particular, animal proteins that are not "lean" and have a higher saturated fat content, like those in red and — most especially — processed meat, are known to be pro-inflammatory, whereas protein-rich foods like fish, beans, and eggs tend to be more anti-inflammatory.

Sneak fiber into your meals

Longevity researcher Dan Belsky, who studies biological aging, and who was not involved in the study, said it is a "reassuring" finding for nutrition science.

"On balance it seems like maybe a little less meat, a little more veg in your diet is a good thing," Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, said. This idea goes along with decades of other research, in studies that have tracked what people eat over months and years, and looked at their health outcomes. Even among identical twins, people who eat more plants and less meat seem to do better on standard health measurements.

"We know we can manage our risk for heart disease, diabetes, reduce our risk for many cancers," Belsky said.

Nutrition is personal. How individuals respond to different foods can vary a lot, based on our genetics, our gut microbiome, and lifestyle.

Still, decades of research suggest a diet high in red meat is not great for your health and longevity.

Senior says you can easily mix your meat with other protein sources, like beans.

If you're making a bolognese sauce, why not substitute half of the meat for lentils? Beans are famously rich in dietary fiber, which can improve blood sugar, lower cholesterol, and tamp down inflammation.

"We're not even saying you need to go for a fully vegetarian diet, but trying to substitute some of that [meat] out might do the trick," he said.

• Americans aren't flocking to Florida like they used to.
• BI spoke with three former Floridians about why they say the state has lost some of its appeal.
• Affordability is a common issue among relocaters, particularly with the state's higher home prices.

Kimberly Jones was born and raised in Florida and expected to live in South Florida for the rest of her life.

But after COVID, Florida no longer felt the same. An influx of out-of-staters strained the infrastructure in Jones' area of South Florida, where new construction, crowded grocery stores, and traffic-jammed commutes became the norm. The flood of newcomers also drove up housing costs, making it harder for longtime residents to afford the place they've always called home.

In 2021, Jones and her husband packed their bags and moved to North Carolina. They're not the only ones who have fallen out of love with Florida. While people are still moving to the state, net domestic migration — or the number of people moving into the state from elsewhere in the country minus those moving out to other parts of the US — has steadily cooled in recent years.

There are a few reasons behind Florida's slowing numbers and waning appeal. For some, the state's tax benefits may no longer outweigh its rising cost of living. That was certainly the case for Jones.

"Our reasons for moving were multifaceted," Jones, 60, told Business Insider. "A major factor was affordability — the cost of living in Florida had gotten out of control. Prices increased for everything — homeowners' and auto insurance, and even for everyday expenses like groceries and eating out. Those costs felt particularly high in South Florida compared with other parts of the state."

The Joneses found a more affordable, more relaxing life in North Carolina

Jones and her husband settled in a small rural town about an hour from Charlotte. They now live in a custom-built lakefront home on 1.5 acres — the kind of property Jones said she couldn't have afforded in Florida.

Indeed, Florida's home prices have continued to climb in recent years. Data from Redfin shows that the median home sale price in Florida increased by 19% between March 2021 and March 2026, reaching $417,000.

With the state's overall cost of living rising, many people — especially young adults, like Jones' son — are finding it difficult to become homeowners.

"My daughter managed to buy a condo a few years ago, when prices were lower, and interest rates were still low," Jones said. "But my son has little chance of buying anytime soon; he'll be renting for the near future, like most of his friends — most of my friends talk about the same thing with their kids."

Besides more affordable housing, Jones and her husband are also enjoying lower home insurance costs, as well as cheaper groceries and restaurant prices in North Carolina. But perhaps the biggest benefit of all is that the lower cost of living has allowed Jones to cut back on work.

"My husband retired a few years ago, and I was able to transition to remote work," Jones said. "We love [North Carolina's] slower pace of life and the fact that people are very nice up here. My quality of life — my stress level, everything — has improved tremendously just from being out of what felt like a rat race."

Natalie Alatriste left Florida in search of a more like-minded community

Natalie Alatriste is also a native Floridian. She remembers a time when her hometown of Miami felt sleepier, and neighborhoods like Little Havana were still under the radar. Today, she said, the city feels transformed.

"There's a pre-COVID Miami and a post-COVID Miami, and the post-COVID version is completely different," Alatriste, 35, told Business Insider. "The cost of living has gone up, and so many people have moved in that traffic is always heavy."

But it was not just Miami's growth that pushed her to reconsider her future in the state. Alatriste said Florida's shifting political landscape was also a factor in her decision.

"In 2024, I seriously started thinking about leaving not just Miami, but Florida entirely," she said. "The state's politics became a turning point for me. During the presidential election, everything I voted for — the amendments, the candidates, all of it — went in the opposite direction."

In 2025, Alatriste moved to Shirlington, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, that's roughly a 20-minute drive from Washington, D.C. She and her partner rent a three-bedroom, three-story townhouse that's about 2,500 square feet, and pay roughly $4,350 a month. It's still expensive, but Alatriste said sharing the cost with a partner makes it easier to handle, and overall, Virginia feels more affordable.

"My quality of life feels much better in Virginia. I don't feel like I'm wasting so much time or spending so much money just to live," she said. "I also have greater peace of mind and can breathe easier because I'm part of a community that feels more aligned with my values."

Karen Meadows wanted a more active retirement

Florida is one of the most popular retirement destinations in the country. It offers plenty of obvious draws, including no state income tax, warm weather, and an abundance of retirement communities. But for some retirees, like Karen Meadows, life spent at the beach or by the pool isn't enough.

"Many people move to Florida to retire because it's quiet and has a slower pace of life," Meadows, 62, told Business Insider. "But for me, I wanted to move somewhere with more energy."

In 2024, Meadows and her husband moved to New York City.

"It's funny because the first thing everybody says about our move is, 'Oh my God, you did the opposite,'" Meadows added, "and they're right."

Meadows sold her home in Panama City Beach and now lives in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo in Brooklyn. Though New York still feels intimidating at times, being closer to her kids and living in a vibrant city has made the move worth it.

Beyond training for marathons — including the New York City Marathon and the Boston Marathon, both of which she has run several times — she volunteers with North Brooklyn Angels and the food rescue organization City Harvest. She has also joined the North Brooklyn Runners Club and started a book club.

"I know I probably could have moved somewhere more laid-back, warmer, and with lower taxes, but I love New York," Meadows said. "I'm almost 63, and I feel better and more alive than ever. Life feels freer, I'm more engaged, and there's still so much to explore."

Are you a former Floridian? We want to hear from you. Email the reporter, Alcynna Lloyd, at alloyd@businessinsider.com to share your story.

One morning in January, Gracie Nielson was scrolling TikTok when she discovered something that made her skin crawl.

The fashion, lifestyle, and beauty influencer with over 600,000 followers noticed a comment on one of her videos that directed her to a clip of a woman wearing low-slung blue jeans and a yellow crop top. Her face didn't resemble Nielson's, but the exact same outfit was hanging in Nielson's closet, and even the woman's body struck a familiar pose. Nielson realized it was a shot-for-shot replica of a video she'd posted months prior, down to the backdrop — a corner of Nielson's home in California. Intrigue quickly devolved into unease.

"That's so crazy. This is my house. This is my body, just with somebody else's face," Nielson recalled thinking. "It's just a really uncomfortable feeling."

The other woman in question may not be a woman at all, but a digital echo: Sienna Rose, aka @siennarosely, describes herself as a neo-soul singer who has over 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Her TikTok page is filled with uncanny videos where the star smiles and vamps — but never talks — to the camera. Though she's been plagued by accusations that she's AI-generated, Rose has never performed live; AI detection tools used by the streaming service Deezer have flagged Rose's music as AI-generated. Emails I sent to the address listed in Rose's TikTok bio went unanswered.

It's Nielson's job to make videos, so she made another TikTok to share her reaction to the discovery. "I'm so scared, you guys," she said, comparing her video to Rose's since-deleted one. The TikTok quickly went viral, amassing over 2.4 million views to date — confirmation that Nielson's shock had reverberated far beyond her usual audience.

"I even had a friend text me that day, and she was like, 'I did not know Sienna Rose was AI,'" Nielson said. "She's like, 'I have listened to her music before, completely not knowing that this is not a real person.'"

AI influencers are here, and if Nielson's case is any indication, you may not have even noticed. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible to the average person, employers, companies, and brands have begun investing in the technology to reduce labor costs. Number-crunchers aren't the only ones who are being replaced — creatives are feeling the heat, too. Now, there's AI music on the Billboard charts, AI used in Oscar-winning movies, and, of course, AI all over our social media feeds.

Just as influencers once stormed the internet — harnessing the then-new technology of social media to draw eyeballs, score paid sponsorships, and rake in advertising dollars previously reserved for traditional celebrities — digital avatars are now poised to flood the same market.

Ally Rooker, a part-time content creator with nearly 190,000 followers on TikTok, described having AI imitate real-life influencers to hawk products as nothing short of labor-busting.

"When I see influencers promoting generative AI video tools, I'm like, 'You don't understand the reason that you have a career,'" Rooker told Business Insider. "You don't understand how fragile what you're doing is, and how fragile your revenue is. Because you're promoting your replacement."

The multibillion-dollar creator economy was built on aspirational influencers who can promise their followers that a better life — or at least clearer skin, or a life-changing haircut, or a dream vacation — is just a swipe away. So what happens when a new crop of competitors is aspiration, personified: influencers who don't suffer from hormonal acne, bed head, or debilitating jet lag? Friendly, almost-human faces who don't need to eat, sleep, or even get paid?

AI influencers are already making money from brand deals

In a social media landscape where real people already use beauty filters and Photoshop, brands are going all in on artificiality. A 2025 survey of about 1,000 senior marketers in the UK and US from the social and influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy found that roughly 79% said they are increasing investment in AI-generated creator content. Grand View Research estimates that the global virtual influencer market will reach $48.88 billion by 2030.

Real influencers fear that could translate into a lot of lost income.

"Why would Maybelline pay a real person if they can just pay an AI person that looks essentially the same?" Rooker said, using the popular beauty brand as an example. "The person scrolling Maybelline's Instagram doesn't need to know who it is in the video. They just have to think it's a real person."

Right now, "think" is the operative word. Disclosure requirements for AI influencers remain murky, and lawful uses of AI vary from state to state in the US. While many AI influencers are labeled as such in their bios — Aitana Lopez, a pink-haired fitness and fashion influencer calls herself a "digital soul," while Olivia Brand, a blonde Alex Cooper knock-off who generates inspirational podcast clips on TikTok, calls herself an "AI it-girl" — casual scrollers on their FYPs can easily remain oblivious to the fact that they've encountered AI at all.

Even if someone like Nielson could make the case for a right of publicity violation — alleging that a third party has taken her name, image, or likeness and used it for a commercial purpose without permission — lawsuits are expensive, and a worthwhile payoff isn't guaranteed.

All of this raises questions about how human influencers can continue to make a living if brands begin to favor their visually pristine, easily programmable counterparts. Those fears aren't unfounded: The Clueless, the Barcelona-based agency that created Aitana Lopez, among other hyper-realistic AI "stock models," pivoted away from hiring humans in the pandemic, citing their unpredictability and inconsistency as motivating factors.

Now, Aitana has three full-time partnerships, including one with a Spanish salon chain. She was recently used in a Black Friday campaign for Amazon. The Clueless creative director Andy García estimated that Aitana's assets — including her brand deals, paid posts, and bespoke "skincare" brand, Vellum, which is actually a software program to enhance the skin texture of AI avatars — generate about $75,000 to $100,000 a month. Other AI influencers also boast thriving careers: Lil Miquela, one of the original digital avatars, has partnered with Prada and Calvin Klein; Xania Monet landed a multimillion-dollar record deal; and Shudu, marketed as "the world's first digital supermodel," has starred in campaigns for Balmain and Hyundai.

García doesn't see her company's creation and other AI influencers as job-killers, but rather hurdles real humans have the tools to overcome.

"Right now, AI influencers are really not a threat to real influencers," she said. "It's like any opportunity, to which real influencers can adapt."

Many people still prefer to follow humans over robots

While brands may enjoy the control and cost efficiency digital avatars afford, when confronted directly with the question of AI, many consumers remain unconvinced.

Comment sections online are full of backlash against AI-generated ads and digital avatars, particularly those that seem designed to blend in with real people. Sienna Rose has inspired numerous sleuths to comb through her videos for copy-and-pasted details. (Suffice it to say that Nielson isn't the only creator whose backdrops and body movements appear to have been cloned on Rose's page.) Others have gone viral for protesting AI creep in daily life, from bots replacing customer service agents to stumbling across fake influencers on their feeds. When they're not being fooled by AI, many are irritated by it.

Cameron Mackintosh, a part-time content creator based in Nashville, said she was shocked and dismayed when she was briefly duped by an AI influencer on Instagram — and, even worse, when she noticed that people she knew in real life were following the account. Her video about the revelation blew up, amassing over 1.7 million views and hundreds of passionate comments.

"I would never want to read a story written by AI. I would never want to read a book written by AI. I wouldn't want to consume a painting that was created by a computer," Mackintosh told Business Insider.

As Business Insider reported in October, consumer backlash to AI accounts is causing some brands to retreat from the tech. In February, The New York Times compared the AI boom unfavorably to the "dot-com boom," citing a 2025 YouGov survey in which more than a third of respondents said they were "concerned that AI would end human life on earth."

Allison Fitzpatrick, an attorney in New York with experience in advertising and influencer marketing, told me that concerns about intellectual property and copyright infringement — not to mention the demand for real-human relatability that made influencers a force in the first place — have translated to a lack of interest in AI influencers among the brands that she works with.

"I think the human audience, the followers, are smart enough to know that between an influencer who is human and can actually taste the product or go on vacation and stay at the hotel or fly in the airline," she said. "You're going to take the human influencer's endorsement far more seriously than an AI influencer who's done none of what I've just described."

Influencers are ready to fight back

Influencers like Nielson aren't giving up hope yet. They say leaning into reality, not realism, will be key to staying in business.

"A lot of content creators, people like to follow them because they are relatable — people sharing skin issues or insecurities, for example," Nielson said. "That wouldn't really happen using an AI avatar because it's not human. It's not real."

Emily Higgins, a North Carolina-based content creator who also runs a social media consulting business, told me that as high-production-value content becomes the norm, she expects to see a renewed embrace of scripting hiccups, grainy footage, and other deliberate imperfections.

"If something's too highly produced or too perfect-seeming, then immediately, it can be dismissed as AI," Higgins said. "We're going to see people trying to create more flaws in their content. We'll see more human, emotional, raw kinds of elements."

Some brands are already leading the charge. Dove and Aerie have vowed not to use AI in their marketing materials, using slogans like "Real People Only" and "Keep Beauty Real." Aerie, which stopped retouching its models in 2014 — putting stretch marks, blemishes, and body diversity front and center — earned its most popular Instagram post in a year thanks to its anti-AI promise. Meanwhile, Heineken and Polaroid have explicitly mocked AI and Big Tech in recent ad campaigns.

Influencing is often dismissed as a low-effort profession, but at its core, it's an act of vulnerability. To broadcast your face and feelings to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of strangers requires nerve and resilience, neither of which AI can reproduce.

As a result, Mackintosh said she expects people to begin seeking out creators and brands that put visible effort into the creative process.

"There's this novelty about human creation, and I don't think that will ever go away," she said. "I always think it will be appreciated. I just think there will be less and less of it because, economically, it will be easier to fake."

Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps. The Pentagon has introduced many initiatives to deepen relationships with Silicon Valley. But making officers out of multimillionaire executives with no military experience served as a strong symbol of a new era in which venture capitalists and technologists see themselves as essential to the defense of the nation.

The tech industry, which once prided itself on its libertarian- and counterculture-inflected antiwar ideals, has emphatically re-enlisted in the American military project. Drawn by patriotism and lucrative government contracts, numerous tech companies — from established giants like Google and SpaceX to military-minded startups in Southern California — have started working for the defense establishment, from supplying the Department of Homeland Security to building AI-powered drones and autonomous weapons to be used in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Anduril, a leading munitions startup, just announced a Pentagon contract that may be worth up to $20 billion.

No company has driven tech's transformation from keyboard to warrior like Palantir, a data and analytics firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, which has a current market cap of $360 billion. Palantir's financial network and its alumni are responsible for bringing numerous defense-tech startups into being. And it helped brush away the tech industry's reticence to be involved in war-making.

Now, a growing canon of books by and about Palantirians is helping to crystallize, and proselytize, tech's new hawkishness. Last year, Karp and his Palantir colleague Nicholas W. Zamiska published "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West," which outlined their austere vision for a militarized republic secured by Silicon Valley technologies and led by highly skilled engineers. Last fall, New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Steinberger published an authorized biography, "The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State." Now, Shyam Sankar, Palantir's chief technology officer and one of the four techies-turned-officers, has published "Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III." Cowritten with his colleague Madeline Hart, "Mobilize" claims that the US government needs to urgently boost military production — with the help of Silicon Valley — in order to head off a conflict with China, which the authors think will attempt to capture Taiwan in 2027.

From these books, and from a battery of public statements by Karp and his cofounders, a distinctive worldview emerges — an unapologetically nationalistic attitude that has total contempt for one's enemies in politics and business and that sees constant, world-rending conflict in our future. This belief system was developed by a group of people who exhibit a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats. You might call it Palantirianism.

Birthed from the 20-year-long global war on terror, which coincided with the tech boom, Palantirianism holds that America's adversaries don't negotiate for peace. They surrender entirely — or, as Karp has said, they will be too "scared" to challenge the US in the first place because they fear immediate destruction. Palantirians' catchword is "deterrence" — derived not from fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or diplomacy but by developing overwhelming AI-based firepower. "The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war," Karp writes in "The Technological Republic."

Under Palantirianism, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about is good for the world — but it would be far better with the tech industry's participation and leadership. "Eisenhower wasn't warning about the existence of the military-industrial complex; he was warning about its potential for undue influence, a distinction often lost," write Sankar and Hart. In their view, bringing together Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is not a step toward undue influence for America's tech billionaires. It's exactly what the country requires: "American capitalism and the American military need each other," they write. "Reuniting the American industrial base, commercial and defense, is an existential issue."

Palantirians see securing American military hegemony as the national priority. Karp, who once called himself a "neo-Marxist" and a Democratic Party supporter before drifting rightward, told his biographer that national security is the only issue that matters to him, and that the tech industry's workers should devote themselves to the same. "A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose," he writes. The answer for Karp, the high priest of Palantirianism, is obvious: What ought to be built is what makes people safer. What makes people safer is empowering the military, police, and intelligence services. That is his vision of the common good.

His vision is now transforming the tech industry, the military, and how we look at national security. "We have made the mistake of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return. What should the public demand for abandoning the threat of revolt?" Karp writes, sounding like the Marxist of his youth. "Free email is not enough."

Palantir grew out of a program at PayPal — where Thiel was CEO — to fight financial fraud in its system. The company itself was later founded in 2003 with an explicit mission: defending the West, which its founders see as imperiled. "A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West," Karp writes early in his book. It's not always clear what those threats are (or even what constitutes "the West"). In the conservative tech mogul's imaginarium, wokeness and DEI seem to be as dangerous to the American public as a revanchist Russia. Karp frequently refers to an organized "assault on religion," without elaborating except to say that it "left us vulnerable as a society."

With seed money from the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital firm — which the agency established to help incubate national-security startups — Palantir slowly grew to become the go-to analytics platform for much of the military and intelligence establishment. It wasn't an easy ride: The company was in the red for more than 20 years, and it sued the US Army, claiming that it had boxed out Palantir by violating its own procurement rules. Palantir won the lawsuit, cultivated numerous government and military insiders (who were sometimes given its software for free), and now runs a software platform, known as Project Maven, that's used across the US military and NATO. It has other software tools that have been used by corporations, police departments, hospitals, and the federal government when it was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maven started as software to analyze drone video feeds, with a $10 million contract going to Google. After Google employees protested working for the Pentagon and Google dropped the project, Palantir, working alongside other tech companies, picked it up and ran with it. Maven eventually became "an all-purpose AI operating system" integrating vast data sources into a dashboard that intelligence analysts have said makes their work much easier, even saving lives in the field. Maven is now used in conjunction with other systems, such as Anthropic's Claude chatbot, which sits on top of Palantir's platform. The Washington Post reported that Claude was used to rapidly generate thousands of targets for the ongoing US-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. The US military is investigating whether AI was used to target the bombing of a school that killed at least 100 Iranian children. In a sign of how Maven has the potential to take humans out of the loop, Sankar and Hart note in their book that "machine-to-machine connections were enabled to allow Maven to communicate with weapons systems and send confirmed targets directly to artillery."

With its martial mission, Palantir isn't like many software companies. Most employees have one of three job titles: deployment strategist, product development engineer, or forward-deployed engineer. The latter group is software engineers sent to work directly with clients — whether in Manhattan or Kabul — to customize Palantir's tools and troubleshoot on the fly.

Leading this motley "artists colony" is Karp, who has a Ph.D. from Goethe University, enjoys cross-country skiing with his Norwegian ex-commando bodyguards, practices tai chi, and retains four Austrian assistants with whom he speaks in German. An ex-Israeli intelligence officer serves as "a kind of fixer" for Karp, who describes to his biographer a lifelong feeling of personal vulnerability.

Karp once had a policy of never spending more than $1 million for a home; that was before he received a $1.1 billion pay package in 2020. Now he owns a private jet and lavish properties all over the country, most of them in ski areas. Recently, he spent $120 million on a Benedictine monastery in Colorado.

He calls himself "a fluorescent praying mantis." With his many-limbed mannerisms and braggadocious quips, Karp has turned himself into a mascot for Palantir's culture. "Always energetic and upbeat around the office," he's known for launching into impromptu talks with employees that become an "orgy of free association," Steinberger writes. He can be "a little bit incoherent," but also exhibits "crazy charisma."

In public, his mad-mogul image can play well, generating viral clips of his vows to drone enemies with "fentanyl-laced urine." TV producers began to love him because "he was reliably unfiltered, thanks in part to his practice of getting hopped-up on Mexican Coke beforehand."

The son of a white Jewish father and a Black mother, Karp's identity has been a core throughline in his life and career. As a child, Karp was bullied at school, contributing to a sense of fear and personal instability.

"You're a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic — would you not come up with the idea that you're fucked?" Karp says to Steinberger. In this context, Karp's sense of identity was hopelessly complicated and a potential social liability.

Karp didn't tell his Palantir colleagues that he was Black until 2019, but he presented differently in his youth. He went to college at Haverford, where he "was active in black student affairs, and his social life mainly revolved around Haverford's black community," Steinberger writes. He organized a conference at Yale about racism on college campuses and wore a Palestinian keffiyeh in a yearbook photo. One of his close friends from the time said, "He was much more of a Black man then than he is now."

After college, Karp enrolled at Stanford Law School, which he almost immediately regarded as a mistake. He became friends with another disenchanted classmate, Thiel, who at the time was already a deeply ideological veteran of campus culture wars.

After Stanford, Karp moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Goethe University. Karp would later say that Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany's postwar intellectual giants, was for a time his dissertation advisor, which Habermas has denied. According to letters examined by Steinberger, Habermas tried to steer Karp toward an English-language degree in another subject. "Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers — and yours, you won't blame me, even more so," Habermas wrote to Karp.

Karp didn't listen. He went on to finish his dissertation — an examination of how aggression is used as a tool of social integration — which he wrote in German under the supervision of Karola Brede, who had previously studied under Habermas. With Brede, Karp cowrote an academic article — the only one he published — a consideration of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism and Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

In the years since, Karp has embraced his Jewishness while expressing reluctance to claim his Black identity. The story of his parents' relationship became for him a kind of cautionary tale of how identity politics run amok.

"My father wanted to marry a Black woman," says Ben Karp, Alex's brother. "Dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism," Steinberger notes. Leah Jaynes liked that Bob Karp was Jewish, and Karp liked that she was Black. They eventually divorced, after which Bob Karp remarried and adopted biracial children. Bob's new family didn't sit well with his sons. "Alex's realization, years later, that racial and ethnic identity had been foundational to his parents' relationship was part of the reason he developed a visceral dislike of identity politics," writes Steinberger. "He felt as if he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him."

Steinberger depicts Karp's personal reckoning over his parentage as part of what moved him to the right. In 2015, he told company employees that he didn't like Trump. According to "The Philosopher in the Valley," Karp once told a friend that he wouldn't mind pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of a helicopter. The company has gone on to work for ICE and other government agencies executing hardline Trump policies.

Two global events contributed to Karp's political metamorphosis: COVID and Hamas' attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. During the pandemic, Karp stocked up on canned food and bullets, and loved his time in isolation. "While the pandemic was wretched for most people, Karp found it blissful," writes Steinberger. Plenty of time for cross-country skiing.

After Palantir returned from remote work, Karp's proclamations became more extreme. He started calling Palantir "a prepper company" and reveling in its role in doling out violence to enemies of the West.

Oct. 7 reanimated Karp's sense of personal vulnerability and his commitment to Israel. Having once celebrated the virtues of debate with his friend and political opposite Peter Thiel, he told Palantirians that the company wouldn't tolerate any disagreement over its work for the country. Palantir took out a full page ad in The New York Times declaring, "Palantir Stands With Israel."

Under Karp's never-apologize-never-explain leadership, Palantir has become a leading bogeyman for opponents of the surveillance state. New York City is now speckled with posters denouncing the company as the "enemy." Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich recently called Palantir "America's most dangerous corporation."

The truth is more tangled. By its own claim, Palantir proudly stands for American militarism, abets the surveillance state, and has catalyzed a shift in the tech industry toward supporting the security services. But influential as Palantir is, the company makes software — tools to implement government policy. It does not directly collect data or conduct surveillance. It sucks up that information from clients, including authoritarian states, making the job of war-making or repression potentially much easier. There are numerous firms beyond Palantir — including the big five "prime" defense contractors — engaged in this kind of work.

Palantirianism — a belief system that is now being spread through venture capital investments in startups like Anduril, Saronic, and Shield AI, and tech's close alliance with the Trump administration — is far more influential than Palantir itself. People "want to know they are safe, and safe means that the other person is scared," Karp said at an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum. This is the simple core belief that now animates the defense tech industry and swaths of the Silicon Valley elite. (Elon Musk is a Karp fan.)

By 2025, Karp was writing in shareholder letters that the West owed its success to its primacy at "applying organized violence" — a notion of which he evidently approved. He started talking about how certain cultures were "regressive and harmful" compared to others.

"We have been building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, and irrational, a world in which you have to show strength," Karp said during an earnings call. People "have to pick sides." Some people "are violent and not conformant with morality."

For many years, Karp said that fascism was his greatest fear. He wanted nothing more than to stem the rise of the far right in America. Yet Karp's company has provided direct assistance to what many observers have described as the most authoritarian president in US history. He did all this with the help of his close friend Peter Thiel, Palantir's chairman, an early Trump supporter who decades ago said that he had tired of electoral democracy. Steinberger summed up the contradiction: "With Trump restored to power, it appeared that authoritarianism had triumphed in the United States and that Palantir, which Karp had always touted as a bulwark of the liberal international order, would henceforth be serving the agenda of a president who was contemptuous of America's political tradition."

Although Karp has matured, in his biographer's view, into a "statesman CEO," he is still driven by spleen. Throughout "The Philosopher in the Valley," he repeatedly complains that his college alma mater hasn't invited him to give a speech or cultivated him as a donor. Karp seems to detests Haverford with a similar passion that he applies to terrorists and student protesters. "I eventually came to realize that he needed enemies," Steinberger writes of Karp. That need, it turns out, has implications for us all.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley."