regulation
A White House memo lets vetted companies run offensive cyber operations under federal control News
A presidential memorandum signed August 12 creates a program allowing vetted US companies to conduct surveillance and disruptive cyber operations against foreign criminal groups, but only under Justice Department and Homeland Security supervision.
Sanders tells three CEOs to pause, using their own promises News
Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter on August 10 asking Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg to immediately pause AI development, building his case almost entirely from the safety commitments the three companies published themselves.
Virginia orders Dominion to bill data centers for the power lines built to serve them News
The Virginia State Corporation Commission ordered Dominion Energy on July 31 to design, within 90 days, a tariff that charges large data-center customers directly for the substations and transmission lines built solely for them, rather than spreading those costs across every ratepayer.
The White House's Open-Weight Carve-Out Is a Private Briefing, Not a Published Rule News
Reporting says the White House finished an AI framework that covers only closed frontier models and will not publish it, but the only public legal instrument is June's Executive Order 14409, which contains no definition of open-weight, no US-origin condition and no mandatory testing regime to be exempt from.
EPA Says an Off-Grid Plant Built for One Data Center Escapes the Acid Rain Program News
An EPA guidance memorandum states that a fossil-fuel power plant with no physical connection to the utility grid, built to serve only an adjacent private data center, falls outside the federal Acid Rain Program and its permit, allowance, and monitoring requirements.
A Munich Court Found Suno's Models Memorised Six Songs News
The Regional Court of Munich I largely granted GEMA's claims against Suno, holding that six well-known works were reproducibly stored in Suno's models and could be extracted through simple prompts, and assigning responsibility to Suno rather than its users.
The EU AI Act's transparency rules start today. The high-risk rules do not. News
Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from 2 August 2026, requiring chatbots to identify themselves and generative systems to mark their outputs as machine-detectable - but the much larger high-risk rulebook was pushed to late 2027 and 2028.
China did not give away free models. It built a governance body. News
Reports that China offered free AI models to the Global South at a Geneva summit describe a discussion session; the concrete instrument came nine days later in Shanghai with the founding of an intergovernmental AI cooperation organisation.
The FCC just added every foreign-made advanced robot to its national security Covered List News
On July 28 the FCC added all foreign-produced advanced robotic devices and foreign-produced power inverters to its Covered List, blocking them from new equipment authorizations, on national security determinations that cite remote commandeering and surveillance risk rather than naming any country or company.
1,178 frontier AI employees ask Washington to build a brake News
A petition signed by 1,178 verified employees of frontier AI companies asks the U.S. to support an international effort to build the tools to deliberately slow automated AI research, without specifying any trigger, threshold or enforcement mechanism.
Anthropic says it never asked to ban open-weight models, and names what it does want instead News
Anthropic published its position on open weights, rejecting a categorical ban while backing three specific restrictions: chip export controls, action against industrial-scale distillation, and mandatory pre-release safety testing for sufficiently capable models, open or closed.
The open-weights industry letter grew from 25 names to 35 - and OpenAI is on it News
A cross-industry statement titled Open Weights and American AI Leadership now lists 35 signatories on its live Microsoft-hosted page, including OpenAI, Nous Research, GitHub and Cisco, contradicting the widely shared claim that OpenAI declined to sign.
Amazon starts asking sellers to declare AI-generated people, as New York's ad law takes effect News
Amazon has added AI-generated and AI-generated-people checkboxes to its seller content upload flow, a global intake change triggered by a New York law effective June 9 that requires advertisers to disclose synthetic performers or face penalties of $1,000 to $5,000.
Bipartisan bill would force AI companies to build a kill switch News
Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on July 23, which would let Homeland Security order large AI companies to shut down a system after a serious incident and preserve its weights for audit.
Anthropic doubles its policy-advocacy funding to $40 million News
Anthropic said on July 21 it gave a second $20 million to Public First Action, bringing its total to $40 million for a bipartisan nonprofit that it says is barred from spending on any candidate election.
US floats sanctions over AI 'distillation' as Anthropic details 16 million scraped chats News
The Treasury secretary suggested the US could sanction Chinese AI labs over model 'theft' while Anthropic and OpenAI allege large-scale unauthorized scraping of their models' outputs, but the verified record shows provider allegations and a proposed sanctions bill, not enacted policy or any proof that model weights were copied.
Google's two opposite bets: a Gemini-specialized chip and an EU order to open Android AI News
Google is reportedly designing a server chip called Frozen v2 that hardwires Gemini's architecture for six-to-ten times more tokens per watt, even as the European Commission adopted binding measures forcing Android to open eleven AI capabilities to rival assistants, making Google simultaneously bet on locking Gemini into silicon and being forced to unlock Gemini's Android advantages.
Altman is briefing Washington on OpenAI's next models, not launching GPT-6 News
Bloomberg reports that OpenAI's Sam Altman plans to brief Trump-administration officials and lawmakers next week on the company's upcoming model generation and its effect on work, but no primary source confirms a GPT-6 release date, and the meeting appears tied to a June executive order building a frontier-model safety-review process.
China Bans AI Romantic Companions for Minors in a World-First Rule News
Five Chinese agencies enacted the world's first dedicated regulation of emotionally interactive AI, banning virtual romantic partners for minors and pushing platforms like ByteDance and Alibaba to pull companion features.
New York just froze new hyperscale data centers for a year News
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order creating what her office calls the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, halting discretionary state environmental permits for up to a year while New York writes new development standards.
A leading open-model researcher says US open weights may have six months left News
Nathan Lambert of the Allen Institute argues in a widely-read essay that a coming White House executive order could ban or indefinitely delay any open-weights model above roughly GPT-5.5 capability, and that the industry's distillation debate is regulatory capture.
Hassabis proposes a FINRA for frontier AI News
Demis Hassabis published a governance framework calling for a US-led, industry-funded standards body that would review frontier models 30 days before release and could eventually coordinate an industry-wide slowdown.
200-plus experts sign 'WeMustActNow,' urging governments to prepare for AI job displacement News
More than 200 experts including Nobel laureates signed a Stanford Digital Economy Lab statement urging governments to prepare now for AI-driven economic displacement, amid a concurrent survey signaling strong but methodologically thin public appetite for socializing AI gains.
A New Campaign Argues You Have a Right to Run AI on Your Own Computer News
A grassroots advocacy site, Right to Local Intelligence, is campaigning against proposed state laws it says could require a license just to download and run open AI models, framing local AI as the next personal computer.
The government cleared one Anthropic model and kept the other locked up News
Washington partially reopened access to Anthropic's Mythos 5 for about a hundred organizations, but its more powerful sibling Fable 5 stays blocked - and Anthropic is still suing.
The US government quietly lets Anthropic turn its most powerful model back on News
Two weeks after ordering it switched off, Washington cleared Anthropic's Mythos 5 for release to more than a hundred trusted US institutions, a notable de-escalation.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.6, but only to companies the government clears first News
OpenAI's most capable models yet shipped today as a tiny, government-vetted preview, signaling that Washington now holds a gate in front of the frontier.
The US government just banned Anthropic's most powerful AI model News
For the first time, Washington has export-controlled an AI model itself, not the chips it runs on. Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have been dark worldwide since June 12, and the trigger involved an NSA test that the internet has badly misread.