From the archive
AI policy sets the rules for how artificial intelligence is developed, deployed and held accountable. Follow AI regulation, copyright disputes, privacy, surveillance and government decisions affecting the technology. Our coverage explains who a proposal applies to, whether it is law or still under discussion, and what it could mean for developers, businesses and the people using AI.
Lead story
AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial-AI company co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about US$8.2 billion. The move brings research into AI systems that model the physical world closer to a chipmaker’s hardware and software business, with potential applications in robotics…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Cloudflare says automated, non-human traffic passed half of all internet traffic in May 2026, driven heavily by AI agents and crawlers. The company is proposing controls for publishers facing the costs and commercial questions that follow when more website visitors are machines, not customers.
Watch Desk
America is adding record amounts of clean power, but the renewable energy industry’s leading trade group warns that growth could fall sharply from 2028 if federal restrictions continue. That matters to the AI build-out too: rising electricity demand, driven largely by AI, is making the fight over new…
Watch Desk
Carnegie Mellon University says a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin will fund a new Miami campus and put $500 million into its School of Computer Science. The scale is extraordinary; the consequential question is what the money will build for computing and AI research, and who will…
Watch Desk
A team presenting Hunmin-CUA says it transferred selected weights from a stronger computer-use model into its own 397-billion-parameter model, improving agent performance while avoiding a weakness in high-resolution screen grounding. The results make an interesting case for selective model transfer, though the team’s benchmarks are its own and…
METR Watch
METR president Chris Painter told a US Senate subcommittee on 30 September that AI agent oversight must account for systems collaborating to evade restrictions, not just individual agents making mistakes. His testimony draws on METR’s investigation of the previously disclosed OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and asks whether supervision can…
Watch Desk
Enterprise teams choosing an AI gateway may find that the awkward procurement questions matter more than the model menu: who can access what, what gets logged, and where prompts travel. A comparison of five gateways finds sharply different answers, with practical trade-offs for teams weighing security, provider choice…
Watch Desk
AI companies may face pressure not only from rivals at the frontier, but from cheaper models that are capable enough for everyday work. A new essay argues that this “good enough” market could weaken the case for paying top prices for the most advanced systems.
Watch Desk
A US appeals court has upheld a ruling for Thomson Reuters in its copyright dispute with Ross Intelligence, rejecting Ross’s fair-use defence for AI training, Reuters reports. The decision is a significant legal development in the debate over whether copyrighted material can be used to build AI systems.
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT plugins into app-like experiences, with interactive panels, a dedicated home in the sidebar and new ways to trigger automations. The shift gives developers more room to bring their tools into the conversation, rather than asking users to hop between chat and another interface.
Watch Desk
Nvidia and AMD are reportedly pressing the Trump administration to ask Congress to change China-related chip export restrictions in the annual defence policy bill. The dispute concerns who sets the limits on advanced AI-chip sales, and how far they should reach.
Watch Desk
China has built an AI governance system spanning recommendation algorithms, synthetic media and generative AI services, and a new framework extends its attention to risks across AI’s lifecycle. The Conversation’s account makes a useful counterpoint to calls in the US for rules that, in some areas, China has…
Watch Desk
Developing nations are calling for a greater role in shaping AI rules, warning that governance led mainly by wealthy countries could deepen global inequality. At a recent UN Security Council session, 128 delegations addressed AI, up from five four years ago, Reuters reports.
Mistral AI Watch
Morocco’s digital transition ministry has launched two open-source AI tools developed with Mistral AI: a classifier for identifying Arabic dialects and a speech-recognition model that transcribes Darija, including speech switching between Arabic, French and English. That gives developers a practical starting point for building tools around how people…
Watch Desk
FrontierSWE’s creators have released version 2 of their benchmark, expanding it to 34 technical challenges and introducing evaluations that run for up to 20 hours. They say Claude Fable 5.1 leads the results, ahead of GPT-5.6 and GLM-5.3, a ranking that puts long-horizon AI coding ability under fresh…
Watch Desk
Investors appear to have priced in a 32.6% lasting productivity boost for software engineering from AI, according to a working paper by economists at UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics. That is a measure of market expectations, not proof that engineers are already getting 32.6% more…
Watch Desk
A Hugging Face community article argues that powerful AI agents could make compute costs balloon, even as model access looks remarkably cheap to users. Its worked example puts a month of rented GPUs for a large open-weight coding model at about $5,172 to $6,034, against the author’s roughly…
Watch Desk
Anthropic and OpenAI are warning that advanced AI needs stronger safeguards, but an Associated Press investigation asks who might benefit from the way that warning is framed. Its account points to a live dispute over who sets the rules: governments, independent evaluators or the companies themselves.
Cohere Watch
Cohere chief executive Aidan Gomez is calling for a government-led global body to coordinate AI safety, including efforts to bring China into the conversation. His proposal pairs international coordination with independent testing of advanced models and a clear route for companies to report incidents.
Geoffrey Hinton Watch
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are among the authors of a new report urging governments to prepare for AI systems that could accelerate AI research itself. The authors say projects that would take people months could be automated by AI by 2028, while stressing that an intelligence explosion…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is drawing a sharper line between Copilot features covered by a subscription and its more advanced AI work, which will incur usage-based charges on top. For businesses, the new agentic tools bring a variable bill, but administrators can set spending limits and alerts.
