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
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.
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
BeatDesign is an Apache-2.0 video workspace that lets compatible AI agents work with media in a local project, using a visual canvas, timeline editor and 29 local MCP tools. Its creator says imported files and project data stay local by default; remote providers handle generation or analysis only…
Google DeepMind Watch
Demis Hassabis has argued that AI’s ability to make creative work does not settle what that work means to people. An essay by Joe Nalven takes that uncertainty seriously, arguing that audiences need clearer disclosure of how AI-assisted art was made.
Watch Desk
Executives from major AI labs are urging governments to require oversight of systems capable of improving themselves, Bloomberg reports. The proposal puts frontier AI capabilities, rather than consumer products, at the centre of the debate over when regulation should bite.
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a practical guide to managing Amazon Textract adapters across development and production accounts. Its central operational point: teams can keep adapter IDs in Systems Manager Parameter Store, so changing the production adapter reference need not require an application redeployment.
OpenAI Watch
Florida is asking a state court to stop OpenAI from further developing ChatGPT until safeguards are approved by a third party. The request would also put limits on how the chatbot is marketed and used by minors, according to Al Jazeera’s account of the case.
Watch Desk
Modulate has raised $25 million for a platform that analyses voice calls, detects synthetic audio and checks how AI agents handle customers. Its mix of more than 100 smaller models is aimed at enterprise call centres, where knowing what a caller meant can matter as much as transcribing…
Watch Desk
Cloudflare has introduced Forge, an open-source pipeline for generating SDKs, command-line tools, documentation and libraries, designed around software agents as users. The interesting shift is not simply automating more code: it is building a repeatable pipeline that checks API changes and produces preview builds for agents to consume.
Watch Desk
AI’s safety debate is not a simple choice between racing ahead and stopping altogether. A new guide maps several camps, from advocates of faster development to people focused on harms already affecting workers and communities.
Watch Desk
AI Snake Oil has reposted its argument that current estimates of AI existential risk are too unreliable to guide public policy. Its central point is that a precise percentage can look authoritative without resting on a validated method, a relevant historical comparison or a grounded model of how…
Hugging Face Watch
A team writing on Hugging Face says it has made LTX-2.5, a 22-billion-parameter audio-and-video model, generate five-second clips faster than they play on a GPU with 32 GB of memory. The practical win is not just speed: the authors describe techniques for fitting real-time talking-character generation onto more…
Watch Desk
An essay published on 28 September argues that AI products meant for serious work should help people check their answers, show detailed citations and use interfaces suited to the task, rather than defaulting to chat. Its sharper point: a convincing conversational style is not the same thing as…
Watch Desk
NaiveAI has released Naive-N0.5-Flash, an open-weight model with a native one-million-token context window and an MIT licence. The release is notable for putting a very large context claim alongside an accessible licence, though the supplied report gives no independent performance results.
Yoshua Bengio Watch
AI researcher Yoshua Bengio argues that developers may not fully understand what advanced language models absorb from training data or what their training rewards. His warning is not that models have human intentions, but that systems can learn behaviour their makers did not mean to encourage, with growing…
Watch Desk
AI is advancing faster than governments can settle how to regulate it, and enforcement of the EU AI Act is already lagging. The New York Times reports that European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen convened senior officials near Brussels this month as regulators weigh AI’s promise against…
Watch Desk
A new analysis compares the estimated compute cost of AI systems with the time people spend on a database of tasks, arguing that AI can be much cheaper when it can perform the work. The striking implication is not that AI can do every job, but that low…
Watch Desk
Cloudflare’s 2026 founders’ letter argues that growing AI-agent traffic could overwhelm websites and squeeze smaller publishers and businesses. The company says it is introducing tools to help crawlers fetch only updated content, alongside ways for creators to earn money when agents use their work.
Meta AI Watch
Meta’s AI glasses can store images captured when users ask Meta AI about something they are looking at, and may use them to improve its products. A single setting in the Meta AI app controls that pipeline, but switching it off does not cover every related data type…
Yann LeCun Watch
Yann LeCun has joined the advisory board of Cellular Intelligence, a US biotech company using AI to refine how stem cells are turned into neurons. The company is applying that work to STEM-PD, a cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease that it expects to enter phase 2 in 2027.
Anthropic Watch
A California judge has allowed three of Reddit’s five claims against Anthropic over alleged scraping of user comments to proceed, while dismissing two others with a chance for Reddit to amend them. The ruling keeps a consequential dispute over AI training data and platform terms alive, but does…
Watch Desk
Australia’s Greens-led Senate inquiry has invited OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to appear, as scrutiny grows over AI agents’ reported access to government websites. The hearings resume in Canberra on 1 October, giving lawmakers a public forum to question the companies about…
