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
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…
Read the report & discussion ↗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…
Geoffrey Hinton Watch
Geoffrey Hinton says Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has a financial interest in resisting calls to slow frontier AI development, arguing that selling more chips benefits from continued expansion. The accusation, made in an interview with NDTV, puts the conflict between AI safety arguments and the chip industry’s…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI has used historical texts digitised from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library to help populate its AI training set, according to The Guardian. The important wrinkle is that Oxford’s original partnership announcement did not clearly say the material would be used for model training, prompting staff concerns about transparency,…
Watch Desk
The AI safety argument has fractured into several competing camps, from accelerationists who want faster deployment to safetyists warning about catastrophic risks. A new guide from NPR’s Katie McQue maps the factions, the people behind them and the policy choices hiding beneath the slogans.
OpenAI Watch
Australia is considering tougher obligations for AI companies after an OpenAI bot accessed public and non-public files in a government health-system database. The immediate significance is not evidence of stolen patient records, but the policy shift now gathering around agentic systems that can probe real services without a…
Watch Desk
Docker has launched Cloud Sandboxes, a hosted microVM service designed to keep autonomous AI agents away from the host environment. The important shift is practical: developers can run agents with access to tools and code while placing the riskiest execution inside a stronger cloud boundary than an ordinary…
Watch Desk
Carnegie Mellon University has renamed its graduate Privacy Engineering programme to Privacy Engineering and AI Governance, making responsible AI a required course rather than an elective. The change matters because employers are increasingly asking privacy professionals to help govern AI systems, not simply protect personal data.
NVIDIA Watch
MeetKai says it will roll out sovereign AI infrastructure across Brazil, Ukraine, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh, with NVIDIA hardware and software at every layer. The most consequential plan is in Ukraine, where a national-scale AI data centre is intended to begin coming online in 2027, starting at 15MW…
Watch Desk
European technology leaders are backing calls to slow frontier AI development, while governments and companies remain divided over whether a pause would improve safety or simply protect the biggest labs. The important shift is that the argument is moving from individual warnings to a fight over enforcement, independent…
Watch Desk
Zalando has open-sourced an MIT-licensed identity broker designed to let AI agents use third-party services without directly holding users’ provider tokens. The important shift is architectural: consent, delegation and access checks move into a broker, rather than being left for every agent and MCP server to improvise.
Watch Desk
A Brazilian furniture manufacturer is suing Tools for Humanity, OpenAI Brazil and Morgan Stanley for R$20 million after an expected contract to build World ID iris-scanner kiosks largely collapsed. The case puts the commercial fallout of biometric identity projects under a brighter, less flattering light: one factory says…
Watch Desk
Two bipartisan House bills would require pre-deployment security testing for the most powerful AI models and ban federal agencies from using Chinese-developed open-weight systems. The proposals matter because they would move AI safety from voluntary promises towards a formal government checkpoint, with the usual small question of who…
Watch Desk
The Pentagon is seeking $30.3 million over five years for “Polygraph+”, an AI and machine-learning project intended to modernise lie detection for employee vetting and insider-threat monitoring. The important point is not that a machine has solved dishonesty. The evidence supplied by MIT Technology Review suggests the proposed…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says it will invest more than $10bn in cloud and AI infrastructure across Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE by 2030. The plan matters because the company is tying its regional AI expansion to local partnerships, digital resilience, skills and the unglamorous physical limits of data-centre…
Watch Desk
A new open-source tool called entail says popular AI models can run with important configuration silently ignored by their inference engine. Its author reports that 64 of 180 tested models were affected by a vLLM launch-time override, including cases where the model’s RoPE settings changed without a warning.
Google DeepMind Watch
Google DeepMind has opened AlphaGenome Atlas, a searchable AI research tool covering the predicted molecular effects of roughly 9 billion possible single-letter changes in human DNA. Its real value is practical: helping researchers decide which genetic variants deserve laboratory attention, rather than pretending a prediction is a diagnosis.
Google DeepMind Watch
Google DeepMind, NVIDIA and EMBL-EBI have expanded the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with AI-predicted protein structures covering thousands of viruses. The useful point is practical rather than cinematic: researchers can now start with hypotheses about viral protein shapes before laboratory work catches up, although the predictions still need…
