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 Prospect essay argues that fixation on AI wiping out humanity can draw attention away from harms already being debated, including job displacement, privacy, copyright and the growing power of technology companies. Its central challenge is not simply whether existential risks are possible, but who gets to define…
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Monash University has joined Project Tapestry, a global AI collaboration focused on building models while members retain control of their data and computing infrastructure. The project says its Monash-BharatGen team has already trained a shared model across Australian and Indian sovereign computing systems, keeping training data within each…
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Multiply Labs has raised $75 million to expand robotic systems that automate manual steps in biologics manufacturing. The company says its robots can work with existing pharmaceutical equipment, potentially helping manufacturers increase output without rebuilding their facilities.
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A US lawsuit over Tung Tung Tung Sahur, the AI-generated meme character, is putting a difficult question before the courts: how much human input makes an AI-assisted creation protectable? The dispute could help clarify where copyright ends and other claims to a viral character begin.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic’s reported $518 billion in computing commitments sharpens a practical question for businesses: are they ready to put AI systems to work, and to take responsibility when they go wrong? An Observer analysis argues that enterprise controls may lag behind the infrastructure and growth ambitions described in Anthropic’s…
Google DeepMind Watch
Google’s AI infrastructure chief Amin Vahdat says power is the most fundamental constraint on scaling AI, even as failures, networking and hardware efficiency all put pressure on large systems. His account also shows why faster chips alone will not settle the question: the useful measure is how much…
Jacob Coxon Watch
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon told New York City lawmakers that frontier AI firms are pursuing automated AI research, warning that it could leave people with less control over what comes next. His testimony also put a concrete workplace concern on the record: he said most…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has opened its Frontier Partner specialisation to partners delivering AI agents, offering qualified firms co-selling and other commercial support. The designation covers work across Microsoft’s cloud, productivity, development and security products, making it a notable push to turn agent expertise into customer services.
Epoch AI Watch
Epoch AI has published an analysis of how six leading Chinese AI companies earn revenue, from consumer apps and model APIs to enterprise services and indirect gains through other products. Its headline comparison: as of September 2026, the six firms together generated about 10% of the AI-related revenue…
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A researcher has tested a retrieval system designed to answer financial due-diligence questions using exact, checkable excerpts rather than free-form AI paraphrases. In a small study of Austrian banks’ annual reports, the full pipeline found a relevant passage in the top five results for all 12 answerable questions…
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AI policy is beginning to shape the conversation around possible Democratic presidential contenders, with candidates split over how far to regulate frontier systems and data centres. A new Silver Bulletin analysis compares eight prospective contenders, showing that the debate is already broader than a simple choice between innovation…
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FastVideo has released FastH3 V2 and an experimental smaller model, FastH3 Trim, for video generation with synchronised audio on consumer hardware. The notable change is the claimed ability to run on machines with as little as 8GB of memory, rather than relying on data-centre hardware.
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A company can buy AI tools from different vendors and still depend on the same underlying models, APIs or computing providers. Swati Deepak Kumar, a Citi senior vice-president of IT, argues that this can leave important business decisions exposed to the same blind spot or behaviour change, even…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published guidance for governing SageMaker HyperPod when several machine-learning teams share a cluster. Its central point is practical: project membership alone is not a security boundary, so access, compute allocation and operations need separate controls.
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OpenAI and Anthropic told an Australian parliamentary inquiry they would welcome laws requiring AI companies to report data breaches caused by their agents. The proposal puts a practical question on the table: should companies decide for themselves when to disclose an incident, or should the law set a…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral Large 4 entered public preview on 6 October, with hosted access through Mistral’s API and OpenRouter. A Hugging Face community guide says the model has a published one-million-token context window and lists preview API prices, giving developers something concrete to assess beyond the launch-day numbers.
Watch Desk
AI could make it easier to turn ideas into working projects, but a flood of new ideas may leave laboratories, infrastructure and institutions struggling to keep up. That is the central tension in an essay by Hemanth Asirvatham and Elliott Mokski, published on OpenAI’s website as part of…
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Large language models can make historical OCR easier to read, but fluent corrections may alter spellings, names or passages that the page does not support. A new survey maps the main approaches and argues that preserving the source needs to be measured alongside transcription accuracy.
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AI data centres are becoming a campaign issue in several closely watched US midterm races, where candidates are arguing over who should pay for the electricity and grid upgrades they require. Axios identifies contests in Michigan, Ohio, Colorado and Pennsylvania where those costs, and the politics around new…
