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
Norway is considering temporary restrictions on AI-enabled eyewear in some public places, citing the risk that people could be recorded without their knowledge. The proposal could affect Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but officials have not settled which devices or locations would be covered, and no ban is in force.
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Reflection says its forthcoming Beam model has 501 billion parameters and is designed to give businesses and governments another open-weight AI option. The founders’ account makes the story about more than a model launch: Reflection is betting that open access can coexist with a business selling the infrastructure…
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Bridgewater Associates is urging policymakers to consider a 35% tax on AI use, with revenue used to give the public a stake in AI companies and help workers. The proposal, reported by the New York Post, turns the debate over AI’s economic gains into a concrete question: who…
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New York City lawmakers are set to debate proposals for outside review of AI systems, human-operated shut-off controls and cash rewards for whistleblowers. A hearing reported for Monday brings those ideas into a live argument over how far a city should go in regulating AI companies.
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Senator Adam Schiff says Congress should legislate on AI sooner than it did on social media, arguing that voluntary promises from technology companies are not enough. In an interview with The Verge, he points to questions ranging from copyrighted training material to AI safety and use in the…
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AI ownership is spreading across company leadership, but executive-search chief Nada Usina argues that the key question is not who gets the title. It is who is accountable for what the business expects AI to achieve.
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Tencent is reportedly set to rent about 100,000 AI chips from Oracle for five years, in a deal estimated at $7 billion. If accurate, it would be a major example of Chinese firms obtaining overseas AI computing capacity while access to advanced chips remains a live policy issue.
Geoffrey Hinton Watch
A paper co-authored by Geoffrey Hinton and 21 other researchers examines how automating AI research could accelerate the development of AI itself. Its most striking projection is conditional, not a claim that an intelligence explosion is already happening: if AI research were fully automated and current estimated returns…
Cohere Watch
PwC and Cohere have announced a global alliance, beginning in Canada, to help businesses deploy AI in their own data and technology environments. The partnership’s practical pitch is a combination of Cohere’s enterprise AI products and PwC’s implementation and risk expertise, aimed at organisations that have struggled to…
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AI tools are making it faster and cheaper for US political campaigns to produce ads, but viral reach has not proved a reliable shortcut to winning votes. Fox News reports that campaign strategists see the technology spreading, while pointing to high-profile cases where attention did not translate into…
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Google has appealed European Commission requests to open Android features to rival AI services and share search data with competing search engines, according to The Wall Street Journal. The dispute puts privacy and security arguments against the EU’s push for rivals to compete with Google’s Gemini on more…
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Production AI agents need firm controls around their actions, not just better prompts or stronger models. An O’Reilly Radar article sets out practical safeguards for teams building systems that use tools and handle sensitive context.
Groq Watch
Two former Groq engineers who held shares are suing over the company’s 2025 technology-licensing deal with Nvidia, alleging that Groq’s board left some shareholders with an unfair payout. The case puts a disputed AI-chip transaction, valued at $20bn in the report, under a legal spotlight.
Jacob Coxon Watch
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon is due to testify at a New York City Council hearing on AI on 5 October, alongside representatives of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta. The hearing puts his warnings about frontier AI development into a policy debate with potential consequences for how the…
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arXiv has capped how often people can submit new papers, introducing a limit of two per calendar month and three active submissions at a time. The rules apply from 1 October, and rejected submissions count towards the monthly limit.
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People can dislike the AI industry’s relentless push and still find chatbots useful enough to keep coming back. A new MIT Technology Review essay argues that public scepticism may be aimed less at AI itself than at the companies’ insistence that it is inevitable.
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Jev AI’s production guide says to keep API keys on the server, minimise and redact the data sent to the model, and keep business rules and consequential actions under application control. That is useful advice for anyone wiring model-generated decisions into a real workflow, where “the model thinks…
Qualcomm Watch
Huawei and Qualcomm have agreed a multi-year patent deal spanning 5G and AI, combining cross-licensing with Qualcomm’s purchase of selected Huawei US patents. Huawei says the transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals and does not include any other business cooperation. That distinction matters: this is an agreement over…
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Change.org says it will put $100m of its own money into rebuilding its core petitions platform with AI, and has launched a beta AI copilot for petition creators. It is a substantial bet on making AI part of the machinery behind online campaigning, not just another writing assistant…
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A company-built AI agent for ServiceNow is being used to create catalogue items, analyse incident trends and review software licences. Its developers say the pilot suggests that tightly scoped workflows can deliver more practical value than a broad, do-everything IT agent.
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A White House meeting with AI executives ended with an agreement favouring industry self-regulation over government intervention to slow new models, El País reports. The account captures a pointed split over who should manage AI’s risks: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argues that companies should solve safety problems through engineering,…
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A Hugging Face community guide compares six reinforcement-learning methods used in language-model training, matching each to the problem it is intended to address. Its useful point: PPO, RLOO, GRPO, Pref-GRPO, GSPO and GDPO are not interchangeable recipe names; they make different trade-offs in compute, training stability and reward…
