Policy · Page 15
regulation, copyright fights, safety rules and the politics of AI
The 'AI Consciousness' Debate Is a Legal Escape Hatch for Big Tech
When AI companies hint their systems might be sentient, they may be building a case to dodge responsibility for real-world harms. Here is why that matters for everyone, not just lawyers.
OpenAI is bringing ads inside ChatGPT to 31 European countries
Free and Go users in Germany, France, Italy and 28 other markets will start seeing sponsored placements. Paid plans stay ad-free.
OpenAI pledges $5 million to help government watchdogs keep up with AI
The company says human reviewers can't manually check systems that run at machine speed, and is offering tools, training and credits to the bodies meant to hold national security AI to account.
Anthropic's Invisible AI Watermarks Were Cracked in Four Hours
The EU's new content-labelling rules forced Anthropic to watermark every Claude response. Developers tore through the system before the news cycle ended. Here's what that means for workers, writers, and anyone who uses AI tools.
Google bought Spirit Airlines' employee records. Workers are alarmed.
A bankruptcy auction last Friday handed Google a vast trove of Spirit Airlines' workplace data. No passenger details are included, but thousands of current and former employees want to know: how safe is their information?
She Applied for Thousands of Jobs and Got Zero Interviews. Now She's Suing the AI That Screened Her Out
A California lawsuit targets Eightfold AI, a hiring software company used by PayPal and Microsoft, arguing that its automated screening tools secretly rank job applicants without telling them or giving them a chance to challenge the results.
Bernie Sanders says AI is a real issue. Is anyone in Washington actually treating it that way?
A prominent senator's op-ed names artificial intelligence alongside healthcare costs and inequality as threats working families face. The political system, he argues, is not keeping up.
Jill Lepore's New Book Says AI Is Already Dismantling Democracy. Is She Right?
A Pulitzer-winning historian argues that big tech's grip on public life is not a future threat but a present reality, and her new book spells out exactly what that looks like.
Autonomous Drones Are Already Killing Without Accountability. That Is the Real AI Weapons Problem
A military surgeon argues the danger from AI in weapons isn't some far-off sci-fi threat. It's happening now, and the law of war isn't keeping up.
America's Air Traffic System Is Broken. A $12.5 Billion Fix May Mostly Enrich One Company.
Flight delays hit a decade-long high in 2025. Radar went dark over nine states. Now billions in repair funding look set to flow to Palantir, a data company with deep government ties and no experience running air traffic control.
What are people actually doing with AI chatbots? A new study looked at nearly 25,000 real conversations to find out
AI companies publish usage reports, but researchers say those reports leave out the messy parts. A new independent project called the AI Observatory dug into real chat data and found a very different picture.
AI firms are quietly buying up secondhand books by the thousands. Some are being destroyed to train chatbots.
A US court ruling cleared Anthropic to use purchased books for AI training. Now booksellers report a strange surge in sales of obscure titles, and court documents reveal a project with a goal to 'destructively scan all the books in the world'.
Police are misusing licence plate readers to stalk women. Flock's fixes have big holes in them.
The company behind 120,000 roadside cameras updated its rules after officers used the system to track women. The changes don't go nearly far enough.
Sainsbury's pauses face-scanning AI after it wrongly accused a shopper of theft
Matt Arnold, 46, was ejected from a Sainsbury's store after its facial-recognition system misidentified him as a shoplifter. The supermarket has now paused the technology at that location while it investigates.
Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Report Used ChatGPT for Editing, Authors Admit
A $3.48 million government-funded study into age-checking technology contains citations to academic articles that do not appear to exist. The authors say AI did not invent them.