Policy · Page 24
regulation, copyright fights, safety rules and the politics of AI
Nearly 200 Companies Signed Trump's AI Electric Bill Pledge. It Has No Teeth.
Utility giants and data centre operators have joined a White House promise to protect consumers from higher electricity bills caused by AI. The pledge is voluntary, carries no penalties, and enforcement is largely out of federal hands.
US threatens sanctions on Chinese AI models over alleged intellectual property theft
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Washington will scrutinise Chinese open-source AI for stolen technology, and could punish companies found to have copied American models.
China's AI surge is giving Silicon Valley a serious headache
New Chinese models keep punching above their weight, and American tech giants are finding it harder to shrug them off.
Two Chinese AI Models Just Rattled Wall Street. Here Is What Is Actually New.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8 claim to match the best American AI models at a fraction of the cost. The shock is less about the models themselves and more about how long the world ignored the warning signs.
Stanford Students Walked Out on Google's CEO at Graduation. Here Is What They Actually Wanted.
More than a hundred students left during Sundar Pichai's commencement speech at Stanford. Their grievances went far beyond artificial intelligence.
Tech Workers Are Turning to Unions, and AI Is the Reason
From Google DeepMind to Meta, software engineers who once had every perk imaginable are now seeking collective bargaining rights. The trigger? AI is changing their jobs faster than their contracts can keep up.
The US Army Ran Out of AI Credits. Here Is What That Tells Us.
The Army promised its workers unlimited AI access. Six weeks later, the credits were gone. Now soldiers and civilian staff face new limits, and one worker told Wired the tools were unreliable anyway.
Living next to a data centre: what UK residents are actually experiencing
Across Britain, roughly 450 large data centres hum away on industrial estates and at the edges of towns. The people living alongside them are starting to speak up.
Pope Leo XIV's speeches pass AI detection test, weeks after he called AI humanity's biggest threat
An Australian company has officially certified a collection of the Pope's writings as genuinely human-authored. The timing is hard to miss.
Nine Entertainment Cuts 30 Newsroom Jobs, Blaming AI Disruption
Australia's largest media company is shrinking its mastheads at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, citing structural shifts driven by artificial intelligence.
AI Chatbots Are Giving Voters Wrong Answers About Which Party to Support
A new study tested AI tools during Hungary's 2025 parliamentary elections and found they recommended parties that weren't even on the ballot. What that means if you ever ask a chatbot for voting advice.
UK water industry says the country cannot supply enough water for its AI datacentre ambitions
Cooling a server farm drinks enormous amounts of water. Britain's water trade body says the government hasn't reckoned with that, and the AI growth plan has a fatal flaw baked in.
A federal judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors and publishers
The payout works out to $3,000 per book across roughly 500,000 works. But the ruling that made AI training on copyrighted text legal still stands, and many authors are not celebrating.
Sony Sues Udio Over More Than 30,000 Songs in Major AI Music Copyright Case
After a judge blocked Sony from expanding its original lawsuit, the record label has filed a fresh case targeting a vast catalogue of tracks the AI music tool allegedly copied without permission.
The US government's top AI standards job has turned over three times in four months
Chris Fall has quit as director of the main federal body responsible for setting AI safety standards, leaving a key role empty amid growing pressure over Chinese AI models and industry calls for independent oversight.