Policy · Page 7
regulation, copyright fights, safety rules and the politics of AI
Mirror Publisher Reach Cuts 220 Newsroom Jobs as AI Summaries Drain Web Traffic
Reach, the company behind the Mirror, Express, Manchester Evening News and dozens of regional titles, is shedding another 220 editorial staff. The reason given is blunt: readers are getting their news from AI-generated summaries instead of clicking through to articles.
Scotland demands environmental checks on big datacentres before they can be built
Any new facility drawing more than 50 megawatts of power must now pass an environmental impact assessment. The Scottish government stopped short of a full ban, but the rules are tighter than they have ever been.
AI CEOs Have Been Warning About AI Dangers for Years. Here Is What They Actually Did.
From Elon Musk's 2017 governors speech to last week's chorus of caution, the tech industry's most powerful voices have repeatedly called for AI regulation, while building the very systems they say scare them.
AI's Dominance Is Not a Done Deal
The spread of artificial intelligence feels inevitable to many people. It isn't.
Australia may let AI companies scrape everything you post online, by default
The Albanese government is weighing changes that would give US tech giants open access to Australian content. Here is what that means for anyone who has ever posted, written or created anything on the internet.
A Godfather of AI Says Governments Are Almost Ready to Act
Yoshua Bengio, one of the researchers who built the foundations of modern AI, says governments are getting close to acting on AI safety the way they acted on Covid: fast, collectively, with serious consequences for the industry.
Congress went home early and took the AI bills with it
Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled Thursday's votes, letting lawmakers dodge a Hegseth impeachment resolution and a flurry of proposed AI bills before the midterm recess.
AI's e-waste bill by 2050 is far bigger than anyone was counting
A nonprofit has calculated the full weight of hardware behind AI, and the e-waste total by 2050 is enough to fill 23 million shipping containers.
Washington Is Talking About AI Regulation. Nobody Is Actually Passing Any.
A FINRA-style AI oversight agency got killed by tech-exec phone calls. Congress has three competing bills and no votes scheduled. Here is where US AI regulation actually stands.
AI could wipe out humanity, some researchers warn. How seriously should we take that?
A wave of alarming claims from AI insiders has pushed calls for slowing down development into the mainstream. Here is what the researchers are actually saying, what the tech companies want, and where governments stand.
Al Gore Says Stop Worrying About the Data Center and Start Reading the Safety Reports
The former vice president thinks emissions fears are overblown. What keeps him up at night is what AI companies are quietly disclosing about their own models.
The regulation beat just tripled on us, and it wasn't the regulators
We published 30 stories on AI regulation in the week of 8 September, up from 8 the week before. What actually moved was the argument about who gets to write the rules.
Existential risk stopped being a fringe beat in our pages this week
We ran six stories on human extinction from AI in seven days, up from one the week before. Three different outlets carried it. Here is what that shape tells us, and what it does not.
An AI Researcher Just Quit Anthropic Over Existential Fear. Should the Rest of Us Be Worried?
Jacob Coxon walked away from one of the world's top AI labs saying colleagues believe the next year or two will decide humanity's fate. Here is what that actually means.
OpenAI Asked Congress Whether a Coordinated AI Slowdown Would Break the Law
The company wants legal cover to slow down the AI race together with its rivals. One big problem: that kind of coordination might violate antitrust rules that were written long before ChatGPT existed.