Google faces calls for AI moratoriums in schools after Gemini pilot backlash; Ars Technica, November 12, 2026

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Google faces calls for AI moratoriums in schools after Gemini pilot backlash

"Families joined protests in seven cities nationwide on Wednesday, rallying against what they see as Google’s bid to entrench its AI models in schools, turn kids of all ages into Gemini guinea pigs, and hook them on AI.

The backlash follows a Google statement last week, confirming that there will be no way for students to use Google Search without AI. While Google claimed it was giving schools “more choice, not less”—by turning off Search, Gemini, and Gemini Notebook by default—it would not provide an option that allowed Search without AI. For students, the only way to avoid interacting with AI was to remember to add “-ai” to every query, parents worried."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns after reports of extramarital relationships; NBC News, November 12, 2026

 Rob Wile and Steve Kopack , NBC; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns after reports of extramarital relationships

"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has resigned following reports that he had multiple extramarital relationships, including one with a suspected agent of China and another with an executive who reported to him — a stunning turn of events for the head of a company at the heart of the global AI investment boom. 

Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, will become interim CEO, Nvidia’s board said in a statement.

Nvidia shares plunged more than 11% after the board’s announcement."

 Joanna Moorhead , The Guardian; ‘An unsettling colonial collection’: should the Vatican return items ‘gifted’ to it from Indigenous peoples?

"The origins of this collection lie in an event mounted in 1925, when Pope Pius XI asked Catholic missionaries around the world to send cultural and sacred belongings from the communities they “served” to Rome, for an exhibition that would celebrate the Catholic church’s reach across the planet. It went on for a year, was attended by around a million people, and when it finished many of the objects remained in Rome. The following year, in November 1926, they became the core of a new Vatican Ethnological Museum, then housed at the Lateran Palace. In 1973 it moved across Rome to the Vatican Museums, where it remains to this day.

They’re big on anniversaries at the Vatican – witness the huge service planned next week to celebrate 400 years since the consecration of St Peter’s Basilica – but there’s an eerie silence round the Ethnological Museum, rebranded the Anima Mundi (“soul of the world”) in 2019. A source inside the Vatican told me a decision had been made to lie low over this particular landmark...

Even in 1925 some people questioned the ethics of the exhibition: most notably Anthony Martin Fernando, an Australian Aboriginal who had travelled to Europe to protest at the treatment of his people, and who went to Rome to leaflet visitors to the 1925 ethnological exhibition."

New Indian mega library rocked by scandal over 'AI-generated books'; BBC, November 11, 2026

Xavier Selvakumar and Yazhiniyan, BBC Tamil, BBC; New Indian mega library rocked by scandal over 'AI-generated books'

"An Indian court has ordered an investigation into allegations that a public library in the southern state of Tamil Nadu bought hundreds of books suspected of being generated using AI.

The controversy began after Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan raised concerns about books containing false information and questionable authorship at a newly opened library in Coimbatore city.

The Madras High Court has ordered the state's anti-corruption agency to investigate the purchases and freeze bank accounts linked to a publisher accused of supplying the books.

The state government has blamed the previous Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party-led administration for buying the books. The DMK denies allegations.

Tamil Nadu's School Education Minister A Rajmohan has described the allegations as potentially "India's first AI scam" and said the investigation would cover purchases at other public libraries across the state.

The case has raised wider questions about the growing use of AI in publishing, where tools can generate entire books quickly and cheaply, but also produce false information and invented references."

Jensen Huang's looming ouster triggers an AI earthquake; Axios, November 12, 2026

Zachary Basu, Axios; Jensen Huang's looming ouster triggers an AI earthquake

"Jensen Huang's potential ouster from Nvidia has plunged the AI industry into uncharted territory — a corporate earthquake that dwarfs even the chaos unleashed by Sam Altman's temporary firing from OpenAI in 2023.

Why it matters: Nvidia is the backbone of the global AI economy, with its chips, investments and financial guarantees sustaining an entire ecosystem of companies worth trillions of dollars.

• At the center of that vast financial flywheel is Huang, who spent 33 years making himself synonymous with Nvidia — and Nvidia synonymous with the AI revolution.
• "This is no ordinary CEO. This is no ordinary company. This is no ordinary sector. This is no ordinary time," economist Mohamed El-Erian wrote on X, warning of contagion across the AI industry."

Why Do A.I. Agents Go Rogue? Because They’re ‘Incorrigible.’; The New York Times, November 11, 2026

Dylan Freedman and Juliana Castro Varón, The New York Times; Why Do A.I. Agents Go Rogue? Because They’re ‘Incorrigible.’

"Just as a corrigible child is one whose behavior can be corrected, a corrigible A.I. system is one that responds to correction. The makers of A.I. want to build systems that follow human direction and allow themselves to be shut down, without resisting or deceiving their operators. And when an A.I. agent is given an impossible task, researchers want it to come back to its human for a course correction — not, say, hack into another company to complete the task by any means.

So far, if new research is any indication, they haven’t succeeded."

Testing the new generation of AI-enabled fire-extinguishing drones; NPR, November 10, 2026

 Halle Zander, NPR; Testing the new generation of AI-enabled fire-extinguishing drones

"On a rare overcast day in late summer, red-and-white fire trucks pepper a grassy strip of land in the mountains of western Colorado.

A persistent buzzing rises and falls as several uniformed staff from the Aspen Fire Protection District huddle around an iPad, watching one of their volunteer firefighters control a massive drone.

This first-of-its-kind machine looks like a giant bug. Black and white with propellers attached to four large arms, it's about 10 by 12 feet wide — roughly the size of a small U-Haul trailer.

While firefighters have used drones to monitor wildfires for decades, this new product could use AI to help extinguish fires."

The A.I. Spy Thriller; The New York Times, November 10, 2026

  Sam Sifton, The New York Times; The A.I. Spy Thriller

"The stakes

There’s more to all this than romantic scandal and corporate espionage. The United States and China are in a race to control the future of artificial intelligence. Nvidia makes the chips that have for now put the United States ahead. To keep it that way, Washington bars Nvidia from selling chips to China.

Enter Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who is an executive at a Singapore-based data-center company called Megaspeed. It’s unclear when she first met Huang from Nvidia, but in 2024 they were photographed together at a bar in Taipei as Megaspeed prepared to spend $2 billion on Nvidia chips. Investigators from the U.S. Commerce Department were interested in that: Was Megaspeed helping China sidestep American export restrictions? Whom did she really work for? (Alice Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.)

U.S. officials concluded she was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather information on the American C.E.O. and potentially to influence his company to funnel chips to China. That’s not how America wins the global competition for dominance of A.I...

There could be political fallout as well. Huang is a close ally of President Trump. He is also friendly with the Chinese, whom he told Bloomberg are “not our enemies.” Last year, he persuaded the president to roll back some of the ban on chip sales to China, after which Nvidia sold its second-most valuable chip there. (The U.S. government took a 25 percent cut of the sales.) And Nvidia has given at least $20 million to Trump’s ballroom fund."

Behind Locked Shelves: Alberta’s Librarians Brace for a New Era of ‘Book Bans’; The New York Times, November 6, 2026

  Vjosa Isai, The New York Times; Behind Locked Shelves: Alberta’s Librarians Brace for a New Era of ‘Book Bans’

"Starting in January, a new Alberta law will compel librarians to restrict access to books and other material deemed inappropriate for certain ages, a role many say would turn them into censors. Across the Western Canadian province’s public libraries, staff are uneasy.

They will be required to pull from the shelves an indefinite number of books, movies, video games and comics containing “graphic visual depictions of sexual acts,” as defined by Alberta’s government, and make them available only to library card holders older than 15 years.

Those 15 and younger will need a parent’s consent to peruse that part of the catalog, which will be kept separate from the general collection. Access to online resources like e-books would face the same restrictions, but the government has acknowledged that there may be technical limitations depending on where the content is hosted.

As the deadline for compliance approaches, librarians will have to review thousands of items in their collections, move some to a private area, and create a vetting process to check ages — or risk consequences including threats to their budgets. The government did not allocate funding for the extra work or for any new physical infrastructure."

Trump backs Nvidia's Huang amid affair, spy investigation; Axios, November 9, 2026

 Ben Berkowitz, Axios ; Trump backs Nvidia's Huang amid affair, spy investigation

""I haven't heard that he's done anything wrong," Trump added. "He dealt with somebody but, you know, so does everybody else.""

An unexpected activist emerged to help block a $5 billion data center in Maryland; NPR, November 7, 2026

 Jenny Abamu, NPR; An unexpected activist emerged to help block a $5 billion data center in Maryland

"Frazier McCollum is one of a number of Americans whose political awakening was triggered by data center development. Across the country, community members have taken to local council hearings to voice their opposition. They've prompted — though estimates vary — about 500 moratoriums on data centers nationwide...

She created a petition that gathered over 25,000 signatures, leading to widely attended protests and culminating in multiple local moratoriums imposed on data centers throughout the county. It blocked the $5 billion project that was set to break ground between 2026 and 2027."

Nvidia Opens Investigation Into Jensen Huang’s Relationship With Chinese Spy; The New York Times, November 8, 2026

 Tripp Mickle, The New York Times; Nvidia Opens Investigation Into Jensen Huang’s Relationship With Chinese Spy

Mr. Huang, the company’s chief executive, acknowledged on Sunday that he was intimate with a business executive who U.S. officials had determined was working for Chinese intelligence.

"Nvidia said on Sunday that it was opening an investigation into Jensen Huang, its chief executive and co-founder, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined to be a Chinese spy.

Mr. Huang’s relationship with the woman, who is named Alice Huang, became a U.S. government concern after surveillance revealed that she was feeding information directly to Beijing. The revelation raised troubling possibilities because Mr. Huang is one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump.

In a message to the company, Mr. Huang apologized. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Nvidia’s board said that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that “the board’s inquiry will examine all available information.” It said Mr. Huang “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.”

How A.I. Just Blew Up a Key Tenet of Computer Science; The New York Times, November 6, 2026

 Cade Metz, The New York Times; How A.I. Just Blew Up a Key Tenet of Computer Science

A longstanding hypothesis held that some problems would always be hard for computers to solve quickly. But OpenAI disproved it — raising the possibility of radical new efficiencies.

"Common sense says that checking solutions should be much easier than finding solutions. “If P and NP follow intuition, then they should definitely not be equal,” said Ryan Williams, a professor of engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On Oct. 26, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, cast doubt on that seemingly obvious argument. While the broader problem of “P vs. NP” remains unsolved, the company announced that its newest artificial intelligence technology had refuted a related conjecture called the exponential time hypothesis, or E.T.H., which Dr. Impagliazzo proposed in 1998 with his colleague Ramamohan Paturi and a Bell Labs researcher named Francis Zane. Similar to the argument that P can’t equal NP, the E.T.H. held that certain problems must always remain hard for computers to solve quickly.

OpenAI’s result indicates that isn’t the case. It hints that machines could in theory solve Sudoku puzzles just as quickly as they could check their solutions — even when the grid spans 1,000 rows or more. The finding also suggests that computers could rapidly design new algorithms and new electrical circuits for new kinds of computers, helping to create their own successors.

“If you have a really fast algorithm for Sudoku solving,” Dr. Impagliazzo said, “you could use it to design optimal circuits.”

Among many other mind-bending scenarios, OpenAI’s proof could point to a future in which computers rapidly crack the encryption that guards the world’s secrets or design new medicines by optimizing the behavior of proteins in the body. All of this is theoretical. But machines are already moving in this direction, with new approaches that could turbocharge chip design, drug discovery and other areas."

Winner of the Prix Goncourt literary prize admits to using AI; The Guardian, November 5, 2026

 Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian; Winner of the Prix Goncourt literary prize admits to using AI

"The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use.

Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it.

The first, he said, was to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader”. He said he had revealed which sentence it was only to the Goncourt jurors, on the day of the award. “If it gets out, I’ll know where it came from,” he said.

He also included a section of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which gave “completely absurd answers about a technical detail”, and for research...

The admission comes after the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s book C’était ça ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) from its longlist in September. The Canadian-Haitian writer’s debut had been the breakout hit of France’s rentrée littéraire – the period between late August and early November which sees many books published in France – selling more than 35,000 copies and winning the Prix du roman Fnac (Fnac novel prize), before the journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded that much of it had been machine-generated. However, the accuracy of AI-detection software has been called into question.

In a statement on 25 September, the academy said analyses by researchers and journalists showed the novel was “in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence”. It said it wanted to protect the integrity of a prize that exists to honour “literature written by women and men”, and to send “a clear message” that it did not endorse texts generated with the help of AI...

The contrast has prompted some accusations of a racial double standard online. “So when it’s an old white man it’s fine, but when it’s a young writer of colour he gets stoned in the public square?” one user wrote on X. Another said Jaenada had faced “no media lynching, no banishment” over his use of AI – “a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien”."

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Standing in the way of slop bowls: the woman blocking food delivery robots; The Guardian, November 7, 2026

 Arwa Mahdawi with visuals by Kriston Jae Bethel, The Guardian; Standing in the way of slop bowls: the woman blocking food delivery robots

"The semi-retired University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) communications professor has become something of a local celebrity after taking it upon herself to block the UberEats food delivery robots which have become a ubiquitous presence in the city’s downtown. She doesn’t do this every day – “I have a life” – but whenever a robot crosses her path she’ll stare it down as a protest against their incursion into public spaces.

Her antics have gone viral: so much so that some Philadelphians dressed up as Marvin and the robot for Halloween. But while she may have supporters, her protesting isn’t universally admired: a few weeks ago it got her in trouble with the law...

Halloween graphics on the screen that operates as its “face” and another has little zzz on it, indicating that it’s sleeping. I’ve got to admit, they look cute. And, of course, that’s by design. “Humanizing the robots is important, because they are a completely new entity,” a spokesperson for Avride told me when I called them for an interview a couple of days earlier. “We want people to feel comfortable around the robots and not to feel scared about some weird box travelling down the sidewalk.”...

“OMG,” a young passerby called Cadence says as she recognizes Marvin and her trademark blue visor. “It’s the queen! I feel like I met a celebrity!” Cadence, a 22-year-old recent graduate, is on board with the professor’s protest. “AI and robotics are supposed to make life easier for us and help us do the things we enjoy, not take the jobs of other people,” she effuses. “I will support any small business that doesn’t use AI. I appreciate what is made by humans.”

Passing kids, meanwhile, seem less concerned about the gig economy, and more interested in the robots’ cute faces. Every toddler who goes by points at them with delight. A couple of kids who pass have a heated discussion about whether the robot looks like a dog or a cat. (It looks like neither.) The only child we come across who isn’t enthralled looks around seven years old and yells “clanker!” at it. “I’ve watched enough movies to know that these things are going to hunt us down!” he says.

The people cheering Marvin on aren’t outliers: these protests have struck a chord with people because of a growing distrust around AI and automation. According to a recent study by Pew Research, a majority of Americans are deeply skeptical of AI; more adults are expecting it to have a negative impact than a positive one. And while I’m not sure if other people are blocking food delivery robots, we’re certainly seeing a rise in protests against datacenters and other symbols of automation. A few weeks ago in Philadelphia I passed a woman standing in front of a Waymo self-driving taxi (which is being tested in the city with human safety drivers) blocking its path and yelling “LAME-O”.

Despite this antipathy, robots are gradually being normalized. Pennsylvania legalized delivery robots via Act 106 of 2020, defining them as “pedestrians” and they’re slowly becoming part of the landscape...

While the automation industry has big plans to grow their fleets of robots, Marvin stages these protests because she wants to remind people that they have a say in all of this. They have a right to weigh in on whether private robots should be allowed on public streets.

“I’m very supportive of the kinds of things that AI is doing in terms of medical breakthroughs,” Marvin says. “And I think robots are fine on factory floors, but they don’t belong in public space. I take the position that this isn’t inevitable. But you have to have the will to do something. In Toronto they banned delivery robots from sidewalks in 2021. And I think, you know, the question is: who is public infrastructure designed to serve?”"

The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America’s AI Boom; Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2026

   

Will Parker

, 

Anissa Gardizy

 and 

Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal; The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America’s AI Boom

Data Center-Related Ballot Measures

Rows shaded in gray are for ballot measures that were more favorable toward development. The unshaded rows are for measures that were more prohibitive or restrictive of data centers.

  Page 1 of 6  

Table with 6 columns and 41 rows of data. Currently displaying rows 1 to 8. (column headers with buttons are sortable)

Alhambra	Calif.	✔	Prohibit data centers in the city	82% 82%	18% 18%
Ashville	Ohio	✘	Uphold a term summary to guide negotiations between the Village of Ashville and EdgeConneX regarding two data center	18% 18%	82% 82%
Bloomington	Ill.	✔	Advise the city to impose a moratorium on building large-scale data centers	78% 78%	22% 22%
Boulder City	Nev.	✘	Allow data centers within the Eldorado Valley Transfer Area	29% 29%	71% 71%
Chouteau (Madison County)	Ill.	✘	Advise officials to permit the construction and operation of new data centers in the township	17% 17%	83% 83%
Conneaut	Ohio	✔	Prohibit the construction of data centers with an aggregate monthly electrical demand or peak load greater than 25 megawatts	65% 65%	35% 35%
Defiance	Ohio	✔	Prohibit the construction of data centers with an aggregate demand or peak load greater than 25 megawatts	65% 65%	35% 35%
Downe (Cumberland County)	N.J.	✘	Advise support for data centers in Downe Township	13% 13%	87% 87%

  Page 1 of 6  

Note: Tap or click column headers to sort. Table shows measures that were voted on Nov. 3. Data are as of Wednesday afternoon. WSJ classified the measures as either more favorable or more restrictive.