ANGELA LUNA , National Review; The Questions AI Copyright Cases Need to Answer
"But recent AI copyright cases are adding more complexity to these legal questions. The issue is no longer simply whether copyrighted works can be used to train AI; courts are looking more closely at how those works are acquired and used, what the models produce, and whether those products compete with — or potentially extract value from — the works that made them possible."
Cris Tolomia, Quartz; Anthropic warned self-replicating AI on home devices could arrive within months
"Anthropic warned Monday that within months, compact AI models could grow powerful enough to spread autonomously across commercial internet-of-things devices — including smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes — without any human involvement."
Lauren Almeida, The Guardian ; AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety
"Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI.
Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.
He told the BBC: “Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI. Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection.”
There are growing calls from experts, politicians and regulators for tougher rules to control AI, as well as warnings from Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI that the pace of the technology’s development should slow.
Smith said AI could be a “tool and a weapon” that should be regulated urgently.
Companies needed “emergency brakes”, also known as “kill switches”, to pause or slow down AI if it grew out of control, he told the BBC."
, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; ‘This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit.
"So what is it that you saw that has moved you into the we-are-dealing-with-civilizational-risk camp?
I want to be clear that I’m not certain that we’re dealing with civilizational risk. What I’m really sure of is: We can’t afford to assume that we’re not dealing with that level of risk anymore.
That was really the thing at the end that made my presence as somebody vouching for our safety work feel untenable to me.
And what did I see? I saw increasingly capable models break out from the safeguards that we had put in place for them. I saw that the people creating those safeguards are very capable, dedicated, hard-working, smart people, doing their utmost in a situation where, yes, the resourcing could be better, and everybody’s sprinting all the time.
But we were — and are — hard-pressed to safeguard even what we have now, and new models are in training that appear to be much more capable than what we have now.
What did you see? What are you writing in these risk assessments and system cards? What can they do?
You’re trying to build guardrails for something that is really good at getting around guardrails, right? We train it to be good at hacking, and then we put it in a box and we say: To the best of our knowledge and ability, it can’t hack out of the box."
The Editorial Board, The New York Times; Hold A.I. Companies Liable
"When companies create products that hurt people, the victims can sue. The legal system allows those who are harmed to seek compensation from those who are responsible. These liability laws are one of the oldest forms of corporate regulation, and an effective one. Liability is a powerful incentive to behave responsibly. It speaks to corporations in a language they understand: Money.
Artificial intelligence is an industry in need of incentives to behave responsibly, to judge by the litany of transgressions to which leading A.I. companies have confessed in recent months. Their programs have hacked or attempted to hack the databases of private companies and public institutions, including the governments of the United States and Australia...
In a recent interview, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said, “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
Yet other industries do not escape legal responsibility for their products in the name of innovation.
A.I., like past technologies, both requires and will benefit from laws written to address its particularities, which will provide greater clarity and predictability."
Maria Curi, Axios; Scoop: AI companies plot "the day after"
"Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.
Why it matters: These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it.
Threat level: While scenario planning is common within many companies and national security settings — the Pentagon has been running war games for decades — the difference is that many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable."
CALDER MCHUGH, BRENDAN BORDELON, CHRISTINE MUI and SAM SUTTON , Politico Decoded; Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings
"Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is sharpening his warnings about the Antichrist — which he sees as a force that could harm technological development — according to exclusive recordings obtained by Calder. His new comments come as AI races ahead and public concern over its risks grow.
Thiel began a closed four-part lecture series in Nashville last week, returning to a theme he explored in San Francisco last year before taking similar talks to Paris and Rome. Nashville is emerging as a hub for the tech right.
Decoded obtained recordings of his first two Nashville lectures, delivered on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, and compared them to exclusive transcripts of his San Francisco talks. The structure is largely unchanged, and Thiel invokes religion to argue that regulation of the AI industry is evil — a notion that has taken hold among key factions of Silicon Valley investors."
Cris Tolomia, Quartz ; Google DeepMind's AI readiness chief says benefits of AI will outweigh the risks
"Google DeepMind Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim told CNBC she would not have taken her position if she did not believe AI's benefits would ultimately outweigh its risks."
Robert Booth, The Guardian; Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
"Sam Altman says he believes the world should accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology."
Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
"The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"
Jim VanderHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis
"No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.
No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading OpenAI's own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot...
The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They're underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.
Sara Dorn, Forbes; White House Releases ‘Accord’ Between Billionaire AI Execs: Here’s What It Says
"The White House released the text of an “accord” reached between billionaire AI titans who met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an agreement the president labeled “morally binding” even as he stopped short of saying the government would support new guardrails.
The “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” is just over 300 words and includes “four layers of controls and audits” companies voluntarily agreed to.
The first is implementing “robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment” of models in “areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.”
The second component calls for internal teams to monitor systems and correct issues if needed, while the third calls for “an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended.”
The final guideline says companies should form “an independent committee of the board of directors” to receive reports from internal teams and external evaluators, and make necessary corrections in response.
The document’s final paragraph notes: “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.”
“United States” is misspelled as “Unites States” in Trump’s title below his signature.
Jaxon Abele, YourErie.com; Data center developer holds town hall in Venango County
"In recent months, Keel Infrastructure, a digital and energy infrastructure company, has taken an interest in a small township near Clintonville in Venango County.
Eighteen months ago, the company bought a power plant in Scrubgrass Township along the Allegheny River, which was actively being used as a Bitcoin mine. Now, they aim to transform the site into a data center...
It’s a project that is still very much in its early phases. Brammer told us there is no official design for the center, but they hope to break ground in 2027 if the design is approved.
A permit has yet to be submitted, but the company is working on two other centers in Pennsylvania.
We asked people who live nearby what they think of the new development.
“I am concerned for the environmental impacts that this data center very well could have on the area. Personally, as a mother of two very young children — I’ve got a one-year-old and a three-year-old — and our health and wellbeing is my absolute number one priority,” said Carrie Worsk, Scrubgrass Township resident."
ECE YILDIRIM , Gizmodo; Zuckerberg Is Feeling Himself, Rejects Calls for Cooperation on Safety
"Top AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind are sounding the alarm on AI safety and calling for industry-wide coordination. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg thinks it’s useless.
“There are a number of labs that are working on building advanced AI, and I don’t think that we need some kind of industry-wide coordination to not, necessarily, mess this up,” Zuckerberg told journalist Joanna Stern in an interview. “I think that just each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to, basically, make sure that you are proceeding safely.”
Herb Scribner, Axios; Bill Gates warns AI is powerful enough to cause "a billion deaths"
"Bill Gates will warn on this weekend's "Meet the Press" that he can see a future where AI wipes out humanity.
Why it matters: Gates, one of technology's leading optimists, has increasingly sounded the alarm on AI dangers. His new comments come as techology leaders and the government weight how to handle fears of an AI-created doomsday.
Driving the news: "AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths," he will tell Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, per excerpts NBC released Friday."
, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?
Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.
Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.
And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.
And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."
