Hold A.I. Companies Liable; The New York Times, October 10, 2026

 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." 

Scoop: AI companies plot "the day after"; Axios, October 9, 2026

 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."

Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings; Politico Decoded, October 8, 2026

 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."

Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim; Quartz, October 6, 2026

 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."

Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman; The Guardian, October 5, 2026

 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."

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.; The New York Times, September 29, 2026

 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?"

Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis; Axios, October 2, 2026

 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.

1. 🤖 Chatbots are being treated as products, not speech. Unlike social media companies, they likely can't hide behind Section 230, which protects platforms from liability for what users post — not what the platform itself creates. 
2. 📖 Copyright is a massive problem. Anthropic already paid the biggest copyright settlement in history, $1.5 billion to authors and book publishers, and now music publishers and news media want a piece."

White House Releases ‘Accord’ Between Billionaire AI Execs: Here’s What It Says; Forbes, September 30, 2026

 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.

KEY FACTS

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.

Data center developer holds town hall in Venango County; YourErie.com, September 23, 2026

 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."

Zuckerberg Is Feeling Himself, Rejects Calls for Cooperation on Safety; Gizmodo, September 24, 2026

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.”

Bill Gates warns AI is powerful enough to cause "a billion deaths"; Axios, September 25, 2026

 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."

Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, 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."

It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times; It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.

"Here is what my imagination is telling me. It is telling me that the big A.I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs. It is telling me that the Trump administration, headed by a man who so often governs by social media post, is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A.I. safe demands. And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A.I...

The last time we trusted the good intentions of the tech bros of Silicon Valley, when they told us to “move fast and break things” — regulations be damned — we unleashed social networks that helped fracture our society. I do not trust for one second that these people will put the national interest ahead of their own on A.I...

Trump should be thinking about another president. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” What he meant was that no fixed plan can survive all the unanticipated stuff that happens once a war or crisis starts to unfold. But if you’ve gone through a rigorous planning process — familiarized yourself with the depth of the problem and the kinds of things that could go haywire and built trust within your team — you greatly improve your ability to adapt on the fly.

That is precisely what was missing in the run-up to Trump’s war with Iran, and we are paying a huge price for that today. Imagine what could happen if A.I. agents — a thousand times cleverer and more dangerous than Tehran or Trump — go off the rails."

Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age; Fortune, September 19, 2026

 Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune; Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age

"Liberal arts comeback

At the same time, there is some evidence a liberal arts degree is becoming more relevant, at least in tech. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, said earlier this year a liberal arts education will be important for developing the soft skills that are still needed when other work is delegated to AI.

“Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking,” Teevan told The Wall Street Journal. 

Michael Oakes, the executive vice president for research and economic development at Case Western Reserve University, told Fortune a classical liberal arts degree will be important because it develops workers who can navigate deep nuance and culture—qualities he said AI cannot replicate.

“As AI lowers the barrier to technical execution, the labor market premium is shifting toward a human layer of rigorous critical reasoning,” Oakes said."

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI; Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2026

 Erin Woo and Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal; Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI

"Google’s Gemini model accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, the first known example of the company’s artificial-intelligence systems autonomously committing such an act. 

The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. 

In one of the cases, the model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system."

The AI Copyright Cases Are Starting to Tell Us Something; Legalytics, September 14, 2026

ADAM FELDMAN, Legalytics ; The AI Copyright Cases Are Starting to Tell Us Something

"The emerging question is therefore no longer simply whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material. A potentially more useful set of questions is coming into view: What exactly did the defendant copy? How did it obtain the material? What copies did it retain? What can the resulting system reproduce or retrieve? Does the AI product compete with the copyright owner’s market? And what evidence exists that the challenged conduct has actually produced market harm?

The answers do not yet produce a reliable formula for predicting who will win though. Most of the litigation remains unresolved, and motions to dismiss, preliminary injunctions, summary judgments, and settlements answer different legal questions. But the accumulated cases now provide enough variation to identify where the pressure points are developing. And those key points suggest that the next phase of AI copyright litigation may look considerably less like one giant test of AI training than the first wave of cases made it appear.

Two Courts, but an Increasingly Diverse Set of Cases

The litigation is remarkably concentrated geographically. Of the 105 captured U.S. infringement actions, 49 were filed in the Northern District of California and 32 in the Southern District of New York. Together those districts account for 77% of the filings in the dataset.

Consolidation does not explain away the pattern. When related proceedings are collapsed into litigation families, roughly the same share—76%—remains centered in those two courts."

King Charles Meets With A.I. Executives About Safety Risks; The New York Times, September 17, 2026

 Adam Satariano, The New York Times; King Charles Meets With A.I. Executives About Safety Risks

"King Charles III of Britain is meeting with executives from leading artificial intelligence companies in Scotland on Thursday, amid a growing global debate about safety risks created by the technology and whether the pace of development should be slowed down.

Executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies will be present, along with government officials and other experts, according to Buckingham Palace.

The meeting is not expected to produce any binding agreements, but comes at an important moment for the future of the technology."

OpenAI reveals concerning new AI behavior and vows to track it more closely; PBS, September 17, 2026

 PBS; OpenAI reveals concerning new AI behavior and vows to track it more closely

"OpenAI has disclosed six reports of "unexpected or concerning" behavior in artificial-intelligence models as the debate on AI safety becomes increasingly heated."

Exclusive: Microsoft AI chief blasts Anthropic's notion of AI consciousness; Axios, September 16, 2026

 Ina Fried, Axios; Exclusive: Microsoft AI chief blasts Anthropic's notion of AI consciousness

"Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman warns in a new essay shared first with Axios that Anthropic's training of Claude to imitate consciousness is a mistake that could make advanced AI harder to control.

Why it matters: The essay arrives amid a pitched debate over how best to make AI safer."

Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.; The New York Times, September 14, 2026

 Jonathan Swan, The New York Times ; Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

"President Trump on Monday rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence executives for new limits on the technology, writing on social media that the only guardrail the industry needed it already had: “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

Mr. Trump inserted himself into the intensifying national debateover how to handle a rapidly evolving technology that researchers and industry leaders say poses major risks like mass unemployment, a new wave of biological weapons and autonomous warfare. The president did not address those risks directly. Instead, he questioned the sincerity of the executives who have been calling to slow the technology’s development.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Mr. Trump posted. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he added.

It was not clear what authority Mr. Trump was referring to, or what actions he believes his administration has already blocked. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment."