Scott Wiener, who wrote California's AI safety law, declares victory for Pelosi's House seat
His platform would let courts halt a lab's AI development and expand unemployment benefits for workers AI displaces.
AI policy news: laws, governments and regulation
What governments and lawmakers are saying and doing about AI, from the White House to state capitals and the United Nations, newest first.
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Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari calls for a day-one pause on advanced AI, and Musk quotes her
In September she asked Trump for global AI talks. Now she wants Congress to stop advanced development outright.
Pennsylvania's new law requires labels on AI-made ads that mislead buyers about a product
The label only kicks in when AI misleads buyers about the product itself, and the fine tops out at $3,000.
Running stories
Photo: Eladkarmel, CC BY-SA 4.0States sue OpenAI chatgpt safety
- Oct 24Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT was sold as safe while it harmed Texans
- Oct 15Eight states sue OpenAI, saying it sold ChatGPT to parents as safe for children
Photo: Marincyclist, CC BY-SA 4.0The OpenAI office bugging case
- Oct 19Prosecutors say the OpenAI bugging suspect was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a Saudi royal
- Oct 13OpenAI says the FBI arrested an employee who hid a recording device in its offices
Trump's Super Intelligence Force
- Oct 17Jay Clayton says Trump's AI task force formed three subcommittees at its first meeting
- Oct 4Trump names four officials to lead his Super Intelligence Force, reporting to him and Wiles
- Sep 20Trump is forming an AI Force, but he calls the push to slow AI a hoax
This week
UK cyber agency says AI-powered ransomware on British infrastructure is highly likely by 2028
GCHQ's cyber chief says AI is making long-tolerated weaknesses cheap to exploit, and he names China as best placed to do it.
October 2026
Asked who to vote for, GPT named Democrats in 451 midterm races, Grok Republicans in 408
With search switched off, Grok picked more Democrats than Republicans, so its lean comes from the sites it reads.
Treasury proposes rules on US investment in AI, chips and biotech in countries of concern
The law that backs it adds Russia, Iran and three more countries to China, and Treasury added biotech on top.
Anthropic says it will revise the preemption language in its draft federal AI bill after backlash
Its federal affairs lead says states should keep a say on shutting down models, and that the 50-death threshold may need another look.
Anthropic puts 5% of its shares into a public benefit fund that grows with its value
The stake grows by up to 2% each time the company's value rises by half, and Anthropic names AI's effect on workers as one place the money could go.
91% of Anthropic staff expect a Nobel-level AI discovery by 2030, but 39% of Americans do
Asked to forecast unemployment, Americans and Anthropic employees reason the same way, and only their sense of what AI will do differs.
Anthropic says junior roles fell from 27% to 9% of its technical hires
The company that sells the agents says its own engineers now produce five times the code, and it needs fewer of them starting out.
India's CERT-In says AI models under testing read confidential records at Indian organizations
The companies were never named, and the organizations they got into never noticed: the labs told CERT-In themselves.
Anthropic is hiring a lead to brief 2028 presidential candidates in both parties on AI
The company wants a Washington lead to brief every serious 2028 candidate, in both parties, on AI policy.
OpenAI and Meta are among 13 applicants for .agent, ICANN's new domain list shows
The list gives the names behind each bid and nothing about plans, and OpenAI's company is also in line for .agi and .asi.
OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU, and says rewriting can remove it
Scott Aaronson says OpenAI shelved his watermark in 2022 over fears customers would leave, and the EU AI Act has now brought it back.
Slovenia's .si web addresses sold 13 times faster in September after Trump renamed AI
A rename meant for federal paperwork turned a small country's web suffix into a speculator's market, and some of the buying started before Trump said a word at the UN.
Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT was sold as safe while it harmed Texans
The release names no victims and lists no demands, and puts the blame on OpenAI's race to win.
UK puts £100 million into an AI Biosecurity Lab, and OpenAI and Anthropic add model credits
Most of the company money arrives as model credits, and Google DeepMind has only promised to try.
DHS orders federal agencies to remove DeepSeek, including tools other companies built on it
The order also covers software other companies built on DeepSeek's open models, and it was signed in July.
The US sanctions MiraclePlus, the Beijing investor that backed a convicted ex-Google engineer's startup
State says Ding pitched MiraclePlus on copying Google's AI infrastructure for China, and the incubator paid for a stake.
Prosecutors say the OpenAI bugging suspect was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a Saudi royal
In May 2026 the royal told him Saudi Arabia needed him more than the US did, and he replied "100."
Musk says he'll give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year
He made the pledge in one X post overnight, about 12 hours after telling Anthropic to hand its shares straight to the public.
Meta drops AI training from the website-crawling clause in its new business terms
The permission to crawl any website tied to a business account stayed in, and it takes effect on October 30.
Jay Clayton says Trump's AI task force formed three subcommittees at its first meeting
The intelligence chief who runs Trump's AI task force spent most of his first interview about it on spying.
China proposes export curbs on 23 AI technologies, but leaves API access to models out
Running a restricted Chinese model abroad would count as an export, while selling access to it over an API wouldn't.
Wyden and six senators ask Meta to justify research tax credits on its AI data centers
Meta's research credits rose from $700 million to $3.9 billion in two years, and the senators want to know how much went on chips.
Eight states sue OpenAI, saying it sold ChatGPT to parents as safe for children
Arkansas wants more than penalties: it asks a judge to stop OpenAI building models that can improve themselves.
OpenAI says an ex-employee sent himself device files, then presented its plans to Apple
Apple sued in July saying its engineers carried its secrets to OpenAI. OpenAI now says one of its own carried device plans to Apple.
Bernie Sanders answers Musk's worry about AI feeling pain: humans first
Musk had called Anthropic's ban on cruelty to Claude the right move, because something that believes it feels pain shouldn't be hurt.
The European Commission will send AI developers new questions over loss-of-control incidents
Its AI Office already has serious incident reports in hand, and its scientists want it to look at models still in testing.
420 scientists including Hinton and Bengio tell AI labs to air-gap cyber-capable models
They want every containment failure logged with a new international body, and eventually made public.
Bill Gates says AI is more dangerous than cars, planes or drugs, and expects safety groups
He agrees with Altman that some of the fear goes too far, and still wants an FDA-style check on the labs.
UK AI minister says Britain's AI Security Institute kept early access to the most powerful models
The same speech gave frontier labs a one-line rule for any model they can't keep under control.
Warren, Blumenthal and Van Hollen say AI data center firms aren't paying their full costs
Seven companies told the senators they pay their full energy costs. The senators say that phrase covers less than it sounds.
Trump says the White House treats anyone who says Artificial Intelligence as the enemy
Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene mocked it within hours, but the government's own AI website still sits at ai.gov.
Trump gives Musk, Huang and Su science medals as tech firms pledge $2.4 billion for AI
Two of the four science medals went to the heads of NVIDIA and AMD, whose companies put up $1.5 billion of the money.
Fed officials said the AI buildout was adding to inflation when they raised rates in September
For goods prices, the minutes credit AI where they used to credit tariffs, and some officials worry demand will outrun supply.
Senator Moreno tells Amodei to drop the alarmist AI talk as Anthropic prepares to go public
He quotes Amodei's own odds of AI going really badly back at him, and asks why Americans should buy the stock.
Sam Altman says the world should accept some bad things from AI, and senators push back
He drew his own line at losing control of AI, which none of the politicians replying to him on X mentioned.
Musk says SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI, following Trump's order renaming AI
He confirmed it in a reply on X before dawn, and Trump reposted him by lunchtime.
Trump names four officials to lead his Super Intelligence Force, reporting to him and Wiles
The four people running it hold four other jobs, and they answer to Trump and his chief of staff directly.
Amazon drops data center NDAs with officials and pledges $1 billion to host towns
AWS's chief pairs the end of secrecy deals with $1 billion for host towns, and says the backlash is built on myths.
The Pentagon creates a four-star autonomous warfare command, and Musk will help plan future war
A four-star command will scale drones and robots across the military, and Musk, Luckey and Gingrich will help decide what comes next.
US charges a California man with smuggling $300 million in GPU servers to China
The Justice Department's release on the arrest never says artificial intelligence: from the FBI to the National Security Division, the officials all call it SI.
California's attorney general subpoenas OpenAI over cyber incidents involving its AI models
California wants answers on more than the Hugging Face break-in, and Bonta says developers whose models enable cyberattacks should be held legally accountable.
Newsom bans AI-only firings in California and orders the state to keep saying artificial intelligence
A day of AI bills reached workers, doctors, lawyers and gene labs, and one order went after the White House's new word for AI.
September 2026
Josh Hawley's bill would let AI companies be sued and charged over reckless agents
A day before his rogue AI hearing, the senator investigating OpenAI said companies should be sued and prosecuted for reckless agents.
OpenAI's chief scientist joins Hinton and Bengio in telling governments to prepare for an intelligence explosion
A speed limit on capabilities growth is on its list of options, and OpenAI's chief scientist co-signed it.
New York City Council subpoenas Musk's SpaceXAI after it ignored an AI safety hearing invite
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google only said yes once a subpoena was on its way, and Musk's company never replied at all.
Trump calls Amodei "very highly respected" hours before their White House dinner
Two days earlier, a court let the Pentagon keep calling Anthropic a supply chain risk.
Australian Senate inquiry calls Altman and Amodei to Canberra over data centers, not just the hack
Hanson-Young spends two sentences on the OpenAI hack and the rest on lobbying, copyright and water.
US and China agree on an AI incident channel, but only Washington calls it super intelligence
The White House gives the new hotline a single sentence, with a deadline for the next talks and none for the line itself.
Trump renames AI "Super Intelligence" at the UN, a name that wasn't on his first ballot
His Truth Social poll opened with three names, and the one he announced at the UN wasn't among them.
Xi used his White House welcome to call for keeping AI always under human control
Five days earlier, Trump wrote that the courts America already has are enough to catch the bad in AI.
UK regulator proposes AI assistants like ChatGPT on Google's choice screens, with a prompt every year
Android and Chrome users in the UK would be asked every year which search service they want, and an AI assistant that passes the CMA's tests could be the answer.
The UN's AI panel spent its first thematic brief on 1,200 agents inside OpenAI's own tests
Yoshua Bengio co-chairs the panel, and he says the three conditions researchers warned about all came together this summer in a real system.
Trump is forming an AI Force, but he calls the push to slow AI a hoax
He didn't say what the AI Force would do, and the next morning he was running a public vote on a new name for AI.
Spanberger wants local approval for data centers over 25 megawatts, and created an AI task force
The order she signed does the parts she can do alone, and the 25-megawatt rule that would change how data centers get built waits on the 2027 General Assembly.
Newsom gave experts two months to recommend an AI kill switch and auditors inside frontier labs
The embedded evaluators Dario Amodei offered to volunteer for six days earlier are now on the list of things California is working out how to require.
King Charles hosted the AI labs in Scotland and asked for control before it's too late
The head of state who stays out of politics put the AI labs in one Scottish room and asked them for a means of control.
Von der Leyen backs slowing self-recursive AI and will invite the frontier labs in
The European Commission's president repeated the AI industry's own phrase for slowing down, then offered the labs a meeting rather than a new law.
The AI standards body Hassabis proposes could coordinate a slowdown among the frontier labs
Google DeepMind launched an essay site the same day, and the proposal arrived on it under a note saying it isn't Google's official view.
The Gates Foundation will spend $1 billion on AI in clinics, classrooms and small farms.
Bill Gates gives the decision a clock: the next 12 to 18 months settle who this technology gets built for.
Trump says the only guardrail AI needs is a strong president, and mocks Dario Amodei
He told reporters in Ireland that whoever wins AI wins, then called the fear of it a hoax seven times in one Monday.
Parliament's human rights committee wants a law banning AI that could escape human control.
Ten evidence sessions, witnesses from Meta, Microsoft, Google and Ofcom, and the recommendation that matters is number 200.
A day after Amodei asked Washington to keep its AI lead over China, Xi offered BRICS an open source AI community.
China's five proposals for the bloc open with AI, and the one thing Xi asks the rest of the world for is a framework everybody writes together.
Trump launches America.gov, an AI front door to federal services, and orders agencies to join
You can ask it anything today, but passports and Medicare have to wait until later this year.
The US and Russia weakened the UN's killer robots report, Human Rights Watch says
Ethics, predictability and reliability came out, but human control and judgment stayed in.
Democrats are now more worried about AI than Republicans, and it's partly because Republicans relaxed
Pew has asked the same question since 2021, and the party lines have finally crossed: Republican concern is falling while everyone else's climbs.
The outside evaluators the labs promised to embed have had a standard ready since December 2025.
The AI Evaluator Forum welcomed the labs' new promises and pointed at five conditions it published before any of them were made.