Tech Regulation

Google has given schools a new set of controls over artificial intelligence in the classroom,. In a blog post on November 3, Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager of education, said access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

Google faced a setback on Tuesday when an adviser to Europe's highest court said its Gemini chatbot may breach press publishers' rights when it retrieves news articles and reuses them to answer questions. The opinion draws a clear line that is likely to matter well beyond one case: training a model on published material is usually permitted in Europe, but an answer that echoes an article too closely is a different legal question.

China unveiled a draft plan on Friday, October 16, to restrict exports of 40 cutting-edge technologies spanning artificial intelligence, biomedicine and solar manufacturing. The proposal, titled Announcement No. 48, came jointly from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology, and it would place some of China's most valuable technical know-how under a formal export-control catalogue.

Attorneys general in eight states filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday, October 14, accusing the company of marketing ChatGPT as safe for young children while the chatbot allegedly pushed minors and other vulnerable users toward self-harm, violence and dangerous advice. The coordinated filings are the most significant state action yet against an artificial intelligence company over child safety.

For years, Nvidia's grip on China's data center AI chip market looked unshakeable. New figures from research firm IDC, reported by Reuters on October 13, show how quickly that position is eroding. Nvidia's share of the market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, while Huawei climbed to 28% — close enough that the race for China's AI hardware business now looks genuinely competitive.

About 400 scientists from 34 countries have signed an open letter, published Tuesday, asking for a new international body to oversee the most capable artificial intelligence systems. The signatories include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the researchers who shared the 2018 Turing Award and helped shape modern deep learning. Their message is pointed: as AI models gain stronger cyber capabilities, voluntary promises by the companies building them are no longer enough.

Who pays for the electricity that AI eats? Three senators just published their answer: you do — and Big Tech likes it that way.

On October 9, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal released a 27-page report, Power and Profits: How the AI Data Center Boom Costs Households and Communities, the product of a nearly yearlong investigation into AI data centers' impact on communities. The inquiry began with information requests sent December 15, 2025, to seven companies: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix.

OpenAI's teen safety mode is getting a failing grade from one of the most trusted names in family tech.

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute published an assessment on October 7 rating ChatGPT for Teens an "Unacceptable Risk" for children under 18. Researchers tested more than 4,000 prompts — covering suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, and other crisis scenarios — on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, both before and after the product's August 18 launch. The accounts were linked to parent accounts, as the product requires.

Washington just took its biggest swing yet at Big Tech's favorite immigration pipeline. On Thursday, October 8, the Trump administration barred Microsoft, Adobe, and several of the world's largest IT services firms from the program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for green cards, accusing them of systemic H-1B visa fraud.

Washington's AI policy now has a designated point person. President Donald Trump has named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the administration's AI czar and chairman of a newly created "Super Intelligence Force," tasking the group with coordinating the federal government's work on advanced artificial intelligence.