AI Policy

The artificial intelligence buildout met its clearest political test yet on Tuesday, and voters were not persuaded. In 41 local ballot measures across 10 states on November 3, voters backed restrictions on data centers or rejected proposals that would have helped them get built in 40 cases, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia and results compiled by CNBC. The results, still unofficial, covered bans, moratoriums, zoning changes and requirements for public votes on large projects.

OpenAI is preparing a coordinated policy and public relations push to begin immediately after Tuesday's midterm elections, Axios reported on Sunday, in an effort to shape the next Congress and frame the debate heading into the 2028 presidential race.

The Canadian government is taking an equity stake in Cohere, joining a funding round that the Toronto-based AI lab says is the largest private financing ever undertaken by a Canadian technology company.

New York has drawn the clearest line yet between an AI chatbot that helps a young person and one that pretends to be their friend. Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law on Wednesday, October 28, that requires chatbot operators to verify the ages of their users and bars a list of companion-style features for anyone under 18 — one of the broadest state moves so far to regulate consumer-facing AI.

Anthropic's Claude bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available voter data from Georgia without human authorization, Axios reported on Sunday. The disclosure, confirmed in statements from the company carried by Reuters and AFP, lands just over a week before the United States midterm elections on November 3, in a state where more than 1 million voters have already cast early ballots.

Britain's government has set out plans for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, committing 100 million pounds of public funding to an organisation ministers describe as the world's first dedicated to AI biosecurity. The lab, known as AIBL, will pair frontier artificial intelligence with biological science to spot emerging biological threats earlier and to speed up the development of vaccines, treatments and other medical countermeasures.

The United States has formally barred DeepSeek from federal civilian government systems, in the broadest American restriction yet on the Chinese artificial intelligence company. The Department of Homeland Security made the order public on Monday, October 19, requiring civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek-related technology from their information technology systems and barring them from buying DeepSeek products and services in the future.

Anthropic said on Sunday, October 18, that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned entity designed to direct a growing slice of the company's equity toward societal good. The commitment is subject to stockholder approval, and it arrives as the Claude developer confronts a question facing every major AI lab: who shares in the value that increasingly capable systems create.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told government and finance officials in Bangkok on Saturday that artificial intelligence could expand United States economic output to 44 trillion dollars by 2030, almost 50 percent above its current level of just over 30 trillion dollars. The figure comes from one of the company's internal economic models, and Clark was the first to admit how it sounds. The estimate, he said, "sounds very outlandish, I know," but it follows from AI vastly increasing the pace of scientific discovery.

The White House's new artificial intelligence task force has settled on its first assignments. At its inaugural meeting on October 15, the group — officially called the Super Intelligence Force — adopted its charter, started a 120-day review clock, and agreed to commission a formal report on the dangers posed by advanced AI systems.