Tech 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.

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.

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.

Publishers who want to keep their work out of AI training have spent years juggling a different switch for every company: one token for Google, another for OpenAI, another for Anthropic, and so on. On Friday, October 30, the four largest Western AI builders moved to end that patchwork, announcing they will all honor a single shared signal in a website's robots.txt file.

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.

Google has quietly rewritten one of the clearest promises in its privacy policy. In a version that took effect on October 16, the company added an exception to its long-standing pledge not to show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Google Photos. The pledge still stands, but only until a user chooses to share that content with another Google service that supports personalized ads.

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.