The Center for Humane Technology warns: do not be distracted by the surge of attention around “AI welfare” and Microsoft’s AI CEO agrees.

Research from MIT highlights a “cognitive cost” of regularly using LLMs. 

New research suggests that the people most likely to use AI tend to be those who understand the technology the least, a reversal from other technological trends. 

An analysis of the six-most downloaded AI companion apps found that 43% used tactics such as guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, and metaphorical restraint when users tried to disengage. 

Fear not, workers! Palantir has launched “Working Intelligence: The AI Optimism Project,” a “quasi-public information and marketing campaign” centered around AI in the workplace. 

The Chartered Management Institute reveals that one third of UK employers is using some kind of “bossware” technology to track workers’ activity, and this may be an underestimate.

While President Trump wages a trade war premised on the return of manufacturing work, the US tech sector is backing ventures that aim to replace human workers with robots. 

Amazon marked the deployment of its millionth robot in its warehouse operations. 

Copper and lithium extraction in Chile’s Atacama desert has been accelerated to keep pace with generative AI’s need for power plants and power lines, devastating the local environment and communities.

While the access to cheap and abundant energy seemingly makes the Gulf region seem like a good place to situate data centers, the current tensions in the area introduce new risks. 

US states are facing pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from rising electric bills due to the energy demands of data centers. More than a dozen states have taken steps to address the issue. 

A deal is being struck that would allow an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz to control TikTok’s US operations. Concerns are rising that TikTok may become a platform for American state-run social media. 

YouTube is using AI for age verification by inferring a user’s age, regardless of the birthday in the account, raising serious privacy and freedom of expression concerns. 

A report by the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law found that LLM content moderation tools exacerbate discrimination, censorship, and surveillance and are potentially harmful for non-dominant languages in the Global Majority. 

Researchers anticipate an increase in AI-driven data breaches that impede the deployment of networked low-carbon technologies, like electric vehicles, smart building systems, and grid-responsive technologies that we need  to mitigate climate change.

Despite purporting to have safety measures in place, the Tea app’s users - who are predominantly women -  had their images, identifying information, and private conversations compromised in two separate security breaches in late July, leading to online abuse against the women whose information was stolen.

Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism and what he sees as the “fusion of tech and fascism.” 

The race to dominate the AI-powered defense drone market is intensifying.

NVIDIA chips are finding their way into Russian drones that use AI, enhanced navigation systems, and real-time acquisition logic. These are drones that “no longer follow orders [but] follow intent.” 

Many nuclear war experts take it as an inevitability that governments will mix AI and nuclear weapons. 

A data broker owned by major US airlines is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the US government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples’ movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, and ICE.

The Center for Privacy and Technology found that the Department of Homeland Security captured the DNA of thousands of US citizens. Unlike other forms of mass surveillance, genetic surveillance also impacts any of the affected party’s biological relations that exist today and may exist in the future. 

rBio, an AI model trained to reason about cellular biology using virtual simulations, is poised to accelerate biomedical research and drug discovery. 

SpaceX is paying $17 billion for the rights to some of EchoStar’s valuable spectrum for cellphone service, laying the foundation for Starlink’s global direct-to-cell business.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a rival to Musk’s Starlink, now has over 100 satellites in orbit, with more set to launch in the coming months.

US officials are looking for alternatives to SpaceX and have indicated that they will seek to buy rocket launches, satellite internet, and other services from emerging competitors if available. 

The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 released a report that “investigates the corporate machinery” sustaining the war in Gaza and outlines international law mechanisms for holding the private sector - and its executives - accountable. Tech companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are mentioned specifically.

New York State has become the first US state to ask companies to disclose when AI contributes to mass layoffs, the first official step toward measuring and perhaps eventually regulating AI’s impact on the labor market.

The European Commission published its final Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI. It sets out detailed expectations for companies around transparency, copyright, and measures to mitigate systemic risks. Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have signed or signalled their willingness to sign the code. Meta has stated that it will not.

The UK’s Online Safety Act has come into force, requiring online platforms to check that all UK-based users are at least eighteen years old before granting access to “harmful” content. 

President Emmanuel Macron said he will ban social media for youth under 15 years old if progress is not made at the EU level to significantly limit the amount of time minors can spend online. 

Denmark is considering a proposed change to its copyright law that would ensure that everybody has a right to their own body, facial features, and voice. It would give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove content that includes their likeness if it is shared without their consent. 

Following a ruling in an antitrust lawsuit, Google is able to keep its search business running “largely without interruption.” The company will have to share more of its data with competitors and create an oversight committee to monitor its business practices. Generative AI featured heavily in the judge’s reasons, predicting that users will increasingly use chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to gather information they previously sought through internet search. The ruling, which comes alongside a parallel EU case, has implications for Apple’s and Meta’s upcoming cases. 

Amazon has to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC claims that it used deceptive sign-up and cancellation practices in its Prime program. $1.5 billion of the settlement funds will go to an estimated 35 million customers.

OpenAI is being sued by the parents of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after eight months of ChatGPT use in which the chatbot validated his self-destructive thoughts. This case is the first major lawsuit against a general-purpose AI chatbot for psychological harm. The plaintiffs allege that their son’s death “was a predictable result of deliberate design choices.”

Meta is being sued by one of its former security engineers for failing to protect its users’ data, violating privacy regulations, and firing him in retaliation for whistleblower complaints with US authorities. 

The New York State Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit against Meta and TikTok for the wrongful death of a minor can move forward. The court distinguished this case from other Section 230 cases, suggesting that Meta’s and TikTok’s algorithms went beyond simple promotion of the content in question.

Microsoft settled with EU anti-trust regulators to decouple Teams from its Office productivity suites. The decision follows a 2020 complaint by Slack, now part of Salesforce, alleging that tying Teams to Office gave Microsoft an unfair market advantage.

A Brazilian indigenous group brought a formal complaint before federal authorities asking them to stop the development of a TikTok data center being built on their land. The group’s leaders say their legal right to consultation was violated and that their concerns about the project’s water consumption are being ignored.

The Chilean government has partnered with 30 institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean to create Latam-GPT as an alternative to Big Tech LLMs, which have limited capabilities in languages other than English. The model follows Southeast Asia’s Sea-Lion, Africa’s UliaLlama, India’s BharatGPT, and Mongolia’s Egune AI. 

Limited partners are increasingly adding AI ethics to their due diligence practices, even as ESG has fallen out of the limelight. Regulatory developments at the state level in California and New York are helping to drive the push. Early leaders include Manulife, StepStone Group, and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Pharmacists in the Amazon region are using AI developed by Brazilian nonprofit NoHarm (and backed by Google and Amazon) to process prescriptions faster in overburdened public clinics. Early evidence from the project suggests it is a scalable model for under-resourced health systems.

AI “Godfather” Yoshua Bengio is launching a new non-profit AI safety research organization called LawZero that intends to prioritize safety over commercial imperatives. The organization is a response to what Bengio sees as today’s frontier models “growing dangerous capabilities and behaviours, including deception, cheating, lying, hacking, self-preservation, and more generally, goal misalignment.”

Startup Crusoe Energy Systems, currently valued near $10 billion, converts stranded fuel into computing energy to power data centers, a solution that addresses both energy inefficiency and environmental waste. Since its founding in 2018, Crusoe has prevented over 22 billion cubic feet of natural gas from being flared, which is equivalent to taking 630,000 cars off the road annually.