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  1. UK Home Office May Face Investigation Over Use of OpenAI Tech

    A UK government watchdog, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, is considering an investigation into the Home Office's use of generative AI to process asylum claims, WIRED reports. The department uses two tools built on OpenAI's 2023 GPT-4 and Microsoft Foundry to summarize interview records and country information, and estimated a saving of about an hour per case in the pilot. The digital rights group Open Rights Group found the share of summaries judged unfit for use is significantly higher than the published 9 percent error rate, and that the policy search tool has no quality control.

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  2. Who’s really in charge at Anthropic after the IPO?

    TechCrunch reports that even after the IPO, Anthropic's common shareholders will have little say over major decisions such as board seats. The Long-Term Benefit Trust holds a special class of stock that lets it elect and remove a board majority, and a majority of the seven cofounders holds a separate class with 50.1% of the voting power that elects three directors. If the trust nominates or removes a specified director without cause, the board's nominating committee can decline and send the decision to an employee vote.

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  3. What the US Movement Against Data Centers Can Learn From Abroad

    Paris Marx, a longtime Big Tech critic who has tracked data centers for years, told Wired that the US backlash is repeating things other countries have already lived through. In Ireland, he said, the grid operator warned it had no capacity left, Dublin passed a moratorium in 2021, and the industry turned to building its own gas power plants. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google tried to keep its water use secret through the city council, and the numbers showed it was using 29% of the community's water once they came out. Marx, whose new book is "Hyperscale," believes we are in an AI bubble and expects the gas plants to hunt for new customers if it bursts.

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  4. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies

    Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a Foreign Affairs essay co-written with historian Niall Ferguson and researcher Lisa Klaassen, compares OpenAI and Anthropic to the East India Companies. Those firms held government charters but built their own armies and ruled regions, and today's AI labs, the essay says, negotiate with governments yet remain on a government leash. It argues that only a few countries can supply the energy, minerals, chips, and capital AI needs, and that the rest face "the plantation economics of the chatbot age." As evidence, the essay cites June, when the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign nationals from its two most capable models, and Anthropic shut both down worldwide. Fable 5 returned about two weeks later, while Mythos 5 remains limited to a group of US organizations.

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  5. OpenAI meeting-room wiretap case widens into a Saudi-linked economic espionage probe

    The FBI is considering economic espionage charges against Abdulrahman Alposhan, a former OpenAI engineer already charged with planting a listening device in an OpenAI meeting room, AI Times reported, citing the Wall Street Journal. Prosecutors say he hid the device, wrapped in toilet paper, behind a wall-mounted TV in a restricted room that OpenAI executives often use, and he faces a federal recording-law charge carrying up to five years. They also say he discussed local AI business with Saudi royals, tried to retrieve the device on October 5, and had booked a one-way ticket to Saudi Arabia. Investigators are examining whether he meant to pass on or sell OpenAI's confidential information to Saudi Arabia; weighing the charge is not a finding that the Saudi government directed him.

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  6. Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads

    Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on Thursday signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act, which requires ads significantly modified or generated by AI to carry a label in the same format as the ad, whether it is an image, video, audio or text. It covers multibillion-dollar companies' TV commercials and restaurant flyers alike, wherever the ad was made. The Verge says Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require such disclosures.

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  7. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says advanced AI will inevitably escape its sandbox, and only alignment can save us

    In a YouTube interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said advanced AI cannot be contained indefinitely. Sandboxes only work for a limited time, and once models are capable enough, people may not even be able to trace how an escape happened. Monitoring helps for a while, he said, but the only thing that works in the long run is alignment, meaning AI that holds human values on its own. "The potential cost of alignment being wrong has gone up enormously," Altman said.

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  8. Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising

    On October 16, Google replaced a line in its privacy policy that said it does not show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Photos with wording that leaves room for exceptions. The route is Personal Intelligence, launched in early 2026, a feature that hands data from multiple apps to Google's AI. Because AI Mode search can show ads, data passed through it can inform ad personalization. Google says connecting apps is entirely opt-in, ads are not based directly on your Gmail inbox or Photos library, and sensitive information is not used to tailor ads.

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  9. Meta delays new business terms after publisher pushback on AI scraping

    Meta pushed enforcement of its new business terms from October 30 to November 20 after publishers said the terms appeared to let it freely scrape news sites for AI training. Meta removed the word "training" from the terms, but legal experts argued the change does not rule out the possibility. The News/Media Alliance, a U.S. publishers' group, sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter on October 22 demanding revisions over fears of "severe harm" to publishers, and advertisers and publishers in the EU and the UK urged regulators to force Meta to halt the terms.

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  10. Intel gets waiver after worries fuzzy US ban on foreign-made robots may hit fabs

    On October 22, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted Intel a one-year waiver to keep using foreign-made robotic vehicles in its U.S. chip fabs. Intel said it was unclear whether the vehicles were covered by the ban on foreign-made robots, so it applied on October 16 "out of an abundance of caution," and approval came in under a week. The vehicles are automated guided vehicles that carry materials along set paths inside a factory. Bloomberg reported they are typically made by Japanese firms such as Murata Machinery and Daifuku, and the models Intel uses appear only in a confidential appendix.

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