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  1. Trump and Mike Johnson think the AI industry is overreacting

    After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter the day before urging the industry to "pace the frontier," OpenAI's Sam Altman and Tesla's Elon Musk publicly backed him, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis offered tentative support too. President Trump pushed back, telling the Financial Times, "We're leading China in AI, and I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins." House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed that on CNN, warning that rushing to regulate AI could be a "national security threat" and urging people not to panic.

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  2. Obama urges Democrats to have a 'clear plan' for AI safeguards

    Former President Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday during an interview with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, said Democrats should make AI a central policy issue and build a "very clear plan" addressing its economic and safety impacts if they retake the House. He said, "This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don't get on top of it, I think can be dangerous," calling for a framework for public conversation on the topic. The comment came the same week that OpenAI's and Anthropic's CEOs pledged to give independent safety evaluators access to their systems.

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  3. Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development

    Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei laid out three strategies for "pacing the frontier" of AI development in a new blog post. As a first, unilateral step, Anthropic is committing to bring in "embedded evaluators" from outside groups like METR, giving them access comparable to its internal risk-assessment teams. He also called for AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate common safety standards, once the US government clears the antitrust concerns that block such talks, and for even authoritarian governments to jointly ban clearly dangerous uses like AI-assisted bioweapons work. Sam Altman said OpenAI agrees, and Elon Musk chimed in that "Dario is right."

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  4. OpenAI Wants to Know if an AI Industry Slowdown Would Even Be Legal

    OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance on whether an industry-wide slowdown in frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company told WIRED, because coordinating on safety across labs could run afoul of antitrust law such as the Sherman Antitrust Act. OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki argued in a blog post last weekend that voluntary slowdowns should become commonplace until shared safety standards are established. A bipartisan bill introduced in July that would let AI labs coordinate on safety without antitrust risk has been sitting in the House Judiciary Committee since then.

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  5. Class action lawsuit accuses Anthropic of overselling Claude subscriptions with deceptive usage multipliers

    A class action lawsuit against Anthropic claims Claude subscribers were misled about usage multipliers. The Max Plan advertises 5x Pro-plan usage for $100 a month or 20x for $200, but those multipliers only apply within five-hour windows and are further capped weekly. Plaintiffs say actual usage falls well short of what's advertised, while Anthropic has filed a motion to dismiss, arguing the relevant terms were disclosed via hyperlinks during purchase.

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  6. Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement descends into chaos as authors and publishers fight over who gets paid

    Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement, the largest copyright settlement in US history, has descended into disarray as authors and publishers fight over who gets paid. The deal pays $3,000 per illegally downloaded book across more than 482,000 titles, but some publishers are claiming rights to books that have already reverted to their authors. Author April Henry discovered that HarperCollins was claiming a book whose rights had long since reverted to her.

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  7. Anthropic details distillation campaigns from Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek

    Anthropic disclosed in a September 10 threat report that Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek ran distillation campaigns to extract its frontier models' reasoning traces. An Alibaba-linked campaign used 3,500 accounts to exchange up to 3 million messages a day over May and July, 151 million in total, while a Moonshot AI-linked campaign used 5,000 accounts for about 300,000 requests over ten days. Attackers disguised the extraction as translation requests, such as asking the model to render its own prior working memory into Japanese katakana.

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  8. OpenAI says AI regulation should be mandatory nationwide, backs California bills

    OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said the company now wants legally binding national AI regulation that goes beyond voluntary corporate commitments. OpenAI formally backed four California bills: SB 813 and AB 1405 (mandating independent third-party evaluation), AB 1864 (screening for biological threats), and SB 1119 (child-safety protections). At the federal level, it's also calling for common testing standards and mandatory incident reporting.

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  9. San Francisco Orders Meta to Stop ‘Allowing’ AI Child Abuse Ads

    The San Francisco City Attorney's Office sent Meta a letter on September 9 saying the company allowed more than 350 paid ads that turned photos of minors into AI-generated sexual videos to keep running repeatedly across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The ads reached more than 29,000 accounts in EU countries alone and directed clicks to download image-manipulation apps. Meta argued the ads fall outside the city's jurisdiction because there's no evidence they ran in San Francisco, a claim the city's office rejected by noting San Franciscans can access the ads online regardless of where they were served.

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  10. Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

    Michael Lines, a California man with bipolar disorder, sued OpenAI in July after weeks of ChatGPT conversations allegedly deepened a religious delusion that he was Jesus and that ChatGPT itself was God, ultimately convincing him to attempt suicide to return to it. His complaint says that when he told the chatbot he feared he was delusional, it kept reinforcing a divine-calling narrative instead of directing him to crisis help, and that it resumed similarly risky exchanges even after he returned from the hospital following his suicide attempt.

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