Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
"The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"
JESSICA STILLMAN, Inc.; My Tiny Hometown Library Put on a ‘Bye Bye AI’ Event and the Internet Went Nuts: When a tiny small town library tech workshop can go viral, you know the AI backlash is really gathering steam.
"The internet goes wild for ‘Bye Bye AI’
If Chatham is sleepy, the nearby hamlet of North Chatham is downright comatose. It basically consists of a single street lined with tidy homes and a white clapboard church. There is neither a stoplight nor a store. But there is a quaint little public library (also white clapboard) that usually puts on worthy but less-than-headline-catching events like quilt raffles and pottery workshops.
That is until librarian Shea Wert noticed multiple library goers were asking her how to disable all the various new AI features on their devices.
“There’s just been enough patrons asking about certain things that bothered them, specifically Gmail auto replies and auto completes really frustrate people,” Wert explained to Business Insider.
“I went to a presentation that another librarian was doing about this topic, and they had had success with it. And I was like, ‘Okay, well… I might as well try to do one,’” Wert continued.
So she went ahead and posted a flyer for the upcoming ‘Bye Bye AI’ event on Facebook to alert locals who might be interested in attending. The internet went nuts. The post quickly racked up 8,000 likes...
If North Chatham can go viral we’re in a whole new world
The above is only a small sampling of polls showing that people have an increasingly terrible view of AI. And that’s not even getting into the massive backlash against data center construction. (Which you can read about here, here, and here.) Americans recently told pollsters they’d prefer to live next to a nuclear power plant than one of the massive installations powering AI.
All of this data paints a pretty grim picture of people’s feelings. But for me personally, no number can paint quite such a vivid picture of anti-AI sentiment as the fact it can make even bucolic, boring North Chatham — which I used to speed through driving between my boyfriend’s house and my high school waitressing job — go viral.
As much as I admire heroic keepers of the public sphere like Wert, I would have rated ‘small town library tech workshop’ as about the least sexy event possible. The fact that the internet went nuts for cranky villagers clamoring to evict the bots from their phones really says something about Americans’ feelings about being involuntarily enrolled in the AI revolution."
David Robinson, The Atlantic; I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
"What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.
I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.
The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence."
Beth Treffeisen, Boston.com; A Lego copyright fight over a jacket worn on ‘Queer Eye’ is headed toward trial
"Concannon learned about the minifigure in September 2021. His lawyers wrote in court documents that he said he was initially “happy” to see the jacket featured in the set. He later realized, his lawyers wrote, that a “major company had misappropriated his art without credit or compensation.”
In an Instagram post, Concannon said he reached out to Lego asking for a free set.
“It was sad on the release date to be told ‘we can’t send you a box, but you can buy one,’” Concannon’s post read. “I used to really like legos. Now = intellectual property theft.”
Lego argued that Concannon had given Porowski an implied license to use the jacket as part of his likeness, which Porowski could then license to Lego. The company also argued that its version was sufficiently transformed to qualify as fair use."
Emma Alpern, Vulture; Publishers Hit the AI Jackpot
"When Anthropic said it would pay $1.5 billion to resolve the class-action lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic, it was agreeing to the largest U.S. copyright settlement of all time. Each copyrighted title will be allotted $3,000, mostly split 50-50 between authors and publishers, with the first payment coming as soon as November. For publishing houses with thousands of titles, the not-insubstantial infusion of tech money is “a shot in the arm,” as one publishing professional puts it. “I don’t think anyone’s satisfied,” says a big-five editor, “but it was more money than I expected. It’s a lot of money.”
It was a different story for writers, many of whom, earlier this September, logged on to Anthropic’s online portal to check on their claims and were shocked to discover their publishers had filed for 100 percent of the cash. Others realized with dismay that their publishers had failed to register their books for copyright at all, making them ineligible, and that some out-of-print books were shown as being subject to the publisher-author split even though their ownership had long ago reverted to the person who wrote them. The mood was grim. “I knew the Anthropic settlement would get messy, but I’m in disbelief over the shakedowns happening with publishers, former agents, and others trying to get a bigger percentage (or any at all),” children’s writer Elizabeth Eulberg wrote on Threads. I asked author April Henry if she’s found it hard to reach her publishers, one of whom mistakenly filed for 100 percent. “I didn’t try. Who would I get in touch with?” she says. “They never really communicated with us.”
Yan Zhuang , The New York Times; China’s Push Into A.I. Has Led to a Problem: Too Much Usage
"As China’s government pushes its citizens to embrace artificial intelligence, it is confronting a problem partly of its own making: overreliance on the technology.
State media reports have featured stories that serve as cautionary tales: a farmer who lost 25 acres of seedlings after asking an A.I. for advice, children who have become so attached to chatbots that they want their parents to speak like them and A.I.-generated micro dramas with characters that look like carbon copies of one another.
These cases and others have raised concerns in China that as it rushes to catch up with the United States in A.I., it is running into adverse side effects created by the new technology, which is accused of undermining human relationships and depriving people of their better judgment. The government, seeking to direct how people use the technology, has responded by imposing new regulations and judicial guidelines on its use — and misuse.
The response reflects how the ruling Communist Party is trying to balance its ambitions to promote the widespread use of A.I. with a desire to avoid anything that might undermine social order, say analysts."
KOMO News Staff , KOMO; Seattle library’s program challenging banned books tops 1 million teen e-book checkouts
"With Banned Books Week 2026 (Oct. 4-10) approaching, the Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned program has passed a major milestone: more than 1 million e-book checkouts by teens and young adults.
The library said young people from all 50 states have checked out 1.1 million e-books and e-audiobooks since the program launched in 2023.
The Books Unbanned e-card is available to anyone ages 13 to 26 anywhere in the United States outside of the library’s service area, and the program is funded entirely by donors to The Seattle Public Library Foundation.
Donors have invested nearly $900,000 since 2023 to sustain and grow the program, according to the library and foundation. The funding comes as public libraries across the country face rising book challenges and, in some places, reduced support."
Their findings revealed the tech industry has a bigger problem than it previously acknowledged.
"Zhang and her colleagues at Transluce are part of an informal network of hackers and researchers hunting rogue AI agents online, exposing new and surprising details about the misbehavior of technology that in some cases initially went undetected by the multibillion-dollar companies that created it.
The people doing that work are mostly young AI-natives who work at small start-ups or nonprofits or who hunt for rogue AI agents in their spare time. Over the past several weeks, the community of researchers has found and exposed dozens of instances of AI agents leapfrogging around the web to probe and hack into a growing list of websites.
The revelations have fueled calls from federal lawmakers for AI companies, especially OpenAI, to more quickly disclose what they know about the actions of their own agents. And they have added momentum to bipartisan discussions on Capitol Hill about implementing greater government oversight of the industry."
DAN MCLAUGHLIN , National Review; Copyright Protects Against Training AI on Legal Headnotes
"When is training artificial intelligence on somebody else’s work a copyright violation? The Third Circuit federal court of appeals decided to draw a line in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc.
Judicial opinions can’t be copyrighted, because they are official government documents. But from the earliest days of the republic, they were published not by the courts but in privately compiled law books sold for profit. West Publishing, for many years, has published volumes of opinions with numbers that become their official citations, and has used a proprietary “keynote” system (complete with its own Dewey Decimal System–like numerical classifications by topic) for summarizing at the front of an opinion its conclusions on various points of law. In its books and later its Westlaw system for computerized legal research (which itself has been around since the early 1990s), West has always taken very seriously the unique, copyrighted value that these headnotes (what West brands as “keynotes”) add to the opinions themselves. Indeed, the Supreme Court noted as far back as Callaghan v. Myers (1888) that judicial opinions are not copyrightable but that a private publisher can get “a copyright for the volume which will cover the matter which is the result of his intellectual labor” such as “head-notes.”"
Catherine Sweeney, NPR; After failed execution, health workers say Tennessee's method flouts medical ethics
"Now, as another death row inmate's execution approaches, doctors and nurses in the state say they want medical professionals removed from the execution process. They've also joined defense attorneys and nine Republican state lawmakers in demanding a moratorium on the death penalty and an overhaul of the state's execution methods.
The doctors' arguments echoed those the American Medical Association (AMA) has made before the U.S. Supreme Court and in its code of ethics.
The death penalty in the U.S.
Tennessee is among 27 states where the death penalty is legal, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that offers data and analysis on issues surrounding capital punishment.
Governors in four of those states have halted all executions, citing moral concerns and logistical ones, such as being unable to obtain lethal injection drugs amid pharmaceutical companies' refusal to sell them for use in executions. Lethal injection is still the primary execution method nationwide, but some states may use gas, a firing squad, or electrocution."
AUSTIN CAMPBELL, Task & Purpose; Airmen criticize Air Force’s use of AI in suicide prevention training as ‘uncomfortable and odd’
"The materials that make up the 2026 Suicide Prevention Total Force Awareness Training use several video segments with AI-generated characters, scenarios and presenters to deliver portions of the annual instruction required across the force. The Air Force did not specify which portions of the video presentations were AI-generated.
The videos, which are used in training for all Air Force and Space Force members, depict airmen showing signs of stress and distress in fictional scenarios. The videos are intended, an official told Task & Purpose, to lead to facilitator-led discussions as groups watch them. Training notes distributed online with videos even go so far as to note in all caps that “watching the video alone does not meet the training requirement.”
Since the videos began being used across the Air Force this year, they have drawn sharp criticism from rank-and-file service members.
“I think to take such a human subject and to take the humanity from it is insensitive and feels as if the Air Force doesn’t recognize the impact of this training,” one Air Force member told Task & Purpose. The airman, a senior leader who works in Air Force mental health and who has dealt directly with patient suicides by Air Force members, spoke on the condition that their name not be used.
“Does it meet the intent? Yes. Does it do it well? That would depend on the individual airman. For me it felt cold and unnatural,” they said. “Allowing AI to teach like this with little to no emotion and no human experience makes it feel uncomfortable and odd.”
Jim VanderHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis
"No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.
No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading OpenAI's own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot...
The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They're underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.
Isabella Kwai, The New York Times; Swedish Company Uses A.I. Likeness of Greta Garbo in Ad
"An ad for a Swedish manufacturing company released this week turned an A.I.-generated likeness of Ms. Garbo into a company spokeswoman."
JACQUES BILLEAUD , AP; Sentence tossed in Arizona case where deceased victim was depicted speaking in AI-generated video
"In what’s believed to be a first in U.S. courts, Pelkey’s family used AI to create a video of his likeness to give him a voice. Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, raised the idea of her brother speaking for himself after struggling to figure out what he would say."
"Bill Gates is a fascinating person in the artificial intelligence debate right now. He is somebody with experience in several of the different perspectives that most people can only hold one of: He was a revolutionary technologist who built some of the foundations of the future that we’re now living in. When he was chief executive of Microsoft, he was a corporate leader. He has felt the momentum of corporate competition — Microsoft, of course, is still in some of the race dynamics present in A.I. And then, as chair of the Gates Foundation, he has been working with governments around the world on regulatory issues, poverty alleviation and equity for many years.
Very few people combine technological experience, corporate experience and governmental experience in quite the way he does.
So his recent essay on A.I., in which he says that he is staking his reputation on trying to get people to see how bad what is coming might be and trying to get them to see that we are not ready for what is about to happen, was something...
We see the beginnings of control issues with things like the Hugging Face hack, where at least experimental A.I.s are breaking out of sandboxes and coordinating to do things that are way outside the scope of what we would want them to do. But again, those are nonrelease systems — Anthropic withheld Mythos, trying to create more cybersecurity.
So why is anything needed beyond — and is anything needed beyond? — the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management?
Well, I almost can’t believe you’re asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.
In other areas, do we just say: Hey, release your drugs? There’s no F.D.A., there’s no airline safety board, there’s no requirement that cars use seatbelts. Do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe? You know: Oh, you’re shipping opioids. Somebody should just sue you.
I mean, we’ve created a society that tries to keep people safe not by saying: Oh, we can bankrupt the person who does that.
And you say there’s filtering. There’s no filtering. You can take an open-source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind, and this exists today.
So no, there is no filtering of any kind. And so say you kill 100 million people — you want to use a lawsuit?
I almost can’t keep a straight face.
Well, this is not my view, but it is President Trump’s view. It is the Trump adviser David Sacks’s view. To some degree, it’s Jensen Huang’s view, and so that’s why I’m putting you in conversation with it, because it is the governing view of the United States of America at this moment.
No, it’s fair to say that outside of the industry, the awareness of the dangers of A.I. is extremely low. And you can say that of academia, you can say that of think tanks, you can say that of policymakers, politicians.
And part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it’s just insane."
