Josh Shapiro wades into AI debate with call for ‘strict guardrails’; CNN, September 17, 2026

Arlette Saenz, CNN; Josh Shapiro wades into AI debate with call for ‘strict guardrails’

"Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Thursday called for greater federal regulation of artificial intelligence while criticizing President Donald Trump for minimizing concerns, saying “We cannot ignore the warning signs nor downplay the very real risks.”

“I am not a doomer. I don’t think that it is inevitable that AI is going to take over the world, or that someone will misuse it to kill us or to do harm,” Shapiro said at an AI summit in Pittsburgh on Thursday. “But I do have real concerns, as do many Pennsylvanians and many Americans, and I don’t think that the very real concerns of our neighbors that they overwhelmingly express about this technology is a hoax, as our president has called it.”

Debate about whether to regulate the rapidly advancing technology has escalated amid calls from industry leaders to slow down AI development. Democrats eyeing potential White House runs in 2028, like Shapiro, are grappling with how to approach AI amid increased concerns about the technology’s progress, and President Barack Obama recently encouraged those considering running for president in the coming years to prioritize AI policy in their forthcoming agendas."

Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.; The New York Times, September 3, 2026

Kevin Roose, The New York Times; Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.

"When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:..

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want."

The AI backlash is only getting started; The Economist, June 25, 2026

 The Economist; The AI backlash is only getting started

"Advances in artificial intelligence have long terrified techies. Lately, voters are feeling the angst, too. ai is unpopular in the West and climbing up the political agenda. The fiercest fights so far have been in America, where protests against data centres have scuppered nearly $100bn-worth of projects, warring ai megadonors have just dumped tens of millions into a Manhattan congressional race and around 40% of voters tell pollsters that they want ai banned from most industries. But spats are breaking out elsewhere: after chipmaking profits soared recently, workers at Samsung in South Korea threatened a strike to secure special payouts."

Seattle passes moratorium on new data centers amid national backlash; The Seattle Times, June 9, 2026

Greg Kim, The Seattle Times; Seattle passes moratorium on new data centers amid national backlash

"Amid a growing backlash to artificial intelligence, Seattle City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to enact a one-year moratorium on new large data centers and study their impact. 

Mayor Katie Wilson was quick to support a ban after proposals surfaced in April for five large data center projects in the city. She said she was looking forward to signing the council’s bill.

Seattle would join more than 70 cities and counties around the nation that have temporary or permanent bans on new data centers, including major cities like Denver, New Orleans and Minneapolis, according to a databasemaintained by hedge fund Interconnected Capital. New York could also become the first state to temporarily ban large data center construction if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill passed by the state legislature last week.

Seattle’s bill would place a one-year freeze on the development of large data centers that use more than 20 megavolt-amperes, roughly equivalent to 20 megawatts, with the option to extend the moratorium another six months. The city council also passed a separate bill Tuesday to analyze how data centers impact Seattle’s electrical grid capacity, water usage, utility rates, land use, local jobs and public health.

“If it doesn’t benefit all of us, we don’t need that technology,” said councilmember Eddie Lin, a sponsor of the moratorium."

Countries Consider A.I.’s Dangers and Benefits at U.N.; The New York Times, September 25, 2025

 Steve Lohr, The New York Times; Countries Consider A.I.’s Dangers and Benefits at U.N.

"The United Nations on Thursday announced a plan to establish itself as the leading global forum to guide the path and pace of artificial intelligence, a major foray into the raging debate over the future of the rapidly changing technology.

As part of its General Assembly this week, the organization said it was implementing a “global dialogue on artificial intelligence governance,” to assemble ideas and best practices on A.I. governance. The U.N. also said it would form a 40-member panel of scientific experts to synthesize and analyze the research on A.I. risks and opportunities, in the vein of previous similar efforts by the body on climate change and nuclear policy.

To begin the initiative, dozens of U.N. member nations — and a few tech companies, academics and nonprofits — spent a portion of Thursday summarizing their hopes and concerns about A.I."