Fiona Riley, Forbes; USA Today Sues OpenAI For Over $250 Million, Alleging Willful Copyright Infringement
"USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities are seeking more than $250 million in damages from OpenAI, including up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for every time OpenAI stripped copyright information, according to the complaint, which was filed in New York federal court on Thursday."
Maria Curi, Axios; Scoop: AI companies plot "the day after"
"Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.
Why it matters: These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it.
Threat level: While scenario planning is common within many companies and national security settings — the Pentagon has been running war games for decades — the difference is that many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable."
Siobhan Roberts, The New York Times; ‘Breathtaking,’ ‘Devastating’: Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release
Hundreds of new A.I.-generated findings moved the frontiers of higher math in a single day — dispelling any doubt that the field is forever changed.
"“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.”
That’s how Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, responded to an A.I.-generated proof that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant, released on Tuesday.
And that single proof — worthy, in Dr. Kontorovich’s assessment on social media, of arguably the highest honor in the field of mathematics — was just one among more than 350 findings that the firm released that day, all at once.
Not all of them were quite so remarkable. But Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which established the coveted Millennium Prize Problems, called OpenAI’s release “breathtaking.”
“Until very recently, it would have been impossible to imagine that the frontiers of mathematics could move so far in one day,” Dr. Bridson said."
CHLOE JAD , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; As data center backlash grows, residents in Forward Township beg leaders to ‘please, please hear us’
"In town halls and community centers across the country, residents are banding together to voice their opposition as tech and business leaders make their plans, anticipating the computational demand for artificial intelligence and attempting to sell their data center projects to borough councils and township residents."
Robert Booth, The Guardian; ‘Dystopian’: Co-op becomes latest firm to put staff under AI surveillance
"The Co-op has become the latest employer to place workers under AI surveillance with an automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers.
In a system described as “oppressive and dystopian” by a whistleblower, Co-op Legal Services is using AI models to record, analyse and award a percentage score for interactions between agents and customers seeking advice about probate, wills and estates...
“You are being watched,” said a Co-op worker who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity and said the AI created a sense of distrust. “It’s different from occasionally being listened to for compliance purposes. [You are] being monitored absolutely every word that you say and every time that you utter something … It just feels really dystopian. It’s the thin end of the wedge.”"
Tori Lee , The University of Chicago; Book bans are surging. So are efforts to ‘let books be’
"What are the most common reasons why books are banned or challenged?
Surges in book bans often follow major periods of social change and political instability. For instance, the spike in book bans in the early 2020s heavily targeted narratives around race and systemic racism in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. We've also seen a surge in book banning concerning LGBTQIA+ representation and identities at a time when openness to issues of sexual identity and gender is broadening.
These campaigns are frequently driven by traditional power bases anxious about demographic and cultural shifts. Research shows that book bans spike heavily in politically contested counties and during election cycles. Lawmakers and political candidates frequently use book bans as a symbolic political action to mobilize voters."
Reuters; Countries weigh banning smart glasses over privacy concerns
"Governments, courts and companies are considering restrictions and examining existing rules on smart glasses amid worries that the technology, brought to mainstream by Meta's Ray-Bans, could be used to photograph, film or audio-record confidential materials or people without their knowledge.
Here is a summary of what countries and regions are doing to protect people's privacy, in alphabetical order."
Retraction Watch; Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements
"In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.
The most recent such correction in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) was on September 8. According to the notice, authors of a March article on mammal diversity in Mexico provided additional information on the camera trapping method employed in the study — namely, that their research did not require approval from an animal ethics committee.
At least three other similar corrections have appeared in EJWR in the last four years, with several more articles with missing ethics statements flagged on PubPeer by commenter “Pseudotocinclus tietensis.”"
,
Drew Hinshaw,
Rebecca Ballhausand
Joe Parkinson , The Wall Street Journal; ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account"Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece when she reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Please.”...
“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters, adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with bill payment instructions from American Express. “You could just send it here,” she wrote on July 3, 2025, just days before her July 9 confirmation hearing."
CALDER MCHUGH, BRENDAN BORDELON, CHRISTINE MUI and SAM SUTTON , Politico Decoded; Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings
"Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is sharpening his warnings about the Antichrist — which he sees as a force that could harm technological development — according to exclusive recordings obtained by Calder. His new comments come as AI races ahead and public concern over its risks grow.
Thiel began a closed four-part lecture series in Nashville last week, returning to a theme he explored in San Francisco last year before taking similar talks to Paris and Rome. Nashville is emerging as a hub for the tech right.
Decoded obtained recordings of his first two Nashville lectures, delivered on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, and compared them to exclusive transcripts of his San Francisco talks. The structure is largely unchanged, and Thiel invokes religion to argue that regulation of the AI industry is evil — a notion that has taken hold among key factions of Silicon Valley investors."
Steve Rose , The Guardian; Why Arturo Béjar left Meta – and blew the whistle: ‘I don’t recall Mark ever being empathetic’
"It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021. That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. “I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.
By that time, Béjar had worked at Facebook (which rebranded as Meta later that month) for a total of eight years. He had learned how to communicate with Zuckerberg. “You couldn’t talk to Mark about, ‘We have to do this thing to prevent suicide because it’s the right thing to do,’” he says. “You had to put everything in terms of metrics. That was his language. That’s how he related to things, which is also what’s behind all the grief in the world right now.”"
PEN America; Nearly 12,000 School Book Bans Nationwide in 2025-2026—Biggest Number in a Single Year
"PEN America today reported nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools nationwide during the 2025-2026 school year—the largest number in a single year. New state censorship laws accounted for much of the increase, coupled with the use of artificial intelligence to remove books en masse including popular manga series and other graphic novels.
In a report released to coincide with Banned Books Week, the latest accounting of book bans increased to 34,000 instances since PEN America began documenting the spreading book censorship crisis in schools in 2021.
Texas recorded the largest number of book bans during the 2025-2026 school year (over 8,100), surpassing Florida (over 3,200), due to the impact of a censorial Texas law, SB13, which bans broad categories of books in schools. Florida had been No. 1 for three consecutive years.
The writers and free expression organization also reported a record number of unique titles banned in the last school year—more than 7,000—which impacted more than 4,000 authors, illustrators and translators, also a record number. In addition, researchers identified 114 school districts that had banned books over the year, the highest number ever for a single year according to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans.
Patricia McCormick’s 2006 award-winning young adult novel Sold, which tells the fictional story of a teenager from Nepal who is sold into sexual slavery, was No. 1 among the most frequently banned books during the school year. The most banned author for the second year in a row was Stephen King."
Anthony Vinci , The New York Times; A.I. Is Lying to You. Here’s How to Fight Back.
"Portal Kombat’s goal is to influence these models so that they will pass along propaganda to trusting users in response to questions. Portal Kombat pushed over 3.6 million stories across hundreds of independent websites in dozens of languages in 2024, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online disinformation. NewsGuard researchers systematically tested A.I. chat systems and found that Portal Kombat propaganda was regularly provided to users.
Large language model influence operations are just one way that America’s adversaries are using A.I. to try to steer its politics. China directs its A.I. platforms to push false claims about the treatment of Uyghurs and to censor dissent and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is using A.I. to generate scores of news websites to turn Americans against democracy and Western alliances. Like many, these adversaries use A.I. to create fake written, audio or video content that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing."
Kari Paul, The Guardian; Who owns ‘brain rot’? Inside the international legal drama over a beloved meme
"One of the most beloved characters in an absurdist genre of online video content has become the center of an international legal battle that could determine where human creativity ends and artificial intelligence begins...
The character has generated a great deal of money and stands to create much more – he will soon be joining Fortnite as a skin. But who should benefit from this virality?
That question is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in the US district court’s northern district of California, where a games company is suing the French creative agency Mementum, which represents Noxa, over the right to use Triple T as a character in a popular Roblox game.
Eben Jeda, co-founder of Mementum Lab, said he started the agency with the goal of modernizing economic infrastructure around internet-native works, the creators of which are often completely cut out of any resulting profit."
Cris Tolomia, Quartz ; Google DeepMind's AI readiness chief says benefits of AI will outweigh the risks
"Google DeepMind Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim told CNBC she would not have taken her position if she did not believe AI's benefits would ultimately outweigh its risks."
Robert Booth, The Guardian; Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
"Sam Altman says he believes the world should accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology."
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.”"
