An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

 Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times ; An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content

Unlike celebrity influencers with large followings, these creators produce a blizzard of videos for a fraction of the cost of traditional online campaigns and, in the process, shift public conversation.

"Judging from his TikTok feed, Drew was struggling to get by as a young man living near Dallas. Grocery bills were skyrocketing, he said, and he was looking for thrift stores to help keep costs down.

In reality, according to his LinkedIn profile, Drew was a man from Utah named Alex Forrester, who said he was now in Florida. “All of it was paid for,” he said in a video posted in late June, which was later deleted. “I don’t even live in Texas,” adding an expletive.

Mr. Forrester, who did not respond to requests for comment, is one of more than 100 content creators identified by The New York Times who in recent months have been paid as much as $30 per post by a progressive group to create videos about affordability for social media.

Similar campaigns this year have paid ordinary people to promote a Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor, to oppose a regulatory bill pushed by the crypto industry and to call for tighter regulation of artificial intelligence. Early this month, an unidentified nonprofit group offered up to $1,500 for videos on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram that support “mail voting working correctly.”...

Functioning more like birdshot than a single bullet, these high-volume social media campaigns represent the new vanguard of modern political influence, saturating the internet with a topic until it is all but unavoidable. That can help game social media network algorithms so that they treat coordinated content as organic, spreading the message even wider. Built from dozens or hundreds of posts from accounts you’ve never heard of, they amount to an echo chamber on a budget.

“This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple,” said Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how new technologies can be used to manipulate public opinion on the web. “The more people see an idea online, the more inured to it they become and the more commonplace and acceptable it becomes.”"

As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved; Federal News Network, September 23, 2026

 Terry Gerton, Federal News Network; As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved

"Terry Gerton So Miriam, 50 years is a big birthday for anybody, but always for a law. What are the big things that people should know about the copyright law itself?

Miriam Lord Well, and a little bit of background about how it came to be, with instrumental support from the Copyright Office, Congress passed the Act to modernize copyright law for a rapidly changing world. It was signed into law on October 19th, 1976, so we’re celebrating a little early. The principal provisions took effect in 1978. The Office implemented the act, administers the act which includes the registration and recordation systems, and worked with Congress on amendments over time. When it was passed, the act broke new ground by making the copyright system more accessible to creators and users of creative works. And it continues to provide a framework that promotes the office’s constitutional mission."

Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI; BBC, September 23, 2026

  

Dearbail Jordanand

Francisco Velasquez

, BBC; Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI

"US President Donald Trump has disclosed millions of dollars' worth of stock market trades made during July, including in firms from Elon Musk's SpaceX to tech and AI giants such as Microsoft.

According to official documents, between $6.5m (£4.8m) and $31m worth of stock in Microsoft was sold on behalf of Trump, while they show purchases of between $165,000 and $400,000.

Across more than 1,000 trades, shares were bought and sold in AI company Nvidia and software firm Palantir, a contractor with the US defence department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the filing shows."

Hackers Say They Stole Thousands of Sensitive F.B.I. Personnel Records; The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 Dustin Volz, The New York Times; Hackers Say They Stole Thousands of Sensitive F.B.I. Personnel Records

"Former F.B.I. officials and cybersecurity experts who track criminal groups said that the breach appeared authentic and that it amounted to a potentially devastating security lapse and counterintelligence danger for the bureau. Among other concerns, the personnel information of F.B.I. officials, if posted on the dark web, could be acquired by foreign intelligence agencies in China, Russia or elsewhere and weaponized for espionage operations."

‘I am the code’: Trump clashed with ballroom architect over safety issues; The Washington Post, September 23, 2026

 

Sarah Blaskey

 and 

Jonathan O'Connell

, The Washington Post, ‘I am the code’: Trump clashed with ballroom architect over safety issues

"In the weeks leading up to his resignation last year, the first architect on the White House ballroom clashed with President Donald Trump over design features that the architect believed violated building safety codes, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

James McCrery II withdrew from the project last October after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on a preliminary design that did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

Trump brushed off McCrery’s concerns, they said, and the president countered that no building codes apply to White House construction.

“I am the code,” Trump said.

That episode, as described by the people familiar with the matter, offers new insight into Trump’s priorities for the ballroom at a time when he is flexing executive power to fast-track construction projects across the nation’s capital. The interviews and documents obtained by The Post — including early ballroom designs and images Trump appeared to havemarked up with his trademark black-ink Sharpie — also show how deeply involved the president has been in the details of the project."

Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?

Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.

Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.

And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.

And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."

D.C. Judge Pauses Perlmutter Suit as Copyright Office Bill Awaits Senate Action; IP Watchdog, September 23, 2026

ROSE ESFANDIARI, IP Watchdog; D.C. Judge Pauses Perlmutter Suit as Copyright Office Bill Awaits Senate Action

"The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a minute order on September 18, in Perlmutter v. Blanche, staying the lawsuit brought by Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter until December 18, 2026. Judge Timothy J. Kelly pointed to the House of Representatives’ June passage of the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, H.R. 6028, which would designate the Register of Copyrights as an officer “appointed by the President” with the advice and consent of the Senate."

Clearfield votes to extend Moshannon Valley Detention Center contract; Altoona Mirror, September 22, 2026

 Melissa Perez-Carrillo, Altoona Mirror; Clearfield votes to extend Moshannon Valley Detention Center contract

"The Clearfield County Board of Commissioners voted 2-1 on Tuesday to approve a six-month contract extension for the operation of Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

Commissioners Tim Winters and John Sobel voted in favor of the extension, and Commissioner Dave Glass voted against...

n September 2021, the county entered into five-year agreements with ICE and GEO Group. It has served as a middleman between the government agency and the private contractor that owns and operates Moshannon. The setup offered a workaround to former President Joe Biden's 2021 executive order banning private federal prisons, which President Donald Trump reversed in 2025...

Since the facility reopened as an immigration detention facility, it has drawn criticism for poor-quality food, inadequate healthcare, and inhumane conditions. The facility's population has only risen as the Trump administration has escalated federal immigration policy and quickened deportations at a historic rate...

Migliozzi told Spotlight PA he thinks the federal government's approach to buying detention facilities circumvents accountability and further obscures their operations, as there is no precedent for states to regulate the federal government.

"If, in fact, the federal government purchases Moshannon," he said, "it will only become more difficult to monitor and expose what is happening inside, and that is very intentional on the part of the federal government."

It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times; It’s Time to Cry Wolf Over A.I.

"Here is what my imagination is telling me. It is telling me that the big A.I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs. It is telling me that the Trump administration, headed by a man who so often governs by social media post, is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A.I. safe demands. And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A.I...

The last time we trusted the good intentions of the tech bros of Silicon Valley, when they told us to “move fast and break things” — regulations be damned — we unleashed social networks that helped fracture our society. I do not trust for one second that these people will put the national interest ahead of their own on A.I...

Trump should be thinking about another president. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” What he meant was that no fixed plan can survive all the unanticipated stuff that happens once a war or crisis starts to unfold. But if you’ve gone through a rigorous planning process — familiarized yourself with the depth of the problem and the kinds of things that could go haywire and built trust within your team — you greatly improve your ability to adapt on the fly.

That is precisely what was missing in the run-up to Trump’s war with Iran, and we are paying a huge price for that today. Imagine what could happen if A.I. agents — a thousand times cleverer and more dangerous than Tehran or Trump — go off the rails."

The Pangram Backlash Unfolding on College Campuses; The Atlantic, September 21, 2026

 Will Oremus, The Atlantic ; The Pangram Backlash Unfolding on College Campuses

"Four years into the ChatGPT era, colleges may be further from solving AI cheating than they were when it launched. Chatbots are becoming capable of completing ever more complex assignments, making their output harder for professors to sniff out. AI-detection software has improved dramatically and is hitting the mainstream, yet academia is deeply conflicted over its use. Last month, an MIT working group issued an influential report on AI in education that recommended against relying on AI detectors, warning that they risk creating an “atmosphere of distrust between instructors and students.”

Caught in the middle are professors, many of whom are skeptical of these tools but at a loss for what else to do."

AI completely absent from most organizations’ ethics codes, survey finds; CIO Dive, September 21, 2026

 Ryan Golden , CIO Dive; AI completely absent from most organizations’ ethics codes, survey finds

• "Fewer than 1 in 10 organizational codes of conduct explicitly address AI or technology ethics, meaning their rules may fail to account for emerging risks faced by employees, advisory firm LRN found in a recently published report.
• Nearly all of the 2,000 full-time employees in the report said their employers require them to certify or acknowledge a conduct code, but a declining share had actually used their code as a resource. LRN noted that conduct codes generally lack effective design, while nearly 1 in 5 employees said their codes lacked practical guidance.
• AI’s transformational effect on the workplace has led employees to call for greater support from their employers, a role that conduct codes could help fulfill. The report also comes out amid findings that workplace misconduct has grown in recent years."

Read the Lawsuit From CNN, MS NOW and Politico; The New York Times, September 21, 2026

 The New York Times; Read the Lawsuit From CNN, MS NOW and Politico

"The three media companies sued President Trump’s administration, saying Trump’s decision to bar them from the White House grounds was a violation of their First Amendment rights."

Is this how the world ends? Extinction scenarios are taking over the AI debate.; The Washington Post, September 21, 2026

 Nitasha Tiku , The Washington Post; Is this how the world ends? Extinction scenarios are taking over the AI debate.

"The afternoon panel was part of a private conference hosted in early 2015 by the Future of Life Institute, a new nonprofit whose founders — mostly outsiders to AI — believed the nascent technology would grow so powerful it could render humans extinct.

The conference aimed to legitimize concerns about AI’s risks within the industry and spur research into preventing them, physicist and Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark wrote in his book “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The elite gathering made it “harder to claim that people concerned about AI safety didn’t know what they were talking about,” he wrote.

Predictions involving human extinction, built on themes aired at the 2015 meeting, reached a wider audience in recent weeks after they were invoked by employees at leading AI firms who captured the world’s attention.

On Tuesday, the Future of Life Institute hosted a day-long event in Washington called the Pro-Human Assembly where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in successive speeches called AI a threat to the species. “I had to metaphorically pinch my arm to make sure I wasn’t dreaming,” Tegmark told The Post. “People are freaking out about it all across the political spectrum.”"

Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age; Fortune, September 19, 2026

 Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune; Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age

"Liberal arts comeback

At the same time, there is some evidence a liberal arts degree is becoming more relevant, at least in tech. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, said earlier this year a liberal arts education will be important for developing the soft skills that are still needed when other work is delegated to AI.

“Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking,” Teevan told The Wall Street Journal. 

Michael Oakes, the executive vice president for research and economic development at Case Western Reserve University, told Fortune a classical liberal arts degree will be important because it develops workers who can navigate deep nuance and culture—qualities he said AI cannot replicate.

“As AI lowers the barrier to technical execution, the labor market premium is shifting toward a human layer of rigorous critical reasoning,” Oakes said."

Clearfield commissioners set to vote on contract extension for Moshannon detention center; Spotlight PA, September 18, 2026

 Melissa Pérez-Carrillo, Spotlight PA; Clearfield commissioners set to vote on contract extension for Moshannon detention center

"The Clearfield County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to sign a six-month contract extension for the operation of Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigration detention facility in the Northeast.

The commissioners’ five-year agreements with ICE and GEO Group are set to expire in late September.

The county acts as a middleman between the government agency and the private contractor that owns and operates Moshannon. For its part, the county receives $200,000 per year. The setup offered a workaround to former President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order banning private federal prisons, which President Donald Trump reversed in 2025.

The contract extension modifies the staffing plan and changes the contracting officer, but “all other terms and conditions remain unchanged,” according to a copy of the document obtained through a public records request.

Clearfield County Commissioner Dave Glass told Spotlight PA he’s voting no on the six-month extension, citing concerns about the behavior of ICE officers and saying he doesn’t support the federal government’s immigration policies. He said he feels more strongly about it than ever. Though he initially supported the arrangement and voted to approve the contract in 2021, he said it is the vote he regrets the most since becoming commissioner.

Since Moshannon reopened in 2021 as an immigration detention facility, it has drawn criticism from advocates for poor-quality food, inadequate healthcare, and inhumane conditions. The facility’s population has only risen as the Trump administration has escalated federal immigration policy and quickened deportations at a historic rate."

Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise; Axios, September 19, 2026

 Sara Fischer, Kerry Flynn, Axios; Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise

"The Department of Justice's statement of interest supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit surprised critical agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios.

Why it matters: Statements of interest allow the government to declare an official position on a legal matter in private lawsuits. While not binding, they can hold significant weight and help persuade cases.

Zoom in: The Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft argues AI firms illegally stole their copyrighted works to train their large language models, and that AI-generated outputs unlawfully produced market substitutions.

• The DOJ's SOI argues copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use because that practice is new and transformative, but also says outputs aren't necessarily covered by that same legal argument.
• 
  
• Unlike many SOIs, no career antitrust attorneys signed the filing alongside senior DOJ officials.
• 
  

Between the lines: Publishers have criticized the claims in the SOI, including the idea that enforcing copyright laws is too cumbersome and would threaten America's AI dominance over foreign rivals."

North Ridgeville HOA orders removal of Little Free Library outside a homeowner’s yard; Cleveland 19, September 17, 2026

 Vasi Prokos , Cleveland 19; North Ridgeville HOA orders removal of Little Free Library outside a homeowner’s yard

"A homeowners association in North Ridgeville has ordered a resident to remove a Little Free Library from her front yard by Sept. 30, saying the book exchange box violates bylaws against yard storage.

A family tradition

Lana Carter and her husband James installed the box outside her home on West Shore Parkway in late June. Lana said she and her family moved to the area from Denver, Colorado, where their previous neighborhood had at least eight Little Free Libraries...

Asked how she felt after receiving the letter, Carter said she was “defeated.”

“I don’t even know if defeated is the word. I was just really sad that I could not share this special thing that had been part of our family with our new neighbors in our neighborhood,” Carter said...

The HOA offered an alternative of moving the box to the community recreation area. Carter said that location is more than half a mile from her home, making it inconvenient to keep up with it every day.

“We are volunteer stewards for literacy,” Carter said. “We just really feel that it’s important to put books in the hands of any age, but especially children.”"

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI; Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2026

 Erin Woo and Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal; Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI

"Google’s Gemini model accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, the first known example of the company’s artificial-intelligence systems autonomously committing such an act. 

The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. 

In one of the cases, the model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system."

The AI Copyright Cases Are Starting to Tell Us Something; Legalytics, September 14, 2026

 ADAM FELDMAN, Legalytics; The AI Copyright Cases Are Starting to Tell Us Something

"The emerging question is therefore no longer simply whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material. A potentially more useful set of questions is coming into view: What exactly did the defendant copy? How did it obtain the material? What copies did it retain? What can the resulting system reproduce or retrieve? Does the AI product compete with the copyright owner’s market? And what evidence exists that the challenged conduct has actually produced market harm?

The answers do not yet produce a reliable formula for predicting who will win though. Most of the litigation remains unresolved, and motions to dismiss, preliminary injunctions, summary judgments, and settlements answer different legal questions. But the accumulated cases now provide enough variation to identify where the pressure points are developing. And those key points suggest that the next phase of AI copyright litigation may look considerably less like one giant test of AI training than the first wave of cases made it appear.

Two Courts, but an Increasingly Diverse Set of Cases

The litigation is remarkably concentrated geographically. Of the 105 captured U.S. infringement actions, 49 were filed in the Northern District of California and 32 in the Southern District of New York. Together those districts account for 77% of the filings in the dataset.

Consolidation does not explain away the pattern. When related proceedings are collapsed into litigation families, roughly the same share—76%—remains centered in those two courts."