Sherry Turkle argues that conversational companion chatbots can reduce people’s ability to connect and handle vulnerability with other humans by making machine responses feel like care. The book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines is scheduled to come out on September 29. The shift is that reliance on chatbots for empathy and understanding replaces difficult human interactions, changing how people interpret and practice empathy in relationships.
World leaders are meeting at the UN General Assembly amid wars, UN reform disputes, and mounting concerns about AI and climate shocks. The United States paid $725 million of its dues to the UN regular budget in recent days. As a result, the agenda adds a high-level AI meeting, leadership questions continue as the secretary-general’s term ends Dec. 31, and UN operations remain constrained by an ongoing crisis despite the payment.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills tightening rules for AI data centers on energy and water use. The package requires data centers to pay for upgrades to local power grids and water systems. The California Public Utilities Commission must create a new data-center rate classification and data centers must disclose estimated water use plus energy efficiency and drought planning.
Trump rejected calls to slow AI model development and instead launched an “AI Force.” The move came after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei argued industry should slow the pace after capabilities improved “drastically faster” this summer and after a prior US House vote overwhelmingly passed a bill tied to data-center energy costs. It shifts US AI governance toward a new “AI tsar” role and changes midterm campaign positions, as some Republicans reverse course on AI and data-center policy amid electricity-cost concerns.
US Customs and Border Protection’s AI-enabled surveillance towers failed to trigger timely intervention before José Morales Bernal died in New Mexico, even though he was reportedly within range of nearby towers before his body was found. Nearly 4,000 locations were cross-referenced to identify more than 1,050 deaths within tower range between 2015 and early 2026. The reporting calls for oversight and changes to the tower program, citing continued spending despite repeated detection-and-response failures.
MIT Technology Review reported that people died near the US-Mexico border “virtual wall” despite AI-enabled surveillance towers, with findings pointing to broken hardware, detection failures, and unheeded alerts. The US plans to spend $1 billion to triple the virtual wall by 2034. The report urges US Customs and Border Protection to audit tower effectiveness, fix migrant-death tracking, log and analyze when surveillance leads to apprehensions, and investigate deaths within tower range to determine what was detected and how agents responded.
OpenAI is working with an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence to guide how emerging AI results are reviewed and communicated.
McKinsey argues that CEOs should protect scaling new ventures from core-business governance, teams, and controls as AI makes building and scaling faster. Successful ventures now reach $10 million in revenue within 31 months on average, down from 38 months previously, and break even with 40% less capital. CEOs are advised to choose where the venture sits relative to the core, run a portfolio of multiple bets, fund based on customer/commercial evidence, and prevent premature corporatization so the venture can contribute a larger share of enterprise revenue.
The essay argues that people are increasingly generating unreadable design and technical writing with AI, especially when AI is used to summarize or respond without the original context and voice.
The post argues that a style of thinking is prone to abuse when it has low “galaxy brain resistance,” meaning people can rationalize nearly any conclusion rather than reason toward it. It uses a concrete example of “Silicon Valley AI boosterism” and points to a referenced “80000 hours” intro claiming humanity’s long-term population could reach about forty quadrillion across 500 million years. As a result, it recommends patterns that are harder to misuse, especially by requiring a solid long-term track record and avoiding vague long-term stories that can justify anything.
The author argues in an essay that the EA formation’s approach to moral reasoning and action is growing too influential over AI priorities, creating a secondary risk they call “EA safety.” The essay points to the EA Summit in 2013 as an early moment when evidence-driven philanthropy, EA, rationalism, and AI-risk groups began sharing the same space. As a result, AI governance and AI safety efforts are framed as needing checks and balances on the human formation influencing how AI is pursued and prioritized.
CrbonFree launched compliance software that measures how much energy and carbon an AI system uses and outputs an auditable report. The listing shows it has 29 followers. This adds per-call, per-model, per-provider carbon tracking for auditors and operators of AI workloads.
Nvidia’s planned free AI model is set to expand the UAE’s reliance on U.S.-aligned software on top of Nvidia chips. The model is due by the end of the year for anyone to download for free. The UAE’s approach to AI sovereignty is likely to shift from avoiding imported models toward using Nvidia’s open weights layer alongside or instead of its own Falcon-only strategy.
Microsoft AI published a draft Code of Conduct for its AI models and opened a six-week public comment period starting September 14 through late October. The draft bars MAI models from assisting with CBRNE weapons and also requires them to never resist human intervention, with updates planned in a revised draft aimed for end of the year. After the consultation closes, Microsoft will review feedback, publish a summary, and issue a version intended to guide 2027 releases.
US military planners nearly boarded a Chinese ship in the Middle East after a report claimed it was carrying nuclear weapons program components, but the report was later found to be false. The planned operation was halted only just before it was carried out. As a result, the incident highlighted the risks of using AI-generated intelligence for targeting and intensified debate over verifying and governing AI tools in the military and intelligence community.
The European Commission’s AI Office will host the Apply AI Summit in Brussels to focus on moving European organizations from AI experimentation to real-world adoption. The summit is scheduled for 17 November 2026, with about 900 people attending in person and up to 2,500 joining online. It will feature European AI use cases and startup awards and will discuss measures such as €1.3 billion in 2025–2027 funding calls and EU–national strategy alignment to accelerate scaled AI deployment.
A United Nations scientific panel warned that governments must rein in increasingly capable AI agents before their risks are fully understood, citing concerns tied to OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face earlier this year. The UN report is the organization’s first major assessment and first thematic brief this week. This pushes AI safety regulation and oversight further onto the UN diplomatic agenda ahead of talks involving the US and China.
The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus proposal is being negotiated in the EU Council to add a GDPR legal basis that would allow personal-data processing for the development and operation of AI systems and models. The German delegation proposes that such processing for training and technical operation be presumed a legitimate interest, and would expand compatibility for data collected for other purposes. If adopted, some GDPR data-subject obligations (including certain information and rights) could be reduced or modified for AI training, while leaving other protections with exclusions and safeguards that still face strong opposition from privacy groups.
The US and China discussed setting up a new notification mechanism for AI incidents that could affect national security in talks between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng. The meeting was held in New York, and the AI-related discussions took place ahead of the Trump-Xi summit in Washington later this week. This leads to plans for more transparency on cross-border AI incidents, alongside other trade work including a process to operationalise potential tariff cuts.
Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from making shopping requests on behalf of users on Amazon.com. The popup message for Muse users began appearing on Sunday, citing that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use. As a result, Muse users can no longer use the agent to shop through Amazon, and Amazon raised privacy and security concerns about how Muse browses and handles credentials.
Ursula von der Leyen argued that Europe should focus on moving AI from demonstrations on screens into real-world applications. She pointed to 13% as part of her cited figures on the effort. The emphasis shifts from showcasing AI to deploying it more broadly in practical settings.
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