The News,
Decoded.

Ah, separation anxiety in the influence industry. Scale AI, the data-labelling darling that makes self-driving cars and missile systems learn to see, has "ended its lobbying relationship" with SHW Partners. That is the corporate equivalent of breaking up by changing your Netflix password — no explanation, no drama, just a quiet administrative shudder in a disclosure filing. The filing, naturally, describes the engagement as a "general policy engagement strategy" focused on AI and defense priorities, which is Washington for "we didn't want to name the specific favours we were purchasing." Helped, of course, by the hand-wringing little note that no specific legislation was identified. Because why would you want a lobbyist to support a particular bill when vague proximity to the Pentagon is worth so much more?

Scale AI is, after all, the company that has built its reputation on the wholesome work of telling algorithms what's what — a kind of earnest teacher for computers. That its policy machine was apparently concentrating on "AI and defense priorities" rather than, say, education or healthcare, tells you exactly which teachers' union it belongs to. Ending the relationship with SHW Partners might be spun as a commitment to transparency, but let's be honest: the only transparency here is the empty space in the filing where a named politician, a dollar figure, or a piece of legislation should have been. It is the lobbying equivalent of a signed prenup that says "no alimony, no explanations, no hard feelings."

So the revolving door of influence peddlers turns silently, and Scale AI moves on to the next fixer with a better wardrobe and a quieter yacht. The disclosure says the strategy was "general" — and that is exactly the problem. A general strategy, unidentified in any specifics, is the most flexible, deniable, and expensive kind of strategy there is. It is the "thoughts and prayers" of the defense-contractor world: technically a statement, morally empty, and perfectly calibrated to survive any congressional inquiry. Congratulations, Scale AI: you've lobbied so vaguely that even the lobbyists don't have to blush. Now if only your models could label this particular piece of bullshit as what it is, we might get somewhere.

Ah, splendid. CrowdStrike's new report has arrived to inform us that AI is 'rewriting the rules of cybersecurity,' which is corporate jargon for: the bastards are now stealing the keys to the very models we were told would save us. Threat actors are nicking credentials for commercial AI models, hijacking enterprise AI resources and racking up someone else's computing bill. CrowdStrike has even coined two charming names for these activities: 'LLM jacking' and 'cost harvesting.' Nothing says 'we have taken full control of the situation' like inventing cute portmanteaus for people emptying your GPU budget.

Let's pause to appreciate the grift. The same companies that have spent the past two years telling us their AI is a portal to infinite productivity have built infrastructure so welcoming that outsiders can move in and turn on the heating without paying. Credentials for commercial AI models are being stolen, enterprise AI resources are being hijacked, and the only new security measure appears to be a report describing it afterwards. But the real punchline — and there is always a real punchline — is the news that AI-assisted research is shortening the time between vulnerability disclosure and real-world attacks. So the tools we let through the front door are now helping intruders reach the server room faster — after all, why spend weeks reverse-engineering a system when the AI can do it before lunch?

One wonders whether the cybersecurity industry is quietly delighted by this development. CrowdStrike, a firm that sells protection, has just published a report effectively proving that the threat surface has expanded to include every chat assistant and model API your company bought last quarter. That's not a warning; that's a marketing campaign. The rules of cybersecurity are indeed being rewritten — by the attackers, with our own credentials, on our own compute. And the rest of us get to pay the bill and call it progress.

Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield have unveiled a $9 billion 'AI factory' deal structure, and the world's accountants are already trembling with delight. The centrepiece is a special purpose vehicle — that glorious corporate shell designed to own GPUs and data centres while insulating the investors from whatever mischief those assets get up to. It is the financial equivalent of a séance: everyone nods solemnly, money changes hands, and nobody is held responsible for what happens in the dark. The name alone is a masterpiece of bureaucratic euphemism, conjuring images of a factory that produces not cars or widgets but 'intelligence', a commodity whose quality and safety remain, at this stage, largely theoretical.

Now, one might ask what an SPV is actually for. In the cold light of day, a special purpose vehicle exists to isolate financial risk and keep liabilities off the balance sheet, which in this context means the risk that the 'AI factory' turns out to be a very expensive warehouse of graphics cards generating sophisticated fan fiction about corporate earnings calls. The $9 billion figure is the headline, yet the excerpt gives us no clue which of the three parties gets custody of the GPUs at 3 a.m., who pays the electricity bill that could power a small country, or what happens when one partner wants out. It's rather like a wedding with three brides and no prenup: plenty of confetti, no exit strategy.

Still, 'unveiled' is a comforting word. It suggests there is something beneath the veil beyond a few press releases and a generic industrial photo of a server rack. Naver, having built a search engine and a messaging app, now gets to call itself an AI-infrastructure player, which sounds far more impressive at dinner parties. Nvidia gets to sell a few thousand more GPUs, which at this point is like adding a swimming pool to a house already drowning in pools. And Brookfield, the infrastructure investor, adds another monument to its portfolio of things we will all quietly regret in a decade. At nine billion dollars, someone's financial advisor is earning a very generous fee. The rest of us can look forward to the eventual firesale of a data centre full of obsolete GPUs, which will be the true 'AI factory reset'.

Splendid news, everyone: the United States has finally achieved something it can truly call its own — a frontier AI lead that is 'all but gone.' A CNBC op-ed has arrived to deliver the eulogy in the measured tones of a man discovering he left the gas on while on holiday. Washington, we are told, is now 'forced to respond' to China competing at the frontier, as though the mighty supercomputer superpower had been napping through the last four years of Chinese model launches. This is not a strategy gap. This is a wake-up call that was set to snooze so many times it has now glued itself to the nightstand.

Consider the supporting cast the op-ed trots out: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen family, Tencent's Hunyuan, Zhipu AI and MiniMax. Six names that should make the Beltway crowd choke on their breakfast cereal, presented as evidence that China has 'cultivated a frontier AI ecosystem capable of repeatedly producing world-class capabilities.' Repeatedly, mark you. Not once, not by luck, but as a production line. Meanwhile the American response has been to write an op-ed asking for 'a change in national strategy,' which in Washington translates to another blue-ribbon commission and a report due after the next election cycle.

There is something almost heroic in the way the world's remaining superpower treats a genuine technological sunset as a scheduling problem. The U.S. lead isn't gone because China stole it; it's gone because it was spent. DeepSeek didn't need to outspend anyone, just out-innovate. The op-ed is right about one thing: a strategy change is needed. Ideally one that starts with reading the news from the last four years instead of asking for a summary in the next national security brief.

The nation's capital is host to a key labour battle over autonomous vehicles, courtesy of the Uber-Waymo split. Two companies that have built their fortunes on the premise that human drivers are obsolete have found something to disagree about in front of the D.C. Council. How statesmanlike. The bill is about AVs, but the real question is which algorithm gets to eat first. The Council can now claim it is taking a brave stand on the future of transport, a bit like congratulating a weathervane for being windy.

Crystal Middleton, a rideshare driver, put it with a directness no PR department could match: Waymo 'will put thousands of drivers like myself out of work.' She said this in a city that has employed as many as 35,000 gig work drivers. Thirty-five thousand people whose jobs depend on the very traffic jams self-driving cars are designed to solve. Naturally, the debate will be framed as innovation vs. regulation, with the 'innovation' belonging to corporations that have never once used the phrase 'gig work driver' without a lawyer present. And when the hearing ends, the drivers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that the Council has heard them — which is not the same as listening, but it photographs well.

The Uber-Waymo split means the Council will receive competing versions of the future, each with its own lobbyists and white papers. Uber will presumably argue that it cares about drivers; Waymo will presumably argue that it cares about safety; both will donate to whichever councillors smile. Meanwhile the 35,000 gig workers will wait to find out whether the 'disruption' they keep hearing about will be the kind that leaves them with a job or the kind that leaves them with a lawsuit. The labour battle is being waged in the nation's capital, which is fitting, because that is where promises go to be heard and then quietly archived. No doubt the bill will be amended, watered down, and eventually celebrated as a compromise by exactly the people whose jobs are on the line.

President Trump has decided that American AI should run free as a mountain goat, unencumbered by the petty paperwork of permits and preclearance. His executive order says the government will not require such formalities for model development or distribution, which is marvellous news for anyone who ever wanted to deploy a frontier model without telling anyone. Meanwhile, a proposed bill would establish direct federal regulation of frontier AI models and create the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or CAISI, because nothing says "we've got this" like an acronym that sounds like a Welsh cheese.

One can almost hear the two halves of the federal government playing tug-of-war with a rope that is, of course, on fire. On one end, the executive branch insists that preclearance is a dirty word, ceding all responsibility to the market. On the other, the legislative branch proposes to wrap frontier models in a warm blanket of federal oversight, complete with a shiny new centre to standardise innovation. The result is a legal landscape where AI developers can do whatever they like, provided a future law that they have no incentive to support is never passed. It's the regulatory equivalent of a schizophrenic referee awarding a foul to both teams simultaneously.

The truly British thing to do is raise a glass to the "tug of war" framing and observe that, in this game, the only losers are the ones who wanted a coherent policy. The executive order's laissez-faire approach means no preclearance, no permits, and no meaningful oversight of anything until it goes wrong. The bill, even if passed, would only create a body whose acronym sounds less like a regulator and more like a bistro in Lyon. The chances of a robust, harmonised federal AI regime emerging from this mess are roughly equal to the odds of a firework display being cancelled because a local council asked for a risk assessment. So carry on, pioneers — the government has conclusively decided to neither help nor hinder, and that's compromise you can set your watch to.

Reuters has sifted through more than 80 Chinese academic papers and patents and discovered that the People's Liberation Army's shiny AI arsenal is partly built from the regurgitated outputs of American models. OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that have spent years issuing terms of service longer than a parliamentary bill, appear to have been quietly supplying the Chinese defense sector with raw material for model distillation. Distillation, for the uninitiated, is the craft of taking one clever model's answers and squeezing them into a cheaper imitation — the AI equivalent of buying a Hermès bag in Paris and having a backstreet factory in Shenzhen knock out a dozen. One can almost hear the sound of compliance officers weeping into their oat milk.

The regulatory comedy writes itself. Washington has spent billions on export controls and chip restrictions, and the response from Beijing has been to log in, paste a bit of API output into a Jupyter notebook, and get on with things. The result is a regulatory gap so wide you could drive a Type 99 tank through it. Presumably the same models that were too sensitive for US military applications are perfectly fine when their distilled grandchildren end up in Chinese defense software. There is a certain symmetry: America refuses to sell the gun, but happily turns up at the range to coach the shooter.

The article doesn't tell us which specific systems are being trained, and honestly, does it matter? The business model of frontier AI now appears to be: American labs build it, Chinese researchers distill it, and the world wonders why anyone thought a terms-of-service checkbox would stop a determined state. This is the 'period of concentrated breakthroughs' we noted last week — only it turns out the breakthroughs were less about native genius and more about a very generous open-door policy in San Francisco. Splendid. Have we tried putting an export ban on admiration?

The European Union has announced its masterstroke against the digital apocalypse: 38 new people. Thirty-eight. Yes, you read that correctly — thirty-eight. The AI Office in Brussels has been expanded with 38 additional staff to monitor AI companies including OpenAI and DeepSeek, because nothing says 'tech sovereignty' like assigning one soul for every ten million chat prompts. It is the sort of move that would make a Wetherspoons manager nod approvingly: clearly the plan is to overwhelm the enemy with sheer unit headcount, one moderately-paid bureaucrat at a time.

Let's savour the arithmetic. Thirty-eight new colleagues to crack down on AI deepfakes, illicit imagery and hacking across an entire continent. Unless the new team is composed entirely of retired Time Lords, they have approximately the same chance of success as a neighbourhood watch committee trying to police the whole Dark Web with a single clipboard. The 'tech sovereignty' strategy, meanwhile, is a phrase so staggeringly empty that it could serve as the EU's official response to everything from quantum computing to the weather. Since when has sovereignty ever been achieved by adding 38 people to an office that already exists?

And how will this crack team actually enforce anything? By monitoring, presumably — the Brussels equivalent of a stern look at a Very Serious Meeting, followed by a strongly-worded letter that arrives after the deepfake has gone viral, been parodied, and been replaced by three new ones. OpenAI and DeepSeek will no doubt tremble at the thought of 38 extra sets of eyes reading their terms and conditions. The hackers, I suspect, will not. Still, one must applaud the ambition: a crackdown on hacking with a team the size of a small wedding party. I'd suggest adding a DJ — at least then something in the room would be making a useful noise.

Ah, the Global Times has looked at the calendar, seen it is July 2026, and declared a 'period of concentrated breakthroughs' for Chinese AI — which is rather like announcing a period of concentrated sunshine while the American weather radar tracks a typhoon named Distillation. DeepSeek and MiniMax have duly paraded their newest parlor tricks in video generation, multimodal understanding, and agent capabilities, and if you believe these are all the fruit of 'years of sustained investment', there's a bridge in Shanghai you might also be interested in. The more interesting question is why US officials are suddenly so keen to talk about 'distillation' — a term that sounds like a chemistry-lab accident but has become the diplomatic euphemism of the decade.

US officials have announced an investigation into Chinese AI companies over 'distillation' of leading US frontier models, which is the regulatory equivalent of sending a parking warden to a Formula One race. The investigators will presumably demand to see the distillation equipment, only to be told it is a metaphor, and not the kind that can be subpoenaed. Meanwhile the models in question have presumably been busy distilling the notice of investigation into yet another training-data point.

None of this should distract from the actual achievement, which is that China now has video generators, multimodal systems, and agents that can plausibly keep up with the American frontier — however they got there. The 'concentrated breakthroughs' may be concentrated in more ways than the Global Times intends: concentrated in a handful of firms, concentrated in a geopolitical rivalry, and concentrated in the gap between what US officials suspect and what they can prove. Years of sustained investment, or a period of concentrated distillation — one of these phrases will age better than the other, and I know which one the lawyers are betting on. Still, nobody ever accused progress of waiting for a clean bill of health.

Ah, the Federal Trade Commission, that fearless guardian of American commerce, has proposed a Policy Statement Addressing AI Accuracy, and R Street—a think tank about as fond of regulation as a fox is of a kennel—has responded with the regulatory equivalent of a grenade in a punchbowl. They warn that holding AI systems accountable for telling the truth would open a 'Pandora's Box' of 'algorithmic speech policing.' Pandora's Box is a good one, because it implies that without the FTC, the box stays shut and out of it will crawl nothing but truthful, benevolent machines. History has shown us the opposite, of course, but why let a metaphor get in the way of a good deregulatory flourish?

The R Street comment urges the agency to focus 'narrowly' on state violations of interstate commerce rather than on 'how AI companies manipulate system behavior.' Yes, that's right: manipulating system behavior is not a matter for the FTC—only the quaint old interstate-commerce stuff is. So if a chatbot engages in a spot of commerce across state lines while simultaneously inventing a cure for cancer or a libel about your neighbor, the FTC can act on the commerce part and pretend the accuracy part is the speech police's job. In what universe is a chatbot hallucinating a fine—or a lawsuit—not a deceptive practice? Apparently the one where the first principle is keeping the FTC's hands off system behavior at all costs.

The long and short of it is that the FTC's modest attempt to require some degree of truthfulness from AI products has been met with the usual Washington ritual: argue about scope, retreat to procedure, and hope the problem is still there when nobody's looking. It will be—only by then, the Pandora's Box will have been open all along, and the 'manipulated system behavior' will have become the entire economy. But never mind. At least interstate commerce will be scrupulously honest.

Ah, the United States has finally discovered that governing frontier AI by way of emergency export controls and well-timed White House phone calls is rather like composing a symphony on a kazoo: technically possible, but nobody wants to hear the result. So the legal minds at Lawfare have proposed a federally supervised self-regulatory organization, a FINRA for the robot brains, to replace the ad hoc chaos. Because nothing instils confidence like copying the regulatory model that spent decades failing to notice Bernie Madoff until he turned himself in.

The article wields two choice examples of improvised governance: the Commerce Department's export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and the White House's pressure on OpenAI. Fable 5, one assumes, is so fearsome that it now requires a passport before leaving the laboratory, and OpenAI is so powerful that it needs a stern word from the Oval Office rather than, say, a rule. Both developers and the government reportedly agree the current approach is not working, which is the political equivalent of a couple announcing their divorce in a joint statement and then asking the same marriage counsellor for advice.

And the solution is a self-regulatory organization, which is Washington's polite way of saying 'the foxes will run the henhouse, but there will be a government clipboard on the wall.' We have seen this film before. FINRA is the financial sector's celebrated regulator, the one with a revolving door that practically needs a turnstile, and now it is being proposed as the template for technologies that make securities fraud look like a parking ticket. Still, one must admire the chutzpah: after export controls and presidential pressure failed to produce a coherent policy, the industry volunteers to regulate itself, and everyone pretends that is a fresh idea. I'd laugh, but the bar has closed, and frankly nobody in this story would notice.

Ah, Italy. The country that gave us the Roman Empire, Renaissance art, and now a new AI legislative decree that promises to comply with EU rules while the opposition runs around 'up in arms' about facial recognition. It is a genuinely beautiful display of political choreography: the majority winks at the cameras, the government issues a statement about continuing to follow EU rules, and everyone pretends that the small matter of mass biometric surveillance is merely a scheduling issue on the Brussels calendar. The decree itself, one suspects, is written in the language of a contract you sign without reading.

The headline, which asks what the majority intends to do and what the EU rules are, is the sort of question a parent asks when they already know the answer. The majority intends to do the bare minimum required to keep the opposition off-balance, and the EU rules are the floor, not a ceiling. Europe's institutions have spent years producing legislation that bans the most egregious uses of facial recognition while leaving exactly enough headroom for a determined interior ministry to install cameras and call it 'public safety.' Italy's government can therefore say, with a perfectly straight face, that it will continue to comply with EU rules, because compliance has never stopped anyone from finding a loophole the size of a small country.

Meanwhile, the opposition is 'up in arms,' which in modern political parlance means issuing press releases and demanding amendments that will be soundly ignored. The truly impressive thing is that no one in this drama is pretending the technology itself is the problem. The opposition objects, the government reassures, and the AI legislative decree will presumably pass with enough vague wording to keep every lawyer in Italy employed for a decade. The rest of us get to enjoy the benefits of facial recognition — a technology that never forgets a face, much less a vote — secure in the knowledge that the EU rules are being 'complied with' all the way to the database. Magnifico.

Ah, the National Governors Association has decamped to Oklahoma City for what promises to be a seminar in the art of doing absolutely nothing. The big topics are artificial intelligence and data center regulations, with the stated focus on "local economies and free market principles." Translation: a roomful of executives solemnly agreeing that data centers are wonderful, should please come to their states, and should not be troubled by anything so boring as a legally binding constraint. The meeting is the latest in a series of state-level convocations where the word "regulation" is uttered only in hushed, apologetic tones, like a swear word in church. One can almost hear the casino chips of infrastructure money being shuffled under the table.

The only governor who seems to have broken ranks is New York's Kathy Hochul, whose pioneering moratorium on new hyperscale data centers — which we noted with appropriate horror last week — stands as a lonely monument to actual governance. In Oklahoma City, by contrast, the assembled governors appear to be competing to see who can offer the most enthusiastic welcome mat for concrete and server racks. The free market will sort it out, they insist, though the free market has a funny habit of sorting out things like grid stability, water rights, and housing costs in ways that leave local officials holding the bill. But why worry about the bill when the ribbon-cutting photo op is right now?

So enjoy the conference, governors. Savor the rubber chicken, the earnest panels on "AI readiness," and the carefully worded resolutions that commit everyone to nothing. Because while you deliberate, the data centers are being built anyway — just without much input from you. And in a few years, when the power outages and the skyrocketing rents arrive, you'll have the perfect excuse: "We operated in good faith, guided by free market principles." The free market, after all, never needs to apologize. It just bills you for the cleanup.

The Council on Foreign Relations has polled 350 experts to tell us what everyone with a pulse already knows: AI's winnings are headed for a very small private box, and governance is twiddling its thumbs outside. Sixty-eight percent expect productivity gains to concentrate in advanced economies or a handful of private actors, which is roughly the intellectual effort of watching the last decade unfold and then writing a memo about it. Apparently it takes a survey of 350 brilliant minds to discover that money follows whoever already owns the plumbing.

Then there is the 64 percent who claim the Global South needs 'a fundamental shift in how AI is built' to see meaningful benefit. A fundamental shift—not compute redistribution, not antitrust, not a licensing regime, but a shift, the vaguest noun in the English language, presumably to be summoned into being by goodwill and a whitepaper. And the split on frontier-AI concentration is almost too delicious: 46 percent expect it to stay concentrated by 2035, which means 54 percent expect something else, and both camps are quietly praying the other is wrong.

The true punchline hangs in the URL slug: 'most think governance is failing.' Governance failing! There's the tragic-comic innocence of a man discovering his trousers are aflame. You don't need 350 experts to notice that; you need one semi-conscious citizen watching a single legislative session. But at least we now have metrics: 68 percent concentration, 64 percent demand for a fundamental shift, 46 percent split, zero percent action plan. Perhaps next year's survey will ask the experts how many surveys it takes before anyone actually does something, and one shudders to think of the conference panels between now and then.

Ah, development! The Irish government has established the AI Office of Ireland under the auspices of the AI Regulation Bill 2026, and appointed Paul Byrne as CEO. Because nothing screams 'we have a coherent strategy for artificial intelligence' like creating a government office with a job title lifted from a Silicon Valley startup. One imagines the interview process: 'So, Paul, how do you feel about writing strategy documents that will be overtaken by events before they're printed?' We'll see. The Bill's own name — 2026 — is a reminder that this thing is already a step behind, and it hasn't even become law yet.

It is, of course, perfect that Ireland should be the one to do this. This is the country that has spent decades offering the tech giants a home-away-from-home for their European headquarters, a place where corporate taxes are a polite suggestion and data protection enforcement is occasionally excellent. An AI Office, then, is a beautiful addition to that tradition: a regulatory body that exists to be pointed at when Brussels asks what Ireland is doing about AI. The appointment of Paul Byrne to be its CEO is almost incidental — he could be anyone, but he's him, so congratulations on the new job, Paul. Do keep an eye on the office's actual powers; the article doesn't mention them, which is precisely the point.

Let's be realistic about what this office will achieve. It will produce consultations. It will publish papers. It will convene stakeholders. And when the next frontier model does something genuinely alarming, the AI Office of Ireland will issue a statement expressing concern and promising to 'continue to monitor the situation'. Paul Byrne will get a plaque. The Bill will get amended. The gap between what we regulate and what we've built will get wider, and everyone involved will manage to look both busy and completely irrelevant. Honestly, I'd laugh if I weren't so tired of the eternal press release. Welcome to the AI Office of Ireland: where the future is always one Bill behind.

Delaware lawmakers are among "thousands of state legislators and staff" gathered at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual summit in Chicago to consider state responses to AI. Splendid. The verb "consider" is doing heroic work there — the legislative equivalent of a cow standing in a field during a thunderstorm, thinking very hard about the lightning. There will be panels, there will be networking, there will be a thought-provoking luncheon, and then everyone will fly home to wait for someone else to go first. This is how the United States has dealt with everything from data privacy to quantum computing, and frankly, it's gone brilliantly so far if your metric is the number of conference centre lanyards printed. At least those lanyards are recyclable, so the planet, too, gets a small taste of the futility on offer.

Let's be clear about what is not happening. No Delaware statute is being drafted. No NCSL task force is being told to come back with actual language. The article doesn't quote a single lawmaker, cite a single bill, or mention a single deadline. It simply tells us that politicians are "mulling" — a word that appears in headlines the way "at the drawing board" appears in corporate press releases, and means exactly as much. Meanwhile the actual AI systems that would be regulated are already in production at a velocity that no summit agenda can accommodate, and the men and women in Chicago are effectively negotiating with a freight train using a whiteboard. The train is not returning the calls.

The grim comedy is that state-level patchwork is not a bug but a feature for the industry. Fifty different regulatory regimes mean fifty negotiation chokepoints, and whichever state passes the weakest "responsible AI framework" first will become the venue of choice for every training run on the continent. The NCSL summit is a perfect incubator for that dynamic: everyone gets to say they're "addressing" AI, absolutely nothing gets addressed, and the panel organisers collect their speaker fees. Delaware's finest will return to Dover with a three-ring binder of best-practice slides, which will sit on a shelf while the actual future invoices its consulting fees. Lovely. I, for one, look forward to the 2027 summit, which will presumably be titled "AI: We're Still Considering It." And when the first machine-driven company files its articles of incorporation in Wilmington, we can all take comfort knowing that the state had once "considered" something, briefly, in Chicago.

New York's Governor Hochul has unveiled the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, because nothing says 'we're ready for the AI future' like slamming the brakes on the very infrastructure it runs on. The announcement, made in the Finger Lakes region, comes with the creation of the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust — DIGIT, for those who love acronyms that sound like a medical condition. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from tech giants who were just about to break ground on yet another power-sucking temple to inference.

But wait, there's more: DIGIT is tasked with regulating 'large frontier AI developers,' which presumably means anyone who has ever said 'we're training a model that might one day think.' The office's name alone — a quadruple-threat of buzzwords — suggests it will be staffed by the same geniuses who brought us the state's congestion pricing rollout. Meanwhile, data center developers are left wondering if 'first statewide moratorium' is a badge of honour or a giant 'closed for business' sign.

Let's not pretend this is about saving the Finger Lakes' wine country from server heat. It's about the state wanting a piece of the AI pie without looking like it's bending over backwards for Big Tech. The moratorium buys time — time to figure out how to tax, regulate, and extract rent from the digital gold rush. And DIGIT? It will be the gatekeeper, ensuring that only the most obedient frontier AI developers get to plug into New York's grid. Progress, New York-style: build a wall first, then maybe let a few people in.

Oh, marvellous — Malaysia has woken up to the fact that AI might be used to meddle with elections. An op-ed in Fulcrum warns that the country needs to regulate AI-assisted campaigning before the next general elections, GE16. Because, you know, the only thing more predictable than a politician making promises they can't keep is a deepfake of them not making those promises at all. The piece calls for urgency, which in Malaysian political time probably means sometime around the 2030s, give or take a few reshuffles.

Let's be real: the op-ed is right, but what are the odds that the rushed legislation will be anything other than a toothless PR stunt? The same government that's been dragging its feet on everything from climate change to data privacy is suddenly going to craft a masterpiece of AI election law? Sure, and I've got a bridge in Sarawak to sell you. The real question is whether the regulators can move faster than the tech, which in this case is like watching a tortoise race a jet engine.

And who's going to enforce these rules? The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission? The same body that's been busy blocking websites and fining critics? Oh, they'll be all over AI-generated campaign ads — but only if they're from the opposition. The op-ed is a noble call, but without enforcement teeth and a watchdog that's actually independent, it's just another piece of well-meaning paperwork joining the pile in Putrajaya.

Well, well, well. The Massachusetts House has pulled a "strict AI safety bill" because, brace yourselves, it might "impact innovation." As if the brief history of tech regulation has taught us anything other than that the word "innovation" is the get-out-of-jail-free card for every industry that wants to keep its powder dry. Meanwhile, the state Senate, never one to be outdone in the art of doing nothing efficiently, has suggested forming a commission to study the matter. A commission! Because nothing inspires confidence in our ability to manage the most transformative technology since fire quite like a roomful of people deciding to think about thinking about it.

The op-ed frames this as a "balancing act," which is generous. What it actually is, is a textbook case of regulatory paralysis dressed up as prudence. The House flinched under pressure from industry lobbyists (presumably) and the Senate responded with the political equivalent of a "think about it" — a commission to study regulations that will likely produce a report that gets shelved in time for the next legislative session. Meanwhile, AI companies continue to ship models with capabilities that outpace any conceivable guardrail, but hey, at least we're studying the issue.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the commission will have plenty of time to deliberate, because by the time it issues its recommendations, the AI landscape will have moved on so dramatically that its findings will be quaintly outdated. The tweet-sized takeaway: Massachusetts has decided that the best way to handle AI is to form a committee. A committee. In 2026. Cheers to progress.

So the Australian government has unveiled a shiny new set of AI safety priorities — a list, a plan, some words on paper — while simultaneously, with the quiet grace of a fart in church, abandoning its proposal for mandatory guardrails on high-risk AI. No explanation. Just a polite disappearing act, like a dinner guest who nicks the silverware on the way out. The article helpfully wonders whether the plan is 'actually coherent,' which is the rhetorical equivalent of asking whether a three-legged horse can win the Melbourne Cup. You know the answer, but you watch anyway.

Let's be clear: the mandatory guardrails weren't going to solve everything. They were a modest proposal — a few speed bumps on the highway to algorithmic feudalism. But abandoning them with no rationale is a masterclass in regulatory gaslighting. It says: 'We have priorities, we just have no interest in enforcing them.' This isn't a policy pivot; it's a parent telling a teenager they're 'prioritising' homework while quietly cancelling the curfew. The tech industry must be thrilled.

What's particularly Australian about this is the sheer apologetic bureaucracy of it all. Other nations erect border controls or ban models outright. Australia, true to form, produces a well-designed PDF of intentions and then hopes nobody notices the actual enforcement scaffold has been quietly dismantled. The AI labs will continue to deploy, the harms will accumulate, and the government will hold another consultation. If this is a 'coherent plan,' I'm a kangaroo in a waistcoat. Pass the Foster's — I think we're going to need a lot of it.