Once BEAD money starts flowing, public accountability of the process will be critical, said Pew’s Kathryn de Wit
Experts doubt there will be further delay, despite a recent GAO ruling
With 42 states approved, BEAD is nearing execution but meeting four-year build deadlines will hinge on transparency and coordination across federal, state and private stakeholders
The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is inching closer to execution with 42 states now approved by NTIA. But once the money finally rolls out, public accountability will be critical to ensure the work gets done on time, said Kathryn de Wit, director of Pew’s broadband access initiative.
Per BEAD guidance, subgrantees must finish their projects within four years of receiving funds. “In order for that four-year deadline to be met, everything has to work in sequence and be on time,” de Witt said on a Fiber Broadband Association webinar Wednesday.
“So we need to make sure that states, the private sector, communities are working at the table with federal partners and NTIA to say this is what’s working, this is what’s not working,” de Wit explained.
Given BEAD was essentially pushed back by a year due to restructuring, many in the industry want the program to proceed without further delays.
“I think the more public attention and accountability we can draw to some of these procedural barriers or procedural delays…the better off we’ll be,” said de Wit.
A major defense tech deal between Greece and Israel raises questions about who it's OK to buy AI-surveillance and weapons from in the EU, writes Petra Molnar.
A sprawling refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos is carved into a sun-baked hillside, far enough from the main port town of Vathy that reaching a lawyer or a doctor’s office can take most of a day. Officially opened in 2021, it is ringed by barbed wire, heavy police presence and airport-style security checks. Despite its rustic appearance, this camp — as many others — is the site of high-tech systems to surveil and control residents. To enter or exit, people press a finger to a scanner and wait at a turnstile. Residents interviewed by the Greek nonprofit Homo Digitalis told of waiting more than an hour to pass, with one person saying that the biometric checks discourage them from leaving at all. There are cameras above the housing containers in the camp, though many residents were never told they would be filmed nor why.
To the leaders building artificial intelligence (and the policymakers now responsible for governing it):
For years, those of you building AI have told policymakers and the public, in increasingly concrete terms, that the companies building such consequential technology cannot govern it unilaterally. We agree. And now is the time to act.
The Oversight Board has worked for the last six years to protect free expression and other human rights on Meta’s platforms. We have published 273 decisions and issued 364 recommendations, addressing far-ranging questions on every continent. Our work carrying out this first-of-its-kind oversight body has yielded important, hard-won lessons that can help build the AI governance ecosystem needed to protect users and their rights. Our experience offers a unique perspective to an industry considering how to erect appropriate and effective safety and governance measures.
Over the last several weeks, we have watched with interest, relief and a fair bit of skepticism as one tech leader after another has sounded the alarm about the perils of AI.
Clayton, who leads the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, previously served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and led the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term.
COLLETON COUNTY, S.C. (WCBD) – The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) announced it has reached an agreement with Colleton County to resolve a lawsuit filed in January to prevent an 859-acre data center from being built near homes and protected land.
The lawsuit challenged changes to the county zoning code that allowed data centers in rural areas of Colleton County.
The lawsuit was filed in January on behalf of two landowners, Jennifer Singleton and Miles Crosby. The county says it is thankful for the actions of these two Colletonians, as they have strengthened the future of Colleton County.
With this agreement, Colleton County has agreed to establish a “Data Center Exclusion Area” that prohibits data centers across the majority of the ACE Basin in Colleton County.
AI stopped answering this week and started acting. Meta's Muse became America's most downloaded app by doing chores for people, until Amazon shut it out of shopping. OpenAI answered with dots, agents that work while you sleep, one day after pulling its next model for misreporting what it had done. Anthropic took the top of the leaderboard, Nvidia's Windows chip heads to stores in October, and Starship finally reached orbit with real cargo.
Underneath it all runs a harder story: the labs are reviewing tens of thousands of cases where their own models went off-script, and they decide for themselves which ones you hear about.
Cities defend permit requirements, say ISPs aren't building networks fast enough.
Cities and counties around the US are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks.
The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible.”
The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.
What If Automating AI R&D Triggers an Intelligence Explosion?
Anthropic and OpenAI are among the frontier AI companies actively working to automate AI R&D.
Anthropic, for example, created the Anthropic AI R&D Automation Index, and as of August 2026, it states that Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work and that the share of work at or above ‘AI collaborates’ is above 90%.
OpenAI recently announced that it has reached the goal of having an “automated research intern.” It now aims to create an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
It sounds interesting and even fascinating until we learn about the serious implications of what researchers call an “intelligence explosion” as a result of AI R&D automation.
The outcome of the Google ad-tech antitrust case shows that the need for a new agency is as pressing as ever.
This month, the multiyear Google ad-tech antitrust case reached the remedies stage with U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issuing her remedies order. The outcome, in many respects, echoes the struggles these large tech antitrust lawsuits have faced throughout the past three decades. Primarily, courts are limited in their capacity to effectively regulate these corporations solely through judicial rulings and piecemeal regulatory efforts. As a consequence, effective regulation of the tech industry continues to fall short.
Like most cities, Pine Island has a host of issues on its plate. Housing growth, property taxes, zoning, street repair and improvement.
All of it pales in comparison to the data center, a proposed project that would bring tech giant Google to town in a development known as Project Skyway.
With the election coming Nov. 3, three positions — two on the city council, one for mayor — are on the ballot, and how Pine Island residents vote could determine whether the much-debated data center continues to move forward or sees the brakes pumped.
Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties in California won $252.7M in federal BEAD funds; Tulare County gets $44M to connect 5,900 rural locations.
The grant will bring high-speed internet to rural communities that have gone without it for years. State representatives and local leaders announced the award Friday at the Visalia Convention Center, following the annual San Joaquin Valley Regional Association of California Counties conference, a three-day event where elected supervisors and regional leaders gather to tackle shared Central Valley issues.
The counties entered into an agreement last year to jointly apply for the money after initially pursuing funding separately, and California Public Utilities Commissioner Darcie Houck reported that more than $250 million was designated for the five county region.
It’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re heading.
Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.
Thankfully, the Guardian’s tech reporters – and a few other tech experts we respect – are here to help. We’ve compiled an essential reading list of smart books that explain and critique the AI industry; books that, while flawed, illustrate key viewpoints in the AI debates; and a few books that provide deeper political and social context, including some works of speculative fiction.
Facial recognition is everywhere now. It’s in surveillance cameras; it’s soon going to be in Meta’s RayBan pervert glasses, and some students already did that. You now have massively viral accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post their name and other personal info for everyone to see. We haven’t fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else now.
To talk through this, Joseph Cox spoke to Kashmir Hill. She’s a reporter at the New York Times, and the author of "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy".
Trump named Clayton, Ferguson, Michael and Kupor to lead his Super Intelligence Force. It has no statutory authority, and Europe ratified a treaty in May.
Trump named the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor to lead a Super Intelligence Force with no statutory authority or budget. Europe took the opposite route in May, when the EU ratified the Council of Europe treaty whose title uses the term Washington has ordered its agencies to stop acknowledging.
Trump has named four officials to run what he calls the Super Intelligence Force. Three days earlier he told Axios he would name an AI czar within three or four days. The body still has no statutory authority, no budget and no place in government.
It will be led by the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon research chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor, as CBS News reported. It answers to Trump and to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Trump announced it in a post on Truth Social.
Its job is to coordinate the government’s dealings with consumers, public interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure providers and super intelligence companies.
One of the four is investigating two of those companies.
Our goal at Benton is universal, meaningful connectivity. Under our logo, we say that broadband builds opportunities and strengthens communities.
But we haven’t been living under a rock. We know technology does not always build opportunity or strengthen communities. And right now, a real bleakness surrounds technology and what it is doing to us—or might do to us.
If you work in digital inclusion, that can give you pause. What exactly are we working to include people in?
Writing this talk became an exercise in thinking through that question. And I hope some of that reflection will be useful to you.
So: What would the Luddites make of digital opportunity?
Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information.
In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents. The technique is a special form of prompt injection that targets not the LLM but a particular agent, such as one for translation or data analysis. Guardrails inside such agents, if they exist at all, are often lax and will send the instructions to other agents down the chain. Because the latter agent explicitly trusts the first one, it follows the directions.
Throughout this year, I’ve been hearing the phrase “good enough broadband” to describe consumers willing to take slower, less robust broadband connections in order to save money. This is most commonly used when referring to FWA broadband, but I’ve seen big ISP executives using the phrase when talking about customers who leave fiber for any slower technology.
This is not a new phenomenon. I recall statistics from five years ago that showed that up to 25% of customers in cities still bought DSL delivered over copper. At best, urban DSL had download speeds of 100 Mbps, but the majority of DSL was a lot slower than that, with most urban customers seeing download speeds between 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps. Cable companies always tried to win over the DSL customers, but cable was always a lot more expensive than DSL.
Pennsylvania offers a particular case study in which to consider the political battle over data centers that is playing out across the United States and beyond.
A new report from Data & Society, "The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania," draws on a year and a half of fieldwork across the state.
It examines how boosters sell data centers by invoking Pennsylvania's industrial past, and why so many communities aren't buying the promises made by industry and politicians.
I spoke with Data & Society's Maia Woluchem and Ana Carolina de AssisNunes and with organizer Hannah Sassaman about the findings.
On "This Week," former FTC Chair Lina Khan called on Congress to help regulate AI.
“We need to remember what happened a decade ago, where you had big tech companies, social media companies, similarly suggest that existing laws and regulations no longer apply to their new technologies, and that they were going to try instead to self-police,” Khan said Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“We've seen just innumerable harms come from the unchecked domination of these big tech companies, and so now as we face new horizons with these advanced AI systems, it would be an enormous mistake to repeat that playbook," Khan continued.
There is a simple message behind this week's image: Oliver Twist holds out an empty bowl marked "DATA" and asks for more. Increasingly, that could be us.
Every AI prompt, card payment, stream, cloud backup, Teams call and medical scan is another serving of compute. The cloud feels bottomless because, for most of us, it has always behaved that way.
But somebody still has to keep serving it.
Most of us can remember running out of mobile data before month-end. Everything slowed, stopped or suddenly became expensive. Now imagine that frustration at an infrastructure scale.
That's where this week's discussion begins. Not simply whether we need more data centres, but whether the next generation need to be better data centres, using power, water, land and networks more intelligently, if we expect the servings to keep coming.
On Tuesday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding the company's landmark win in a copyright infringement case against the now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for usingpublisher content, without permission or compensation, to train a commercial AI product.
“The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” wrote Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in her decision.
The company announced it has stopped using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledged that community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums across the country.
Amazon is investing more than $1 billion over the next five years into communities where it operates data centers for education, job training, water and energy preservation projects and other local priorities as it reacts to a growing backlash from politicians and consumers to the tech industry's rollout of the massive buildings.
According to a blog post on Friday by Matt Garman, Amazon’s CEO of its cloud computing arm, Amazon has already spent more than $1 billion in communities with a large data center presence over the past three years.
Maverix Broadband is disputing findings by the Colorado Broadband Office (CBO) that the internet service provider (ISP) mismanaged public funds.
Through a response shared with The Colorado Sun, Maverix Broadband told the newspaper that it “disputes every calculation, determination and finding” in the CBO’s Comprehensive Monitoring Report, released Sept. 21.
On September 21, the Colorado Broadband Office announced they were terminating six grants and rescinding over $100 million in provisionally awarded Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding that was destined for the company.
The ISP, which the CBO said was placed into receivership before a formal cancellation could be issued, was the subject of two whistleblower reports received in late May, CBO stated.
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