Voters are anxious about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and key players across the political spectrum have started to notice. 

Now, the Working Families Party has rolled out a slate of policy proposals for the midterms, backed by more than two dozen Democratic candidates and representatives, that aims to address that anxiety. Their plan to counter AI-related job losses? Not a direct cash dividend, but a program seeking to place Americans in union jobs. 

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that over half of Americans believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 70 percent think that broad AI adoption will decrease the overall number of available jobs. 

With the midterms coming up, corporations and politicians are looking to address these fears. This month, OpenAI proposed creating a “public wealth fund” that would “provide every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.”

Yesterday, New York Assemblyman Alex Bores proposed a taxation framework designed to redistribute wealth from major AI corporations to people whose jobs might be displaced by their products, calling it an “AI dividend.” 

The Working Families Party, meanwhile, is proposing what looks like another Green New Deal-style jobs program to solve the same problem. 

Paramount Skydance is in "advanced talks" with California Attorney General Rob Bonta to settle the 12-state antitrust suit that's holding up its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the WSJ reported.

The two sides have discussed Paramount potentially agreeing to run Warner Bros. studio separately for some period of time, per the Wall Street Journal.

However, Bonta has previously said that running the two companies separately — but under common ownership — would be a mere “behavioral” remedy, and that he is looking for a structural remedy that would entail separate ownership.

Scaleout deploys decentralized AI-driven learning to military bases and drones.

As European militaries adapt to the use of AI and drones in modern warfare, a NATO-backed startup is helping to deploy AI-driven target detection and selection that can run on small drones for surveillance and attack missions.

The company, Scaleout Systems, was originally founded by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2018, and initially focused on training and deploying machine learning models directly on the hardware available in commercial trucks and other vehicles. But once Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the company pivoted toward defense applications.

“With the war in Ukraine and a shifting world, we realized that this technology can be very important to operationalize edge data and sensor data for machine learning to make sure that NATO allies have found that strategic advantage,” Andreas Hellander, cofounder and CEO of Scaleout Systems, told Ars.

Instead of using frontier AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic, Scaleout is harnessing leaner ones, such as machine learning models that can perform computer vision tasks on the hardware of drones or computers used at forward bases. “They need to fit on forward-deployed hardware and edge hardware, which can vary quite a bit from small embedded devices to quite powerful edge workstations,” Hellander said.

OpenAI isn’t open.

The trillion-dollar artificial-intelligence firm has hidden its plans for local data centers behind a seemingly impenetrable wall of nondisclosure agreements and secrecy.

And it’s not alone. Other leading AI companies — including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI — routinely require local and state officials to sign strict NDAs before discussing data-center impacts to local infrastructure and natural resources. The tech giants’ use of NDAs has become the latest flashpoint over data-center development in communities across the United States.

Often negotiated between government officials and the shell companies that build data centers, the NDAs are crafted to conceal the identity of the tech giants funding these sprawling energy-and-water-sucking complexes — allowing billionaire-owned tech firms to operate in the shadows.

For a time, many in the media portrayed data centers as a boon to local communities, bringing jobs and investment into regions that have fallen on hard times. But over the past year, that tale has turned. That’s due in part to the work of local independent news outlets that have engaged with local activists, organizers, community members and experts to expose the dangerous and often-illegal practices driving data-center development.

In Wisconsin, Wisconsin Watch has led much of this vital work. The outlet is a scrappy and independent nonprofit-news service dedicated to strengthening communities through engaged local journalism. 

Today’s blog talks about volunteerism in the broadband/telecom industry. I was prompted to write the blog when a friend sent me the picture to the right of cookbooks published as a fundraiser by the Louisiana Chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America. The Telephone Volunteers was a non-profit created by AT&T in 1911, first led by Theodore Vail, the famous AT&T president who oversaw the big growth of the company. The organization claims 800,000 members today. The Pioneers are organized into state and local chapters that tackle a wide range of local charitable causes. When I worked at Southwestern Bell, they gave employees one day off each year to participate in a non-profit activity organized by the Telephone Pioneers.

I know a lot of readers of this blog work for non-profits, and I know a number of people who donate time to broadband-related charitable causes. I’m involved in two non-profits in North Carolina, but this blog is not about me, but about the idea of using our accumulated industry knowledge to give back to the community.

Half of workers have touched AI. Half of businesses pay for it. One in six firms makes anything with it, and one in seven workers uses it every day. All four numbers are true.

Every AI adoption headline this year has been accurate, and almost none of them measure the same thing. Gallup counts people who touched it. Ramp counts businesses that paid for it. The Census Bureau counts firms that produce something with it. Only one survey counts the daily habit, and that number is a fraction of the others. Line the four up and the "50%" story turns into a ladder with a steep drop between the second rung and the third, and the drop is where most of the 2026 budget went.

1. 52% of U.S. employees have used AI at work this year, and 15% use it daily, according to Gallup's second-quarter survey of 22,573 workers. Same survey, same quarter: the touch rate is three and a half times the habit rate.
2. Half of businesses pay for AI. About one in five produces with it. Ramp's card and bill-pay data crossed 50.4% of businesses paying for AI in March, while the Census Bureau's firm-level research finds 18% of firms using AI to produce goods or services, and 65% of the firms whose workers use it keep it to three or fewer tasks.
3. The spend is bimodal, not average. Ramp's top 1% of firms spend $7,450 per employee per month on AI; the median firm spends $11.38, roughly 650 times less. Even the top tier's spend fell 9.7% in August, which Ramp reads as vacation season, not retreat.

The distance between "bought it" and "depend on it" is an adoption problem, not a capability problem. The firms that close that distance inside their own walls will collect the returns the averages keep promising everyone else.

Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reason. That's what makes this sting, says Jack Raynor, president of NetExperience.

This month, Cambium Networks eliminated 53.6% of its global workforce and placed its UK subsidiary into administration, according to the company’s own SEC filing.

Administrators are now searching for buyers for parts of the business, and the company has said it expects the remaining entities to be wound down. For the partners, resellers, and operators who built businesses on Cambium hardware, the practical questions are immediate. Who supports the deployed base? Where do firmware and security patches come from? What happens to margin if a forced re-platform lands on their own timeline and their own budget?

There’s no satisfaction in watching this play out. Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reasons: competitive pricing, solid performance, and a workable margin. That’s what makes this sting: it wasn’t a bad decision. It’s the risk that comes standard with any single-vendor architecture, regardless of which vendor is chosen.

We absolutely need to hold AI companies liable for the damage they cause. I wrote about this in my book Taming Silicon Valley, pointing to what many others have long written about it. I am in full agreement with Senator Josh Hawley on this tweet from earlier today, too:

But I am here today to call attention to a growing trend: people on the technolibertarian right calling for liability in AI (which is totally reasonable), but then using that as if it were an argument against regulation.

Take this interview with Joe Lonsdale, amplified last night by David Sacks,

How the “corruption of inaction” in both parties is helping AI oligarchs avoid accountability and endanger the world.

Political corruption is often perceived as transactional: Cash flows to a politician, who then proactively does something for a donor. But there is an equally pervasive kind of corruption that’s more difficult to see, because it isn’t necessarily in campaign finance reports that document the exchange of money. 

It is a corruption of inaction — and it may end up being the central force in our government’s decision to ignore the purported threat of tech billionaires’ artificial intelligence murdering us all.

“Corruption of inaction” is a term invoked by Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in our final episode of The Lever’s new season of Master Plan — and you can see that stealthy form of corruption in both parties’ reaction to apocalyptic new warnings about AI’s dangers.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” issued an ominous warning: Congress may only have one year left to implement safeguards on artificial intelligence before it loses control of it.

Flock deserves the heat it’s getting, but switching to another provider won’t necessarily improve anything.

There’s a nationwide rebellion against license plate readers underway, and the company Flock is the focus. That’s natural, because the company has “essentially dominated license plate recognition across the United States,” as industry analyst IPVM put it. But Flock is far from the only vendor, and with Flock rightly receiving most of the heat, it’s important to realize that its competitors aren’t so great either, and that simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company’s surveillance won’t necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology.

We have covered Flock in depth, including in this 2022 white paper and in numerous blog posts since. A pioneer of centralizing ALPR data through the cloud, the company runs a vast “National Lookup” searchable nationwide database of license plate and other photographic data of vehicles — an inherently authoritarian infrastructure that has, among other things, already been used to help ICE in its human rights-violating deportation drive, and to try to track and investigate a Texas woman who had an abortion.

Aside from being dominant in the domestic police ALPR market, Flock is also alienating many communities because of its lack of truthfulness and erratic and immature public statements.

The "AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act" has passed the U.S. House of Representatives.

The day is coming closer when new passenger vehicles sold in the United States would have to include AM radio.

The “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act” has passed the U.S. House of Representatives. It marks a major advance in a multi-year push by broadcasters who have worried about carmakers removing AM radio reception from vehicles, electric and otherwise.

Broadcasters, Christian organizations and advocates for older Americans are among those welcoming the vote.

The Searchlight Institute has pushed Democrats toward lighter regulation of AI and data centers while keeping quiet about board ties to Simone Coxe, whose family fortune is linked to Nvidia.

The previously undisclosed board of an ascendant DC think tank pushing Democrats to the center includes a Democratic Party megadonor with a stake in artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia, which could benefit from the organization’s efforts to defend data center build-outs and limit AI regulation.

The Lever exclusively reports that philanthropist Simone Coxe — whose multibillion-dollar fortune largely comes from her venture capitalist husband’s investments in Nvidia — sits on the board of the Searchlight Institute, a new center-left DC think tank. Nvidia is heavily invested in data center expansion.

Coxe, also the cofounder of and director at California news organization CalMatters and a prolific Democratic donor, is listed as a director of the Searchlight Institute in the organization’s DC incorporation documents. The think tank has not disclosed its association with Coxe or her husband, Tench Coxe.

New Delhi [India], September 19 (ANI): Leading artificial intelligence companies Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google face allegations of collusion after calls emerged for a coordinated slowdown in AI development, according to a civil lawsuit filed in a United States federal court on Friday.

According to a news report by Politico, the complaint filed in the Northern District Court of California, claims that public statements made earlier this month amounted to an illegal business agreement between competitors under US antitrust law. The matter began with Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei issuing a public plea for "industry-wide coordination" to "pace the frontier" of artificial intelligence advancement.

The call drew prompt agreement from SpaceXAI head Elon Musk, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. The legal filing alleges that this collective agreement among industry rivals violates the Sherman Act by forming an unlawful pact to restrict competition.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of four plaintiffs, including lawyer Cheyenne Hunt, Florida attorneys Charles Buist and Nick Spetsas, and California resident Christine Bullock. In the complaint, the plaintiffs signalled that they intend to seek class-action status on behalf of other individuals impacted by any corporate decisions to slow down development.

Nick Rowley, one of the lawyers who filed the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs, stated that the action seeks to stop private arrangements from sidelining regulatory oversight.

It wasn’t so long ago that when a scary new technology burst onto the scene and raised uncomfortable new social questions, lawmakers knew just what to do: call their in-house tech think tank to get some perspective.

In 1974, Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan advisory body that provided independent analysis of new scientific and technological issues, from acid rain to polygraph test accuracy. The OTA made sure that if lawmakers were curious about a nascent technology, they had a good source of information besides the industry itself. It was educational, nonideological, and a resounding success.

This, of course, infuriated the conservative movement. As part of the 1994 “Contract with America,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich shuttered the OTA the following year, striking a crucial blow for ignorance, bias, and deference to private industry. Today, six of the largest technology companies collectively employ one lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress. Layer on the gutting of local newsrooms due to a Google- and Meta-dominated ad market, plus a handful of legacy outlets now reshaped by tech billionaires with their own agendas, and Congress has very few trustworthy sources of information.

Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.

Over the last few weeks, a panic over the possibility of dangerous consequences from artificial intelligence has swept through elite media and politics. I haven’t seen anything like this since the Covid moment, and before that the 2008 financial crisis, the pre-Iraq War debate period, and the few months after 9/11. The fear is thick, and real. And the one solid demand, seemingly from every quarter, is that We Must Regulate This Technology.

The most common solution is to impose some form of safety standards, akin to the Food and Drug Administration, but for large language models. That’s something former Congressional candidate Alex Bores believes, and he’s raised $30 million in just a few months to launch a political organization around it. That’s where Bernie Sanders is, and Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are seeking something similar. Others analogize the problem to large banks, calling for a bank supervisory regime. Some want a total pause on any AI development.

Many of these ideas are vague and sometimes not administrable, with undefined terms. But there’s nothing wrong with having a basket of ideas. That said, there’s something very weird about this whole situation. And that is, we already have a set of regulators at a Federal and state level with a mandate to look at industrial practices.

Amazon Web Services didn’t design its data centers to withstand war, and now the company admits it can’t recover what’s been lost.

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.

Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.

The bipartisan revolution against automated license plate readers suggests Americans have not entirely lost their rebellious spirit.

A grassroots revolt against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has gained momentum across the United States.

ALPRs are AI-powered cameras that capture images of all passing vehicles. The camera systems turn details into datapoints searchable by anyone with access to the information.

Today, there are more than 130,000 ALPRs on U.S. streets. And more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use cameras produced by a single manufacturer, Flock Safety, which says its cameras have helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest criminals and reduce crime.

But some members of those police departments have abused the data gathered by ALPRs. A police officer in Kansas was sentenced to 18 months probabtion in April 2023 for using Flock camera to stalk his estranged wife. A Florida police officer was fired and arrested in March 2026 for using data gathered by ALPRs to stalk a woman he had previously harassed on a TV set. And activists filed a lawsuit against California police departments in October 2021 for illegally sharing information collected from ALPRs with out-of-state and federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Due to public outcry, cities across the U.S. have rejected and canceled contracts with Flock. In September 2026, Florida’s Department of Transportation revoked permits for ALPRs on its highway system.

SpaceX says your phone will get a 5G-like experience from space by 2028. Brilliant engineering, or is somebody smoking something?

A few days ago, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen made a statement that should make anyone in mobile pay attention. Speaking at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference, he said SpaceX expects to switch on a “full 5G quality service” directly to smartphones in the first half of 2028. Not emergency texting. Not a few optimized apps when you are stuck in the mountains. Something that should actually feel like mobile broadband.

And this was not a random comment from Elon Musk. Earlier this year, Starlink SVP Michael Nicolls said the next generation of Starlink Mobile should, in the right conditions, “look and feel like you’re connected to a high-performing 5G terrestrial network.” SpaceX is talking about more than 100 Gbps of downlink capacity per V2 Mobile satellite and peak speeds of up to 150 Mbps directly to a normal smartphone.

That sounds almost ridiculous when you think about the physics. 

Opposition to data centers and Flock cameras tells us something important about why normalization isn’t inevitable, write Evan Selinger and Divya Ramjee.

Why are so many people across the political spectrum resisting AI-powering data centers and Flock’s network of AI-infused surveillance cameras? The national movement—lawsuits, legislative lobbying, protests, and sabotage—is striking because Americans have already ceded so much privacy and autonomy to tech companies. We largely complain and shrug from one techlash to the next, while increasingly invasive technologies are normalized.

The answer is salience. Data centers have been around for decades, and privacy scholars and activists have long warned about the dangers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and community surveillance cameras. But until now, neither had the heightened level of visibility that makes people less willing to tolerate their harms. Salience is the driving force behind data center construction projects getting delayed, paused, and banned; Flock cameras being vandalized; and municipal and agency contracts with Flock being canceled or not renewed.

Members of the commission received outsized financial support that seems intended to shape the party’s policy response.

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) took to ABC’s Sunday morning show to assure the public that the Democratic Party is taking strong measures to combat the AI Doomsday threat roiling the country. His prime example: a Democratic House commission on artificial intelligence stacked with lawmakers who’ve received a bonanza in campaign funding from Big Tech.

In the interview, Jeffries said the purpose of the Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, convened last December, was to “evaluate the steps that needed to be done and then present an aggressive framework … so that Congress can act.”

But according to a review of campaign finance records by The Lever, that five-person commission is filled with Democrats who have received outsized financial support this election cycle from AI-linked super PACs, executives, and investors.

The spending seems intended to shape the party’s policy response to AI, particularly if Democrats win a majority in November.

“If it was tone deaf in December to think that the favorite Democrats of tech oligarchs should lead the way on the biggest issue in our political economy, it is a failure of each and every one of the five senses to retain those people in a year of ever increasing anger at data centers and alarm about the good faith of the industry,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of watchdog group Revolving Door Project, which criticized Jeffries’ appointments to the commission last year because of the members’ longstanding record of deference to Silicon Valley.