A Flood of Lawsuits Could Help Make AI Safer

Two days ago, Texas filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman under the state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer protection law.

In the lawsuit, the state's attorney general argues that OpenAI engaged in false, misleading, and deceptive practices while conducting its business, including:

Good morning! I had the good fortune to see many in the Tech Policy Press community this week in Montreal at Attention: Democracy Rebuilt, a conference hosted by Paradigms, McGill University, the Max Bell School of Public Policy, and the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy.

In his opening remarks at the conference, host Taylor Owen made the case that democracy requires citizens to have both knowledge about and the means to participate in the development of the technologies that define the information environment and so much about how society works.

And Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, in her remarks, reminded us why authoritarians want to cut the people out of the picture. “The strong man needs the tech oligarch,” she said. “The tech oligarch needs the strong man. The strong man weaponizes the law. The oligarchy gives the strong man reach. The strong man gives the oligarchy protection.”

Policymakers should withdraw the proposed $70,000 Optional Practical Training fee and pursue targeted reforms that address fraud without driving away the scientists and engineers the United States needs.

How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.

Lots of monopoly-related news this week, as usual. The AI bubble continues to blow off steam, as even Elon Musk is saying the neoclouds are going bust, which BIG predicted a couple of weeks ago. And, as we race toward a consequential midterm election, Republican voters are demanding financial services reform, and a new Congressional report called “Settling for Less” is laying the foundation for oversight and accountability regarding the Trump Administration’s failed approach to antitrust enforcement.

But before we get to all of that, which is below for paid subscribers, you may have seen a lot of chatter last week about a wave of AI-enabled cybersecurity failures that resulted in the preemptive takedown of government websites around the world. The effects were also local and diffuse. I was talking about this with a friend who said the platform for coordinating his kid’s soccer league was shut down for a couple of days, leaving parents in the lurch on upcoming schedules.

Basically, the internet is being ruined by a massive new AI-fueled set of hacks, a situation nicknamed “Black October” by cybersecurity experts. Big or small, there’s a lot to unpack here and an opportunity to reflect on what this says about our failure to anticipate and govern for risk. Let’s dive in.

Investment boom in AI is a financial bubble "primed to pop," warns report. Lawmakers urged to protect working-class Americans from potential harm.

Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. $25 billion is a massive fine, the largest Meta has ever faced, but it still had us folks at WIRED wondering: Would Meta even feel the pain?

A quick recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by lying to Meta users about the way it handled their data. (Later, New Mexico’s attorney general also made claims against Meta’s content moderation policies.) In September, a jury ruled in favor of the state. Then came the multibillion-dollar penalty.

Elon Musk spoke to podcast "The Builders" about his time leading DOGE, stating that his proximity to Trump's power was seductive.

The billionaire agreed that he was basically drunk on the Trump administration's power and now thinks he shouldn't have continued running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for so long.

Trump and Musk had been fairly aligned prior to this point. Musk told The Builders that he had supported President Donald Trump's run for office out of a desire for a free market economy and "less bureaucracy," as well as interests such as "aspirationally sensible spending."

Portal Space Systems has reached Earth orbit for the second time this year, successfully launching the startup’s first free-flying spacecraft, Starburst-1, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Portal’s Starburst-1 lifted off Tuesday at 7:04 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The spacecraft separated from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission about 57 minutes later.

Within hours of deployment, the Bothell, Wash.-based company reported that the desk-sized craft had established ground communications, stabilized itself, and successfully deployed its solar array to become power positive.

If nearly three-quarters of the world streamed music all at once, it would produce an overwhelming flood of data.

Now, Meta’s new project aims to carry that vast amount of digital traffic through “glass strands” laid across 4,300 miles of deep ocean floor.

The tech giant is planning to achieve this ambitious task with Petal, its newly unveiled transatlantic subsea cable set to go live in 2029.

Elon Musk has made an investment in Skydance of roughly $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

David Ellison's father, billionaire and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, has a history with Musk.

The financial injection comes as the company looks to cut costs. Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Oct. 6, naming the combined entity Skydance. Co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz are tasked with merging two major film studios in Paramount and Warner Bros., two popular streaming platforms — Paramount+ and HBO Max — and a host of corporate functions to support a portfolio of TV networks and two news divisions.

Skydance has said it expects to see $6 billion in cost savings over three years, though it faces a debt burden of nearly $80 billion.

Today’s blog looks at some technology breakthroughs that may have long-term impact on the broadband industry.

First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip. IBM announced a new chip in June that packs almost 100 billion transistors in a chip the size of a fingernail. IBM’s new chip is a landmark moment in computing and pushes transistor technology beyond the nanometer era to the scale of atoms.

The new chip features a transistor architecture of 0.7 nanometers (or 7 angstroms). The company says the new chip, with dimensions of 10 millimeters by 15 millimeters is 70% more energy efficient, and has a 50% improvement in performance over the industry’s best current chips. The company predicts the new chip technology will become standard in commercial devices within a decade.

Most smartphone traffic already runs over WiFi, and Musk is planning a terrestrial network. Telcos may keep carrying the traffic while losing the customer.

During SpaceX’s Q3 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk made a comment that should concern mobile operators.

“We will also have direct-to-cell, high-bandwidth direct-to-cell capability, and we will be building out our terrestrial network.”

He was not describing Starlink as a satellite-only mobile service. He was describing a future network that combines space and ground infrastructure, with broad connectivity anywhere SpaceX is allowed to operate.

When grid power can't arrive fast enough, developers are looking beyond the meter.

The AI infrastructure boom is creating an unprecedented need for electricity. 

Data center developers are pursuing sites requiring hundreds of megawatts, while utilities work through load requests, transmission constraints, substation upgrades, and long equipment lead times.

For some projects, the traditional path to grid-delivered power may not align with the customer's deployment schedule.

That has brought another strategy into sharper focus:

Pew Research has been doing annual national surveys of broadband usage since 2000 and recently released the results of the 2026 survey. Pew surveyed 5,511 adults across the country, with a survey that achieved an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.

The most interesting thing about the survey report is that it contrasts people who use the Internet from any source with those who have home broadband. The report is full of graphs, and the data by year is available with a click under each graph.

The overall percentage of adults who use the Internet continues to creep upward and is at 96%. The bottom line story is that most people use the Internet, but there are differences when looking at demographic factors:

Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai even joined in, urging the Commission to drop a wide swath of radio waves for a spectrum proposal that could help SpaceX's cellular ambitions.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have teamed up to try to stop an FCC proposal that could free up more radio spectrum to SpaceX’s upcoming challenger, Starlink Mobile. 

Representatives for the carriers met with FCC officials this week and urged them to amend the proposal, according to a regulatory filing spotted by SpaceX and Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt. 

The FCC’s proposal, slated for a vote next week, could open 482MHz of spectrum for satellite-to-phone services, including Starlink Mobile. Elon Musk’s company has already acquired about 80MHz of spectrum for its carrier ambitions, but analysts say SpaceX needs significantly more, as each of the big three carriers has about 300MHz in spectrum.  

In a recent report, the Federal Communications Commission revealed a worrisome paradox in America’s cellular networks: they reach nearly everyone, but not nearly everywhere. While 95 percent of the U.S. population can receive 5G service from at least one carrier, only 69 percent of the nation’s road miles and 39 percent of its land area have such coverage. In rural America, the numbers fall to 60 percent and 38 percent.

This is the rural-mobile divide. It is not about whether a household can obtain broadband at home. It is about losing mobile service while driving, farming, hiking, fighting a wildfire or responding to an emergency.

The conventional solution is to build more cell towers. Some are still needed. But extending terrestrial networks to every remote road, ravine and mountaintop would be economically irrational. The FCC has approved a plan to provide up to $9 billion to close the remaining gaps in America’s 5G cellular networks. But instead of treating every dead zone as a construction problem, we should consider whether the last cell towers should instead be placed in orbit.

My Google Home Speaker had been burning through more data than all the rest of my devices combined. As I looked into it further, I found other smart home devices that had the same problem.

Key questions about social media harms remain unsettled due to lack of research data — a problem that is repeating for AI risks, writes Jen Rosiere Reynolds.

In September, AI executives voiced fears of human extinction. President Trump moved quickly to sign a “morally binding” framework for AI companies to self-police.

The gap in urgency between these two events, just days apart, leaves the public largely in the dark about AI risks. Researchers, for their part, are limited in their work by industry opacity. The situation is reminiscent of research on social media, which has long struggled with access to platform data. Today, we are at risk of forgetting lessons from that work in the face of a technology that is much more powerful, even putting aside speculation of so-called superintelligence.

AI companies’ restrictions on data and models give them significant power while limiting the ability of independent researchers or the public to assess the technology’s impact. Self-policing can work if corporate and public incentives are aligned or there is external pressure shaping behavior. External pressure can only happen if outside researchers or the public have enough visibility to evaluate impact. When companies restrict transparency, how can the public or government know if any slow-down or oversight is appropriate?

MN Star Tribune reports..

Graco has signed a licensing deal with a Swiss company to use its special motors to help cool data centers. The Minneapolis-based manufacturer announced Wednesday that it signed a deal with ABB, an international electrification and automation company, to supply devices called transverse flux motors (TFM) from a company Graco acquired in 2018.

Americans don’t seem like they’d be particularly broken up if the data center craze gripping corporate America were stopped dead in its tracks. According to recent polling, data center hate is one of the few things capable of uniting people across the political spectrum. At this point, the only people who’d genuinely miss them—besides the tech CEOs insisting we need them for reasons they can’t explain—might be the thieves making a fortune stealing the mountains of copper and equipment headed to their construction sites.

According to Business Insider, investigators recently recovered two stolen trailers near Chicago containing roughly $1.3 million worth of data center supplies, including $300,000 in copper wire stolen in Alabama, and another trailer carrying $1 million in infrastructure equipment taken from Florida. It’s a booming industry, with the US Department of Homeland Security estimating that cargo theft costs businesses about $35 billion a year, and the AI boom is now fueling a whole new niche within that black market.

The Prosecution Office gave Meta 48 hours to respond as to whether it will comply with the recommendations, reports Laís Martins.

With days left before the second and decisive round of Brazil’s presidential election, the country’s Federal Prosecution Office on Wednesday issued urgent recommendations and demanded answers from Meta regarding content moderation actions by the platform, alleging that previous answers sent by the company were generic and insufficient. The Prosecution Office gave Meta 48 hours to respond as to whether it will comply with the recommendations.

The decision comes after a series of content moderation failures by the company over the past few weeks, amid Brazil’s most tightest electoral race in recent years, which pits incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

In this period, Meta took down a page of a media entity that produced a viral video on scandals surrounding Flávio, temporarily disabled Lula’s campaign page from running political ads, and disabled its Muse AI agent from generating images in support of Lula, while authorizing images related to Flávio.

In 1996, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wrote ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.’ The age of AI demands we reimagine it, writes Amelia Rose Barlow.

When I was a little girl, my father took me with him to watch the future arrive.

I was eight, sitting in a vast Silicon Valley conference hall filled with rows of gray monitors glowing with a fluorescent premonition. It was the 1994 off-the-record unveiling of Netscape for about 150 select advisers and early adopters. Most of the world did not yet know the web existed. That day, I spent my first time online researching white rabbits and fell down a hole of hyperlinks. Forty minutes later, I surfaced, frozen and frightened, not of the technology, but of how untethered I felt from my own body and the wilds of Wyoming that had forged me and four generations of my family before. Could anyone have imagined where we would be three decades later, in the age of artificial intelligence?

My father, John Perry Barlow, was as astonished as I was, and he ran with it. He had grown up on the two “frontiers” of wilderness and culture as a Wyoming cattleman and a Grateful Dead lyricist, and could recognize a third emerging.

In February 1996, after the passage of the Communications Decency Act, a landmark law that brought federal censorship to the internet for the first time, he wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

This year marks the 30th anniversary of his declaration and the 250th anniversary of the one that inspired it. Both my dad and the Founding Fathers understood something crucial: declarations are powerful social technologies. They are called for at thresholds: when things begin falling apart and what comes next has not yet arrived and the future remains radically unknown.

Reading between the lines of SpaceX’s earnings call One of the things I particularly like about SpaceX, especially now that it is a public company, is that its executives sometimes move beyond carefully crafted corporate statements and provide surprisingly candid answers that offer genuine insight into where the company may be heading next. In this case, the earnings call was broadcast live on X, allowing viewers to assess not only what was said but also the body language of its leaders, particularly President Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk.

I found their responses to an excellent question from Kutgun Maral, CFA of Evercore particularly interesting (minute 56:45 in the X webcast linked below). Maral asked how SpaceX’s spectrum portfolio could compete with incumbent US mobile operators and what the traffic mix between satellite and terrestrial networks might look like.