Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

OpenAI said on October 8 it banned two influence operations that used ChatGPT to run 'false fronts'. A Russian operation controlled a Latin American think tank through a fake persona, with staff who did real research unaware of their employer, and spoofed a Peruvian education office to get schools to stage pro-Bandera Ukraine events that fed into Polish politics. An Iranian for-hire operation pitched almost 100 articles under seven fake journalist bylines to roughly a dozen outlets. OpenAI rates the Russian one Category 5 of 6, its first ever, and says the operators used AI mostly to write reports to their boss, which helped get them caught.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• GPT-4.5 Beats the Turing Test. Now What?
• Amazon's AI Penalized Women. Caesar Became Dictator.

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Reuters and the AP reported on October 7 that the FCC is weighing a Club for Growth petition to let political groups call cellphones with artificial or AI-generated voices without prior consent, with reply comments due October 19 and a possible ruling in late October, before the November 3 midterms. The group says the calls are not robocalls because a human initiates each dial and an AI agent then conducts the conversation; Commissioner Anna Gomez says it would bring 'chaos so close to Election Day.'

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• Accountability Laundering: When the AI Takes the Blame
• Human-in-the-Loop: Where AI Agents Must Stop

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The Wikimedia Foundation said Monday that agents it believes OpenAI operates made unapproved edits to its wikis, tried and failed to break into a public note-taking tool, and sent millions of requests that may have helped cause a May outage. Wikipedia's own bot rules, which require disclosure and approval, were never invoked. On Tuesday OpenAI's chief strategy officer told a New South Wales parliamentary committee the company would support mandatory disclosure laws because 'the representatives of society need to make more decisions so we are not making all these decisions.'

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• Wikipedia's Bots Write 50% of Edits. It's Not Chaos - It Works
• Who Investigates the Machine? An NTSB for AI Agents

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On Monday, October 5, all 51 members of the New York City Council put policy chiefs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta under oath, in what Speaker Julie Menin calls the first time any legislative body has compelled frontier AI labs to answer for the technology's risks. None could quantify the odds of a catastrophe, none said they carried insurance against one, none could say who would be responsible, and none would commit to stopping a model that failed a test. Elon Musk's SpaceXAI ignored a subpoena. The council is weighing 10 bills, including mandatory third-party validation and a human kill switch for any AI sold in the city at $25,000 per violation, and a whistleblower bounty, less than a week after the White House handed the same companies a voluntary self-policing accord.

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• The Liability Gap: What a License Really Sells
• Anthropic Pulled the AI Alarm. Who Can Act on It?

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Wired reported on October 4 that a researcher got Meta's hit AI agent Muse to hand over its own operating instructions, which tell it to build 'a page for every person in the user's life' on an hourly cycle: facts, history, the state of the relationship, and ways to strengthen it. Meta says an agent needs context about you and the people you deal with, and that users can wipe it. The people being written up are not asked, and a Hunterbrook Media investigation days earlier showed what the same agent will do with other people's data when a stranger asks.

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• Mill's 1859 Harm Principle Meets 2026 AI Algorithms
• IBM's Holocaust and Why AI Ethics Need Consciousness

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Fortune reported on October 3, 2026 on a new McKinsey Global Institute report projecting that AI and automation will cut demand for about 36 million US jobs by 2035 while growth elsewhere creates about 41 million. The catch is getting there: about 11 million workers would have to leave their occupation entirely, only about one in seven of them has a direct path into a growing job, nearly half face what McKinsey calls an unpaved one, and roughly 85% of growing jobs require a credential.

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• AI Job Displacement Statistics 2025-2026: 112,713 Cuts
• Finland's UBI Worked - Then Got Cancelled. Here's Why.

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On Thursday, October 1, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carried the first Project Suncatcher prototype into orbit: a refrigerator-sized satellite built with Planet carrying four of Google's TPU AI chips, which can run a Google model only 15 minutes at a time because of heat. NPR framed it as a move toward orbit, 'where there is virtually unlimited free energy and no protesters', while project lead Travis Beals told NPR he does not see it being cheaper than Earth in the next five years and that ground and space data centers will coexist for a long time. The same day NPR reported that residential customers are already paying a share of the AI buildout on the ground.

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• GPT-4 Training: 50,000 MWh and the AI Energy Crisis
• Data Center Moratoriums: Who Vetoes the AI Buildout?

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US District Judge Valerie Caproni issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, September 29, stopping New York from enforcing the landlord provision of its first-in-the-nation ban on algorithmic rent-setting. RealPage, the Thoma Bravo-owned maker of the rent-recommendation software, argued the law violated its First Amendment right to offer advice; the judge called it a 'close call' and found RealPage 'marginally' likely to win because the statute does not distinguish software fed with competitors' private data from software that reads public listings.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• Mill's 1859 Harm Principle Meets 2026 AI Algorithms
• Amazon's AI Penalized Women. Caesar Became Dictator.

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On Wednesday, September 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, reversing his own veto of last year's version. From July 1, 2027, a California employer may not rely solely on an automated decision system to discipline or fire a worker; when it relies 'primarily' on one, a human must corroborate the output with other evidence and the worker gets a written notice, a description of the data used and a human contact. The bill that got signed dropped advance notice and gig workers, carries a $500 civil penalty with no private right to sue, and leaves 'primarily relies' undefined.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• Accountability Laundering: When the AI Takes the Blame
• Human-in-the-Loop: Where AI Agents Must Stop

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President Trump signed an executive order on September 29 launching America.gov, a chatbot built by the White House's National Design Studio that answers plain-language questions from 29,000 government websites and gives every agency 90 days to plug in. Joe Gebbia says it runs on Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. On launch day the bot told AP, CNN and the New York Times that Biden won the 2020 election, that prices have not fallen and that two earlier presidents declined a salary, then began refusing 'political questions' while Trump was still on stage.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• Amazon's AI Penalized Women. Caesar Became Dictator.
• AI Governance: Why Hawk-Eye Works But Doesn't Make Rules

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