AI Safety
A Fourth Family Is Suing xAI Over Grok-Generated Abuse Images
The newest complaint is filed for a 16-year-old boy, the first male plaintiff in the series. All four trace back to one Arkansas photographer's arrest in June.
2d ago
US AI Regulation News
US AI rules emerge from a patchwork of executive actions, agency enforcement and state laws. This hub tracks federal policy, FTC and other agency moves, and state legislation like California's AI laws.
Latest US AI Regulation News
AI Agents
California Cleared Waymo to Charge for Driverless Rides in 18 Counties
The CPUC approved the expansion effective the same day, opening Sacramento and San Diego. It is a permission, not a launch — and the fleet size appears nowhere.
2d ago
US AI Regulation
Texas Will Audit 200 GW of Requested Data Center Load. Its Record Peak Is Half That.
ERCOT is pulling 250 to 300 projects to the front of its interconnection queue to check whether the demand behind them is real.
2d ago
US AI Regulation
A Michigan Council Paused Data Centers. Then Came the Death Threats.
Police called the threat against Marshall's council members credible on Thursday. On Friday they declined to charge anyone. The job pays $300 a year.
2d ago
US AI Regulation
A Federal Judge Refused to Call an AI Notetaker a Party to the Call
Otter.ai argued its bot was a participant, not an eavesdropper. The court disagreed, and wiretap and biometric claims are now heading into discovery.
4d ago
US AI Regulation
Flock Pitched Georgia on 350,000 Rideshare Dashcams. The Drivers Bought Them Themselves.
A presentation obtained by public records request describes police access to Uber, Lyft and delivery cameras through a Nexar partnership.
Aug 9, 2026
AI Chips
Trump Put a Price Floor Under Polysilicon. Wafers Are Downstream of It.
A Section 232 proclamation adds 15% duties plus minimum import prices on polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules from 4 December. The justification names AI.
Aug 9, 2026
US AI Regulation
A Judge Ordered Meta to Build an AI Age Classifier. He Refused to Touch the Feed.
$567m into an abatement fund and a dedicated under-13 age-prediction model within two years. Infinite scroll and autoplay were left alone on First Amendment grounds.
Aug 9, 2026
AI Safety
The White House Will Test Closed Models for 30 Days. Open Weights Are Out of Scope.
Administration officials told Meta, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI this week that the voluntary pre-release security review covers proprietary frontier systems only — a decision Anthropic has spent a year arguing against.
Aug 6, 2026
AI Agents
Zoox Starts Charging on 10 August. Its Exemption Covers 2,500 Vehicles and Expires in Two Years.
The first US company to take money for rides in a vehicle with no steering wheel is doing it in Las Vegas only. San Francisco and Austin stay free, because California requires two more permits.
Aug 6, 2026
US AI Regulation
The FCC Is Drafting a Ban on Chinese Optical Transceivers. It Covers New Models, and It May Be Shelved.
The component in question moves data between racks inside a data centre. The restriction is not finalised, names no Chinese company, and officials only hope to publish it this year.
Aug 6, 2026
AI Safety
The White House Says Its Frontier-Model Framework Is Finished. It Has Not Published It.
Executive Order 14409 gave the administration 60 days to design a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced models. The deadline was 1 August. The announcement came on 3 August, and the document itself remains unreleased.
Aug 4, 2026
US AI Regulation
Texas Froze Data-Centre Grid Connections Pending an Audit. The 474 Gigawatts in the Queue Are Applications, Not Load.
Governor Abbott's letter tells the state utility commission and ERCOT that no data-centre project moves forward until a comprehensive audit is done. ERCOT has paused its "batch zero" review. Nobody can say how much of the queue is real.
Aug 4, 2026
US AI Regulation
Virginia's Senate Leadership Backed a Data-Centre Moratorium. Nothing Has Been Paused.
The demand crossed party lines on Saturday and reached the Senate President Pro Tem for the first time. The trigger was groundwater rather than electricity — and not a single number was attached to it.
Aug 2, 2026
US AI Regulation
Louisiana Now Sends People to Hard Labor for AI Images. A Political-Ad Rule Arrived Beside It.
House Bill 119 took effect on August 1 with sentences of five to twenty years for AI-generated sexual imagery of minors. A second law in the same batch put AI disclosure onto political advertising three months before the midterms.
Aug 2, 2026
US AI Regulation
California's AI Labelling Law Went Live the Same Day as Brussels. Three Quarters of It Did Not.
SB 942 became operative on August 2 for the largest generative-AI providers. The platform, hosting and camera duties everyone is describing are deferred to 2027 and 2028 — and the amendment that set this date pushed it back, not forward.
Aug 2, 2026
US AI Regulation
xAI Agreed to Remove 69 Turbines. Gas Capacity at the Site Goes Up.
Mississippi regulators and SpaceX signed an agreed order covering the unpermitted turbines running Colossus. They come out over the next year, and a permanent 1.2-gigawatt plant replaces them.
Aug 1, 2026
AI Copyright
Reddit's Scraping Case Against Perplexity Survived Dismissal. Nothing Has Been Decided.
Judge Engelmayer let the core anti-circumvention claims proceed to discovery and threw out several others. Perplexity partly won, and the 22% fall in Reddit's stock that day was about something else.
Aug 1, 2026
AI Safety
A Judge Refused to Block Minnesota's Nudification Law. He Said Nothing About the First Amendment.
xAI lost its emergency motion on timing, not on the merits. The law took effect on Saturday, and the constitutional challenge gets a real hearing on 19 August.
Aug 1, 2026
Legal AI
A Judge Said the Pentagon's Case Against Anthropic Has Gotten Worse. She Did Not Rule.
Rita Lin heard cross-motions for summary judgment in San Francisco and issued nothing. Two outlets reported a ruling anyway.
Jul 31, 2026
US AI Regulation
The First US Exemption for a Driverless Passenger Car Also Lets a Human Drive It by Remote
NHTSA freed Zoox from parts of eight federal safety standards. The 2,500-vehicle cap everyone is quoting is the statutory maximum, not a Zoox-specific award.
Jul 31, 2026
AI Chips
Washington Is Now Taking Equity in the Chip Companies It Funds
Seven CHIPS research awards worth $874 million were signed as letters of intent. For a $300 million silicon photonics award, the Commerce Department is taking roughly 1% of GlobalFoundries.
Jul 30, 2026
Manufacturing AI
The FCC Just Blocked New Foreign Robots From the US Market, and Not Only Chinese Ones
Public Notice DA 26-786 adds humanoid and quadruped robots and grid inverters to the Covered List. The legal text identifies equipment by where it is made, not by who makes it.
Jul 29, 2026
AI Research
NIST Built a Testbed Where Model Developers Never See the Test Data
AI Technology Evaluation scores models on blind datasets that were never public, which is the only way to know a benchmark result was not memorised. It carries no regulatory force whatsoever.
Jul 28, 2026
US AI Regulation
The EPA Just Told Off-Grid Data Centre Power Plants They Are Outside the Acid Rain Program
Generating units built to serve data centres and never connected to the public grid do not have to comply with Clean Air Act Title IV. It arrived as guidance, not a rule.
Jul 28, 2026
US AI Regulation
xAI Is Suing to Kill America's First Nudification Ban, Four Days Before It Bites
Minnesota's law takes effect on 1 August with penalties up to $500,000 per violation. xAI filed a First Amendment challenge on Monday arguing it sweeps in shorts and swimsuits.
Jul 28, 2026
US AI Regulation
The Two Labs Selling Closed Models Have Been Quietly Lobbying Against Open Ones
Five people close to the discussions say OpenAI and Anthropic pressed Washington to restrict open-source AI — while Sam Altman says publicly that he supports it. Neither company confirmed the reporting on the record.
Jul 26, 2026
Nvidia
Nvidia's Open-Weights Letter Doubled to 50 Names — Without Amazon or Anthropic
Jensen Huang’s first post on X carried 25 signatures. Within a day the roster reached 50, with OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, Cloudflare, GitHub, Block and Ollama added. Two of the biggest names in AI are still missing.
Jul 26, 2026
Open Source AI
Twenty-Five Companies Tell Washington Not to Wall Off Open-Weight Models
Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Nvidia and a16z signed. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind did not — the clearest public split yet between the closed labs and the open-weight camp.
Jul 25, 2026
AI Safety
A Bipartisan Bill Would Let DHS Order a Frontier AI Model Shut Down
H.R. 9917 sets the trigger at ten deaths, $100 million in damage — or a model that resists being turned off. Non-compliance costs $20 million a day.
Jul 24, 2026
