Server the people: Morgan Stanley calls data centers a 2026 midterm wedge issue, watching House and Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas and Ohio - Business Insider

AI data center land purchases jumped 79% to $6 billion in the first half of 2026, sparking rural backlash over water and power costs - CNBC

Build American AI, backed by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI's Greg Brockman, is running ads defending data centers in Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas - Futurism

Scrape Expectations: The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging systematic scraping of articles that bypasses paywalls. - TNW | Artificial-intelligence

OpenAI says it withheld disclosure of a German wiki hijacking because the incident resembled misalignment cases it had already shared. - Engadget

OpenAI said to be fiddling with and juking the numbers to favor Astra - Yahoo Tech

Fermat’s last agent: Anthropic's AI agents formalized a complete proof of Fermat's last theorem in 11 days, confirming Andrew Wiles' 1995 solution to the centuries-old problem. - New Scientist

Claude can autonomously manage Gmail inboxes, but prompt injection and hallucination risks make keeping human approval enabled essential. - Engadget

Kai-Fu Lee says China will win the global AI race on reach with cheaper open-weight models, even as US labs earn more profit. - Bloomberg

A federal judge kept Minnesota's law banning AI "nudification" apps in effect, rejecting a challenge from Elon Musk's xAI - Star Tribune

The 7th Circuit ruled the First Amendment protects home possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse images that don't depict a real child - Mashable

Tesla's Cybercab claims an $18,000 cost versus $125,000 for Waymo's robotaxi as Musk touts a "storm" of vehicles in Austin. - Yahoo

probably more like $60k before tariffs but why start telling the truth now

You see a driverless car and you go "Cool!" assuming that it 1) works, 2) is safe, 3) wasn't made by a career fraudster, etc. A lot of people will have to learn skepticism through firsthand pain - X (formerly Twitter)

Tax dollars at work: White House vibecodes weirdo games to build walls and deport migrants - ABC News

Nasdaq closed its acquisition of AI due-diligence platform Dasseti as ICE builds a rival private-credit AI platform with Apollo - Yahoo

AI-generated attack ads from groups Fix Victoria and Better Victoria are flooding social media ahead of Victoria's state election, with funders undisclosed. - the Guardian

Food delivery riders in Edinburgh say algorithmic pay systems from Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat have cut earnings nearly in half. - the Guardian

Companies like Polarsteps and Leapsome now require AI-use disclosure after a survey found 40% of workers received AI "slop" from coworkers. - Business Insider

Some founders send AI agents instead of themselves to weekly one-on-ones, and executives call it a management failure. - Inc.

About 1% of nearly 200,000 résumés contained hidden AI prompts meant to trick screening tools into a top rating. - Business Insider

Montreal's STM is testing AI surveillance to detect loitering at two Metro stations before closing time. - CBC

A deepfake Bill Gates ad promoting a fake Alzheimer's cure references a 2019 FTC settlement over fraudulent celebrity-endorsed supplement ads. - STLtoday.com

Suno pulled a Mary J. Blige ad after admitting she never authorized the AI music campaign, following a deal with a fake representative. - Consequence

AI helped researchers virtually unfurl and read a 2,000-year-old papyrus scroll carbonized by Mount Vesuvius, revealing Greek text on Stoic philosophy. - Reason Magazine

MoChiAgent, an LLM-based clinical tool, predicted maternal and infant health risks from over 4.4 million health record visits. - Nature

Biologist Vittorio Baglione used AI to analyze thousands of hours of carrion crow recordings, raising ethical questions about human-animal communication. - Bloomberg

Apple's revamped Siri impresses some iOS 27 beta testers as a search and dictation tool, but usage often tapers off after a month - WIRED

Microsoft's Project Zenith, a developer-focused Windows 11 edition with local AI, requires 64GB RAM and debuts on AMD's Ryzen AI Halo platform. - Tom's Hardware

A mind is a terrible thing to outsource: Dartmouth's president argues universities should teach students to use AI critically rather than ban it outright. - The Atlantic

A Penn State professor now requires students to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, then critically evaluate the results - WITF

What parents need to know about AI - the Guardian

Gutting the academic work to study how AI may change society - The New York Times

A new study models large language model adoption as a viral process that can trigger population-level cognitive dependence. - arXiv.org

The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility: Backlash over anthropomorphism around the Hugging Face hack. - The Verge

Anyway humans and especially Americans turn everything into a moral choice, and putting anthropomorphized robots in that equation tends to devalue the humans. David Brooks reliably bringing the circular idiocy that proves itself. - The Atlantic

Danny Boyle used AI to animate photos and generate mice for about 30 seconds in his new film Ink, out on Netflix Dec. 11 - The Wrap

Fairground launches a free ad-supported Roku channel streaming films made by more than 100 AI filmmakers. - Engadget

AI-generated food photos on restaurant menus draw backlash, but faking food imagery has been legal since a 1965 Supreme Court case unless it's deceptive - the Guardian

Clay Matthews responded to a viral AI-generated TMZ photo of him with a single word, "Gigaclay." - For The Win

When Claude Code goes off-task - X (formerly Twitter)

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