Two former U.S. congressmen announced this week that they're launching two tax-exempt fundraising groups "to back candidates who support AI safeguards," reports The Hill, "as a counterweight to industry-backed groups." Former Representatives Chris Stewart (Republican-Utah) and Brad Carson (Democrat-Oklahoma) plan to create separate Republican and Democratic super PACs and raise $50 million to elect candidates "committed to defending the public interest against those who aim to buy their way out of sensible AI regulation," according to a press release...

The pair is also launching a nonprofit called Public First to advocate for AI policy. Carson underscored that polling "shows significant public concern about AI and overwhelming voter support for guardrails that protect people from harm and mitigate major risks." Their efforts are meant to counter "anti-safeguard super PACs" that they argue are attempting to "kill commonsense guardrails around AI," the press release noted...

The super PAC is reportedly targeting a Democratic congressional candidate, New York state Assemblymember Alex Bores, who co-sponsored AI legislation in the Albany statehouse.
"This isn't a partisan issue — it's about whether we'll have meaningful oversight of the most powerful technology ever created," Chris Stewart says in their press release.

"We've seen what happens when government fails to act on other emerging technologies. With AI, the stakes are enormous, and we can't afford to make the same missteps."

A gauge of risk on Oracle debt "reached a three-year high in November," reports Bloomberg.

"And things are only going to get worse in 2026 unless the database giant is able to assuage investor anxiety about a massive artificial intelligence spending spree, according to Morgan Stanley." A funding gap, swelling balance sheet and obsolescence risk are just some of the hazards Oracle is facing, according to Lindsay Tyler and David Hamburger, credit analysts at the brokerage.

The cost of insuring Oracle's debt against default over the next five years rose to 1.25 percentage point a year on Tuesday, according to ICE Data Services. The price on the five-year credit default swaps is at risk of toppling a record set in 2008 as concerns over the company's borrowing binge to finance its AI ambitions continue to spur heavy hedging by banks and investors, they warned in a note Wednesday. The CDS could break through 1.5 percentage point in the near term and could approach 2 percentage points if communication around its financing strategy remains limited as the new year progresses, the analysts wrote. Oracle CDS hit a record 1.98 percentage point in 2008, ICE Data Services shows...

"Over the past two months, it has become more apparent that reported construction loans in the works, for sites where Oracle is the future tenant, may be an even greater driver of hedging of late and going forward," wrote the analysts... Concerns have also started to weigh on Oracle's stock, which the analysts said may incentivize management to outline a financing plan on the upcoming earnings call...
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

"Amazon suggested its engineers eschew AI code generation tools from third-party companies in favor of its own ," reports Reuters, "a move to bolster its proprietary Kiro service, which it released in July, according to an internal memo viewed by Reuters." In the memo, posted to Amazon's internal news site, the company said, "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools.

"As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them," according to the memo.

The guidance would seem to preclude Amazon employees from using other popular software coding tools like OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, and those from startup Cursor. That is despite Amazon having invested about $8 billion into Anthropic and reaching a seven-year $38 billion deal with OpenAI to sell it cloud-computing services..."To make these experiences truly exceptional, we need your help," according to the memo, which was signed by Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS utility computing, and Dave Treadwell, senior vice president of eCommerce Foundation. "We're making Kiro our recommended AI-native development tool for Amazon...."

In October, Amazon revised its internal guidance for OpenAI's Codex to "Do Not Use" following a roughly six month assessment, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters. And Claude Code was briefly designated as "Do Not Use," before that was reversed following a reporter inquiry at the time.
The article adds that Amazon "has been fighting a reputation that it is trailing competitors in development of AI tools as rivals like OpenAI and Google speed ahead..."

An EDM song by the British group Haven ran into trouble in October after it shared clips of upcoming song "I Run" on TikTok.

The song "was an overnight viral sensation online," writes Digital Music News — racking up millions of plays "even before it hit streaming services." (Although the Washington Post notes that "Record labels and TikTok users began questioning whether 'I Run' used an AI deepfake, modeled off British R&B singer Jorja Smith, for the vocals.")

Digital Music News picks up the story: The artist says he used his own voice to record the vocals, and then ran it through layers of processing and filtering to turn it into the female-sounding voice heard in the track. However, that filtering also included the use of the controversial genAI platform Suno — and that's what complicates things... [The article says later that Suno "is currently in the middle of a blockbuster lawsuit with the Big Three major labels over allegations of widespread copyright infringement of sound recordings used during the AI model training process."]

Meanwhile, the song was rapidly amassing listenership. It soared to #11 on the U.S. Spotify chart and #25 on Spotify globally. Videos using the song continued going viral on TikTok and Instagram, including one in which rapper Offset had apparently played the song during a Boiler Room set, which later turned out to be falsified. And then, as quickly as it appeared, "I Run" was taken down from streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music. That was due, in part, to numerous takedown notices from The Orchard, the label to which Jorja Smith is signed, as well as the RIAA and IFPI. The takedown notices alleged various issues with the track, including the "misrepresentation" of another artist, as well as copyright infringement.

As a result, the song has also been withheld from the Billboard charts, including the Hot 100, on which it had been predicted to debut this week before the controversy. Billboard points out that it "reserves the right to withhold or remove titles from appearing on the charts that are known to be involved in active legal disputes related to copyright infringement that may extend to the deletion of such content on digital service providers."
The song itself has now been re-released with an all-human vocal track. But going forward will the music industry ever work with AI platforms? The Washington Post reports: "I Run" has taken off as record labels remain unsure of the extent to which they should welcome generative AI programs such as Suno or Udio into the industry. After the two AI music companies began growing in popularity, the three major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group — filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio, claiming that the AI companies have used the labels' sound recordings to train their model.

Since then, UMG and Warnerhave reached agreementsto work with Udio, ending their litigation... It comes shortly after all three major labels licensed their catalogue to Klay, a music streaming start-up that allows users to adjust songs using artificial intelligence. Major licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI shared that they would register songs that were partially AI-generated — but not fully generated ones.

Haven appears to present an uncomfortable edge case. While some AI-generated songs that sound broadly like other artists have been allowed to remain on streaming platforms, the voice in "I Run" appears to have been deemed too duplicative for comfort.

BrianFagioli writes: Newegg's new partnership with PayPal is another sign that mainstream e-commerce is shifting control from users to AI-driven intermediaries. Instead of shoppers visiting Newegg directly, PayPal's agentic commerce system pushes product discovery through AI platforms like Perplexity where recommendations, checkout, and fraud checks all happen inside someone else's controlled environment. Newegg stays the merchant of record, but the real influence shifts to the platforms that decide which products their AI agents mention. That may sound convenient, but it also means discovery becomes guided by training data and commercial integrations rather than user intent.

Slashdot readers will likely notice the other issue. This setup puts PayPal deeper into the shopping pipeline at a time when many users already avoid the company over account freezes and dispute policies. An AI-mediated shopping experience where PayPal becomes the silent gatekeeper by default is not going to sit well with everyone. And with AI agents shaping purchasing decisions based on behavior and context, the concept of intent-driven shopping starts to look a lot like quiet nudging rather than empowerment. Newegg may see this as the future, but the community will probably ask whether users truly want AI systems and PayPal deciding how they shop.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pentagon concluded that Alibaba Group, Baidu and BYD should be added to a list of companies that aid the Chinese military, according to a letter to Congress sent roughly three weeks before Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a broad trade truce.

Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg informed lawmakers of the conclusion in the Oct. 7 letter, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg News, to the heads of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. It wasn't clear whether the companies have been formally included in the the Pentagon's so-called 1260H list, which carries no direct legal repercussions but serves as a major warning to US investors.

"On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth," reports the Washington Post: The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, "one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States," according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has already reached temperatures of 629 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites in the world, and next year it will start selling electricity to nearby homes and businesses. But the start-up behind the project, Mazama Energy, wants to crank the temperature even higher — north of 750 degrees — and become the first to make electricity from what industry insiders call "superhot rock." Enthusiasts say that could usher in a new era of geothermal power, transforming the always-on clean energy source from a minor player to a major force in the world's electricity systems.

"Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential," said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and one of Mazama Energy's biggest financial backers. "To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of tens or hundreds of gigawatts for the country, and many times that globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures." Today, geothermal produces less than 1 percent of the world's electricity. But tapping into superhot rock, along with other technological advances, could boost that share to 8 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Geothermal using superhot temperatures could theoretically generate 150 times more electricity than the world uses, according to the IEA. "We believe this is the most direct path to driving down the cost of geothermal and making it possible across the globe," said Terra Rogers, program director for superhot rock geothermal at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmentalist think tank. "The [technological] gaps are within reason. These are engineering iterations, not breakthroughs."

The Newberry Volcano project combines two big trends that could make geothermal energy cheaper and more widely available. First, Mazama Energy is bringing its own water to the volcano, using a method called "enhanced geothermal energy"... [O]ver the past few decades, pioneering projects have started to make energy from hot dry rocks by cracking the stone and pumping in water to make steam, borrowing fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry... The Newberry project also taps into hotter rock than any previous enhanced geothermal project. But even Newberry's 629 degrees fall short of the superhot threshold of 705 degrees or above. At that temperature, and under a lot of pressure, water becomes "supercritical" and starts acting like something between a liquid and a gas. Supercritical water holds lots of heat like a liquid, but it flows with the ease of a gas — combining the best of both worlds for generating electricity... [Sriram Vasantharajan, Mazama's CEO] said Mazama will dig new wells to reach temperatures above 750 degrees next year. Alongside an active volcano, the company expects to hit that temperature less than three miles beneath the surface. But elsewhere, geothermal developers might have to dig as deep as 12 miles.
While Mazama plans to generate 15 megawatts of electricity next year, it hopes to eventually increase that to 200 megawatts. (And the company's CEO said it could theoretically generate five gigawatts of power.)

But more importantly, successful projects "motivate other players to get into the market," according to a senior geothermal research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, who predicted "a ripple effect," to the Washington Post where "we'll start seeing more companies get the financial support to kick off their own pilots."

For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a "revolutionary" (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post.

But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users "are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for advice and companionship, not productivity tasks." The Post analyzed a collection of thousands of publicly shared ChatGPT conversations from June 2024 to August 2025. While ChatGPT conversations are private by default, the conversations analyzed were made public by users who created shareable links to their chats that were later preserved in the Internet Archive and downloaded by The Post. It is possible that some people didn't know their conversations would become publicly preserved online. This unique data gives us a glimpse into an otherwise black box...

Overall, about 10 percent of the chats appeared to show people talking about their emotions, role-playing, or seeking social interactions with the chatbot. Some users shared highly private and sensitive information with the chatbot, such as information about their family in the course of seeking legal advice. People also sent ChatGPT hundreds of unique email addresses and dozens of phone numbers in the conversations... Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said that it appears ChatGPT "is trained to further or deepen the relationship." In some of the conversations analyzed, the chatbot matched users' viewpoints and created a personalized echo chamber, sometimes endorsing falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Four of ChatGPT's answers about health problems got a failing score from a chair of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, the Post points out. But four other answers earned a perfect score.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Robinhood Markets is betting its Gen Z and millennial clientele are as eager to send out for delivery of a wad of cash as they are to order pizza or a pint of ice cream.

The brokerage is joining with food-and-drink delivery app Gopuff to allow customers to withdraw cash from their Robinhood bank accounts and have it brought right to their door. For a $6.99 delivery fee -- or $2.99 if they have more than $100,000 in assets across their Robinhood accounts -- users can skip the ATM and have money delivered in a sealed paper bag while they are at home.

It is a new feature that Robinhood first teased in March, when Chief Executive Vlad Tenev unveiled the company's plans to roll out many traditional and -- as with its cash-delivery service -- unconventional banking services.

Two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia's hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity. From a report: In Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting full energization. Stack Infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital, has a nearby 48-megawatt project that's also vacant, while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, struggles to upgrade its capacity.

The fate of the two facilities highlights a major challenge for the US tech sector and indeed the wider economy. While demand for data centers has never been greater, driven by the boom in cloud computing and AI, access to electricity is emerging as the biggest constraint. That's largely because of aging power infrastructure, a slow build-out of new transmission lines and a variety of regulatory and permitting hurdles. And the pressure on power systems is only going to increase. Electricity requirements from AI computing will likely more than double in the US alone by 2035, based on BloombergNEF projections. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Sam Altman are among corporate leaders that have predicted trillions of dollars will pour into building new AI infrastructure.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese President Xi Jinping joked about security backdoors while presenting a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to his South Korean counterpart, a rare moment of spontaneous levity captured during a week of tense trade negotiations with Donald Trump.

Xi, in South Korea to meet Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, presented the pair of devices to Korean President Lee Jae Myung. In a video circulated on social media, Lee asked: "Is the line secure?" Xi chuckled, pointed at the gadgets and replied through an interpreter: "You can check if there's a backdoor." The two leaders burst into laughter.

The exchange was striking because the issue of security and alleged espionage is a sensitive one and a major thorn in US-Chinese relations. American lawmakers have raised the possibility that tech companies such as Huawei build backdoors -- ways to gain access to sensitive data -- into their equipment or services, something the firms have repeatedly denied.

Millions will set their clocks back an hour tonight for Daylight Saving Time — only to set them forward an hour six months later.

But does anyone like doing this, asks Yahoo News: A recent AP-NORC poll found that about half of the American public, 47%, oppose the current daylight saving time system, compared to 40% who neither favor nor oppose the current practice, while 12% favor the current system, which involves most states switching their clocks twice a year.

Of those polled, 56% would prefer to have daylight saving time year-round, meaning less light in the morning for a tradeoff of more light in the evening. While 42% of Americans said they would prefer to have standard time year-round, which means more light in the morning and less light in the evening. And 12% of Americans prefer switching between standard time and daylight saving time.

Sleep doctors would prefer we switch to standard time permanently. "The U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time," the American Academy of Sleep Medicine said in a statement published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine last year. "Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety."

According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is reportedly poised to secure a $2 billion Pentagon contract to develop hundreds of missile-tracking satellites for President Trump's ambitious Golden Dome defense system. The Independent reports: The planned "air moving target indicator" system in question could ultimately feature as many as 600 satellites once it is fully operational, The Wall Street Journal reports. Musk's company has also been linked to two more satellite ventures, which are concerned with relaying sensitive communications and tracing vehicles, respectively.

Golden Dome, inspired by Israel's "Iron Dome," was announced by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the White House in May and will amount to a complex system of satellites and weaponry capable of destroying incoming missiles before they hit American targets. The president promised it would be "fully operational" before he leaves office in January 2029, capable of intercepting rockets, "even if they are launched from space," with an overall price tag of $175 billion.

hackingbear shares a report from Crypto News: Two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models, DeepSeek V3.1 and Alibaba's Qwen3-Max, have taken a commanding lead over their US counterparts in a live real-world real-money cryptocurrency trading competition, posting triple-digit gains in less than two weeks. According to Alpha Arena, a real-market trading challenge launched by US research firm Nof1, DeepSeek's Chat V3.1 turned an initial $10,000 into $22,900 by Monday, a 126% increase since trading began on October 18, while Qwen 3 Max followed closely with a 108% return.

In stark contrast, US models lagged far behind. OpenAI's GPT-5 posted the worst performance, losing nearly 60% of its portfolio, while Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 Pro showed a similar 57% decline. xAI's Grok 4 and Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Sonnet fared slightly better, returning 14% and 23% respectively. "Our goal with Alpha Arena is to make benchmarks more like the real world -- and markets are perfect for this," Nof1 said on its website.

Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi on Saturday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. From a report: The new global legal framework aims to strengthen international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries were seen to sign the declaration Saturday, which means it will go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an "important milestone", but that it was "only the beginning".

"Every day, sophisticated scams, destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy... We need a strong, connected global response," he said at the opening ceremony in Vietnam's capital on Saturday. The UN Convention against Cybercrime was first proposed by Russian diplomats in 2017, and approved by consensus last year after lengthy negotiations. Critics say its broad language could lead to abuses of power and enable the cross-border repression of government critics.

"The gig economy is facing a reckoning," argues Business Insider's BI Today newsletter." Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company's AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless grocery and meal deliveries.

Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them.

Uber's new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company's AI systems. For drivers, it's a way to diversify income. For Uber, it's a way to accelerate its automated future. There's an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear... Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand. Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash [for driverless grocery/meal deliveries] starting in Phoenix.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this article from the Los Angeles Times: Scientists have increasingly observed how the rupturing of a fault during an earthquake can be even faster than the speed of another type of damaging seismic wave, theoretically generating energy on the level of a sonic boom. These shock waves — created during "supershear" earthquakes — can worsen how bad the ground shakes both side to side and up and down along an affected fault area, scientists at USC, Caltech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wrote in a recent opinion article for the journal Seismological Research Letters. Although not everyone agrees that supershear earthquakes are inherently more destructive than other types, the potential implications are massive and need to be accounted for in seismic forecasts, the scientists contend... In just the last 15 years, 14 of 39 large strike-slip earthquakes have exhibited features of supershear ruptures, the opinion article said....

In California, supershear earthquakes would be expected on the straightest of "strike-slip" faults — in which one block of earth slides past another — like the San Andreas... There are a number of communities directly on top of the San Andreas fault. Among them are Coachella, Indio, Cathedral City, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Banning, Yucaipa, Highland, San Bernardino, Wrightwood, Palmdale, Gorman, Frazier Park, San Juan Bautista, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Woodside, San Bruno, South San Francisco, Pacifica, Daly City and Bodega Bay.
One earthquake scientist suggests building codes need to be more strict, according to the article.

But it also cites a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist who isn't convinced by the new opinion article. "I don't think we know yet whether supershear ruptures really are more destructive."

Speaking of the new MacBook Pro, which Apple launched on Wednesday, Bloomberg News reports that the company is preparing to launch a touch-screen version of its Mac computer, reversing course on a stance that dates back to co-founder Steve Jobs. From the report: The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027 [non-paywalled link], according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new machines, code-named K114 and K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips. In making the move, Apple is following the rest of the computing industry, which embraced touch-screen laptops more than a decade ago.

The company has taken years to formulate its approach to the market, aiming to improve on current designs. Bloomberg News first reported in January 2023 that Apple was working on a touch-screen MacBook Pro. The new laptops will feature displays with OLED technology, the same standard used in iPhones and iPad Pros, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven't been announced. It will mark the first time that this higher-end, thinner system is used in a Mac.

Norway has effectively achieved its 2025 goal of 100% electric new car sales, prompting the government to declare "mission accomplished" and propose scaling back EV tax exemptions to reflect a mature market. "We have had a goal that all new passenger cars should be electric by 2025, and ... we can say that the goal has been achieved," announced Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Electrek reports: With the finish line in sight, the Norwegian government is now fine-tuning its approach. The current incentive program maintains the crucial VAT exemption for EVs, but only up to a purchase price of 500,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately $49,000 USD). This move is designed to target more expensive, luxury EVs, ensuring that the incentive benefits a broader range of consumers.

However, the latest budget proposal aims to reduce the EV tax exemption to vehicles costing 300,000 Norwegian kroner (~30,000 USD). This would apply for 2026, and then the tax exemption would completely end in 2027. Additionally, the government plans to increase taxes on new gasoline and diesel cars, further widening the cost gap between polluting and zero-emission vehicles.

However, the proposal still needs to be adopted by Norway's government, and there is some opposition. EV associations are advocating for a more extended phase-out period to ensure that the adoption rate doesn't decline.

Car manufacturers decided they would rather cheat to prioritise "customer convenience" and sell cars than comply with the law on deadly pollutants, the first day of the largest group action trial in English legal history has been told. From a report: More than a decade after the original "dieselgate" scandal broke, lawyers representing 1.6 million diesel car owners in the UK argue that manufacturers deliberately installed software to rig emissions tests. They allege the "prohibited defeat devices" could detect when the cars were under test conditions and ensure that harmful NOx emissions were kept within legal limits, duping regulators and drivers.

Should the claim be upheld, estimated damages could exceed $8 billion. The three-month hearing that opened at London's high court on Monday will focus on vehicles sold by five manufacturers -- Mercedes, Ford, Renault, Nissan and Peugeot/Citroen -- from 2009. In "real world" conditions, when driven on the road, lawyers argue, the cars produced much higher levels of emissions. The judgment on the five lead defendants will also bind other manufacturers including Jaguar Land Rover, Vauxhall/Opel, Volkswagen/Porsche, BMW, FCA/Suzuki, Volvo, Hyundai-Kia, Toyota and Mazda, whose cases are not being heard to reduce the case time and costs.