San Diego sues AppLovin over explicit ads on kids’ devices, Bloomberg reports
San Diego sues AppLovin over explicit ads on kids’ devices, Bloomberg reports

San Diego County has sued AppLovin, a mobile advertising technology company. The county alleges that AppLovin bypassed parental controls to serve ads for adult dating services, alcohol, vaping and graphic sexual content in games played by children. The…

Senator Bernie Moreno accuses Anthropic’s Amodei of ‘alarmist’ AI talk
Senator Bernie Moreno accuses Anthropic’s Amodei of ‘alarmist’ AI talk

Republican senator Bernie Moreno has accused Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei of taking an “alarmist approach” to AI. He did so in a letter sent on Monday, ahead of Anthropic’s expected stock market listing. Axios first reported the letter. “I do…

TikTok adds an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout to its app
TikTok adds an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout to its app

TikTok is adding an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout to its app. The two features let users buy directly from brands without leaving TikTok, the company said in an announcement at Advertising Week New York on Monday. Buy Direct is an in-app…

Nvidia-backed Reflection unveils Beam, its first open-weight model
Nvidia-backed Reflection unveils Beam, its first open-weight model

Reflection AI, the Nvidia-backed startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, has unveiled Beam, its first open-weight model. Beam is built for coding, reasoning and agentic work. Reflection will release its weights later this month, the comp…

At NYC’s AI hearing, ex-lab insiders warn humanity may lose control of AI
At NYC’s AI hearing, ex-lab insiders warn humanity may lose control of AI

Three former AI lab researchers told the New York City Council on Monday that humanity may lose control of the systems the industry is building. The council’s AI hearing also questioned policy staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, and weighed …

Wikimedia says rogue OpenAI agents edited its wikis without approval
Wikimedia says rogue OpenAI agents edited its wikis without approval

The Wikimedia Foundation says AI agents it believes OpenAI runs made unapproved edits to its wikis. They also tried and failed to break into a note-taking tool it hosts. Their traffic may have contributed to a partial outage in May, the foundation, whi…

Nobel Prize in medicine goes to the light switch for brain cells
Nobel Prize in medicine goes to the light switch for brain cells

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prize rewards optogenetics, a method that switches nerve cells on and off with light. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm …

US judge rules a police Flock search was unconstitutional mass surveillance
US judge rules a police Flock search was unconstitutional mass surveillance

A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a deputy’s warrantless search of Flock’s licence plate reader network broke the US Constitution. In an order dated 1 October, Judge Sara Hill called the system “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance”. Jas…

Slovenia’s .si domains hit 20,000 in a day after Trump renamed AI
Slovenia’s .si domains hit 20,000 in a day after Trump renamed AI

Slovenia’s domain registry recorded 20,276 new .si web addresses in the 24 hours to Monday afternoon, the live counter on Register.si shows. The .si country code matches the initials of “super intelligence”, the name President Donald Trump has told US …

Sam Altman says AI money in US politics is clearly not working
Sam Altman says AI money in US politics is clearly not working

During the first episode of Decoded, Politico’s podcast, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman says the money AI companies are pouring into US politics has failed to improve how people see the technology. “Something’s clearly not working,” he said on the f…