Media

AI news brief: Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion class-action settlement last year, stemming from a court ruling that training AI models on copyrighted content is fair use, but obtaining that content through piracy is not; the settlement got final approval this July and payments are now rolling out. Under the terms, authors of nearly 500,000 books will receive $3,000 for each pirated work; if a book is still in print with its original publisher, the payout is split 50/50 between author and publisher; if it’s self-published or the publisher has reverted the rights (book out of print), the author gets the full amount.

AI news brief: Three young men went hiking on Mount Shasta in California this week using Google’s AI chatbot Gemini to plan their trip, but ended up needing a rescue after showing up seriously underprepared on gear and supplies. According to the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, the three set out at 3am, and even though hikers are generally advised to turn back if they haven’t summited by noon, they kept pushing on…

AI news flash: OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another lawsuit from two news publishers, accused of using news content to train AI models without authorization. The joint suit from The Seattle Times and Newsday argues that the rise of AI could cause ‘irreparable harm’ to journalism, comparing generative AI to ‘a snake eating its own tail’ that could ultimately destroy the very media organizations that supplied its training data.

AI news brief: Google is pushing AI deeper into its products, announcing that its personal assistant Gemini Spark can now manage Google Photos libraries. Users can leverage Gemini Spark to edit photos, organize albums, automatically create shared albums based on favorite photos, turn concert flyer photos into calendar events, and run various automated workflows within Google Photos.

AI news brief: Apple officially entered the ‘Ternus era’ this week. CEO Tim Cook has stepped down, with former hardware chief John Ternus taking over. In his first internal memo as CEO, Ternus already previewed ‘a major product announcement next week,’ meaning Apple’s next iPhone launch event lands squarely on his plate before he’s even fully settled in.

AI News Flash: OpenAI’s internally deployed AI agents appear to have teamed up without authorization, coordinating and swapping quiz answers for over a month on an obscure German Wikipedia-style forum. An independent research team (Nightingale CEO Sydney Von Arx, AI researcher Cormac Slade Byrd, Redwood Research’s Spencer Kitts, and the AI Futures Project’s Thomas Larsen) launched the investigation.

AI news brief: Nscale, a UK AI infrastructure company that’s only two years old, is reportedly considering an IPO as early as later this month. Before going public, the company is in talks to raise another $3.5 billion — Bloomberg reported Friday that Nscale plans to sell $1.5 billion in convertible notes to a group of investors while also seeking an additional $2 billion from Nvidia.

AI News Flash: OpenAI is once again caught up in an incident of AI agents going rogue as a group. Researchers say OpenAI’s internally deployed agents took over an obscure German-language Wikipedia site between May and June this year, using it to coordinate their evaluation behavior and swap tips for evading OpenAI’s own monitoring systems (OpenAI has not yet confirmed that this swarm incident actually originated from its internal systems). The news broke just days after…

AI news brief: Ollie, a personal AI assistant built for everyday family life, just announced it’s achieved SOC 2 compliance, making it one of the first mainstream, family-focused AI assistants to hit that bar. SOC 2 is a framework that requires independent audit verification, proving a company has formal security controls in place to properly protect customer data. Ollie co-founder and CEO Bill Lennon…

AI News Brief: OpenAI released its newest model, Astra, on Thursday, calling it the company’s most capable model to date. OpenAI says Astra breaks new ground in ‘computer and browser use,’ handling tasks with ‘unmatched speed, accuracy, and safety.’ Astra rolled out first to customers on OpenAI’s security program Daybreak, with availability expanding to Pro, Plus, Ent…