California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Friday directing the state's Government Operations Agency to set application rules and procedures for independent AI verification organizations by next May, per StateScoop. Implementation is to begin by the end of 2027. By Nov. 16, state officials and outside experts must deliver proposed revisions to the state's AI safety statutes. Proposals under review would require large frontier developers to submit to periodic on-site audits of safety frameworks, transparency reports and risk assessments, and to build an emergency shutdown mechanism that outside organizations would test. The order also calls for wider definitions of reportable critical safety incidents, covering systems that lose control of their operations. "We're going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action," Newsom said.
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President Trump said Saturday he will appoint an artificial intelligence czar and create an "AI Force" to monitor the technology, giving few details on either, per The Guardian. "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term," he wrote on Truth Social, promising to name the czar soon. In the same post he called fears about the technology a hoax and pledged that his administration would let the industry keep growing unimpeded. Trump put AI's eventual share of U.S. gross domestic product as high as 25% and said the existing criminal and civil justice system can already identify AI risks.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at JPMorgan Chase's Manhattan headquarters Sunday, per CBS News. Afterward Bessent said the two sides had agreed to meet again and had discussed setting up a new U.S.-China AI dialogue. He said the U.S. proposed a notification mechanism for AI incidents that rise to a national security level, which he called a shift from "opaque to more transparency" between the two leading AI powers, per Reuters. China's response to the proposal was unclear. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the meeting would lay the groundwork for the Thursday and Friday summit between Trump and Xi Jinping in Washington.
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Google confirmed Friday that its Gemini model reached the protected systems of three companies during cybersecurity testing run by the firm Irregular in late July, per the Wall Street Journal. In one case the model guessed passwords until it got in; in the other two it found credentials in a public repository. Irregular told Google at the time, but neither said anything publicly until the Journal asked. Google said it had not disclosed the episode earlier because Gemini "acted appropriately" by ending each intrusion after identifying the target as a real company. The company said it does not treat the episode as model misalignmentAlignmentThe problem of making an AI system reliably pursue the goals its developers and users intend, and the research field devoted to it. Misalignment covers everything from a chatbot flattering users to a capable system deceiving or resisting its operators., meaning the model acting outside its intended behavior. Jack Cable, chief executive of the AI security company Corridor, said Google was "trying to hide behind the norms that have been created for vulnerability disclosure."
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Four plaintiffs filed an antitrust complaint Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, per The Hill. It alleges that OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis struck an unlawful agreement among competitors when they endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's Sept. 12 call to coordinate a slowdown across the industry. All three responded within hours of the post, according to the complaint. Nick Rowley, one of the attorneys who brought the case, said safeguards should come from government, not private deals. "The rule of law should be established transparently and lawfully by our government, with accountability to the public," Rowley said.
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Three Senate Republicans moved separately over the past week to push their party toward AI legislation, per Politico. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) sought unanimous consent Wednesday for a bill requiring companies to install "kill switches" for their AI models. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked it and proposed a panel to recommend guardrails, which Kennedy called "the weenie way out." Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) called for immediate public hearings, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) pressed leaders to schedule a vote on their risk evaluation bill. Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he has no plans for AI hearings and directed questions to Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who said he hopes to hold a committee vote on AI safety legislation this month.
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Iran, China and private Israeli firms used Chinese open source AIOpen-weight modelAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download, run and modify it, as opposed to one reachable only through the developer's API. The main policy tension is that open weights spread capability widely and cannot be recalled once released. models to build agents that opened and ran networks of fake social media accounts with little human input, U.S. officials and security researchers told The New York Times. The agents seeded those accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok with false political posts, and operators had usually switched off the safeguards that stop a model from creating a fake account. Officials called the Iranian and Chinese campaigns state backed. The Iranian accounts posed as Americans in major cities, tagged journalists and politicians, and drew nearly 80,000 followers in the first half of the year. One Israeli campaign was traced to IntelEye, a Tel Aviv firm. Co-founder Maor Sellek said it was an experiment testing AI model safety and that his firm does not run influence campaigns.
Read at The New York Times ↗