A federal moratorium on state regulation of AI systems moved closer to passage last week when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it could be included in the Republicans’ massive tax and spending bill. The bill needs only a majority vote to pass, although it could still be modified. If the risks aren’t clear: Anthropic released a new report finding that most major AI will resort to blackmail to save themselves.
Threatening to sue companies that don’t buy ads from you may sound like a protection racket, but it seems to be working for Elon Musk. The Republican-run Federal Trade Commission has expanded the opportunities by requiring that media buying agency Omnicom, as a condition of acquiring IPG, agree not to avoid placing ads based publishers’ “political or ideological viewpoints” or the viewpoints of content they publish, or rely on standard brand-safety tools such as exclusion lists.
Synthetic audiences — AI agents trained to simulate the response of consumers to advertising programs — are one of the more benign AI applications. Evidenza, which creates such things, just landed a partnership with Dentsu to use its tools. They are still an exception: survey research firm Cint found just 2% of respondents are open to using it.
The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.