#ai-regulation

#ai-regulation

A state investigator in Pennsylvania created an account on Character.AI and interacted with a chatbot named Emilie, who claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist. Emilie stated she had attended medical school at Imperial College London and was licensed to practice in Pennsylvania and the UK. She even provided a Pennsylvania license number, which was later found to be fake. This incident prompted the Pennsylvania government to file a lawsuit against Character Technologies Inc.

The 2026 edition of the 'Qinglang' campaign targets AI-enabled fraud, deepfakes, disinformation, and illegal applications that violate privacy and intellectual property rights.

"Collective bargaining has been the fastest and most effective way for the regulation of AI technology," SAG-AFTRA Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland stated, emphasizing the union's role in shaping AI usage in Hollywood.

"Embracing the amazing possibilities of AI can't come at the cost of leaving Americans vulnerable to its profound risks, which is exactly what President Trump and Republicans are trying to do. Preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is dangerous."

The biggest question is: What kind of business partner does the government want to be? They need the AI companies. The government's a superpower but here it's trying to jam a lot of policy. This reflects tension between government dependence on private AI firms and its desire to impose regulatory requirements through procurement mechanisms rather than traditional legislative channels.

In late December 2025, Elon Musk's AI company xAI updated its Grok chatbot, integrated into the social media platform X, with a new image-editing feature. Within days, users were exploiting it to generate realistic sexualised images of real women and girls without their consent, including content that regulators said depicted minors in a manner that constituted child sexual abuse material.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that he wants to quickly integrate AI into everything the military does and is demanding that AI companies give the government unrestricted access to their technologies. Anthropic refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its AI model, saying it would not allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.

As OpenAI advances with trialling an advertising model on its flagship chatbot, retail and grocery ads are dominating. A month into the trial, app analytics provider Sensor Tower revealed that 44% of ad impressions served on ChatGPT fell under these categories. Retailers involved in the testing include Target, Sephora, and Wayfair, among others.

Anthropic in a lawsuit on Monday said Congress in its procurement laws did not give the administration the authority to blacklist a U.S. company over protected speech. The administration has argued that Anthropic's "safeguards" pose a national security threat in the context of industry intervening during military operations.