Algorithmic Control
Scores, automated decisions, and the person who has to prove the machine was wrong.
October 23, 2026 · Power & Politics
China will vet some AI projects for job losses
Companies in China may soon have to show what an AI rollout will do to employment before it gets approved. The General Office of the State Council published a policy opinion, numbered Guobanfa [2026] No. 29 and signed October 16, on October 23, 2026, setting 18 tasks that include an employment risk assessment during project review for AI applications in market-access sectors that could cause a large employment shock. It also tells authorities to deploy AI first where labour is short or work is dangerous, encourages firms to explore an "unemployment buffer period" with advance notice for affected workers, and asks for rules against algorithmic hiring discrimination.
October 2, 2026 · Cultural & Ethical
Pope rejects Anthropic's AI suffering question
One of the biggest AI companies has spent a year asking religious leaders whether its own software might be able to suffer, and the Pope has said no. Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah led the inquiry as part of the company's "model welfare" program, consulting Jewish, Mormon, Sikh and Ubuntu leaders along with Vatican officials over a series of dinners. Pope Leo XIV, a former mathematician from Chicago, used his May encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" to state that artificial intelligences have no body, no experiences and no capacity for joy or pain, a rejection the New York Times reported Anthropic representatives were unhappy about.
September 20, 2026 · Technology & Capability
Alibaba shrinks its image model to run on a home GPU - Research License only
A serious image generator that fits on a gaming graphics card is now a free download, with a catch in the fine print. Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1 on September 20, 2026, cutting the visual generator from roughly 20 billion parameters to 7 billion while adding native transparent (RGBA) output, editing with up to ten reference images and 2K resolution, with weights on Hugging Face, ModelScope and GitHub and same-day support in ComfyUI, Diffusers, vLLM-Omni and SGLang. Unlike earlier Qwen-Image releases under Apache 2.0, this one ships under a research-only license that bars commercial use without a separate grant from Alibaba, and its benchmark claims come from Qwen's own scoring chart.
August 13, 2026 · Power & Politics
California decides which AI bills live in one morning
Roughly 30 AI bills covering chatbot safety for children, algorithmic management of workers, healthcare AI and copyright disclosure all got a single up or down vote in one compressed hearing, with no debate and no recorded vote for the ones held. California's Senate and Assembly Appropriations Committees ran back to back suspense file hearings on August 13, 2026, and 24 AI-related bills advanced toward floor votes while others died silently for the session. Senator Jerry McNerney's SB 813, which would create a California AI Standards and Safety Commission, was passed with amendments removing contingency language and re-referred to the Rules Committee, while his SB 833 on AI in critical infrastructure systems was held in committee.
June 27, 2026 · Cultural & Ethical
One hiring AI quietly blocked millions of minority applicants
One AI hiring platform's bias affected millions of job applicants across 156 different employers at once. Stanford researchers studied 4.2 million applications to the Pymetrics hiring platform and found Black and Asian applicants were recommended at rates that crossed the EEOC's own "adverse impact" threshold for discrimination. The researchers noted that Pymetrics's own aggregate bias metrics had hidden these job-level gaps, and warned that when one vendor handles hiring for so many employers, a rejected candidate can hit the same algorithmic wall everywhere they apply.
June 24, 2026 · Power & Politics
Warren calls for antitrust rules to cover AI pricing
Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered remarks at the Open Markets Institute's 2026 conference on June 24, calling on Congress to strengthen antitrust enforcement tools, apply them to AI companies and algorithmic pricing systems, and appoint judges with deeper knowledge of antitrust law. Warren argued that corporations should not receive exemptions from competition law because their pricing or business decisions rely on algorithms, and she specifically cited AI-driven rent pricing tools as an example warranting regulatory intervention. She also called for greater transparency in merger reviews and referenced the Trump administration's approval of major consolidations as evidence of weakening enforcement.