Google said on Tuesday that it will turn off artificial intelligence in its educational apps for K-12 student accounts unless school administrators expressly enable it. The Alphabet-owned search giant said that after surveying school administrators and teachers, it wants educational institutions to control students’ access to various AI capabilities. “We believe schools should have control…
Washington — Ace Parsi describes himself as “personally pretty against AI.” The Democrat is running an uphill race against Republican Rep. Riley Moore in ruby-red West Virginia and has drafted a legislative proposal to block new data centers that don’t have buy-in from constituents. But after what he said was probably the most complicated decision…
From AI chatbots to lifestyle trends, the concept of optimizing one’s life came sharply into focus in 2026. That’s why Dictionary.com picked “maxxing,” a reflection of our increasingly online society, as its latest Word of the Year. “Maxxing (sometimes -maxxing) is short for ‘maximizing,’” says Dictionary.com. “This trendy term can be used on its own…
Zane Shah arrives at school at 8:45 a.m., greets his friends and stores his backpack in the assigned cubby. It could be any middle school morning. But one thing about Shah’s school is different: There are no traditional teachers. Shah, 13, is an eighth grader at Alpha School, a network of private, for-profit institutions that…
Artificial intelligence may be unparalleled as a tool for gathering information about countless subjects. But what happens when a chatbot dispenses advice on more sensitive topics typically reserved for experts, such as human health? That question underlies a recent lawsuit filed by a Washington man who alleges in a lawsuit against OpenAI that he was…
Character.ai said it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with its chief executive attributing the chatbot provider’s financial problems to “significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds.” The company said it will continue operating as it seeks to sell its business, and added that The Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay $20 million for a…
A year ago, there weren’t many voters talking about data centers. Now, the massive facilities being built to satisfy the enormous computing needs of the AI boom have become one of the most explosive issues of the 2026 midterms, and their construction is opening a divide between the Trump administration and Republicans running in state…
A cadre of elite techies, financiers, and high-level Trump administration officials have spent a year quietly charting an extraordinary and rapid campaign to persuade Americans to use apps and other artificial intelligence-powered tools to manage their healthcare and medical records. As that campaign has unfolded, administration officials have granted tech companies an unusual opportunity to…
In July, Reps. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, had a request for the Federal Election Commission: help make sure artificial intelligence chatbots do not feed voters false information about the 2026 midterm elections. The lawmakers, writing to the FEC as well as the Justice and Homeland Security…
The world is awakening to the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence amid a barrage of reports about AI agents defying their human creators. In reality, however, the story stretches back to Silicon Valley, where AI was born. So how did we get here, exactly? That’s the question technology journalist Kevin Roose seeks to answer in his new…
