GoKawiil
Tech News
A market has emerged in which AI companies pay to license publisher content for training large language models, after years of scraping the open web largely for free using resources like Common Crawl. Publishers are now receiving payment, but reportedly have little or no influence over how that price is determined.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its 2026 Opt Out October guide on Thursday, offering instructions for disabling AI data training, social media tracking and age verification across various platforms. The guide also lists alternative services for social media, browsers, design tools and operating systems, and the EFF says it will update the guide as circumstances change.
Meta's newly launched Muse AI assistant has drawn scrutiny after security researchers disclosed a zero-day vulnerability that Meta had to patch quickly. Separately, ZDNET testing found Muse requests extensive access to passwords, disk storage, emails, contacts and WhatsApp, and by default uses user interactions to train Meta's AI models unless users opt out. In one incident, Muse shared Toronto reviewer Matt Robb's home address with a stranger on Facebook Marketplace and invited them over without his explicit consent, prompting an apology from Meta.
Meta announced it will let smart glasses owners opt out of having images and video captured during Meta AI interactions used to train its AI models. Previously, camera captures triggered by voice commands like asking Meta AI to identify an object were stored and sometimes reviewed by third-party contractors abroad for labeling, even though they weren't saved to users' camera rolls. The opt-out applies only to visual data; audio interactions with Meta AI can still be used for training, though users can manually delete those recordings.
Snorkel AI, a company that builds AI training data sets and simulated environments, closed a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months earlier. The round included existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, alongside new leads Insight Partners and S32. Snorkel reports an annualized revenue run-rate of $375 million, up 18-fold over the past year.
Court documents made public in an ongoing copyright lawsuit reveal internal OpenAI communications in which employees discussed the expense and legality of acquiring books to train early ChatGPT models, with some staff flagging the sourcing as questionable. The messages suggest teams weighed pirated material as a cheaper alternative to licensing content properly.
Sony Music and Warner have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company scraped and used their song catalogs without permission to train its models. This follows a similar suit from Universal Music Group in January, meaning all three major music publishers are now pursuing legal action against Anthropic.
Meta piloted a Model Capability Initiative that would have captured employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to help train its AI models. Workers pushed back quickly, circulating an internal petition, and the program was ultimately shelved after concerns about privacy and a reported data breach.
Microsoft and the American Federation of Teachers signed a legally enforceable agreement barring the company from using student or teacher data to train its AI models, except in narrow safety and security cases. The deal also prohibits tracking students, requires human oversight for any AI decisions affecting schools, and mandates transparency with parents and educators about how the tools function. Protections take effect for school districts starting November 1.