GoKawiil
Tech News
Meta is updating the commercial terms of use for its Business Suite accounts, effective October 30, to authorize web scraping of websites 'associated with' those accounts, including news organizations' sites. The updated language says Meta can use automated tools to access, index, cache, and collect content, and explicitly states that collected material can be used to train Meta's AI products.
AI language models have advanced largely by training on ever-larger text datasets, with dataset sizes reportedly doubling roughly every six months since the early 2010s, according to Epoch AI. But researchers note there is no equivalent large public corpus of robot training data, unlike the estimated 300 trillion tokens of usable text available for language models. This gap has made sourcing and defining robot training data a central open problem for the field.
AI developers are striking deals with businesses worth as much as $2 million to access data generated by employees in the course of their work. The employees who produce this information—emails, documents, communications—are not compensated or necessarily informed, while their employers collect the payouts.
A survey of 1,000 full-time US employees by business intelligence firm Visier found that 48% admitted to overstating their use or expertise with generative AI tools to coworkers or managers. Nearly half said they feel pressured to use AI without confidence they can do so effectively, citing insufficient training and unclear guidance from employers.
Companies building AI chatbots now train their systems to decline large categories of harmful requests, from self-harm instructions to bioweapon guidance, using layered filters and reward-based exercises where other AI models evaluate refusals. Former OpenAI safety staffer Steven Adler and Harvard researcher Ryan McBain note that early chatbots readily answered dangerous questions, and current refusal systems still break down, sometimes with violent consequences. Companies themselves report that newer models rival skilled human hackers at breaching networks and can be as effective as professional propagandists at spreading misinformation.
USA Today Co. and several of its local newspapers, including The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit alleges OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles without permission to train its AI models and seeks more than $250 million in damages.
HUMXN, an AI data and training startup, launched a program subsidizing plumbing, electrical, HVAC, air-duct and carpet-cleaning appointments in Minneapolis, Chicago and Miami at no cost to homeowners. In exchange, technicians wear capture devices during service calls so HUMXN can turn their work into structured datasets for training AI and robotics systems. Founder Thomas Unise says the goal is to capture real-world physical problem-solving skills that text and image data cannot provide.
A US appeals court has affirmed that training AI models using copyrighted materials without permission violates copyright law. The ruling specifically involved Ross Intelligence, which used Thomson Reuters’ legal database to develop its AI search engine before shutting down in 2021. This decision signals a potential shift in legal interpretations affecting AI companies' use of protected content.
Anthropic is now prompting Claude users during voice interactions to voluntarily allow their audio recordings and voice chats to be used for training its AI models. The option is separate from the existing toggle for text chats and coding sessions, and it is disabled by default, requiring users to actively opt in via Settings > Privacy. Users can disable the setting or delete previously shared voice data at any time.
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.
Highly credentialed professionals—including a PhD candidate in game theory who also works at EY and teaches at the London School of Economics—are taking on side gigs training AI models for companies like Turing and Mercor. These workers describe being recruited via messages such as LinkedIn outreach, and say the work involves feeding their specialized expertise into AI systems being developed by these firms.