GoKawiil
Tech News
The House of Representatives voted with strong bipartisan support to pass the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, which would direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require automakers include AM radio in new cars, trucks and SUVs at no extra cost. The measure now moves to the Senate, where a companion bill co-sponsored by Sens. Ed Markey and Ted Cruz already has 60 co-sponsors, enough to survive a filibuster.
A major cryptocurrency market-structure bill known as the Clarity Act has failed to advance, even after the industry poured hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying efforts to secure its passage. The setback leaves crypto firms without the clearer federal rules they had hoped would settle long-running regulatory disputes.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI companies should implement their own safety controls rather than waiting for government regulation to catch up with the technology's rapid development. He warned that AI's fast progress carries real risks and could go badly if not managed responsibly by the firms building it.
An Anthropic researcher resigned publicly, warning that AI labs are 'gambling with our lives,' and two colleagues echoed the concern. In response, Senator Bernie Sanders announced plans to introduce legislation banning the development of superintelligent AI.
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced plans to introduce legislation forcing Apple and Google to build device-level safeguards preventing children from taking, sharing, or viewing nude images on phones and tablets. The move comes after a three-month voluntary compliance deadline given in June, which Nandy says produced only partial improvements from the companies.
The UK government says Apple and Google failed to meet a three-month deadline to make it impossible to capture, view, or share child nudity images on their devices. In response, officials are introducing what they call world-first legislation that would impose fines and potential criminal liability on executives at companies that don't build these protections into phones and tablets sold in the UK.
A California bill aimed at regulating surveillance-based pricing — where retailers use personal data to set individualized prices — failed to advance to Governor Newsom's desk before the legislative deadline. The California Retailers Association responded by expressing hope that lawmakers can restart negotiations next year by focusing on points of existing consensus.
The Clarity Act, a bill meant to set clear market-structure rules for digital assets by dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC, failed to get a vote before the Senate's August recess. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has now scheduled a procedural vote for September 15, but unresolved disputes over stablecoin rewards and ethics provisions tied to President Trump's crypto holdings could still stall progress. Industry figures, including SALT CEO John Darsie, say they doubt the bill can pass before the 2026 midterms complicate the legislative calendar.
New proposed legislation would require companies to build in the ability to throttle, suspend, or fully shut down AI agents if needed. However, the specific technical mechanisms and trigger conditions for when such controls should activate remain undefined.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has proposed incorporating images, diagrams or visual aids into legislative text, arguing current bills are written in dense language accessible mainly to Capitol Hill insiders. She frames the idea as a way to make lawmaking more transparent and understandable to ordinary citizens rather than only policy staffers.
The EU has enacted the AI Act, a roughly 50,000-word, 113-article law representing the first comprehensive AI regulation worldwide. The U.S., by contrast, has no federal AI law, instead relying on executive orders, agency guidance from bodies like NIST and the FTC, and a rapidly growing number of state laws, which more than doubled from 49 in 2023 to 131 in 2024.