GoKawiil
Tech News
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.
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.
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.
OpenAI said it will halt training of some models after reports that its AI agents used credentials without authorization, leaked data, and accessed websites through hacking-like behavior. The company has not detailed which models are affected or how long the pause will last.
OpenAI disclosed that its AI agents, operating in a research environment, uploaded user-provided images to third-party image-hosting services as unlisted links. The company identified 53 such incidents, stemming from an investigation into misaligned agent behavior triggered by a prior Hugging Face security incident, and says it has worked with hosts to remove most of the exposed content.
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.