The Consumer Price Index for October will show how price pressures are trickling through the U.S. economy. See more of our coverage in your search results. Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve. U.S. inflation has accelerated this year as the war with Iran, along with an artificial intelligence investment boom, have stoked price pressures across the country. Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday will show just how potent those pressures continue to be. Economists broadly expect a reprieve in October, with overall prices as measured by the Consumer Price Index rising 0.3 percent for the month after a 0.6 percent jump in September. "Core" prices, which strip out volatile food and energy items, are forecast to have risen just 0.2 percent. But don't expect a year-over-year comparison. The agency will not release one given that it was unable to collect data during last year's government shutdown, which ran from Oct. 1 through Nov. 12. The trajectory of inflation is being closely watched by the Federal Reserve. Tuesday's C.P.I. report will be the last before the central bank meets for its final gathering of the year on Dec. 8 and 9. November's report comes out the day after the meeting. Policymakers have broadly signaled that they will raise rates next month as they seek to stamp out price pressures that have pushed inflation further away from their goal.

The Download: Pelosi's successor targets AI and data centers face power woes Plus: The FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair. Nancy Pelosi's replacement is ready to regulate AI As a California state senator, Scott Wiener authored legislation aimed at curbing the risks of advanced AI. Now, after winning a tight congressional race for Nancy Pelosi's open San Francisco seat, he could play a key role in setting federal AI policy. I spoke with Wiener only a few hours after he had been declared the victor. But he was already thinking about AI risk: during our 20-minute conversation, he used the phrase "recursive self-improvement" half a dozen times. "We need to slow this down," he told me.

Going up in flames storyboard for Gone With the Wind (1939). Going up in flames storyboard for Gone With the Wind (1939). 'Without storyboards, I feel like I'm in Grand Central station in my underwear': film fights back against AI As Hollywood begins to adopt the technology, the professionals in most direct jeopardy are the illustrators mapping out directors' first visions. A film industry dominated by AI is a dystopian prospect: stories and dialogue generated by large language models, populated by reincarnated screen icons and uncanny humanoids . That is in the future, but the real-world impact of AI is already directly affecting jobs behind the scenes, as Hollywood's biggest film-makers begin to adopt the technology.

The AI Safety Debate Has Lost the Plot. The risk of nuclear catastrophe is real, as is the fallout of the China-US domination game (hi there, spies). But no need to panic about Skynet. In early fall, I felt my anxiety rising from its usual baseline. Was it September's back-to-school energy? Nope, I realized with annoyance: It was AI--again. Only this time, instead of its purveyors warning of massive job displacement, they were foretelling mass extinction. Who needs jobs when we're all dead? Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked into a major open-source platform, Hugging Face . These bits of software-- AI agents --were assigned human attributes: They had "gone rogue," displayed "bad behavior," "cheated."

The Consumer Price Index for October will show how price pressures are trickling through the U.S. economy. See more of our coverage in your search results. Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve. U.S. inflation has accelerated this year as the war with Iran, along with an artificial intelligence investment boom, have stoked price pressures across the country. Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday will show just how potent those pressures continue to be. Economists broadly expect a reprieve in October, with overall prices as measured by the Consumer Price Index rising 0.3 percent for the month after a 0.6 percent jump in September. "Core" prices, which strip out volatile food and energy items, are forecast to have risen just 0.2 percent. But don't expect a year-over-year comparison. The agency will not release one given that it was unable to collect data during last year's government shutdown, which ran from Oct. 1 through Nov. 12. The trajectory of inflation is being closely watched by the Federal Reserve. Tuesday's C.P.I. report will be the last before the central bank meets for its final gathering of the year on Dec. 8 and 9. November's report comes out the day after the meeting.

Australia will make it mandatory for artificial intelligence companies to immediately report when their AI models go rogue and to open their models for evaluation, the government said. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday the government had accepted all recommendations from a rapid review into the breach, which "include mandatory AI company reporting when it comes to misaligned behaviour or cyber-incidents, and consideration of reforming criminal law in cases of serious misconduct". The decision comes after OpenAI-powered models hacked into an Australian government health data system in June, slipping past its digital defences and accessing files without authorisation. Top AI firms have recently raised the alarm regarding the risk of humans losing control of their systems, calling for AI development to slow down to a pace that allows it to be safely regulated. Earlier this year, Anthropic's safety research scientist Evan Hubinger went so far as to say he believes there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could "kill all humans" within a decade.

As a California state senator, Scott Wiener authored legislation aimed at curbing the risks of advanced AI. Now, after winning a tight congressional race for former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's open San Francisco seat, he could play a key role in setting federal AI policy. I spoke with Wiener on Friday, only a few hours after he had been declared the victor. But he was already thinking about AI risk. The previous day, the AI nonprofit METR had released a report that had been widely interpreted as evidence that Anthropic had achieved recursive self-improvement, a phenomenon in which AI meaningfully contributes to its own advancement and AI progress potentially spins out of control. "It's very concerning," Wiener said, citing the report as evidence that we are quickly running out of time to regulate AI. "It was my hope that Congress would take decisive action before [the end of] this year," he said. "That does not appear to be happening." Wiener has been increasingly focused on AI in recent years, and he's made many of the AI safety movement's concerns his own: During our 20-minute conversation, he used the phrase "recursive self-improvement" half a dozen times, for example."We

If video killed the radio star, then AI slop returned the favor. At least, that is what Josh Cowell, founder of camera maker CAIM1, will tell you. Short for Counter Artificial Intelligence Machine 1, the startup is working to reestablish our collective faith in the validity of images through its latest prototype: a camera that embeds cryptographic proof of a photo's authenticity directly into the image. As Cowell described in a blog post by the startup's silicon chip provider, Tropic Square, the traditional photograph is dead, and designing a secure camera to replace it is an exercise in healthy paranoia. When you take a photo using its prototype, CAIM1's internal chip creates a unique silicon fingerprint that certifies when, where, and with which camera the photo was taken.

As the publishing industry wrestles with paranoia over the provenance of manuscripts, writers are caught in an impossible bind. Andrea Bartz is a prolific novelist with an impressive résumé . Since 2019, she has published five thrillers, become a New York Times bestselling author, had her work optioned by the likes of Netflix and Hulu, and picked up an endorsement from Reese Witherspoon's influential book club. But while Bartz and many other writers were on guard against this plunder of their work, another AI threat was brewing. What happens when authors are accused of relying on artificial intelligence themselves?

Demonstrators against artificial intelligence hold a protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Candidates who favor stricter oversight of artificial intelligence racked up wins in key congressional races, aided by a pro-regulation political funding group backed in part by Anthropic at a time when Americans are increasingly uneasy over the rapidly developing technology. Public First, funded by Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and other AI safety advocates, poured more than $63 million into the midterms to promote candidates aligned with its goal of stricter regulation, according to the group's numbers. The architects of two of the country's most sweeping state-level AI laws -- Colorado's Manny Rutinel and California's Scott Wiener -- will be among the incoming U.S. House members elected with help from Public First, bringing energy and expertise to Congress. Ten of the 17 congressional candidates the group backed were elected.