The Australian government is seeking support from global tech giants as it works to strengthen the country's online safety laws and artificial intelligence (AI) regulations. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who met Apple CEO Tim Cook at the tech company's headquarters in Cupertino, California, on Saturday, said that "Australia can't do it alone" when it came to protecting children from the dangers of the internet. "We're putting stronger rules in place to keep Australians safe online," he said. "And now, big tech companies like Apple are stepping up too." Albanese, who is also in the United States for the United Nations General Assembly, used his trip to call for stronger AI regulation after dire safety warnings from industry leaders.

The reliably Republican South Dakota senate seat has an incumbent on the ballot. But PACs associated with AI labs and investors have already spent more money on the race than actual residents have. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, arrives for a vote in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. Major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to $1 million into incumbent Republican Mike Rounds's South Dakota senate race, seeking to shape the outcome of a noncompetitive race amid a critical national debate over AI regulation. Rounds has been the beneficiary this cycle of around $600,000 in spending by outside groups, with the vast majority of that figure coming from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which receives funding from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei, speaks in India in February. CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei, speaks in India in February. AI CEOs say they need to slow the pace of development. After apocalyptic warnings about the threats posed by AI, leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's calls to'slow the pace' F acing a public uproar over Anthropic researchers' repeated warnings that artificial intelligence could kill all of humanity by 2030, the AI company's CEO Dario Amodei issued a proposal at the weekend to slow down the technology's advancement to ensure public safety. In a rare display of unity, the heads of the largest US artificial intelligence companies all agreed immediately.

The European Union and the United States continue to pull in opposite directions on artificial intelligence, with Washington urging other governments to loosen constraints at a recent Group of 20 ministerial meeting. On Tuesday, the US hosted a G20 "innovation" meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where it put forward arguments against AI-specific regulations. "Policymakers do not need to approach each innovation in isolation and should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-its-kind policy problem," Kratsios said. Such appeals are part of Trump's overall approach to making the US "the world leader in artificial intelligence". He has led a campaign to slash regulations, including in AI development.

Look Up Creator Playbook Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series Seen an ad with an AI influencer or actor? It may be against the law. New York has a law regulating AI actors, but will Trump's FTC crack down on synthetic performers, too? Two complaints of undisclosed AI use have already been submitted to New York's AG under the new law. This screenshot was included in the Athletifreak complaint alleging the undisclosed use of synthetic performers.

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy AI4Media Humans Do The Heavy Data Lifting Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 The Royal Statistical Society's AI Task Force has issued a critical mandate via a new paper, AI Regulation Needs Statistics, which demands that statistical principles actively shape global AI governance. The publication escalates the core argument of their foundational work, AI is Statistics . This earlier paper argued that AI is fundamentally statistical, meaning effective and ethical deployment is impossible without statistical literacy. You can watch our expert panel discuss the topic here . A major focus of that work was around the challenges of evaluating AIs, given that they are dynamic systems that continue to evolve once they have been deployed in the real world.

The "right to be forgotten" and the data privacy laws that encode it have motivated machine unlearning since its earliest days. Now, some argue that an inbound wave of artificial intelligence regulations -- like the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) -- may offer important new use cases for machine unlearning. However, this position paper argues, this opportunity will only be realized if researchers proactively bridge the (sometimes sizable) gaps between machine unlearning's state of the art and its potential applications to AI regulation. To demonstrate this point, we use the AIA as our primary case study. Specifically, we deliver a "state of the union" as regards machine unlearning's current potential (or, in many cases, lack thereof) for aiding compliance with various provisions of the AIA. This starts with a precise cataloging of the potential applications of machine unlearning to AIA compliance. For each, we flag the technical gaps that exist between the potential application and the state of the art of machine unlearning. Finally, we end with a call to action: for machine learning researchers to solve the open technical questions that could unlock machine unlearning's potential to assist compliance with the AIA -- and other AI regulations like it.

The right to be forgotten and the data privacy laws that encode it have motivated machine unlearning since its earliest days. Now, some argue that an inbound wave of artificial intelligence regulations -- like the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) -- may offer important new use cases for machine unlearning. However, this position paper argues, this opportunity will only be realized if researchers proactively bridge the (sometimes sizable) gaps between machine unlearning's state of the art and its potential applications to AI regulation. To demonstrate this point, we use the AIA as our primary case study. Specifically, we deliver a state of the union as regards machine unlearning's current potential (or, in many cases, lack thereof) for aiding compliance with the AIA. This starts with a precise cataloging of the potential applications of machine unlearning to AIA compliance. For each, we flag the technical gaps that exist between the potential application and the state of the art of machine unlearning. Finally, we end with a call to action: for machine learning researchers to solve the open technical questions that could unlock machine unlearning's potential to assist compliance with the AIA -- and other AI regulation like it.

AI regulation is seen as urgent by nearly 8 in 10 voters in a new poll, with 80% saying protecting public interests should be prioritized over promoting innovation.

Plus: how wastewater tracking could help curb measles' rise in the US. Can ChatGPT Health do better? For the past two decades, there's been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker "Dr. But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. According to OpenAI, 230 million people ask ChatGPT health-related queries each week.