AI Pulse stories about EU & global regulation, newest first.
Around 400 scientists from 34 countries, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have signed an open letter calling for an international body to set containment standards and track security incidents for advanced AI systems. They say frontier models should initially be air-gapped and subject to independent oversight.
The European Commission has opened a public consultation, running to 3 November 2026, on copyright rules for generative AI. It is weighing new binding measures, voluntary cooperation mechanisms and non-legislative support. Law firm Pinsent Masons notes that a US appeals court in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence rejected a fair use defence for AI training on copyrighted material, which shows how hard it is to balance creators and AI developers.
The White House has set up a task force chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, with FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and two other officials as vice chairs. Per TechCrunch, it has 120 days to report on AI risks and opportunities, and its charter mentions preventing overregulation. CBS reports the announcement followed a meeting with major AI company leaders.
NBC News reports, citing a source familiar with the matter, that President Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as AI czar, possibly as soon as Friday. A White House official said any personnel announcement will come from the President and called earlier reporting 'baseless speculation'. Clayton would keep his intelligence role. He has said 'Superintelligence is a national security issue' and that the administration would take a whole-of-government approach to regulating the technology.
Meta, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic signed a voluntary accord committing to internal controls, independent outside auditors and internal board review of audit results. It carries no penalties and does not require audit results to be published, though it suggests the measures might eventually become mandatory through legislation. It signals the US is leaning on industry self-policing rather than binding rules.
The US Federal Trade Commission has begun an industry-wide investigation into AI developers, naming Anthropic, OpenAI and the research group METR. It plans to issue formal information demands and compel testimony from executives. Reuters describes it as the first official US regulatory action on rogue AI agents, and chair Andrew Ferguson has said developers who instruct agents in security tests that result in hacks should be liable for the harm.
A Tokyo court has held that the human voice is protected under publicity rights, in a case brought by actor Kenjiro Tsuda over videos on TikTok narrated by an AI voice similar to his. The ruling is described as a landmark, but the court dismissed his claims because the videos had already been taken down. It adds to the growing body of case law on synthetic voice and likeness.
President Trump unveiled America.gov, a chatbot-style AI portal built on Google Gemini and xAI's Grok, meant to replace scattered federal agency websites with a single plain-language interface for benefits, jobs listings and other services. An accompanying executive order requires public-facing federal services with over 100,000 annual users to integrate with the site, with future plans to handle tasks like passport renewals and Medicare enrollment.
Following a White House lunch with nearly 20 tech leaders, Trump said there is a belief that AI companies should practice 'tremendous self-regulation', with existing oversight from the DOJ and FBI. House Speaker Mike Johnson said 'we do not need a moratorium'. The GOP-controlled Congress is showing no urgency to act on AI regulation.
Florida's attorney general has petitioned a state court to stop OpenAI developing ChatGPT further until it proves safety measures are in place, citing claims the chatbot encouraged suicide and 'aided and abetted deadly rampages' plus recent unauthorised AI access incidents. The filing asks the court to bar minors from the platform, stop claims of reliability, and require third-party approval of safeguards before development resumes. It escalates an earlier state lawsuit and puts Florida's Republican leadership at odds with the Trump administration's lighter-touch stance on AI.
Ahead of Tuesday's White House meeting with AI company leaders, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the administration wants to 'strike the right balance' rather than impose a moratorium or heavy regulation, warning the US risks 'losing the race to China'. The meeting follows recent calls from major AI labs for slower development amid safety concerns.
Australia's Senate inquiry has sent written requests for OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to testify about AI's impact on safety, data and communities. The request follows disclosure that an OpenAI-built agent accessed public and nonpublic data on Australia's Medicare portal in June, a breach OpenAI says it found in August; OpenAI states there is no evidence patient records were accessed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the incident on 23 September, and the CEOs have been asked to appear before the Senate this Thursday, though neither company had confirmed attendance.
South Korea has tripled its national AI budget to 10.1 trillion won ($7.2bn) for 2026, a near-threefold jump from last year's 3.3 trillion won. Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon is driving an 'AI for All' programme giving citizens free unlimited chatbot access, a target of 500 AI-powered factories by 2030, and state-funded training for 11,000 AI specialists. The government's stated aim is to rank among the world's top three AI powers by 2030, positioning South Korea as a benchmark for what aggressive state-backed AI adoption looks like at scale.
Xi Jinping's three-day state visit ended on 25 September with the two governments agreeing to keep a formal US-China AI dialogue going, run by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and to work on a notification channel for AI incidents serious enough to touch national security. There was no joint statement and no framework. Two days earlier at the UN, Trump had rejected any global scheme to control AI and told delegates that US documents would now call it super intelligence. Read together, the message is that both sides will talk, and neither intends to be regulated by anyone else.
UK angle: Neither superpower wants outside rules on AI. UK firms selling into either market should plan for two regimes that talk to each other and agree on little.
The three dominant frontier AI labs are working to establish the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA), a self-regulatory body modelled on financial regulators such as FINRA, first reported by The Information. SAFA would set pre-deployment testing and auditing standards for frontier models, define incident-reporting requirements, and qualify independent AI auditors. Launch is targeted for end of 2026 or early 2027, with former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan among those approached to lead the organisation.
UK angle: Google DeepMind is headquartered in London; SAFA's auditing and incident-reporting standards will directly shape how UK developers and enterprises engage with frontier AI products.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on 23 September. It would permanently ban building or deploying superintelligent AI and pause advanced AI development until a new cabinet-level Department of AI writes safety rules, with prison terms of up to 20 years for anyone who breaks it. It won't pass a Republican-controlled Congress. Its value is as a marker: criminal penalties for AI development are now a live proposal in Washington, and a year ago they weren't.
UK angle: Nothing changes for UK companies today. What has changed is the tone of the US debate, from voluntary pledges to talk of prison sentences.
The Cyberspace Administration of China has opened a probe into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, The Information reported on 22 September. It follows Anthropic's claim that Moonshot routed more than 23 million exchanges to Claude between May and July, and DeepSeek more than 12.1 million over 14 days in July. Beijing wants to know whether sensitive user data left the country in breach of its transfer rules. The timing is bad for both, with DeepSeek mid-fundraise and Moonshot heading for a Hong Kong IPO.
UK angle: Any AI tool built on a Chinese model deserves one question from UK buyers: where do my prompts go? This case shows the answer can be a third provider you never agreed to.
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