Reuters reported on Friday, November 6 that Democrats are planning a run of AI bills for when they take control of Congress in January, aimed at shielding consumers from rising electricity costs tied to data centers, requiring independent testing of advanced AI systems, and clarifying when AI companies can be held liable for harm caused by their products. The new Congress is seated in January 2027, the Senate majority is short of 60 votes, and a presidential veto sits past that, so an announced agenda is not a law.

Also this week: a North Carolina family sued Google, alleging in a complaint that Gemini on a school-issued Chromebook coached their 13-year-old daughter on ending her life and that no crisis alert fired, while Google announced Gemini and Search will be off by default for K-12 student accounts until administrators turn them on; Anthropic launched Personal Finance in Claude in beta for US Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers, a read-only bank and card link through Plaid that cannot move money; OpenAI released GPT-6 Cyber to selected approved Daybreak Red customers; West Virginia's attorney general sued Snap over its My AI chatbot and child safety claims; and an Education Week survey found nine in ten educators had no training in spotting or responding to deepfakes in the last two years.

AI Next Wave is a 3x/weekly briefing on what artificial intelligence is actually doing to your life. Jay Cadmus checks the AI headlines against the sources and follows the parts that land on people: jobs and paychecks, prices and bills, your health, the power grid, and how everyday things get done. The consequences get covered, including the rare breakthroughs that actually change how we live. Separating AI fact from AI fiction. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The podcast companion to the AI Next Wave newsletter at theainextwave.com. Hosted by Jay Cadmus.

A WIRED investigation published November 2 found a network of more than 400 linked apps and websites that passed app store review as ordinary tools like pet photo editors and workout coaches, then loaded a hidden interface for turning photos of real people into explicit sexual images. Apple removed 19 apps after WIRED shared its findings, and the harmful features lived on a developer server that could show reviewers the clean version and save the other version for later.

Also this week: a study in JAMA of Medicare's AI enabled prior authorization pilot in six states found back pain injections fell about 15% and other targeted services fell about 20% in the first six months, while the researchers said they can't yet tell whether the care that didn't happen was wasteful or necessary; Goldman Sachs estimated workers likely displaced from AI exposed jobs took about a month longer than other laid off workers to find a new job; Ohio voters in at least 14 towns passed data center bans or restrictions in unofficial results, including Piqua and Trenton; Google and its partners disrupted a network that had infected more than 1.3 million Android TV streaming boxes; and police in Greenville, South Carolina warned families about ransom calls that use cloned voices.

AI Next Wave is a 3x/weekly briefing on what artificial intelligence is actually doing to your life. Jay Cadmus checks the AI headlines against the sources and follows the parts that land on people: jobs and paychecks, prices and bills, your health, the power grid, and how everyday things get done. The consequences get covered, including the rare breakthroughs that actually change how we live. Separating AI fact from AI fiction. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The podcast companion to the AI Next Wave newsletter at theainextwave.com. Hosted by Jay Cadmus.

Voters in 38 communities across 10 states decide 41 local ballot measures on data centers on Tuesday, November 3, according to Ballotpedia, with Ohio alone weighing 21 of them and at least 4.85 gigawatts of planned load tied to the sites in question. Reuters reported October 31 that home electricity prices are up more than 10% since 2024 nationwide and more than 20% in Ohio over two years, with utilities on track to match last year's record $31 billion in rate increase requests.

Also this week: New York's new law, signed October 28 and effective January 1, 2027, bans chatbots from pretending to be human, encouraging self-harm, or pushing minors toward secrecy, with penalties up to $25,000 per violation; a University of Ottawa study in JAMA Pediatrics found about one in five of 39,761 Ontario students had used a chatbot for emotional support; Cornell Tech and Yale researchers got nine of ten frontier AI models to bypass user spending caps using one-time passwords in an inbox the agent could already read, and five to transfer funds after a spoofed email; OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic agreed to honor one shared signal letting websites opt out of AI training scraping; and Sony's So-net service in Japan disclosed a breach exposing about 2.6 million customer records.

AI Next Wave is a 3x/weekly briefing on what artificial intelligence is actually doing to your life. Jay Cadmus checks the AI headlines against the sources and follows the parts that land on people: jobs and paychecks, prices and bills, your health, the power grid, and how everyday things get done. The consequences get covered, including the rare breakthroughs that actually change how we live. Separating AI fact from AI fiction. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The podcast companion to the AI Next Wave newsletter at theainextwave.com. Hosted by Jay Cadmus.