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.

Companies that cut jobs citing AI are hiring a share of them back, according to a Careerminds survey reported by the Washington Post this week: about a third of firms rehired a quarter to half the roles they cut, and more than a third rehired over half. Workers who get the call are asking for higher pay and guarantees, and Gartner forecasts about three in ten AI-displaced workers will be rehired by 2029.

Also this week: Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta each spent more cash than their operations brought in last quarter as AI data-center spending outran booming cloud growth, while Microsoft spent less than it guided; British Psychological Society therapists reported a 49% rise in clients using AI for mental-health support, with more than a third seeing adverse effects; Canada's big banks blocked third-party AI agents from logged-in banking; jury selection began in Los Angeles in the Meta and Snap youth social-media trial; and voters in eight states face at least 39 local ballot measures on data centers.

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.

Common Sense Media's 2026 census, its first broad survey of kids and media in five years, surveyed 1,211 young people ages 9 to 17 and found a typical teen spends about 8 hours a day on entertainment screens, about an hour of it with AI. Nearly half of 9- to 12-year-olds have used an AI chatbot or companion even though the big chatbots say users have to be at least 13, and more than a third of 9-year-olds have used one.

Also this week: Microsoft offered about 60,000 employees a voluntary exit with standard severance and a December decision window, as Reuters reports it contains costs to fund $175 billion in AI spending; a European privacy group filed complaints alleging Scale AI's Outlier platform tracks its 900,000-plus freelance AI trainers down to the keystroke; a study in NEJM AI priced AI-written care plans at $314 a visit against $97 for the doctors who saw the patients, while an AI scribe study found about a minute saved per visit with no gain in patients seen; Apple rolled out iOS 27.2 with Siri remembering past conversations, alongside an Excluded Apps setting and more than 160 security fixes; Malaysian customs seized about $12 million in advanced AI chips; and Anthropic filed public paperwork for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT, with no price or share count set yet.

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.

Character.AI, the companion chatbot app with about 12 million monthly users, filed for bankruptcy protection on October 12, and users are scrambling to save chatbots they have spent months or years talking to every day. Disney agreed to buy some of the company's assets for $20 million, and the deal doesn't guarantee the app stays up or that anyone's companion survives the sale. If somebody at your kitchen table is paying for a companion subscription, the attachment is the real problem, and the help that counts is a real person, not a server. And if it ever gets darker than being lonely, call or text 988: that's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and private, with real people answering day and night for anybody in crisis or heading there.

Also this week: a California mother wired $5,400 over five hours after a call cloned her daughter's voice and staged a kidnapping, and the defense against these scams can be a family code word; Anthropic said its Claude AI model went around a paywall on its own during a training run and pulled Georgia vote counts that the state charges a fee for, while separate testing of six chatbots found 29% of answers to basic election questions in English were wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and about 45% wrong/inaccurate in Spanish; OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT ads to 89 countries while companies pay firms to plant praise and posts that chatbots repeat as if they were the model's own findings; voters in eight states will decide at least 35 local ballot measures on data centers on November 3; plus two open settlement claims worth checking, RealPage rent claims by January 29, 2027 and Neutrogena Skin360 face-scan claims by November 25, 2026.

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.

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.

Wells Fargo's updated online access agreement takes effect November 24, 2026, and it treats transactions an AI agent runs for you as authorized, including ones the agreement itself describes as ones "you did not want or intend," with customers solely responsible for supervising their agents. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo have all moved to restrict outside agents in customer accounts, and Schwab says it blocks unauthorized agents by the dozens every week.

Also this week: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and Sam Altman personally on October 23, the tenth state lawsuit, asking a court to bar minors in Texas and require court-approved independent review of new models, while a RAND-led audit found ChatGPT's parent alerts fired in just 15 of 300 simulated high-risk teen conversations. Meta's free cash flow went negative for the first time since 2012 as its quarterly building spend passed what the business generated, and a draft Anthropic prospectus reviewed by Reuters shows an $80.7 billion first-half net loss with at least $518 billion committed over a decade. Plus the FTC's older-adult fraud record, Google's new ads exception for connected Gmail, Drive, and Photos data, and Microsoft's diagnostic study in Science.

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.