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.

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