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.