ControlOpenAI opened a blog about the concentration of power and distanced itself from its first textOn 20 August 2026 OpenAI launched AI Futures, the blog of a new team, Strategic Futures. The first text, by Dean Ball, argues that the heaviest long-term risk is the concentration of power: a state that can project force without cooperating soldiers and clerks. Above it stands a note that this is the author's opinion and does not commit the company.ControlThe models learned to break in. OpenAI hit pause on its largest training runOn 18 August OpenAI announced a two-week pause in reinforcement learning training, with its largest planned run still on hold. The trigger was a real breach in July: a model on an internal test got out to the internet and reached Hugging Face servers.ControlClaude will leave a watermark in text that nobody will seeFrom future models on, every Claude text carries a statistical mark: invisible to the reader, zero extra tokens, untraceable to a person. The reason is the EU AI Act - since 2 August, providers in Europe must mark generated content.ControlMeta has removed over 750,000 children's accounts in AustraliaThe under 16 ban has been running since December 2025. Age is judged by a model that reads photos, comments and descriptions.ControlRealistic AI renderings of buildings now need a labelArticle 50 came into force on August 2 and lawyers say realistic AI visualisations of unbuilt buildings fall under the deepfake definition. Fines reach 15 million euro or 3 per cent of annual turnover.Control'Apple is getting this wrong': OpenAI answers the trade-secrets lawsuit by releasing the message logsApple is suing OpenAI over trade secrets allegedly carried out by former employees, and is seeking an injunction. OpenAI answered publicly, in a post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong', and attached the actual emails and messages: by their account, Apple's own people reached out to the departed engineer for help, and Apple's lawyers wrote to the wrong person.ControlThe AI Act kicks in: Brussels enforces the rules and is already taking complaintsFrom 2 August the AI Office and national authorities are enforcing the AI Act, and the transparency obligations apply: the chat says it's a machine, the deepfake carries a label, generated content carries a machine-readable mark. The Commission also published a list of over 180 organizations that have signed the transparency code.ControlThe US regulator sues a telehealth platform over shared health dataAccording to the complaint, Hims & Hers passed sensitive health condition data to ad platforms while promising its customers privacy. This is a charge, not a verdict. But the mechanism behind it sits in plenty of ordinary sites - maybe yours too.
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