Safety

US voters in the 2026 midterm elections voted against AI data centers in at least 38 of more than 40 ballot measures across 13 states, passing outright bans in six cities and power limits in 12. Pro-data center politicians also lost offices nationwide, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who was defeated by Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa after his support for AI data centers became a central campaign issue.

Google Research has introduced Agile Deliberation, an open-source framework that uses vision-language models to help humans build AI image classifiers for subjective categories. The system guides users through scoping concepts and resolving edge cases via borderline images, feeding human feedback into an automated prompt optimization loop.

Quanta Magazine explores new research investigating whether artificial intelligence models have the capacity for introspection, or awareness of their own internal thought processes. The piece connects this AI research to broader philosophical and psychological debates regarding consciousness and whether introspection is an illusion.

Leading AI laboratories have established election war rooms to monitor and respond to deepfakes during the midterm elections. The piece examines whether this traditional social media strategy is effective at countering AI-generated election misinformation.