philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Amazon’s Ring unveils flying drone and robot to patrol homes and businesses

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The company on Tuesday unveiled the $250 Ring Drone Cam, a security camera that can fly from room to room, including upstairs, as well as capture footage during the day or at night. When an alarm or sensor on windows, doors and home security devices is triggered, the textbook-sized drone travels a preset path to investigate suspicious activity. Users can also deploy the drone at any time, the company said. ...

Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018 and is known for its doorbells, has been beset with privacy concerns, primarily due to its partnerships with police. Earlier this year, Ring faced renewed scrutiny over a controversial Super Bowl ad touting an AI pet-finding tool called “Search Party.” It then canceled an integration with police tech provider Flock Safety, which has also faced widespread backlash over its automated license plate readers. ...

Siminoff said the drone can’t fly outside per Federal Aviation Administration regulations, which restrict operating drones unless they’re within a line of sight of a pilot. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/10/amazons-ring-unveils-flying-drone-robot-to-patrol-homes-businesses.html

Beyond LLMs? China forges new path for AI with focus on industrial systems

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China has also moved away from isolated AI applications towards industry-wide systems, often coordinated by local governments, according to Nie Jun Yu, Huawei Technologies’ global chief architect of digital government, who also spoke at Monday’s conference at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

In provinces such as Zhejiang and Guangdong, local authorities were coordinating AI adoption across entire industries rather than leaving individual companies to develop their own systems, Nie said.

China’s approach differed from that of the United States and Europe as it had a greater emphasis on making AI widely accessible through infrastructure rather than competing solely on model capabilities, he added. ...

See the full story here: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3373822/beyond-llms-china-forges-new-path-ai-focus-industrial-systems

New AI regulator announced, as government considers criminal law change to keep erring frontier companies in line (Australia)

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) safety regulator, which will enforce penalties for frontier AI companies that breach their obligations. 

The government is also considering criminal law changes to deal with serious misconduct by any of these companies. ...

The six mandated requirements for companies are:

• maintain security controls across all stages of AI development and deployment 
• identify and manage serious risks associated with models
• quickly provide mandatory notification of incidents to the Australian government 
• allow independent evaluation of models 
• maintain and publish safety and security frameworks to ensure good governance, risk management and transparency 
• respond to updated standards and rules as technologies change.

Albanese said these protections were in line with recommendations from the parliamentary joint select committee on AI. ...

See the full story here: https://theconversation.com/new-ai-regulator-announced-as-government-considers-criminal-law-change-to-keep-erring-frontier-companies-in-line-296274

Google’s new AI ‘ultimatum’ sparks concern over tech giant’s power in California schools

But that decades-long relationship between the search giant and education turned into the subject of a furor this week when Google announced that starting in January it plans to block K-12 students from using its search engine unless districts opt into the company’s AI-generated version of it.  

“If a school is not comfortable with that and simply wants AI off, then they have the choice to not have Search on at all,” Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education, said on Monday during a virtual briefing.  ...

Google’s decision could complicate such efforts, particularly because schools rely on the company’s digital workspace for daily lessons and its search engine for research and assignments.  ...

See the full story here: https://timesofsandiego.com/education/2026/11/08/googles-new-ai-ultimatum-sparks-concern-over-tech-giants-power-in-california-schools/

US bank regulator issues first-ever AI guidance for examiners

... Under the new framework, first reported by ​Reuters, the OCC says banks are not expected to establish separate risk ​parameters for AI use and examiners should not treat the technology as a unique risk. But examiners should consider the way a lender is using AI, ​as well as the size and complexity of the lender. ...

The OCC said its examiners should focus ​on the consequences of potential AI-driven mistakes at banks ​rather than ⁠the sophistication of particular models they're using.

For example, it said a simple AI agent that is authorized to initiate transactions could be considered ⁠riskier ​than a sophisticated model deployed for internal ​purposes. Higher-risk uses of AI may require greater restrictions on autonomy or more direct ​human oversight, the document said.

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-bank-regulator-issues-first-ever-ai-guidance-examiners-2026-11-04/

Microsoft AI CEO warns industry against trying to build conscious machines

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Microsoft’s Suleyman has argued that proving machines are conscious would be like when the centuries-long belief that Earth was the center of the universe was proven wrong by Copernicus, or similar to the survival-of-the-fittest theory proposed by Charles Darwin.

“It would be one of the most significant moments on Earth since the dawn of life. If we build a conscious machine, we will have created a new digital species. It would upend our morality, our politics and the core foundation of human civilization,” he wrote.

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-11-01/if-we-say-ais-deserve-rights-it-could-start-to-believe-it-microsoft-ceo-says

AI can make tech CEOs’ lives easier. What about everyone else?

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And in this case, it just seems like that bet is not borne out yet — for a variety of reasons, partly because the society that this technology is being promoted into is very different. People are starting to say, “I don’t love the influence that this technology is having in my life. I don’t love that you’re pitching this as something where every experience in my life should be optimized out of. But actually, I want to live my own life. I actually want to parent my own children.”

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See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/01/ai-can-make-tech-ceos-lives-easier-what-about-everyone-else/

A Defense Contractor Gave Their Personal AI Agent Access to a Secure Pentagon System

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The Accenture employee is alleged to have connected a secure production environment to their personal Claude account so as to allow an AI agent to write and deploy code. Claude is currently barred from being used by DOD staff. (Anthropic directed WIRED to the company’s usage policy, which instructs users not to use its products to “interfere with the operation of military bases and related infrastructure” or to “bypass security controls such as authentication systems, end point protection, or monitoring tools without authorization.”)

The Accenture employee’s AI agent ran on the DOD network for two months before it was identified and the vulnerability could be patched. Sources indicate that despite the security risks posed by the AI coding agent, Accenture employees did not treat the incident as severe or urgent. DOD employees and federal contractors are required to report any cybersecurity incident within 72 hours of its discovery, but sources indicate Accenture did not initially report the breach to the government at all. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/a-defense-contractor-gave-their-personal-ai-agent-access-to-a-secure-pentagon-system/?_sp=7ab0d326-0ec7-4433-95b8-cb1d2a1cf0c3.1793378859830.f6aee7c3-05dc-4350-9a1b-cb61c16fd7cd

OpenAI Executive Dean Ball Rejects “Silent Consensus” That AI Will Sideline Humans

... “The silent consensus is not consensus because people agree it is good,” Ball said. “It is consensus because people share the intuition that it is inevitable.” ...

“I expect incidents of this type to worsen in severity, scale, and speed over the coming months and years, and I expect that much of what we today know as frontier AI governance will be built in a state of crisis,” Ball said. ...

Ball argued that while the tech industry has ambitious visions for new AI technologies, it has given far less thought to how society will function alongside them. ...

Still, Ball acknowledged that his perspective could prove wrong. If autonomous AI companies begin to beat out human competition, he said, “many foundational tenets of liberalism may well have to go out the window.” ...

“We can become a new kind of man, not a transhuman, but a man expanded,” Ball said.

See the full story here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/26/openai-exec-lecture/

Why Anthropic’s draft bill sets $1 billion threshold for AI risk

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Under the bill, a federal judge, at the request of the Commerce Department, would only be able to block model release if there is imminent, foreseeable enumerated risk. A model reaches this threshold if it is believed to be able to cause more than $1 billion in damages or kill or seriously injure more than 50 people via a cyberattack, the model evading its developer’s controls or the creation or release of a biological weapon. ...

The risk language mirrors similar risk thresholds in SB 53, the California bill that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law last year, the RAISE Act, which Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) approved in December and Illinois’ SB 315 signed by Gov. JB Pritzker (D). Each of the bills built on one another, using similar verbiage. ...

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/21/anthropic-bill-ai-risk-threshold-01128458