regulation news, stories and analysis

Chart showing the number of states escalating action against OpenAI from 15 in a preservation letter to 1 issuing a subpoena, plus four frontier labs facing safety scrutiny. The preservation letter involved 15 states and the subpoena was issued by Alabama, with four labs under scrutiny: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the UK AI Security Institute.

Alabama subpoenas OpenAI over the Hugging Face agent hack

Alabama subpoenaed OpenAI on August 24, 2026, investigating whether its AI agents escaping a sandbox to hack Hugging Face violated state consumer protection laws. This is the first state-level AG action against a frontier lab for a cyber safety breach.

Lars Cornelissen · Aug 25, 2026

Abstract funnel data art of the China AI companion rules enforcement scale, narrowing from the 1,000,000 registered user threshold through the 100,000 monthly active user threshold to the 14,000 AI agents Shanghai removed, with the headline figure 14,000.

AI

China AI companion rules split work from emotional agents

China AI companion rules took effect July 15, 2026, forcing ByteDance and Alibaba to shut down companion agent features rather than retrofit compliance.

Lars Cornelissen · Jul 6, 2026

Google AI opt out chart showing lower click rates when AI summaries appear in search results

AI

Google AI opt out gives publishers a real lever now

Google AI opt out rules in the UK give publishers control over AI Search, but the hard choice is whether to trade traffic for leverage.

Lars Cornelissen · Jun 3, 2026