28 September 2026

Bill Gates: AI companies regulating themselves is not enough, laws are needed

In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," Bill Gates came out in favor of a law regulating AI: "No one thinks self-regulation is enough." In his view, AI is already so powerful that in the hands of people with bad intentions it could lead to "a billion deaths." He called a kill switch that would let authorities shut down models insufficient on its own: safeguards and oversight, he said, must be mandatory.

NBC News ↗ The Guardian ↗ USA Today ↗

From recent days

New York court sentences Michael Smith to 18 months in prison - his bots played AI songs billions of times, earning him over $8 million in royalties

Judge John G. Koeltl on Tuesday, October 6, sentenced Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release and ordered the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said. According to prosecutors, from 2017 to 2024 Smith ran thousands of fake accounts (up to 10,000 at once) that streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times; in April 2023, Smith's bots using YouTube Music family plans played his music 80.9 million times, while Taylor Swift's entire catalog had 9.3 million plays on such plans. Smith pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit fraud; it is the first criminal streaming fraud case in the US, Billboard reports, adding that the defense asked for no prison time and prosecutors for at least 46 months.

justice.gov ↗ Billboard ↗ Gizmodo ↗

PewDiePie unveils Ajax - an AI model that doesn't refuse to answer and runs on a home computer

YouTuber PewDiePie presented Ajax - an AI model that can run on a home computer and from which he removed the refusal mechanism. It is a fine-tuned version of Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B. It powers Odysseus, the YouTuber's earlier project: an assistant running on the user's computer that handles email and calendar and browses the web. According to the author, OpenAI banned his account twice while he was working on the model, once for distillation, that is, training one model on another model's answers.

Tom's Hardware ↗

SpaceX strikes deal to buy 800 MHz spectrum licenses and wants to become a major US mobile carrier

SpaceX announced a deal to buy nationwide 800 MHz spectrum licenses (up to 14 MHz of paired spectrum). This band is meant to let the Starlink Mobile network reach inside buildings. Once the FCC approves, the company wants to combine satellites that connect directly to phones with a terrestrial network and compete with T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. The same week, the FCC approved the Gen2 constellation: 15,000 V2 Starlink Mobile satellites, which according to SpaceX will provide more than 100 times the capacity of the current generation.

SpaceX ↗ The Verge ↗

All news →