Chatbots are leading hikers astray

Citing Axios, TechCrunch says OpenAI is lining up a public relations campaign for after the US midterms. Chris Lehane, who runs global affairs, sees the midterms as a preview of 2028, when he expects AI to dominate the agenda. His ideas for shaping the debate include speed limits for AI, showing people how AI helps in everyday life, a US role in global standards, and calling data centers AI compute campuses instead. Data centers are deeply unpopular, and Amazon and Microsoft have said they will drop NDAs in talks with local governments. Lehane described the debate as healthy and said communities should make companies deliver real benefits.

Engadget reports that an X user spotted new lines in Claude's instructions: it should help build original games, genre games, and games based on a user's own designs and assets, but not recreate a specific existing game, even under a new name or a claim of originality. Addy Osmani of Anthropic's technical staff confirmed the change on X, saying IP infringement with Claude breaks the usage policy, that original and genre games are unaffected, and that the company will keep tuning the balance. The change follows a wave of AAA games decompiled with AI help and released as browser fan projects. The report also notes Anthropic's earlier settlement with authors over training data.

In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Frank Calegari describes OpenAI's October 6 release of more than 700 research papers as a turning point: AI can now make groundbreaking contributions across mathematics, yet the papers are badly written, ignore attribution norms, and some are wrong. Pointing to the classification of finite simple groups, he warns against declaring a field finished once its famous problems fall. Rather than focus on the companies, he argues mathematicians should change what they control: evaluate all work as if AI-assisted, hire through in-person conversations, demand more from journals, broaden graduate training, give better seminars, and take responsibility for vetting AI results. Choosing worthwhile problems, he says, may matter more than producing proofs.

Brave announced on its official X account that Ask Brave, its AI answer feature, has become faster and smarter. Answers to simple questions arrive about 70% sooner, and when building an answer it now researches the query in more depth, drawing on ten times as many search results. According to Brave's website, Ask Brave is the AI chat built into Brave Search. It handles both quick questions and deeper research, pulls content from many pages into one answer shown right on the results page, and works on desktop and mobile. It runs on Brave's independent index, with a privacy focus, no profiling, and cited sources. Brave says more improvements are coming. The post includes a short demo video, available via the source link.