TechPulse USA

Google has until November 2 to explain why its artificial intelligence is sitting on classroom desks across America — and why, the senators demanding the answers say, schools often cannot switch it off. The letter is short, blunt, and bipartisan, and it lands at the exact moment Washington has stopped arguing about whether children use AI and started arguing about who put it in front of them. On October 21, Senators Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote to Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet and Google, with nine questions and a deadline. Their message, in the senators' own words, is that they hold "grave concern" over Google's aggressive push of AI products into schools. The sentence that will travel furthest is the one they put in plain language: "Google is forcing their AI products into classrooms across America, and children are paying the price." Photo: The US Capitol, Washington, DC. File p...

By Daniel Rao Let us be precise about what happened on Friday, 23 October 2026, because precision is the whole story here. Senator Ron Wyden did not pass a law, attracted no Republican co-sponsor, and did not put a price tag on anything. What the Oregon Democrat and Senate Finance ranking member did was release draft legislation — a plan, in public, for a country that is frightened of losing jobs to artificial intelligence before it has actually lost them at scale. That candour, offered up front rather than buried in a footnote, is what makes the Stability and Opportunity for Workers Act worth taking seriously. It is a safety net designed in daylight, with its gaps visible. The draft, released alongside Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Senators Michael Bennet and Elizabeth Warren, would rebuild American unemployment insurance from the floor up. And it would ask the industry at the centre of the anxiety — the data-centre operators whose warehouses of servers power the AI bo...

It took one senator to kill it — and barely a floor exchange to do it. On Wednesday, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana walked onto the Senate floor and asked his 99 colleagues to pass — right then, by unanimous consent, bypassing committee markup and the usual floor process — a bill requiring artificial intelligence companies to build "kill switches" into their most advanced models: a hardwired emergency shutoff for an AI that starts to go rogue. Under unanimous-consent rules, a single objection kills the motion. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was already on his feet. "I don't oppose the spirit of this bill," Paul said, "but I do ask that we have all of the information. We should not impose new regulations on AI throughout our whole economy without studying, without debate, without a single committee hearing." And just like that, the fast-track attempt was dead on arrival — a casualty, as Kennedy put it with characteristic bluntness, of a Congress that ...