News That Caught Our Eye #71

Published on August 14, 2025

Summary

The UAE is turning petroleum profits into digital influence, offering its advanced Falcon AI completely free—seeking to position itself as the neutral alternative in U.S.-China tech competition. Meanwhile, America's own AI strategy faces sharp criticism. Former Biden officials call Trump's Action Plan internally contradictory even as AEI experts praise its geopolitical ambition but question implementation feasibility and ambiguity. Hundreds of hardware store parking lots have quietly become surveillance nodes, with Home Depot and Lowe's AI cameras feeding license plate data directly to law enforcement. InnovateUS debuts free expert-curated fall workshop series: 1) AI for law enforcement (hosted by New Jersey and Rutgers), 2) democratic engagement design (Reboot and the GovLab with Harvard's Allen Lab), and 3) public communication in the AI age (led by former NYT Executive Editor Jill Abramson and Northeastern's John Wihbey). Government Technology also debuts its inaugural AI 50 recognition program. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Upcoming InnovateUS Workshops

InnovateUS delivers no-cost, at-your-own-pace, and live learning on data, digital, innovation, and AI skills. Designed for civic and public sector, programs are free and open to all.

This month's workshops. Sign up here.

August 20, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: From Bureaucracy to Vitality: Transforming Public Organizations, Michele Zanini, Co-founder, Management Lab

August 21, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: UX in Government: How to Hire, Build Skills, and Grow Capacity, Cindy Phan, UX Engagement Lead, U.S. Digital Response, Keith Wilson, Talent Engagement Manager, US Digital Response

August 26, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Future-Ready Government: Building Resilience Across State and Public Agencies, Dan Chenok, Executive Director, IBM Center for The Business of Government

New Workshop Series - Curated by experts and focused on specific themes, these workshops are free. Attend one or all:

AI for Law Enforcement: Aimed at law enforcement and public safety professionals builds foundational knowledge and best practices for responsible AI deployment in policing. Hosted by the State of NJ and the Rutgers Miller Center on Policing and Community. Begins September 4. Sign up here

Public Engagement for the AI Era: Learn how to design effective and efficient AI-enhanced citizen engagement that translates public input into meaningful outcomes. Hosted by Reboot Democracy and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard. Begins September 11. Sign up here

Amplify: Mastering Public Communication in the AI Age: Explore how AI tools—when used responsibly and transparently—can strengthen communication, broaden outreach, and counter disinformation. Hosted by former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson and John Wihbey, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University. Begins Oct 7. Sign up here.

Governing AI

Elon Musk and X notch court win against California deepfake law

Chase DiFeliciantonio on August 5, 2025 in Politico

“A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a California law restricting AI-generated, deepfake content during elections — among the strictest such measures in the country — notching a win for Elon Musk and his X platform, which challenged the rules. But Judge John Mendez also declined to give an opinion on the free speech arguments that were central to the plaintiffs’ case, instead citing federal rules for online platforms for his decision.”

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Governing AI

A Deep Dive Into the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan

John Bailey on August 5, 2025 in American Enterprise Institute

"The AI Action Plan represents an important step toward strengthening American leadership in AI innovation. Achieving the plan’s promise will demand more than federal leadership. Governors must lead, aligning state investments and priorities with national goals; frontier AI labs hold the technical expertise to make safety and transparency real; civil society must push to ensure the benefits of AI are broadly shared and grounded in public trust. Only through this kind of deep, cross-sector partnership can the US turn vision into sustained advantage."

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AI for Governance

The Center for Public Sector AI Launches Its Inaugural AI 50 List

on August 5, 2025 in Center for Public Sector AI

"The AI 50, a new recognition program from the Center for Public Sector AI, highlights individuals and organizations making significant contributions to AI adoption and advancement in public sector agencies. Public and private sector participants focused on public service are eligible to submit. It was just a few years ago that artificial intelligence hit the mainstream. Since then, government has bet big on AI, from automating workflows and building chatbots to standing up AI working groups and appointing AI officials. To acknowledge that tidal wave of innovation, the Center for Public Sector AI is honoring both individuals and organizations — from state and local agencies as well as the private sector — with the inaugural AI 50 Awards."

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AI for Governance

Strategies for Integrating AI into State and Local Government Decision Making: Rapid Expert Consultation

Rayid Ghani et al. on July 31, 2025 in National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine

“As the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape rapidly evolves, many state and local governments are exploring how to use these technologies to enhance public services and governance. While some localities are currently using AI technologies, others are in the process of integrating or still deciding whether and how to adopt them, and for what uses. The available options pose different levels of risk and require balancing the potential of AI technologies to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness with potential challenges, such as associated costs, public trust considerations, data security risks, and long-term sustainability. The increasing development of new AI technologies presents a timely opportunity to provide evidence-informed insights as decision makers navigate the complexities of these technologies. This rapid expert consultation offers practical insights into how state and local governments can effectively integrate AI technologies into public services and governance processes.”

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AI and Public Safety

Home Depot and Lowe's Share Data From Hundreds of AI Cameras With Cops

Jason Koebler on August 6, 2025 in 404 Media

“Hundreds of AI-powered automated license plate reading cameras paid for by Lowe’s and Home Depot and stationed in the hardware stores’ parking lots are being fed into a massive surveillance system that law enforcement can access, according to records obtained using a public records request. The records, obtained from the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff’s Office by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media, show the sheriff’s office is able to tap into Flock license plate reading cameras at 173 different Lowe’s locations around the U.S. and that it can tap into cameras and gunshot-detecting microphones at dozens of Home Depot stores within Texas. The records are the latest to shed light on how expansive Flock’s surveillance network has become, and highlights that it includes cameras that are operated by both police and private businesses.”

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AI and Public Safety

We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents

Iason Gabriel et al. on August 4, 2025 in Nature

“Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are shifting their focus to building agents that can operate independently, with little human intervention. To be an agent is to have the ability to perceive and act on an environment in a goal-directed and autonomous way… The rise of more-capable AI agents is likely to have far-reaching political, economic and social consequences....Here, we argue for greater engagement by scientists, scholars, engineers and policymakers with the implications of a world increasingly populated by AI agents. We explore key challenges that must be addressed to ensure that interactions between humans and agents — and among agents themselves — remain broadly beneficial.”

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AI Infrastructure

How AI-Driven Search May Reshape Democracy, Economics, and Human Agency

Cameron Pattison, Vance Ricks, John Wihbey on August 11, 2025 in Tech Policy Press

“In May 2024, Google unveiled a new way to search the web: the AI Overview, which sits just above the classic PageRank cascade in Google Search. It presents you with direct answers to queries, summaries of the content found in the links below, and a carousel of sources. According to Google, AI Overviews (and AI Mode) promise speed, accuracy, directness of answers, effortless convenience, and an ability to ‘do more than you ever imagined.’ Preliminary studies voice concerns over the degree to which this innovation cedes ever-greater algorithmic control over information curation to Google, its effects on the web-link–based economy, and the ways in which it might undermine users’ ability to verify, diversify, and weigh the merits of search results. Acknowledging these issues doesn’t mean harkening back to an imagined past in which similar issues were absent from web search in general, or from Google’s search engine in particular. But there are many who see differences in kind, as well as in degree, from the pre-generative model-based online search environment. Indeed, we see a variety of specific concerns spanning the economic, political, social, and cognitive domains.”

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AI Infrastructure

The UAE is giving away its advanced AI

Divsha Bhat on August 8, 2025 in Rest of World

“The United Arab Emirates is offering its advanced Falcon artificial intelligence programs completely free at a time when OpenAI, Google, and their peers charge hefty fees for access to their more powerful versions. Falcon, an AI chatbot that can understand and generate human-like text in multiple languages, comes with a license that allows anyone to use, modify, or sell the technology."

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AI and International Relations

Should the U.S. put location trackers on AI chips?

Matt Levin on August 5, 2025 in Marketplace

“To win the AI arms race, the Trump administration is exploring requiring location trackers on high-end AI chips all to prevent those very expensive, very powerful Nvidia chips from being smuggled into China. Would that work? Nvidia may be the company that designs those high-end AI chips the U.S. says are too powerful to sell to China, but they’re typically not the company that assembles them into an AI server and then sells those servers to, say, a Malaysian AI startup. ‘The fact of having location tracking means there's sort of a level of surveillance that I think many potential purchasers of these chips would be — rightly — uncomfortable with,’ he said.”

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AI and International Relations

Trump's unusual Nvidia deal raises new corporate and national security risks, lawmakers and experts say

Karen Freifeld, Arsheeya Bajwa and Alexandra Alper on August 11, 2025 in Reuters

“U.S. President Donald Trump upended decades of U.S. national security policy, creating an entirely new category of corporate risk, when he made a deal with Nvidia to give the U.S. government a cut of its sales in exchange for resuming exports of banned AI chips to China. Historically, the U.S. government made decisions to control the export of sensitive technologies on national security grounds. Those decisions were viewed as non-negotiable; if a technology was controlled, companies could not buy their way around those controls, no matter how lucrative the foregone foreign sales. On Monday, Trump raised the prospect of ending that era, saying he would allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to China in exchange for the U.S. government receiving a 15% cut of the company's sales of some advanced chips in that country.”

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AI and Labor

Labor unions mobilize to challenge advance of algorithms in workplaces

Danielle Abril on August 13, 2025 in Boston Globe

As employers and tech companies rush to deploy artificial intelligence software into workplaces to improve efficiency, labor unions are stepping up work with state lawmakers across the nation to place guardrails on its use. Seth Harris...said despite the considerable unknowns about the effects of AI on jobs, it is reasonable to try to blunt risks to workers. “This is the critical moment, not only for AI guardrails, but for collective bargaining over AI in workplaces and industries,” said Harris, who is now a senior fellow at the Burnes Center.

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AI and Labor

Australia and the AI revolution – turning algorithms into opportunities

Jim Chalmers on August 2, 2025 in The Guardian

Article by Australia’s federal treasurer: “In 2020, Australia was ranked sixth in the world in terms of AI companies and research institutions when accounting for GDP. Our industrial opportunities are vast and varied – from developing AI software to using AI to unlock value in traditional industries… Artificial intelligence will be a key concern of the economic reform roundtable I’m convening this month because it has major implications for economic resilience, productivity and budget sustainability. I’m setting these thoughts out now to explain what we’ll grapple with and how. AI is contentious, and of course, there is a wide spectrum of views, but we are ambitious and optimistic. We can deploy AI in a way consistent with our values if we treat it as an enabler, not an enemy, by listening to and training workers to adapt and augment their work. Because empowering people to use AI well is not just a matter of decency or a choice between prosperity and fairness; it is the only way to get the best out of people and technology at the same time.”

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