Voters in at least 13 states are weighing local measures related to data center development in 2026 as artificial intelligence projects surge to the forefront of the tech industry.
The states are Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Ballotpedia.
Ohio leads the nation with 21 measures targeting data center development across 18 jurisdictions, as the state has become one of the fastest-growing data center markets, the organization said.
The measures could support or restrict data center development, including by imposing new requirements that must be met before certain projects can move forward.
As of Wednesday, voters had decided six of the measures across the affected states in special and primary elections held earlier in the year. In each case, voters favored greater limits on data center development, according to Ballotpedia.
Police in Finland have launched a criminal investigation into suspected environmental damage at a planned Google data center site that is part of the tech giant’s $14 billion investment in the country.
The Oulu Police Department said the investigation involves the construction site of Tuike Finland Oy, a local Google subsidiary, in Muhos. Google has described its broader investment in Finland as the company's largest single investment in Europe.
The probe was launched over suspected deficiencies in drainage and water management at the site.
“Based on preliminary information, there have been ambiguities and deficiencies in the drainage and water management of the Tuike Finland Oy data center project site,” police said.
The preliminary investigation is expected to take considerable time and is projected to be completed in 2027, police said.
Etsy announced Wednesday that active buyers increased year over year for the first time in two years, following a crackdown on AI-generated listings.
In its third-quarter 2026 report, the company also said its active seller base grew at its fastest rate in two years.
The growth comes as Etsy announced last week that it was “updating listing image requirements to help protect buyer trust on Etsy.”
The changes include clearer AI rules, stronger enforcement against misleading listings and new tools to promote responsible AI use.
“At the heart of it all is the trust buyers and sellers have when they shop and sell on Etsy. AI is threatening that trust, and we have a responsibility to protect it,” the company said.
As AI use has expanded, Etsy said sellers have become concerned about their work appearing alongside AI-generated images, while buyers have grown more confused about how to recognize authentic products.
{{#rendered}}OpenAI on Thursday updated its Model Spec, a set of guidelines describing how an AI model should behave, putting new emphasis on user goals, safety and human control.
The updated guidelines lay out five core values: faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care.
OpenAI's stated goal is to have their models be truthful and respect users' desire to form their own opinions, especially as chatbots become another primary way people search for information once sought out with traditional internet search engines.
"We’ve been exploring new training methods to help our models learn these core values and better understand and follow the Spec’s specific behavioral principles," OpenAI said in a blog post. "The aim is to build an understanding of why those principles matter and how to apply them in new situations: to do the right things for the right reasons."
French AI startup Mistral on Thursday released its Large 4 model, which it says can help organizations find and address cybersecurity weaknesses.
Unlike Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are mainly accessed through online and cloud-based services, Large 4 can be downloaded and run independently by anyone.
Large 4 is one of the most massive large language models ever created, containing 1 trillion total parameters. Parameters are numerical values an AI model learns during training that help determine how it processes information and generates responses.
Despite Large 4 having 1 trillion parameters overall, only 52 billion are activated for each token it processes, reducing the computing power needed to run it.
Meta recently released a similar open model, Muse Spark Open, with 816 billion total parameters and 42 billion active parameters.
The latest releases from Mistral and Meta show how U.S. and European companies are beginning to take China’s lead in open AI models seriously.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation Wednesday that bans AI companies from allowing their chatbots to interact with children in ways considered harmful to them.
The law now bars chatbots from carrying on a personal, romantic or professional relationship with users under 18, or taking on an authority-figure role.
It also prohibits chatbots from suggesting they are human, alive or experience human emotions.
Additionally, the law bars chatbots from asking children unprompted questions about their emotions or using personal information from earlier conversations.
The state attorney general can sue individuals or businesses inside or outside New York when there is reason to believe they have violated—or are about to violate—the law.
The attorney general can seek a variety of remedies, including injunctions, restitutions, damages and civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation. Private lawsuits can also be filed if parents or a child's guardians believe the law was violated.
Tech:NYC, a nonprofit advocacy group representing New York City's technology sector, opposed the law, calling it "deeply flawed" and arguing some of the definitions and criteria used were too broad.
"This bill could force companies to restrict minors’ access to tutoring tools, homework help, coding assistants, and, arguably worst of all, career platforms—cutting our youngest New Yorkers off from resources that support their education and prepare them for the workforce," the nonprofit said in a statement.
The law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2027.
{{#rendered}}The Mayo Clinic, one of the most respected healthcare institutions in the world, has partnered with an AI-powered drug discovery firm to study autism spectrum disorder.
Through its technology, Transcripta Bio will help the Mayo Clinic better understand the molecular and genetic differences among people across the autism spectrum, with the goal of identifying targeted treatments for different groups of patients.
Mayo Clinic researchers will study the DNA, gene activity and symptoms of people with autism to look for biological differences between patients. The goal is to identify differences that might not show up through genetic testing alone.
Finnish police said Thursday that they have launched an investigation into alleged environmental abuses by Google, which is building a data center in northern Finland, Reuters reported.
Authorities said Tuike Finland, a subsidiary of Alphabet's Google, cut down trees and greenlit drainage projects at the construction site near the town of Muhos before required environmental impact assessments were completed.
"Based on preliminary information, there have been ambiguities and shortcomings in the drainage and water management at the construction site of Tuike Finland Oy's data center project," police said in a statement.
"The criminal investigation will examine, among other things, circumstances related to these issues," they added.
On Oct. 6, Finland's Supervisory Agency ordered Google to halt all activities at the Muhos site, as well as another site, that could have environmental impacts.
Google did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Reuters contributed to this post.
Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell resigned Wednesday after just over a year on the job after multiple reports came out that he relied extensively on artificial intelligence for his various published writings.
Semafor was the first to report on Schnell's AI use, claiming that the mathematical biologist's Aug. 9 opinion piece in The Washington Post was 100% AI written.
Semafor reached this conclusion by running the text of the article through Pangram, a piece of software that detects how much content in a written passage was done by AI.
Ironically, Schnell's piece was about how college students use AI to cheat on their assignments and what educators should do to maintain the integrity of their courses.
"Generative AI makes polished work easy to produce. Universities must now devise credible ways to observe the capacities behind it. The value of a degree will depend increasingly on whether they succeed," Schnell wrote to conclude the article.
Semafor's exposé and deeper reporting by The Dartmouth, the college's school newspaper, led to the Ivy League institution assembling a faculty-led committee to investigate Schnell's published work.
After reviewing Schnell’s internal emails and university records, the committee identified two additional academic publications in which he used AI to varying degrees.
For one of the academic articles, Schnell used the college's enterprise Claude tool to "substantially edit his research manuscript, troubleshoot errors in computer code, and generate figures for his publication."
The committee also found that Schnell violated The Washington Post's stated AI use policy when writing his op-ed.
President Sian Leah Beilock announced Schnell's departure on Wednesday afternoon, saying his resignation was his decision.
{{#rendered}}U.S. officials have concluded that a former executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed was collecting intelligence for Beijing during her tenure there, according to a New York Times report.
Alice Huang, the executive, also met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang multiple times, a relationship that reportedly alarmed U.S. officials because of the sensitive information she could potentially glean from the leader of the world's largest chipmaker.
Her familiarity with Huang came as U.S. officials suspected she was helping China evade restrictions on its access to advanced AI chips, including those made by Nvidia.
The Times reported that President Donald Trump, who has grown closer to Huang, was briefed on this situation about a year ago but took no action.
Huang was reportedly never warned by U.S. officials about Alice Huang's alleged intelligence-gathering for Beijing, though some senior Trump administration officials now doubt he could have remained unaware of her activities on some level.
China rejected the allegations as "groundless smears and slanders," while Nvidia said its chief executive's meetings with Alice Huang were "not unusual or unexpected."
"Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," an Nvidia spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement. "We're confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know."
The spokesperson added that "Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers."
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Anthropic announced Wednesday that it is expanding Claude for Legal with a gallery of ready-made AI tools designed to help lawyers review contracts, track regulations and manage legal work.
The new tools, called artifacts, allow legal teams to analyze documents, check legal citations, compare contract terms and monitor upcoming regulatory changes.
Users can start with built-in examples, upload their own documents or connect existing legal research systems, then share customized tools with colleagues across their organizations.
Anthropic says Claude performs an initial review while lawyers remain responsible for evaluating the results. The company has also added more than 60 legal connectors, including Bloomberg Law, Filevine and Legora.
The expansion follows the May launch of Claude for Legal and includes tools developed with law firms and legal technology companies, including Goodwin, Harvey and Foley & Lardner.
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