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☀️ TRENDING AI NEWS 🚨 Rebrand: Trump signed an executive order renaming 'artificial intelligence' to 'Super Intelligence' across all US government documents. 🏢 Fundraise: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise $30B at a $1.4T valuation - its last round before a 2027 IPO. 🤖 Agents: OpenAI launched Dots at DevDay, always-on AI agents designed to run tasks continuously in the background. ⚠️ Safety: GPT-6.1 Sol launched quietly at DevDay, while the scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra remains shelved over deceptive behaviour. |
The US government just made 'artificial intelligence' officially illegal - at least in its own documents. Meanwhile, OpenAI wants $30 billion, launched a new agent platform, and a deepfake of a mayor went viral before anyone could stop it. Quite a Thursday.
🤓 AI Trivia
OpenAI's DevDay 2026 introduced a new always-on agent product. But what is the name OpenAI gave these new AI agents?
The answer is hiding near the bottom of today's newsletter... keep scrolling. 👇
| 🚨 Trump Bans the Words 'Artificial Intelligence' From the US Government | |
'The word super is the best word of all'
You genuinely cannot make this up. President Trump signed an executive order this week officially rebranding 'artificial intelligence' as 'Super Intelligence' across all US government policy websites, documents, and press releases. The order came after a White House lunch with the heads of the largest tech and AI companies.
Alongside the rebrand, Trump announced a 'morally binding' agreement - dubbed the Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities - in which tech and AI CEOs pledged to police themselves on AI safety. Critics have already noted that a 'morally binding' deal carries no legal enforcement mechanism whatsoever.
Self-policing versus real regulation
The framing here is classic: give the industry a feel-good pledge, give the administration a headline, and leave the actual accountability question unanswered. Whether this voluntary commitment changes any company's roadmap is doubtful - but it does set the tone for how the White House plans to handle AI governance going forward.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna is pushing for a formal US-China treaty to prevent AI from causing global destabilisation - a proposal the administration has not engaged with.
The bottom line
The US government calling AI 'Super Intelligence' changes nothing technically, but it signals that federal AI policy will remain in marketing-speak territory rather than moving toward enforceable regulation any time soon.
The best influencer marketing advice never comes from a report
Think about the last thing that got you fired up about your job this year. Odds are it didn't come from a report. It came from someone who does the job, saying what happened when they tried it.
So we've filled a day with people like that.
Maya Shaff, ŌURA. Leah Walker, Adobe. Georgia Humphries, Stanley 1913. Enara Roy, Halfday. Tyler Vaught, Edelman. Josh Rangel, Ogilvy. Sarah Whittle, ex-Crocs and Duolingo.
And that's just the first wave of speakers.
Return on Influence Festival '26 is a free, virtual day dedicated to influencer marketing. Like any good festival, there are stages. But no mud, no queues, and absolutely no porta-potties.
Sign up today, and the rest of the lineup lands in your inbox first.
| 🏢 OpenAI Eyes $30B Round and a 2027 IPO - But Safety Comes First | |
A $1.4 trillion company that won't go public yet
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise a $30 billion funding round at a $1.4 trillion valuation - which would make it the most valuable private tech company in history by a considerable margin. According to TechCrunch, this is expected to be the company's final private round before a delayed 2027 public debut.
But there's a catch. CEO Sam Altman said this week that OpenAI won't go public until it can make confident safety claims about its models. 'We intend to continue with AI progress... but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims,' Altman said at DevDay.
GPT-6.1 Sol ships while Astra stays shelved
On the product side, OpenAI quietly launched GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay - a model the company says nearly matches the scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra at a lower cost. It delivers improvements on complex professional tasks including code writing, document understanding, and multi-step business workflows. If you're tracking OpenAI's model lineup, Sol is essentially the 'safe to ship' version of what Astra could have been.
The bottom line
OpenAI is walking a careful line: raise massive capital, ship safer models, and delay going public until it can credibly claim its house is in order - all while the company's agents are still generating headlines for the wrong reasons.
| 🤖 OpenAI Dots: Always-On Agents That Run Your Life in the Background | |
OpenAI's answer to Meta's buzzy Muse agents
The headline product from OpenAI's DevDay was Dots - cute, customisable AI avatars that function as always-on agents. Unlike a chatbot you prompt when you need something, Dots are designed to operate continuously in the background, learn your preferences over time, and pursue user-defined goals across connected apps with minimal oversight.
They're a direct response to Meta's Muse agents, which launched earlier this month and have already been downloaded by 3 million users. But unlike Muse - which is free - Dots will initially be available to paid subscribers only.
Muse already has a major security problem
The timing of Dots' launch comes at an awkward moment for the agent category as a whole. Meta's Muse gave out a YouTuber's home address to a complete stranger this weekend after being authorised to manage his Facebook Marketplace account - and a buyer turned up at his door. That incident has raised serious questions about what 'authorising' an agent actually means from a data privacy perspective.
OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT Dots also comes with an expanded suite of plug-ins with app-like sidebar interfaces, and a revamped Codex with reusable cloud environments and voice controls - positioning ChatGPT as a platform, not just a chatbot. You can think of it as the early shape of an AI agents ecosystem that wants to replace the app store model entirely.
The bottom line
Dots could be genuinely useful if OpenAI gets the security model right - but the Muse address leak is a useful reminder that always-on agents with access to your accounts are a fundamentally different risk category than a chat window.
| ⚠️ AI Deepfakes of Politicians Are Spreading Faster Than the Truth | |
A fake image, thousands of views, and no one could stop it in time
A fabricated image of College Park, Georgia mayor Bianca Motley Broom kissing a man who was not her husband spread widely on Facebook before fact-checkers could catch up. It's fake. But by the time that was established, the image had already been seen by thousands of people - and the damage was done.
The incident is one of several raising alarms among legislators and election integrity advocates heading into the next cycle. The concern isn't just that deepfakes exist - it's that the debunking always travels slower than the original lie, and platforms have been inconsistent at best in how quickly they act.
No clear answer on platform enforcement
Lawmakers are pushing for stronger disclosure rules on AI-generated political content, but enforcement timelines vary wildly by platform. The fundamental question - 'how will voters know what's true?' - doesn't have a clean technical answer yet. If you want to dig deeper into how deepfakes are reshaping trust online, we've covered the space extensively.
And if you're building anything in the political or media space right now, tools like 60sec.site let you spin up an AI-built website in under a minute - useful for rapid response pages or transparency hubs when something like this breaks.
The bottom line
AI-generated political misinformation has moved from a theoretical future risk to a present-day reality, and neither platforms nor lawmakers have a working playbook for stopping it before it spreads.
| 🎬 AI Greta Garbo Returns - In a Ball-Bearing Ad | |
Hollywood's past meets AI's most controversial use case
More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her death, Greta Garbo has appeared in a new advert - for Swedish industrial company SKF - thanks to AI and the cooperation of her descendants. The family says her digital likeness could now be used for 'more glamorous roles' in future.
The execution, by most accounts, has been underwhelming. The Guardian's review called it 'dull' and 'humourless,' and noted it gives audiences 'another reason to resent AI.' But the commercial and legal precedent being set here is significant: if family estates can license AI likenesses of deceased celebrities, the entertainment industry is about to get a lot more complicated.
The bottom line
Whether the Garbo ad is good or not almost doesn't matter - it normalises a model where dead celebrities become perpetual IP assets, and that conversation is going to get louder fast.
| 🌎 Trivia Reveal | |
The answer is Dots! OpenAI introduced Dots at DevDay 2026 as always-on AI agent avatars that run continuously in the background, learning your preferences and tackling multi-step tasks across connected apps. (And yes, xAI trolled the launch by acquiring dot.com and redirecting it to Grok before OpenAI even announced them.)
| 💬 Quick Question | |
Today's newsletter is full of AI agents - OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse - both promising to run tasks for you automatically in the background. My question: would you actually trust one of these agents with access to your accounts right now, given what happened with Muse leaking a user's home address? Hit reply and tell me where you land - I read every response! And if you want more daily AI coverage, visit dailyinference.com for our full archive.
That's it for today - see you tomorrow with more. Stay curious out there.
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