On October 19, nine Chinese agencies issued an 18-point notice on commerce, one of which applies tiered governance to commercial AI agents: registration, testing and recalls in sensitive areas, self-assessment in low-risk ones. The guidance carries no penalties or timetable and does not say which tier these agents fall under; three days earlier, Beijing had proposed export controls on intelligent agents.
DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion, one of the largest funding rounds in China. It comes just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove the company's technology over national security concerns.
The GSA, the US federal purchasing agency, was due by October 19 to add a clause to new tenders for LLMs, chatbots and agents: no training on government data, deletion of fine-tuned weights and embeddings at contract end, and incident alerts within 72 hours. European vendors can still bid but must give 30 days' notice of any adaptation to non-US rules that substantially changes their model's answers, which could cover AI Act tuning.
Standard EN 18286, published in the EU's Official Journal on October 14, is the first harmonized standard under the AI Act and gives a presumption of conformity for the quality system required of high-risk AI providers. Nine of the ten areas in the standardization request, including risk management, data and cybersecurity, still have no standard, so the rest of compliance must be shown without one.
Datacentres, AI and dislike of the billionaires behind it have turned many Americans against big tech, and campaigns are using it. One Tennessee ad shows datacentres crushing rivers, parks and farmland to attack a candidate over a law that allowed them.
Google illegally cleared some 250,000 trees across 330 hectares of forest near Muhos in northern Finland to build a datacentre, and has been ordered to halt work at two sites in the country. Residents say muddy runoff from the stripped land is flowing into a nearby stream.