China's Xi Jinping proposes BRICS 'open-source AI zone'
Visual Credits: Flickr/MEAPhotogallery
Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed setting up a BRICS open-source artificial intelligence (AI) community, offering to help member countries develop and deploy large language models, AI training and a common digital cloud platform, Indian Express reported.
Speaking at the BRICS Summit in New Delhi on Sunday, Xi said China would take the lead in establishing a “BRICS AI open source community”, support cooperation on large language models, organise specialised AI seminars and training courses, and build what he described as an open ecosystem for AI.
Chinese AI companies produce world-leading open-source AI models - whose underlying code is accessible for adaptation by users - while US developers have favoured closed-door approaches.
Xi also called for establishing a "broad, consensus-based global AI governance framework,” Euronews reported.
Xi is expected to visit the United States this month for talks with President Donald Trump, with AI governance likely to be part of their discussions as fears grow that the world risks losing control of the rapidly developing technology, the outlet said.
PayPal fires 25% India employees on AI adoption
PayPal laid off approximately 600 employees (about 25% of its India workforce) on August 31, 2026, the Hindu reported. However, the company claims it sacked 220 workers.
According to India Today, affected staff received sudden meeting invitations on Monday morning, August 31, and had their system access revoked immediately after the call
The reductions are part of a global transformation to lower costs and integrate AI. PayPal expects AI and automation to drive a large portion of its long-term operational savings. Company disputes reports of larger job cuts; declines to provide details on impact on contract workforce
US government sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit
The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in a lawsuit against the New York Times, arguing in favor of the use of copyrighted writing to train artificial intelligence, reported the Guardian.
The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023.
The US government filed a brief in court. A brief has advisory rather than legal weight. “The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally … As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence’,” the brief said.
Copyright owners, including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets, have filed dozens of lawsuits over AI training against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms. They say the companies misuse their material to train AI systems and do so without compensation.
For AI chatbots to generate responses, machine learning systems are first fed billions of lines of text. The bots produce their output by statistical analysis of what the next word should be by matching a user’s query to parts of the database.
Tech CEOs undermining regulation : ‘I don’t think anyone is really comfortable’: Democrat leading on AI raises alarms at Trump, Zuckerberg call
Rep. Lori Trahan said she and other House Democrats would haul in tech CEOs, like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, if her party takes back the majorit
A House Democrat trying to lead her party on artificial intelligence policy sent a warning shot Friday to tech CEOs trying to undermine efforts to regulate the fast-growing technology.
AI-linked stocks slide after tech bosses call for slowdown in ‘reckless’ development
Bosses of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX called for a slowdown in AI “reckless” development, citing fears the technology could soon run out of control.
The chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to “slow down”, but also said Washington should actively impede Beijing’s advancement in order to keep a technological edge.
However, Donald Trump dismissed calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy”. The president wrote: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!” He said his administration had “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!)”.
The UN security council, meanwhile, is planning to hold a meeting on AI next week as international concern rises, Agence France-Presse reported on Monday. Shares in SoftBank, a Japanese investor that is a big backer of OpenAI, slumped 13%, while the South Korean Kospi stock index, which relies heavily on chipmakers that supply AI companies, dropped by 3%.
Amodei has said that “building too fast is reckless”, warning that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet” in future.
China dismisses AI ‘fearmongering’, spy chief says U.S. models threat to cyber security
Meanwhile, China dismissed what it said were “fear mongering” calls for the US to block Beijing’s AI industry. China’s ministry of foreign affairs responded to a question about Amodei’s essay by saying all parties should work together on AI.
“Fear mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a press conference on Monday.
Earlier, president, Xi Jinping, warned at a conference in July that AI should “always remain under human control”.
China’s top intelligence official warned that the use of AI by adversaries could pose a risk to the country’s political and social security. Chen Yixin wrote that advanced US models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber could pose serious risks to Beijing’s critical information infrastructure. He called for strengthening of AI security against the U.S. models which have been weaponised and were examples of new threats to cybersecurity, he said.
Jim Reid, of Deutsche Bank, said intense competition in the sector meant it was unlikely AI companies would stop investing so heavily in their technology.
Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, alleging in federal court that the tech companies copied the newspapers' journalism without permission to train their AI systems, reported Reuters.
The suit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features.
The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. "We feel strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation," Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.
The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them
Oracle’s 6 am layoff email partly because of AI adoption
Oracle has begun a new round of layoffs, partly because of AI adoption in certain departments. The latest cuts follow a substantial reduction in Oracle’s workforce during fiscal 2026. Oracle’s workforce declined by about 21,000 employees, or 13 per cent. Business Insider reported. The plan includes severance, contract terminations and other exit costs and is partly linked to the adoption of AI across some functions, news agency Reuters reported.
The layoffs come as Oracle dramatically increases spending on data centres to meet demand for artificial intelligence services.
The company reported $28.5 billion in capital expenditure in the first quarter, up from $8.5 billion a year earlier, and maintained its fiscal 2027 capital expenditure forecast at $90 billion-$95 billion, Business Insider reported.
Reuters reported that the company is trying to balance its aggressive AI infrastructure expansion with concerns over its cash flow and debt burden.