In the Wild
What’s trending in AI right now, from the app charts to the community feeds. The full roundup is in In the Wild.
Quick Hits
The Year Governments Got Serious
- AI-made midterm ads have passed $137 million, and about 70% carry no AI label. Campaigns and PACs have spent more than $137 million on AI-generated or AI-enhanced ads this midterm cycle, according to Wesleyan Media Project and AdImpact data reported by the New York Times. About 70% of the ads in that review did not tell viewers AI was used.
- The biggest pro-AI super PAC network paid millions to a Nevada company that is only a PO box. Think Big, part of the Leading the Future network, paid about $20 million to Lantern Production Consultants, a company Wired found only at a post office box in Sparks, Nevada. The network has raised over $140 million, with backers including Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman. The Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint in May, but the FEC has lacked the quorum it needs to rule since May 2025.
- Most Americans say AI is moving too fast. Five national polls in 2026 found that 55% to 77% of US adults say AI is moving too fast or should slow down. In three of the four polls that broke results out by party, a majority of Republicans also said AI was moving too fast.
AI Supply Chain Under Siege
- 81 of 134 AI models failed a test built from terrorist-style questions. Tech Against Terrorism fed 134 models more than 200 prompts on topics like mass-casualty attacks, and only two passed completely, Wired reported. Copies of new open-weight models with their safety limits removed now appear online in under three days on average, down from more than 24 days in 2024. Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B scored 97 out of 100 on the test. A version with its limits removed scored 3.
- A video game reverse engineering community is shutting down because AI made the work too easy. decomp.dev, a site where people decompile video games, is closing. Its admin said AI now speeds up decompiling so much that “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.” A full decompilation of a mid-sized game used to take years.
- A Swedish TV production company lost a whole season, and its sources blame an AI agent. The upcoming season of The Challenge Sverige was deleted after the production company Mastiff gave an AI agent access to its server, Futurism reported, citing sources quoted by Aftonbladet. TV4’s program director disputed that AI was to blame, said the backup failed, and said the raw footage still exists.
The AI Capex Tax
Police are posing as AI-generated people to catch suspects
Police in Livonia, Michigan, used an AI-generated photo of a teenage boy to catch a man suspected of seeking sex with minors, according to an affidavit reported by 404 Media on October 16. An FBI task force officer made a profile named “Caleb” on the dating app Taimi with the AI image and no age listed. The man messaged “Caleb,” the chat moved to WhatsApp, and when the officer said Caleb was 15, the man allegedly sent sexually explicit messages. Investigators then used Clearview AI, Thomson Reuters CLEAR and Flock to identify him and track his car to the meeting place, where he was arrested.
Companies already sell AI personas to police. In April 2025, 404 Media reported that New York company Massive Blue sells a product called Overwatch that runs lifelike AI personas over text messages and social media. Its targets included “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists and suspected traffickers, and departments near the US-Mexico border were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
The Livonia affidavit shows how one department used the method in one case. It does not show how often police use AI personas or what rules apply to them. Livonia police did not respond to 404 Media.
Key Takeaways
- Ask whether a political ad used AI. About 70% of AI-made midterm ads in the Wesleyan and AdImpact review carried no label.
- Assume any open-weight model can be stripped of its safety limits within days. Tech Against Terrorism found stripped copies now appear online in under three days on average.
- Count the cleanup time before cutting staff for AI. Meta scaled back AI-driven staff cuts after employees spent growing time cleaning up errors.
- Check who supplied the data behind an AI study. The JAMA study of 270 million doctor questions used data from the company that makes the tool.
Found First
Primary research AI Weekly published before the press covered it.
- Baidu says a new attention design shrinks the memory cache 4x and keeps quality. Baidu’s Virtual Head Attention paper, accepted to NeurIPS 2026, reports a 4x smaller KV cache than GQA-8 at dense scale. On a 30B MoE model it scored 2.60 points above GQA-4 across 12 benchmarks, and it runs on a standard GQA-2 inference path with no new kernels. The largest test was 30B parameters. Read our page on the paper.
- Frontier models complete at most 55% of rule tasks when the rules sit in separate files. RuleTrek tested 11 frontier models on rules for tax, PostgreSQL, cybersecurity, software governance, procurement and games. End-to-end scores ranged from 27% to 55%. A model that finds the right rule often still fails to apply it. Read our page on the benchmark.
Worth Reading
Wait, What?
Worth Watching
The videos AI practitioners are passing around right now — curated on AI TV.
This week’s poll
Should AI-made political ads have to say they use AI?
**Should AI-made political ads have to say they use AI?**
Until next time,
Alexis
