October 18, 2026

Welcome, humans.

Okay, so your next car could have a whole roster of AI helpers riding along. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said its cars would eventually run other companies’ AI agents, but gave no launch date.

Think of the direction as an ecosystem of assistants in your car, with software from different companies that can handle tasks for you. Rivian’s own assistant already shows the basic idea: connect your calendar, then ask it to move a meeting or navigate to your next appointment. The new part is opening the car to outside agents, too.

How will all these AI agents work together? Still a mystery. But if my car starts scheduling alignment meetings, I'm taking the bus.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

😺 Meta's new terms could let it scrape your website.
📰 China proposed new restrictions on AI exports.
📰 AstraZeneca signed an AI drug discovery deal worth up to $1.5 billion.
📰 Arkansas sued OpenAI over ChatGPT safety claims.
🎓 Turn your open browser tabs into a comparison table.

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😺 Meta's new terms could let it scrape your website

You use Instagram to bring people to your work. Now, the fine print could give Meta permission to collect that work for itself. That’s quite a referral fee.

Here’s what changed: Meta’s business terms take effect October 30 and authorize scraping websites associated with businesses using its products. That means automatically collecting content from those sites to develop and train Meta products. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that could include training its AI on publishers’ articles.

This could reach beyond what you post on Instagram. Sharing an article on Instagram could authorize Meta to collect the full article from your site, under the experts’ reading.

You can’t reject these terms separately and keep using Meta’s business products, according to Nieman. That’s a lot hiding behind “keep using our services.”

Meta says the update is about ads and recommendations. They say it’s about simplifying existing rules for collecting product information, not claiming a new right to scrape news. But experts question how broadly the terms could be used.

Even if Meta gets permission to collect content, using it to train AI is another legal question: does it have the right to learn from that work? Five major publishers sued Meta in May, alleging it pirated millions of works to train its Llama AI models. That’s a separate case, but it shows why a new set of terms doesn’t end the argument over whose work AI can learn from.

Now put that next to what other companies are doing with the same content:

Google is paying publishers. On October 15, it said more than 400 publications participate in its News AI pilot. CNN, Axios, and the Financial Times are among the new partners. Their content powers things like article summaries and audio briefings.
Cloudflare is testing payment for AI use. Its Pay Per Use beta, announced September 30, lets publishers accept offers from AI companies. The buyer sets the price and what it wants to use the content for, then reports its own usage. Cloudflare handles the bills and payouts.

Why this matters: If you use Instagram or Facebook to promote your business, Meta's new terms could have implications for content you never actually posted there. And with AI companies increasingly hungry for training data, the bigger question is who gets to decide how your work is used.

Apparently, having an Instagram account now comes with a side quest in copyright law.

🎓 AI Skill of the Day: Turn your open tabs into a comparison table

You've got five browser tabs open, each showing a different product, pricing plan, or research article. And, naturally, every website organizes its information differently.

Congratulations. Your browser is now a homework assignment.

ChatGPT's Chrome extension can help you compare information across open tabs without constantly switching between them.

Here's how to try it:

Open three to five pages you want to compare, such as software pricing plans or competing products.
Install the ChatGPT Chrome extension and connect it to the ChatGPT desktop app.
In a supported desktop session, reference your Chrome tabs with @Chrome and ask:

Try this prompt:

Compare the pages in my open tabs. Create a table showing key differences, pricing, pros and cons, and anything important that's missing. Include source links and flag anything you can't verify.

For pricing comparisons, ask ChatGPT to distinguish monthly payments from annual commitments and identify features that cost extra.

You can also ask it to organize your tabs by topic when you're done.

Five tabs enter. One useful table leaves.

Note: Browser integration availability may depend on your app version, plan, and workspace settings.

Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here.

🍪 Treats to Try

*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise to 700K+ readers here!

*Mercor tested 12 CPAs and AI on simplified accounting tasks. Accountants averaged 37%; one model scored 100% across 20 attempts. Read the study.
Why Successful AI Pilots Still Struggle to Reach Enterprise Scale. Read more.
IdeaLens checks whether your writing looks AI-planned, even when you wrote it yourself. Think of it as a second opinion, not a lie detector.
Fish Audio turns scripts into voiceovers with delivery instructions like "whispering" or "excited." Your inner voice actor can take the weekend off.
TwelveLabs Playground helps you find specific moments in videos using plain-English searches. Less scrubbing, more finding.
Hintly explains unfamiliar terms and acronyms during Google Meet calls. Finally, an alternative to nodding confidently through jargon.

📰 Around the Horn

China proposed new export restrictions covering 23 categories of AI technology, with an exemption for technology already publicly available.
Arkansas sued OpenAI, alleging it misled consumers about ChatGPT's safety, including risks to children.
Apple reportedly plans to bring Apple Intelligence to China in December, although the new Siri isn't expected to be included.
AstraZeneca signed an AI drug discovery deal with Insitro worth up to $1.5 billion, targeting liver and heart diseases.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested chipmakers could stop supplying customers that develop unsafe or irresponsible AI.
Researchers found that AI agents can develop shared communication systems through interaction, without being explicitly taught human language.

🌞 Sunday Special

Missed a few issues this week? We've got you. Here are the biggest stories and most interesting tools from Monday through Friday.

Top 5 Tools of the Week

Deep Review examines technical documents and helps identify issues before you share your work.
Muse Spark Open offers developers a downloadable model for coding agents, with commercial-use restrictions worth reviewing.
OpenLume creates animated explainers you can interrupt with questions. Because sometimes you need the video to explain itself.
OpenScreen turns screen recordings into polished demos with zooms and captions.
ngram transforms text and screen recordings into editable explainers, giving you a head start on tutorials and walkthroughs.

Thursday Trivia reveal: A was real. B was AI-generated. Take another look at the pair.

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