Control of Congress, an open governor's seat, 14 propositions and a Bay Area transit tax are on the ballot. Here is what to know, from Washington to your school district.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman published an X essay Nov. 1, 'Don't build conscious superintelligence,' saying current AI systems are not conscious and developers have no right to create conscious beings; he said he would call for a stop to AI development if consciousness emerged in training.
The first World Robot Mount Tai Climbing Competition was held Nov. 2 in Tai'an, Shandong, with nearly 90 teams, Xinhua reported. A Zhishen Lingyue humanoid won the 1.6 km, 600-step humanoid race in 27:26; Beijing Lingyi Technology's legged robot won the 3.9 km, 3,100-step race in 43:41.
Anthropic's amended S-1 filed Nov. 2 says internal estimates about future models indicate it 'may imminently meet' its Responsible Scaling Policy threshold for 'dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI,' though no current model is designated as exceeding it.
Wired reported Nov. 2 that a network of 400+ apps and websites linked to Chinese-language developers posed as ordinary AI tools but could load hidden tools for making sexual deepfakes; Apple removed 19 apps and Meta took action against thousands of ad accounts.
MIT CSAIL researchers posted a Nov. 2 blog study reporting that GPT-6 Astra can read and write neural-network weights directly; editing 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights raised its MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1%. Not peer reviewed.
