AI-made midterm ads top $137 million, and 70% carry no AI label  October 17th 2026

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.

• Meta's new open model is showing up in US search trends. Google's trending "artificial intelligence news" searches in the US pointed to it this week. Meta's 800 billion parameter Muse Spark Open model needs about 1TB of RAM to run locally, which means two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios or four 256GB ones, at roughly $38,000 for the four.
• xAI's Grok Bot app is climbing the Productivity chart. Grok Bot lets you message AI agents from your phone like coworkers, and the agents sign in to your tools and websites and keep working after you close your laptop.
• An app that records and summarizes your meetings is moving up too. Summary records, transcribes and summarizes meetings, interviews, lectures and podcasts, so you can listen instead of taking notes.
• A private AI image app is new on the Graphics & Design chart. LocalForge runs Stable Diffusion image generation on your iPhone with no internet connection and no per-image fees. It needs a phone with at least 6GB of RAM.
• A chatbot app with voiced characters is climbing in Lifestyle. CHAI lets you chat with a large selection of AI characters that reply with their own voices, and create your own.

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

• Some companies that rushed into AI are now pulling back. Meta scaled back plans to cut staff and lean on AI agents after employees spent more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, the Guardian reported, citing Reuters. Firms from Microsoft to McKinsey are limiting how much employees use AI, and an Atlanta Federal Reserve working paper found 90% of executives say AI has not yet raised productivity at their companies.
• The first large study of doctors using AI counted 270 million questions. About 950,000 US physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners sent 270 million questions to the AI tool OpenEvidence over about two and a half years, according to a Harvard Medical School study in JAMA. 51.9% of questions were about clinical decisions, mostly treatment, and 13.9% were about diagnosis. OpenEvidence supplied the data, and three co-authors are or were its employees.

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

• How Heavily Are PhD Students Offloading Their Scientific Writing to AI?: An NBER paper measured AI writing in nearly every US STEM PhD dissertation from 2019 to 2026. It found none before 2023 and AI writing in 29% of dissertations filed in 2026. Graduates whose dissertations contain AI writing are less likely to go into academic research.
• Machine learning models trained on a long-running survey poorly predict hundreds of life outcomes: Matthew Salganik's team ran thousands of models per outcome and found that most life outcomes were not very predictable. Even for the most predictable ones, the complex models showed little skill over a simple method.
• A Y Combinator startup wants an AI agent watching every customer: Outlit's founders say "every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move," pulling from call logs, sales data, social posts and LinkedIn. The product has not been publicly released.

Wait, What?

• About half of men surveyed said they knew two AI executives who do not exist. In a Harvard survey of more than 5,400 Americans, 53% of men said they knew of Mira Murati, Susan Milner and Craig Dalton. Murati is real. The researchers made up Milner and Dalton. 40% of women said they knew the two fake names.
• Palantir's CTO says AI researchers are taking up smoking to show they believe AI will cure cancer. Shyam Sankar said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "so many AI researchers have started smoking" to signal their faith in AI. He named no researchers and gave no evidence.

Worth Watching

The videos AI practitioners are passing around right now — curated on AI TV.

Black Hat USA 2026 | The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident Black Hat

This week's poll

Should AI-made political ads have to say they use AI?

Until next time,

Alexis