This week, Ofcom published the first of doubtless many reports on the impact of the Online Safety Act, which came into force in 2025. In the report, Ofcom acknowledges that there has been little change in the amount of “harmful material” children encounter online. The one bit of success appears to be that children are less able to access mainstream pornography sites because of age verification – but children still see pornography via social media, messaging, and gaming services. Ofcom wants to add body stigma and depression content to the list of types of “priority content” deemed harmful to children.
This is all without the proposed social media ban, which, separately, Ofcom warns may bar 100,000 16-to-17-year-olds because they have neither a passport nor a driver’s license to act as backup when other methods of age verification fail.
As Mike Masnick puts it at Techdirt, the OSA is ineffective, so Ofcom concludes we need more of it. So very Yes, Minister – specifically the episode The Challenge, in which a local government administrator proposes that every policy should be accompanied by criteria by which it could be declared a failure – “failure standards”. The civil service is horrified.
To mark Andy Burnham’s June arrival as prime minister, the Open Rights Group proposed a reset of digital policy. ORG advocates giving users better tools, publishing government content more widely so users aren’t forced to use Facebook and X, and shift government advertising budgets to local news sites. These all seem sensible.
In a new analysis of age-gating in Australia from DefendDigitalMe, Jen Persson and Madeleine Stone warn against conflating the process of age verification and the desired outcome of making children safe online. “Age checks on their own leave the harms children face online largely untouched, while building a permanent identity layer, often tied to a live face scan, between every person and the digital public sphere. The cost and risk of that layer fall first on the children these policies are said to protect.” They conclude that there are better alternatives: create protections for all users, not just children; subject new high-risk features to human rights assessments; enforce existing law; act on specific harms; and improve digital literacy. And: build in off-ramps so that policies don’t work can be ended. (RIP Humphrey Appleby.)
“The harm lies in platform design and engagement-driven business models,” they write, citing the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, “not in children’s access.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that stories about absurd new uses of AI must invoke Philip K. Dick. And so that is how Bloomberg Law announces that the state of Delaware, the first choice of American corporations, plans to create a new form of company – autonomous, bot-run Artificial Intelligence Companies, which would be allowed to claim limited liability for owners and full corporate “personhood”, sign contracts, make business decisions, own assets, and bring lawsuits. The PKD will be in the as-yet-unreleased details. The proposal would enable a 30-month test in a “regulatory sandbox”, possibly beginning next year. Argentina has similar plans. Professor Yonathan Arbel suggests the appropriate response is “terrified excitement”.
Maybe, if you’re a lawyer. My own response is more like exasperation. Those cited in the Bloomberg piece claim that legal penalties will “guide” AICs to behave “responsibly” by consuming resources that their programming would identify as needed for business expansion. What fantasy thinking is this? If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that AIs will find the shortest path to their assignment, even if that means using strategies humans would reject as illegal or ethically wrong. Does anyone really think AIs will be less inclined to create cover-ups than human-run Volkswagen, Enron, Theranos, or Bernie Madoff? Given the history of human interactions to learn from, AICs will sue human beings who try to expose their wrongdoing rather than decide to behave correctly. Dishonest humans will love them.
Granted, human-run companies are no more scrutable at the moment; many are thickets of chatbots. But at least human CEOs fear prison and poverty; AIs fundamentally can’t care about either.
As on their 2009-2016 show The Good Wife, TV writers Michelle and Robert are ahead of the headlines. In the third episode of their new series, Cupertino, “Juno”, an AI incorporates in order to gain standing to file a lawsuit.
The good news, according to Joe Miller and Sujeet Indap at the Financial Times, is that at least some people are paying attention. The chair of the House Oversight committee, James Comer (R-KY), has already written to Democratic Delaware governor Matt Meyer asking for more detail, concerned that “Delaware’s AIC proposal could be used to protect powerful AI companies and their investors from responsibility for reckless harmful actions”.
At Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin traces the idea to a July 2026 op-ed in Fortune by John Nay and secretary of state of Delaware Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez laid out their case for AICs. In their argument, wrapping AICs in a legal structure is essential because prohibiting autonomous software from transacting will be impossible. IANAL, but surely the humans in charge of the company the autonomous software represents are liable *now*. What’s the problem?
Illustrations: Local Halloween decoration in 2026.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
