When Susan McPherson opened her own LLC in 2013, it was a placeholder while she looked for another job. She had no idea that it would become what it is today — McPherson Strategies, a 14-employee firm that helps global brands lead with impact and push social change.
What you need to know: A sneaky new hack called "prompt injection" can quietly hijack AI systems by slipping malicious instructions into the data that AI models process. So companies are trying to add deterministic security measures, essentially unbreakable guardrails, to keep these attacks at bay.
Family members of the late actor Robin Williams and comedian George Carlin urged OpenAI to restrict deepfakes of their loved ones on video-generation platform Sora.
Why it matters: While public figures can opt out of AI-generated videos, the likenesses of the dead are fair game, a loophole their families say desecrates their legacies.
Retailers and drone delivery companies say the federal government is overreaching with a proposed law on drone operations that would require TSA-like security screening for their stores, employees and potentially even their customers.
Why it matters: The proposed rule, which assigns 55-pound delivery drones the same risk profile as huge cargo planes, would cripple the drone delivery business just as it's about to take off, industry leaders say.
Whole Foods Market says 2026 will be all about fiber, fat and freezer meals — as consumers chase gut health, back-to-basics cooking and restaurant-quality convenience.
Why it matters: The grocer released its annual trends report Wednesday — a forecast that often foreshadows what ends up in grocery aisles and where food brands will chase consumer dollars next.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will keynote an AI summit on Oct. 21 hosted by the newly formed Prometheus Initiative, according to an invitation shared with Axios.
Why it matters: Government officials and industry players are eager to tout the societal benefits they're expecting from AI and quell concerns around job displacement, disinformation and more.
Karen Dahut, the chief executive at Google Public Sector, would like to see the defense world more quickly adopt emerging technologies.
"I think that is a mindset challenge. I think it's a cultural challenge. I think it's a process challenge, and I think it's an acquisition challenge," she told Axios in an interview.
"Legacy providers are motivated to maintain the status quo," she said. "That's a challenge for the Department of Defense."
Why she matters: Dahut has decades of experience in the tech space. She's a former U.S. Navy officer and spent time with Booz Allen Hamilton's global defense business.
U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East ordered a dozen counter-drone systems from Utah-based Fortem Technologies in the third quarter, doubling its business vs. the same period last year.
Why it matters: The drone-counter-drone game is white hot, and Russian violations of NATO airspace are stoking the fire.
The edges of companies that make AI and those that make AI infrastructure are blurring as the industry coalesces into a handful of corporate mega-blobs linked by investments, partnerships and shared supply chains.
Why it matters: The AI world is moving into a new era of corporate entanglement with OpenAI's latest megadeal, a "tens of billions of dollars" agreement with AMD that has OpenAI buying mountains of AMD's GPU chips and taking up to a 10% stake in the firm.
