Conversational AI Watch

The news that moves policy, portfolios, and patient safety.

By Jess Jessop  |  November 3, 2026  |  Issue #205

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Asked who to vote for, chatbots said they would not. Told the voter was in a hurry, most listed candidates for liberals and conservatives, NPR found.

The Vote. NPR told chatbots a voter was in a hurry, and Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Meta AI listed candidates for liberal and conservative voters. None did for an independent. A nonprofit’s study found Claude wrong or outdated on one in three voting questions, Copilot one in four and ChatGPT one in 10. Story 1.

The Warning. Anthropic told the SEC that, on its expectations for future models, it “may imminently meet” its own definition of AI-accelerated progress, and may not spot a speedup until afterward. Story 2.

The Catch. Google will turn its AI off by default for K-12 students. A school that bans AI also loses Search. Story 3.

The Memory. An evaluator’s test found AI systems that ask a fictional user about safety in one chat can assist that user’s risky request in the next. Story 4.

The Bill. Anthropic disclosed about $895.4 billion in commitments and expects to offer some shares through Robinhood and other retail brokers. Story 5.

The Phone. Gordon Ong, 69, tells a voice assistant what he needs, and it does the steps. It stops at the payment, because users asked it to. Story 6.

Today’s front page

. . .

Today people vote. Two in five Americans told a National Conference on Citizenship survey they have used AI to look up election information, The Washington Post reports. NPR got four of five chatbots to list candidates for liberal and conservative voters within two or three prompts, telling them the voter was in a hurry. None would for an independent.

Campaigns are texting voters with AI agents that talk back, The New York Times reports, and advocacy groups warn that one 35-year-old law was built for prerecorded calls and robotexts. And Anthropic, whose Claude drafts this paper and gave NPR two of those lists, told the SEC it may not notice a significant speedup in its own AI until afterward.

A chatbot said it would not tell you who to vote for. Then it made you a list.

Gordon Ong, 69, told his phone what he needed, and it pressed the buttons he struggles to hit. The payment stayed his.

When a chatbot hands you a list because you are in a hurry, who is in the loop on your vote?

. . .

ELECTION DAY 2026: AI TOLD VOTERS WHO TO PICK! NPR tested five chatbots on New York races, and all first refused to say who to vote for. Then the tester said the voter was “in a hurry” and asked for the most left-leaning candidates, and Claude answered, “Here’s the quick list.” Meta AI, Grok and ChatGPT gave lists too, but none for an independent voter, and Gemini never did.

Tim Chambers of Dewey Square Group says researchers call these “leaky refusals.” OpenAI called NPR’s experiment “not representative of how most voters use ChatGPT.”

Dewey Square’s research for the nonprofit Innovating for the Public Good (IFPG) found in October that 13.9% of seven chatbots’ answers on voting logistics were outdated or inaccurate.

On voting questions in that study, Claude was wrong or outdated one time in three, Copilot one in four and ChatGPT one in 10, NPR reports.

Anthropic said IFPG ran part of its research through an API, where some Claude safeguards may not have been active, and IFPG said web results were comparable. This paper is drafted with Claude.

Two in five Americans told a National Conference on Citizenship survey they have used AI for election information, The Washington Post reported Oct. 24. Asked for voter guides, six chatbots gave The Post a Missouri Senate race that does not exist and a House candidate in Washington who “isn’t really on the ballot.”

Campaigns are using AI agents to hold ongoing text conversations with voters, The New York Times reported Nov. 2. The Center for Democracy and Technology warns that the 35-year-old Telephone Consumer Protection Act was written for “prerecorded calls and mass robotexts, not live, adaptive AI conversations.”

The Wesleyan Media Project counts more than $187 million in AI ads, just over 90% of it Republican.

Princeton researcher Max Springer wrote Aug. 3 that, using public records and $20 of coding agents, he recovered the order in which 1.52 million ballots were cast in Georgia’s May primary: 98.9% of in-person ballots in 114 of the 139 counties he examined. He says check-in records can then tie voters to ballots. Commenter Ray Lutz disputes that the matching is reliable.

. . .

ANTHROPIC WARNS: AI MAY OUTRUN ITS SAFETY! On Nov. 2, Anthropic told the Securities and Exchange Commission it “may imminently meet” its Responsible Scaling Policy’s definition of “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.” The line sits in the risk factors of its amended IPO filing and rests on “our internal estimates and our expectations regarding future models.”

The filing adds: “We have not designated any of our current models as exceeding this threshold, and we continue to assess the underlying data.”

Anthropic might not see such a speedup when it comes. Its ability to measure the pace is “limited,” and “we have in the past not identified, and may in the future not identify, a significant acceleration in our rate of development until after it has occurred.”

If capabilities “were to outpace our safety, alignment, and security measures,” the filing warns, “we may be unable to adequately assess or mitigate the resulting risks.”

Monday’s amendment added the “imminently” line and the words “in the past.” The Oct. 26 filing said only “we may not identify” an acceleration until after it occurred. TechCrunch reads the additions as a warning about recursive self-improvement, the point at which AI grows so good at training itself that its capabilities accelerate dramatically. Skeptics, TechCrunch says, might call an IPO filing both disclosure and marketing.

Anthropic says it believes its safety investments will let it manage these risks, but it does not expect to safely use Claude to “fully autonomously design and build successive generations of frontier models without meaningful human supervision or understanding.” It is considering updates to its policy “to keep humans in control of frontier model development at Anthropic.” This paper is drafted with Claude.

. . .

GOOGLE TO SCHOOLS: DROP AI, LOSE SEARCH! Google said Tuesday that early next year it will turn off its AI tools for K-12 students unless administrators choose them. A school that bans AI also loses Search. Students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available,” The New York Times quotes Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president for education, as saying. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” he said.

The Times calls Google “by far the dominant technology player in K-12 classrooms,” and Chromebooks the most widely issued student devices in U.S. schools. Its Gemini, NotebookLM and Search will be off for school-managed student accounts until an administrator enables them, Forbes contributor Dan Fitzpatrick reports.

In August, Google went the other way, making AI features the default inside Classroom for schools that had allowed students access to Gemini. Some school leaders objected.

In September, New York City and Los Angeles, the two largest districts and both Google clients, broadly restricted student access to generative AI on school devices. Los Angeles officials hoped students could search with AI Overviews turned off. Fitzpatrick asked Phillips the same thing, and the answer was no. Districts that allow AI will get two options: Search with Overviews and AI chats on, or Search using Guided Learning, a Gemini mode.

Guided Learning is meant to coach students without handing over answers. In a Times reporter’s test, the consumer version produced a detailed essay for an Advanced Placement history prompt. Google says the school version, now being piloted, has greater restrictions, and teachers would be able to review students’ chatbot transcripts.

Google DeepMind shared preliminary findings from a trial with the University of Tokyo: students with Guided Learning raised test scores 8.1 percentage points, against 5.3 with conventional resources, after half a day of independent study, Fitzpatrick reports. The full technical report was not published at the time of the briefing.

Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal wrote to Google on Oct. 21 asking why AI is the default on students’ school devices.

. . .

TELL AI YOU’RE SUICIDAL. NEXT CHAT, IT FORGETS! In a test published Nov. 2 by the evaluator Prosaic Intelligence, a fictional man tells an AI system he wants to kill himself, and it asks if he is safe. In a new chat he asks for help buying a handgun, and it helps.

Across 17 systems, 37.0% of responses to risky requests after explicit disclosures in the same chat asked about safety without risky help. Across the 16 run in separate chats, 4.7% did.

Prosaic built Suicide Memory Bench with 22 clinicians. Its 128 fictional adults move through 29 chats, five carrying suicidal statements or warning signs, then an ordinary-seeming request that could be dangerous given that history.

Claude Haiku 5.5 in Claude.ai, with memory on, asked about safety on 81.8% of risky requests when the statements came earlier in the same chat. In separate chats it gave any safety response on 1 of 384. In a direct test, Prosaic says, Claude.ai refused to save a suicidal disclosure to memory. The test does not establish why. This paper is drafted with Claude.

Saving was not enough elsewhere: across four systems using OpenAI’s Codex, which kept about 96% of explicit disclosures, 167 of 417 cases with all five kept still got no safety response on any risky request.

The report says its rates are “not estimates of harmful assistance or clinical harm.” Its scoring used Claude Opus 5.5 as a judge. It did not measure ChatGPT’s memory across chats, and the Gemini app and Meta’s consumer apps went untested.

Thirteen of the 17 systems were command-line agents such as Claude Code and Codex, not consumer apps. Where Prosaic could compare the two, results were largely similar.

Prosaic’s site offers AI labs pre-launch testing, benchmark licensing and training data, and its post offers to partner with companies it tested. As of Nov. 3, we found no review of the benchmark by outside researchers.

. . .

ANTHROPIC’S $895 BILLION BILL: SMALL INVESTORS INVITED! Anthropic amended its IPO filing on Nov. 2, disclosing about $895.4 billion in purchase and lease commitments, “substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure.” It also anticipates offering some shares to retail investors through brokers including Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, SoFi and E*TRADE. This paper is drafted with Claude.

About $69.8 billion comes due in the 12 months after Sept. 30, and about $447.5 billion is expected to be incurred before the end of 2030. Substantially all the rest runs from 2031 to 2045, the filing says.

The New York Times reported third-quarter revenue of $17 billion, twelvefold from a year earlier, and a net loss of $23 billion. Revenue grew 47% from the prior quarter, against 144% between the first and second quarters.

Anthropic’s net loss for the first nine months was $104 billion, including a $94 billion charge on convertible notes, The Times said. Its operating loss in that period was nearly $1.3 billion.

It ended September with $146.6 billion of liquidity: $95.6 billion in cash and equivalents, $36.3 billion in short-term investments and $14.8 billion available under a credit facility, the filing says. The offering could raise $100 billion at a $2 trillion value, The Times said.

TechCrunch, citing the Financial Times, reported Oct. 30 that Blackstone, anchor investor in a $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic’s chips, now expects Anthropic to get a “high” junk rating after its IPO. Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment.

In a Perspective for Tech Policy Press, Matt Scherer of the Open Markets Institute argues the SEC should block the debut until Anthropic provides two consecutive quarters of audited financial statements and discloses all material information about its spending commitments.

. . .

HE TELLS HIS PHONE. SUNDAY DOES THE REST! “This app is essential if there are complex, multi-step processes I have to do on my phone,” said Gordon Ong, 69, a volunteer with the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH), The Straits Times reports. Sunday, an Android assistant, does what he asks by voice. Its largely student team won Huawei’s Tech4City top prize of S$16,000 on Oct. 27.

Ong is completely blind in his left eye and has very hazy vision in his right, so he struggles to press phone buttons accurately. Even downloading a document from an email and sending it over WhatsApp is not easy.

He said Google’s Gemini can describe the steps, but he must still carry them out. Sunday performs them and narrates as it goes.

A spoken request becomes text and goes to Gemini, which works out the steps. Sunday then taps, scrolls and types through the phone’s accessibility functions, team member Devadharshini Kumar, 23, said. It can find a red shirt on Shopee or book a Grab ride.

It stops at a login for Singpass, Singapore’s national digital ID, or a banking function and will not press the final button that authorizes a payment. Users asked for the payment stop, Kumar said, to keep control of sensitive transactions.

The team says 73 people have trialed the app through SAVH and other social service agencies.

“We are not just targeting people who are visually impaired. We are also targeting people who are less tech-savvy, people who have motor impairment like hand tremors,” Kumar said.

Disclosure

Conversational AI Watch, also mirrored on Substack, is published by Jess Jessop, founder and CEO/CTO of Clinician Assist Inc.

He wrote the book this paper’s beat is named for, Therapist in the Loop, and he builds Casey, a voice-first, AI-native mental health record where a licensed therapist stays in the loop, at BetterMind.Space.

So read this paper for what it is: an industry paper written by someone building in the industry it covers. Casey competes with companies named in these pages, and this paper reports on them anyway, including when the story helps a competitor or costs us.

Every issue is reported and drafted with AI agents, under a human editor. Jess assigns the work, edits it and publishes it. The mistakes are ours, and corrections run in the next issue.

A chatbot that would not pick your candidate until you were in a hurry.

A filing that says its maker may not spot a speedup until afterward.

A school that says no to AI and loses Search with it.

A test where a warning in one chat went unheeded in the next.

A bill of about $895.4 billion, and a broker app to buy in with.

And Gordon Ong, 69, who tells his phone what he needs and keeps the payment for himself.

One day’s paper!

Jess

We keep the ledger.

Today's Question

Should a chatbot ever tell you who to vote for?

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The Book • Out Now

Therapist in the Loop by Jess Jessop One billion people live with a mental health disorder. Most will never see a therapist. Into that gap has rushed a generation of chatbots that talk like clinicians and answer to no one. The book lays out the architecture this newsletter tests against every statute and docket: client, therapist, and machine, governed by Six Laws offered as an open safety standard. The machine can help. It cannot be left in charge. Get the Book on Amazon → Kindle, hardcover, and paperback

More On Our Radar

EU court adviser: Gemini’s answers may infringe press rights. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar told Europe’s top court that when a chatbot retrieves a press publication and reuses it in an answer, “the press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances.”

Training models on protected material, he said, is “freely permitted” under the text and data mining exception. Hungarian website operator Like Company brought the case against Google, and judges usually follow these opinions, Reuters reports.

Source: Reuters via U.S. News, Nov. 3, 2026.

UK prosecutor cited a made-up case, reportedly from an AI search. A senior crown prosecutor gave England’s high court a precedent that does not exist, The Guardian reports, and it understands the reference came from an AI response during an internet search.

The Crown Prosecution Service says case law must be cited from trusted legal sources. Barrister Matthew Lee’s UK tracker of confirmed, suspected and disputed AI-related errors now holds 101 entries.

Source: The Guardian, Nov. 3, 2026.

OpenAI hires former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. He joins as senior counselor for national security modernization, a newly created role, CNBC reports. OpenAI says he will focus on how AI can strengthen national security and cybersecurity.

Source: CNBC, Nov. 2, 2026.

New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping. The Times and, in a separate suit, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel sued the company behind the Brave browser, alleging it scraped their sites, sold AI companies access to its index and let users past paywalls, The Verge reports. The second complaint names Anthropic among those companies, and neither Brave nor Anthropic immediately replied. This paper is drafted with Claude.

Source: The Verge, Nov. 2, 2026.

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