Massachusetts Probes and Baltimore Sues Over DraftKings AI Promotions

For years the polite fiction was that the bookie just took your bet. This week that fiction copped a battering in two places at once. Massachusetts is probing how DraftKings used AI to target losing gamblers, with its gaming commission set to examine how DraftKings and other licensed sportsbooks deployed artificial intelligence in promotions. At the same time, the City of Baltimore has lodged an action in its circuit court against DraftKings Inc and Flutter Entertainment trading as FanDuel. I have watched enough…

Tech Briefing — Wednesday, September 30 2026

OpenAI scraps GPT-6.1 Astra over safety failures but pivots to a new 'Dots' always-on agent, while Anthropic files IPO papers revealing a $42B loss and a $2T valuation target. AMD pays $8.2B for Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, and at home the RBA's rate hike and a landmark social media case dominate the morning read.

• 🤖 Models and Launches 4
• 💰 Funding and Business 3
• 🔒 Security 4
• 🌍 World and Australia 6
• 🌐 Notable 4
• 🔥 Hacker News 6

Bureaucratic Absurdism

A remarkably strong field today: four of five completed letters achieved near-perfect Kafkaesque flatness, with standouts like 'algorithms are classified as weather' and an office that 'opens only upon receipt of an accepted application.' The differences came down to density of impossible procedure — the winners never winked at the reader, while the stragglers let a soup joke or an explicit '[Fabricated Municipal Code]' tag leak through.