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Look out, Space Force! On Saturday, President Trump announced plans to form a new “AI Force” and appoint an artificial intelligence czar to oversee the sector, even as he brushed off warnings about AI risks as a “hoax.” While tech experts urge stricter safety regulations and oversight, and as prominent Democratic governors (e.g., Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia) are taking state-level action to impose stricter regulation and oversight on the technology, Trump emphasized that his administration intends to support industry growth rather than restrict it, relying on existing legal systems to handle wrongdoing.

A new lawsuit accuses four major tech rivals—Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google—of illegally teaming up to slow down their AI progress. Paid subscribers of these platforms argue that coordinating this slowdown, rather than competing naturally, hurts consumers by reducing the value of their paid subscriptions. While the tech companies claim the pause is needed to focus on safety, the plaintiffs contend that private agreements between competitors violate antitrust laws and that safety rules should come from public government standards instead.

A California judge has allowed the majority of Reddit's data-scraping lawsuit against Anthropic to move forward, rejecting Anthropic’s claim that Reddit's user terms were unenforceable. The suit accuses Anthropic of illegally taking user posts and comments without permission to train its Claude family of models. While three major claims will proceed, the judge temporarily dismissed two weaker claims (unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels), giving Reddit until mid-October to revise and resubmit them with more specifics.

Lean TECHniques works alongside Midwest companies to leverage technology for business impact. Through advisory, coaching, and embedded delivery, Lean TECHniques helps organizations develop high-performing teams, create environments that fuel innovation, and deliver best-in-class customer experiences. Core areas of expertise include software, cloud, artificial intelligence, product management, and technology leadership.

Jev is a new AI model from a startup called TypeSafe AI, founded by Diogo Almeida, a former OpenAI researcher who helped invent the training method behind ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, it doesn't write or chat in human language. It takes in information and returns a probability, such as “92% likely this email is a customer complaint,” so software can make decisions on its own. Because developers set the possible answers in advance, it can't make things up the way chatbots do, and it's far cheaper and faster to run. Developers are using it for jobs like sorting business emails and checking commands for safety, and one Vercel engineer reported results 5 to 18 times faster than with an OpenAI model. Think of it less as a chatbot and more as a fast, low-cost decision-maker working behind the scenes.

Professor Snider has been teaching a design course this semester, and he recently finished teaching about design history. That inspired him to test out ChatGPT’s ability to make posters in a couple different historic design styles promoting our AI Lunch Club.

Google CC, which we have recommended for parents trying to stay on top of their kids busy lives, has pivoted to do just that. CC now bills itself as an AI agent built for families. Now CC gets its own Google account, and up to six people can join it. Each morning it sends the group a shared "Your Day Ahead" brief covering who needs to be where, what needs to get done, and what CC already handled. It pulls dates and to-dos from what members share and puts them on a family Calendar and Task list. It can also do the busywork: fill out permission slips and registration PDFs, build school supply lists, and draft weekly meal plans. Sign up here.

AI agent: An AI system that doesn't just answer you but goes off and does things. It takes a goal, breaks it into steps, uses tools (a browser, your email, a spreadsheet, a code editor), checks the results, and keeps going until it's done or stuck. Ask a chatbot to help you book a flight and it'll explain how. Ask an agent and it'll open the airline's site and start filling in the form.

Under the hood, it's still an LLM. What's different is the loop wrapped around it: plan, act, look at what happened, adjust. That loop is why agents can handle a 20-step task. It's also why one can go sideways at step 4 and confidently build on the mistake through step 20. The more freedom an agent has, the more a small error costs you. The practical rule: let it draft, research, and organize on its own, but keep a human sign-off on anything that sends, spends, or deletes.

Miss out on any previous AI terms of the week? Check out our Glossary of AI terms, where we’re collecting all entries in the series. And if you want us to define a term in an upcoming newsletter, let us know!

The Innovation Profs are Drake University Professors Chris Porter and Chris Snider. Porter leads Drake’s Artificial Intelligence major and Snider is a multimedia professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.