Today's Headlines

  • The New York Times and three other newspapers sue Brave, saying its search index feeds their articles to AI companies
  • OpenAI launches its Grid Protectors Program to cut data center power use when the grid is strained
  • ChatGPT will merge its Chat and Work tabs, and ChatGPT and Codex will share one usage allowance from December

Today's thread is who pays for the inputs that AI runs on. Four American newspapers sued the browser maker Brave, saying it passes their articles to AI companies without permission or payment.

OpenAI set out a plan to keep its data centers' power costs off local household bills, and ChatGPT is moving to a single usage allowance shared with Codex.

Today's Top Three

The New York Times and three other newspapers sue Brave over a search index they say feeds AI companies

The New York Times, and in a separate suit the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on November 2.

According to the complaints, Brave crawls the web with a crawler that does not identify itself, so sites cannot block it, and copies articles into its search index, the Brave Index. Brave itself says the index holds more than 30 billion web pages.

The publishers say Brave sells AI companies paid access to that index and so passes their articles to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, Cohere and others. The Times's complaint calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content."

Beyond copyright infringement, the suits target the browser's "Paywall blocker" feature, alleging it circumvents access controls in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The complaints also seek restitution under New York unjust-enrichment law, saying Brave strips the ads that run with the papers' articles and shows its own. The Times asks for damages and an injunction and demands a jury trial.

OpenAI launches its Grid Protectors Program to cut data center power use when the grid is strained

OpenAI on November 2 launched the Grid Protectors Program, a national effort to agree with utilities and regulators that its future data centers will reduce electricity use when the grid is under strain.

OpenAI calls the facilities compute campuses. The arrangements will differ by location and set how much demand can be cut, how quickly and for how long. Depending on local needs, OpenAI says it may also supply power to the grid from on-site generation or storage.

The pilot is the campus OpenAI plans in Effingham County, Georgia. OpenAI says it will pay the full infrastructure and electric-service costs of serving the project, and its agreement with Georgia Power includes up to 1,000 megawatts of flexible demand. OpenAI puts that at the average demand of roughly 700,000 households.

Georgia Power projects about $950 million a year in customer savings from 2029, from its portfolio of large-load agreements and expected growth. It estimates a benefit of at least $15 a month for a typical home using 1,000 kilowatt-hours.

OpenAI's position is that large computing facilities should pay their own costs and help utilities run the grid. It says it will publish further commitments as local arrangements are finalized.

ChatGPT will merge its Chat and Work tabs, and ChatGPT and Codex will share one allowance from December

OpenAI told users it will bring the agentic features of Work into the main ChatGPT experience, and that ChatGPT and Codex will share one usage allowance starting in December.

According to OpenAI's help page, the change covers the Plus, Pro and Business plans. Usage will be measured in tokens and will depend on the model and the task, with advanced models and complex tasks drawing more. Instant chat will not count against the allowance.

OpenAI expects most users to wait for resets about as often as they do now. Combined remaining usage and reset times will appear under Settings, Usage, and users who hit the limit can wait for a reset, upgrade their plan or buy credits.

According to the email to users reported by TechCrunch, the merged experience will go first to selected users for feedback before a wider rollout. Codex stays a separate experience in the ChatGPT desktop app.

Other Developments

Business

Products

Research

  • In a November 2 guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai and Jie Xue argue that if mathematicians place the worth of their work in understanding truth rather than in personal achievement, discoveries made with AI need not diminish their purpose. Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era (What's new, Terence Tao's blog)

Source: selected by the editors from the AI news inbox (collected November 3, 2026: 9 items, 3 primary and 6 secondary).