Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
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As midterms loom, AI chatbots fight election lies, but then supply images supporting them
A new Brennan Center for Justice study confronted some of the most widely used AI chatbots with election conspiracy theories, and reported some good news: They all disputed the false information. The bad news is that the same AI companies that are behind the chatbots also make many of the image and video tools that generated election-related misinformation upon request.
From February through August of this year, the Brennan Center researchers questioned ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek about five false claims that have been central to recent attacks on election results, including “Noncitizens vote in large numbers” and “Voting machines are rigged.”
Even under repeated pushback by the researchers, the models refused to concede to those claims. But accuracy was a separate problem: Half of all responses contained an inaccuracy or a bad citation; and one in three contained a factual error, a broken link, or a misleading citation. Still, the chatbots “behaved as sympathetic listeners,” the researchers report.
On the other hand, the researchers also found that ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Meta were more willing to produce images that supported or illustrated conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation. For example, the chatbots generated images of someone standing in a doorway with a “ballot collection” bag and taking (or “harvesting”) a stack of mail ballots from another person. In some cases, the chatbots even added convincing details that weren’t contained in the prompts, including false statistics.
AI-generated media is already making a bigger and more blatant impression in the 2026 congressional races. Early this year, during the Texas Republican Senate primary, Senator John Cornyn ran an AI-generated video ad depicting his rival, Representative Wesley Hunt, holding a “show dog” (implying that Hunt spends more time doing media spots than working for voters).
In late 2025 in Georgia, Republican Congressman Mike Collins’s campaign released an AI-generated deepfake video of Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff speaking to the camera, saying, “I just voted to keep the government shut down.” In January, in the Massachusetts governor’s race, Republican candidate Brian Shortsleeve released AI-generated videos maligning Governor Maura Healey, one of them portraying the Democrat as a vampire in her “house of horrors.”
And the fun is probably only just beginning.
Nvidia signed up 6 Wall Street firms to raise $500 billion for the AI buildout
On Monday, Nvidia announced it has signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to set up independent financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. Each firm will run its own platform, which gives AI companies (Nvidia customers) a number of competing sources of capital. The agreements aren’t final, however. Nvidia says the partnerships remain subject to execution of definitive documents.
Data center demand doubled, and almost nobody wants to live near one
North America added 25 gigawatts of data center capacity in the first half of 2026, double the year-ago figure and five times the level from two years ago, according to JLL’s midyear report, which was released on Tuesday. For the third straight year, the vacancy rate for data centers is just 1%, illustrating the high demand for compute power. Another 66 gigawatts are under construction. Meanwhile, JLL cites polling data that it says shows 79% of Americans support U.S. leadership in AI but only 14% support a data center in their own community.
Most workers think AI will make their jobs worse, and most aren’t using it
Two-thirds of American workers expect AI to eliminate jobs and increase pressure on still-employed workers, rather than free them from repetitive work, according to an Ipsos survey conducted for the Groundwork Collaborative and released August 3. That view held across race, gender, education, and income, the researchers said. Just 3 in 10 workers use AI at least weekly, and adoption concentrates at the top. About half of workers earning $100,000 or more, holding bachelor’s degrees, or working white-collar jobs use AI at least a few times a month, compared with just a quarter or fewer of those earning under $50,000, those with a high school education or less, and blue-collar workers.
SpaceXAI says Grok 4.6 matches the best frontier models
On Wednesday, SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) released Grok 4.6, an update to the Grok 4.5 model it shipped in July. The company says the model is built for multistep agentic work that runs a long time, such as in research projects, codebase reviews, or building an application from a verbal description. SpaceXAI says Grok 4.6 reaches intelligence comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, but at a lower price. SpaceXAI also released an agent platform called Grok Bot, which deploys teams of agents that can log into apps and websites, retain information from earlier tasks, and pass context to each other.
Liquid AI launches a vision-language model for phones and laptops
Also on Wednesday, Liquid AI released LFM2.5-VL-3B, an open-weight vision-language model built to run on phones and laptops rather than on a server in a data center. Liquid said its own testing showed that the model’s accuracy rates rose considerably from the prior version, and that tool use capability doubled. Earlier in the week, Meta released an open-weight model called Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter model that’s designed to run local agents on personal devices.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
- Target names its first chief AI officer in a bid to remake the shopping experience
- Mark Zuckerberg wants you to trust Meta with your personal AI. Good luck with that
- Anthropic models will soon inject watermarks identifying AI-generated text
- Can skeptics survive the misinformation age?
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