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President Donald Trump named a new superhero-sounding AI task force this week dubbed the “Super Intelligence Force.” It's led by Jay Clayton, the new AI Czar and also director of national intelligence.

Plus, Democrats in the Senate blocked a bill to address data center energy costs ahead of the midterm elections, and a new poll shows Americans are not feeling too great about how our leaders in government are dealing with the risks from AI. Cristiano Lima-Strong, senior AI and government reporter at Bloomberg Government, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to break down these stories on this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

It started when Kalie Robins posted an Instagram video with her kid. Meta's built in AI chatbot, Muse, started prompting her to ask questions about her daughters and personal life, which sent her down a social-media-privacy rabbit hole.

Robins took to her feed — at the time, with only a few hundred followers — to share her experience. “It starts pulling completely separate information for each of my kids: their names, birth information, pictures and videos of them. And then it says, ‘pinpointing Kalie Robbins' location,’” she said in her now viral video.

Meta responded to the incident saying it “missed the mark” and has fixed the issue that prompted those questions.

But Robins says she's now been catapulted into the AI privacy discourse. And it's pretty uncomfortable.

More on this:

Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters — from Futurism

Meta’s Muse AI Agent Is Building a Dossier On You — from Time

OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife recently backed out of a planned $25 million donation to Leading the Future, an artificial intelligence-focused political action committee.

Brockman said the PAC had become a “distraction” at OpenAI. But only after the executive had already given an initial $25 million.

AI-focused PACs are spending big to shape competing visions for AI policy in the midterm elections.

Brendan Glavin, Director of Insights at OpenSecrets, explains how these PACS are looking to influence elections this year.

The AI industry appears to be getting more serious about safety.

Leaders of top companies signed a non-binding agreement at the White House Sept. 30, laying out standards and best practices for responsible development of advanced AI. OpenAI delayed the release of its latest model due to safety concerns. And Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the sector to slow things down and "pace the frontier."

Wall Street initially wasn't too happy about that push and stocks related to the AI buildout took a momentary tumble.

But Jordan Nanos, at the chip research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis, argues that greater investment in AI security could actually drive more demand for computing power.

We've been hearing a lot about the threat of out-of-control of AI in recent weeks; mostly, from the people making the technology. There was the Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who publicly quit and kicked off the whole discussion. Others, including that company’s CEO Dario Amodei, chimed in with alarming appraisals of AI's existential risk.

Making sense of all this as an outsider can sometimes feel like decoding an unfamiliar civilization. So, we called Spencer Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, who studies anthropology and researches AI workers.