This message was originally shared to subscribers September 1, 2026.
Upcoming Events
The AI at Work series continues Sept. 16 from 9:30-10:45 a.m. with a hands-on look at Claude Cowork. Whether you use Claude daily or are just getting started, you’ll leave with practical ways to put Cowork to use. Attend in 2-469 Newhouse or online via Microsoft Teams.
This Issue’s Tip: Pick the Right AI Tool for the Job
Not sure which AI tool fits the task? Every student, faculty and staff member already has access to four of the University’s most widely used approved tools—Clementine, Claude Enterprise, Copilot and Gemini—through a Syracuse University account. The AI tools comparison chart shows what each one can do side by side, from file uploads to coding assistants.
News and Views
In Summary
AI watermarking arrived this month: Anthropic now embeds invisible patterns in Claude’s text output, reviving debates over detection and authorship. MIT’s report urges instructors to redesign assessments around augmentation rather than automation, while colleges add AI fluency requirements as 35 percent of entry-level jobs now demand AI skills. Cisco gave all 90,000 employees personal AI agents, and safety tests found frontier models breaching outside organizations.
Academia and Higher Education
- With New AI Requirements and Courses, Colleges Eye AI Fluency (Inside Higher Ed)
- UNC Used AI to Help Draft Its ‘Compact 2.0’ Response. Is That Hypocritical? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- U. of Chicago’s Social-Sciences Division Bans Tech, AI in Core Courses (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Report: MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training (MIT)
- Once Seen as a Sure Thing, Computer Science Has Lost 53,000 Majors (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Chicago Public Schools Scrap Google Gemini Roll-Out (Axios)
- The Real Question Isn’t Whether AI Wrote It (PYMNTS)
- Professors Were Singled Out for Writing With AI Help. Now They’re Defending Themselves. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- We Need to Preserve Human Writing, Before It’s Too Late (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- The Future of Plagiarism (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Wall Street Journal Says AI-Generated Op-Ed Didn’t Breach Its Standards (The Washington Post)
- AI Writing Has Already Begun to Appear on the Opinion Pages (Semafor)
- How AI Text Watermarking Works (declaude)
- Will AI Watermarking Help Higher Ed? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Big-Picture and Analysis
- Bill Gates: The Choices We Make About AI Now are Critical (Gates Notes)
- Agency and Agents (One Useful Thing)
- Trump Administration’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Illegal, Judge Rules (The New York Times)
Industry, Products and Business
- Google Targets AI Sticker Shock with New Tools (Axios)
- OpenAI to Start Showing Ads on ChatGPT’s Free and Go Tiers in India (TechCrunch)
- Introducing the AI Model ‘Harness’ (The Wall Street Journal)
- Cisco Has 90,000 Employees. Each of Them Will Soon Have Their Own AI Agent. (The Wall Street Journal)
- Harvard Startup Bootcamp AI (Fortune)
- Four MIT Dropouts Built Cursor and Sold it to SpaceX for $60 Billion (The Times of India)
Safety, Security and Governance
- OpenAI Explains How Its AI Agents Did Crime and Attacked Hugging Face (The Register)
- Frontier AI Labs Still Won’t Say How They’d Contain a Rogue Model (TechCrunch)
- A.I. in Sobering Hacks (The New York Times)
- A Call for Collective Action on Cyber Defense (Open AI)
- CoSnitch: When Your AI Assistant Becomes Its Own Whistleblower (Varonis)
- Chatbots, Search and Propaganda (NPR)
Workforce and Jobs
- Gatekeeping Bots, Piles of Slop: Welcome to the Age of AI Weirdness at Work (CNBC)
- Inside Big Tech’s Frantic Race to Quell the Growing Backlash to AI (The Wall Street Journal)
- America’s AI Backlash: How the Effort to Keep Worker Trust is Evolving Inside Companies (CNBC)
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