Norway moves to ban AI glasses in parks, schools and shops
One parliament is getting a bill about AI glasses, OpenAI is putting ads where you watch it draw, and Cohere is handing enterprises a dial for agent spending.
Norway will propose a temporary ban on AI glasses in selected public places — the first national legislative move against the devices anywhere. Digitalisation Minister Torgeir Micaelsen announced the plan on Monday: the bill goes to the Storting "as soon as possible" and would cover parks, beaches, museums, shopping centres, concerts and sporting events, health facilities, gyms with changing rooms, and schools and kindergartens, with Education Minister Kari Nessa Nordtun already asking municipalities to keep AI glasses out of classrooms in the meantime. It is not a blanket prohibition — private use stays legal, exceptions are planned for vulnerable groups and socially beneficial uses, and the government has not yet decided whether the rule covers camera-and-audio glasses, camera-and-AI glasses, or all body-worn capture gear. No penalties and no start date have been announced; the measure is explicitly a bridge while an expert group designs permanent regulation. The obvious counterweight is that California's governor vetoed a smart-glass recording bill last week and the EU has no bloc-level action at all, so Norway is writing the template while the category is still being defined — which is either foresight or a rule that gets rewritten the moment the hardware changes.
OpenAI will start testing visual ads in ChatGPT later this month — sponsored product images shown below the picture ChatGPT is in the middle of drawing. The format appears as a labeled carousel or row of product photos during image generation, stays separate from the generated image, and does not influence the answers, OpenAI says; it will not appear for Plus, Pro or Enterprise subscribers. The company says guardrails are meant to keep ads out of "emotionally vulnerable, sensitive, or otherwise unsuitable contexts," and advertisers can set negative keywords — but the announcement names no launch advertisers and sets no revenue target. For scale, by The Decoder's earlier reporting: ChatGPT Ads has run since February in more than 40 countries and reached a $1 billion annualized run rate against a stated $100 billion-by-2030 ambition, while ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users, roughly 5% of whom paid for a subscription earlier this year. The wait for your picture was always the least monetized screen in consumer AI; this fixes that, and we looked at the measurement side in September — OpenAI's ad pixel tracks ChatGPT users across 1,000 websites.
Cohere released North 2, a rebuilt version of its enterprise agent platform. Agents now keep memory across sessions, prompt-built agents and reusable skills can be shared across a company, and the admin console gains the part aimed squarely at finance teams: token spending tracked down to individual users and agents, consumption tiers, alerts before a limit is hit, and org-wide caps. North 2 stays model-agnostic and deployable on-premises or fully air-gapped, with connectors for Slack, GitHub, SharePoint and OneDrive and financial-data connectors to PitchBook, S&P Global and FactSet planned. Named users include Bell Cyber, LG CNS and Radical Ventures, but Cohere published no benchmarks and no prices — a launch selling procurement comfort rather than performance, three weeks after agreeing to merge with Aleph Alpha.
What to watch: whether any other Nordic or EU government follows Norway this month, and which advertisers sign up for OpenAI's US test.
Is a national ban on AI glasses in public places the right template, or an overreaction before the category has settled? Tell us in the comments.
