Friday, September 12, 2025

Media Contact:
Dara McBee | Hamm Institute for American Energy | 580-350-7248 | dara.mcbee@hamminstitute.org

Leaders gathered at the Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University on Thursday to focus on one urgent question: how will
the United States power the rise of artificial intelligence?

The discussion of the roundtable report out of the American Energy + AI Initiative
underscored emerging top-tier priorities and highlighted the speed and scale required
to align energy systems with rapid advances in data and technology.

Keynote speaker Mark P. Mills, Hamm Institute Distinguished Scholar, described how
data centers and AI applications will drive a surge in demand unlike anything before.
Mills is leading the Hamm Institute’s core research for the American Energy + AI Initiative,
which is shaping the policy and investment agenda to ensure that America can meet
this challenge.

OSU President Jim Hess also gave remarks, emphasizing the university’s leadership
in advancing applied research and preparing the next generation of energy leaders.

A featured panel brought together a mix of perspectives from across energy and technology.
Panelists included Harold Hamm, founder of the Hamm Institute and Chairman Emeritus
of Continental Resources; Caroline Cochran, co-founder of Oklo; Takajiro Ishikawa,
CEO of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; and E.Y. Easley, research fellow at SK Innovation.

Together, they explored how natural gas, nuclear innovation, global supply chains
and international collaboration can help meet the moment.

“The United States has the resources it needs. What it lacks is speed, certainty and
alignment,” said Ann Bluntzer Pullin, executive director of the Hamm Institute. “This
initiative is about turning urgency into action so that America and its allies can
lead in both energy and AI.”

The initiative has already convened roundtables in Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Palo
Alto, California. Each conversation has surfaced priorities that move beyond analysis
toward action, including timely permitting, stronger demand signals to unlock investment,
reforms to unclog grid interconnection, and deeper coordination with allies on fuels
and technology.

The initiative’s next steps will focus on solidifying and advancing these emerging
top-tier priorities. The Hamm Institute will continue to convene leaders and deliver
research that accelerates solutions to meet AI’s energy demand.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into seven tech companies around potential harms their artificial intelligence chatbots could cause to children and teenagers.

The inquiry focuses on AI chatbots that can serve as companions, which “effectively mimic human characteristics, emotions, and intentions, and generally are designed to communicate like a friend or confidant, which may prompt some users, especially children and teens, to trust and form relationships with chatbots,” the agency said in a statement Thursday.

The FTC sent order letters to Google parent company Alphabet; Character.AI; Instagram and its parent company, Meta; OpenAI; Snap; and Elon Musk’s xAI. The agency wants information about whether and how the firms measure the impact of their chatbots on young users and how they protect against and alert parents to potential risks.

The investigation comes amid rising concern around AI use by children and teens, following a string of lawsuits and reports accusing chatbots of being complicit in the suicide deaths, sexual exploitation and other harms to young people. That includes one lawsuit against OpenAI and two against Character.AI that remain ongoing even as the companies say they are continuing to build out additional features to protect users from harmful interactions with their bots.

Broader concerns have also surfaced that even adult users are building unhealthy emotional attachments to AI chatbots, in part because the tools are often designed to be agreeable and supportive.

At least one online safety advocacy group, Common Sense Media, has argued that AI “companion” apps pose unacceptable risks to children and should not be available to users under the age of 18. Two California state bills related to AI chatbot safety for minors, including one backed by Common Sense Media, are set to receive final votes this week and, if passed, will reach California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. The US Senate Judiciary Committee is also set to hold a hearing next week entitled “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots.”

“As AI technologies evolve, it is important to consider the effects chatbots can have on children, while also ensuring that the United States maintains its role as a global leader in this new and exciting industry,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in the Thursday statement. “The study we’re launching today will help us better understand how AI firms are developing their products and the steps they are taking to protect children.”

In particular, the FTC’s orders seek information about how the companies monetize user engagement, generate outputs in response to user inquiries, develop and approve AI characters, use or share personal information gained through user conversations and mitigate negative impacts to children, among other details.

Google, Snap and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Our priority is making ChatGPT helpful and safe for everyone, and we know safety matters above all else when young people are involved. We recognize the FTC has open questions and concerns, and we’re committed to engaging constructively and responding to them directly,” OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. She added that OpenAI has safeguards such as notifications directing users to crisis helplines and plans to roll out parental controls for minor users.

After the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine sued OpenAI last month alleging that ChatGPT encouraged their son’s death by suicide, the company acknowledged its safeguards may be “less reliable” when users engage in long conversations with the chatbots and said it was working with experts to improve them.

Meta declined to comment directly on the FTC inquiry. The company said it is currently limiting teens’ access to only a select group of its AI characters, such as those that help with homework. It is also training its AI chatbots not to respond to teens’ mentions of sensitive topics such as self-harm or inappropriate romantic conversations and to instead point to expert resources.

“We look forward to collaborating with the FTC on this inquiry and providing insight on the consumer AI industry and the space’s rapidly evolving technology,” Jerry Ruoti, Character.AI’s head of trust and safety, said in a statement. He added that the company has invested in trust and safety resources such as a new under-18 experience on the platform, a parental insights tool and disclaimers reminding users that they are chatting with AI.

If you are experiencing suicidal, substance use or other mental health crises please call or text the new three-digit code at 988. You will reach a trained crisis counselor for free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can also go to 988lifeline.org.

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An initiative steered by Concordia researchers is challenging the conversation around the direction of artificial intelligence (AI). It charges that the current trajectory is inherently biased against non-Western modes of thinking about intelligence — especially those originating from Indigenous cultures. As a way of decolonising the future of AI, they have created the Abundant Intelligences research program: an international, multi-institutional and interdisciplinary program that seeks to rethink how we conceive of AI. The driving concept behind it is the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems to create an inclusive, robust concept of intelligence and intelligent action, and how that can be embedded into existing and future technologies.

The full concept is described in a recent paper for the journal AI & Society.

 “Artificial intelligence has inherited conceptual and intellectual ideas from past formulations of intelligence that took on certain colonial pathways to establish itself, such as emphasizing a kind of industrial or production focus,” says Ceyda Yolgörmez, a postdoctoral fellow with Abundant Intelligences and one of the paper’s authors.

They write that this scarcity mindset contributed to resource exploitation and extraction that has extended a legacy of Indigenous erasure that influences discussion around AI to this day, adds lead author Jason Edward Lewis. The professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts is also the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary. “The Abundant Intelligences research program is about deconstructing the scarcity mindset and making room for many kinds of intelligence and ways we might think about it.”

The researchers believe this alternative approach can create an AI that is oriented toward human thriving, that preserves and supports Indigenous languages, addresses pressing environmental and sustainability issues, re-imagines public health solutions and more.

Relying on local intelligence

The community-based research program is directed from Concordia in Montreal but much of the local work will be done by individual research clusters (called pods) across Canada, in the United States and in New Zealand.

The pods will be anchored to Indigenous-centred research and media labs at Western University in Ontario, the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, the University of Hawai’i—West Oahu, Bard College in New York and Massey University in New Zealand.

They bring together Indigenous knowledge-holders, cultural practitioners, language keepers, educational institutions and community organizations with research scientists, engineers, artists and social scientists to develop new computational practices fitted to an Indigenous-centred perspective.

The researchers are also partnering with AI professionals and industry researchers, believing that the program will open new avenues of research and propose new research questions for mainstream AI research. “For example, how do you build a rigorous system out of a small amount of resource data like different Indigenous languages?” asks Yolgörmez.  “How do you make multi-agent systems that are robust, recognize and support non-human actors and integrate different sorts of activities within the body of a single system?”

Lewis asserts that their approach is both complementary and alternative to mainstream AI research, particularly regarding data sets like Indigenous languages that are much smaller than the ones currently being used by industry leaders. “There is a commitment to working with data from Indigenous communities in an ethical way, compared to simply scraping the internet,” he says. “This yields miniscule amounts of data compared to what the larger companies are working with, but it presents the potential to innovate different approaches when working with small languages. That can be useful to researchers who want to take a different approach than the mainstream.

“This is one of the strengths of the decolonial approach: it’s one way to get out of this tunnel vision belief that there is only one way of doing things.”

Hēmi Whaanga, professor at Massey University in New Zealand, also contributed to the paper.

Read the cited paper: “Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks.”

— By Patrick Lejtenyi

— Concordia University

— @ConcordiaUnews

— AB