The Briefing

Yes, and federal rules allow it with conditions. On September 9, 2026 we read the enacted text of six state laws on AI in coverage denials: all six require a licensed human to make a medical-necessity denial, one (Utah) requires the insurer to tell enrollees it uses AI at all, and none require your denial letter to say whether AI touched your case. Arizona’s bill banned AI by name; the law the governor signed does not contain the word.

Yes, you can – and the drafting was never the legal part. On September 8, 2026 we read the will-execution statute in California, Florida, New York and Virginia: all four require two witnesses, and none says a word about who wrote the document. We also read the usage rules of four AI assistants (four of four require a licensed professional) and scored the 11 readable pages ranking for this question: three mention witnessing at all, and one names a number.

On January 14, 2026 the FTC finalized an order banning GM and OnStar from selling driver data to consumer reporting agencies. That order names three companies and leaves every other automaker to write its own rule. On September 7 we read six privacy notices from five other carmakers, and scored the eight readable pages that rank for this question: none of them mention the order, and none mention the free file you can demand to see whether your driving ever reached an insurer.

Amazon names three ways to get Alexa+, and the only plan called Alexa+ is the dearest of all of them. We priced every door from Amazon’s own plan pages on September 6, 2026: twelve months of the Alexa+ Standard plan is $239.88, twelve months of Prime — which includes the same Alexa+ plus free shipping and Prime Video – is $139.00. That is $100.88 more for less. Two doors cost $0, seven Echo models never get it at any price, and one state is written out of one feature by name.

Four days before the Sept. 9 event, the honest answer: nothing to buy, and five things standing in front of it. We read all ten footnotes on Apple’s Apple Intelligence page on September 5, 2026. The word ‘free’ appears zero times, a dollar sign zero times, and ‘subscription’ twice – both in footnotes, both attached to a paid iCloud+ plan. Plus the $400 gap between the two Apple Intelligence iPhones, and what Tim Cook actually said about iCloud.

A $19.99 line nobody remembers ordering, or $10 that appeared on a phone bill. We counted nine documented ways a Google AI Pro charge can start, from Google’s and Verizon’s own help pages on September 4, 2026 – and only five of them put anything on a Google statement. Plus the trap page one skips: accepting a free offer can cancel the plan you already pay for.

Between shoppers, generally no – the 1936 law everyone cites governs dealings between merchants. But on August 19, 2026 the FTC proposed an enforcement policy statement naming seven personalized-pricing scenarios as likely Section 5 violations, with comments open until September 18. We scored page one: four of six questions, zero answers.

Mostly no – and then, on January 1, 2026, yes for exactly 39 billing codes in six states. We counted the codes in CMS’s own operational guide and the people in CMS’s own enrollment file on September 2, 2026, and read the payment rule Congress went to the floor over.

The most common AI scams are deepfaked investment pitches, business email fraud, romance schemes, fake job interviews and the cloned-voice call from a relative in trouble – and in 2025 they cost Americans $893,346,472 across 22,364 complaints. But the ranking is inverted from the coverage: investment pitches took $632 million of that, the cloned-grandchild call took $5 million. A gap of 126 to 1. First edition of our monthly read of what the FBI and FTC actually published: the fake IC3 website the FBI warned about in July, the recovery scams that target people who already lost money, and our count of all eleven FTC consumer alerts from August 2026 – four of the eight scam alerts describe money that started moving after someone clicked a paid ad.

Canceling ChatGPT Plus takes four steps and about thirty seconds. Getting the $20 back is a separate screen with a separate answer, and for an American the honest answer is usually no. We read five AI subscription refund policies in full on August 31, 2026 – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google One, Google Play and Microsoft. Between them they name 12 countries, two trading blocs, and exactly one U.S. state: New York. Here are the exact cancellation steps for web, iPhone and Android, the 24-hour rule that decides your next bill, who to ask for a refund depending on who billed you, and why the federal click-to-cancel rule people describe to each other is currently a request for comments.