RAIN — Week of September 21, 2026

CRAI News

From the RAIN blog: AI Has a Rural Blind Spot

Ask Amy

My mom almost wired money after getting a call that sounded exactly like my daughter's voice. How are regular people supposed to protect themselves from that kind of thing?    Shaken in Tennessee

Scams like this existed before AI and will continue to get harder to detect as AI advances. It feels particularly vile when family bonds and trust are used against us. I have experienced something like this with my own mother-in-law. She was tricked into giving remote access to her computer, exposing all her bank accounts and passwords. This left her feeling vulnerable and embarrassed. The truth is this can happen to any of us. The plan that we came up with as a family doesn't rely on technology and will apply in the era of AI.

Anytime a call, a text, an email comes through with a request for money, passwords, or just feels urgent out of nowhere, stop. Hang up, close the chat or email. And start to double check. Call someone, ask someone else's opinion. If anything feels like a phishing expedition do not engage and double check. In the case of your mom, she should stop and call you, call your daughter and make sure things are real before she reacts.

And don't think this can only happen by using emotional family connections. These scams keep you on the phone, giving you only one path to fix the emergency. They find whatever you cannot afford to lose, whatever causes you to let down your guard. For a small business owner that might be their website. For someone else it might be their house. AI didn't invent this type of scam but it has made it cheaper and more targeted. The way to break that loop is to stop engaging and double check.

Shaken in Tennessee, make a plan with your mom and your family this weekend. And share your family’s close call with others so people remember the risks, especially with AI being so good at imitation.

Every column starts with a reader question. Yours can be next: ruralai.org/rain

Stories of the Week

Tribal leaders talk AI, proposed legislation and national priorities at annual Northwest convention

Delegates at the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians convention in Snoqualmie, Washington, passed three AI resolutions: forming an ATNI AI task force, governing youth chatbot use in schools, and demanding tribal consultation before states expand AI in child welfare under Executive Order 15359.

Panelists from Yakama Nation and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission warned that data center cooling water could raise Columbia Basin river temperatures harmful to salmon, with almost no state or county regulation. The child welfare resolution now moves to the National Congress of American Indians.

Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data center

Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, the 2.45-gigawatt Stargate campus in New Mexico, letting it delay payments if the site misses its 2028 opening. An Energy Transfer pipeline meant to fuel the site slipped nearly six months to February 2027 after regulators repeatedly denied permits.

New Mexico's environment department must rule by November 23 on the air-quality permit for the Bloom Energy fuel cells that would power the campus. For rural counties courting AI compute, Jupiter shows that energy and permitting, not demand, set the schedule.

AT&T Is Automating Away Jobs—and Its Old Telecom Empire

AT&T cut roughly 2,100 jobs in the first half of 2026 and says headcount will keep falling as it automates customer service, cell tower siting, and network tuning with AI systems. By year's end it expects to be free of copper obligations across more than 85 percent of its footprint.

Copper retirement requires state and federal approval precisely because rural areas often have no alternative, and the plans have drawn local protests. What replaces the landline and DSL (fiber, fixed wireless, or satellite) determines what rural households pay and whether they get served at all.

Rural communities can learn how to push back on data center construction from resistance to factory farms

Writing in Barn Raiser, Raj Patel and Jim Goodman argue that communities facing AI data center proposals should study how CAFO fights were lost, after right-to-farm laws and state preemption arrived before neighbors organized. Sixty-seven percent of the 1,500 proposed data centers are slated for rural areas.

Their advice for local hearings is concrete: ask about water, power, money, and democracy before the zoning and statutes get written. The land-rush speed is terrifying, they write, but it also means the questions can still be asked in time.

XPRIZE Wildfire winners spotted fires within 10 min—but couldn't stop them

No team claimed either grand prize in the $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire, but Anduril took $1.2 million for using AI computer vision on a sentry tower near Nenana, Alaska, then sending an autonomous drone to drop retardant balls. All three finalists detected the fire within 10 minutes; none put it out.

That benchmark matters because the 911 call remains the most common wildfire alert, averaging at least 15 minutes. For rural fire districts covering hundreds of square miles with thin crews, closing that gap is the entire problem.

xFarm Technologies' acquisition of Sibium Analytics brings it closer to defining agriculture's data layer

xFarm acquired Brazil's Sibium Analytics, adding 8 million hectares of sugarcane monitoring to a platform already serving 600,000 farmers across 24 million hectares. Its new AI agent takes plain-language questions through WhatsApp and answers with specifics like how many millimeters to irrigate, and when.

The bet is compliance: biofuel rules expected in 2027 will demand audit-ready field data, and that same traceability logic is moving toward grain and ethanol supply chains here. Whoever owns the data layer sets the terms growers sign.