This week in the 802
1. South Burlington: OnLogic is selling for $675 million. Headquarters and jobs stay put.
OnLogic, the industrial computer maker off Interstate 89, agreed to be bought by Omron, a Kyoto-based automation company. The price is $675 million. The companies announced it Oct. 13, and the deal is expected to close in or around January 2027, pending regulatory approval.
OnLogic says its global headquarters, including manufacturing and engineering, will stay in South Burlington. It has 300 employees worldwide, 160 of them in Vermont. It will keep its brand, its leadership team under CEO Sean Larkin, and run as an independent business inside Omron.
Employees get a “thank you” bonus of $1,500 for each month they’ve worked there. A five-year employee gets $90,000. Shareholding employees, 167 of them per Omron’s filing, also get an equity payout.
Omron wants OnLogic for its rugged edge computers, the machines that run AI and automation on factory floors and in rough conditions rather than in a distant data center. Omron’s CEO said manufacturing is becoming “more connected, data-driven and intelligent.” OnLogic started at a kitchen table in 2003 as Logic Supply.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/south-burlingtons-onlogic-to-be-acquired-for-675-million-by-a-japanese-company-called-omron/
https://www.onlogic.com/about/news/omron-signs-agreement-to-acquire-onlogic/
2. Montpelier: the state has a backup chatbot, and it’s cheap on purpose.
It’s called ChatVT. It’s an internal AI assistant for state employees, and about 500 of them use it each week, according to Rose Vath, who runs AI and business intelligence at the Agency of Transportation. She spoke to the Partnership for Public Service’s AI Center for Government (Oct. 8).
Vermont already lets state workers use ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, as long as the data is public. The catch is the bill. Every question costs tokens. “ChatVT is our safety hatch if these [tools] start to become financially burdensome,” Vath said. It was designed with “the express goal of cost minimization.”
Vath also floated a public version for small businesses. So far that’s only an idea.
For anyone running a shop, the testing is the useful part. Her team is building an AI tool that answers questions from about 75 of the agency’s procedures, manuals and handbooks. Before anyone relies on it, they’re writing a library of test prompts and having testers grade the answers for accuracy and completeness.
https://aicenterforgovernment.org/2026/10/08/ai-bright-spot-lowering-costs-and-modeling-accountability-with-ai-in-vermont/
3. Your school district: the state says no ChatGPT-style chatbots before high school. It doesn’t know who turned them on.
Vermont’s Agency of Education guidance, out since January, says no AI chatbots for pre-K through grade 2, only lesson-limited AI for grades 3 to 5, and school-designed chatbots under a teacher’s direction for grades 6 to 8. General-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini wait for high school. The agency’s own site says the guidance is not a mandate.
Compass Vermont (Oct. 12) asked which districts let students use Google’s Gemini. The answer: “We do not collect this level of specificity.” Every Vermont school system uses Google’s education software. Since August, Gemini inside Google Classroom has been on by default for students in districts that have also turned on Gemini or Google’s Notebook tool. Districts can switch it off for students under 18.
The latest state survey covers 2023 to 2024. About 5 of Vermont’s 54 school systems had any AI policy or notice. 16 didn’t require their software vendors to sign student data privacy agreements. Senate Education Chair Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, says his committee will likely take up AI next session. He’d like a model policy, not a ban.
4. Attorney General’s office: Character.AI is in bankruptcy. The states want its users’ chats protected.
Attorney General Charity Clark said Oct. 14 that Vermont joined a coalition of state attorneys general filing a notice in the bankruptcy of Character Technologies, the company behind the Character.AI chatbot. The worry is what happens to the data in a sale. The company holds private chatbot conversations, from children and adults, about mental health, relationships and emotional struggles. The states want protections attached to any sale of the business or its assets, and say the company’s voluntary limits on minors could be reversed by a new owner.
“Filing for bankruptcy does not absolve a company of its obligations under consumer protection laws,” Clark said.
https://ago.vermont.gov/blog/2026/10/14/attorney-general-clark-seeks-consumer-protections-characterai-bankruptcy
5. Statehouse: the signed Anthropic agreement is posted. We missed it.
Last week we said the signed agreement for the state’s free Anthropic trial hadn’t been made public. It had. On Oct. 7 the Legislature’s IT oversight committee posted a document titled “Signed contract with VT and Anthropic,” alongside the Agency of Digital Services’ written answers. We regret the error.
The agreement covers a six-month evaluation of Claude for Enterprise, including Claude Security and Claude Code “with cyber defense runbooks,” with $100,000 in credits. Either side can end it at any time with notice. Liability on each side is capped at $1,000 or the fees paid. The agency’s answers say the agreement was reviewed by its general counsel and its chief data and AI officer, and signed in June by the agency’s then-serving chief information security officer.
Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes’ last day was set for Friday, Oct. 16. Deputy Andrea DeLaBruere takes over as interim. The committee meets next on Oct. 29.
http://legislature.vt.gov/Documents/2026/Workgroups/JITOC/Agency%20of%20Digital%20Services/W~Denise%20Reilly-Hughes~Signed%20contract%20with%20VT%20and%20Anthropic~10-7-2026.pdf
http://legislature.vt.gov/Documents/2026/Workgroups/JITOC/Agency%20of%20Digital%20Services/W~Denise%20Reilly-Hughes~ADS%20Response%20to%20SLTT~10-7-2026.pdf
https://legislature.vermont.gov/committee/document/2026/345/Date/10-7-2026
If it lands here
Google released Gemini 4 Argon on Oct. 13. If you already pay for Google AI Pro or Ultra, it’s in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search now, no new signup. For anyone building on it, the API is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output through Nov. 30, then $4 and $20. If you’ve got a hard job you’ve been putting off, this is the cheap month to test it.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/introducing-gemini-4-argon/
The free version of ChatGPT changed too. OpenAI’s GPT-6 with what it calls Intelligent UI started reaching Free and Go accounts Oct. 8. Answers can now include charts, forms, buttons and small tools built on the spot, like a calculator or a bill splitter. Worth a try on a quote, a schedule or a budget before you build a spreadsheet by hand.
https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-for-everyone/
The number
About 5 of 54. That’s how many Vermont school systems had any AI policy or notice in the state’s latest published survey, covering 2023 to 2024. The 2025 results are expected by winter.
Try this: before you trust an AI tool with your manual, price list or procedures, write 10 questions you already know the answers to. Run them. Grade every answer. That’s what the Agency of Transportation is doing before it relies on its own tool.
Skip this: handing a whole workflow to an AI agent when one AI step inside the process you already have would do. “Injecting one use of AI into a deterministic workflow is far less risky,” as Vath put it.
Also in the pile
UVM: Claude and Claude Code are now available to the campus by request, alongside Microsoft Copilot. ChatGPT is in contract review, and a multi-model AI service with UMass Amherst is targeted for an initial winter rollout. https://www.uvm.edu/it/news/expanding-uvms-ai-tools-and-services
Vermont Tech Jam: Saturday, Oct. 24, at Hula in Burlington. Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, a deepfake forensics expert who recently bought a farm in Vermont, talks at 1 p.m. (Seven Days) https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/tech/hany-farid-deepfakes-vermont-tech-jam/
UVM: Josh Bongard, “Don’t Panic! AI from the Inside,” Tuesday, Oct. 20, 4:30 p.m., Alumni House, open to the public. https://events.uvm.edu/event/presidential-dan-carol-burack-lecture-with-uvms-josh-bongard-discussing-ai-and-its-implications-for-research-learning-education-and-careers
Slopaganda: AI-generated election satire keeps spreading after the successful challenge to Act 75, the state’s election deepfake law. Thirty-one states now regulate AI in political media. (VTDigger, Oct. 7) https://vtdigger.org/2026/10/07/vermonts-slopaganda-problem/
From Wallingford. Drafted with tools, edited here. If a fact is wrong, hello@aiinthe802.com.
Reply and tell us: does your kid’s school let students use Gemini? Has your school board talked about AI at all?