Technology | The Guardian

Beneath the free-market rhetoric, Washington actually intervenes to control the building blocks of AI systemsAt first glance, today's artificial intelligence policy landscape suggests a strategic retreat from regulation. As of late, AI leaders such as the US have doubled down on this messaging. JD Vance champions AI policy with a deregulatory flavor". Congress considered a 10-year ban on state AI legislation. On cue, the Trump administration's AI action plan" warns against smothering the technology in bureaucracy at this early stage".But the deregulatory narrative is a critical misconception. Though the US federal government takes a hands-off approach to AI applications such as chatbots and image generators, it is heavily involved in the building blocks of AI. For example, both the Trump and the Biden administrations have been hands-on when it comes to AI chips - a crucial component of powerful AI systems. Biden restricted chip access to competing nations such as China as a matter of national security. The Trump administration has sought deals with countries such as the UAE. Continue reading...

Questions grow over water and energy costs of warehouse of computers in Sonoran desert - but will Project Blue be stopped?A company's opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: The series is known for its massive multiplayer shootouts, but there's a missed opportunity to tell a meaningful story about warAnd so Battlefield is back. The long-running military shooter series, which specialises in gigantic online multiplayer conflicts involving dozens of ground troops, tanks and aircraft, has returned for its sixth main instalment - and it's thrilling, epic and compulsive.Apart from the single-player campaign mode, which I absolutely hated. It's another oh-so-familiar tale of preternaturally talented soldiers just doing their jobs to defend the free world in the face of evil private military companies, terror organisations or double-crossing CIA operatives. It could be almost any military shooter of the last decade or any straight-to-streaming war film starring one of the Hemsworths. But it's not. It's a seven-hour cliche bombardment that you have to take an active part in. Continue reading...

Computers running software will still work but steadily become more vulnerable to viruses and malwareFrom Tuesday Microsoft will no longer offer free support as standard for Windows 10, an operating system that is used by millions of computer and laptop owners around the world.Figures for September suggest four in 10 of those using Microsoft Windows worldwide were still using Windows 10, despite the introduction of its successor, Windows 11, in 2021. Continue reading...

Names, email addresses and other contact details of users from around the world could also have been takenGovernment ID photos of about 70,000 global users of Discord, a popular messaging and chat platform among video gamers, may have been exposed after hackers compromised a company contracted to carry out age verification checks.Some users' names, email addresses and other contact details, IP addresses and messages with Discord's customer service agents may also have been taken. The attacker has been trying to extort a ransom from the company. No full credit card details or passwords were seized. Continue reading...

The IGDA Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world's biggest video games event this summer - but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developersGamescom, the annual video game convention held in Cologne, Germany, is a unique event. It not only draws hundreds of thousands of players to pack out vast convention halls each year, but it also hosts professionals, offering them a chance to get their games into the hands of fans, and gives industry hopefuls a shot at passing their resumes to developers. For those based outside the US, it is the biggest event of the year by far. It is the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation's first year here, and executive director Alyssa Walles is excited.The IGDA Foundation provides professional development for underrepresented and marginalised people hoping to enter the video game industry, a crucial service considering the many barriers prospective producers, developers and writers face. Though Walles is fairly new to the IGDA Foundation, having joined three years ago, she is a video game industry veteran. She knows how crucial it is to help those who aren't born into privileged situations, who can't afford to travel across the globe to conventions, or have not had traditional schooling in computer design or coding. Continue reading...

British Standards Institution study across seven countries found quarter of bosses believe entry-level tasks could be automated to reduce costsYoung people entering the workforce are facing a job-pocalypse", as business leaders invest in artificial intelligence (AI) rather than new hires, according to a study of global business leaders.Bosses are prioritising automation through AI to plug skills gaps and allow them to reduce headcount, instead of training up junior members of staff, a report by the British Standards Institution (BSI) found. Continue reading...

NHTSA reported Teslas driving through red traffic lights and driving against direction of travel during a lane changeUS automobile safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla vehicles equipped with its full self-driving (FSD) technology over traffic-safety violations after a series of crashes.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the electric carmaker's FSD assistance system, which requires drivers to pay attention and intervene if needed, had induced vehicle behaviour that violated traffic safety laws". Continue reading...

Technology is radically reshaping how we make music. As I dug deeper into this for a radio 3 documentary I began to wonder if creative organisations are right to be so upbeat about AI. Are we riding the wave or will the wave destroy us?The hacker mansion is part startup commune, part luxury crash-pad, part sales floor for the future. They are dotted around Silicon Valley, inhabited by tech founders and futurists. The most opulent I've seen is in Hillsborough, one of the Bay Area's wealthiest enclaves, just south of San Francisco. Inside, marble floors gleam beneath taped-up portraits of tech royalty; in the gardens, gravel is raked into careful Zen spirals and pools shimmer beyond the hedges.It was a sunny June afternoon, and I had come with my producer, Fay Lomas, to record interviews for a BBC Radio 3 documentary about the collision of generative AI and classical music in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Continue reading...

Saudi Arabia's investment in Twitter increased its influence in Silicon Valley while being used at home to shut down critics of the regimeAli al-Ahmed didn't think that Elon Musk was responsible for the decline and fall of Twitter. Musk was another face representing an old regime. And its sins began well before Musk bumbled into Twitter HQ, in October 2022, carrying a porcelain sink. (In an attempt at humour, Musk posted a video of himself arriving at the Twitter offices carrying a sink with the caption Entering Twitter HQ - let that sink in!")Ahmed was a Saudi journalist and analyst living in the Washington DC area. He was a founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs (formerly the Saudi Institute), a Saudi-focused thinktank with an emphasis on human rights reporting, and was the kind of expert - passionate, principled, always glad to hop on the phone - that journalists loved having in their digital Rolodex. Continue reading...

Video game chat platform tells users that driver's licences and passports were among the forms of data accessed via a third-party customer service providerVideo game chat platform Discord has suffered a data breach, informing users that their personal information - including identity documents of those required to prove their age - were compromised.The company stated last week that an unauthorised party had compromised one of Discord's third-party customer service providers, leading to the access of a limited number of users" who had been in contact with the customer service or trust and safety teams. Continue reading...

Asian migrant laborers who paid predatory recruiting fees say global mega-corporation has not kept its promise to pay them restitutionWarehouse laborers from Asia say the world's second largest employer, Amazon, has failed to live up to its promises to compensate them for financial abuses tied to their work for the online retailer in Saudi Arabia.In 2023, Amazon promised to reimburse recruitment fees to its contract workers from Asia who had been forced to pay large sums to secure jobs at the company's warehouses in Saudi Arabia. Since then, Amazon has paid more than $2.6m in compensation to roughly 950 workers from multiple countries. Continue reading...

Experts say attempting to extort children lost Radiant group credibility in hacking world, which made it take actionCybercriminals who stole pictures and the private information of thousands of nursery children have deleted the data after a backlash against the hack.A gang calling themselves Radiant have removed details of children at the UK-based Kido nursery chain from a website it had set up to extort victims. Continue reading...

PlayStation 5; Sucker Punch/Sony

We asked coaches and athletes to reveal the gizmos they use to get more from every workout. From smart goggles to turbo trainers, here's what they recommend The best massage guns: tried and tested relief for sore, tired musclesThe fitness-focused tech scene is booming, and there are now more ways than ever to track, analyse and dissect every run, ride and workout rep. From carbon-plated running shoes to form-boosting pool floats, a new wave of fitness kit promises to help you set PBs, win that next match and elevate your athletic abilities.Not every device, wearable or training tool will be right for your goals, so you'll need to be clued up on where to invest your hard-earned money. To cut through the marketing gumpf, I enlisted the help of experts across various disciplines and sports to identify the technology that can truly make a difference. And surprisingly, it isn't always the newest, most expensive releases - some aren't even smart". Continue reading...

A new platform will be an alternative to Kindle, and bookshops will earn 100% of the profit from salesThe online store Bookshop.org is launching a platform through which independent bookshops in the UK will be able to sell ebooks as an alternative to Amazon's Kindle offering.Independent bookshops will earn 100% of the profit from sales, and ebooks will be priced the same as they are on Amazon. Continue reading...

Super-budget Chinese retailer reports revenues of $63.3m last year, almost double its $32m in 2023The UK operation of the Chinese online marketplace Temu doubled revenues and pre-tax profits last year, as British consumers snapped up products offered by the super-budget retailer.Temu UK reported revenues of $63.3m (46.4m) last year, almost double the $32m in 2023, while pre-tax profits similarly surged from $2m to $3.9m, accounts show. Continue reading...

Preteens are parroting influencer speak and demanding anti-ageing products as the pressure to fit in intensifiesJessica, 25, was working a shift at Sephora when a little girl who looked about 10 ran up to one of her colleagues, crying. Her skin was burning," Jessica said, it was tomato red. She had been running around, putting every acid you can think of on the palm of her hand, then all over her face. One of our estheticians had to tend to her skin. Her parents were nowhere to be seen."Former Sephora employee KM, 25, has her war stories too. Like the day a woman was caught shoplifting and told the security guard she was trying to steal because her kid was getting bullied because she didn't have a Dior lip gloss. [The mom] couldn't afford it but her daughter told her she is going to get made fun of at school." Continue reading...

A growing number of shooters are in conversation with their digital communities, which are becoming extremeOn the day that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson shot and the killed rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, prosecutors say, he texted his roommate to confess what he had done. While appearing to admit to the murder and describe how he was planning to retrieve his gun, he pivoted to mention why he had carved messages into the ammunition.Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme," Robinson texted, according to authorities. Continue reading...

Sam Altman said if there is doubt the system will default to the under-18 experience putting safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens'OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18, unless that user passes the company's age estimation technology or provides ID, after legal action from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself in April after months of conversations with the chatbot.OpenAI was prioritising safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens", chief executive Sam Altman said in a blog post on Tuesday, stating minors need significant protection". Continue reading...

Top-spec cameras, cutting edge AI, great software and stunning screen squeezed into a more manageable frameThe Pixel 10 Pro is Google's best phone that is still a pocketable, easy-to-handle size, taking the excellent Pixel 10 and beefing it up in the camera department.That makes it a contender for the top smaller phone with Apple's iPhone 17 Pro, offering the best of Google's hardware without an enormous screen. It is also the cheapest of three Pixel 10 Pro phones starting at 999 (1,099/$999/A$1,699) sitting below the bigger 10 Pro XL and the tablet-phone hybrid the 10 Pro Fold. Continue reading...

What once seemed a pretty fringe subculture of hobbyists riffing on stories that got them privately hot is now bringing mainstream cinema to a rolling boilThere was a time when fan fiction meant furtive scribbles uploaded to shadowy corners of the internet, in which Mr Darcy was recast as a moody vampire flatmate, Captain Kirk discovered his inner romantic, or Gandalf finally got around to opening an artisanal shop in the Shire. It was an underground hobby that could never trouble Tinseltown's accountants. And yet here we are in 2025, with the news in the Hollywood Reporter that Legendary Pictures has just paid at least $3m - (2.2m) - an unprecedented amount - for the screen rights to a forthcoming novel called Alchemised that began life as an unauthorised and kinky Harry Potter spin-off.The backstory behind Alchemised, by SenLinYu, sounds pretty freaky. SenLinYu's original book, titled Manacled, inhabited a strange sub-niche of Potterverse named Dramione" in which Hermione Granger finds herself regularly involved in unlikely and transgressive romantic encounters with Draco Malfoy. Now stripped of all reference to Hogwarts, butterbeer and Nimbus 2000s, and with renamed characters, Alchemised will hit shelves and online bookstores later this month as the dark fantasy tale of a young woman with memory problems who finds herself at the mercy of a powerful and cruel necromancer. Continue reading...

Justice department in lawsuit accuses company drivers of routinely refusing to serve people with disabilitiesThe US government sued Uber on Thursday, accusing the ride-sharing company of violating federal law by discriminating against passengers with disabilities.In a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the US Department of Justice said Uber drivers routinely refuse to serve riders with disabilities, including people who travel with service animals or stowable wheelchairs. Continue reading...

Move comes after parliamentary committee finds platform like a slow poison' to young peopleA French lawmaker has asked the state prosecutor for a criminal investigation into whether TikTok was responsible for endangering the lives" of its young users.Arthur Delaporte, a Socialist MP, said he co-chaired a six-month French parliamentary inquiry into TikTok's psychological effects on minors and heard testimony from families, social media executives and influencers. Continue reading...

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligentIn the spring of 2024, when Rachael Sawyer, a technical writer from Texas, received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter hiring for a vague title of writing analyst, she assumed it would be similar to her previous gigs of content creation. On her first day of work a week later, however, her expectations went bust. Instead of writing words herself, Sawyer's job was to rate and moderate the content created by artificial intelligence.The job initially involved a mix of parsing through meeting notes and chats summarized by Google's Gemini, and, in some cases, reviewing short films made by the AI. Continue reading...

Models for reconnaissance, rescue, interception and attack are changing the way both sides operateIt's more exhausting," says Afer, a deputy commander of the Da Vinci Wolves", describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide.Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is costly - in the last 24 hours we killed 11," Afer says - but the assaults that previously might have happened once or twice a day are now relentless. To the Da Vinci commander it seems that the Russians are terrified of their own officers, which is why they follow near suicidal orders. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Workers say 500k contract with US tech firm which supplies Israeli forces raises serious ethical questions'Public sector workers have voiced deep concern" after Coventry city council signed a 500,000-a-year artificial intelligence contract with the US data technology company Palantir.The deal is the first of its kind between a UK local authority and the Denver-based company, which supplies technology to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and to help Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. Continue reading...

It's bad for the planet and could make many jobs - including mine - obsolete. But my loathing runs deeper than thatIt's one of those topics that comes up over drinks or dinner at the moment: whether or not you think AI is going to steal your job. So far, I've felt relatively confident that while AI could no doubt have a fair crack at writing a newspaper opinion column, there is something I do as part of my work that AI cannot: reporting.Except now, it seems, AI is claiming to be doing that as well. Last week, it was revealed that at least six reputable publications have had to take down published articles because it turned out that they were probably pieces of fiction written by AI and then passed off by somebody as works of journalism under the name of Margaux Blanchard. One of these was a piece for Wired titled They Fell in Love Playing Minecraft. Then the Game Became Their Wedding Venue, which quoted a digital celebrant" called Jessica Hu, who does not seem to actually exist. Another publication, called Dispatch, received a pitch from Blanchard" about an ex-mining town called Gravemont that had been repurposed as a training ground for death investigation. Gravemont doesn't exist either.Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist Continue reading...

Lawsuit accuses companies of conspiracy to monopolize markets for smartphones and generative AI chatbots'Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is suing OpenAI and Apple over allegations that they are engaging in anticompetitive conduct. The lawsuit, filed in a Texas court on Monday, accuses the companies of a conspiracy to monopolize the markets for smartphones and generative AI chatbots".Musk had earlier this month threatened to sue Apple and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, after claiming that Apple was making it impossible" for any other AI companies to reach the top spot on its app store. Musk's xAI makes the Grok chatbot, which has struggled to become as prominent as ChatGPT. Continue reading...

Critics say Max, a WhatsApp rival, could be used to track users, though state media says it is not a spying appA Russian state-backed messenger application called Max, a rival to WhatsApp that critics say could be used to track users, must be pre-installed on all mobile phones and tablets bought in the country starting next month, the Russian government said on Thursday.The decision to promote Max comes as Moscow, locked in a standoff with the west over Ukraine, is seeking greater control over the internet. The Kremlin said in a statement that Max, which will be integrated with government services, would be on a list of mandatory pre-installed apps on all gadgets", including mobile phones and tablets, sold in Russia from 1 September. The firm behind Max said this week that 18 million users had downloaded its app, parts of which are still in a testing phase. Continue reading...

Whistleblower warns UK's top AI research body in danger of collapse due to threats over funding and new directionWhen the UK government announced the creation of the Alan Turing Institute in 2014 it promised a fitting memorial" to the renowned computer scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer.More than a decade on, Britain's leading AI institute is in turmoil as staff warn it may be in danger of collapse and ministers demand a shift in focus to defence and security work. Continue reading...

Mostly soundtracked by cats meowing a Billie Eilish song, these AI-generated fantastias tell tales of cheating, revenge and violence - and are being watched by millions

Deputy PM says move would cause rise in revenge porn', as Labour launches attack ads against Reform UK leaderNigel Farage is failing a generation of young women" with his plans to scrap the Online Safety Act, Angela Rayner has said, arguing the move would cause an increase in the prevalence of revenge porn".The comments by the deputy prime minister are the latest criticism of Farage from the government, with Labour launching a parallel series of attack adverts on the Reform UK leader, including one showing him alongside the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. Continue reading...

Pilot at London trust aims to reduce paperwork and free up doctors, as UK brings AI to public servicesAn artificial intelligence tool designed to speed up the discharge of patients is being trialled at a hospital trust in London.The platform completes documents needed to send fit patients home, potentially saving hours of delays and freeing up beds. Continue reading...

Ditched single-use plastic bottles but can't find a good reusable one? I spent two months putting dozens through their paces - these are the ones worth buying The best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups for hot drinks, testedIf you think a water bottle is just a water bottle, it's time to wake up. In 2025, there's a lot riding on your choice of drinking vessel. The heady combination of worrying about the planet and, on a more day-to-day level, staying hydrated has made reusable water bottles a must-have.Once the preserve of hikers and gym-goers, water bottles have become a small but significant act of environmental virtue signalling. Not all bottles are created equal, though. Some are insulated, some leak, some weigh as much as a toddler, and some even infuse your water with hydrogen (more on that later). The choice is dizzying.Best water bottle overall:

Who has the time to help underprivileged children when you have a pickleball court and a president to attend to?If you put it in a novel - a ham-fisted satire of tech overlord hypocrisy, say - it would look too contrived to fly. But here we are, absorbing a story from the New York Times this week in which Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are discovered to have been running a private school out of their compound in Palo Alto, California, in violation of city zoning laws. More pertinently, the school of 14 kids, which includes two of the couple's three daughters, is less than a mile from the school for low-income families that the couple founded in 2016. Guess which school the world's second-richest man and his wife are shutting down?Say the word zoning infraction" to a certain stripe of American and the effect is equal to using queue jumper" on a Briton, but of course the broader point here isn't one about permits. (A spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told the newspaper that the family was unaware about the zoning laws and that the private school, or pod of home schoolers" as they put it, is now moving to another location.) It is, rather, about Zuckerberg's perceived retreat from progressive social causes, starting with the shuttering of the school and ending with the announcement in May this year that the pair's charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), will be pulling funding from almost all the affordable housing and homeless charities it supports in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as slashing diversity programmes.Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Nvidia is the world's first $4tn company - and it just made an astonishing deal with Trump. But who is the company's founder, Jensen Huang, and what is behind its success? Tae Kim explainsIt is the richest company in the world, with a market value of $4tn. But while you may know the names of other extraordinarily rich companies - such as Apple or Google - you may never have heard of Nvidia.Created by Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese American, Nvidia is a microchip company with just 40,000 employees. Its products can be found in the games we play and ChatGPT. So how did Huang do it - and will he be able to see off Donald Trump's tariff regime and navigate the difficulties of doing business during Trump's trade war with China? Continue reading...

Christine Chapman apologizes for role in identity fraud that amassed millions to allegedly aid nuclear weapons programIn March 2020, about the time the Covid pandemic started, Christina Chapman, a woman who lived in Arizona and Minnesota, received a message on LinkedIn asking her to be the US face" of a company and help overseas IT workers gain remote employment.As working from home became the norm for many people, Chapman was able to find jobs for the foreign workers at hundreds of US companies, including some in the Fortune 500, such as Nike; a premier Silicon Valley technology company"; and one of the most recognizable media and entertainment companies in the world". Continue reading...

Chinese media said more than 100,000 were members of Telegram group that shared pictures taken without consentAnger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent.The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called MaskPark tree hole forum". It said it had more than 100,000 members and was comprised entirely of Chinese men".Additional research by Lillian Yang and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu Continue reading...

Microsoft says vulnerabilities in its SharePoint servers exposed as reports point to wave of attacksMicrosoft says Chinese threat actors", including state-sponsored hackers, have exploited security vulnerabilities in its SharePoint document-sharing servers, with research indicating that several hundred government agencies and organisations have been breached.Hackers have already breached 400 agencies, businesses and other groups, the Dutch cybersecurity company Eye Security said, adding: We expect it may continue to rise as investigations progress." Continue reading...

Future of Life Institute says companies pursuing artificial general intelligence lack credible plans to ensure safetyArtificial intelligence companies are fundamentally unprepared" for the consequences of creating systems with human-level intellectual performance, according to a leading AI safety group.The Future of Life Institute (FLI) said none of the firms on its AI safety index scored higher than a D for existential safety planning". Continue reading...

The tech giant will buy 3GW of US hydropower in deal to fuel AI and data center growth across eastern statesGoogle has agreed to secure as much as 3GW of US hydropower in the world's largest corporate clean power pact for hydroelectricity, the company said on Tuesday, as big tech pursues the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters.The deal between Google and Brookfield Asset Management includes initial 20-year power purchase agreements, totaling $3bn, for electricity generated from two hydropower facilities in Pennsylvania. Continue reading...

Firm revises new terms of service that had suggested uploaded files could be used to improve machine learning models'The popular filesharing service WeTransfer has said user content will not be used to train artificial intelligence after a change in its service terms had triggered a public backlash.The company, which is regularly used by creative professionals to transfer their work online, had suggested in new terms that uploaded files could be used to improve machine learning models". Continue reading...

Destruction is the order of the day as DK embarks on his first standalone adventure in a decade. The team behind his return reveal allWhen you think of Nintendo, it's almost impossible not to picture Donkey Kong. The ape that started it all, Donkey Kong's tie-donning, barrel-launching arcade antics introduced Mario to the world and almost bankrupted Nintendo in the process, after a near-miss legal battle over alleged King Kong copyright infringement. Yet despite Donkers' undeniable place in gaming history - and obligatory appearances in Smash Bros and Mario Kart - for the last few console generations, Donkey Kong platformers have been MIA. Enter DK's first standalone adventure in 11 years, Donkey Kong Bananza.While Mario's recent adventures saw him exploring the reaches of outer space or deftly possessing enemies with an anthropomorphic hat, DK's grand return is all about primal rage. Employing a similar voxel-based technology to Minecraft, DK's Switch 2 adventure swaps the former's thoughtful Lego-esque world-building for gleeful destruction, letting players shatter every colourful level into smithereens. Continue reading...

China supplies most rare earth magnets to electronics manufacturers, but curbed exports earlier this yearApple has signed a $500m deal with a US firm for rare earth magnets, essential for manufacturing electronics, after China curbed exports of the scarce, vital materials.The backing from one of the world's most valuable companies comes after MP Materials, which operates the only US rare earths mine, last week agreed to a multibillion-dollar deal with the US Department of Defense that will see the Pentagon become its largest shareholder. Both deals are aimed at mitigating supply chain risks after China limited the outgoing supply of rare earths earlier this year in response to Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs. Continue reading...

It was a week of lows and highs for the tech billionaire after the CEO of X resigned and its AI chatbot declared itself a super-Nazi - followed by scoring a contract of up to $200mHello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, saw its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok go Nazi. Then its CEO resigned. In the past three years of Musk's ownership of the social network, it feels like X has weathered at least one public crisis per week, more often multiple. Continue reading...

In the fevered environments within sporting arenas, anything that can help an official has to be a good thingWe are all suckers for a good story. And there was certainly a cracking twoparter at Wimbledon this year. First came the news that 300 line judges had been replaced by artificial intelligence robots. Then, a few days later, it turned out there were some embarrassing gremlins in the machine. Not since Roger Federer hung up his Wilson racket has there been a sweeter spot hit during the Wimbledon fortnight.First the new electronic line-judging system failed to spot that Sonay Kartal had whacked a ball long during her match against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova - which led to the Russian losing a game she otherwise would have won. Although, ironically, it happened only because an official had accidentally switched the system off. Continue reading...

Defense department also inked contracts with other leading AI firms including Google, Anthropic and OpenAIThe week after its Grok chatbot identified itself as MechaHitler" and generated antisemitic posts, Elon Musk's xAI firm announced a contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) worth nearly $200m. The deal is for developing and implementing artificial intelligence tools for the agency.The DoD on Monday also announced similar contracts with $200m ceilings with several other major US-based artificial intelligence developers, including Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. The agency is partnering with the General Services Administration to make these companies' AI tools available for use throughout the federal government. Continue reading...

Minecraft and other creative games are becoming recognised as powerful means of self-expression and mental health support, including for traumatised Ukrainian refugeesOleksii Sukhorukov's son was 12 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. For months, the family existed in a state of trauma and disarray: Sukhorukov was forced to give up his work in the entertainment industry, which had included virtual reality and video games; they became isolated from friends and relatives. But amid the chaos, his boy had one outlet: Minecraft. Whatever was happening outside, he'd boot up Mojang's block-building video game and escape.After 24 February 2022, I began to see the game in a completely different light," says Sukhorukov. I discovered that Ukrainian children were playing together online; some living under Russian occupation, others in government-controlled areas of the country that were the targets of regular missile attacks; some had already become refugees. And yet they were still able to play together, support one another, and build their own world. Isn't that amazing? I wanted to learn more about how video games can be used for good." Continue reading...

The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by AIThey went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated - right down to their music, promotional images and backstory.The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to. Continue reading...