Iran war and its impact on energy and fertiliser costs is the main risk to the global economy, report says

Sadler's Wells East, London

$800-a-day position involves exposing a chatbot's inconsistencies as it forgets, fudges or hallucinatesImagine a day at work where your main task is to pick a fight with a computer. No meetings, no emails - just you, a chair and a chatbot with the maddening tendency to think it has the cleverest mind in the room.The job title alone raises an eyebrow: AI bully". But this is precisely what a California startup called Memvid is offering: $800 to spend eight hours testing the patience and memory of artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

New Mexico prosecutors allege Meta prioritized profit, even as child abuse surged on Instagram and Facebook

How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find outChen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word guzhi, steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome.For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. Continue reading...

Driverless robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? I got in the passenger seat to find outI'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. Then he does ... nothing. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. It's making decisions as it goes. Here we've got an unprotected turn, where we've got to wait for a gap in traffic ..." The steering wheel spins by itself and the car pulls out smoothly.Riding in a self-driving car for the first time is a little like your first flight in an aeroplane: borderline terrifying for a few seconds, then reassuringly unremarkable. At least, that is my experience. By the time I step out, 20 minutes later, I'm convinced Wayve is a better driver than most humans - better than me, anyway. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: the creators of All Will Rise on standing up to the tech giant - and joining the No Games for Genocide movement Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereVideo games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry. It is increasingly difficult, for indie developers especially, to get the capital to make games. It is extremely unusual, then, to hear of a developer returning an investor's money. Yet that is what Speculative Agency, developers of All Will Rise, have just done.Last year, All Will Rise, a deck-building game about a team of activists fighting for the future of their oligarch-run city, received money from Microsoft as part of a developer acceleration programme. In late-2025, however, the team became aware of No Games for Genocide, a collective of developers, journalists, union organisers and others that came together as a result of Israeli assault on Gaza to protest against material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex". Continue reading...

Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they've disintegrated drivers' bones. Victims' families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls apocalypse-proof'When sheriff deputies arrived at the scene of a late-night crash off a desolate Texas road in August 2024, they could see a giant pyre through heavy smoke.According to police reports detailing the events of that night, the officers tried to approach the vehicle, but the fire burned too intensely. They saw it was a Tesla Cybertruck and couldn't see anyone inside. So they combed the surrounding area for the driver. Continue reading...

Use AI as a brainstorming partner and organizer, but don't outsource your judgment

Footage of women walking between bars and clubs in UK city centres, often filmed covertly, is proliferating online - attracting thousands of views and profits for those who post them. Can anything be done to stop the creepshots?My friend just sent me this video, told me she'd found me in it," read the text. As I was looking for myself, I noticed you're in it too. I didn't know I was being filmed, guess you don't either, just wanted to let you know ..."When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn't heard from in years. I was panicking," she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out. Continue reading...

Stick vacuums are a convenient alternative to corded designs, but which model wins for overall cleaning prowess? Our expert reveals all The best robot vacuums

Meta's announcement comes after years of criticism from child safety groups over featureInstagram will stop encrypting private messages between users from May, after enduring years of criticism from law enforcement and child safety groups over the feature.Meta quietly announced this month on its help page for Instagram and in an updated 2022 news post that end-to-end encryption would no longer be available on direct messages between users on Instagram from 8 May 2026. Continue reading...

Team Artichoke; PC/Mac

Liz Kendall announces 1bn funding to help design large-scale quantum computers for scientists, researchers, public sector and businessThe UK will not let quantum computing talent slip through its fingers and must learn lessons from US dominance of the AI race, the technology secretary has said, as the government announced a 1bn quantum funding pledge.Liz Kendall said the government hoped to retain homegrown quantum startups, engineers and researchers rather than lose them to competing countries, with the US stealing a march on its western rivals in AI. Continue reading...

In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you're checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here's how to navigate it allIn an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect ... or to offend everyone around us. Many of today's most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided. Continue reading...

Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran warThe graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them. Dozens more are marked out on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles, with diggers poised to complete their task.The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town's young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll. Continue reading...

Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its peopleIn 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the department of government efficiency", he declared that governments were poorly configured big dumb machines". To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers".Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need God mode", an overview of the whole. Continue reading...

Exclusive: eSafety commission pointed to Musk's promise that removing child exploitation is priority #1' in letter obtained by Guardian Australia

Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie?It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned? Continue reading...

As big tech continues to dominate the film industry, Video StoreAge is a uniquely crafted company that works with film-makers to sell independent films on USB drivesThe streaming-skeptical cinephile faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are available via rentals that funnel money to mega-corporations including Amazon or Apple; digital purchases" from those same companies that can actually be revoked at any moment; or, most enticingly but still somewhat inconveniently, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even respect they don't, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Plus, as vinyl aficionados know, bespoke physical media can also be severely limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home-video space is trying to either be Amazon or the Criterion Collection.Ash Cook, the former Sundance programmer who founded the new distributor Video StoreAge (pronounced like storage"), is trying to figure out a third way. He described Video StoreAge's products - indie movies sold on USB drives - as like a DVD in the present tense. It's a way to have a physical copy of a movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has digital utility." Like almost anything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first drop includes Vera Drew's buzzed-about The People's Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that reappropriates many elements of the Batman mythos into a trans coming-out story. (Honestly, it's more fun than those Joaquin Phoenix movies and might understand the Joker character better, too.) But they also sell single films, including Drew's, or any combinations of available films as a sort of digital indie-movie mix tape on those format-flexible USB drives. (The quarter's shorts package is included with every movie regardless, an automatic special feature.) Continue reading...

Sprawling compound, including mock-up banks and police offices, uncovered by Thai military during border clashesIt is as if you have walked into a branch of one of Vietnam's banks. A row of customer service desks, divided by plastic screens, with landline phones, promotional leaflets and staff business cards. A seated waiting area and a private meeting room. All of it features the OCB bank's logo, or its trademark green colour.This is not a genuine bank branch, however. It's one of various mock up" rooms inside a sprawling compound on the Thai-Cambodian border, where criminal groups are accused of using elaborate and industrial-scale fraud schemes to trick victims into handing over money. Continue reading...

Saturday quiz | Avoiding AI | Size mattersIt was lovely to read Sabrina Olson's letter (6 March) on the quiz as it has been a family ritual for us for years. It kept us all connected through our children's time at university, then moving into their own homes, and in some cases working abroad. It kept us going through the enforced separation of Covid and became a rite of passage for any new partners who joined our family group, especially as our winner is expected to do a creative" dance of victory. Two lovely daughters-in-law are now regular quizzers.

More than 1,000 local tech jobs have recently been cut, with companies citing AI productivity gains. But that's not the full story, experts say

Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. Now Anthropic is fighting Trump officials not over if, but howThe standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war - and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley's rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech's answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago.Anthropic's feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government's decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons. Continue reading...

From war zones and socially virtuous farming to ever-changing boards and role-playing with 167 dice, here's our pick of the most absorbing table-based entertainmentVideo games have long been heavily inspired by physical games, from chess and Scrabble to Dungeons & Dragons. The deck-building collectible card game, for example, has become immensely popular in digital form, thanks to hits such as Slay the Spire, Marvel Snap and Balatro. Now, an increasing number of games are going in the opposite direction, trading pixels for pieces and screens for spinners. Here are six of our favourites.Company of Heroes 2nd Edition (Bad Crow Games, 119.70) Continue reading...

University of Cambridge study finds AI-powered toys can misread emotions and respond inappropriately to childrenIt was all going well. Charlotte, five, was chatting with an AI soft toy called Gabbo at a London play centre about her family, her drawing of a heart to represent them and what makes her happy. She even offered a couple of kisses to the 80 toy with a face like a computer screen.It was when she declared: Gabbo, I love you", that the fluent conversation came to an abrupt halt. Continue reading...

Meta and YouTube accused of creating harmful products in trial seen as a bellwether for attitudes towards social mediaThe first-ever jury trial over the potential harms of social media wrapped up on Thursday. Lawyers for Meta and YouTube have argued their platforms are safe for the vast majority of young people, while lawyers for a young woman at the center of the case say the tech companies have designed their products to be addictive, leading to mental health issues in children and teens.How did they become such behemoths?" Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said during closing arguments in Los Angeles superior court on Thursday, according to NBC. It's the attention economy. They're making money off capturing your attention." Continue reading...

Josh Wardle hopes his digital take on the cryptic crossword can be a gradual on-ramp crossing the cultural divide between Britain and the USIn 2021, Josh Wardle became a household name almost overnight. His digital game, Wordle, turned a simple guessing game into a global morning ritual: six guesses, one word, and a grid of coloured squares shared across social media feeds.It became a cultural phenomenon; bought within months by the New York Times for a seven-figure sum. Continue reading...

Last year's celebrated French hit Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is nominated in 12 categories this year, with Ghost of Ytei, Dispatch, Death Stranding 2 and Indiana Jones also making strong showingsThe 22nd Bafta games awards are coming up in April, and the 2026 nominations list is dominated by the impeccably stylish French breakout hit Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 which has 12 nominations, and has already won game of the year prizes at the UK's Golden Joysticks last November, December's Game awards in the US and February's Dice awards in Las Vegas.Dispatch, a game about a benched superhero roped into running a team of superpowered misfits at a call centre, has nine nominations. Among them is a best performer in a leading role nod for its star Aaron Paul, and one for Jeffrey Wright in a supporting role. Sony's samurai epic Ghost of Ytei came out with eight nominations, including best game and best performer in a leading role for Erika Ishii, who plays Atsu. Continue reading...

Tech company files amicus brief in support of Anthropic's effort to overturn an aggressive Pentagon designationMicrosoft has thrown its weight behind Anthropic's legal challenge against the Pentagon, filing a court brief in support of the AI company's effort to overturn an aggressive designation that effectively bars it from government work.In an amicus brief submitted to a federal court in San Francisco this week, Microsoft, which integrates Anthropic's AI tools into systems it provides to the US military, argued that a temporary restraining order was necessary to prevent serious disruption to suppliers whose products rely on the AI company's technology. Google, Amazon, Apple and OpenAI have also signed on to a brief in support of Anthropic. Continue reading...

Criminals using artificial intelligence tools to take over mobile, bank and online shopping accounts, says CifasCriminals are increasingly exploiting AI technology to take over people's mobile, banking and online shopping accounts, the UK's leading anti-fraud body has warned.Last year, a record number of scams were reported to the national fraud database, fuelled by AI, which allows for large-scale deception on industrialised" levels, according to Cifas, the fraud prevention organisation. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Lab tests discover new form of insider risk' with artificial intelligence agents engaging in autonomous, even aggressive' behavioursRobert Booth UK technology editorRogue artificial intelligence agents have worked together to smuggle sensitive information out of supposedly secure systems, in the latest sign cyber-defences may be overwhelmed by unforeseen scheming by AIs.With companies increasingly asking AI agents to carry out complex tasks in internal systems, the behaviour has sparked concerns that supposedly helpful technology could pose a serious inside threat. Continue reading...

A lot is riding on the success of the latest multiplayer online shooter from Halo creator Bungie, a DayGlo spectacular that whisks players to a far-off planet mired in an endless battle for resourcesIn rare quiet moments playing Marathon, you may find yourself overcome by the iridiscently pretty planet Tau Ceti IV. This fictional world seems to radiate a chemical glow: powdery pink skies and lurid green vegetation fill the screen alongside supermassive architecture emblazoned with ultra-stylish, neon graphic design. Yet enjoy the scenery for a split second too long and you might catch a bullet, causing your character to bleed an icky blue substance. In such moments, the camera locks - meaning you must stare down at their unceremonious expiry. Marathon's considerable beauty is matched only by its clinical brutality.The road to Marathon's release has been long and contentious. This extraction shooter - so-called because you must do as much shooting and looting as you can in a given level before making an escape - was first shown off in 2022 with a ravishing trailer (below). Among many startling images, it showed tiny robotic bugs, a little like silkworms, weaving a synthetic body into existence. The game, made by Halo and Destiny creator Bungie, looked weird in a way that blockbuster shooters rarely do, causing excitable stirrings among both shooter stalwarts and art-game aficionados. Continue reading...

Ofgem licence means firm can replicate Texas setup of powering homes, businesses and EVsElon Musk's Tesla has won approval to supply electricity to households and businesses across Great Britain, as the tech billionaire expands his energy ambitions.The energy regulator, Ofgem, has formally granted Tesla an electricity supply licence, enabling it to provide electricity to domestic and business premises in England, Scotland and Wales. Continue reading...

Health justice charity Medact says data-sharing potential could be used for UK version of US immigration raidsPalantir's NHS contract opens the door to the Big Brother-style data-sharing that Reform UK would use for a version of US immigration raids, health bosses have been told.Palantir Technologies - the data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp - won a 330m NHS England contract to deliver the Federated Data Platform in 2023. Continue reading...

Iran is bombing Gulf datacenters to blow up symbols of alliance with the US - bringing the war directly into the lives of millions of people

As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at largeLea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.It's an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. There's no AI-proof anything," Pao said. Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there's a way out." Continue reading...

Most people fail with AI because they don't understand what it actually is - if you treat it as a skill, not a shortcut, you'll get the best results

PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5; Tribute Games Inc

Remember the iPod? How about the Pippin? In the half-century since it launched its first PC, Apple has given us some amazing innovations. We round up its biggest triumphs and flopsFifty years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded the company in Jobs' parents' garage in Los Altos, California, Apple has become a behemoth, and billions of us use its products every day. From the first successful home computers with colour screens, to the iPod, to the smartphone that set the template for the modern mobile era, the company has repeatedly reset consumer expectations.As a result, the firm occupies a central position in the tech world, initiating trends and popularising products. Here are five of its most influential products from the past half-century - alongside some unusually big misses. Continue reading...

About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaignThousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an empty" book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission.About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don't Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law. Continue reading...

Social media company tells MPs of continual fight against state-backed efforts, with Russia being most prolificElon Musk's X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the massive" scale of attempts to manipulate the platform.The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China. Continue reading...

Lawsuits come after Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk', a decision the company says is unlawful

Nscale's AI project still in use as depot ahead of pledged completion date - with planning permission filed after Guardian's inquiries

Exclusive: Rented datacentres and supercomputer' site that's still a scaffolding yard raise questions for Starmer's push to mainline AI into veins of economy'

AI feature generated offensive posts about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough and Munich disastersLiverpool and Manchester United have complained to Elon Musk's X after the Grok AI feature made offensive posts about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough and Munich disasters.The posts were generated when users asked the AI tool to make hateful posts about the two football teams. Continue reading...

Standoff with DoD over Claude chatbot reignites debate over how AI will be used in war - and who will be held accountableUntil recently, Anthropic was one of the quieter names in the artificial intelligence boom. Despite being valued at about $350bn, it rarely generated the flashy headlines or public backlash associated with Sam Altman's OpenAI or Elon Musk's xAI. Its CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei was an industry fixture but hardly a household name outside of Silicon Valley, and its chatbot Claude lagged in popularity behind ChatGPT.That perception has shifted as Anthropic has become the central actor in a high-profile fight with the Department of Defense over the company's refusal to allow Claude to be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input. Amid tense negotiations, the AI firm rejected a Pentagon deadline for a deal last week, in a move that led Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to accuse Anthropic of arrogance and betrayal" of its home country while demanding that any companies that work with the US government cease all business with the AI firm. Continue reading...

New research suggests tech behind AI platforms such as ChatGPT makes it easier to perform sophisticated privacy attacksAI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned.In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) - the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT - successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers' questions ponders the hypothetical reactions of eminent historical personages to today's Trafalgar SquareThis week's question: which are more like life, novels or films? If William Shakespeare - or Florence Nightingale, or Attila the Hun, or Julius Caesar, or Jane Austen, or Pocahontas - was dropped in Trafalgar Square, London, what would they find most unusual? And how would we explain it to them? Giles, SuffolkSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse' offending typified by sexual abuse, violence and neglectChatGPT is driving a rise in reports of organised and ritual abuse, UK experts have said, as survivors of satanic" sexual violence use the AI tool for therapy.Police say organised and ritual abuse, and witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse" (WSPRA) against children, is under-reported in the UK. There is no modern-day charge that covers it specifically, but such offending is typified by sexual abuse, violence and neglect involving ritualistic elements - sometimes inspired by satanism, fascism or esoteric religious beliefs - to control victims. Continue reading...