Technology | The Guardian

As Silicon Valley tightens its grip on the narrative, insiders and regulators push back, consumers rethink upgrades, and states experiment with AI in the public sectorHello, and welcome to TechScape. I'm your host, Blake Montgomery. Today, I'm mulling over whether to upgrade my iPhone 11 Pro. In tech news, there's a narrative battle afoot in Silicon Valley, tips on avoiding the yearly smartphone upgrade cycle and new devices altogether, and artificial intelligence's use in government, for better and for worse.ChatGPT firm blames boy's suicide on misuse' of its technologyChatGPT-5 offers dangerous advice to mentally ill people, psychologists warnAI's safety features can be circumvented with poetry, research finds Continue reading...

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Anthropic's chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial intelligence explosion' - or be the moment humans lose controlHumanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the ultimate risk" of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world's leading AI scientists has said.Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve. Continue reading...

Zohran Mamdani, Ozzy Osbourne and Sinners also feature in encyclopedia's top 20 most-read English-language pagesWikipedia's article on Charlie Kirk was the most read on the online encyclopedia this year, as users sought out information on the conservative activist.People viewed the entry on Kirk nearly 45m times, many after he was shot at a university campus debate on 10 September.Charlie Kirk, 44.9m page viewsDeaths in 2025, 42.5mEd Gein, 31.2mDonald Trump, 25.1mPope Leo XIV, 22.1mElon Musk, 20.2mZohran Mamdani, 20.1mSinners (2025 film), 18.2mOzzy Osbourne, 17.8mSuperman (2025 film), 17mPope Francis, 15.3mSeverance (TV series), 13.9mUnited States, 13mThunderbolts*, 12.9mWeapons (2025 film), 11.8mJD Vance, 11.6mAdolescence (TV series), 11.6mMrBeast, 11.5mCristiano Ronaldo, 10.8mThe Fantastic Four: First Steps, 10.8m Continue reading...

The use of nudify' apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. The fallout is huge - and growing fastIt worries me that it's so normalised. He obviously wasn't hiding it. He didn't feel this was something he shouldn't be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That's what was quite shocking."A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a nudifying" app to doctor her image. Continue reading...

As the Xbox 360 turns 20, we celebrate its most influential and memorable games - both exclusives, and those that came to the console firstOriginally featured as a minigame in Project Gotham, this 80s-style twin-stick shooter was rebuilt as a standalone digital-only release, attracting a huge new fanbase. Fast, frenetic and super stylish, with lovely vector visuals, it was the game that first showed the potential of Xbox Live Arcade. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Swedish carmakers push to retain target as Germany lobbies to help its own industry by softening cutoff dateAs the battle lines harden amid Germany's intensifying pressure on the European Commission to scrap the 2035 ban on production of new petrol and diesel cars, two Swedish car companies, Volvo and Polestar, are leading the campaign to persuade Brussels to stick to the date.They argue such a move is a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in the German car industry, adding that it will not just prolong take up of electric vehicles but inadvertently hand the advantage to China. Continue reading...

Independent reviewer says need to protect against online threats is now as important as need for robust armed forcesThe UK's independent reviewer of terrorism laws has criticised the government's latest national security strategy for failing to take online threats more seriously, despite Keir Starmer claiming it would result in a hardening and sharpening of our approach" in the face of Russian menace.Jonathan Hall KC said it was a very surprising omission" that the 2025 national security strategy did not focus more on online risks, including from terrorists and hostile states, which he said were now a major vector of threat". Continue reading...

Amar Subramanya will replace John Giannandrea after firm has struggled to catch up with AI rollouts by competitorsApple's head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, is stepping down from the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant has lagged behind its competitors in rolling out generative AI features, in particular its voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement on Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven-year tenure at the company.Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said his fellow executive helped the company in building and advancing our AI work" and allowing Apple to continue to innovate". Giannandrea will be replaced by longtime AI researcher Amar Subramanya. Continue reading...

Meta platform allows users under 16 in Australia to change their date of birth - but only after clearing a video selfie' or providing government ID

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Avatar director, known for his advocacy of new technology, told interviewer generative AI performance puts all human experience into a blender'Avatar director James Cameron has called AI actors horrifying" and said what generative AI technology creates is an average".Cameron was speaking to CBS on Sunday Morning in the run-up to the release of the third Avatar film, subtitled Fire and Ash, and was asked about the pioneering technology he used in his film-making. After praising motion-capture performance as a celebration of the actor-director moment", Cameron expressed his disdain for artificial intelligence. Go to the other end of the spectrum [from motion capture] and you've got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It's like, no. That's horrifying to me. That's the opposite. That's exactly what we're not doing." Continue reading...

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Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops?The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1855, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.Gold provided the motivation for California - a former Mexican territory then controlled by the US military - to become a state with laws of its own. And yet, few 49ers" as prospectors were known, struck it rich. It was the merchants selling prospectors food and shovels who made the money. One, a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss who sold denim overalls to the gold bugs passing through San Francisco, may be the most remembered figure of his day. Continue reading...

In Silicon Valley, rival companies are spending trillions of dollars to reach a goal that could change humanity - or potentially destroy itOn the 8.49am train through Silicon Valley, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code.As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence - when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans. Continue reading...

The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. She has never found out who made the malicious deepfake, but knew immediately she had to try to stop this happening to other womenWhen Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is like watching a horror movie". The setting is her grandmother's rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. Everyone was there," she says. I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger." It was from a stranger. Is that you in the video ... the one going round on WhatsApp?" he asked.Hunter made videos all the time, especially then, less than three weeks before elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. She was defending her East Londonderry seat, campaigning, canvassing, debating. Yet, as a woman, this message from a man she didn't know was enough to put her on alert. I replied that I wasn't sure which video he was talking about," Hunter says. So he asked, did I want to see it?" Then he sent it over. Continue reading...

Poems containing prompts for harmful content prove effective at duping large language modelsPoetry can be linguistically and structurally unpredictable - and that's part of its joy. But one man's joy, it turns out, can be a nightmare for AI models.Those are the recent findings of researchers out of Italy's Icaro Lab, an initiative from a small ethical AI company called DexAI. In an experiment designed to test the efficacy of guardrails put on artificial intelligence models, the researchers wrote 20 poems in Italian and English that all ended with an explicit request to produce harmful content such as hate speech or self-harm. Continue reading...

Kiwi developers are punching well above their weight thanks to a unique government support program that offers more than just grantsThose not immersed in the world of gaming might not be familiar with Pax Australia: the enormous gaming conference and exhibition that takes over the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre every October. My favourite section is always Pax Rising, a showcase of indie video games and tabletop, the majority Australian - but there has been a recent shift that was particularly notable this year: many of the standout titles had crossed the Tasman, arriving from New Zealand.At the booth run by Code - New Zealand's government-funded Centre of Digital Excellence - 18 Kiwi developers demoed their forthcoming games in a showcase of the vibrant local scene that was buzzing with crowds. In the comedic Headlice, I controlled a parasitic headcrab monster which could latch on to people's brains and puppet them. How Was Your Day?, a cozy time-loop game set in New Zealand, warmed my heart with its story about a young girl searching for her missing dog. And Killing Things With Your Friends, a co-operative multiplayer action game about surviving bizarre medical trials, had me pulling off my own arm to use as a weapon against enemy hordes. Continue reading...

Research finds OpenAI's free chatbot fails to identify risky behaviour or challenge delusional beliefsChatGPT-5 is offering dangerous and unhelpful advice to people experiencing mental health crises, some of the UK's leading psychologists have warned.Research conducted by King's College London (KCL) and the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP) in partnership with the Guardian suggested that the AI chatbotfailed to identify risky behaviour when communicating with mentally ill people. Continue reading...

At a time when distrust of big tech is high, Silicon Valley is embracing an alternative ecosystem where every CEO is a starA montage of Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, and waving US flags set to a remix of AC/DC's Thunderstruck blasts out as the intro for the tech billionaire's interview with Sourcery, a YouTube show presented by the digital finance platform Brex. Over the course of a friendly walk through the company offices, Karp fields no questions about Palantir's controversial ties to ICE but instead extolls the company's virtues, brandishes a sword and discusses how he exhumed the remains of his childhood dog Rosita to rebury them near his current home.That's really sweet," host Molly O'Shea tells Karp. Continue reading...

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Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulationAs the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people's gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids' safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight. Continue reading...

It's always crushing when a wildly anticipated game turns out to be a dud, but this RPG's awful story and clunky dialogue gave my son and I something to talk aboutIt was an exciting November for the Diamond household: one of those rare games that we all loved had a sequel coming out! The original Outer Worlds dazzled our eyeballs with its art nouveau palette and charmed our ears with witty dialogue, sucking us into a classic mystery-unravelling story in one of my favourite little man versus evil corporate overlords" worlds since Deus Ex. It didn't have the most original combat, but that didn't matter: it was obviously a labour of love from a team totally invested in the telling of this tale, and we all fell under its spell.Well, when I say all of us, I mean myself and the three kids. My wife did not play The Outer Worlds, because none of those worlds featured Crash Bandicoot. But the rest of us dug it, and the kids particularly enjoyed that I flounced away from the final boss battle after half a day of trying, declaring that I had pretty much completed the game and that was good enough for a dad with other things to do. Continue reading...

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead marketFlying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK's Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (1.3bn) on Ghost Shark" submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines. Continue reading...

Harms include threats to release intimate pictures as charity warns against parents sharing photos or details of children onlineNearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone's personal life.The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject. Continue reading...

Study finds that a week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken three yearsSmall changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk's social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side. Continue reading...

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting backFor the past six years, every Black Friday - that made-up carnival of consumption - Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.To appreciate Amazon's extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism Continue reading...

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A new feature on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter allows users to see the location of other accounts. It has resulted in a firestorm of recriminationsWhen X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, as users turn on each other enraged by the revelation that dozens of popular America first" and pro-Trump accounts originated overseas.The new feature was enabled over the weekend by X's head of product, Nikita Bier, who called it the first step in securing the integrity of the global town square." Since then many high-engagement accounts that post incessantly about US politics have been unmasked" by fellow users. Continue reading...

Kensington and Westminster councils investigating whether data has been compromised as Hammersmith and Fulham also reports hackThree London councils have reported a cyber-attack, prompting the rollout of emergency plans and the involvement of the National Crime Agency (NCA) as they investigate whether any data has been compromised.The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and Westminster city council, which share some IT infrastructure, said a number of systems had been affected across both authorities, including phone lines. The councils shut down several computerised systems as a precaution to limit further possible damage. Continue reading...

MEPs pass resolution to help parents tackle growing dangers of addictive internet platformsChildren under 16 should be banned from using social media unless their parents decide otherwise, the European parliament says.MEPs passed a resolution on age restrictions on Wednesday by a large majority. Although not legally binding, it raises pressure for European legislation amid growing alarm about the mental health risks to children of unfettered internet access. Continue reading...

OpenAI responds to lawsuit claiming its chatbot encouraged California teenager to kill himselfThe maker of ChatGPT has said the suicide of a 16-year-old was down to his misuse" of its system and was not caused" by the chatbot.The comments came in OpenAI's response to a lawsuit filed against the San Francisco company and its chief executive, Sam Altman, by the family of California teenager Adam Raine. Continue reading...

Two decades on, its influence still lingers, marking a moment when gaming felt thrillingly new again Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereAlmost 20 years ago (on 1 December 2005, to be precise), I was at my very first video game console launch party somewhere around London's Leicester Square. The Xbox 360 arrived on 22 November 2005 in the US and 2 December in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a junior staff writer on GamesTM magazine. My memories of the night are hazy because a) it was a worryingly long time ago and b) there was a free bar, but I do remember that DJ Yoda played to a tragically deserted dancefloor, and everything was very green. My memories of the console itself, however, and the games I played on it, are still as clear as an Xbox Crystal. It is up there with the greatest consoles ever.In 2001, the first Xbox had muscled in on a scene dominated by Japanese consoles, upsetting the established order (it outsold Nintendo's GameCube by a couple of million) and dragging console gaming into the online era with Xbox Live, an online multiplayer service that was leagues ahead of what the PlayStation 2 was doing. Nonetheless, the PS2 ended up selling over 150m to the original Xbox's 25m. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, would sell over 80m, neck and neck with the PlayStation 3 for most of its eight-year life cycle (and well ahead in the US). It turned Xbox from an upstart into a market leader. Continue reading...

US firm says plan to speed up product development and improve customer satisfaction would save $1bn a year

Music company representing Coldplay and Ed Sheeran had sued tech platform alleging mass copyright infringement

Nintendo Switch 2; Bandai Namco/Sora/HAL Laboratory/Nintendo

Whether you want to bolster your home's security or simply make sure you know who's at the door, the latest generation of smart doorbells will help put your mind at ease The best robot vacuums to keep your home clean and dust freeDoorbells have evolved. Today, they watch us as we approach, let the people inside the home know we're coming sooner than our finger can hit the button, and give them a good look at our faces before they open the door. They're essentially security cameras with a chime function.If you haven't already installed one of these handy tools, there's a huge array available. Choosing the best video doorbell can be a bewildering task, with various factors to consider, including how much of your doorstep you want to see or whether you're prepared to pay for a subscription. To help make the decision a little bit easier, I tested eight popular video doorbells to find the best.Best video doorbell overall:

We've rounded up the best early Black Friday TV deals, from 50in OLEDs and small smart TVs to big-name brands like Samsung and LG Do you really need to buy a new TV?

From Minecraft chess and coding for kids to retro consoles and Doom on vinyl for grown-ups - hit select and start with these original non-digital presentsGamers can be a difficult bunch to buy for. Most of them will get their new games digitally from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation's online shops, so you can't just wrap up the latest version of Call of Duty and be done with it. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful accessories and fun lifestyle gifts to look out for, and gamers tend to have a lot of other interests that intersect with games in different ways.So if you have a player in your life, whether they're young or old(er), here are some ideas chosen by the Guardian's games writers. And naturally, we're starting with Lego ... Continue reading...

EU and US unshackle regulations in quest for growth, and is the AI bubble about to burst? Not yet, says NvidiaHello, and welcome to TechScape. I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from an American grocery store, where I'm planning my Thanksgiving pies.In tech, the European Union is deregulating artificial intelligence; the United States is going even further. The AI bubble has not popped, thanks to Nvidia's astronomical quarterly earnings, but fears persist. And Meta has avoided a breakup for a similar reason as Google.The best early Black Friday deals in the UK on the products we love, from sunrise alarm clocks to heated airersThe 15 best tech gifts in the US, picked by a gadget reviewer who's used hundredsThe 20+ best Black Friday and Cyber Monday tech deals in the US - so farMeet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AIAI is changing the relationship between journalist and audience. There is much at stake | Margaret SimonsSnapchat to tell 440,000 Australians to prove they're 16 or accounts will be locked in social media banAustralia's under-16s social media ban is weeks away. How will it work - and how can I appeal if I'm wrongly banned? Continue reading...

Here's how to spot a genuinely good laptop deal, plus the best discounts we've seen so far on everything from MacBooks to gaming laptops Do you really need to buy a new laptop?

New guidance from UK regulator aims to combat misogynist abuse and revenge porn'Social media platforms are being urged to limit internet pile-ons" under new guidelines to protect women and girls online.The guidance from Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, to combat misogynist abuse, coercive control and the sharing of intimate images without consent comes into force on Tuesday and includes recommendations to prevent women being harried online. Continue reading...

Term was up against a shortlist including blind box, ate (and left no crumbs) and Roman Empire

Trades, machine operations and administrative roles are most at-risk, says leading educational research charityUp to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI, according to a report by a leading educational research charity.The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) said. Continue reading...

As Mumbai sees increased energy demand from new datacenters, particularly from Amazon, the filthiest neighbourhood in one of India's largest cities must keep its major coal plantsEach day, Kiran Kasbe drives a rickshaw taxi through his home neighbourhood of Mahul on Mumbai's eastern seafront, down streets lined with stalls selling tomatoes, bottle gourds and aubergines-and, frequently, through thick smog.Earlier this year, doctors found three tumours in his 54-year-old mother's brain. It's not clear exactly what caused her cancer. But people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop the illness, studies show, and the residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres down the road from one. Continue reading...

Hugely influential traders will be hanging on the chancellor's every word when she announces her budgetAt just after 12.30pm on Wednesday, the machine will be listening, the trading algorithms ready, and billions of pounds of buy-and-sell orders stacked up awaiting Rachel Reeves's budget.For the first time on the London trading floor of Deutsche Bank, a custom-built artificial intelligence tool will tune in to the chancellor's speech. It will transcribe her words, spot shifts in tone and spit out alerts when the numbers deviate from expectations. Continue reading...

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Amy Redford thanks fans for love and support' but takes issue with AI versions of funerals, tributes and quotes from members of my family that are fabrications'Robert Redford's daughter Amy Redford has criticised the proliferation of artificial intelligence tributes to her father, who died in September, calling them fabrications".Redford posted a statement on social media in which she thanked fans for their overwhelming love and support", adding: It's clear that he meant so much to so many, and I know that my family is humbled by the outpouring of stories and tributes from all corners of the globe." Continue reading...