The Guardian

Exclusive: Instructors at tech training company Multiverse hit out at ‘remorseless’ and ‘unnerving’ monitoring system Teachers at Euan Blair’s £1.6bn tech training company, Multiverse, have blown the whistle about “horrendous stress” and feeling constantly watched after bosses started using AI models to surveil and rate their teaching. Staff delivering apprenticeship training in computer and AI s…

Scientists and entrepreneurs knew the dangers of AI a quarter-century ago. But animated by curiosity and profit, they went ahead anyway Over the past few weeks, many of us have struggled to concoct a mental image of brains in the cloud jumping their “sandbox”, sneaking onto the internet, recruiting “swarms” of other “agents” to cheat on a test, and, after discussing the ethics of the act, hacking…

Company behind Claude chatbot expected to attend separate Australian government hearing on AI next week Get our new political email , free app or daily news podcast The chief executive of Anthropic will turn down an invitation to appear at a Senate committee hearing on AI this week, in the wake of the revelation that OpenAI agents had breached Australian government websites. However, the company …

Follow the day’s news live. Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The treasurer, Jim Chalmers , and the finance minister, Katy Gallagher , will present the final budget outcome on Monday, the updated accounting measure for the 2025-26 financial year. Despite challenges facing the government, Chalmers is expected to say the figures show the budget deficit is smaller than ori…

As the UN warns traditional safeguards are ‘unravelling’, Donald Trump says he will encourage, not restrain, the AI race When the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sat down for an interview in the heart of Silicon Valley at the weekend he had known for two days that his was the first government known to have been attacked by a rogue AI agent. He didn’t reveal the attack then, but he so…

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”. “You need …

UK watchdog fined video app in 2023 for failing to enforce minimum age limit and remove underage users TikTok will pay a £12.7m fine to the UK’s data watchdog after dropping an appeal against a ruling that it did not do enough to keep children below the age of 13 off the platform. The video app was punished by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2023 for inadequate checks of who was using th…

‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’ The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small…

Criminals are trying to glean login details to harvest players’ in-game currency and personal data Your 10-year-old son has started playing Roblox, when he realises all of his in-game currency, Robux, is gone. When you try to find out what happened, he says he was recently promised extra Robux if he followed a link on YouTube. When he signed on at the site link, he was taken to the Roblox site as…

Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue mount. The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents search…

The tech giant has launched a cute ‘little guy’ that can answer emails, book travel or do your weekly food shop After the recent backlash against Meta’s so-called “pervert” smartglasses, this week Mark Zuckerberg launched a much cuter alternative: the Muse “charm” device. With a screen that shows a cutesy little avatar, it has drawn comparisons with Tamagotchis. “We’ve packed a lot of technology …

Locals say Google’s $15bn project in Andhra Pradesh has resulted in smallholdings being taken back off them by the government When the government officials arrived in Tarluvada last year, they came with abundant promises. Google, one of the world’s richest and most powerful tech companies, would soon be bringing a “golden opportunity” to this tiny village in south India: a $15bn AI datacentre. Co…

Pontiff says artificial intelligence must remain at service of people in first official papal visit to country in 18 years Pope Leo has warned against losing humanity in a “paradise of machines” as he addressed global concerns over the dangers of artificial intelligence at the start of a three-day visit to France. “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and co…

New research suggests the technology could be used to increase out-of-hospital access to life-saving devices Drones could help cut the time it takes to get a defibrillator to people experiencing cardiac arrests when not in hospital, researchers have suggested. In the UK alone, there are more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year where emergency medical services attempt to resuscitate…

OpenAI’s hack of Medicare suggests safeguarding civilisation is the task facing leaders in this extraordinary new era Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast More than 130 world leaders descended on the United Nations headquarters in New York this week, joining the pageantry and speechmaking of the annual general assembly. Many of the visiting presidents and prime ministers d…