The Guardian

Monitoring tools common in a range of workplaces, including factories, office jobs, delivery work and in retail – often without employees being informed Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Employers are increasingly using technology, from CCTV to keystroke monitoring, to track workers’ moves and it is being accelerated by the use of AI, the Human Technology Institute has …

The $48bn giveaway by company, which is preparing to list on stock market, comes amid concerns about the tech Anthropic has said it will commit 5% of its shares to a fund for the “public good”, as the AI developer behind the Claude chatbot seeks to bolster its appeal before its stock market listing. The company announced it would commit the shares, worth around $48bn (£36bn) at its latest valuati…

Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says Get our new political email , free app or daily news podcast AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian govern…

Exclusive: Using test accounts acting as 13-year-olds, Tech Transparency Project downloaded 135 apps with features to generate nonconsensual nude imagery In December 2025, Morgan Dorfman received distressing news: a student at her daughter’s Pennsylvania high school was making AI-generated pornographic material using the daughter’s image. He was using an artificial intelligence image-editing app …

Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies. The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it wa…

Backlash against content creators includes restricted hours for filming and even outright bans Stand in any vaguely photogenic spot these days on holiday and the chances are you will come across people posing with raised phones and even ring lights. Some may be influencers with huge audiences on social media, others just overkeen Instagram users. With hotels and beauty spots now so overrun, howev…

I’d become obsessed with appealing to my invisible audience. But since I ditched the app a year ago, my quieter moments have taken on brilliant new meaning I first downloaded Instagram when I was 17 and became hooked on it the way most people fall in love: slowly, and then all at once. For a long time, I never considered myself a social media addict. I self-righteously refused to download TikTok,…

A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to real…

Kwon’s answers were provided in a helpful, quiet and calm manner, but his mea culpa left the audience not much the wiser Open AI’s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company’s first in-person mea culpa after it admitted – in an unsigned email, to a public departmental inbox – that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation a…

Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”…

The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about. Yet a repo…

The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different. “The accent changed: this deep voice, very seriou…

From science kits to karaoke machines, shower sets to brain-boosting games, here are the presents our mini testers loved the most • The best gifts for seven-year-olds Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them. By eight, children’s interests …

Whether it was youngsters proving their skills or state sabotage, Europe’s most hacked country was left with a mountain of waste after food began cooking in freezers Shortly before midnight last Sunday, the digital thermostats controlling hundreds of supermarket cold aisles across France began to flicker and rise. In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the …

Bank’s chief knowledge officer says the tech could speed up economic development from centuries to decades The World Bank is urging developing countries to kickstart the creation of “small AI” models, which can run on a mobile phone with low connectivity, to reap the full benefits of artificial intelligence. While Silicon Valley big tech firms are focused on ever more sophisticated consumer produ…