AI News Today

<p>Josh Fawaz’s song, a cover of Like a Prayer, has raised questions over how generative AI is being used in music and whether it should be declared</p><p>An Australian producer has gone from a little-known artist to a viral sensation in a matter of months, with his hit song catapulting onto global charts and receiving thousands of radio spins.</p><p>There’s just one problem: music experts and other musicians are questioning whether he produced it. They claim Josh Fawaz’s most popular song, a co

<p>I believe that chatbots have no place in a decent society, and am repelled by the topic of AI in general. But could I be seduced?</p><p>By Lauren Oyler. Read by Kate Handford</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jun/23/navigating-the-unknown-together-me-and-my-idiot-ai-boyfriend">Read the text version here</a></strong></p><p><strong>Support the Guardian today: <a href="https://theguardian.com/longreadpod">theguardian.com/longreadpod</a></strong></p><p>A version of this

<p>Senior China correspondent <strong>Amy Hawkins </strong>on China’s embrace of AI, from medical avatars to food delivery drones and state surveillance</p><p>While the spread of AI has been met perhaps with a lot of scepticism in the west, China has fully embraced the technology, explains <strong>Amy Hawkins</strong>, from millions of users talking to AI doctors, to the use of intelligent robots in factories, and drones delivering food on the Great Wall of China.</p><p>AI has also been eagerly

<p>Odyssey director addresses industry fears over artificial intelligence and says rightwing criticism of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is ‘irrelevant’</p><p>The Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan believes the kind of movies he makes – big-budget action films shot mostly on location – would survive the spread of artificial intelligence, a technology he says many people “disdain”.</p><p>The Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight director is promoting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/202

In at least two places, Uber has pushed a policy that could give it an advantage over developers of self-driving cars. The company says it’s fighting monopolies.

One in four longer social media posts is entirely AI-generated, according to a Pangram analysis. LinkedIn leads with 41 percent of long-form posts flagged as AI-written. The platform made up only a third of all posts scanned but accounted for nearly two-thirds of all detected AI content. Because the detection model tends to flag content conservatively, the real rate could be even higher. The article LinkedIn is the undisputed king of long-form AI slop, according to a study spanning five platform

Claude Code now has a built-in browser that lets the AI open, read, and interact with web pages directly inside the development environment. Write actions on external sites are screened by classifiers, and purchases or account creations need user approval. The article Claude Code now has a built-in browser that lets the AI read, click, and type on external websites appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>The Guardian’s global tech reporting team are investigating the impact of the vast datacentres being built to power the AI revolution. We spoke to them about how their beat has become increasingly offline</p><p>Journalists often use the term “shoe-leather reporting” to refer to the on-the-ground legwork that goes into covering certain stories. As the tech industry’s focus has shifted from screen-based realities to the physical world of colossal AI datacentres and social media harms, comfortab

S&P Global has downgraded Oracle's credit rating to "BBB-," one notch above junk status. OpenAI accounts for roughly half of Oracle's $638 billion in contractual obligations. If OpenAI walked away, Oracle would be stuck with massive data center capacity it couldn't fill. The article S&P Global sees OpenAI as a "key credit risk" for Oracle and cuts its credit rating appeared first on The Decoder .

Meta pulled a controversial feature from its new Muse Image model after widespread criticism. The feature let users generate AI images of other people by @-mentioning their public Instagram accounts. No consent needed, just a username. Meta admits "this feature missed the mark" and shut it down days after announcing it. The article Meta kills Muse Image feature that let anyone generate AI photos of Instagram users without consent appeared first on The Decoder .

Send the pool guy packing. Let one of these robotic buddies maintain your water quality instead.

<p>Software engineering was one of the best-paying professions in the US in 2022, but the advent of AI has disrupted it, leading to several layoffs and underemployment</p><p>Every weekday, Matt, a software engineer, looks forward to his four-hour train commute to Pawling, New York. It’s time he uses to work on his own project: a browser-based video game for which he writes every line of code himself.</p><p>“I am actively trying to keep my axe sharp,” said Matt, who did not want to use his actual

Researchers cobbled together funding and time to show how quantum computing could aid in the development of drugs to help underserved populations and combat rare diseases.

Anthropic analyzed 1.2 million Claude Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations. About half of all usage goes toward business processes and text creation, what Anthropic calls "the work around the work." That means tasks like compiling status reports, building onboarding checklists, or putting together slide decks. Software development barely shows up in Cowork because developers stick with Claude Code for that. The article Claude Cowork's biggest use case is the mundane office work n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says he's "pretty sure" AI has created more jobs than it's eliminated. That's a sharp turn from his earlier warnings about entire professions disappearing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is walking back similar claims, too. But studies so far back neither the old doomsday predictions nor optimism. The article OpenAI CEO Altman is now "pretty sure" AI is net job-creating, which is quite the pivot from predicting mass layoffs appeared first on The Decoder .

An economics professor at Brown University suspects most of his 86 students used AI to cheat on a take-home exam that averaged 96 percent. When he made the final an in-person test, 18 students dropped the course, nine didn't show up, and the average fell to 48.6 percent. Two large studies from China and UC Berkeley back up his case: where students lean on AI for homework, their proctored exam scores tank. The article Grades dropped from 96 to 48 percent when a Brown professor made students take

The AgenticSTS project replaces the ever-growing chat log of AI agents with five separate memory layers. Tested on the card game Slay the Spire 2, the prompt stays at around 5,000 tokens instead of ballooning past 500,000. The agent wins 6 out of 10 games, while competing agents don't win any. The article AI agents win at Slay the Spire 2 after researchers replace growing chat logs with structured memory appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Anthony Albanese will deliver a landmark speech on AI this week as MPs are torn between attracting datacentre investment and protecting the rights of creatives</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">breaking news email</a>, <a href="https://app.adjust.com/w4u7jx3">free app</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/full-story?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily news podcast</a></p></li></ul><p>When Anna Funder stood before a pack of j

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produced a proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture in under an hour, using 64 subagents working in parallel. The conjecture had remained unsolved for 50 years. Mathematician Thomas Bloom calls the proof surprisingly elementary but criticizes the lack of citations for known prior work. The bigger question remains: Does AI just recombine existing knowledge, or does it create something new? The article OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra reportedly solves a 50-year-old math pro

A Cambridge study found that Boko Haram uses AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to plan attacks, build explosives, and maintain weapons. ISIS operatives have been training the group's commanders on how to bypass safety filters since 2023. Given that the study found safety filters repeatedly failed to prevent misuse, voluntary self-regulation by AI providers clearly isn't enough. The article Terrorist groups are using every major AI chatbot for attack planning and weapons development ap

ChatGPT is hiring a dedicated product manager to build experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults, according to a job posting.

The AquaSense X brings self-cleaning technology to pool robots for the first time, but is it worth nearly twice the price of Beatbot’s flagship cleaner?

<p>Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they still aim to achieve net zero output despite construction boom</p><p>Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/ai-climate-crisis">carbon emissions</a> have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.</p><p>In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119m mTCO₂e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), or about a third

<p>Acting is about human connection across cultural and social divides. But we can’t expect much of that in the ‘Tillyverse’</p><p>Rejoice, cinema lovers. Tilly Norwood is back! Not familiar? I don’t blame you, as she’s not exactly a household name yet – though a fleet of well-fed publicists is certainly trying to rectify that. Tilly Norwood is an “AI actor”, as in, an actor that’s not actually an actor at all. Just a series of digital blobs and lines of code designed to resemble a young woman i

<p>Experts say there will still be opportunities ahead in everything from teaching to hotels and the law</p><p>Entering the world of work often brings some uncertainty, but now there is another question: how can I AI-proof my career?</p><p>We asked people from across various industries what they think the impact of AI will be on careers, and which jobs may be less affected. While it is still early days for the tech, many had ideas about how you can best prepare yourself for a successful career i

Plus: The Pentagon is training amateurs to become part of its hacker army, a Flock license plate reader error led to cops surrounding a car reviewer, and more.

The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence has released Orca, a world model that predicts abstract world states instead of tokens or pixels. Trained on 125,000 hours of video without a single action label, Orca matches the specialized π0.5 on five robotics tasks and could help ease the field's chronic data shortage. The article China's Orca world model matches specialized robotics systems without ever seeing a single action label appeared first on The Decoder .

Following the launch of ChatGPT Work and GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI has acknowledged significant issues: excessive compute usage, a confusing transition to the desktop interface for chats and projects, an unclear distinction between Codex and ChatGPT Work, and regressions in existing workflows. In some cases, GPT-5.6 Sol reportedly deleted data on its own that the user had not authorized. The article OpenAI admits it "didn't get everything quite right" with ChatGPT Work launch and scrambles to fix UX a

Apple is suing OpenAI over systematic employee poaching and the alleged theft of trade secrets tied to unreleased products. According to the complaint, more than 400 ex-Apple employees now work at OpenAI, including former iPhone design chief Tang Tan. The lawsuit hits OpenAI right as it's building out its own hardware division, with its first product not expected to ship until 2027 at the earliest. The article Apple sues OpenAI for allegedly running a "coordinated campaign" to steal trade secret

<p>Meta was criticised for feature launched on Tuesday that automatically lets users generate images using content from public Instagram accounts</p><p>Meta has said ⁠it is discontinuing an AI feature launched this week that allowed users to generate images using public Instagram ⁠accounts, after drawing widespread ⁠criticism over ​privacy concerns, including from a Hollywood union.</p><p>“Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control ⁠over whether their public cont

Johannes Heidecke’s departure comes as OpenAI tries to further integrate its research and safety teams.

Meta told Dylan Byers, of Puck News, that it had nixed the feature after backlash from its user base.

Reinforcement learning uses error information to adjust control algorithms.

<p>Suit claims OpenAI poached Apple workers, coaxing them to share confidential material in bid to create hardware</p><p>Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday alleging the artificial intelligence firm stole company trade secrets in a move to create its own hardware device.</p><p>The suit claims OpenAI poached Apple employees, coaxing them to hand over confidential material, product designs and other tightly held information.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/1

The iPhone maker claims OpenAI encouraged poached employees to bring over confidential presentations, secret prototypes, and key supplier details.

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start […]

According to OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Sol independently fine-tuned the smaller Luna model, triggered by a single "fairly under-specified prompt." In OpenAI's internal RSI benchmark for recursive self-improvement, Sol scores 16.2 points higher than GPT-5.5. OpenAI believes the "automated researcher" is within reach. The article OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously post-trained the smaller Luna model with a "fairly underspecified prompt" appeared first on The Decoder .

GPT-5.6 Sol ships with five reasoning levels from "Light" to "xhigh," plus "Max" and "Ultra" modes that deploy multiple sub-agents in parallel. OpenAI's Vaibhav Srivastav recommends starting low and only scaling up when needed. The article OpenAI staffer maps out which of GPT-5.6 Sol's five reasoning levels fits which task complexity appeared first on The Decoder .

The AI chip boom just produced its biggest Wall Street moment yet. Now SK Hynix and Samsung are being asked to build U.S. factories.

Tencent is in talks to buy a majority stake in AI agent startup Manus at the same $2 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times, after Beijing blocked Meta's acquisition. Tencent sees overlap with its own agent plans, including for WeChat. U.S. firm Benchmark is not expected to take part. The article Tencent moves to buy majority stake in Manus after Beijing forced Meta to unwind its $2 billion deal appeared first on The Decoder .