AI News Today

<p>Scottish government to consider SNP national council motion for moratorium on all new datacentres</p><p>The Scottish government is about to consider a sweeping moratorium on building new datacentres, putting a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy at risk.</p><p>Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. That motion has been sent to the Scottish government to consider.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news

"The reality is, when you're optimizing for production, you start looking at a price/performance," Guillermo Rauch tells TechCrunch.

The update is part of Apple's broader effort to make Siri feel more natural and personal, as it rebuilds the assistant around generative AI.

Cloudflare is giving all customers granular AI bot controls. Site owners can now manage Search, Training, and Agent bots separately instead of blocking them all at once. Starting September 15, 2026, Training and Agent bots will be blocked by default on ad-supported pages. The article Cloudflare replaces its blanket AI bot block with granular controls for search, training, and agent crawlers appeared first on The Decoder .

Zhipu AI is bringing GLM-5.2 to its ZCode development environment, pitching the model's long-context capabilities for complex coding tasks. New customers get a free five-day trial with up to 5 million tokens per day, and subscribers receive about 1.5 times more token quota through July 2026. The article Zhipu AI launches ZCode to challenge Claude Code and OpenAI Codex at a fraction of the cost appeared first on The Decoder .

OpenAI's GPT-4 led the Epoch Capabilities Index for about a year, far longer than any model since. Since Claude 3 Opus took the top spot in February 2024, the lead has changed hands 17 times, with a median stay of just seven weeks. Competition is fiercer now, but the capability gains between models are shrinking. The article GPT-4's dominance lasted a year while today's top models barely survive seven weeks at the top appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Thousands of gaming jobs will be shed over the coming fiscal year as Microsoft continues to invest heavily in AI</p><p>Microsoft said on Monday it was eliminating about 4,800 jobs – roughly 2% of its global workforce – in a cost-cutting move that will deliver a sweeping restructuring of its struggling Xbox gaming division.</p><p>The cuts include the deepest overhaul in Xbox’s history, with approximately 3,200 gaming jobs to be shed over the coming fiscal year, four game studios being spun off

Anthropic accused of spying on users; engineer says “experiment” is over.

Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on Monday — the latest in a series of layoffs that’s stoking fears of AI replacing jobs. The layoffs will hit Xbox and commercial sales the hardest.

<p>Jodie Heenan says her award-winning short film Guardians of the Burrow ‘looks and feels’ real </p><p>Scene: a dimly lit underground burrow. A giant Amazonian tarantula and a tiny dotted humming frog share the space, an unlikely duo captured in extraordinary detail.</p><p>Except, they haven’t been. Guardians of the Burrow, a short “wildlife documentary” by the Australian digital content designer Jodie Heenan, is entirely AI generated. At the weekend it won a prize in the Omni international AI

FCA official makes case for greater powers for watchdog as millions use technology for personal finance decisions.

Nvidia's next AI server rack, Kyber NVL144, has been delayed more than a year to 2028 because of circuit board manufacturing problems, according to analyst firm SemiAnalysis. Asian suppliers lost up to double-digit percentages in market value. The more powerful Rubin Ultra variant has also been canceled. The setbacks could give AMD and Google an opening to compete. The article Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 reportedly pushed back more than a year, Asian suppliers drop appeared first on The Decoder .

ByteDance and Alibaba are shutting down the features that let users build and chat with custom AI companions, responding to new regulations from Beijing. The article China forces its biggest AI platforms to shut down humanlike chatbot personas appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>These systems will soon be able to track our public and private lives. But we can make the policy choices to reject it</p><p>In the near future, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai">AI</a>-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong – shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it – the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communi

Amazon Web Services is shutting down its crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk to new customers starting July 30, 2026. The article Amazon sunsets Mechanical Turk, the original "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>FCA’s review into how tech will reshape financial services warns about amplified risks of cyber-crime and fraud</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2026/jul/06/sky-takeover-itv-broadcasting-media-deal-business-live-news">Business live – latest updates</a></p></li></ul><p>Ministers have been urged to toughen the City regulator’s powers to protect consumers against the potential risks of AI, according to a landmark review.</p><p>The Mills review by the Financial Con

<p>Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion</p><p>AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.</p><p>As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases – some leaning distinc

An AI companion sounds dystopian, but it has become a common thread in the wider conversation about the perils of generative AI. What it refers to is essentially a conversational agent built to sustain an ongoing, personal relationship with a user, with the memory and steady persona that keep it consistent from one session to […] The post China’s AI companion rules: what Beijing is really going after appeared first on AI News .

Security firm Sysdig describes an extortion attack where a language model broke in on its own, stole credentials, and destroyed databases. No human appeared to be at the controls. The article JADEPUFFER is the first agentic ransomware operation and it exposes old security sins at machine speed appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Suspicions grow in Lanarkshire that local people have been misled on supposed benefits of the huge development</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/05/lanarkshire-scotland-ai-datacentre-project-renewable-energy">Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise</a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/britain-ai-growth-zones-explainer">What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans

<p>Exclusive: Government and developers privately acknowledged Lanarkshire datacentre site had power provision ‘issue’</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/05/scotland-lanarkshire-village-ai-datacentre">‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre</a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/britain-ai-growth-zones-explainer">What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasib

<p>Lanarkshire datacentre run by renewables and creating thousands of jobs not achievable by 2030, Guardian investigation finds</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/05/lanarkshire-scotland-ai-datacentre-project-renewable-energy">Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise</a></p></li></ul><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/05/scotland-lanarkshire-village-ai-datacentre">‘It’s smoke and mirr

<p>US companies hoping to make fortunes from AI want the creative product of our country to be available to them for free, or for peanuts. Words fail me</p><p>Last week I went to Canberra with a group of other people who live by selling our creative work. We make the books, songs, artwork, First Nations artworks, films, music and TV shows that delight and entertain us, reveal us to ourselves as humans, and connect us as Australians.</p><p>The works we make are our property. They are ours to sell

<p>Race to develop ‘embodied AI’ focuses on creating dextrous hands to transform humanoid robots from gimmicks into useful products</p><p>Human hands – nimble, nerve-filled appendages that are the most flexible part of the human skeleton – are exceptionally complex. Many tasks that most people can do largely without thinking, from tying a pair of shoelaces to buttoning up a shirt, in fact require a complex set of neurological instructions and precise choreography. In thousands of years of human

<p>Exclusive: Foreign secretary warns of combined risks of AI, climate crisis, irregular migration and foreign interference</p><p>Artificial intelligence poses a “Hiroshima”-style risk to humanity if governments do not agree to curb how it is developed, the foreign secretary has warned.</p><p>Yvette Cooper urged countries, including the US and China, to agree international rules for AI, telling the Guardian she believes the issue will dominate foreign policy over the next two years.</p> <a href=

A Google Deepmind developer ported the 2003 real-time strategy game "Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour" to iPhone and iPad using Anthropic's Claude Code. The first build took 40 minutes. The full source code is on GitHub. The article Claude Code and Fable 5 ported the 2003 PC game Command & Conquer to native iOS in "a few hours" appeared first on The Decoder .

"Group project, but make it 1776." That's how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google's collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to […]

<p>The more I learn about celebrities and their odd passions, the more encouraged I am. So much for AI drowning us in a flood of bland ‘tasteslop’</p><p>The internet, as we know, is now a depressing hellhole where everything is a terrifying shot of cortisol straight into the eyeballs or AI slop, interspersed with adverts for protein. So may I offer a recommendation for a modest corrective? It’s called <a href="https://www.pi.fyi/">Perfectly Imperfect</a>.</p><p>It is a daily newsletter about stu

Wealthy US families are increasingly sending their kids to AI schools like Alpha School, which combines two hours of AI tutoring with project-based workshops for up to $75,000 a year in tuition. The trend highlights a growing education gap in the AI era, where traditional schools are struggling to adopt the technology, which may do more harm than good if used without the right skills. The article AI private schools sell wealthy US families on personalized learning over traditional education appe

Mistral founder Arthur Mensch warns companies against relying on closed AI models. He claims AI labs are storing more and more customer data and have, in some cases, used it to go after their own customers as competitors. The concern is valid, but Mistral can't really compete with frontier models from OpenAI or Anthropic on performance and is betting heavily on EU sovereignty as its strategic edge. The article Mistral CEO Mensch says proprietary AI models give labs a front-row seat to your busin

Bytedance's AI video tool Seedance is dividing Hollywood. A viral clip featuring AI-generated Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise prompted the Motion Picture Association's first-ever cease-and-desist against an AI company. But behind the scenes, studios are quietly using the tool on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis, says Simpsons animation producer Joel Kuwahara. The article Hollywood wants Seedance banned and reportedly also wants to keep using it appeared first on The Decoder .

AI search agents rarely fail at multi-step research because of the search itself. Their real problem is not asking the user for clarification when queries are ambiguous. A new benchmark called DiscoBench shows that models searching repeatedly instead of asking follow-up questions actually perform worse, at 51.9 percent, than those that just guess. Even the best model only hits 43 percent overall accuracy. When ambiguity is removed from the queries, accuracy jumps by up to 40 points. The article

<p>Update in England expected to reach about 200,000 patients over the next year as part of £10bn package to overhaul NHS systems</p><p>The NHS will begin using AI on its app to direct patients to the appropriate services, it has been announced.</p><p>The tool will be used to triage patients and to ascertain if they should be allocated a GP appointment. Some may be advised to attend a pharmacy or their local A&E department instead, depending on the severity of their condition.</p> <a href="https

<p><strong>Exclusive:</strong> With the technology fast becoming popular in GP surgeries, regulators are monitoring its implementation and potential pitfalls</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>The federal health department has raised conce

The open-source tool pxpipe converts long text prompts for Claude Code into compact PNGs, exploiting the fact that Anthropic charges for images by pixel size, not text content. Developer Steven Chong reports cost savings of 59 to 70 percent, at the price of accuracy and speed. The article Open-source tool pxpipe hides text in PNGs to cut Claude Code and Fable 5 token costs up to 70% appeared first on The Decoder .

As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.

Anthropic developer Thariq Shihipar argues that with Claude's new model, Fable 5, the bottleneck is no longer the model itself but the user's blind spots. He describes techniques like blindspot passes and structured interviews that programmers can use to systematically uncover their unconscious knowledge gaps before handing implementation off to Claude. The article Anthropic developer shares prompting tips for Fable 5 that focus on finding your own blind spots first appeared first on The Decoder

<p>Exclusive: £20bn of ‘potential’ £30bn AI investment touted by UK ministers appears to have been hypothetical</p><p>It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project –<strong> </strong>would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.</p><p>But the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/09/openai-pulls-out-of-landmark-31bn-uk-investment">plans were paused i

Greg Brockman admits ChatGPT's plugins, heavily marketed in 2023, failed "because the models weren't ready." Instead of app extensions, he sees the future in an invisible, context-aware agent. But OpenAI's own Codex is still light-years from that vision. The article OpenAI cofounder envisions "almost no interface" future where nobody learns software anymore appeared first on The Decoder .

A study of more than 26,000 Chinese students found that AI users finished homework faster and scored higher but performed up to 24 percent worse on exams. The full impact on entrance exam results took about two years to show up, meaning short-term studies systematically underestimate the damage. The article A 26,000-student study shows AI's hidden learning cost takes two full years to surface appeared first on The Decoder .