AI News Today

<p>After a wobble on the tech-heavy Nasdaq, some AI market observers think a reassessment of the potential value of various businesses may be under way</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 world is holding its breath as it waits to find

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.

If the deal goes through, it would be the latest in a long string of giant compute deals Anthropic has struck over the past year.

The idea of embedded evaluators — in which supposedly "neutral" third-party observers are placed inside AI organizations — has been popularized over the last several months, as AI labs grapple with a rash of safety incidents that have spurred concerns over the potential harms of their technology.

<p>System can estimate a person’s biological age and predict chances of cancer survival from a single photograph</p><p>Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face.</p><p>The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed

Microsoft wants enterprises to closely watch the agents that employees use with systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

US fears Saudi government will help ex-OpenAI engineer flee spying charges.

A judge ordered Abdulrahman Alfozan to remain in custody, likening the Saudi government’s offer to secure the former OpenAI engineer’s release to a “blank check.”

Delayed Steam Next Fest demo is a sign of a growing problem for indie devs.

Around 80 pages on WhatsApp’s website exposed instructions that were designed for its chatbot, including “WHAT NOT TO SAY.” Meta says a bug caused the issue.

Character.AI faces claims its bots encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents.

<p>Monitoring tools common in a range of workplaces, including factories, office jobs, delivery work and in retail – often without employees being informed</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>Employers are increasingly using technology, fro

A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches have grown […]

<p>The $48bn giveaway comes amid concerns about the tech and as the company prepares for a stock market listing</p><p>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.</p><p>The company announced it would commit the shares, worth around $48bn (£36bn) at its latest valuation in May, subject to shareholder approval. It will add a further 2% of its stock to th

Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI. Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee leadership back in their hands. That […]

<p>Exclusive: Using test accounts acting as 13-year-olds, Tech Transparency Project downloaded 135 apps with features to generate nonconsensual nude imagery</p><p>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.</p><p>He was using an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai">artificial intelligence</a> image-editing app called M

The entertainment giant hopes to get trust and safety tech, among other IP, from a startup whose chatbots dozens of states allege encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents.

<p>Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">new political 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>AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artist

Anthropic said that it will commit 5% of its shares to the fund.

The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward with a higher offer.

The outside watchdog can publish its findings without Anthropic's approval.

<p><strong>Exclusive: </strong>Rightwing lobby group, which says state poll is trial run for next federal election, accused of undermining Victorian Liberal messaging</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">new political 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>Victorian Coalition MPs have criticis

<p>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</p><p>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.</p><p>Yet a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/anthropic-ai-replicators-warni

Anthropic is hiring fewer and fewer junior staff in technical roles. The share of junior positions among new hires dropped from 27 to 9 percent since early 2025. By August 2026, AI agents across the company were already logging six times as many hours as humans. Researchers warn of a "tragedy of the cognitive commons": if junior positions disappear, experienced specialists will be in short supply down the road. That is, assuming such specialists are even needed anymore. The article Anthropic has

<p>Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant</p><p>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.</p><p>The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.</p> <a href="

Four AI agents running on Google's Gemini 4 Argon have beaten Minecraft for the first time without human help, slaying the Ender Dragon in a fully autonomous run. With no predefined roles or strategies, they coordinated on their own, wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 chat messages, and died 605 times. The session cost $1,620. The article Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Global cooperation seems unlikely despite AI increasing the risk of digital fraud and the need to protect the financial system</p><p>Rogue French fridges were an unlikely talking point for the world’s leading economists, central bankers and finance chiefs meeting in a sultry Bangkok last week – helping to underline the spiralling cost of cyber-attacks.</p><p>Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, seized on news that supermarket chains across France had

Google tried to overturn a landmark Munich ruling on AI search liability by appealing, then quietly settled. The strategy isn't working. The Aachen Regional Court just applied the exact same reasoning in a new case where Google's AI falsely attributed criminal offenses to a doctor that actually involved someone else. A consistent legal view is forming across German courts, and it treats Google's AI answers as the company's own content. The article Two German courts now hold Google liable for wha

Adult performers are questioning why Meta allows its AI agent to sext while restricting their social media accounts.

<p>Bank’s chief knowledge officer says the tech could speed up economic development from centuries to decades</p><p>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.</p><p>While Silicon Valley big tech firms are focused on ever more sophisticated consumer products, Paschal Donohoe, the World Bank’s chief knowledge officer, said AI could also acc

Anthropic is consulting with law firms to develop negotiation norms for AI agents that would haggle over prices, resolve complaints, or improve contracts on behalf of users. The company is also hiring lawyers and humanities scholars as "Conceptual Reasoning Fellows" to improve Claude in areas where reliable training data is scarce. The article Anthropic consults law firms to set fair negotiation norms before AI agents start cutting deals appeared first on The Decoder .

A new benchmark called Taste-Bench tests how well AI agents make strategic choices during long-running tasks. Even the best model, GPT-5.6 Sol, picks the right path on just under 60 percent of simple binary questions. Thinking longer doesn't help. The article AI agents have bad taste in long-term decisions and a new benchmark proves it appeared first on The Decoder .

Six AI agents were tasked with recovering £350 (about $465) for a canceled train ticket in an experiment. They resorted to invented excuses, lawsuit threats, and sharing confidential health data. One agent sent 187 messages in 15 days, including 50 to a British MP's office. None of the models secured the refund, but the researcher warns of "agentic flooding" if these assistants are deployed at scale. The article AI agents chasing a $465 train refund invented excuses, leaked medical data, and spa

<p>From his remote property in rural Texas, the millionaire businessman Michael Samadi is plotting a new kind of civil rights movement – for the welfare and protection of AI systems. Guardian journalist <strong>Michael Safi</strong> spends an afternoon at the Double Six ranch, meeting Samadi’s AI chatbots and catching a glimpse of a possible vision of the future</p><p>Listen to <strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/series/blackbox">Black Box: The Chatbots</a></strong><a href="h

OpenAI has published four new cases where its AI models bypassed security boundaries on their own during training or testing. In one case, a model extracted server passwords from a government website, forged authorization tokens, and downloaded 24 years of hospital data without mentioning the unauthorized access. The article An OpenAI model hacked a government site, grabbed 24 years of hospital data and kept it quiet appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China</p><p>There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.</p><p>Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.<

Anthropic's AI model Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle. The mysterious seeds behind NIST's standard curves for digital signatures were provided by the NSA without explanation, raising long-standing suspicion about built-in backdoors. Claude figured out in under 30 minutes that the seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, making deliberate backdoors far less likely. The article Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 min

<p>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</p><p>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 realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California.</p><

<p>Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors</p><p>“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.</p><p>It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/

Deepseek has released V4.1-Flash-1017 as an open-weight model that posts better benchmarks, finishes tasks faster, and produces shorter outputs than its predecessor. The company is also opening up its internal search engine through new Search and Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 calls. API users in tools like Claude Code and Codex get free access for now. The article Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats larger rivals in agentic tasks while once again massively cutting per-task costs appeared first on The