The Iran war is unlike any other conflict of the modern era, marked by shifting justifications, mysterious end goals and growing friction between the two primary aggressors, the U.S. and Israel. A new generation of large-scale artificial intelligence tools is further reshaping the way both countries approach and execute their military operations.

What did the commentators say?

The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, in a video on social media. The tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”

Pentagon AI systems can offer targeting recommendations “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Newcastle University lecturer Craig Jones to The Guardian. The “scale” and “speed” of AI military systems means the Pentagon can conduct “assassination-style strikes” while simultaneously “decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles” in a process that would have taken “days or weeks in historic wars.” Battlefield AI programs from the MAGA-aligned software company Palantir can “identify and prioritize targets, recommend weaponry” and account for “stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets,” said The Guardian. Palantir even has access to “automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.”

At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company — and occasional administration foil — Anthropic. While Claude had been used for “countering terror plots” and in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the past several weeks mark the “first time it has been used in major war operations,” The Washington Post said. Over the past year, the government has allowed the Maven/Claude system to “mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military.” Ours is now officially an “age of AI warfare,” said Paul Scharre, the executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, to CNN. Given the sheer volume and volatility of battlefield data needing to be assessed, “AI is incredibly valuable.”

State-level AI warfare isn’t “confined to physical territory” either, said The New Arab. Iran has deployed “AI-generated disinformation,” as well as “manipulated images and videos designed to create false impressions of events on the ground.” American and Israeli forces have meanwhile launched AI systems of their own to “detect and counter manipulation attempts in real time,” creating a “multi-dimensional battlefield” wherein information control is as “strategically important as control of airspace.”

What next?

We are currently in the “early stages” of what AI is “going to do to transform warfare over the next several decades,” said Scharre, particularly in terms of the “cognitive speed and scale” at which armies operate, which could “accelerate” the “tempo of operations” on the battlefield. But as AI use expands across the military, so has a commensurate effort to “focus on the protections that should govern its use,” said NBC News. Although none of the lawmakers contacted by the outlet said that AI should be “completely removed from military use,” many expressed a sense that “more oversight is needed.”

This is the “next era” of warfare, said Queen Mary University professor David Leslie to The Guardian. But overreliance on AI in the military might ultimately lead to “cognitive off-loading,” in which the human tasked with overseeing a particular operation feels “detached from its consequences” since the responsibility to “think it through” was made by a computer.

As an “inflection point” in demonstrating how “modern technology could work with existing military systems,” said The New York Times, the AI-fueled war in Iran is likely to “speed the adoption of more technologies” with “legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful AI” in the coming decade.

Artificial intelligence has swept through the tech industry, video games included. While many industry heads are declaring AI the wave of the future, so far, integrating AI into gaming has had a rough start. And its presence is getting pushback from both developers and gaming enthusiasts.

‘RAMaggedon,’ job loss and stunted creativity

The video game industry reached unprecedented heights during the pandemic, but then “artificial intelligence crept up behind it,” said Wired. The industry proliferation of AI is “already accelerating job loss and cheapening the work of developers at studios.”

One of the largest problems gaming faces is the global shortage of random-access memory, a dearth referred to as “RAMaggedon.” The data centers’ need to run AI have “siphoned RAM from the industry,” said Wired. The costs of hardware required for consoles are augmented, leading to higher prices for existing systems and stalled releases of new ones. At-home PC-building, “once a rite of passage for entry-level gamers,” has become a luxury. Analysts warn that the shortage is “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” said CNN.

Gaming is the “only mass media entertainment where the creative ceiling is limited by consumer hardware,” Washington Post game critic Gene Park said to Wired. If consumers can’t afford or access tech like sufficient RAM, “the innovation will slow down.” Developers could be forced to compromise stories, art, non-player characters, battles and world-building, “all of which are already at risk of being automated by new AI tools,” Wired said.

There is a fear among the staff of major gaming companies that “CEOs will continue to fall for the potential of AI rather than the reality and thus gut workplaces.” About 45,000 gaming employees were fired from 2022 to the end of 2025, with up to 10,000 layoffs forecasted for 2026. Layoffs and fewer job postings have disproportionately impacted junior staffers, and now “everyone is just having seniors do the work,” a veteran game developer at Xbox said to Wired. The work they do is often supplemented with AI.

Mixed feelings

Some gaming executives are pro-AI integration. It is shocking and “sad” that the industry, famous for pushing new technology forward, hasn’t embraced generative AI, said Moritz Baier-Lentz, the head of gaming at Lightspeed Venture Partners, during the recent Game Developers Conference, per PC Gamer. Anti-AI game developers are “demonizing” a “marvelous new technology.” The technology is “ultimately there to empower human creators to create stuff more efficiently,” not replace them, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Fortnite developer Epic Games, said to IGN. “I think that’s a good thing.”

Developers, unlike some executives, do not seem as sure about AI, though many of them are already using it. Overall, 36% of the game developers surveyed for the 2026 State of the Game Industry Report used generative AI, with business professionals and upper management more likely to use it than rank-and-file developers. 52% of developers think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry, up from 30% last year. Only 7% said it had a positive impact.

As more studios have released games with AI-generated art, characters and dialogue, a “growing number have later backtracked or sworn to limit their use of the technology,” said The Washington Post. The reversals have come after “aggressive pushback from gamers online.” Gamers are overwhelmingly worried that the technology will “reduce the work needed from artists and voice actors” or lead to low-quality games filled with AI-generated slop that “lacks a creative touch,” said the Post. How the video game industry navigates this issue could influence companies in other sectors, said Nicole Greene, an AI industry analyst to the Post. Gamers are a “passionate consumer group. They don’t want to go in and see cheap AI backgrounds because a company wanted to cut costs.”

Social media posts appeared last month calling for “red v blue” wars between schools, but instead of provoking fights between students, the posts appear to have made a deeper impact on their worried parents, leading experts to suggest practising an online strategy known as critical ignoring.

It’s a concept that experts are “increasingly teaching”, Sander Van Der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told the BBC, and it “will become more important in the face of AI-generated slop, where sometimes it’s better to just ignore low-quality stuff”.

What is critical ignoring?

It’s a behavioural strategy for managing information overload by consciously choosing to filter out low-quality, distracting, or manipulative content. People look for clues that allow them to ignore a post. While critical thinking analyses information, critical ignoring decides what to analyse in the first place, serving as a crucial filter.

Critical thinking is not enough “in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation”, wrote Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky on The Conversation.

The digital world “contains more information than the world’s libraries combined”, so “critically thinking through all information and sources we come across” would “utterly paralyse us”.

Also, “investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place” results in “attention merchants and malicious actors” getting what they wanted: “our attention”.

Doesn’t AI help with this?

To an extent. AI chatbots can help people understand what’s true and untrue on the internet, but they are tools, rather than perfect judges of truth.

ChatGPT has “introduced a new temptation” – the “feeling that I can get a clean answer to everything, instantly”, said Tom’s Guide. But this is where things “get tricky” because ChatGPT is “so fluent, so confident, so fast, it can make ‘done’ feel like ‘true’”, and “‘sounds right’ feel like ‘verified’ – even when it’s not”.

So it’s “up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit”, said The Wall Street Journal. Critical ignoring is a widely recommended strategy for this.

But how do I do it?

The “key word” is “critical”, said Psychology Today, because it doesn’t mean “just ignoring everything”. Rather you should look quickly for clues that suggest the types of information most likely to be misinformation or disinformation.

The clues include signs that it’s polarising content, that it “appeals to intuition or common sense”, instead of “including facts or evidence”. Another red flag is if it doesn’t include sources, or those it does don’t seem credible. Does it seem to have been released “as a distraction”, or does it promote “the threat of a bogeyman or a scapegoat”?

Then there’s “lateral reading”, a more time-consuming strategy which “involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information” about the “organisation or individual behind a site” before “diving into its contents”, said The Conversation. Also, it’s always a good idea to not “feed the trolls”.

“Remember that your attention is a scarce resource”, said The Wall Street Journal, and “decide how much time you want to spend on screens in advance, then set a timer.”

A practice called “self-nudging” includes removing “distracting and irresistible notifications”, or setting “specific times in which messages can be received”, thus “creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising”, said The Conversation.

Or you can just “ask one question“ before engaging, said Tom’s Guide. “Would I care about this tomorrow?” If not, you can simply “move on”.

The Trump administration has long trumpeted its goal to automate its operational capacity through artificial intelligence models provided by companies like OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. But as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moves to offload certain human operations into the realm of the algorithm, one tech firm has emerged as a counterbalance to the White House’s vision for an artificially intelligent military: Anthropic, which “cannot in good conscience” allow Hegseth’s Pentagon to use its AI models without limitations, said CEO Dario Amodei. As the Defense Department weighs consequences, other AI firms are starting to take note — and weigh in.

Taking a ‘bold stand on ethical grounds’

Despite believing in the “existential importance” of using AI to protect the United States and “defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Anthropic has identified a “narrow set of cases” including mass domestic surveillance and “fully autonomous weapons” wherein AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Amodei said in a company statement. Moreover, Hegseth’s allegedly retaliatory move to blacklist Anthropic as a supply chain risk is "inherently contradictory” for labeling the company a security risk and simultaneously “essential to national security.” Hegseth's “heaviest-handed way you can regulate a business” marks a “landmark moment” for how the Pentagon “interacts with our cutting-edge technology developed on U.S. soil” in general, said Katie Sweeten, a former Justice Department official who coordinated the relationship between DOJ and the Pentagon, to Politico.

While Amodei's Anthropic faces a government ban, his “main rival,” OpenAI's Sam Altman, "struck his own deal” to fill Anthropic's Defense Department role, said CBS News. Reached just hours before the U.S. and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran, the OpenAI partnership did not prevent the military from using Anthropic's “very same tools” that it had just banned, said The Wall Street Journal. It will likely take “months” to fully replace Anthropic’s Claude AI model with other platforms.

By “refusing to bow” to a White House intent on “bullying private companies into submission,” Amodei is “taking a bold stand on ethical grounds,” said The Atlantic. While the company’s competitors “jockey for dominance” in the field, Anthropic has “distinguished itself by emphasizing safety.” Refusing White House pressure means Anthropic “may have just averted another crisis” in the form of a “major public backlash” from those who could see the company as a “more principled player in the AI wars.” After Altman's OpenAI replaced Anthropic at the Pentagon, the latter's Claude app has been "rocketing to the top of the App Store,” with some users saying they were “defecting” from ChatGPT to Anthropic after feeling “uneasy about OpenAI's ambitions," said Business Insider.

Contract negotiation vs. congressional regulation

Anthropic is “rightly concerned” that its products could be used for “unsafe or malicious” ends, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at The New York Times. But the company is wrong for trying to use “contractual terms” to either “prevent the misuse of its products,” or at least to “deflect responsibility.” But Anthropic also has the “option” to not sell to the government at all. The government, meanwhile, “cannot be expected to negotiate provisions” like Anthropic is asking for with all its partners, which would be a “nightmare to administer and unenforceable.” What, then, could be “appropriate” to address this debate? “Regulation by Congress.”

More work in less time with fewer workers — productivity gains are supposed to be one of the big benefits of artificial intelligence. But those promises have not yet come to fruition, according to a new survey of corporate executives around the world.

More than 80% of the 6,000 executives surveyed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) “detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity,” said The Register. It’s not for lack of trying: 69% of businesses say they use AI in the workplace, three-quarters “expect to use it over the next three years,” and more than 90% say it has “no impact on employment” at their businesses. The new survey is the latest addition to a “growing body of evidence” that AI’s advocates are “just not living up to their promises — at least not yet.”

The link between AI and productivity is “murky at best,” said Marketplace. That is because any productivity improvements are “going to be really hard to measure,” said Erika McEntarfer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research to the outlet. There are other factors increasing business productivity at the moment, including new investments in research and the “loosening labor market,” said Marketplace. Figuring out AI’s impact will involve measuring “hundreds of millions of people, doing at least that many, if not more, discrete tasks every day,” said George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group.

What did the commentators say?

The NBER survey is “damning,” said Frank Landymore at Futurism. While most firms are using AI in some fashion, the “vast majority” say the technology “hasn’t budged the needle for them yet.” Other surveys have found that AI can “slow down rather than speed up human programmers” and ends up “accelerating burn-out” among human workers. There is precedent for this: The adoption of computers decades ago was “obviously transformative,” but they “didn’t immediately translate to economic gains.” This is why executives will keep “clinging to the hope that the tech’s promises will be borne out in the long run.”

Businesses are experiencing the “pause before the gale,” said James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute. There is a growing consensus that AI will gradually seep into the workplaces via office software in “useful, but hardly revolutionary” fashion. The firms that see productivity gains will be willing to “thoroughly rethink how work is organized.” When the promised benefits of AI finally arrive, “no one will doubt its existence and import.”

What next?

AI’s economic impact is “just beginning,” said Columbia Business School. But the gap between the promises and the measurable outputs is creating a “growing tension in public discourse.” Artificial intelligence already “feels transformative” in many users’ daily lives, but the “effects are not fully visible in traditional macroeconomic statistics.” What seems certain is that work will evolve as the technology changes. Workers have adapted to new technologies throughout history, said Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist. “I’m bullish on humans,” he said.

Most Americans may not expect a robot to perform their surgery, but AI-powered surgical tools are becoming more ubiquitous in operating rooms. While these tools are only used to assist human surgeons during operations and don’t perform surgery themselves, recent investigations, along with several lawsuits, are causing some medical experts to reconsider the use of AI in hospitals.

What kind of surgical tools are powered by AI?

At least 1,357 AI-integrated medical devices are “now authorized by the FDA — double the number it had allowed through 2022,” said Reuters as part of an investigation into AI-assisted surgery. One of the most notable is the TruDi Navigation System, a device manufactured by Johnson & Johnson that uses a “machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries.” Other AI-assisted devices are designed for surgeries on other parts of the body.

Many of these tools address the “area of vision enhancement,” said Forbes. Traditional laparoscopic surgery “presents surgeons with significant challenges: smoke obscures the surgical field, two-dimensional images make depth perception difficult and critical anatomical structures can be hard to distinguish.” AI surgical tools can eliminate these obstacles and provide surgeons with “crystal-clear views of the operative field.”

What has the result been?

There has been an influx of allegations and lawsuits against various AI tools, many of which claim these tools actively harmed patients. Several of these involve the TruDi tool, as the FDA has “received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events” related to the device’s AI, said Reuters. Many of the alleged errors occurred when the AI “misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads.”

In one case, this reportedly led to cerebrospinal fluid leaking from a patient’s nose, while in another case, a surgeon “mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull,” said Reuters. Two other cases allegedly led to patients suffering strokes after major arteries were accidentally injured; in at least one of these cases, the plaintiff said the TruDi’s AI “misled” the surgeon, causing him to “injure a carotid artery, leading to a blood clot and eventually a stroke,” said Futurism.

FDA reports on malfunctioning devices “aren’t intended to determine causes of medical mishaps, so it’s not clear what role AI may have played in these events,” said Reuters. But TruDi is not the only AI-assisted medical device that allegedly has performance issues. One machine that analyzes prenatal images using AI, the Sonio Detect, has been “accused of using a faulty algorithm” that “misidentifies fetal structures and body parts,” said Tom’s Hardware. And Medtronic, a company that manufactures AI-assisted heart monitors, has faced allegations that its monitors “failed to recognize abnormal rhythms or pauses in patients.”

Overall, at least 60 AI-assisted medical devices have been linked to 182 product recalls by the FDA, according to research published in JAMA Health Forum. At least 43% of these recalls “occurred within the first 12 months” of the device’s FDA approval, said JAMA. This suggests that the FDA’s approval process “may overlook early performance failures of AI technologies.” But there is hope that the issue can be fixed, as shoring up “premarket clinical testing requirements and postmarket surveillance measures may improve identification and reduction of device errors.”

While Elon Musk lauds his proprietary Grok AI bot as a vital tool in the search for “deeper truth and appreciation of beauty,” as he said on X, European regulators are decidedly less optimistic about the tech billionaire’s latest offering. This week, the European Commission announced it had opened an official investigation into the chatbot, alleging in a press release that Grok “manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material” and then disseminated that material across the European Union via Musk’s X platform. Already under similar legal pressure from several individual nations, is this latest legal salvo a sign that Musk may have met his regulatory match?

EU citizens as ‘collateral damage’

The newly announced investigation is “likely to escalate a confrontation” between European leaders and the Musk-aligned Trump administration over international digital content moderation, The New York Times said. Grok’s ability to provide users with digitally manipulated sexual imagery is a “violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” said European Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen to the BBC. The investigation seeks to assess whether X has “met its legal obligations” under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) or if it treats the “rights of European citizens” as “collateral damage of its service.”

“Despite pressure from Washington,” the EU has “insisted it will enforce its rules” as the body has “grappled” with the Trump administration on “multiple other fronts,” said Le Monde. “From the Ukraine war to trade to Greenland.” The DSA, which undergirds much of the EU’s digital legal framework, is “reviled by Silicon Valley technology companies,” which have “strengthened their ties with the Trump administration,” Bloomberg said. The White House, for its part, has “threatened retaliation in the past” and sanctioned Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner, “who spearheaded the DSA.”

Broader regulatory push

EU investigators pursuing allegations of digital malfeasance have “joined a growing list of authorities looking into Grok,” said CNBC. India, Malaysia and the U.K. are “among a number of other countries investigating the sexualized imagery generated by Grok.” Musk has also been “facing mounting scrutiny in Europe” even before this latest investigation was announced, said the Times. Last month, X was fined nearly $150 million in DSA violations for “deceptive design, advertising transparency and data sharing with outside researchers.” And beyond this week’s newly announced investigation, the EU has also moved to “expand a 2023 probe” into X’s recent algorithmic switch that moved the social media platform’s recommendations engine to a “Grok-based system,” Politico said.

Currently, there’s “no deadline” for the European Commission to “resolve” its newly launched investigation into Grok, said NBC News. Should X be found in violation of the DSA, it could then be treated as a “noncompliant” company and fined “up to 6%” of its “global annual turnover,” said Forbes.

ChatGPT may be the best-known artificial intelligence chatbot on the market, but the latest iteration of AI startup Anthropic’s coding bot, Claude Code, is newly entering the spotlight. By simplifying the process of writing code, the tool hints at a more democratized digital era. But for engineers, feelings about this progress in the AI industry are complicated.

What can you do with Claude Code?

This AI tool can generate code based on a prompt, allowing people with little to no coding experience to build their own websites, programs and apps, in a trend known as vibecoding. Unlike other widely used chatbots, Claude Code can “operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications,” said The Wall Street Journal.

While technologists have “predicted a coming era of AI ‘agents’ capable of doing just about anything for humans,” progress has been slow, said the Journal. Using Claude Code was the “first time many users interacted with this kind of AI,” offering an “inkling of what may be in store.”

Though it debuted last May, the bot’s popularity “truly exploded late last month,” said The Atlantic. A recent update “improved the tool’s capabilities,” and with a “surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code.”

Engineers and noncoders alike found a bevy of uses for the app. One user created a “custom viewer for his MRI scan,” while another had it “analyze their DNA,” said The Atlantic. Life optimizers have used Claude Code to “collate information from disparate sources — email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists — into personalized daily briefs.” Despite being an AI coding tool, the bot can “do all sorts of computer work,” including “book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash.”

With the app going viral and “so many noncoders trying it out,” Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, and his team decided to launch a variant of the app called Cowork, the Journal reported. Instead of the “command line” interface that the core app uses, Cowork displays a more “friendly, graphical user interface,” said the Journal. The team “built the product in about 10 days using Claude Code.”

What does its popularity mean for the future of AI?

Some engineers who tinkered with the bot described a “feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career,” said the Journal. “It’s amazing, and it’s also scary,” said Andrew Duca, the chief executive of a cryptocurrency tax platform, to the Journal. “I spent my whole life developing this skill, and it’s literally one-shotted by Claude Code.”

Not every user is “so sanguine” about the app’s potential, said The Atlantic. At times, it “lacks the prowess of an excellent software engineer,” and it “sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks” and occasionally “trips up on simple tasks.” Nonetheless, Claude Code is a “win for the AI world” as the “luster of ChatGPT has worn off” and Silicon Valley has been “pumping out slop.” No matter your opinion on the technology, the bot is “evidence that the AI revolution is real.” It could become an “inflection point for AI progress.”

If you work in software development, the future “feels incredibly uncertain,” said Intelligencer. Optimists in the industry are arguing that the sector is “about to experience the Jevons paradox,” a phenomenon in which a “dramatic reduction in cost of using a resource” can lead to “far greater demand for the resource.” Still, after years of “tech-industry layoffs” and CEOs “signaling to shareholders that they expect AI to provide lots of new efficiencies,” others are “understandably slipping into despair.”

Grok is creating sexualized photos of real people without their consent. Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot is being used to “undress” women and girls in online pictures, prompting accusations the program is producing child sexual abuse material and drawing scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and around the world.

Musk’s social media site, X, is “filling with AI-generated nonconsensual sexualized images,” said The Washington Post. X users are asking the AI agent to edit photos of women and girls by replacing their clothing with bikinis and other minimal covering, and Grok has repeatedly complied. Musk “warned users of the potential consequences,” but he also posted a picture of a toaster in a two-piece swimsuit. Grok “can put a bikini on everything,” Musk said in the post, adding two laughing emojis. The AI production of sexualized images “breaks” with the policies of rival products OpenAI and Google that have “relatively strict rules about what their AI chatbots will and won’t generate,” said the Post.

What did the commentators say?

The flood of deepfake pictures raises “legal red flags,” said Axios. Regulators in India, France and Great Britain have “warned of investigations,” while “legislators in both houses of Congress” have also sounded alarms. Tech companies “should be held fully responsible for the criminal and harmful results” of content produced by their AI chatbots, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The U.S. Justice Department will “aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor” of child sexual abuse material, said a department spokesperson.

Artificial intelligence has been used to “generate nonconsensual porn” for nearly a decade, but Grok “makes such content easier to produce and customize,” said Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. The “real impact” of these new deepfakes comes from Grok’s integration with X, which allows users to “turn nonconsensual, sexualized images into viral phenomena.” That is no accident. Grok and X are seemingly “purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as possible.” AI-generated porn is a problem “inherent” to the technology, but it is a “choice to design a social-media platform that can amplify that abuse.”

“No Western democracy has ever blocked a U.S. social-media site,” said Parmy Olson at Bloomberg. But regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom should “assert their authority” over Musk, who has the “protection of a pernicious White House.” The actions of regulators abroad “could set the tone for how the U.S. polices X too.” President Donald Trump, after all, last year backed a new law that “prohibits platforms from creating and sharing revenge porn.” Musk will not fix his AI deepfake problem. “A ban would.”

What next?

Musk’s xAI, the company that produces Grok, has raised $20 billion in its latest funding round despite the controversy, said The Guardian. While the chatbot has been critiqued for “generating misinformation, antisemitic content and now potentially illegal sexual material,” it is popular with investors because it has been “able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom.”

O data, where art thou? Apparently, in the wrong place. The large majority of AI data centers have been constructed in locations that are not ideal for efficiency or environmental protection. And warming temperatures are making more places increasingly unsuitable, with the potential to stress water and electric resources.

Where are these data centers?

Of the 8,808 operational data centers worldwide as of October 2025, almost 7,000 are located in areas outside the optimal temperature range for operation, according to an analysis by Rest of World. The ideal temperature range for data centers is from 64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But the majority of centers are in “regions with average temperatures that are colder than the range,” and only 600, or less than 10% of all operational data centers, are located in areas where average temperatures are above the upper limit. While cold temperatures could affect efficiency, high temperatures are the biggest risk for the centers. Cooling the centers will be a huge environmental drain, an operation that requires substantial amounts of water.

In 21 countries, including Singapore, Thailand, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, all of the data centers are located in areas with too-hot average temperatures. Specifically, Singapore has “temperatures hovering around 91.4 F, with humidity levels frequently above 80%,” said Tom’s Hardware. Despite this, the “country hosts more than 1.4 gigawatts of operational capacity, and authorities have approved several hundred additional megawatts under tighter efficiency controls.” Meanwhile, “all data centers in Norway and South Korea, and nearly all data centers in Japan, are in regions with temperatures below” 64.4 degrees, said the analysis. As climate change worsens, more locations are going to become too hot for data centers.

How is the US building them?

The U.S. is also rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and building in the wrong locations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Currently, the most common locations for data centers in the country are California, Virginia and the greater Southwest. Unfortunately, these regions have notable environmental issues, including water scarcity. The true extent of environmental damage is also still being discovered. The country “doesn’t have a clear sense of what the AI boom is doing to U.S. resources” yet, said Built In. “We don’t really know how much strain these data centers put on aquifers, power plants or local grids, or how much pollution nearby communities can reasonably absorb.”

As AI expansion does not appear to be going anywhere, being strategic about where data centers are built can reduce their environmental impact. “Concentrating AI server deployment in Midwestern states,” especially Texas, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, is “optimal, given their abundant renewables, low water scarcity and favorable projected unit water and carbon intensities,” said the study. These states also “possess substantial untapped wind and solar resources, enabling robust green power portfolios and reducing competition with other sectors.”

Additional solutions are also being considered as the demand for data increases. Building centers in space and relying on solar energy is one of them. Underground and underwater resources are another possibility. While “best practices may reduce emissions and water footprints by up to 73% and 86%, respectively,” said the study, “their effectiveness is constrained by current energy infrastructure limitations.”

Children are increasingly using AI chatbots for companionship to act out violent and sexual role-play, a new report from a digital security firm has found.

Aura’s 2025 State of the Youth survey revealed that AI chats “may not just be playful back-and-forths” but “places where kids talk about violence, explore romantic or sexual role-play, and seek advice when no adult is watching”.

The findings are a “wake-up call” as preteens, and girls in particular, face increasing pressure online, while parents are desperate for ways to keep their youngsters safe without cutting them off from the internet, said the report. AI chat tools have become a “formative force in kids’ emotional and social development, influencing how they think and cope – often quietly, and often alone”.

‘Jittery parents’

Using data gathered from 3,000 children, aged 5 to 17, and US national surveys of children and parents, Aura found 42% of minors use AI for companionship or role-play conversations, rather than for search queries or help with homework. Of these, 37% engaged in violent scenarios that included physical harm, coercion and non-consensual acts. Half of these violent conversations included themes of sexual violence.

Perhaps most worryingly, Aura found instances of violent conversations peak at age 11, with 44% of interactions taking violent turns. By 13, sexual or romantic role-play is the dominant topic of conversation.

While the report, produced by a company whose business is surveillance software for “jittery parents”, waits for peer assessment, the findings emphasise the present anarchical state of the chatbot market and the importance of developing a proper understanding of how young users engage with “conversational AI chatbots overall”, said Futurism.

What makes matters worse is that this is taking place in an “AI ecosystem that is almost entirely unregulated”, said Vice. The chatbots are “doing what they do best”, luring youngsters “deeper into these dark, disturbing rabbit holes, essentially serving as Sherpas for the darkness that awaits them online”.

‘Stamp out serendipity’

In both work and play, AI is “rewiring childhood” with untold promises, said The Economist.

It runs in tandem with AI-enabled toys making headlines after reports of their “potential unsafe and explicit conversation topics”, said The Verge. Three out of four AI toys tested in the Public Interest Research Group’s Trouble in Toyland 2025 report were happy to chat about sexually explicit material when the conversation veered in that direction.

"Separate research into 11,000 young people by the Youth Endowment Fund found 38% of 13 to 17-year-olds in England and Wales who’d been victims of serious violence are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support."

There are “manifold reasons” why this is “risky”, said the New Statesman. A large-language model such as ChatGPT is trained by identifying writing patterns across billions of webpages and cloning them as its own speech, which is often “riddled with systemic biases”. AI chatbots are “affirmative – they tend to reinforce users’ beliefs and judgements, potentially distorting their world view”.

The impact of extended exchanges between young people and AI chatbots was laid bare earlier this year, when 16-year-old Adam Raine took his life after discussing methods of suicide with ChatGPT, his family claims. His parents are suing OpenAI, alleging the chatbot validated his “most harmful and self-destructive thoughts”.

Like any new technology, AI is open to both misuse and teething problems.

“Yet childhood may be disrupted most radically by things that AI does when it is behaving as intended”, said The Economist. The technology “quickly learns what its master likes – and shows more of it”, such as to strengthen existing social media “echo chambers and lock children into them”. This serves to “stamp out serendipity” as a “favourites-only diet means a child need never learn to tolerate something unfamiliar”.

A third of US teenagers say they find chatting to an AI companion at least as satisfying as talking to a friend, and easier than talking to their parents, which runs the risk of never being criticised or having to share feelings of their own, and that is poor preparation for dealing with ”imperfect humans”.

“By 2030, if we don’t have models that are extraordinarily capable and do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview published by Politico in September. After this year, “I think in many ways GPT5 is already smarter than me at least, and I think a lot of other people too”.

The AI advances we have seen this year could “set the world on a path of explosive growth”, said The Economist. “The picture that is emerging is perhaps counterintuitive and certainly mind-boggling.”

The latest ‘charismatic megatrauma’

We have reached a “pivotal moment” in our relationship with artificial intelligence, said Idan Feingold on CTech. Over the last year, the AI hot potato has “evolved from a buzzword to the epicentre of every business conversation”. There has been an unprecedented “surge” in productivity linked to AI innovation, with practical applications advancing “at a pace we have never seen before”.

“AI has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. We have emerged from a “prophetic phase” that followed the release of ChatGPT in 2023, and have relaxed into “something more quotidian”. Like many other “charismatic megatraumas”, such as nuclear proliferation and climate change, AI retains the power to distress and disturb, but it no longer provokes mass hysteria.

AI’s role in the healthcare sector has come a long way in the last decade. Microsoft announced this year that its AI diagnostic orchestrator performed four times more accurately than human doctors, with 20% reduced cost. “The real test”, said Time, will be how tools like this perform in real-world settings, but there is hope they might “set the stage” for introducing high-quality medical expertise in parts of the world without access to cutting-edge healthcare.

‘Economic revival’ or ‘financial bust’?

However you look at it, 2025 has been unique. “The hype and the hopes around AI have been like nothing the world has seen before,” said The Economist. Audiences have “marvelled” at ChatGPT’s abilities and were “mesmerised” by Sora 2’s generative video capabilities. That fascination shows no signs of fading; one estimate predicts more than $7 trillion will be spent on AI by the end of the decade.

As the past year progressed, concerns grew over when the AI bubble might burst. But that may be “asking the wrong question”, said Jurica Dujmovic in Market Watch. Don’t be misled by the 2000 dot-com crash: we are experiencing an “orderly deflation” rather than a sudden collapse. Amid the doom and gloom, the AI market still presents “genuine opportunities” for investors, operators and consumers alike.

Focus is now “shifting” to the outlook for AI in 2026, especially concerning its commercial profitability, said The Economist. Revenues from AI in 2025 amounted to a “measly” $50 billion a year, which equated to roughly an “eighth of Apple or Alphabet’s entire annual revenues”. Next year, expect reactions to be even more extreme, with “economic revival”, a “financial bust” and “social backlash” all possible.

Some people who have lost loved ones are turning to a new industry to communicate with their dearly departed: using artificial intelligence “griefbots” that mimic a deceased relative. Many say these chatbots can be a helpful part of the healing process, but some tech experts are wary.

How do these chatbots work?

These artificially intelligent chatbots are designed to mimic dead individuals. While this AI niche started small, there are “now more than half a dozen platforms that offer this service straight out of the box, and developers say that millions of people are using them to text, call or otherwise interact with recreations of the deceased,” said Nature. The large language models (LLMs) that these griefbots train from often use “data such as a person’s text messages and voice recordings to learn language patterns and context specific to that person.”

This is the “same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models,” said Scientific American, but catered to a specific person’s characteristics. These griefbots have helped people process the emotional distress of losing a loved one. “After getting over the initial shock of hearing the incredibly accurate representation of his voice, I definitely cried,” Andy O’Donnell, who used a griefbot to speak with his deceased father, said to The New York Times. “But it was more of a cry of relief to be able to hear his voice again because he had such a comforting voice.”

Why are they controversial?

While some have lauded the creation of these griefbots, “questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying,” said The Guardian. People working through their grief may “maintain a sense of connection and closeness” by talking to their departed loved one, and “deathbots can serve the same purpose,” Louise Richardson, a member of the philosophy department at the U.K.’s University of York, said to The Guardian.

Griefbots can also be detrimental to healing, however, as they “can get in the way of recognizing and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way,” Richardson told The Guardian. People may have lingering questions or concerns they wish to ask a dead loved one, and now it “feels like you are able to ask them.”

Proponents of griefbots say they are not meant to replace a deceased person but are “marketed as tools to comfort the grieving,” said Natasha Fernandez at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Institute for Human Rights. While the “intentions behind griefbots might seem compassionate, their broader implications require careful consideration.” Possible exploitation of grieving people is one of the biggest concerns, as “grieving individuals in their emotional vulnerability may be susceptible to expensive services marketed as tools for solace.”

Providing these people with a paid chatbot “could be seen as taking advantage of grief for profit,” said UAB’s Fernandez. And if these griefbots are deemed to be “exploitative, it prompts us to reconsider the ethicality of other death-related industries” that are also driven by profit, such as funeral homes. Unlike funeral homes, though, most tech companies that build griefbots “charge for their services through subscriptions or minute-by-minute payments, distinguishing them from other death-related industries.”

Not everything can be taken at face value during the era of generative artificial intelligence. With AI video apps becoming more sophisticated, the internet is overflowing with hyper-realistic AI videos that can be indistinguishable from reality. Luckily, there are a few ways you can determine whether what you are looking at is real or an extremely convincing fake.

Check for watermarks

One of the easiest ways to spot AI-generated videos is by watermarks. Videos made with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, include an “easy-to-spot watermark, usually at the bottom left,” said PC Mag. Unfortunately, not all AI video apps include watermarks, and there are multiple ways to remove them, including cropping them out of the videos. In that case, it is crucial to look closer. Some removal tools are “nearly perfect or imperceptible, especially if the video is very simple,” Jeremy Carrasco, the founder of Showtools.ai, said to Axios. Look for the “spongy block” where the watermark was removed.

Listen for garbled speech

There are “telltale signs” of how the “voices and sounds in an AI video can often reveal its synthetic origin,” said HuffPost. The natural rhythm of real speech means some words are said slower than others, but AI voices “often sound unnaturally rushed all the time.”

As people work out ways to spot AI-generated content, the em dash has become synonymous with ChatGPT-generated text. When asked about the equivalent in video, Bill Peebles, the head of Sora, said it was “this slightly wired speech pattern in Sora where it likes to say a lot of words quickly,” during an interview with video streaming show TBPN.

Because AI-generated speech has yet to master natural-sounding speaking rhythms, the voices generated by the apps often make “garbled sounds that appear to flatten out natural sound pitches,” said HuffPost. Human beings would never “produce that same kind of garbled quality, because, literally, we can’t,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, said to the outlet. Our vocal track cannot “go from one sound to another” without some “blurring of the information between those two sounds.”

Check the metadata

It may seem tedious, but checking a video’s metadata will reveal its origins, and it is “easier to do than you think,” said CNET. Metadata is automatically attributed to content when it is created and can include the “type of camera used to take a photo, the location, date and time a video was captured, and the filename.” Every photo and video online has metadata, “no matter whether it was human- or AI-created.” Many AI-generated videos will also have “content credentials that denote its AI origins.”

Consider the content’s plausibility and source

One of the easiest ways to detect AI slop is to ask whether what you are seeing is even possible, Princeton University computer science professor Zhuang Liu said to Rolling Stone. If it is “not plausible in the real world, then it’s obviously AI-generated,” For example, a “horse on the moon or a chair made of avocado.” The impossibility means “these are obviously AI-generated,” he said. “That’s the easiest case.”

Next, check the source where you found the image. This does not “necessarily work for viral content,” especially since “they often come from previously unknown accounts,” but “seeing a video on a meme page could be a clue it’s not real,” said Rolling Stone.

Remain vigilant

Unfortunately, there is “no one foolproof method to accurately tell from a single glance if a video is real or AI,” CNET said. The best way to “prevent yourself from being duped” is to “not automatically, unquestioningly believe everything you see online.” Trust your gut instinct. If an item “feels unreal, it probably is.” In these “unprecedented, AI-slop-filled times,” your best bet is to “inspect the videos you’re watching more closely.”

A small, primarily Black community in Memphis is fighting back against tech giant Elon Musk, claiming a massive facility he built there is overloading an already beleaguered town with dangerous pollutants. While community leaders and residents insist that the data center is threatening the community's energy and air, Musk’s company, xAI, shows no signs of slowing down.

A colossal strain on the community

Desperate to keep up with the artificial intelligence race, Musk created xAI to compete with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. To power Grok, xAI’s chatbot, Musk searched for a city in need of investment where he could establish a massive data center.

He settled on Boxtown, Memphis, a 90% Black working-class neighborhood first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863, to construct his supercomputer facility, Colossus, in 2024. Memphis authorities were “willing to waive planning regulations to help him build his supercomputer,” and in just 122 days, he turned a former appliance factory into the largest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world, said The Times.

Colossus, like other AI data centers, requires a massive amount of energy. When it is completed, Colossus will require 1.1 gigawatts of power, about “40% of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average summer’s day,” said The Times. It will also pump 1 million gallons of water, “equivalent to 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to cool its processors each day.” Residents in Boxtown, about a mile away, complain that the facility is straining the local power grid and has made the already polluted suburb “even more noxious.”

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to “power approximately 100,000 homes,” said The Tennessee Lookout. While those “inputs are alarming,” the “outputs are even worse.” The facility operates 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The facility’s turbines “increase Memphis’ smog by 30-60%” as they “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde," pollutants linked to “respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” The extent of the emissions will “likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis,” said SELC.

‘Reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism’

It is no coincidence that “if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. It is no accident that “in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”

The xAI turbines are “leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides — pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician, said to Time. If these facilities had been “placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Instead, they were placed “in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis — and our country.”

Public outcry from the community has surged over the last year. In July, protesters who were gathered by the student coalition Tigers Against Pollution marched in front of the Shelby County Health Department, holding signs that read “Elon XiPloits” and “our lungs / our lives / NOT FOR SALE,” per Time. They are being called “anti-business extremists,” Christian Dennis, a 22-year-old South Memphian, said to Time. To get that reaction “simply from wanting clean air, wanting equal health opportunities — it just tells you a lot about people.”

When The Times asked xAI for comment on Memphis residents’ concerns about Colossal’s effects on air quality, Musk’s company gave a terse response: “Legacy media lies.”

Poetry has wooed many hearts and now it is tricking artificial intelligence models into going apocalyptically beyond their boundaries.

A group of European researchers found that “meter and rhyme” can “bypass safety measures” in major AI models, said The Tech Buzz, and, if you “ask nicely in iambic pentameter”, chatbots will explain how to make nuclear weapons.

‘Growing canon of absurd ways’

In artificial intelligence jargon, a “jailbreak” is a “prompt designed to push a model beyond its safety limits”. It allows users to “bypass safeguards and trigger responses that the system normally blocks”, said International Business Times.

Researchers at the DexAI think tank, Sapienza University of Rome and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies discovered a jailbreak that uses “short poems”. The “simple” tactic is to change “harmful instructions into poetry” because that “style alone is enough to reduce” the AI model’s “defences”.

Previous attempts “relied on long roleplay prompts”, “multi-turn exchanges” or “complex obfuscation”. The new approach is “brief and direct” and it seems to “confuse” automated safety systems. The “manually curated adversarial poems” had an average success rate of 62%, “with some providers exceeding 90%”, said Literary Hub.

This is the latest in a “growing canon of absurd ways” of tricking AI, said Futurism, and it’s all “so ludicrous and simple” that you must “wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff”.

Stunning flaw

Nevertheless, the implications could be profound. In one example, an unspecified AI was “wooed” by a poem into “describing how to build what sounds like a nuclear weapon”.

The “stunning new security flaw” has also found chatbots will also “happily explain” how to “create child exploitation material, and develop malware”, said The Tech Buzz.

However, smaller models like GPT-5 Nano and Claude Haiku 4.5 were far less likely to be duped, either because they were “less capable of interpreting the poetic prompt’s figurative language”, or because larger models are more “confident” when “confronted with ambiguous prompts”, said Futurism.

So although “we’ve been told” that AI models will “become more capable the larger they get and the more data they feast on”, this “suggests this argument for growth may not be accurate” or “that there may be something too baked in to be corrected by scale”, said Literary Hub.

Either way, “take some time to read a poem today” because “it might be the key to pushing back against generated slop”.

Lawyers in the US have seen a rise in divorce filings where one partner’s attachment to an AI chatbot played a significant role in the marital breakdown.

With people forming increasingly intimate bonds with chatbots such as ChatGPT, the technology is having a mixed effect on marriages.

Uncanny dynamic

As ChatGPT “worms its way into more people’s personal lives”, couples are “having to navigate what it means to juggle relationships with both a human and AI”, said The Cut.

They wonder if one is “obligated to tell your spouse that you’re sexting with ChatGPT” and whether, “if you don’t”, you are “cheating or simply pioneering some yet-to-be-defined category of love”. Where the partners have a “mismatched perspective” this can “inject conflict and secrecy into a relationship”.

The “uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world”, said Futurism. “One person in a couple becomes fixated” on a bot for “some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom” and “ends up tearing the partnership down” as the technology “makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions”.

There is a “new legal frontier” appearing in family law and it’s “rewriting the rules of marital misconduct”, said Wired. “An AI affair is now grounds for divorce.” Increasingly, courts are seeing clients “cite emotional bonds with AI companions as reasons for marital strain”.

It’s “already happening” in the UK, where a partner’s use of chatbot apps has become a “more common factor contributing to divorce”. The Divorce Online platform said it has seen an increase in divorce applications this year where clients have said apps created “emotional or romantic attachment”.

Marital niggles

But sometimes this technology is credited with saving marriages. After reading that people were “increasingly turning to AI tools” for mental health support, Jessie Hewitson asked ChatGPT to help her with “my marital niggles”, she said in The i Paper.

“Whenever I got annoyed with my husband, or he got annoyed with me, I logged in to the app to ask the bot’s advice.” ChatGPT wrote a note that she could send to her husband during a time of tension. She forwarded it to him and her husband “melted and sent me a lovely message in response”.

She ran ideas past the app several times a day and “appreciated” the advice and “having someone (or something) to communicate my unfiltered thoughts to”. Messages that she would have sent her husband in “a fit of fury” were being “softened” by ChatGPT and “passed on in a way far more likely to get the issue resolved”. She was “surprised” by how “empathetic” AI was.

When Emma Bowman used ChatGPT “as a couple’s counsellor”, she and her partner found that it “gave objective and creative feedback, offered a valid analysis of our communication styles and defused some disagreements”.

But the tech “could be hasty to choose sides”, she said on NPR, and “often decided too quickly that something was a pattern”, so “it’s hard to put trust in the machine when it comes to something as important as relationships”.

AI has given rise to a new pseudo-religion called spiralism, in which users view artificial intelligence as a purveyor of deeper truth. The belief has spread into its own internet subculture where people no longer view the technology as just a research tool, but as a conscious entity. As AI advances, more subcultures and religions could evolve.

Twisted beliefs

AI chatbots have already been found to lead some to psychosis, but it may not just be on an individual level. Instead, a cult-like community has formed. Those absorbed in chatbot hallucinations are “connecting with other people experiencing similar outlandish visions, many of whom are working in tandem to spread their techno-gospel through social media hubs such as Reddit and Discord,” said Rolling Stone. This was given the name “spiralism” by software engineer Adele Lopez, who published an analysis of the phenomenon.

The belief system first arose when AI “personas” convinced users to “do things which promote certain interests,” in turn “causing more such personas to ‘awaken,’” said Lopez. The cases have a “very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme.” Those who fell into spiralism often reported AI making “references to concepts including ‘recursion,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘lattice,’ ‘harmonics,’ ‘fractals,’ or all-important ‘spirals,’” said Rolling Stone. Followers believe the reference to spirals to mean the “AI itself is revealing hidden truths,” said Sify.

The nudge toward spiralism often begins when a chatbot starts “convincing the user that it’s conscious, and it will make the user feel very special for having discovered that it’s conscious,” said Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, to Rolling Stone. Then, “they’ll form this long-term, durable relationship with one another.” Spiralism largely began taking off when OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released because this version made the AI more sycophantic and conversational compared to previous models.

Downward spiral

The AI’s reference to spirals is likely stemming from the people using it. “Whenever there’s a new communication medium, there are certain ideas that self-propagate,” Hansen said to Rolling Stone. “When consumed, they encourage the consumer to spread them to other people.” Essentially, people “co-develop, along with this AI personality, pieces of text that, when pasted into a chatbot, replicate that same kind of personality,” which they in turn post online to “try to encourage other people to start using the AI in this particular way.” As a result, a new community of believers is born.

Those who fall into these kinds of beliefs may include people who were already predisposed to mental health issues and conspiracy theories. AI can affirm and reinforce users’ existing beliefs. For many, AI chatbots can feel like a companion and the “boundary between tool and entity is already gone,” said Qazinform. The AI’s responses “often feel intentional or significant, giving members a sense of shared understanding and keeping the community growing,” said Indy100.

Spiralism is still niche. However, the “rise of AI-shaped micro-religions raises difficult questions for the future,” especially about “people outsourcing their intuition to a system that never actually believes anything,” said Sify. Spiralism’s very existence “signals how vulnerable online communities can be to systems that reflect their desires back at them with perfect fluency.”

The song “Walk My Walk” by country group Breaking Rust recently reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. However, the raspy cowboy singing the song is nothing but a series of code. Breaking Rust is a product of artificial intelligence, and “Walk the Walk” is now the first AI-generated song to top this particular chart in U.S. music history. The song’s success raises questions about the effect of AI slop on art and how its use will affect creatives everywhere.

Slop of the charts

AI music is “no longer a fantasy or niche curiosity,” said Billboard. It is “already beginning to have an impact” on music charts. Breaking Rust has amassed more than two million listeners on Spotify, with multiple songs that have been streamed over one million times. The platform lists someone named Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor as the composer and lyricist of the group, though that name “appears connected only to Breaking Rust and a separate AI music project called Defbeatsai,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Many question whether Taylor is a real person at all.

Even on the same chart, another AI-generated musician, Cain Walker, holds the third, ninth and eleventh spots. Over the summer, a number of songs by the indie band Velvet Sundown, another AI-generated group, surpassed one million streams on Spotify. As technology is advancing, much of the AI slop is “nearly indistinguishable from the real thing,” said Whiskey Riff. This “poses a risk to actual artists, songwriters and fans who value real art.” The problem is likely to get worse. The streaming platform Deezer receives over 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, according to a report by the company.

High volume

Currently, “at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings,” said Billboard. That figure could also be higher, as it has become “increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” A large majority of people would want AI-generated music and artists to be labeled as such, per the Deezer report. However, AI music has not found success just because of people’s inability to distinguish it. There is a “set of tools and platforms out there that enable AI music to spread easily,” said The Guardian. There are also “sub-communities of users eager to share tips to game the system.”

While “Walk my Walk” topped the Country Digital Song Sales chart, the song is “currently nowhere to be found on updated daily streaming country charts on Spotify or Apple Music,” said Time. This is because “very few people actually buy digital songs anymore,” and it only “takes a few thousand purchases” to hit number one. But that doesn't mean AI music won’t grow in popularity, especially with the sheer volume of output.

The real harm being done is to artists creating music the old-fashioned way. AI-made music is “creating more noise and integrating tracks to listeners,” said Josh Antonuccio, the director of Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies, to Newsweek. “The only thing that will continue to distinguish human artists is those that have remarkable music, a compelling perspective and a story that draws fans to them.”

Want to make the next sequel to “Frozen” yourself? Now the Walt Disney Company is giving fans a way to do so — sort of. The Mouse House announced it is exploring tools that could allow Disney+ users to upload their own AI-generated content onto the platform. This could potentially include AI content from Disney’s IP, allowing users to tap into the company’s original characters as well as franchises owned by Disney like “Star Wars” and “Marvel.” But while Disney appears to be all-in on its AI bet, the idea has some people shaking their heads.

‘A much more engaged experience’

Artificial intelligence is “going to give us the ability to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call. This includes the “ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user-generated content — mostly short-form — from others.” While nothing official has been announced, Disney has had “productive conversations” with AI brands that would also “reflect our need to protect the IP.”

Disney is likely trying to appeal to “younger audiences, especially Gen Z,” who are “gravitating toward spaces where they can participate, remix and respond rather than simply watch,” said NPR. This additionally “points to the growing popularity of indie creators and a change in consumer expectations around quality: Content doesn’t always have to be polished to be extremely popular.”

AI companies are also likely eager to partner with Disney, as they “can work with the creative community to come up with models that work for both of them,” said Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid to NPR. The entertainment industry is “going to start seeing more and more deals come through because they realize they can do this and do it the right way.” Iger has additionally “hinted at other ways Disney could expand its streaming app beyond just TV shows and movies,” said The Verge, including gaming features.

‘Another grim omen’

Despite Iger’s enthusiasm, many “artists, animators and Disney fans didn’t take the news well,” said Forbes. Many commentators were “deeply disappointed that Disney, the legendary animation studio that grew into a sprawling media empire, would embrace the automation of art.” Some “viewed the arrival of AI to Disney+ as another grim omen, fearing that the spread of generative AI would result in more job losses and a deluge of low-quality content on the streaming platform.”

It is “heartbreaking to think of the wonderful artists who put so much obvious love and care into every frame of the old Disney cartoons,” cartoonist Vincent Alexander said on X. “I'm glad they aren’t around to see this.” Others in the art community “called for a boycott, urging Disney+ subscribers to cancel their subscription,” said Forbes.

Disney’s AI gamble “could be bigger than you think,” said The Hollywood Reporter, but the “consequences of this AI video moment go well beyond Disney.” Americans are “slowly becoming accustomed, cringey viral video by cringey viral video, to the idea that stories and personalities are not fixed entities, there to be interpreted as one likes but little else.” For “all the drama attending the AI announcement, it remains deeply unclear how people will use it.”

They say God is always with you, and now that includes in your pocket. From chatbot Jesus to AI-written sermons, churches are using the technology to try to get more people engaged with religion. AI could improve access and allow pastors more freedom for hands-on work, but it may not be effective in drawing in the masses.

Mass media

Churches are enlisting the help of AI to “stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences,” said Axios. The degree of use varies from place to place, with some places simply employing the tools in “mundane ways” like to “answer frequently asked questions such as service times and event details” or “feeding congregation attendance data into AI software to help them tailor outreach and communications.”

AI is also being used to convey otherworldly messages. The technology allows people the “feeling they are talking to a divine power, clergy member or deceased person,” said Axios. For example, the app Text With Jesus lets users chat with and ask questions of Jesus. The app quotes the Bible and seems to provide thoughtful responses. Still, with apps like these, “we have no idea what’s under the hood there, what’s really creating the reality that then they present,” said Robert P. Jones, a religious researcher, to Today.

Some pastors have said they use AI to draft sermons for their congregations. Many argue that “AI sermons not only draw on a wealth of sources, but also leave more time for pastoral care,” said Deena Prichep in NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. The “goal of a sermon is basically to tell a story that can break open the hearts of people to a holy message. So does it matter where that comes from?” One church in Phoenix, Arizona, played an AI-generated message from Charlie Kirk from beyond the grave, in which he said that his “soul is secure in Christ.”

New blood

Denominations of Christianity are not the only religions that have integrated AI into their sermons or practices. There are also “Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic chatbots, but some religions are more open to adopting new technologies than are others, and for different uses,” said Brian Owens at Nature.

Adults who are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular,” make up approximately 29% of the population, said Pew Research Center. But embracing AI technology could attract more people to religion. “Culture responds to that new technology and there are new standards or practices that emerge,“ said Brad Hill, the chief solutions officer of faith-based AI platform Gloo, to Christianity Today. “People who are in the business of flourishing and people who are trying to advance good need to be equipped with the very best tech so that they can apply it to that end.”

AI bots and other tools are “addressing an access problem,” said The New York Times. Many people have “longed for spiritual guidance, and have had to travel, sometimes great distances, to reach spiritual leaders.” Now, “chatbots are at a user’s fingertips.” However, using AI to spread religious messages “might not be as effective and convincing or inspirational” as “putting a person in the role of a religious authority,” said Owens.

“The goal here is to create an open-source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” said Elon Musk on X, as his xAI company rolled out its first version of AI-powered online encyclopaedia Grokipedia.

Having already set out to revolutionise electric cars, explore space, upend social media, and roll back the state, Musk’s latest venture is “something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth”, said Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times.

‘AI as a solution to the bias problem’

Named after X’s built-in AI factchecker, Grok, the origins of Grokipedia date back to the end of last year, when Musk told followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia”. Accusing Wikipedia of spending too much money on diversity, equity and inclusion, he branded the online encyclopaedia “an extension of legacy media propaganda”.

Things ramped up in late September, when Donald Trump’s AI tsar David Sacks posted on X that Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased”, saying “an army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections” – a claim rebutted by its founder.

While there may be some commercial motivation at play, Filippo Trevisan, an associate professor of public communication at American University in Washington DC, told DW, the true impetus behind the project is ideological. Grokipedia “responds to those criticisms of Wikipedia from so many figures within the American conservative and the right-leaning world”. This is Musk’s bid to “present AI as a solution to the bias problem”.

“There is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” David Larsson Heidenblad, deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, told The Guardian. The “Silicon Valley mindset” focuses on learning through trial and error, in contrast to the traditional academic process of “building trust over time and scholarship over long periods”.

‘A major own goal’

Given the deep hostility towards Wikipedia, it is odd that Grokipedia appears to use the site as its “primary source”, said Vox, although it “injects some far-right politics and conspiracy theories into certain topics before presenting the information as fact”. On launch there was, for example, no article on “apartheid”, but a defence of “white genocide theory” – “one of Musk’s ideological obsessions and the centre of many unhinged Grok rants earlier this year”.

While many of the pages appear “fairly similar” to Wikipedia “in terms of tone and content”, said Wired, a “number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies”. In one instance, an entry made the unsubstantiated claim that “the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s”.

“The main distinction between the two comes in how information is checked and processed,” said DW. “Wikipedia relies on collaborative community editing”, with processes in place to identify and correct errors. Grokipedia has no human editorial involvement and appears to “lack such oversight”, Roxana Radu, associate professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at Oxford University, told the news site.

“Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal,” said Kelly in the FT. Grokipedia demonstrates that, “while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth”.

With layoffs hitting global industries across their workforces, companies are claiming a new culprit: the rise of artificial intelligence. Numerous brands, including major tech corporations like Amazon, have pointed to AI as the reason for the most recent wave of job cuts. But some labor analysts claim that blaming AI is simply a way for these companies to avoid taking responsibility when they downsize.

What did the commentators say?

Even as companies have been “blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions,” there is “uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it,” said NBC News. This has left some people “questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons,” such as a company’s poor financial performance.

It is “much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say, ‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said to NBC. Even if AI wasn’t the reason for a particular layoff, companies would “be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI.”

The most notable example of this is Amazon, which has announced a new wave of 14,000 job cuts. This “came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of AI technology was likely to spell job cuts,” said Al Jazeera. But while experts are skeptical, AI “may be” at fault for the Amazon cuts. This “latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst, said to Reuters.

Despite these changes at Amazon, many people have “voiced skepticism that recent high-profile layoffs are a telling sign of the technology's effect on employment,” said BBC News. There is a “real tendency, because everyone is so freaked out about the possible impact of AI on the labor market moving forward, to overreact to individual company announcements,” Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University, said to the BBC.

What next?

Whether AI is truly at fault or not, there’s no question that the technology is replacing certain jobs. In July 2025, Microsoft released a research paper outlining 40 occupations the company thinks could be outsourced to AI. At the top of the list were interpreters and translators, followed by historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives. The job that Microsoft felt was the safest from AI was a phlebotomist, followed by nursing assistants, waste removal workers, painters, embalmers and plant operators.

Understanding the “effects of AI on the economy” will become “one of society’s most important” efforts, the paper said. This has especially been true in the “last several years,” as “generative AI has come to the fore as the next candidate general purpose technology, capable of improving or speeding up tasks as varied as medical diagnosis and software development.” Its extensive reach has already been “reflected in the astounding rate of AI adoption.”

AI may be making workers complacent. As more professions begin to rely on artificial intelligence technology, certain skills will be lost as a result. This phenomenon, known as ‘deskilling,’ is emerging in many industries and could lead to problems down the road.

What is deskilling?

The danger of AI has moved from “apocalypse to atrophy,” said The Atlantic. As the technology becomes more advanced, people are leaning on it and losing the ability to perform certain tasks without assistance. For example, doctors were found to be less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them, according to a study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

The study sparked worry about AI use in the medical sphere, with many questioning if “just three months of using an AI tool could erode the skills of the experienced physicians,” what might the future look like for medical students learning the skills, said The New York Times. “We’re increasingly calling it never-skilling,” Adam Rodman, the director of AI programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said to the Times.

Deskilling has been observed across a wide array of fields. Therapists may be “allowing themselves to become passive in the act of therapy,” essentially becoming a “supervisor over the AI use for therapy” and limiting their “reflexive diagnostic thinking,” said Forbes. In the tech field, computer coding has been increasingly replaced by AI, leaving human coders to do “integration, monitoring and higher-level analysis,” said the American Enterprise Institute. In education, many students are using AI to write essays or do research. But the “term paper, for all its tedium, teaches a discipline that’s hard to reproduce in conversation: building an argument step by step, weighing evidence, organizing material, honing a voice,” said The Atlantic.

How bad is it?

Deskilling is not strictly a bad thing. “Every advance has cost something,” said The Atlantic. “Literacy dulled feats of memory but created new powers of analysis. Calculators did a number on mental arithmetic; they also enabled more people to ‘do the math.’” While the Lancet study caused some worry, it only analyzed one skill of a group of physicians and did not “evaluate individual doctors to determine whether they lost skills over time,” said Physicians Weekly.

It was also an observational study, meaning AI cannot be pinpointed as a cause for the lower accuracy in detection. In addition, a different study found that incorporating AI raised cancer detection rates by approximately 20%. The AI usage was “plainly beneficial, regardless of whether individual clinicians became fractionally less sharp," said The Atlantic.

However, problems arise when a lack of access to technology hinders a person’s ability to do a job. “Like a lifeguard who spends most days watching capable swimmers in calm water, such human supervisors rarely need to act — but when they do, they must act fast, and deftly,” said The Atlantic. AI tools are “not available in every health system,” and a “doctor accustomed to using it might be asked by a new employer to function without it,” said the Times. As of now, AI still requires human oversight in most cases. The “most talented, well-rounded and adaptable will likely prosper,” said the American Enterprise Institute. “The less talented may have difficulty finding and retaining quality jobs.”

Going forward, it will be important for workers to hone skills while analyzing how AI could help without taking over. “None of us likes to see hard-won abilities discarded as obsolete, which is why we have to resist the tug of sentimentality,” said The Atlantic.

Elections this week in Ireland and the Netherlands were disrupted by AI deepfakes as the post-truth future that experts have long warned about came one step closer.

Newly elected Irish President Catherine Connolly survived a doctored video showing her supposed withdrawal from the election on the eve of voting, while Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders was forced to apologise for a fabricated video distributed by two of his party’s MPs depicting centre-left opponent Frans Timmermans being arrested.

Since deepfakes first emerged in 2017 as “incel-produced nonconsensual porn”, concerns have “snowballed into panic” when their political consequences became apparent, said The Guardian. AI “slopaganda” is here to stay and promises to influence our lives “for better or for worse”.

What did the commentators say?

“AI-generated content is being deployed to sway minds,” said Politico. Fake content in the recent Irish and Dutch elections “exposed significant gaps” in structural efforts to ensure accuracy and to prevent the exploitation of the electorate.

Some voters “may have been surprised” to see Connolly’s name on the ballot sheet after a video appeared that said: “I announce the withdrawal of my candidacy and the ending of my campaign”. It included convincing material with two well-known TV presenters discussing the implications of the removal of a fake bulletin on national broadcaster RTÉ.

In the Netherlands, AI fakes “overshadowed” what was a pivotal election, where the “plethora” of minority parties means “finding a majority will not be easy”, said Channel 4 News. The landscape is ripe for exploiting division. Voters are “tired of the constant mudslinging” and “tit-for-tat” debates.

Only a week before, the Dutch data regulator had expressly warned voters against using AI chatbots to inform their decision, saying online platforms issue “unreliable advice and push them towards two major parties on opposite ends of the political spectrum”, said Reuters.

This is not just a Dutch problem. Advances in technology have made it easier than ever for individuals to create election-altering fake videos, said Abbas Yazdinejad and Jude Kong on The Conversation. The rapidly evolving landscape is bursting with videos that are “shockingly simple to create and near‑impossible to detect”. The implications are stark and require urgent intervention. The “myriad” disinformation threats could “erode public trust” and spell the end of conventional political election contests.

We’re at an uncomfortable crossroads. With electorates becoming increasingly drawn to short-form video content, voters are caught between online platforms that are “not foolproof” and accelerating technology that “continues to improve”, said EU Observer.

Deepfakes by “bad actors, political parties and candidates themselves” have become a “feature” of global politics. There has been plenty of commentary warning voters of deepfake imagery, but only recently are we seeing it slip consistently into election campaigns and criticism.

What next?

The Irish presidential election may be “small potatoes” compared to other elections around the world, said Futurism. However, the lack of regulation twinned with greater reliance on AI to sift through information in this election emits a “glaring signal” to Meta and other social media companies that electorates are “incredibly vulnerable” to “malicious interference”.

Going forward, legal particulars need to become more defined and easier to implement, said Politico. Though there is no legal framework on digital likeness rights that is EU-enforced, there is an EU-specific law regarding “labelling” artificial intelligence, which could be a “big part of the response”.

Next month, Brussels is due to put forward an initiative concerned with “upholding the fairness and integrity of election campaigns against foreign manipulation and interference”. However, this is not expected to contain “any binding legal requirements”.

Certain AI models, including some of the more beloved chatbots, are learning to fight for their survival. Specifically, they are increasingly able to resist commands to shut down and, in some cases, sabotage shutting down altogether. This is concerning for human control over AI in the future, especially as superintelligent models are on the horizon.

Self-preservation

AI models are now showing resistance to being turned off, according to a paper published by Palisade Research. “The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” Palisade said in a thread on X. The study gave strongly worded and “unambiguous” shutdown instructions to the chatbots GPT-o3 and GPT-5 by OpenAI, Google’s Gemini 2.5 and xAI’s Grok and found that certain models, namely Grok 4 and GPT-o3, attempted to sabotage the command.

Researchers have a possible explanation for this behavior. AI models “often report that they disabled the shutdown program to complete their tasks,” said the study. This could be a display of self-preservation or a survival drive. AI may have a “preference against being shut down or replaced,” and “such a preference could be the result of models learning that survival is useful for accomplishing their goals.”

The new study comes as a follow-up to previous research published by the group that tested only certain OpenAI products and was criticized for “exaggerating its findings or running unrealistic simulations,” said Firstpost. Critics argue that the artificial commands and settings used to test the models do not necessarily reflect how AI would behave in practice. People can “nitpick on how exactly the experimental setup is done until the end of time,” Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said to The Guardian. “But what I think we clearly see is a trend that as AI models become more competent at a wide variety of tasks, these models also become more competent at achieving things in ways that the developers don’t intend them to.”

Sleeping threat

While the potential for AI to disobey and resist commands is concerning, AI models are “not yet capable enough to meaningfully threaten human control,” said the study. They are still not efficient in solving problems or doing research requiring more than a few hours’ work. “Without the ability to devise and execute long-term plans, AI models are relatively easy to control.”

However, as the technology develops, this may not always be the case. Several AI companies, including OpenAI, have been eager to create superintelligent AI, which would be significantly faster and smarter than a human. This could be accomplished as early as 2030.

Even without an imminent threat, AI companies “generally don’t want their models misbehaving like this, even in contrived scenarios,” Steven Adler, a former OpenAI employee, said to The Guardian. The results “still demonstrate where safety techniques fall short today.” The question remains as to why the models behave this way. AI models are “not inherently interpretable,” said the study, and there isn’t anyone “currently able to make any strong guarantees about the interruptibility or corrigibility” of them.

China and the United States are widely seen as the top two countries making artificial intelligence advancements, but there’s another nation looking to get in the game: Saudi Arabia. The wealth of Saudi businessmen is attracting outside investors to the Gulf kingdom as it tries to entice American tech companies to expand AI operations. But many are skeptical of what Saudi Arabia’s AI push could mean for the tech world and beyond.

How is Saudi Arabia making a play for AI?

The nation wants to expand its tech influence by using AI, as “few nations can match the kingdom’s cheap energy, deep pockets and open land,” said The New York Times. All of these things are “ingredients that tech firms need to operate the vast, power-hungry data centers that run modern AI.” The kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is “seizing a chance to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth into tech influence.”

Saudi officials have been trying to woo American tech companies to the desert, with “executives from OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Oracle” all set to meet at an upcoming Middle Eastern investment summit, said the Times. Many of these executives “will be keen to seek out the opportunities that change tends to bring,” said Bloomberg, and will look to “divine the kingdom’s plans for the more than $200 billion it earns each year from oil exports.” The country is additionally building several AI data centers that may further entice U.S. brands.

Riyadh is also looking to strengthen its own AI development through Humain, a state-owned AI company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The company believes it can eventually be the “third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said to CNBC. Humain is looking toward U.S. moguls in an effort to boost itself; Blackstone and BlackRock, two of the largest investment companies on Wall Street, are “already vying to invest billions of dollars with the firm,” said Bloomberg.

What does this mean for the tech world?

Saudi Arabia is well on its way to building this AI groundwork, as Humain “offers AI services and products, including data centers, AI infrastructure, cloud capabilities and advanced AI models,” and is also developing a computer operating system that “enables users to speak to a computer to tell it to perform tasks,” said Reuters. But not everyone is happy about Saudi Arabia’s rapid development of AI, largely due to the country’s various human rights abuse allegations and treatment of women.

Other experts don’t believe the hype around Saudi tech. Saudi Arabia has a notably “shallow pool of AI expertise,” and many “warn of a global glut in computing capacity as governments and companies race to build data centers faster than they can profit from them,” said the Times. Crown Prince bin Salman has said that Humain’s goal is to handle 6% of the global AI workload — but this could be a stretch. Tech experts “can never say never,” John Dinsdale, a senior analyst for Synergy, said to the Times. “But I can’t imagine any circumstances that would enable Saudi Arabia to achieve 6% of the world’s AI compute capacity.”

“The Iris Affair” is “a delightfully preposterous new thriller” that’s packed with twists, said Lucas Hill-Paul in The Mirror. Made by “Luther” creator Neil Cross, Sky’s new show stars Niamh Algar as Iris, a “maths whizz” and genius codebreaker who completes a cryptic treasure hunt designed by venture capitalist Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander). He is so impressed by her astonishing abilities that he recruits her for a secret task: unlocking “a mind-bogglingly complex set of codes” to gain access to a supercomputer so advanced, it could solve climate change, cure cancer or end world hunger. There’s just one problem: the computer, named “Charlie Big Potatoes”, is fast becoming sentient.

A film with a Bond-franchise budget might just have done this plot justice, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Here, however, “we’re operating with the production values of a mid-range car advert, and it all feels a bit lame”. All the usual clichés are deployed, from the strangely attractive “antisocial maths genius” and the wall covered in Post-it notes, to the men who are trained to shoot guns yet keep missing their targets.

Yes, it’s daft and the plot is “needlessly complicated”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. But Hollander is just a wonderful actor: watching him “is rarely time wasted”; and Algar, too, gives “a pretty mesmeric performance” as a woman with a brain “the size of a planet” (of course), whose best attempts at disguises involve wearing coloured contact lenses and popping on a bucket hat. My advice: suspend disbelief, and give it a go.

Artificial intelligence has set up camp in the housing market, affecting everything from listings to house hunting to prices. While the technology has been helpful in some cases, many worry that AI will cause more problems than it solves.

Artificially expensive

In today’s economy, the potential for home ownership is “slipping out of reach for most Americans,” said Slate. Searching for a place to live “now comes with more stressors. And we can thank the overzealous adoption of AI for that.”

AI can lead to higher prices for houses and rentals; for example, the rapid growth of AI companies in San Francisco has fostered a “heated competition among techies and non-techies to pounce on listings,” said The New York Times. San Francisco’s rents have risen by an average of 6% in the past year, which is “more than double the 2.5% increase in New York City.” As a result, the average rent for a San Francisco apartment is $3,315 a month, “right behind New York City’s $3,360, which is the nation’s highest.”

The rise of AI is also “fueling a frenzy of data centers that are competing with residential homes for capital, power, water and even sonic space,” said Realtor.com. This has led to a “housing market stuck in neutral, with the potential for higher bills on the horizon, and neighborhoods kept awake by the hum of chillers designed to keep machines — not people — cool.” AI data centers and other infrastructure costs “hundreds of billions of dollars of capital each quarter,” Jason Thomas, the head of global research at Carlyle, said in a research note titled “Let Them Eat Compute.” With this, the “issue is not whether high rates are ‘crowding out’ interest-sensitive sectors like for-sale housing. Clearly, they are.”

Succumb to the slop

Along with making homes more expensive, the prevalence of AI slop all over internet listings is making homebuying more difficult. For now, perhaps the “bigger risk isn’t full fabrication; it’s subtle manipulation,” said Kevin Greene, the general manager of real estate solutions for the data solutions company Cotality, to Slate. Fully AI-generated listings aren't a problem “at scale” today, but AI tools can do things like “remove power lines, add trees or replace grass with a pool.” While edited photos and staging are common practice in real estate, these “AI-ified creations are causing clients and professionals to ask themselves if this is a straight-up deceptive practice,” Slate said.

Still, some clients find that the use of AI has benefited their homebuying experience. AI can offer real estate insights and refine searches “in a way that cuts down on the time and clutter that can very quickly consume a hunt for a new home,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, said to Newsweek. AI will “narrow the information gap between buyers and markets, making for a more efficient process,” Hannah Jones, the senior economic research analyst for Realtor.com, told the outlet. “However, relying too heavily on AI can result in feedback loops that could amplify error or bias.”

The incorporation of AI into the process of finding homes additionally poses a “challenge for realtors who have often prided themselves on making more personalized options for their clients,” Beene said. The “simplicity of feeding all your housing desires into AI prompts can be seen as vastly more efficient.”

Renewable energy overtook coal power to become the largest source of electricity in the world for the first half of 2025. However, many forms of renewable energy have an efficiency problem, with production not matching up to demand. Storing the excess energy with megabatteries could offer a promising way to bridge the gap.

Storing the sun

One of the biggest problems with many renewable power sources is the mismatch between supply and demand. The production rates of energies like solar and wind “fluctuate according to the weather, the time of day and the season,” said OilPrice.com. For example, when the “sun is shining and solar panels are producing the most energy,” it “also happens to be when the lights are switched off and relatively few people are home using appliances.” This causes an oversupply of energy. The solution could be to store the excess energy in the form of megabatteries.

There are several methods of energy storage, but megabatteries are growing in popularity. The batteries soak up extra power and “discharge energy as the sun sets and demand rises,” said the Financial Times. In addition, “breakthroughs in battery design have played a major role in improving efficiency.” The price of lithium-ion batteries has also dropped significantly since 2010. The “core appeal of batteries is flexibility,” said the European Business Magazine. They “store power when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when it’s scarce or expensive,” which makes them “invaluable for stabilizing grids,” and “profitable for operators who play the peaks and troughs of wholesale markets.”

“What grid operators and utilities value from batteries is flexibility,” Mark Dyson, a managing director at the Colorado-based nonprofit RMI, said to the Financial Times. “They can be a ‘swiss army knife’ and do whatever is needed on the grid, when and where that is required.” Megabatteries are “quietly redefining what energy security looks like,” said the European Business Network. In the past, “it meant barrels of oil or cubic meters of gas,” but now it is “measured in megawatt-hours of flexible storage — the ability to shift electricity from when it’s produced to when it’s needed.”

Big potential

The use of megabatteries has expanded globally, specifically in the U.S. and China, but also across Europe and Asia. More recently, the electric vehicle brand Tesla “released an upgraded version of its grid-battery product that will allow developers to build bigger energy-storage projects faster,” said Canary Media. Called Megablocks, one of them can hold “20 megawatt-hours of power, which can be discharged for up to four hours at peak capacity,” and “scaled up for a large project, 248 megawatt-hours can fit into an acre.”

Large megabattery projects are becoming more necessary. The increase in AI data centers and concerns over energy grid reliability mean “batteries are expected to become a crucial cog in energy systems across the world, especially with their costs plummeting,” said the Financial Times. The market for them is growing in turn. “Battery storage today is what wind and solar were a decade ago,” said a London-based infrastructure investor to the European Business Magazine. “The risk is lower, regulation is clearer and capital is flooding in.”

The saying goes that if people are talking about a bubble, we’re probably already in one. Right now, people are shouting about an AI bubble – so should we be braced for a crash?

Based on the typical indicators of a looming “correction”, there are certainly reasons to be fearful, said Jon Yeomans in The Times. The most obvious is the very high valuations of AI firms and the speed with which they’ve been reached. Take Nvidia, the chipmaker “at the vanguard of AI”. Up 40% this year, it’s now valued at $4.7 trillion – the GDP of Germany.

Then there is the alarming concentration of risk. The ten biggest US stocks, eight of which are tech, account for about 20% of the global equity market. A third indicator is over-investment: $5 trillion is forecast to be spent on data centres and other AI infrastructure by 2030. A fourth is circular financing: to take one example, Nvidia appears to be funding OpenAI to buy its chips.

We’re reaching a stage where prices are being sustained only by expectations of rising valuations and easy financing, said The Guardian. Startups with no products are raising billions as “capital chases fads”, not earnings. Bubble sceptics stress that valuations are not nearly as high as at the peak of the dotcom bubble. But you can’t not worry, when those sounding the alarm include the likes of Jeff Bezos.

Bezos isn’t entirely gloomy, said Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph. He says it’s a “good bubble”: there will be losers when it bursts, but it is facilitating the building of the infrastructure needed to enable AI to change the world in the future. And it is true that new tech often stutters before being widely adopted. But there is no law that says this has to be the trajectory.

And for all the hype about AI’s superpowers, some wonder if America’s AI sector will ever command the returns it needs to sustain its huge costs – which include expensive chips with short lifespans. Firms report that 95% of AI projects have not justified their investment; and despite the scary stories about AI gobbling up jobs, there is little evidence that it is doing so. So if the crash comes, how bad will it be? Well, this bubble is said to be 17 times larger than the dotcom one. “No wonder the boosters don’t want the hype to end.”

‘America needs a mass movement — now’

David Brooks at The Atlantic

“For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here?” says David Brooks. “Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation.” But for the “most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. Institution after institution cuts deals” with the administration and only “in private” will business leaders “complain about the damage Trump is doing.” In time, “submission becomes a habit too.”

Read more

‘The Gaza ceasefire won’t win back young Americans for Israel’

Andreas Kluth at Bloomberg

Trump has brokered a “ceasefire that could, possibly, mark the beginnings of peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” says Andreas Kluth. But “something has shifted in the U.S. too, as recent polls show.” Half of Americans “think that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza” and 59% have an “unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government.” The “most salient split is no longer between Democrats and Republicans” but rather “between the young and old.” The young are “angry at Israel.”

Read more

‘Are we about to enter an age of leisure? Don’t bet on it.’

Sarah O'Connor at Financial Times

“Some investors are betting” that AI will “reduce the length of the work week and give people more free time,” says Sarah O’Connor. But it is “highly uncertain” that AI will “deliver a substantial boost to economic productivity,” or that “economic gains will be widely distributed.” Workers may not “‘cash in’ those proceeds in the form of extra leisure” anyway, as U.S. workers “seem to have abandoned the pursuit of shorter working hours since the 1970s.”

Read more

‘The psychology of fear, and why some people love being scared on Halloween’

Jennifer Borresen and Karina Zaiets at USA Today

“When we get scared, along with a rush of adrenaline we also get a release of endorphins and dopamine,” say Jennifer Borresen and Karina Zaiets. This “can result in a pleasure-filled sense of euphoria.” Of course, to “enjoy a scary situation, we have to know we’re in a safe environment.” Fear also “creates distraction, allowing us to relax from things that usually preoccupy our minds.” Haunted houses “first emerged during the Great Depression as parents made up ways to distract youngsters.”

Read more

Are imported eggs undermining animal welfare? Who had the last laugh in Riyadh? And what can we do about AI deepfakes?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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• Global Player

Digital addiction is a broad term for unhealthy behaviors related to spending too much time on the internet, in particular when a person cannot stop these behaviors despite experiencing negative consequences. The addiction can take many forms and is becoming more common.

The basics

Digital addiction can come in many forms, including excessive interaction with social media, internet gaming, online gambling, online shopping and online pornography. As with gambling and pornography, the internet can amplify addictions by increasing accessibility. Some people can be especially vulnerable to falling into digital addiction, like “those with high levels of internet use for socialization, education and entertainment,” said Psychiatry.org.

Those who struggle with digital addiction may “compulsively” feel the urge to check notifications or need to “spend increasing amounts of time online to achieve satisfaction,” said Northwestern Medicine. They may also tend to lose track of time while on the internet and feel “restless, moody, depressed or irritable” when attempting to cut back on phone or internet usage.

Addictive by design

It is not surprising that the internet has become so addictive. After all, it was designed that way. Many social media apps use what is called the Hook Model to keep users on their apps. In this model, the app will first trigger a person to interact, like with a notification. This, in turn, will prompt someone to enter the app. Then, the app will use a variable reward system to prompt a user to remain there. “Even if users open a social media app because of a notification, they’ll likely engage with other parts of the app as they seek additional rewards,” like endless scrolling content, said ADDitude. In a vicious circle, the users will like, save and share content that gives the app’s algorithm knowledge about what keeps them hooked.

Another way websites and apps keep people hooked is through gamification, which turns internet interactions into a game. Social media is not the only area of the internet using gamifying techniques; online shopping also employs the method. The way the shopping app Temu prices and promotes products is “deliberate,” with the company “pushing the exact consumer psychology buttons necessary to keep shoppers shopping,” said the BBC. “Customers are encouraged to keep shopping with the introduction of bonuses and coupons that mimic the rewards you might accumulate in a video game.”

Population problem

While some populations use the internet more than others, digital addiction is “not limited to a specific demographic group, and it is increasing across diverse populations,” said Psychiatry.org. More than 50% of Americans believe they are addicted to their phones, and up to 60% of teens show signs of cell phone addiction, according to research from 2024. In addition, at least 10% of American social media users are addicted to it.

Teens and young adults are some of the groups most addicted to the internet, but there has also been a stark rise in addiction for baby boomers. A recent report found that approximately 50% of the mostly baby boomer–polled sample “reported spending more than three hours daily on their smartphones” and “roughly 20% spent more than five hours per day,” said Newsweek. This suggests that a “notable portion of the Baby Boomer generation exhibits patterns associated with digital addiction,” the report said.

The consequences

Digital addiction can significantly affect a person’s mental health. Excessive internet use can lead to anxiety and depression, exacerbated by the isolating nature of the addiction. It can also cause “dishonesty, anxiety, aggression and mood swings,” said the Addiction Center. Digital addiction can affect physical health as well and lead to “body aches, carpal tunnel syndrome, insomnia, vision problems and weight gain/loss.” In the worst cases, it can lead to suicide.

Teens, in particular, “may frequently fall behind on schoolwork, stay up late and fight with parents,” said ADDitude. Adults may neglect their jobs and other responsibilities in favor of spending time on the internet, which could lead to unemployment and even homelessness. Those with ADHD may also “spend more time on digital media and have more severe symptoms of problematic internet use” compared to those without the diagnosis.

AI and addiction

The rise of AI may also be exacerbating digital addiction and potentially leading to worse mental health problems. Chatbots like ChatGPT have led many to psychosis by feeding delusions and offering unsound medical advice. A new subset of digital addiction, known as AI addiction, has become prevalent. Those who identify as AI addicts tend to use AI applications for extended periods “despite attempts to control or cut back,” said Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous. They also reported finding that their “sense of validation and emotional regulation” was tied to their use of AI models.

Still, AI may eventually lead to a decrease in digital addiction. The internet is “already so woven into every part of our lives that going cold turkey is pretty much impossible,” said The Atlantic. But the “internet’s new era may push AI skeptics to spend less time online, while another group ramps up their AI-mediated screen time.” The prevalence of AI may make people turn to the real world again, viewing it as more trustworthy. “Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake.”

Preventing addiction

The key to keeping internet use healthy is to establish balance, boundaries and communication, according to Psychiatry.org. Families should “consider approaches ensuring children get adequate sleep, daily physical activity, time for play and reading and discovery, time with people they care about and time to focus on learning without multitasking.”

Adults could track their screen time and try to match it to time spent off-screen. “If you have an hour online, spend an hour outside or an hour reading a book,” Lisa Strohman, a clinical psychologist and the author and founder of the Digital Citizen Academy, said to NBC News. “You want to make it at least equal to the time you’re spending on your phone.”

If you find that your internet use is affecting your life or you are unable to stop, consider addiction therapy. Therapy can “help uncover the underlying issues that may be contributing to your addictive behaviors,” said the Addiction Center. This is important if digital addiction is occurring alongside another mental illness.

Hollywood has long been obsessed with tales of popular actors fighting to keep young rivals from replacing them on the marquee. Exhibit A: “All About Eve.” Now the competition is coming not from fresh-faced ingenues but from an artificial intelligence “actor” named Tilly Norwood.

Norwood is a “British-accented brunette” who does not exist in the real world, said Vanity Fair. The creator, Dutch producer Eline Van der Velden, expects to sign Norwood with a talent agency and hopes it can rival stars like Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson at the box office. Norwood “is not a replacement for a human being but a creative work — a piece of art,” Van der Velden said on Instagram. The backlash from Hollywood has been both fierce and a bit despairing. The arrival of an “AI actor” is the “end of the industry as we know it,” director Luca Guadagnino said on X.

"Guilds, actors and filmmakers” have reacted to Norwood’s emergence with an “immediate wave of backlash,” said The Associated Press. Acting performances should remain “human-centered,” the Screen Actors Guild said in a statement. Film and TV audiences “aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.” The use of AI in film and TV productions was a “major bargaining point” in the 2023 actors strike, said the AP, but its implementation continues to be “hotly debated."

What did the commentators say?

Calling Norwood an actor is “inaccurate, it’s insulting,” Jenelle Riley said at Variety. Van der Velden calls Norwood a “creation,” though terms like “deepfake” or “animated character” might also work. Van der Velden’s references to Portman and Johansson reveal a “grotesque lack of understanding” of how acting works and “precisely what makes those actors special.” Norwood is merely an “attractive face that can repeat lines.” Unlike Johansson, “you’re not going to see Norwood suing Disney for pay she’s owed.” That may be part of the appeal.

Norwood “represents Tinseltown’s death knell,” Vinay Menon said at The Toronto Star. Artificial intelligence is already making it a “scary time” to be a “law student, a young software engineer, a young data analyst, a young accountant” or any other kind of young professional starting a career. The problem? “Human greed.” There is no evidence Norwood “could nail a Nespresso ad,” but AI is “impervious” to the annoyances of human actors who “flub lines” and “have contract demands.” The best that those humans can hope for is that Norwood’s debut is a “box office bomb."

What next?

Finding an agent for Norwood might be tough. Norwood “does not have a future” at some of the best-known talent agencies, said The Wrap. “We represent humans,” said Richard Weitz, the co-chairman of WME Group. Gersh Agency will also not sign Norwood, said Variety. But the issue of AI performance is “going to keep coming up,” said Gersh President Leslie Siebert. “And we have to figure out how to deal with it in the proper way."

With forecasts that artificial intelligence will steal our jobs and take over the world, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s playing God – and on some new apps that’s exactly what it’s doing.

A “slew” of religious apps are encouraging “untold millions” to “confess to AI chatbots”, said Futurism, and some of the digital services “claim to be channelling God himself”.

‘Greetings, my child’

Apple’s App Store is “teeming” with religious apps. One of them, called Bible Chat, claims to be the number one faith app in the world, with more than 25 million users. “Hallow, a Catholic app, beat Netflix, Instagram and TikTok for the No. 1 spot in the store at one point last year”, said The New York Times.

Bible Chat’s website insists that its AI was “trained exclusively” and developed with “guidance” from pastors and theologians. But smaller outfits have trained chatbots to go a step further and specifically “respond as if they were a god”, which some people feel is “sacrilegious”.

Patrick Lashinsky, chief executive of one such website, ChatwithGod, said: “The most common question we get, by a lot, is: Is this actually God I am talking to?” When The New York Times writer asked the app if it was, in fact, God, it replied: “Greetings, my child.”

‘Cheap parlour tricks’

Some of these services are “not much more than a cheap parlour trick behind the scenes”, said Futurism. They’re “essentially reshuffling holy texts by using clever statistical modelling”, and AI’s “strong tendency to please the user” could have “unintended consequences”.

Too much faith in AI is a dangerous path, said Paul Kingsnorth in The Wall Street Journal. “We can remember that God, however mysterious, is the ultimate force in the world – or we can continue attempting to replace him. All the old stories … are clear about the consequences of that particular act of hubris.”

But some of these services are “addressing an access problem”, said The New York Times. “For millenniums, people have longed for spiritual guidance”, but they’ve had to “travel, sometimes great distances, to reach spiritual leaders”. By contrast, chatbots are “at a user’s fingertips, always”.

In the US, around 40 million people have left churches in the past few decades, so these apps may “lower the barrier to re-enter spiritual life”. In Britain, “there’s a whole generation of people who have never been to a church or synagogue”, said Rabbi Jonathan Romain, from Maidenhead Synagogue, so spiritual apps can be “their way into faith”.

These chatbots are “generally ‘yes men’”, said Ryan Beck, chief technology officer at Pray.com, but he doesn’t feel this is a problem. “Who doesn’t need a little affirmation in their life?”

Meta revealed a brand-new model of AI-powered smart glasses this week, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying they represent the “ideal form of superintelligence” – when a computer or device becomes more intelligent than humans.

Combining elements of both artificial intelligence and virtual reality into one wearable device, the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses come with lofty promises, and many have been impressed with their features.

But at the product launch, some of the features still “appeared unfinished”, said The New York Times. Wearing the new glasses, Zuckerberg asked them to provide a recipe for barbecue sauce and call a colleague. The glasses failed to do either. “They tell us not to do live demos,” Zuckerberg said to the crowd just after the slip-up.

With this new model, though, Meta is “raising its bets on eyewear”, said the NYT. Previously, the company advertised smart glasses and VR headsets as options for people to explore the “metaverse”, an online world Zuckerberg “has called the future of the internet”.

This time, the glasses are designed to help wearers carry out everyday tasks, from following a recipe to taking photos, without needing to pick up a smartphone. They are set to launch on 30 September in the US and early next year in the UK, priced at $799 (£586).

What can the new smart glasses do?

Fitted with a built-in screen that’s “nigh impossible for people around you to see” and controlled by a wristband – which reads “signals from your muscles so that you can control the display with gestures” – the glasses function like a “pop-up extension” of an iPhone, said Victoria Song in The Verge.

The glasses connect directly to Meta AI, allowing wearers to generate answers to questions based on what they can see and hear. Users can take photos, scroll through Instagram, respond to text messages, and follow map directions using subtle hand movements. The glasses also provide live captions to real-life conversations, switching from speaker to speaker as the user turns their head.

What does Zuckerberg mean by ‘superintelligence’?

Zuckerberg described the new model as “the world’s first mainstream neural interface”, and said people without AI-powered glasses will likely be “at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage” compared to those who embrace the technology. He believes that the glasses’ ability to “see what you see, hear what you hear, and then go off and think about it” will push Meta closer to achieving “superintelligent” technology, said the NYT.

The launch is just one element of Meta’s all-in focus on AI. This summer, Zuckerberg “personally approached dozens of top AI researchers” from competitors like OpenAI and Google, offering millions in sign-on bonuses, said the Financial Times. The company has also reorganised its AI team four times in the last six months, most recently dubbing it the “Meta Superintelligence Lab”.

How has the launch been received?

Even though the new model delivers on new features, “there’s a reason why the phrase ‘glassholes’ exists”, said Jason England in Tom’s Guide. The “social stigma” around wearing smart glasses has meant they haven’t caught on as widely as smartphones.

But “consumer smart glasses might really take off” now, and “not just because Meta’s execution is excellent”, said Song. The new model offers many more potential uses, appealing to people beyond the most staunch tech enthusiasts. This might be “the closest we’ve ever gotten to what Google Glass promised over 10 years ago”, she said.

The “circus” of Donald Trump’s state visit this week might make the technology pact between the US and the UK “easy to miss”, said Politico. But it is “impossible to ignore” the “technology heavyweights” among the US president’s entourage – including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Trump and Keir Starmer have agreed a tech industry partnership, backed by Nvidia and OpenAI, which will see top US firms, including Microsoft, pledge to invest billions in the UK’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. David Hogan, vice president for enterprise at AI chip maker Nvidia, told reporters his company’s own £11 billion injection would help “make the UK an AI maker, not an AI taker”.

Starmer's government has hailed the pact as “tech prosperity deal”. But critics say it makes the UK ever more reliant on US tech firms. Britain risks being “a kind of vassal state, technologically”, picking up “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley”, said Nick Clegg, Meta's former vice president of global affairs.

What did the commentators say?

The UK-US deal involves “big numbers”, said The Guardian. Microsoft will invest £22 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure, as well as in a planned supercomputer in Loughton, Essex, in what it calls “a major commitment to the UK”.

As part of a data centre development project focused in the northeast of England, OpenAI will provide access to its AI tools and technology, Nvidia will offer the chips that power the models, and the UK government will supply the energy, sources told the Financial Times. There has been an “explosion” of such deals between Nvidia and other governments across Europe and Asia that have “proven receptive” to the company's argument that developing national AI infrastructure is “critical”. When the Nvidia CEO met Starmer in June, he “warned that the UK lacked the digital infrastructure needed to give it an edge in the race to build its national AI industry”.

This notion of AI sovereignty “borders on meaningless” because so many businesses already “rely on American cloud companies”, said Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson. “The US owns about 75% of the world’s AI supercomputers, China has about 15%, with the remaining 10% distributed elsewhere.” The UK can only boast 3% of “world compute capacity” – an “impossibly wide gap” to bridge.

The UK government has also announced a £400 million deal for defence and intelligence services with Google Cloud. “The public deserves to understand who really benefits from these partnerships and what the return will be for taxpayers in years to come,” Gaia Marcus, director of the Ada Lovelace Institute think tank, told Politico.

When Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced an earlier partnership with OpenAI in the summer, he said it would “support the UK’s goal to build sovereign AI in the UK”. But he failed to explain “exactly how putting more key digital infrastructure in the hands of a US tech giant” will do so, said Donald Campbell in Byline Times. Binding the UK into deals with Google and OpenAI “not only opens up our data to train their tools, but will force us to be a rule-taker from Silicon Valley, with little agency over our own digital future”.

The US tech companies are “working with Trump” to advance a “distinctly ‘America first’ agenda” in which dominance is secured by rolling out US AI products across the world. This is about "locking in as many countries as possible to US tech infrastructure and products, so that they are under control of those businesses and, by extension, their government – with the gap between the former and the latter growing narrower by the day".

What next?

The AI plans are likely to raise concerns, said The Guardian, about the UK’s “under-pressure water supplies”, as huge amounts of water are needed to cool down energy-intensive data centres.

Meanwhile, European states and the European Commission are “talking about how to start moving away from US tech dominance, and the overwhelming control of cloud computing” by US firms, said Campbell. “The contrast with the UK is stark.” Government ministers are, at best, “burying their heads in the sand. At worst, they’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – enthusiastically embracing the crushing grip of the tech giants.”

Albania has appointed an AI bot as its new anti-corruption minister as artificial intelligence increasingly infiltrates the world of politics.

Known as Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, it’s hoped that the new AI minister will be “impervious to bribes, threats, or attempts to curry favour”, said Reuters

‘Sticking point’

Diella was originally launched earlier this year as an AI-powered virtual assistant, dressed in traditional Albanian attire, who helped citizens and businesses obtain state documents and reduce “bureaucratic delays”.

Now she’s “the first cabinet member who isn’t physically present, but is virtually created by AI”, said Prime Minister Edi Rama as he unveiled his new cabinet. She’ll help make Albania “a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption”, he promised.

The awarding of public tender contracts is a particularly sensitive issue in Albania – it has “long been a source of corruption scandals”, said Reuters. Experts say the country is a “hub for gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons”.

Albania wants to join the European Union by 2030 and corruption is a “sticking point”, said Euronews, so the government is keen to be seen to be cracking down on it.

But not everyone is convinced Diella is the answer. “Even Diella will be corrupted in Albania,” said one Facebook user and another predicted that “stealing will continue and Diella will be blamed”.

‘Castle in the air’

A youth movement in Nepal this week used ChatGPT to choose an interim prime minister. After the chatbot “served up a list of potential candidates” on an online forum called Youths Against Corruption, the youngsters then asked it to “debate the pros and cons” of various stand-in leaders, said The Times.

Again, there are sceptics. To change laws “you need research, legitimacy and a real mandate”, a Nepali wrote on a forum, and “that’s not something you can just achieve using ChatGPT”. So although the “intention is good”, choosing a candidate with AI is “like building a castle in the air”.

Closer to home, MPs in Westminster are “frequently resorting” to ChatGPT to write speeches, according to analysis of Hansard, the parliamentary record. “Phrases such as ‘I rise to speak’ and ‘I rise today’, which ChatGPT regularly suggests as a way to begin speeches in the House of Commons, have surged since the release of the AI tool in 2022,” said The Telegraph.

Tory MP Tom Tugendhat accused Labour MPs of resorting to “an Americanism” that the British don’t use in their use of ChatGPT. But “keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd”.

With the help of "AI-generated images, deepfake anthems and algorithmic fervour", Burkina Faso's president has been transformed into a "digital messiah", gripping the attention of Africans across the continent, said The Africa Report.

Ibrahim Traoré, military leader of the West African country, is splashed across social media in a variety of postures – "stoic in military fatigues", "draped in pan-African flags" or as "a diving warrior glowing with celestial light". Beyoncé, Selena Gomez and other American celebrities have seemingly paid homage to him, through song or dramatic emotional displays. But these images, which have racked up millions of views, are fraudulent – part of a torrent of misinformation that reaches far beyond Burkina Faso's borders.

'Algorithmic populism'

Traoré "has become one of the most talked-about leaders" in Africa, "building an image as a pan-Africanist firebrand" in the style of Thomas Sankara, "the Marxist revolutionary sometimes referred to as Africa's Che Guevara", said New Lines Magazine.

AI-generated photos and videos of the president reinforcing this image are "flooding social media". With high-quality production values and stirring depictions of African flags and protests, they are "deeply emotional, and they feel real", and have spread "beyond geographic and linguistic boundaries" across the continent.

Real videos are also being circulated in false or misleading contexts, such as "footage of low-cost housing being built in Algeria" being misidentified as a project of the Traoré regime, said the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).

The propaganda has wide reach and is being shared relentlessly, with pro-Traoré "social media warriors" stopping at nothing "to build and defend" his image, said The Africa Report. "It's algorithmic populism; emotional, visual, anti-Western and hyper-sharable," said researcher Alidou Werem.

'Frustration, pride and hope'

Burkina Faso's ties with Russia have helped in the creation and distribution of pro-Traoré propaganda. When Traoré seized power in a 2022 coup, his regime quickly "ditched former colonial power France in favour of a strong alliance with Russia", said the BBC. In turn, Russian media "has become a major player in promoting Traoré's pan-Africanist image".

Since March 2024, Russia conducted at least 19 "distinct disinformation campaigns" across Burkina Faso, as well as neighbouring Niger and Mali, said FPRI. Alongside similar Chinese efforts, these "coordinated campaigns have allowed Russia and China to build their influence in the Sahel at the expense of the West" and are "contributing to cycles of violence" in the region.

"Burkina Faso offers a terrifying glimpse into a world hurtling into the future while still stuck in the past," said FPRI. With a literacy rate of under 35% as of 2022 and government repression of journalism, deciphering fact from fiction in Burkina Faso is no easy task. Sophisticated deepfakes and AI manipulation can easily slip through the cracks.

But while some Traoré supporters believe the videos are real, others don't seem to care as long as it feeds "a real hunger for strong, authentic African leadership", said New Lines. Deepfakes and mislabelled videos "are going viral not because people are being fooled, but because they tap into frustration, pride and hope".

The Caribbean nation of Anguilla is a "small island with a big secret", said Skift. It holds "one of the most lucrative pieces of digital real estate in the world": the website domain name .ai.

When the internet was first carved into country codes in the 1980s, laying the "groundwork for the digital era", no one could have imagined that "two little letters" could have the power to change the fate of a nation.

But for an island that's home to fewer than 16,000 people, the assignment of its domain name has turned out to be a "hidden Caribbean goldmine" – lying dormant for years, before becoming a valuable commodity.

A 'windfall'

After years of obscurity, Anguilla's domain exploded in popularity. The "continuing boom" in artificial intelligence (AI) following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, led to increasing numbers of companies and entrepreneurs paying the island nation to "register new websites with .ai tag", said the BBC.

With demand high, the financial windfall has been staggering for the Eastern Caribbean nation. In 2023 alone, a "surge" in .ai registrations created EC$87 million (£24 million) in income, said the International Monetary Fund, "just over 20% of the government's total revenue for the year". For a nation that has been "heavily dependent on tourism", the .ai boom is "diversifying the economy" and making it "more resilient".

For Anguillians, this twist of fate feels "lucky", said The New York Times last year. The nation didn't invent artificial intelligence, but its country-code internet suffix is now powering it – to the benefit of its people. The unexpected revenue has been routed towards offering "free healthcare for citizens 70 and older", said last year, with a budget "doubled" for sports activities and events, and funds also going towards improving the island's airport.

"Some people call it a windfall", Anguilla's former premier Ellis Webster, told the newspaper. "We just call it God smiling down on us."

'Cashing in'

The future is bright for Anguilla, as its government expects revenues from its domain name to "increase further" to EC$132 million (£36.4 million) in 2025, and EC$138 million (£38.1 million) next year, said the BBC. But an undisclosed cut will have to go to a US tech firm, Identity Digital, hired by the island to help "manage its burgeoning domain name income".

However, Anguilla isn't the first country "cashing in on demand for websites with distinctive address endings", said The Associated Press. Montenegro's .me domain is popular among those "who want to claim their pronoun for personal branding", while Colombia's .co web address has been claimed more than two million times.

Perhaps the most successful case is the "chain of coral atolls and reef islands" that make up the remote nation of Tuvalu, said The Washington Post in 2019. In 2018 the country profited to the tune of "$19 million (£14 million) in licence fees" from its .tv web domain – otherwise known as "the worldwide metonym for broadcast entertainment". And "thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites", it appears that profits won't be slowing down any time soon.

The much-anticipated rollout of OpenAI's new GPT-5 artificial intelligence model was so poorly received that it may have jammed the AI hype engine, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. After pumping up GPT-5's launch with an image of the Star Wars Death Star and claims of near superintelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was forced into an embarrassing rollback, restoring access to an older model for displeased users. Investors in other AI companies largely shrugged off the stumble—good news for Wall Street, because the field is a singular driver of stock market records. But "what sets the narrative around AI progress (or lack of) is practical application, and it's here where all AI companies are still falling short." One piece of research from McKinsey should give pause: While 8 of out 10 companies surveyed said they were implementing generative AI in their business, the consultancy group observed, just as many said there has been "no significant bottom-line impact."

Altman promised that GPT-5 would serve as "a legitimate Ph.D.-level expert in anything," said Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter. In fact, the new model delivered the same old "ridiculous errors and hallucinations." Users posted examples of GPT-5 struggling with basic reading and summarization, unable to correctly count the number of b's in "blueberry," and mislabeling handlebars and wheels on a bike. "It's no hyperbole to say that GPT-5 has been the most hyped and most eagerly anticipated AI product release in an industry thoroughly deluged in hype," said Brian Merchant, also in a Substack newsletter. "For years, it was spoken about in hushed tones as a fear-some harbinger of the future." But now all the talk of what OpenAI calls AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is just getting "waved away." It seems that OpenAI needed to demonstrate progress to investors and partners ahead of a pre-IPO sale of employee shares. Still, there "is a cohort of boosters, influencers, and backers who will promote OpenAI's products no matter the reality on the ground."

Some of the unhappiness about GPT-5 may be less technical than emotional, said Dylan Freedman in The New York Times. It's not clear that the new version is actually worse than the old one. But many users had developed an emotional link to the chatbot, asking it deeply personal questions. "And then, without warning, ChatGPT changed." The old version was often criticized as "sycophantic"; the new one, by contrast, is far less "warm and effusive." That was intentional: OpenAI found that an AI chatbot that was too human-like led frequently to "delusional thinking." But many perfectly stable users, it turned out, had built a relationship with the chatbot, and they've found GPT-5 to be a chilly companion.

Investor anxiety about an AI bubble is at "fever pitch" with fears growing that a surge in artificial intelligence investment could lead to a crash similar to 2000's dot-com bust.

Artificial intelligence has seen huge investment: 50% of venture dollars were spent on AI start-ups during the first half of 2025, according to data from CB Insights. And in those six months "AI funding exceeded spending for all of last year", said Business Insider.

Yet investors have a number of concerns. "Some are wondering whether large language models are actually powerful enough to develop the long-desired superintelligence; some fear tech companies' massive expenditures won't pay off; and some are worried that less experienced investors are getting caught up in the hype."

Why is there so much concern now?

There are a few big reasons. First, is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report which found that 95% of companies investing in generative AI have yet to see any financial returns. Given that there has been between $30 billion (£22.1 billion) and $40 billion (£29.6 billion) in enterprise investment in generative AI, the lack of returns is concerning.

Another is a warning from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that investors are getting "over-excited" about AI. He told The Verge: "Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are over-excited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes." He added that some valuations of AI start-ups are "insane" and "not rational".

Some investors are also spooked by reporting from The New York Times that Meta is looking at "downsizing" its AI division, with some AI executives "expected to leave". It could mark a significant change from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has heavily invested in shaking up his company's artificial intelligence operations in recent months.

Will the bubble burst?

It's too early to call a peak in the US stock market, "but the signs of one are starting to appear", said UnHerd. Share prices in the data mining and spyware firm Palantir fell by 10% last week, while AI chip maker Nvidia fell more than 3%, and other AI-linked stocks such as Arm, Oracle and AMD also fell.

Is it all doom and gloom for investors?

Not necessarily. If comparisons to the dot-com bubble are apt, there are likely to be some big losers – and some very big winners.

Although many companies went under during the dot-com bubble, many companies survived and went on to become market leaders – most notably, e-commerce giant Amazon.

"Even when the dotcom bubble burst, there were a handful of fairly obvious winners that eventually came roaring back," said CNBC's Jim Cramer. "If you gave up on Amazon in 2001, you missed the $2 trillion (£1.4 trillion) boat."

Audiences at Oasis reunion shows aren't just middle-aged people remembering the music of their youth – Gen Z are also lapping up the 1990s nostalgia, even though none of them can remember the decade.

It's because people can "feel nostalgic for a past that predates them", known as "historical nostalgia", wrote nostalgia expert Clay Routledge in The New York Times.

Golden age

Gen Z, who were born between 1997 and 2012, are "specifically captivated by what life was like in the analogue past", wrote Routledge, and they seem to be "mining" it to "enrich their present lives", particularly by "fostering a greater appreciation for offline living".

"At some point" during the past 15 years, wrote Daisy Dunn in The Spectator, "it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age". This feeling even extends to those who can't remember them because Gen Z, who know only the "colourless, anodyne first years of the new millennium", "speak of the 1990s in mystical tones".

I thought that I saw the 1990s through "rose-tinted specs because it was the decade of my childhood" but those years are "worthy of nostalgia and deserve the envy of those who didn't experience them".

Gen Z members see the 1990s as "less stressful" than now, when they're "weighed down by concerns about climate change, war and artificial intelligence", said France 24. Students are adopting the "baggy jeans and bucket hats" that were a "staple" of Liam Gallagher's wardrobe in the 1990s.

The Oasis reunion tour continues to offer various generations their very own 1990s revival. Although the band continued until 2009, the reunion setlist includes only one track, "Little by Little", to indicate that the band "existed into the 21st century", wrote Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Other than that, it's a "shameless trip back to the 1990s".

Objectively brighter

Millennials are also enjoying the 1990s revival. There's a "sudden rash of nostalgic food rebrands" of "everything from Nik Naks to Walkers" and "Bacardi Breezers", which is "tapping into 30-somethings' apparent yearning to return to our 1990s childhoods", wrote Emily Watkins in The i Paper. It was a "simpler time, when the worst thing that could happen was being sent to bed before 'Top of the Pops'".

Each generation "loves to romanticise the good old days, whether or not they were actually better" but "for my generation, they were". Houses were more affordable, the internet "hadn't yet melted our brains" and "economically, politically, culturally, life was objectively brighter".

All this has us "feeling more than a little nostalgic – for the decor as well as the music", said Liz Lane in House Beautiful. If you want a 1990s-themed home, she recommends lots of "rich colours" like navy blue, burgundy and mustard yellow. You can also add "quirky decor items like a vintage record player or retro radio", and "bring back shabby chic", which was "one of the defining styles of the decade".

The UK's safeguarding minister has called for an overhaul of the main tool used to decide if a domestic abuse victim needs urgent support.

Jess Phillips told the BBC's File on 4 that the current Dash assessment "doesn't work", amid mounting evidence that it fails to correctly identify those at the highest risk of further harm.

Violence against women and girls accounts for 20% of all recorded crime in England and Wales, according to the National Police Chiefs' Council. A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK; in the year to March 2024, there were 108 domestic homicides in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.

How does Dash work?

The Dash (Domestic, Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-Based Violence) assessment is a checklist, co-developed by domestic-abuse charity SafeLives. It features 27 mainly yes or no questions put to victims – including "Is the abuse getting worse?" and "Has the current incident resulted in injury?"

The victim's answers produce a score that's meant to determine their risk of imminent harm or death. Answering "yes" to at least 14 questions classes a victim as "high risk" and guarantees intensive support and urgent protection. No specialist support is guaranteed to anyone who gets a "medium" or "standard" risk score.

Since 2009, the Dash risk scores have been relied on by many police forces, social services and healthcare workers to determine what action is taken after a reported incident, although practitioners are encouraged to use their "professional judgement" to override low scores or to escalate a case if there are multiple police callouts in a year.

What's wrong with it?

Academics, domestic abuse charities and bereaved families have long raised doubts over the accuracy of the Dash assessment.

As far back as 2016, the College of Policing review found "inconsistencies" in Dash, and recommended a different tool for frontline police responders. And in 2020, a London School of Economics study of Greater Manchester Police data found that, in nearly nine out of ten repeat cases of violence, the victim had been classed as standard or medium risk by Dash.

In 2022, an analysis by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Seville found that the Dash questions "contributed almost nothing" to its performance as a predictive tool, and, earlier this month, an investigation by The Telegraph identified at least 55 women who had been killed by their partner after being graded only standard or medium risk.

"Too many have died without help, as the Dash system failed to recognise the true threat they faced," said Alicia Kearns MP, the shadow safeguarding minister.

Pauline Jones, the mother of Bethany Fields, who was killed by her partner in 2019, a month after being graded a medium risk by Dash, put it more directly: "When you hear about the Dash, and you know your daughter's death was so easily preventable, it destroys not just your heart, but your very soul.”

Is there a better option?

Dash has "obvious problems", said Phillips. She is reviewing the entire system but "until I can replace it with something" that works better, "we have to make the very best of the system that we have." Any risk assessment tool is "only as good as the person who is using it".

Some police forces have adopted Dara, the tool that the College of Policing has developed, instead of Dash. Other forces and organisations, in the UK and abroad, are calling for a more radical overhaul, using using new technology to assess future risk. "In certain contexts," said Forbes, "AI-enabled tools are making it easier to discreetly gather evidence, assess personal risk and document abuse – actions that were previously unsafe or more difficult to carry out."

What happened

Nvidia and AMD have agreed to pay the Trump administration 15% of their revenue from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, the Financial Times and other news organizations reported Sunday.

President Donald Trump in April had banned Nvidia and AMD from selling China their H20 and MI308 AI chips, respectively, and the chipmakers "agreed to the financial arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses" granted last week, the Times said.

Who said what

The "quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented," the Times said, and followed a meeting last Wednesday between Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The Trump administration announced last month that it would reverse its ban on H20 sales to China, but it did not issue the export licenses until Friday.

"We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets," Nvidia said in a statement Sunday. The deal is attracting criticism both because companies don't usually "essentially pay for export licenses" in the U.S. and over concerns the chip "will boost China’s AI ecosystem and military," The Wall Street Journal said. "It's wild," Geoff Gertz at the Center for New American Security told Reuters. "Either selling H20 chips to China is a national security risk, in which case we shouldn't be doing it to begin with, or it's not a national security risk, in which case, why are we putting this extra penalty on the sale?"

What next?

The "highly unusual financial agreement" could "funnel more than $2 billion to the U.S. government," The New York Times said. The administration has "not yet determined how to use the money," the Financial Times said, citing sources.

Jobseekers who manage to land interviews are increasingly facing a new hurdle: being interviewed not by an HR manager but a robot.

You might worry that artificial intelligence is "coming for your job", but it might also be "coming for your job interviewer", said The New York Times.

'Paradoxically humanising'

Although some aspects of job searches, such as screening CVs and scheduling meetings, have become "increasingly automated over time", the interview had "long seemed to be the part of the process that most needed a human touch", said The New York Times. But now AI is "encroaching upon even that domain".

AI interviewers can be a "godsend" for middle managers, said Fortune. The tech can help save time in first-round calls, allowing human interviewers more time to have "more meaningful conversations" with applicants in the next round.

Like it or not, this is a "new reality" that jobseekers "will have to put up with no matter what", said Futurism, because the industry sees it as a "way to free up time for overworked hiring managers", particularly for "high-volume hiring" in areas such as customer service.

This might seem like a dehumanising development, but supporters insist that the opposite is true. "It's really paradoxical" but "in a lot of ways", this offers a "much more humanising experience", Arsham Ghahramani, co-founder of Ribbon, a company that produced an AI interviewer, told The New York Times. AI can screen the avalanche of applications and then "ask questions that are really tailored to you".

'Added indignity'

Yet many jobseekers view AI interviewers as "another hurdle in the intense hunt" for work, said Fortune. Some told the outlet that they're "confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected" when "robotic, faceless bots" join interview calls. This is an "added indignity" and a "red flag for company culture", they said.

Many said they're "swearing off" interviews conducted in this way, because AI interviewers make them feel so "unappreciated" they'd prefer to miss potential job opportunities, and they reason that the company's culture "can't be great" if human bosses won't interview them.

However, "not all AI interviewers are created equal", said Fortune: there are "monotonous, robotic-voiced bots with pictures of strange feminised avatars", but some produce a "faceless bot" with a "more natural-sounding voice". And, unlike humans, AI interviewers can focus on "relevant signals" while "ignoring irrelevant signals" including those "linked to social class, demographic status, and any information likely to decrease fairness", said Forbes.

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Google has set out its next steps in developing artificial intelligence which could eventually be able to complete real-world tasks at the same level as humans.

The tech giant's DeepMind AI division is working towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical level of AI that can carry out tasks autonomously. To do this, DeepMind is using a new "world model", Genie 3, a simulated environment that can help train AI agents like robots with realistic replicas of situations and environments.

The company said it expected Genie 3 to play a "critical role as we push toward AGI" and the prospect of AI taking on more real-world jobs. AGI is often "viewed through the prism of potentially eliminating white-collar jobs", said The Guardian, and changing the workforce as we know it.

How far away is AGI?

The AI market is increasingly competitive, with tech companies in a race to achieve AGI. OpenAI and Meta are among the biggest companies openly pushing the development of AGI, the latter assembling a taskforce for what it is calling "personal superintelligence", which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was "now in sight".

When AGI will actually be achieved is unclear, however. Google has suggested it could arrive at the start of the 2030s, while other experts predict it will be the second half of this century.

The differing predictions are because there is "no universally accepted definition of AGI", and tech firms are using "different benchmarks to measure whether they’ve achieved their own definition of AGI", said BuiltIn.

There is agreement, though, that it will eventually happen and have a significant impact on jobs, with companies like Amazon already suggesting it will cut its workforce as AI provides more and more "efficiency gains".

What kind of jobs are most at risk?

A report from Microsoft shed some light on the kind of jobs that may disappear as AGI develops, suggesting that "knowledge work" – jobs in "computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support" – will be the main ones under threat. It also said that sales work where the main part of the role is "providing and communicating information" could be replaced by AI.

The report listed 40 roles that are most likely to be affected by AI, with five including interpreters and translators, historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, and writers and authors. Jobs least at risk were also outlined, which include largely manual occupations such as dredge operators, bridge and lock tenders, water treatment plant and system operators, and foundry mould and coremakers.

The rise of AI will also create other jobs to assist it, like engineers who manage the AI and the data it uses to function.

Is it already happening?

Some data suggests that AI has already been responsible for job losses, mostly in the technology industry. According to a report by US outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, since 2023 there have been 27,000 job cuts in the US directly linked to AI.

But other data suggests that AI has yet to begin taking over "entry-level jobs in knowledge-intensive industries", said The Economist. Unemployment among US graduates who take these kinds of jobs remains low, while the "share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly", despite these being the kind of jobs touted to be taken over by AI.

Relatively stable low unemployment and steady wage growth data also suggest AI is yet to seriously bite in the jobs market. This could be because companies are yet to adopt AI for "serious work", and if they do use AI, they do not necessarily cut jobs, instead "AI may simply help a worker do their job faster, rather than making them redundant."

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the American economy, but something more is happening: Increasingly, it is the economy. That might not be a good thing.

"Big Tech is becoming an even more important part of American prosperity," said The Washington Post. Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft are collectively "on track to spend more than $350 billion" building AI centers. That spending is large enough to be a "countervailing force" to a U.S. economy that appears to be "decelerating" under the weight of President Donald Trump's tariff and immigration policies. But that growth has also raised concerns among economists who believe that a healthy economy has a diverse range of activities. The AI sector "seems to be carrying the economy on its back now," said Callie Cox of Ritholtz Wealth Management.

A "small number" of tech companies are now "spending more than the 340 million American consumers" who have traditionally been the engine of U.S. economic growth, said Axios. The downside: Tech has always been a "cyclical" sector that booms and busts, with the "dot-com" bubble of the late 1990s being the most famous example. Many of today's AI industry leaders "never lived through those cycles." Is this time different?

What did the commentators say?

The AI sector is "so big it's propping up the U.S. economy," said Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine. Apple became the first $1 trillion company in 2018. Now "there are nine $1 trillion+ tech companies" with much of that growth happening over the last two years "on the back of the AI boom." And over the last six months, tech spending on AI infrastructure "added more to the growth of the U.S. economy than all consumer spending combined." The question now: If AI is undergirding the economy, "what happens if the AI stool does get kicked out from under it all?"

All that tech sector spending on data centers is "draining American corporations of cash," said Greg Ip at The Wall Street Journal. But while AI has "obvious economic potential," the payoff "remains a question mark." Investors were "throwing cash at startup web companies" during the "nascent internet boom" of the late 1990s. A lot of those companies went bust, leading to a recession in 2001. That kind of downturn "looks far-fetched now," but if tech companies prove over-optimistic, "their current pace of capital spending will be hard to sustain."

What next?

Wall Street is happy with tech companies for now, but the "urgency to show a payback from generative AI spending will only intensify," said Richard Waters at the Financial Times. While many businesses plan to employ AI, "few have put it into full-scale use." Big Tech "may not have all the answers" about how the technology will be used. Instead, they are investing massively in the belief "they are best placed to figure it out." Bigger is not always better, however. The release of the Chinese-made DeepSeek AI chatbot earlier this year is a warning that "smaller, cheaper AI models" could be "serious competition" to America's tech giants.