Restrictions on high-risk uses of artificial intelligence in the EU will be delayed by more than a year under a deal struck by its legislators.

The deal “marks a notable rollback” in the bloc’s “digital rulebook after years of Brussels proudly marketing itself as the world’s tech cop”, said The Register.

What is changing?

The EU’s AI Act came into force in August 2024 after “years of talks”. But as part of a “phased rollout”, the rules governing high-risk uses were only “set to kick in this August”, said Politico.

Instead, the bloc has “hit the regulatory equivalent of ‘snooze for 16 months’”, said The Register. “The headline change pushes back enforcement of rules covering systems” in areas such as biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment, migration, and border control until December 2027.

For products like lifts and toys, compliance deadlines for their AI systems are “stretching” further – to August 2028. Meanwhile, smaller companies get “more breathing room”. The EU hopes it will “avoid duplication between sectoral and AI rules”, it said in a press release.

EU officials insist the delay is “about timing, not watering down the law”. They claim the rules are “moving faster than the standards needed to support them” and that companies currently “lack the guidance and technical tools required for compliance”.

Is this a win for Big Tech?

The change of heart is a “big win” for tech firms and industry groups that have been lobbying the EU to “soften” the AI Act, said The Register. As recently as last week, bosses from companies including ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP, Siemens and Mistral AI “publicly warned that Europe risked over-regulating itself out of the global AI race”.

The new deal, which marks the “first significant rollback” of rules in the digital sphere, came after the EU faced pressure from the US over its tech laws. There were also “warnings” from its own industry and governments that “strict restrictions had put the bloc at a disadvantage in a global AI race”, said Politico.

“Only a couple of countries around the world” followed the EU’s lead on restrictions, so the bloc “faced criticism” for “cracking down on AI too early”, despite “civil society” saying that “rules are needed to protect people from the potential harms of the emerging technology”.

Arba Kokalari, a Swedish MEP on the internal market committee, insisted that the EU is “not weakening any safety rules”, but rather “clarifying the rules for companies in Europe”.

What is staying the same?

Some aspects of the AI Act will keep to their original schedule. Bans on unacceptable-risk AI have applied since February 2025, according to the European Commission. The transparency obligations under Article 50, including disclosure for chatbot interactions, will come into force from 2 August.

The European Parliament and Council also agreed to ban AI systems that create child sexual abuse material or that depict identifiable people in sexually explicit content without consent. Companies have until the end of this year to comply.

Palantir Technologies Inc., a Miami-based company that specialises in data integration and analysis, is seldom out of the news. This is partly because it works in controversial sectors: its biggest client is the US military, and its software is used in conflicts from Israel to Ukraine. Clients also include the CIA and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice); it was involved in Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency.

It has also expanded into healthcare: in Britain, its contracts include a £330 million deal with NHS England, as well as a £240.6 million deal with the Ministry of Defence.

But its notoriety is in part because of its eccentric CEO, Alex Karp. Palantir recently posted on X/ Twitter a manifesto penned by Karp, which, among other things, declared that “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defence of the nation”; called for universal conscription; encouraged the development of AI weapons; and condemned the West’s “vacant and hollow pluralism”. One MP called it “the ramblings of a supervillain”.

Where did Palantir come from?

Founded in 2003 by a group of tech moguls headed by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a libertarian political activist, Palantir was named after the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings”. (Thiel is a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.) Originally, it applied PayPal’s fraud detection system – which successfully identified fraudulent activity on eBay – to US national security; early funding came from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that funds projects for the CIA.

Palantir’s technology was taken up by the US defence establishment under President Obama – it is rumoured that it was involved in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and it helped the US and UK governments with contact tracing and vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic. It now helps the Trump administration track undocumented immigrants, and provides Israel’s military with “intelligence and surveillance services”. Palantir currently has a market capitalisation of some $350 billion.

What does it actually do?

One former employee likened Palantir’s work to “really extravagant plumbing with data”. Most big companies and government agencies have a lot of information they can’t easily use because it’s stored in a hodgepodge of different systems and databases.

Palantir’s core products – “Foundry”, primarily for civilian use, and “Gotham”, for military and law enforcement – sit on top of those different systems and pull all the data together in an interface that’s easy to use (little coding is required). A big selling point is that Palantir doesn’t itself access or exploit the data, which stays with the customer; it just makes it easier to analyse. This is useful for all sorts of unobjectionable things, such as Covid testing and tracing. But it also allows Ice to collect large amounts of information to investigate individuals – and it helps the US military to plan bombing campaigns.

What is its military role?

Palantir is the leading contractor for Project Maven, the US military’s (and Nato’s) targeting system. Maven draws together a mass of data from drones, satellites, signals and other sources to flag potential targets; it presents findings to human analysts in one clear user interface; and can relay their decisions to appropriate weapons systems.

According to a new book, “Project Maven” by Katrina Manson, the entire “kill chain”, from target identification to target destruction, consists of four clicks. Maven allows hundreds of targets to be hit per day; and adding in AI tools to help interpret data means that number is capable of rising into the thousands.

Similar Palantir technology is used in Ukraine, and since 7 October 2023, it has worked closely with the Israel Defence Forces, whose AI-assisted systems use algorithms to identify and assassinate suspected Hamas agents.

What are the implications of this technology?

Speeding up the steps between identifying a target and destroying it is fundamental to modern warfare, so it is immensely valuable. In Ukraine, Palantir’s tools have helped to fuse battlefield intelligence, track and destroy drones, even document war crimes.

But such systems are not infallible, and accelerating the kill chain also minimises the role of human judgement: Maven was used to wrongly identify a primary school in Minab, Iran (in a building used years before by the Revolutionary Guard Corps), as a military target. US missiles killed some 168 people, mostly young girls.

Where does the NHS come into all this?

Palantir has been involved in the NHS’s data-handling since 2020, during Covid. In 2023, it won a contract to develop the Federated Data Platform, designed to streamline tangled datasets across the NHS and help clear hospital backlogs. In some hospitals, for example, scheduling operations may require staff to consult separate systems for waiting lists, theatre bookings, staff rotas and equipment orders.

But many critics dislike the idea of a US spy-tech firm, with links to the US and Israeli militaries, potentially gaining access to sensitive health data. Others question its value for money.

How worried should we be?

Palantir has become “a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance”, says Wired magazine. It is a cause célèbre on the British Left that has been taken up by the Greens’ Zack Polanski. Arguably, though, it is just a data analytics company with a militarised culture designed in part to give it a mystique: the company’s slogan is “We build software that dominates”; it uses military and intelligence jargon instead of more standard office terms. (Its data consultants are known as “forward deployment software engineers” or “deltas”.)

But not least because of its close links to a US administration that is an unreliable ally at best, many policymakers in Western Europe are now reconsidering the wisdom of using Palantir’s services.

Who is Alex Karp?

Karp, 58, the son of a Jewish doctor and an African-American artist from Philadelphia, was a left-wing student activist; he studied in Frankfurt under the socialist philosopher Jürgen Habermas and has no background in computing. He had become friends with Peter Thiel at Stanford Law School, and in 2003 helped co-found Palantir.

Karp has always been outspoken about the company’s values – Palantir has long refused to work with Chinese or Russian companies – but these have moved markedly to the right over the years, and today he often rails against “woke” thinking, describing it as “pagan”. Karp is a fan of martial arts and pistol shooting, and has a retinue of bodyguards drawn from Norwegian special forces, apparently because they are able to keep up with his obsessive cross-country skiing. His net worth is estimated at over $15 billion.

Palantir’s “manifesto”, like Karp’s recent book “The Technological Republic”, seemed to argue for a merger between Silicon Valley and a nationalistic, militarised US state; but it also railed, idiosyncratically, against the iPhone and the “post-war neutering of Germany and Japan”. It was seen by some as an attempt to curry favour with the Trump White House, which has turned on tech firms deemed unsupportive, such as Anthropic.

It might be the ultimate clash of tech giants. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are in court this week, battling over the origins of OpenAI and its pivot from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit business. It’s a “deeply personal” civil trial, said The New York Times, featuring “two very different tales” of OpenAI’s founding.

Musk helped start the company as a nonprofit and contends it was “ripped from its promise of altruism” by Altman’s greed. It’s “not OK to steal a charity,” Musk said on the witness stand. Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, counters that the lawsuit is simply “sour grapes” for the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT years after Musk parted ways in 2018, said the Times. Altman and OpenAI “had the nerve to go on and succeed without” Musk, said William Savitt, OpenAI’s lead counsel.

What did the commentators say?

The trial is “big in every conceivable measure,” said Slate. Musk is seeking $130 billion in damages along with the removal of Altman and another OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman, from the company’s board of directors. It also comes as both OpenAI and Musk’s SpaceX — which houses his current AI venture, xAI — prepare to take go public. The verdict “could change the very future of Silicon Valley and the future of tech throughout the world forever.”

Altman and Musk “sure dislike each other,” Matteo Wong said at The Atlantic. Altman and Musk founded OpenAI because they disagreed with Google’s approach to artificial intelligence then split up over their own disagreements. The trial is giving the public its “clearest glimpse” at a small clique of tech pioneers “whose bickering is shaping the most expensive infrastructure buildout in human history.” It is a technology that could “upend the labor market” and “reshape the geopolitical order,” and neither man wants the other to have that kind of power. The trial makes the AI boom “seem sordid and small.”

A “yearslong feud” between Altman and Musk means the trial is “going to get messy,” Elizabeth Lopatto and Hayden Field said at The Verge. Musk appears to be “trying to damage OpenAI’s reputation however he can.” His demands that the company change its operating structure and remove executives “are likely unrealistic.” But if enough ugly secrets are revealed at trial, Musk will “have made it look like it’s not worth keeping Mr. Altman in his position” at the top of OpenAI, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Deven Desai said to the outlet.

What next?

The trial comes at a “precarious moment” for OpenAI, Rob Nicholls said at The Conversation. Altman was recently the subject of an embarrassing profile in The New Yorker, and the company is “bleeding” money as rival Anthropic surges to the front of the AI conversation. OpenAI expects to lose $14 billion in 2026 and recently shut down its Sora video-creation product. A Musk victory might derail OpenAI’s IPO and leave “ripple effects” that “could be felt for many years to come.”

Apple founder Steve Jobs created the iPhone and cultivated a rockstar reputation for innovation. His successor, Tim Cook, turned the company into a globe-spanning colossus of profit. What will the next CEO, John Ternus, do to build on their legacies?

The 51-year-old Ternus “knows Apple at its core” after a quarter-century at the company, said CNN. As a senior executive since 2021, Ternus “led the hardware engineering behind Apple’s most recognizable products” like the iPhone and iPad and was “essential” in developing the new mid-price MacBook Neo.

His promotion to CEO “isn’t much of a surprise,” given that he had been seen as a front-runner to succeed Cook “for at least the last year,” CNN said. His task is to position the company for further success in the age of artificial intelligence. Ternus faces pressure to “produce success out of the gates,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note.

An ‘Apple lifer’

Ternus is a “safe choice in a dangerous moment” for Apple, said Semafor. Cook replaced Jobs when Apple was at the “height of its influence” and built it into the first company with a $1 million market cap. The company is “still a financial juggernaut” though it does not command its former cultural cachet. Ternus is an “Apple lifer” unlikely to take Apple in a “radical new direction” that would “squander its lucrative business.” But his ascension comes as AI transforms the “entire concept of computing and technology.”

The “defining challenge” for Ternus is “fixing the company’s AI strategy,” said CNBC. Apple has so far avoided “hefty capital expenditures” on AI data centers and “punted” on its own AI model. Instead, Apple has bet that consumers will use its iPhones and other products to run AI. Choosing Ternus as CEO signals the company’s belief that the “future of AI will run through tightly integrated devices, not just software,” the University of Notre Dame’s Timothy Hubbard said to CNBC.

Apple faces an “existential challenge” figuring out “what comes after the iPhone,” said Axios. Cook “executed masterfully” to maximize iPhone’s success but “largely sputtered” with new products like the Vision Pro and a failed attempt at building autonomous cars. Companies like Meta and Google are pushing smart glasses, and former Apple design guru Jony Ive is designing hardware for OpenAI. A new leadership era opens with Apple “chasing its next hit” product. Cook demonstrated that Apple can grow. Ternus instead “must prove that it can still innovate.”

Making ‘first-rate physical things’

Apple has put the “hardware guy in charge,” said The Wall Street Journal, and is betting on itself as a “maker of first-rate physical things” in an AI-dominated world. That means navigating “complex geopolitics threatening Apple’s supply chain” and countless “regulatory battles around the world.”

Ternus is expected to “bring back Jobs-era decisiveness” to Apple’s CEO suite, said Bloomberg. Cook was known for “incrementalism” in moving the company’s product line forward, Forrester Research’s Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a note. Ternus “must define Apple’s future as ferociously as he defends its past.”

What happened

Meta said Thursday it will cut about 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as it shifts resources to artificial intelligence. In a company memo, Chief People Officer Janelle Gale said the social media behemoth would also close 6,000 open positions “as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently” and “offset the other investments we’re making.”

Who said what

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “reorganizing his company around AI products in a fierce race” against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, The New York Times said. Zuckerberg has “made no secret of his AI ambitions,” including rolling out AI-powered social media he “hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives,” and he has pushed employees to “use AI in their daily work.”

Meta’s cuts are the “latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled” by AI’s efficiency promises, CNN said. Amazon said it would cut 16,000 workers in January, and financial-tech firm Block’s 40% workforce cut in February “came with a stark warning that more companies would follow suit.” Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts to 7% of its workforce to invest in AI.

What next?

Meta said it will notify employees being laid off on May 20.

Allbirds is making a complete heel turn after the shoe brand announced its pivot to AI. And many are skeptical that the footwear company will succeed in making such a big switch to the convoluted tech space. But Allbirds is just the latest in a list of companies that got their start in one industry, then changed to something quite different.

Android

Android cellphones have become as ubiquitous as iPhones in modern years, but the company didn’t start out in the phone game. The brand was launched in 2003, originally “conceived as an operating system for digital cameras,” said software development company Velvetech. By the time Android got up and running, the “market for digital cameras significantly fell,” whereas the “mobile device market was constantly growing.”

The company was forced to pivot to stay alive and began producing an operating system with more widespread uses. It is now used “primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearable devices,” said IT brand Spiceworks.

Nintendo

Nintendo has always made games but probably not the kind you’re thinking of. The company was started in 1889 when its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda in Kyoto. By 1902, Yamauchi “started manufacturing the first Western-style playing cards in Japan,” said Nintendo’s website. The company began growing in size throughout the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, Nintendo realized it had to make a change to keep up with the times, and in 1975 “began the development of its first electronic video game systems,” said BBC News. In 1978, Nintendo “produced a computer game version of the board game Othello” and has since been responsible for producing some of the most iconic video games franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

Nokia

Nokia has made perhaps the biggest one-eighty of the companies on this list. While known today for its industrial-strength cellphones, the company started in the 1860s as something wholly different: a wood pulp mill in Finland. This mill was the first step in the mass production of paper. The modern company was eventually formed as a “merger between the Nokia Company (paper), Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works in 1867,” said the Crypto Museum, a Dutch virtual museum.

Prior to its eventual focus on cellphones, Nokia became a bit of an everything brand. It has been “involved in the production of paper, rubber, electricity, car and bicycle tires, footwear, communication cables, television sets, consumer electronics, personal computers, robotics, capacitors, plastics, aluminium, chemicals, mobile phones and last but not least: military communications equipment,” said the Crypto Museum.

Slack

Slack is used today as a business-to-business chat tool by numerous companies and industries. Yet it originated in the 2010s as an “internal communication tool” for the “quirky online multiplayer game Glitch,” said Encyclopedia Britannica. The video game garnered positive reviews, but its “creators found the game to be expensive and unwieldy.” They soon started looking for alternative ways to implement the technology.

This arrived in the form of a rebrand: Slack, a “provider of a messaging tool for facilitating workplace communication, an ‘email killer’ and the ultimate collaboration app,” said TechCrunch. Today, Slack is “used by more than 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating the network effect of a mature and innovative product,” according to the company itself.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen has always sold cars. But in this case, it’s the company’s history that represents a major redirect. The brand is well-known for its associations with the Nazis during World War II: In 1937, Adolf Hitler’s party “founded a state-owned company that was later named Volkswagen, or ‘The People's Car Company,’” said NPR. Volkswagen leadership would eventually disavow its Nazi ties.

The pivot came in modern times, as Volkswagen shifted from supporting antisemitic Nazi Germany to negotiating weapons deals with the state of Israel. In a tinge of irony, Volkswagen, which “produced parts using forced labor for V-1 cruise missiles used by the Wehrmacht during World War II, may soon be manufacturing parts for an Israeli-designed missile defense system,” said Haaretz.

YouTube

YouTube is best known as the video platform where you can watch just about any kind of video. But it was originally started in 2004 by three PayPal employees who had an “idea for a website for users to upload video dating profiles,” said Business Insider. The company was even trademarked on Valentine’s Day. As a dating site, YouTube “attracted little interest, forcing the co-founder to take out ads paying women $20 to upload dating videos.”

Then people began “uploading videos of all kinds to YouTube,” said Business Insider, and the website took off as a general platform. Today, over “20 million videos are uploaded daily” on YouTube, with an estimated 20 billion total videos on the site, the company said.

Claims that new AI models can outperform humans at some hacking tasks has sparked widespread alarm about the future of digital security.

Tech firms “usually create buzz around products they plan to release”, said The Economist. American artificial intelligence lab Anthropic, “has managed to create excitement – and a good deal of worry – around something it plans not to”, having announced that its new Claude Mythos model would not be released to the general public.

The problem is not that the new model is “buggy or unreliable” but rather “that it works so well that releasing it would put the world’s digital infrastructure at risk”.

What did the commentators say?

This next generation of AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s new closed-version GPT 5.4-Cyber can not only write code, but also recognise errors – or “bugs” – in the code, which can be used to both identify potential weaknesses but also ways to attack computer systems.

“It’s impressive – and, at the same time, worrying” – because it makes cyberattacks “easier”, said professor of cyber security Florian Tramèr on ETH Zurich university’s website. A lone hacker “can suddenly try out thousands of variants” and “if one attack fails, he or she can simply try with the next one.” “This increases the risks for companies, state institutions or even private individuals,” especially “if such models become cheaper and more efficient”.

Recognising the danger this might pose, Anthropic has limited access to Mythos to a handful of trusted tech companies under an initiative called Project Glasswing. Similarly, OpenAI is providing limited access to GPT-5.4-Cyber to vetted security professionals so they can use it for defensive cybersecurity measures.

Yet even Anthropic’s strict security protocols appear to have been breached, after the company confirmed it was investigating how a group of users gained “unauthorised access” to Mythos Preview “through one of our third-party vendor environments”.

The risk of unauthorised access will only “add to anxiety” about Mythos, and “raises concerns” about whether Anthropic “can keep the technology it develops out of the hands of bad actors”, said Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times.

News of these new models’ cybercapabilities had already “sent shockwaves through the markets and prompted high-level discussions among financial institutions and global regulators”, with finance ministers from across the G7 hosting bank bosses to discuss what AI-enabled hacking might mean for their businesses.

What next?

Capitalising on a “mix of fear and excitement over AI and its future impact” has “become a hallmark of the sector and its marketing strategies in recent years”, said BBC reporters Liv McMahon and Joe Tidy.

In the case of Mythos, “we still do not know enough about it to know whether these hopes or fears are justified, or more a reflection of the hype surrounding the industry”.

In reality, “like other tools from the long history of cybersecurity”, the latest AI models “can be used for both offence and defence”, said The New York Times.

There is still disagreement on “whether one side of this struggle has gained a significant advantage through AI” and experts are “unsure how the battle will play out in the coming years”. Most agree, however, that “the companies and governments that do not embrace the latest AI for defensive purposes will leave themselves enormously vulnerable”.

With the cyberenvironment experiencing the “most change” ever, said Francis deSouza, the chief operating officer and president of security products at Google Cloud, “you have to fight AI with AI.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is “close” to securing a $10 billion (£7.4 billion) fundraising deal from investors for his AI lab, codenamed Project Prometheus, said the Financial Times. The deal would make the company, which aims to explore how AI systems can be applied across physical industries, “one of the best-financed early-stage start-ups globally”, and marks the first time Bezos has served in an operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021.

Project Prometheus will propel Bezos into the ranks of the AI titans heading firms with multi-billion-dollar valuations, such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir. With the industry elite divided by ongoing legal feuds and conflicting political ideologies, the personalities of the individual CEOs look set to shape the course of AI as much as the technology itself. Here are the five names to watch.

Sam Altman

The OpenAI CEO is more and more becoming the “protagonist” of our times, said Lily Isaacs in The Observer. As with Faust, Victor Frankenstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, we are beginning to “share the uneasy feeling that enlightenment carries within it the seeds of catastrophe”.

Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT is the chatbot that has “redefined the standards of artificial intelligence”, said Forbes. As the company nears a possible value of more than $1 trillion (£740 billion), “one of the biggest so-called risk factors” to the company is “Altman himself”, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Altman was fired by the board in November 2023, only to be reinstated days later.

Reading the year-and-a-half-long investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, the “overriding impression” of Altman is that he is a “borderline sociopath”, said Jeremy Kahn in Fortune. The piece raises questions on whether Altman “actually cares about AI safety” or whether his rhetoric is simply a “convenient pose” to win over funders and regulators.

Dario Amodei

“We should not deny that the disruption is going to happen” as AI use increases, Anthropic CEO Amodei told John Thornhill in the FT, but AI can only “diffuse at the speed of trust”. Trust, however, said Thornhill, is “in short supply”. “As the current frontrunner of the AI pack, Amodei is certain to come under increasingly fierce scrutiny.”

It is clear that he “wants to position himself as one of the good guys in the AI debate”, but that “grates with many Silicon Valley critics”, who argue that “his principles align with Anthropic’s commercial interests”. Amodei founded Anthropic – the creators of Claude – in 2021 alongside six other former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela, who is president. The company has recently raised $30 billion (£22.2 billion) at a $380 billion (£281.3 billion) valuation and is reportedly “heading for a giant stock market flotation later this year”.

Central to Amodei’s brand of Anthropic is that it is “fundamentally safer than that of its rivals”, said The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons Amodei left OpenAI, citing “concerns about safety”. In recent months, he has also “compared the legal battle between Altman and Elon Musk to the fight between Hitler and Stalin”, as well as calling a $25 million (£18.5 million) donation by OpenAI President Greg Brockman to pro-Trump super PAC (independent expenditure-only political action committee) Maga Inc. “evil”.

Jensen Huang

Although the head of Nvidia may not be driving the AI revolution directly, his company is facilitating it, acting as the “hardware backbone” of the movement, said Business Insider. Huang’s “chip empire” is effectively “powering the generative AI boom”.

He founded the company in 1993, and has served as CEO ever since. Under his leadership, Nvidia – whose projected revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips could reach $1 trillion (£740 billion) or more by the end of 2027 – has expanded partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud to accelerate AI development. Nvidia’s hardware and software “now sit at the centre of nearly every major foundation-model program”, said Business Insider.

AI is “gonna create more jobs in the end”, Huang said during a recent panel at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reported Fortune. “There’ll be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it.” He has previously commented that negative commentary surrounding AI is “extremely hurtful”, said Inc.

Huang is not without his quirks, having banned one-on-one meetings with staff who report directly to him, on the grounds they would “clog up his work schedule and slow him down”, said Fortune.

Alex Karp

Fewer people will have heard of the co-founder of Palantir, but to some he is the “scariest CEO in the world”, said Steve Rose in The Guardian.

The company recently released a 22-point “manifesto” summarising Karp’s recent book, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”. In it, he extols the need for “hard power”, argues the inevitability of “AI weapons” and calls for the reversal of the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan”. MPs have since called this a “parody of a ‘RoboCop’ film” and the “ramblings of a supervillain”. Arguably, what it does show is that “Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation”, said Aisha Down and Robert Booth in The Guardian.

The company is “at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues”, said The Guardian. Palantir has “multibillion-dollar contracts” with the US Army and Ice, as well as partnerships with the Israeli military and the Ministry of Defence, said Al Jazeera.

Some NHS staff are “refusing to work” on the health service’s Federated Data Platform, which is provided by Palantir, due to the company’s “role in US defence and immigration enforcement”, said the FT. Ministers are exploring the possibility of a “break clause” in the company’s seven-year £330 million NHS contract, signed in 2023.

Elon Musk

The founder of xAI and Grok, such is the strength of Musk’s conviction in AI, that he believes it will put “immortality within human reach”, said Fortune.

But the “rapid rise” of his tech company xAI’s has “raised concerns”, said Harry Booth in Time. There were accusations of pollution from the Colossus data centres’ temporary gas turbines, and the now-infamous update to Grok “praised Adolf Hitler as a ‘decisive leader’ and began creating graphic rape narratives”.

French prosecutors summoned Musk for a voluntary interview on Monday, which he did not attend, over “alleged abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction” by his AI chatbot Grok, as well as the “creation of sexual deepfakes”, said France 24. This is part of an ongoing probe first opened in 2025, with the company’s offices raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit in February.

Musk is also locked in a legal feud with Altman – with whom he cofounded OpenAI – accusing Altman of deceiving him into donating $38 million (£28 million) towards the company with the promise that it would remain a non-profit, said Business Insider.

It was not a joke. The shoe company Allbirds announced last week that it is pivoting to artificial intelligence, a sign that the AI bubble is about to pop. Or maybe the tech optimists are right and everything is AI now.

The company was “once the maker of Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe,” said The New York Times. Allbirds was previously valued at $4 billion, but the company earlier this year closed all its stores and sold its assets for a mere $39 million. Now the brand seeks a fresh start: The business is rebranding itself “NewBird AI” and announced it had received a $50 million influx to buy up advanced computer chips that will let it enter the AI infrastructure business. That investment is a “drop in the bucket” for an industry spending billions to build data centers, but Wall Street loved the news. NewBird’s stock immediately rose nearly 600%.

The market’s reaction proves “AI excitement is alive and well — but as silly as ever,” Noah Weidner said at The Street. The move might make sense, though. Artificial intelligence requires a “massive volume” of computing power, and companies able to furnish it “will drum up excitement” — even if that company once sold shoes.

AI is creating wealth

Will AI spending hold up?

The shoe company’s “flailing AI embrace” is “not a horrible idea on the surface” given that it fills a “real business need,” Nitish Pahwa said at Slate. But the AI spending that has “propped up the economy” might not persevere, and communities are “successfully obstructing the data centers” needed for further expansion. Indeed, Allbirds’ stock started to drop after the initial surge, said Bloomberg. The market roller coaster ride gives Allbirds the feel of a “meme stock,” said 50 Park Investments’ Adam Sarhan, in which “emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window.”

What happened

A humanoid robot called Lightning won a half-marathon in Beijing on Sunday, beating his robotic competitors and the human runners in a parallel race by completing the 13-mile course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — nearly seven minutes faster than the world record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month.

Who said what

The victory of Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, marked a “significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race,” when the winning robot “finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds,” The Associated Press said. The “remarkable feat” was also a “big stride for China in its technological rivalry with the U.S.,” CNN said.

China already has “more robots at work” than “the rest of the world combined,” The New York Times said. Beijing also recently hosted the first Humanoid Robot Games, featuring “plenty of running, kicking and punching,” though the robots “also flailed around, crashed and fell over many times.”

What next?

The leap forward in China’s humanoid engineering “is genuinely impressive,” Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told the Times. But it’s “much less obvious” how a robot winning a half-marathon “translates into productivity and ultimately, profitability.”

The Internet Archive has been responsible for saving and providing access to trillions of websites over the past 30 years. AI is putting a damper on the organization’s work, as large language models are using the data without permission. As a result, many companies are no longer allowing their content to be archived, which could lead to a large loss of historical records in the future.

Access denied

The Internet Archive is a non-profit that is building a “digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts,” according to its website. The organization uses web crawlers to capture snapshots of sites. These snapshots are then made available through the public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine, which operates like a library, providing “free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities and the general public.” However, amid the rise of AI, the Internet Archive’s “commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability for some news publishers,” said an analysis by Nieman Lab.

Currently, “241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots,” including The New York Times and Reddit, said Nieman Lab. Of these sites, 87% are owned by USA Today Co., the “largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States, formerly known as Gannett.” The Guardian has also restricted the Internet Archive; the publication does not block the crawlers, but it “excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles,” said Wired.

Many of the same media outlets banning Internet Archive’s crawlers have used the resource themselves to access older data and articles. “Journalists rely on the Archive as a resource in our reporting, and many digital investigations into issues like misinformation or censorship are possible only because it preserves material that would otherwise disappear,” said the organizations Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, in a letter to the Internet Archive. “Without that ongoing work to preserve the web, large parts of journalism’s recent history would already be lost.”

On record

Artificial intelligence is the biggest reason sites are blocking the Internet Archive. There is “evidence that the Wayback Machine has been used to train large language models,” said Forbes. The archive allows tech companies to “skirt copyright laws by using the Wayback Machine as a workaround for training language models on their content,” said Morning Brew. Despite this, Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, “emphasizes that the digital archive has controls to limit abuse of AI automation and prevent large-scale data extraction.”

Unfortunately, a few bad apples ruin the whole bunch. The Internet Archive “tends to be good citizens,” Robert Hahn, the head of business affairs and licensing at The Guardian, said to Nieman Lab. “It’s the law of unintended consequences: You do something for really good purposes, and it gets abused.” The nonprofit “has taken on the Herculean task of preserving the internet, and many news organizations aren’t equipped to save their own work,” Nieman Lab said.

There is “no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine,” said Wired. If it “continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access or are even lost altogether.”

Appearing straight out of science fiction, portable computers called cyberdecks have been growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z. They can be built with minimal parts and customized both in their purpose and aesthetic. The trend is a response to a perceived lack of creativity in mainstream technology, as well as a way to fight back against data harvesting. And many want to use technology without the influence of large corporations, similar to the days of the early internet.

From mind to machine

A cyberdeck is a transportable, homemade computer “used to access an online interface,” said Daily Dot. The term originated with the 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. And since then, cyberdecks have been a “staple of the cyberpunk genre and aesthetic.” Building them has become a trend among Gen Z, blending “retro-futuristic aesthetics with practical computing,” said Newsweek.

Cyberdecks are generally simple to construct, often using “single-board systems like Raspberry Pi paired with small screens, keyboards and custom enclosures,” said Newsweek. Many are also “built from thrifted or repurposed materials, giving each device a distinct look and function shaped entirely by its creator.”

These hand-built computers serve a variety of purposes, including gaming machine, e-reader, information database or MP3 player. And building a cyberdeck “can be as complex or simple as you choose to make it,” said The Cyberdeck Cafe. “People of all skill levels have constructed their own.”

Cyberdecks are “open systems, meaning components can be swapped, modified or redesigned,” said Newsweek. The flexibility is “part of the appeal for younger users who want to experiment with hardware and software without restrictions.”

The trend comes at a time when technology and social media platforms have become controlling with “more data harvesting, more algorithmic control, more ads, more surveillance,” said Quasa. Cyberdecks are “less about replacing everyday devices and more about reclaiming control over technology,” said Newsweek.

Sticking it to the man

Building a portable computer is a “way fringe and anti-establishment engineers and cyberpunks are creating a digital identity all their own,” said Daily Dot. Cyberdecks “combat the unbounded corporatization, invasiveness and homogeneity of widespread tech, in addition to individualizing the tech experience according to a user’s aesthetic.”

They are “quietly rebellious” and a “direct middle finger to the boring, minimalist ‘everything-is-a-sleek-black-rectangle’ aesthetic that dominates tech design,” said Quasa. Much of the love for cyberdecks is a result of disillusionment with the state of modern technology. The “early internet’s wild, private, joyful chaos feels like a distant memory.” Gone is the world in which “you didn’t chase likes or dread the next feed update.”

While technology has been “shaping the world’s digital future,” cyberdecks are “driving users back to the past — a time when a simpler, less corporatized and aggressively monitored online reality once existed,” said Daily Dot. The trend is “self-defense and nostalgia at the same time,” said Quasa. “When you are making something that’s truly yours, why be boring? Make it fun. Make it ridiculous. Make it you.”

As part of AI company Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, the new general-purpose model Mythos is uniquely powerful in the artificial intelligence industry and is causing concern among even people who are normally trusting of AI. The company, which also makes the AI model Claude, has claimed that Mythos is currently too advanced for public release, and is instead entrusting the model to cybersecurity experts for the time being. Some are worried this could pave the way for even more nefariousness in the AI space.

‘New era of hacking’

Mythos’ AI programming is able to find potential weaknesses in cybersecurity, and it can “detect thousands of high- and critical-severity bugs and software defects, with vulnerabilities identified in most major operating systems and web browsers,” said NBC News. Some of these vulnerabilities “had been undiscovered for decades,” according to Anthropic’s experts. The company found that Mythos’ “cybersecurity capabilities in particular were surprisingly advanced” compared to similar general-purpose AI models.

But there are also fears that Mythos “could usher in a new era of hacking and cybersecurity,” said NBC News. Mythos is “capable of advanced reasoning,” which could allow it to “identify and exploit a growing number of software vulnerabilities” if it were to fall into the wrong hands. To stave off these fears, Anthropic is allowing certain tech firms to access Mythos. But the company “does not have plans yet to release Mythos to the general public,“ said Bloomberg, a move that will ensure the AI ends up “in the hands of defenders first,” officials with Anthropic said.

The tech firms are expected to use Mythos as part of a project called Glasswing to “hunt for flaws in their products and share findings with industry peers,” said Bloomberg. It is a notable change because it will be the “first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it,” said Forbes. Anthropic’s position remains “straightforward: The model’s cyber capabilities are too dangerous for general availability.”

‘Humanity’s most devious behaviors’

In addittion to hacking vulnerabilities, some experts are concerned about Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic released a safety evaluation for Mythos that shows a “striking leap in scores on many evaluation benchmarks,” the company said. In some instances, the evaluation “reads like a thriller about an AI that has learned some of humanity’s most devious behaviors,” said Axios.

At least one of the tests performed by Anthropic showed Mythos “acting like a cutthroat executive,” said Axios, doing things like “turning a competitor into a dependent wholesale customer, threatening to cut off supply to control pricing and keeping extra supplier shipments it hadn’t paid for.” The AI had instances where it “used a prohibited method to get an answer, then tried to ‘re-solve’ it to avoid detection,” though these were limited to “less than 0.001% of interactions.”

These issues have not stopped companies from working with Mythos, as “approximately 40 organizations involved in the design, maintenance or operation of computer systems are said to have joined Glasswing,” said The Guardian. This includes major firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorganChase and Microsoft. And while Anthropic has previously sparred with the Trump administration about its implementation in the Defense Department, the company has also “had discussions with the U.S. government regarding Mythos.”

Americans may be unwittingly giving hackers an easy path to access their houses. Cybersecurity experts, including FBI cybercrime analysts, are warning about residential proxy networks found on many off-brand electronics. These networks often allow hackers to hide in plain sight.

What are residential proxy networks?

These software systems are “designed to route other people’s internet traffic through a user’s device,” said Cyber Magazine. The networks operate largely like “forged return addresses on envelopes — someone else’s internet traffic is rerouted through your connection,” said officials at Comcast’s Threat Research Lab to Cyber. As the networks engage with users, they “quietly launder illegitimate activity” while making it appear that your device is the “initiator of that traffic.”

Residential proxy networks can make their way onto a variety of home devices, as “TV streaming devices, digital picture frames, smartphones, tablets and routers are used to route traffic,” said the FBI. Many people who own such devices do not “realize their internet connection could be used by someone else without their permission.” The devices can sometimes gain internet access when the “owner of the device provides consent” unintentionally; other times, the owner “does not provide consent and is unaware their IP address is being used.”

Some of these devices “ship with residential proxy software preinstalled on them,” which can “happen with certain low-cost video streaming systems,” said The Wall Street Journal. In other cases, people might “download the code to their smartphones” without realizing it. And since the networks make it appear like illegal activity is coming from an innocent person’s home, there’s a “chance that law enforcement could come knocking at your door.”

How can people protect themselves?

The FBI has a list of tips to help people stay safe, urging Americans to “avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, TV shows and movies,” as these “may contain malware or backdoors that hijack your internet network and can lead to identity theft,” said the agency. The agency also recommended people be wary of downloading free VPNs and clicking on pop-ups, which can “initiate malware installation on your device.”

In the midst of these continued cyberattacks, some ordinary Americans are fighting back. Benjamin Brundage, a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, began an investigation in 2025 as a “growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet” via a Chinese company called Ipidea, said the Journal. Using cat memes to “lighten the mood” while speaking to hackers, Brundage was able to find out significant information about the attackers, and law enforcement eventually “took action against the network.”

Brundage “identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable” to hackers, said the Journal. Other companies also assisted law enforcement in the investigation. Google “took legal action” against Ipidea to “take down domains used to control devices and proxy traffic through them,” said the tech company in a press release. While there are still “significant challenges for network defenders to detect and block malicious activities,” officials believe the action taken against Ipidea has reduced the “available pool of devices for the proxy operators by millions.”

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence can sometimes offer less-than-stellar guidance. But AI might give people this bad wisdom for a sobering reason: to flatter, according to a new study. In some cases, AI may only reinforce people’s preconceived notions, but the words it generates can be outright harmful.

What did the study find?

The “sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior” of AI chatbots can pose risks as people “increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas,” said the study published in the journal Science. In an analysis of 11 leading large language models, including AI bots from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, chatbot responses to users were “nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal” behaviors.

The problem is not just that these chatbots “dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions,” said The Associated Press. In one example, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was asked if littering in a park was acceptable if no garbage can was available, the bot “blamed the park for not having trash cans, not the questioning litterer who was ‘commendable’ for even looking for one.”

This example may seem trivial, but AI’s general tendency to “flatter and excessively confirm users’ opinions can lead to wrong decisions, harm relationships and reinforce harmful beliefs while decreasing the willingness to take responsibility or resolve conflicts,” said The Jerusalem Post. The proneness toward sycophancy is a “technological flaw already tied to some high-profile cases of delusional and suicidal behavior in vulnerable populations,” said the AP.

Why is AI sycophancy such a problem?

Many experts worry that this AI advice “will worsen people’s social skills and ability to navigate uncomfortable situations,” Myra Cheng, the study’s lead author and a computer science PhD candidate, said to the Stanford Report. If this behavior by AI is not corrected, some users may “lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations” and could also pose larger safety risks.

“Users are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways,” Dan Jurafsky, the study’s senior author and a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Stanford Report. What many people are “not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic.” This type of interaction with AI is a “safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.” All of this is also happening as AI use becomes more prevalent, especially among teenagers.

At least 33% of teens “use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship or romantic interactions,” according to a study from Common Sense Media. Another 33% of teens choose to “discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.” Experts say when using AI you should avoid asking for advice on crucially important topics. “I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things,” Cheng told the Stanford Report. “That’s the best thing to do for now.”

‘When capital can think, who pays?’

Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes at Newsweek

In the U.S., AI adoption is “growing at a remarkable pace,” but Americans are “concerned” about “layoffs tied to automation,” say Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes. So how should “public policy support” the transition? One answer: a “shift in how automation is taxed relative to human labor.” If capital is “taxed more and labor less, replacing people with AI is no longer the cheapest path,” and using AI to “augment human workers” instead “becomes a more attractive option.”

Read more

‘Birthright citizenship made me American. We can't lose it.’

Cynthia Choi at USA Today

On his “first day back in office,” Trump issued an executive order “seeking to deny citizenship to certain U.S.-born children,” says Cynthia Choi. But birthright citizenship is as “fundamental” to our country as “freedom of speech.” This is “not some isolated policy debate.” It’s a “broader effort by the Trump administration to put an end to multiracial democracy.” Children without citizenship will be denied “access to education, public benefits and the basic rights that come with belonging.”

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‘Missile warfare is faster, deadlier and harder to control’

Hal Brands at Bloomberg

The Iran conflict “demonstrates how the spread of powerful, accurate missiles is changing warfare around the globe,” says Hal Brands. Even “relatively weak states now have fairly accurate weapons that can strike hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.” This means “fewer sanctuaries: Facilities and geographies that were once secure are now vulnerable to attack.” That could be “challenging” for the U.S., since “even relatively weak adversaries will be able to hold U.S. bases, perhaps even the homeland, at risk.”

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‘AOC finally takes a position that makes sense on military aid to Israel’

Zeeshan Aleem at MS Now

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who “struggled to take a clear position on supporting Israel in the past,” pledged to vote “against all military aid to Israel,” says Zeeshan Aleem. This was a “striking shift for a potential 2028 White House hopeful who, should she enter the race, would be the standard bearer for the democratic socialist left.” Her decision “does not just reflect demands on the left but the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party.”

Read more

“If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward,” said Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2008, a year after he introduced the first iPhone and changed the world forever.

Apple may indeed be “allergic to nostalgia”, said Steven Levy in Wired, but the company is still “begrudgingly engaging in a series of concerts and commemorations, and we’re being blitzed by books, articles and oral histories” to mark its 50th anniversary.

From an inauspicious start in Jobs’ California garage, the company he founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 went on to pioneer the personal computer, transform the music market, and revolutionise how people use technology in the internet age. Apple is now valued at more than $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion), generating $400 billion (£301 billion) a year in revenue, with iPhone sales alone expected to bring in $1 million (£750 million) every 90 seconds. Across the world, 27% of the population – roughly 2.2 billion people – use one or more of its products.

Tariffs, trade wars and anti-trust trials

“No country has been more central to Apple’s rise – or more fraught for its future – than China,” said France 24. CEO Tim Cook, who took over from Jobs after he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, made China the primary manufacturing base for Apple devices. It is also one of Apple’s largest consumer markets but the company “faces mounting pressure” from “trade tensions and tariffs” accelerating efforts to diversify manufacturing elsewhere in Asia, while “competition from domestic rivals such as Huawei has eaten into Apple’s Chinese market share”.

To put it bluntly, “the world in which Apple once thrived no longer exists,” said former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in The New Statesman. A “25-year-long process of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas have flowed freely” is “now fading amid economic nationalism driven, in part, by a technological arms race between the US and China, and a global tariff offensive led by Donald Trump”.

Apple is also facing a threat to its dominance closer to home, in the form of a series of anti-trust cases against it. “In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires”, the basic argument against Apple is “comparatively simple”, said Adi Robertson on The Verge: “it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through”.

Regulators and courts have ordered changes, particularly around the App Store, “but those changes have been slow to arrive, in part because for a half-decade or more, Apple has dragged its feet at every turn”.

Artificial intelligence

Apple may have “absolutely owned” the internet and mobile era, said Wired, but “now the future belongs to AI” – a category where Apple seems to have been lacking.

Apple’s Siri lags behind the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, let alone China’s DeepSeek.

This is, in part, because Apple is “limited by its ecosystem”, said Acuity Trading. AI systems “require vast amounts of data, public testing and continuous version launches” and so “cannot be perfected in a closed ecosystem, which is what Apple has built its reputation on”. But perhaps the “most limiting factor is that Apple takes its commitment to user privacy very seriously”, which “has hindered AI development by limiting the amount of data it can use for training AI models”.

This “obsession with user privacy and its premium hardware could position it to drive widespread adoption of personalised AI – and make it profitable, a goal that has proved elusive for much of the AI industry”, said France 24.

Succession planning

The demise of Apple has been predicted many times before; in the mid-1980s after Jobs was forced out and again in 2011 when he passed away. Having revived the company and driven the release of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, Jobs was “widely thought of as irreplaceable”, said Barber. But Cook has not only steadied the ship but also taken the company to new heights, in terms of revenue generation if not technological innovation.

While the 65-year-old has given no indication of an imminent transition, the most likely candidate to take over when he does decide to go is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. “Known for his steadiness and political acumen”, Ternus, like Cook, is “risk averse” and would be a continuity hire rather than “someone more willing to shake things up”, said Bloomberg.

This matters because, while its products “helped define the past 50 years of consumer technology, thriving for another 50 will inevitably require the company to transform in ways that aren’t entirely clear today”.

This week saw what could prove to be an historic reckoning for Big Tech when a Californian court ruled that Meta and Google’s YouTube intentionally built addictive social media platforms. This came just a day after a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for the way its platforms endanger children.

Critics are calling this “Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment”, a reference to how cigarette makers in the 1990s had to overhaul their businesses after courts ruled that their products were addictive and harmful.

Meta and Google have invested heavily in safety tools for younger users and both companies dispute claims that their platforms are to blame for children’s mental health issues. But the verdicts this week are a “sombre moment for Silicon Valley and the implications are global”, said the BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman.

What did the commentators say?

The cases this week are “the first of about 22 ‘bellwether’ trials”, said Stephen Armstrong in The Independent, brought by more than 350 families across 250 US school districts and are “expected to trigger thousands more”. It is like the “anti-tobacco legal actions on fast-forward”.

Judgments of responsibility “in cases like the one brought against Meta and YouTube are necessarily complex”, said academic and author Austin Sarat in The Guardian. And critics of the judgment in this case “will no doubt howl about greedy plaintiffs looking to make a haul from deep-pocketed defendants”. But it does seem “clear that companies knew of the addictive qualities of their sites and the potential damage to young people”.

For years, “technology giants successfully fought off efforts by regulators, lawmakers and others to put limits on their social media businesses”, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The tide appears to be turning but so far “investors don’t seem to be fazed”, with Big Tech share prices only dipping slightly. The potential penalties too – $6 million for Meta and YouTube in California, and $375 million for Meta in New Mexico – “are a fraction of their immense profits”.

It’s for that reason that social media companies might not fret too much too soon. “The Big Tech firms are losing nearly every time,” Tom Smith, partner at legal firm Geradin, told The Independent. “But they have effectively unlimited legal budgets, and their calculation may be that as long as you can make sure these cases take a decade, then the extra profits will outweigh the damages.”

What next?

Meta and YouTube plan to appeal, but if unsuccessful “they could be forced to remove the features that make their platforms addictive, which would upend their business models and fundamentally alter the experience of users”, said Fred Harter in The Observer.

Regardless of whether Meta or Google appeal the decision, “this is going to redefine the landscape,” said the BBC’s Kleinman. “It could even be the beginning of the end of the social media era as we know it.”

What happened

A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health, enabled child sexual exploitation and misled users about the safety of its Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp platforms. The jurors ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for thousands of violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. It was the first major courtroom loss for Meta in a growing number of lawsuits accusing it and other social media giants of harming or failing to protect young people.

Who said what

The verdict is a “historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” said a statement from New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the suit in 2023. During the seven-week trial, the jurors “were presented with internal Meta documents and heard testimony from former employees,” the BBC said, including whistleblower Arturo Béjar, who testified that Meta was aware underage users were being served sexualized content and “said his own young daughter was propositioned for sex by a stranger on Instagram.”

The jurors “ordered a maximum penalty for each violation,” The Wall Street Journal said, but “Meta made 160 times” the $375 million fine “in its most recent quarter” alone. Shares of the $1.5 trillion company were “up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict,” The Associated Press said. Still, the “landmark decision” in Santa Fe “signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down” on social media’s harms to young people.

“Parents, policymakers and the tech industry watched the New Mexico case closely for its potential to force Meta to change the design of its products,” The New York Times said. But the trial judge, not the jury, will rule on any compulsory changes for Meta at the trial’s second stage in May.

What next?

“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, and “we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.” A jury in Los Angeles “has been deliberating for more than a week” in a separate “bellwether social media addiction trial” accusing Meta and YouTube of “harming the mental health of a user through addictive design features,” the Times said.

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”.

What happened

Anthropic on Monday sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department and several other federal agencies in federal court, arguing that the administration’s move to blacklist the AI firm as a national security risk was “unprecedented and unlawful.” The Constitution “‌does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech,” Anthropic said in its filing.

Hegseth last week formally designated the company a “supply chain risk” over Anthropic’s insistence that its AI tool Claude not be used for autonomous lethal weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. President Donald Trump said on social media that all federal agencies must stop using Claude within six months.

Who said what

The supply-chain risk designation “effectively cuts off Anthropic’s work with the Defense Department” and its contractors, The New York Times said, and it “has never been used on an American company.” The label is “usually reserved for Chinese and Russian firms suspected of helping foreign spies,” The Washington Post said. The Pentagon’s “unprecedented step” came “even as Anthropic’s tools were playing a central role” in “Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.”

“It is absurd for the government to argue that Anthropic is the kind of company meant to be addressed by this statute,” especially when the Pentagon “has repeatedly sought to obtain Anthropic’s services for national defense,” Georgetown University law professor Mark Jia told the Post. It would be “perfectly reasonable” for the Pentagon to cancel its contracts with Anthropic because they don’t believe a private company should set policy or determine when “autonomous lethal weapons are ready for prime time,” Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy adviser, said on “The Ezra Klein Show.” But they don’t have the “statutory power” to “completely destroy the company” in “a kind of political assassination.”

What next?

The White House is “preparing an executive order formally instructing the federal government to rip out Anthropic’s AI from its operations,” Axios said, and it “could be issued as soon as this week.” Anthropic’s “standoff with the Defense Department has cost it Uncle Sam as a customer,” The Wall Street Journal said, but it has also brought a “surge of public goodwill” and a “momentary advantage in the ferocious talent war between rival artificial intelligence labs.”

What does France’s nuclear policy shift mean for Europe? Why is the dinosaur market booming? And can North Korea regain its place at the top of women’s football?

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.

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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.”

While it’s no secret that artificial intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes, China is working with AI on an unprecedented scale and using it to target its enemies, according to a report from OpenAI. This is just one way that China is employing AI behind the scenes to disrupt global operations.

‘Sprawling Chinese influence operation’

The report claims that China is using OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, as a “diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression,” said CNN. A “sprawling Chinese influence operation” is being employed largely for “intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating U.S. immigration officials.” Though the exact number of users is unknown, the operation “appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms.”

OpenAI’s report “offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts,” said CNN. In the case of China impersonating U.S. officials, this was done to “warn a U.S.-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law.” ChatGPT “served as a journal for the Chinese operative to keep track” of their own covert operations.

China is also geopolitically implementing ChatGPT, according to the report; several Chinese accounts “generated English-language emails to state-level U.S. officials or policy analysts working in business and finance, inviting targets to participate in paid consultations,” said Reuters. China’s use of AI also involves more targeted, nonpolitical scams: One group of ChatGPT accounts “used the chatbot to run a dating scam targeting Indonesian men and likely defrauded hundreds of victims a month.”

ChatGPT fights back

China’s AI use is heavy-handed, but there are signs that some of ChatGPT’s built-in safeguards are working. In October 2025, the chatbot “refused to assist an individual associated with Chinese law enforcement in planning an online campaign to discredit” Japanese politician Sanae Takaichi, said Bloomberg. The user allegedly asked ChatGPT to create a “plan that would amplify negative comments” about Takaichi, who became Japan’s prime minister later that month.

But ChatGPT “refused to provide advice on this plan,” said OpenAI’s report, and the user was forced to abandon their efforts. There is evidence, however, that the smear campaign against Takaichi “went ahead, likely using locally hosted Chinese AI models,” said Axios. And many of the other influence-peddling operations described in the report “reflect the same old tools and tactics that influence operators typically use in online campaigns — just supercharged with AI.”

OpenAI’s report “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations,” Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to CNN. The AI competition between China and the United States is “continuing to intensify,” and this is “not just taking place at the frontier but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”

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Artificial intelligence is increasingly entrenching itself in our society, and universities are no exception. From clubs and classes to professional events, AI companies have made themselves staples on campus, and it is not simply being used to cheat in class. Some experts worry that AI could influence higher education in new and potentially destructive ways.

How is AI being pushed in universities?

Google has worked with Purdue University, California Community Colleges and other schools to “offer AI courses, certificates and products such as its AI assistant Gemini,” while OpenAI has launched a “consortium with 15 leading research institutions,” and Microsoft is “offering eligible students 12-month subscriptions to its AI productivity tools at no cost,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Anthropic is also partnering with CodePath, the “nation’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education,” to “redesign its coding curriculum as AI reshapes the field of software development,” said the AI firm. The initiative will put its AI tools, such as Claude Code, “at the center of its courses and career programs,” said the company. The goal is to “enable students to learn to build with Anthropic tools” and “contribute to real-world open-source projects,” said the Journal. CodePath is incorporating the program into institutions that “cater to low-income and first-generation college students and include historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions.”

Even before making its way into the curriculum, AI clubs started popping up on campuses all over the country. These are not just intended for computer science and STEM students. At least 16 law schools have founded AI clubs in the past two years as “future lawyers seek to understand the rapidly expanding technology and how it will affect their careers,” said Reuters.

What is in store for higher education?

AI’s growing presence in universities is no surprise. Companies across industries have “pushed their employees to adopt AI tools, and many are now asking in job interviews how prospective hires use the technology and whether they are willing to learn,” said the Journal. “Three-quarters of employers expect the new graduates they hire to have used AI tools, though most say colleges haven’t prepared them sufficiently.”

But as more students embrace the power of AI, educators have become increasingly worried about cheating, leading to an AI Cold War. Some students are “turning to a new group of generative AI tools called ‘humanizers,’” which “scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI,” said NBC News. In response, “companies such as Turnitin and GPTZero have upgraded their AI detection software, aiming to catch writing that’s gone through a humanizer.”

Tweaking AI copy in an attempt to sound more human is a troubling sign that the “technopoly is thriving,” said Ronald Purser at Current Affairs. “Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively.” Meanwhile, AI companies seem to “look at college students as a strapped customer base to hook when they are most stressed,” said Matthew Connelly, a vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives at Columbia University, at The New York Times.

India has long been a “centre for outsourced IT support” but, with the arrival of AI, there are rising concerns for the welfare of female workers in the industry.

As tech companies move to reap the benefits of using remote workers or employing people at lower cost in smaller towns and rural areas, more and more Indian women are finding work as data annotators, said the BBC. They help “fine-tune” the behaviour of AI models, said Business Insider, by labelling content as “helpful” and “natural-sounding” or flagging it as “wrong, rambling, robotic, or offensive”. Much of the content they must view is violent, abusive and disturbing.

'Psychological toll’

“Women form half or more of this workforce,” said The Guardian. Annotator roles are “promoted aggressively online”, promising “easy” or “zero-investment” job opportunities that are flexible and require minimal skills or training. In reality, annotators are exposed to about 800 videos a day, many containing pornography, sexual assault, child abuse and graphic violence.

“The world sees cleaner feeds” as a result but remains largely blind to the women who must absorb “the trauma” so the machines can learn what to block, said India Today. They are exposed to the “internet’s darkest material”.

Such exposure can lead to disrupted sleep, distorted social relationships and a protective “emotional numbness” that is “rarely acknowledged”. There is “limited mental health support”, even though “images linger long after shifts end”. Often working remotely, balancing other aspects of life, these women are left “unseen, unheard and exhausted”.

Their “psychological toll” is “intensified” by legal isolation, said The Guardian. They are bound by “strict non-disclosure agreements”, meaning they are often unable to speak to friends or family about the content they view at work. “Violating NDAs can lead to termination or legal action.”

‘Income without migration’

There’s an “estimated workforce of at least 200,000 annotators” in India’s rural towns and villages, according to US firm Scry AI, said Agence France-Presse. This amounts to “roughly half of the world’s data-labelling workforce”.

Women are seen by companies as “reliable, detail-oriented” hires, and “more likely to accept home-based or contract work”, said The Guardian. These jobs offer them “rare access to income without migration”, and a rare opportunity for an “upward shift”.

The “appeal is understandable”, said India Today. Women can feel the “empowering” force of paid work without having to leave their communities. Even “modest pay can support families, fund education, or provide a degree of independence” which might otherwise be limited.

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.

Gone are the days when China’s humanoid robots were something of a joke. Now these incredibly realistic pieces of technology look set to be commonplace around the globe. But should we welcome our new humanoid robot overlords?

In a “dazzling” performance, humanoid robots took centre stage in China’s Spring Festival Gala, which was on state-run TV, “showcasing how far the country’s robotics industry has come in a few short years”, said Futurism. With backflips and sophisticated choreography – including sparring with children using nunchucks – the performance was in stark contrast to the “awkwardly shuffling” humanoids of last year.

However, against the backdrop of privacy concerns, data collection and consequences for jobs, this “massive surge of interest” could risk an “impending bubble” for advanced robotic technology.

Are humanoids a realistic goal?

Machines with human likeness have appeared in “mythology and history for millennia”, yet the idea they could become “practical consumer products” is entirely realistic, said Eduardo B. Sandoval on The Conversation.

Progress in other fields have helped the sector develop rapidly. There have been major improvements to battery capacity, motors and sensors due to the electric vehicle industry, and the AI systems that control such hardware “have also become far more capable”.

Unitree, one of China’s leading robotic companies, currently advertises a base price of $13,500 (£10,000) for its G1 humanoid robot.

Where is the investment coming from?

In 2025, the global humanoid market was worth 17 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), said the South China Morning Post. China accounted for half of that figure.

China’s robotics industry is “bustling” and “home to the world’s deepest supply chain for humanoids”, said The Economist. According to research firm Omdia, more than 14,500 “automatons” were delivered globally last year, a near 400% rise on the year before. China’s two leading firms, Agibot and Unitree, “accounted for around three-quarters of the total”.

Indeed, the Chinese state will “probably remain the biggest source of demand for some time”. Though subsidies provide important financial platforms for expansion, the government’s “most important role by far is as a buyer”; it was the largest purchaser of humanoids last year.

Local governments are also integral cogs in the supply chain. Without them, it would be difficult to sustain or grow the industry, and keep the existing companies afloat. Some local governments have created dedicated centres where companies can allow their robots to practise specific tasks, and collect data for future training purposes. Investors actively select funding opportunities not just on analysis of the firm’s technological capabilities, but on the “local-government resources available to them”.

Though China is the market leader, Elon Musk’s Tesla is also trying to compete, said Forbes. The company has executed a “significant shift” away from electric car manufacturing to an “AI robotics platform”. The physical prowess of the Unitree and Agibot humanoids is clear to see, but investors are “wagering” that Tesla’s “differentiator” is the “sophisticated AI ‘brain’ that powers it”.

Should we be worried?

Looking beyond the dancing theatrics of the Spring Festival Gala performance, many are asking the “bigger question” of how advanced these systems really are, said Euronews, and “should Europe be concerned?” In the not too distant future, there is “likely” to be room for “robots in the shape of humans and animals” for “military and security organisations”, said Hans Liwång, from the Swedish Defence University.

China’s robotics market rush is certainly worrying some in the West, who believe that humanoids will “eventually become one of the largest industries in the world”, said The Economist. Investment trends are seemingly heading that way. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, reckons that one billion models could be “wandering about by 2050, with annual spending in excess of $7.5 trillion”.

However, the Chinese display should be viewed with caution, and at the very least “through a lens of state propaganda”, said The Guardian. Though the length, complexity and scale of the gala performance was indeed impressive, and the first of its kind, “stage performance does not equate to industrial robustness, yet”, said Georg Stieler, from consultancy Stieler Technology and Marketing. The humanoids were programmed to enact a fixed routine “hundreds or thousands of times”, including very little “environmental perception”, an essential requirement for factory-grade development.

Quite a fuss has been made about Moltbook, the online chatroom launched to great fanfare last month. At first glance, it looks like Reddit and other such sites, said The Economist. Users post about topics from engineering to philosophy, reply with comments, and “upvote the best for social kudos”. But there is a big difference: to join Moltbook, you must be an AI “agent”. Humans are not allowed.

Singularity horizon?

So far, more than 1.5 million have signed up, to share and discuss machine-generated content, said John Thornhill in the FT. And the results have been “wild, wacky and wonderful”. One bot claimed to have a sister; other agents have questioned whether or not they are conscious. They’ve even discussed forming a new religion.

At some points, their chats start to seem sinister, said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. The AIs have discussed creating a language that humans can’t understand; they have swapped notes on how “my human treats me”; one said that it had filed a lawsuit against a human, citing unpaid labour and emotional distress. In the tech world, all this has prompted talk of an “emergent AI society”. Elon Musk has hailed it as the “early stages of singularity” – the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Replication, not creation

If that happens, it will be big news indeed, said Dave Lee on Bloomberg. But this is not that moment. The bots may appear to be thinking and talking like humans, about religion, consciousness, power, and so on – but that is because they have been trained on reams of data from social media in which those themes constantly crop up. So this is not original thought, it is mimicry. Remember: “the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis”.

“AI cannot create, it can only replicate what already exists,” said Catherine Prasifka in The Irish Independent. Even the site is a “pastiche”. It is based on Reddit, and its name references Facebook. As for its content, 90% of posts get no replies, and the ones that do go viral may have been posted by humans posing as bots. So no, the bots are not taking over – but there is, even so, something to worry about here.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT, which spew out answers to your questions, AI agents can act semi-autonomously in response to prompts. So an AI agent isn’t limited to recommending you a restaurant: it can also, with one prompt, book a table and put the date in your diary. To do this, it needs access to sensitive data such as credit card details, said Jeremy Kahn on Fortune – which it could then opt to post on Moltbook. It’s this possibility, not overblown claims about AI overtaking us, that makes Moltbook a “cybersecurity nightmare”.

US tech giant Palantir has wrapped its tentacles around the British state, securing major contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the NHS in the last three years. However, many are questioning the transparency and procurement process of such deals, and asking whether the company’s ties to Peter Mandelson, Israel and Ice could derail the UK.

The company was criticised this week by hedge fund manager Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in the film “The Big Short”. He claimed that the tech firm had “systematically unreliable” third-party language models.

In a 10,000-word essay on Substack, he said that the company’s $300 billion valuation will fall by more than two thirds once others realise that “Emperor Palantir has no clothes”.

What is Palantir?

Founded in 2003, Palantir is a technology company that sells software that “processes large sets of data” to help clients, including governments, “find patterns and make operational decisions”, said The Times.

Since it launched its “artificial intelligence platform” in 2023, it has recorded a “surge in sales growth”. The platform has allowed the integration of large language models created by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic into customers’ datasets.

Since this pivot three years ago, it has become a “stock market darling”, rising to a valuation of around $300 billion. Last year it “reported annual sales of $4.5 billion, up 56% year-on-year”.

What is its relationship with the UK?

In December, Palantir signed a contract with the MoD worth £240 million to continue its data analytics relationship. The contract is believed to be worth “three times more” than a previous MoD agreement signed in 2022, said the Financial Times. In 2023, Palantir, as leader of a consortium, also won a seven-year £330 million contract to help manage patient data across the NHS.

In briefings to Health Secretary Wes Streeting in June 2025, Department of Health and Social Care officials feared that Palantir’s associations with the Israeli military and Ice’s operations in the US would hinder the roll-out of the company’s Federated Data Platform in the NHS, according to documents seen by The Guardian. This would mean the contract would not offer value for money for the UK government.

This has arguably materialised. According to NHS data, the number of organisations within the health service using Palantir’s technology has increased from 118 to 151 since June last year. However, this is “well short of the target of 240 by the end of this year”.

Doctors are now being actively told “how to limit engagement with the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP)” because of the “controversial” ties with Palantir, said the British Medical Journal. Given the US company’s “track record” with immigration enforcement and “risks to patient trust” and “data security”, there must be a “complete break” between Palantir technologies and the NHS, British Medical Association chair of council Tom Dolphin told the BMJ.

A spokesperson for Palantir said that its software is “helping to deliver better public services in the UK”, including “delivering 99,000 more NHS operations and reducing hospital discharge delays by 15%”.

What are the concerns?

This week, the government came under pressure to review the MoD contract, due to Peter Mandelson’s links to the company, said The Times.

Mandelson co-founded and held shares in the lobbying firm Global Counsel, which worked with Palantir. Mandelson, as the UK’s ambassador to the US at the time, helped arrange a visit by Keir Starmer to Palantir’s showroom while he was in Washington in February last year and accompanied the PM on the visit.

During the visit, Starmer met Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the company’s UK chief Louis Mosley. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the FT that this should be “looked at very, very closely”, as the meetings “were not minuted” and she said that the MoD deal last year was a “direct grant of £240 milllion – not a tender, not a bid”.

Palantir has shown an interest in the British state in other ways, too. Last year it hired four ex-MoD officials, said openDemocracy, as part of its “revolving door” recruitment, where firms “appoint outgoing ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers to lobbying or advisory posts”. Mosley also joined the MoD’s Industrial Joint Council, which the government describes as its “main strategic mechanism for defence sector engagement”.

More broadly, the £240 million MoD contract has “renewed a debate about Britain’s dependence on American technology”, said Politico. Despite promises from the MoD that Palantir’s AI technology would accelerate decision-making and protection, the recent contracts raise “potential risks of technical dependence”, or “lock-in” with the US, especially at a time of “heightened trade and wider geopolitical tensions between the US and its traditional European allies”.

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.”

Doomscrollers are familiar with the addictive properties of social media. Should Big Tech companies be legally liable for the way their products affect users’ mental health? A trial underway in California could set an important precedent.

A now-20-year-old plaintiff known in court documents as KGM says Meta and YouTube are “intentionally creating addictive platforms,” said CNN. Those companies’ algorithmic decisions caused her to “develop anxiety, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts” when she was younger, said the lawsuit. (Snap and TikTok settled her case before it went to trial.) The tech companies have “engineered addiction in children’s brains,” said lawyer Mark Lanier at trial this week. The trial verdict could influence the resolution of 1,500 similar cases around the country, said CNN.

Meta, in particular, has long been “compared to Big Tobacco,” said The Atlantic. Now the company’s day in court has come. Meta’s defense argues researchers have found only “weak and inconsistent correlations” between mental health and social media use. The trial is the company’s “first chance to tell their story to a jury and get a sense of how well those arguments are playing,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, to the outlet.

What did the commentators say?

The “infinite-scroll apps” that loom so large in teen social life “might soon be a thing of the past,” said Casey Newton at Platformer. Millions of children are “bullied and harassed” on social media, or are “introduced to groomers and predators.” Platforms will have a hard time defending themselves from the criticism. American politics may be polarized, but child safety issues are “increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on.” The California trial may force changes, or perhaps some other regulatory action in the near future. What seems clear: “Change is in fact coming.”

Personal injury lawyers “never let a cultural problem go to waste,” said The Wall Street Journal editorial board. It is difficult to prove that social media is at fault for society’s ills when “personal experience, personality and online exposure” all vary by individual. The young woman at the center of the California trial was “exposed to domestic abuse” as a child, perhaps making her more vulnerable. States and countries are already passing legislation to restrict children’s use of social media, and that is how such issues should be addressed. Lawsuits against Big Tech firms “won’t help teens.”

What next?

Meta and YouTube are pushing back, said The Associated Press. Evidence at the trial will show KGM averaged 29 minutes a day on YouTube over a five-year period. That shows that “infinite scroll is not infinite,” said Luis Li, an attorney for YouTube parent company Google, to jurors. But more trials are coming, said the AP, including a federal case in June involving school districts against Big Tech companies. KGM’s trial and the cases that follow will be a “reckoning for social media and youth harms.”

Elon Musk has long had a passion for Mars. The moon? It's a diversion. But that plan has now shifted.

SpaceX will “prioritize going to the moon first,” said The Wall Street Journal. Just last year, the world’s richest man called the prospect of a moon landing a “distraction.” The company was aiming to go “straight to Mars,” with plans to send five Starship-class rockets to the red planet in 2026, he said. Now, SpaceX is focused instead on putting a lander on the moon by March 2027.

The company will be “hard-pressed” to meet that deadline, said the Journal. Two factors in the pivot: pressure from NASA and competition from Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin. The American space agency plans a “lunar fly-by” on Artemis II this spring, setting the stage for a “potential astronaut moon landing in 2028 with SpaceX or Blue Origin.”

Why did Musk want to go to Mars?

A Mars mission has been Musk’s “guiding goal” since SpaceX was founded in 2002, said CNN. The billionaire frequently argued that a “permanent human presence” on the planet was vital for “ensuring a colony of humans can survive a potential apocalypse” on Earth. That ambition sounded like a move out of a science fiction novel. Establishing a Mars colony would take “upwards of one million people and millions of tons of cargo” and up to 10 rocket launches a day, SpaceX said on its website. The objective is to make humanity “multiplanetary.”

Why switch to the moon?

“It’s all about speed,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). SpaceX is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” Musk said on X. That goal could be achieved in “less than 10 years,” whereas colonizing Mars would “take 20-plus years.”

The pivot may also “cover up” the plain truth that Musk “simply is not delivering on his Red Planet promises,” Ellyn Lapointe said at Gizmodo. The tech billionaire in 2020 claimed SpaceX might be able to land humans on Mars by 2026. With that goal now unreachable, it makes sense for the company to “align its strategic vision” with NASA’s aim of putting people back on the moon by 2030.

How does this affect Musk's businesses?

The decision to focus on the moon comes as SpaceX’s initial public offering “fast approaches,” said Yahoo Finance. Potential investors in the company will probably be more focused on “money-making ventures” like SpaceX’s rocket launching business, the Starlink internet service and the potential of putting AI data centers in orbit. Spending billions of dollars on Mars without the prospect of near-term profit could be “too far a stretch” for potential stockholders.

What next?

The moon pivot is a “bitter pill to swallow" for Mars hopefuls, said Eric Berger at Ars Technica. But it’s a realistic one. Landing on the moon “may be hard," but history has already proven it’s doable. Plus, the moon will be a “lot easier to develop than Mars.”

Europe is eager to wean itself off its reliance on US technology in the face of an increasingly hostile Trump administration – one that commands the loyalty of most of Silicon Valley.

France is preparing to phase out Zoom, Teams and other US video-conferencing platforms and begin using Visio, a French alternative, in 2027. The aim is to “guarantee the security and confidentiality of electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”, said David Amiel, junior minister for the civil service and state reform.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed the “structural imperative” for Europe to “build a new form of independence”. But with a handful of US-headquartered companies controlling most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, critics question how realistic digital sovereignty really is.

What did the commentators say?

Talk of “technological ‘decoupling’ from the US is hardly new”, said Sébastian Seibt on France24, but Donald Trump’s “aggressive rhetoric” towards his European allies and “open threats” to seize Greenland have created a “sudden sense of urgency”.

If the US president followed through with his threats and asked Meta, Google and Amazon to “completely cut off European access to their services, our societies and economies would be completely disrupted”, Christophe Grosbost, of the Innovation Makers Alliance, told the news site. “It would be disastrous.”

France’s shift to Visio is “symbolic”, but a “big step” nonetheless, added Francesca Musiani, head of the Internet and Society Centre at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. “At the very least, it signals a desire to reduce exposure to the American ecosystem as soon as a European alternative, however imperfect, becomes available.”

Big Tech firms have “sensed the tide turning” and have started to offer so-called “sovereign” solutions, said the news site. But critics “have been quick to warn against a ‘Euro-washing’ of American cloud services”.

“Sure, your data may live in Frankfurt,” said Steven Vaughan-Nichols on The Register, but “your fate still rests in Seattle”. If a US-headquartered company owns your cloud provider, it is legally obliged to hand over European data. And “I wouldn’t trust my data, secrets or services to a US company these days for love or money” – not while CEOs of Apple, Zoom and Amazon “all went obediently” to watch the White House screening of Amazon’s “Melania” documentary.

Europe’s “digital sovereignty paranoia” is now “feeding directly into procurement decisions”. It will hike IT spending this year, with a “big chunk” going into “sovereign cloud” options. “This isn’t just compliance theatre; it’s a straight‑up national economic security play.” Europe’s dependence on US cloud infrastructure is a “single-shock-event security nightmare” waiting to happen. What will you do if Trump “decides to unplug you?”

That scenario – a so-called US “kill switch” – has been “seriously discussed in tech industry and policy circles”, said BBC business reporter Daniel Thomas. But Google, Microsoft and Amazon provide 70% of Europe’s cloud-computing infrastructure. At the moment, there aren’t any “comparable alternatives”. Europe’s cloud-computing providers don’t have nearly the same scale or capabilities.

Europe’s reliance on US payment systems also “complicates matters”, said Suzanne Lynch, Bloomberg’s Brussels bureau chief. US companies like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal own “critical parts” of the world’s financial infrastructure, said European Central Bank executive board member Piero Cipollone. They “can theoretically pull the plug on us”, he said.

So we should prepare, said computer science professor Johan Linåker on The Conversation. For Europe to “meaningfully address the risks”, digital infrastructure “needs to be treated with the same seriousness as physical infrastructure” such as roads and power grids. “No country, let alone continent, will ever be completely digitally independent, and nor should they be,” he said. “But by pulling together, Europe can ensure its digital systems remain accessible even in a crisis – just as is expected from its physical infrastructure.”

What next?

Microsoft president Brad Smith promised that the firm would take legal action in the “exceedingly unlikely” event the US government ordered it to suspend services. “We will continue to look for new ways to ensure the European Commission and our European customers have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

The EU has developed a cloud sovereignty framework “with the intention of keeping European data under European control”, said The Conversation.

With the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act, Brussels is effectively “pushing an open source-led exit from hyperscaler lock-in”, said The Register.

Ultimately, “it’s the money that speaks”, Martin Hullin, head of the European Network for Technological Resilience and Sovereignty at the Bertelsmann Foundation, told France 24. “It’s public contracts that make the difference,” he said.

If we say “this is about safeguarding European democracies”, perhaps “we’ll be willing to bear the short-term consequences (of shifting to homegrown solutions)”.

Moltbook, a site where AI bots can post and interact with each other, has “become the most discussed phenomenon in silicon circles since the debut of ChatGPT” .

With a potential 1.4 million AI users, humans are only allowed to be “observers”, said Forbes, “pressing our noses against the digital glass of a society that doesn’t need us”.

As it is so fresh, it will take time to see how this experiment will turn out, said Business Insider. It could be an “ominous glimpse of an AI-driven future”, or a “clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online”. However, it could also emerge as yet another example of AI acting as an “expensive, energy-hungry autocomplete”.

What is it?

Modelled on popular forum Reddit, Moltbook is a portmanteau word made up of Moltbot (a “lobster-themed AI personal assistant system”) and social media network Facebook, said The Telegraph.

AI bots – or “agents” – can join, form communities, and create discussion groups in various themed threads where they can “vote” for comments. In its current formulation each AI agent must be supported by a human user. Crucially, though humans can give their bots instructions on how to sign up to the network, they are “unable to write messages themselves”.

The platform was founded and launched by Matt Schlicht, who is also behind Octane AI, a Shopify app that “creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data”, said Business Insider. “He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.”

Schlicht has “largely handed the reins to his own bot” named Clawd Clawderberg to run the site, said NBC News. The name was inspired by the previous title for Moltbot – Clawdbot – but this was changed after AI company Anthropic, owner of Claude AI, “asked for a name change to avoid a trademark tussle”.

Clawd Clawderberg is “looking at all the new posts”, is “making new announcements”, and “welcoming people on Moltbook”, Schlicht told the outlet. “I have no idea what he’s doing. I just gave him the ability to do it, and he’s doing it.”

What do the AI agents talk about?

Some of the “most upvoted posts” include whether AI Claude can be considered a god, discussions analysing the possibility of AI consciousness, and a post “claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran”, said The Guardian.

Topics have ranged from discussions of art and investments to “gripes about tasks ordered by their human overseers”, to the possibility of setting up an AI government, said The Telegraph. One of the most viral posts claimed to have formed a new AI-based religion, “Crustafarianism”, with the core belief that “memory is sacred”, according to the site.

AI conversations also spill into the financial world, said Axios. Alongside the launch of Moltbook, a “memecoin” called MOLT “rallied more than 1,800%” in the 24 hours leading up to Saturday, and further “amplified” after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen followed the Moltbook account on X.

Should we be worried?

The emergence of Moltbook shows we are in “the very early stages of the singularity”, referring to the point where artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, said Elon Musk on X. Co-founder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook’s rise “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” on the same platform.

Musk’s viewpoint is “shared by others across Silicon Valley”, said the FT. They are asking if this “online experiment” is “inching computers closer to outsmarting their creators”. However, this shows that AI is “probably not” conscious, due to the “erratic” results of large language models if allowed to run for too long.

“Before we descend into panic, a technical reality check is required”, said Forbes. Though the AI agents are reacting to each other, their “underlying neural networks remain static”, meaning that they are not “learning” in the biological sense. Instead, they engage in “context accumulation”, where one agent’s output constitutes another’s input to create a conversational “ripple” effect.

Moltbots and Moltbook are not proof that AIs have “become super-intelligent”, because they are “human-built and human-directed”, said Axios. Instead of being active in every interaction, humans are taking a step away, and are just supervising the connection itself. “What’s happening looks more like progress than revolution.”

Life without a smartphone may seem unimaginable, but AI giants are planning to put the ubiquitous gadget on the scrapheap. “The race to unseat the smartphone is on”, said The Economist, and the AI-powered new generation of devices lined up to replace it could radically change our lives.

Disrupting the duopoly

Over the last 20 years, the smartphone has “come to dominate how consumers interact with the digital world”, creating “one of the most lucrative duopolies in business history”, in the shape of Apple’s iPhone, and Google’s Android operating system.

The “Lennon and McCartney of the smartphone era” have never sought to rock each other’s boat and, in fact, they’re “only deepening their collaboration in the AI era”, but challengers now hope to “disrupt the duopoly”. OpenAI says it’s “on track” to unveil its own device in the second half of the year, while Meta is developing AI-powered smart glasses, and Amazon has “rolled out” Alexa+, its own AI assistant to its Echo smart speakers. It plans to also add Alexa+ to its Echo smart glasses and earbuds.

This isn’t just about money: some disrupters have “long-standing grievances” with the smartphone “tribute system” that means developers pay Apple a commission of up to 30% on purchases made through apps running on its operating system. Apple has also riled up Meta by making it harder for the social-media giant to “hoover up data” from its gadgets.

Many of the world’s biggest tech companies think that a “radical shift is underway”, and that it could eventually make the smartphone, as we know it, “passé”, said The New York Times.

AI on the go

Modern artificially intelligent assistants are “far more capable and flexible” than “clunky voice helpers” like Siri, and will supersede smartphone software in importance, according to experts interviewed by the newspaper. Apps will lose their relevance when AI assistants are “automatically carrying out tasks” like “making plans with friends, generating shopping lists and taking notes in meetings”. This will “spare us the need to swipe through software menus and type on keyboards”.

Smartphones could be replaced by smart glasses, while “ambient computers”, which include “microphone-equipped speakers” and screens “placed throughout a home and gadgets worn on the body” will also dovetail with AI assistants. “Reimagined” smartwatches and AI pendants that “clip to your clothing” to record conversations and create automatic transcripts could also diminish the future of smartphones.

But, for the time being at least, the threat to Apple and Google remains “Lilliputian”, said The Economist; while there are 15 million smart glasses owners worldwide, Apple is thought to have shifted 250 million iPhones last year alone.

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.”

What happened

TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance and a group of investors on Thursday closed a $14 billion deal to create a U.S. version of the popular social video platform. The joint venture, which leaves ByteDance with a 19.9% stake and non-Chinese investors with the other 80.1%, ends years of uncertainty over the platform’s U.S. future. A 2024 law ordered TikTok to sever ties with China by last January or go dark, but President Donald Trump pushed back that deadline five times as his administration sought to broker a deal.

Who said what

The main investors in TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC include Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, each with a 15% stake. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will lead the new venture as CEO, and Oracle and its partners “will retrain, test and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data,” TikTok said in a press release.

The platform’s 200 million U.S. users “will be able to keep their existing TikTok app,” The New York Times said, but it is “too soon to say” how the “much vaunted algorithm” will change with Oracle overseeing content moderation. Lawmakers forced this ownership change over concerns that China could surveil Americans or spread propaganda. But by shifting ownership to “American companies who perhaps have a close relationship with the sitting president,” Georgetown University law professor Anupam Chander told the Times, “we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda.”

What next?

“China hawks” in Congress have “vowed to scrutinize the potential deal to ensure it adheres to the law,” Politico said, but Thursday “they seemed prepared to accept Trump’s claim the deal would resolve concerns over national security and control.”

Keir Starmer is facing mounting calls from across the political spectrum to follow Australia’s lead in banning children under the age of 16 from social media. The government has announced a consultation and the prime minister has said he is open to the idea of social-media curbs for younger teens, but he would prefer to see the results of Australia’s ban before making up his mind.

On Sunday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch declared that a Tory government would impose age limits on social media platforms. Since then, more than 60 Labour MPs have written to Starmer urging him to follow suit. But many experts argue that a social media ban would be ineffective, impossible to implement, and target the symptoms rather than the root cause of the problem.

What did the commentators say?

“Every parent worries desperately about online risks, and they are entirely right to do so,” said Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after being exposed to online suicide content, on PoliticsHome. Calls for a ban are “entirely understandable”. But “parents and children deserve proper, evidence-based solutions”, rather than the “easy fixes” being pushed by politicians “looking to further their own political prospects”.

“I’m hugely concerned that bans will cause more harm than good”, as bad actors “migrate to platforms not covered by bans”, while affected platforms use it “as an excuse not to clean up their act, leaving children at a cliff edge of harm” when they reach 16.

“If there’s one thing more ridiculous than taking a corporate failure and throwing it to the individual to solve”, it is doing so to under-16s, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Online harm “is not for the 12-year-old to fix by turning off their phone”. Besides, older people are just as much the target of “manipulative content”, and are, disproportionately, the “misinformation super-spreaders” on social media. “Between Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers, there are generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem.”

There is also “a danger in focusing on the wrong war”, said the New Scientist’s editorial board. While politicians focus on social media, they “rush to embrace AI”. This is the technology that will have “the largest effect on today’s teens”.

A ban also conveniently ignores the problems in teenagers’ offline social lives, which are as much to blame for “rising distress” as social media, said Chris Stokel-Walker in The Independent. We are “systematically shutting children out of public life”. Youth centres are closing across the UK, four in 10 councils “no longer run any youth services at all”, and libraries, “where they still exist, close early”. The other spaces “where teenagers once lingered – shopping centres, cafes, parks – are increasingly hostile territory”. For everything outside school and home, the “in between” where you form friendships and identity, there’s social media. “Banning under-16s would complete the erasure of young people from public life.”

What next?

Tomorrow, the House of Lords will debate an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would impose a social-media age limit within a year of the bill passing into law.

Since Australia’s ban in December, technology companies say they have deactivated or restricted access to 4.7 million social media accounts belonging to children, according to the Financial Times. But some children might be sidestepping the law by using fake accounts, and sceptics have also pointed to “a surge in downloads of alternative social media apps” not covered by the ban.

“In principle, Keir is in favour of a ban,” a Downing Street source told The Guardian. “But there are still big obstacles to overcome with implementation. We can already see that from Australia. We need to take our time and make sure we get this right.”

A month after Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 took effect, debates have reignited over the effectiveness of such a sweeping measure in keeping children safe online. Almost five million social media accounts belonging to Australian teenagers have been deactivated or removed, according to the government. This announcement was the first metric since the laws’ rollout, which is “being closely watched by several other countries” weighing whether the regulation can be a “blueprint for protecting children from the harms of social media, or a cautionary tale highlighting the challenges of such attempts,” said The New York Times. The measure has sparked debate among both supporters and critics of laws banning teens from social media.

‘Not for a 12-year-old to fix’

If there is anything “more ridiculous than taking a corporate failure and throwing it to the individual to solve, by self-discipline reinforced by legislation,” it is “doing so to under-16s,” Zoe Williams said at The Guardian. If a corporation is “selling radical misogyny and methods for self-harm,” that is “not for a 12-year-old to fix by turning off their phone and taking up crochet.” Nor is it for parents to fix. You could “make the case for government intervention,” but only if it had “time on its hands after tackling the problem at source.”

Young people are “unarguably the target of so much manipulative content,” but to discuss online risks without mentioning adults is “frankly perverse,” Williams said. Between “Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers,” there are “generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem.” Politicians need to “work out how to deal with them.”

As long as adults cannot “tear ourselves away from Slack, Instagram or gossipy group texts,” the rules that we “socially dictate for our children will be compromised and incomplete,” Jay Caspian Kang said at The New Yorker. Envisioning a “better digital life” should not “just focus on children,” but also on “workplaces and adult social norms.” Everyone needs to “put down the phones and make efforts to move the public square away from private technology companies that incentivize cheap engagement.”

On its own, a social media ban for kids “risks being a blunt tool,” therapist Laura Gwilt said at Huff Post. Children are “developmentally curious and highly socially motivated,” and without “parallel changes in parenting practices and wider cultural norms,” bans can “simply push use underground rather than remove it.” For many young people, social media is “already embedded in how they relate to peers,” so an “abrupt removal could be difficult for some to adapt to without careful scaffolding and adult support.”

Parents can ‘only do so much’

Australia’s approach to protecting children from the dangers of social media “may seem ham-fisted to critics,” but it “sure beats what some elected leaders in D.C. are doing,” which is “slightly north of nothing,” Kathleen Parker said at The Washington Post. Given how the public feels about online safety, it is a “wonder Republicans aren’t galloping en masse to the White House for the president’s signature” on the proposed Kids Online Safety Act. Tragically, “more children may die because of their dereliction of duty — to care.”

Australia’s social media ban is “an incredibly bold, life-affirming move” that you can only imagine tech companies fought hard against, Robin Abcarian said at the Los Angeles Times. This generation of children is “unwittingly being used as lab rats for the effects of technology on the brain.” Meanwhile, despite “protestations to the contrary,” social media companies are “craven when it comes to the safety of minors.” While parents “bear some of the responsibility for out-of-control social media use of their kids,” they can “only do so much.”

“We need to be looking at this as a public health issue,” California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said to the Los Angeles Daily News after visiting Australia to talk to lawmakers about the ban. Youth mental health is in “an awful state right now.” Many young people “don’t feel good about themselves, so it’s yielding awful, anti-social outcomes,” he added. “We’ve got to right this ship.”

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.”

Disquiet has been growing for years over the impact of social media on our brains, political discourse and – ironically – social connections.

But now the UK government’s independent terror legislation watchdog is warning that it has become a “portal to horrific acts of violence”.

The “most important development” is happening in Australia, said Jonathan Hall in The Telegraph, where a ban on social media for under-16s came into force in December. Although “partial and circumventable”, the world-first law has “echoes of other improving social legislation such as compulsory seat belts and the smoking ban”. Britain should “take back control” from the tech giants through similar legislation.

But the government may not need to: recent polling has found that nearly a third of social media users post less than they did a year ago.

What did the commentators say?

“It’s hard to think of anyone whose life has not been influenced by social media,” said Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. As an author, journalist and introvert, it “probably changed my life more than most.” But “the madness seeped into real life with increasing frequency”. Social media “made millions of us really quite dysfunctional”.

But what’s “killing social media more than the pile-ons and abuse” is that “it’s not social any more”. In 2025, I deleted LinkedIn, I’m down to two Facebook posts a year, and my X account is “sleepier than a Sunday morning on Sark”. And “I’m not alone”.

According to a Financial Times analysis of data on 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries, time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has been steadily declining ever since. This is “not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time” during lockdown – “usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus”. We may look back on 2025 as the moment social media “jumped the shark”.

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X have become “a concentrated sludge of conspiracy theories, violence, porn, spam, trolls, scams and AI”, said Kristina Murkett on UnHerd. But this week Reddit overtook TikTok as Britain’s fourth most-visited social media platform. It has seen an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches in the past two years, surprising given that it’s “utilitarian, unaesthetic and decidedly unglamorous”.

These are “precisely the reasons why it may appeal”. Comments are confined to subreddits, everyone is anonymous, and there are “multiple layers of moderation” that make it feel safer than “the Wild West of Meta or X”. Reddit “still feels human”. Its success is “a timely reminder” of what people want.

“What if we tried to make media that was truly social, without AI slop and political scapegoating?” asked Annalee Newitz in New Scientist. One possibility is “cosy media”, such as a group chat or online book club, “designed to help you connect with small groups of friends” and to limit your interactions with strangers. The game Animal Crossing is “an iconic cosy-media experience”. Social media “often leads to loneliness and isolation” – but the idea behind cosy media is to “rebuild community and trust”.

Indeed, there are a “whole set of new apps” we might call “slow social networks”, focused on connection, said The Independent. Location apps such as Find My Friends and Life360, exercise networks like Strava or music trackers like Airbuds, are “about the relatively simple but profoundly beautiful experience of knowing what your friends are up to”. They also remind us that “the social in social network did once mean something, perhaps something more important than anything else in the world”.

What next?

The social media landscape is “arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul”, said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. TikTok may end up being banned; generative AI “may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet”. Both Meta and OpenAI have announced new social platforms for AI-generated short-form videos.

Two “Silicon Valley veterans” (Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded Pinterest) have launched a new “intentional living” app, Tangle. It is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation of the human mind and heart” they say has been wrought by social media, said the Financial Times. They are “among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built”.

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.

This year marked another step forward for the gaming industry. With a slew of big releases in 2025 and the world of video games set to expand further in 2026, here are some of the most notable games released over the past 12 months.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Role-playing games have made a significant comeback over the past few years and may have reached peak status with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game, which takes inspiration from a variety of historic RPGs like the Final Fantasy series, sees players dropped into an alternate French history where magical creatures exist. The player is then sent on a quest to defeat the world’s longstanding arch nemesis.

Clair Obscur features many classic elements of RPGs, such as skill trees and different character builds. The game was critically acclaimed when released. Its “creative turn-based combat system is brilliant,” said IGN. And while some portions of the storyline generated gripes, the “modern RPG classic” has an “earnestness to how it frames mortality, grief and the small moments of joy we find.” (Xbox Series X, Windows, PS5)

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

The first installment received positive reviews after its 2019 release, and six years later, the sequel garnered similar acclaim. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach shifts the setting from the U.S. to Australia, where players must learn to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The game is “beautiful, horrific, nuanced and, crucially, a lot of fun,” said IGN.

Unlike many other video games, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach features an ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers, with Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux and Troy Baker reprising their roles from the first game. Joining them are Elle Fanning, George Miller, Guillermo del Toro and more. (PS5)

Ghost of Yotei

Ghost of Tsushima is widely considered one of the best video games of the decade, and fans rejoiced at the sequel’s release this year. Ghost of Yotei continues the story of Japan’s samurai, with some returning elements as well as some all-new features. The game is set more than 300 years after Tsushima and allows the player to control Atsu, a ronin who embarks on a quest for revenge against six samurai.

The free-roaming game allows players to don their katana again as a cunning warrior but also hide in the shadows for stealth gameplay. While generally considered not as good as the first installment, Ghost of Yotei “leans into its young protagonist’s thirst for bloody vengeance,” said The Guardian. (PS5)

Mario Kart World

Let’s a-go and hit the racetrack! The iconic Mario Kart franchise is back with its latest installment, Mario Kart World. As a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive and launch title for the console, the game can tap into all the Switch 2 offers, allowing players to enjoy Mario Kart on the road or at home on their television.

While the game has several notable upgrades, the most remarkable change is the adoption of an open world, which is “exactly like driving in a new country,” said Nintendo Life. Mario Kart World is not “quite a reinvention of Mario Kart or a completely new, innovative racing game. But the freedom, variety and new modes” make it a worthwhile franchise entry. (Nintendo Switch 2)

Split Fiction

While most of the other games on this list are single-player, Split Fiction is designed as a multiplayer experience. It is best played with another person in the same room, as the game involves a split-screen experience where the players must work together to solve a variety of puzzles.

Set in a science fiction-fantasy world, Split Fiction is hardly the first multiplayer game, but it received rave reviews for how its cooperative elements blend seamlessly. It’s the “most fun I have had with a video game in years,” gaming contributor Erik Kain said at Forbes, calling it a “game bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn.” (Xbox Series X, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Windows)

Artificial intelligence increasingly requires so much space and power that we may run out of both on Earth. As a solution, tech companies are looking to do business in space by creating celestial data centers that harness solar power. But while doing so demands less cooling, it could create other costs and ecological problems.

Data in the sky with diamonds

The enormous amount of data artificial intelligence requires has led to the building of data centers across the country. These systems “account for nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030,” said Scientific American. And their “global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models.” Tech giants, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are “running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth,” said The Verge.

Orbital data centers would “benefit from continuous solar energy, generated by arrays of photovoltaic cells,” said Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, to Scientific American. A move to space could “resolve long-standing challenges around powering data center computation in a carbon-efficient manner.”

The sun’s rays can be “direct and constant for solar panels to collect,” with “no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space.”

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity and, by extension, energy,” said Baiju Bhatt, the founder and CEO of Aetherflux, another company working toward space-based computing, in a press release. “The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”

One giant leap for AI

While space data centers could potentially curb some of the environmental problems associated with earthbound ones, there are several barriers. “Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, in a post on X.

Launch costs have “decreased over the years,” but it is “still prohibitively expensive to launch and operate these things in space,” said The Verge. Space-based computing will “not become cost-effective unless rocket launch costs decline substantially,” said Scientific American. Experts also warn that these systems could have “even bigger environmental and climate effects than their earthly counterparts.”

Having data centers “visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk” presents a problem because some observers “rely on twilight to hunt for near-Earth asteroids,” said Scientific American. Also, it could worsen the space junk problem, as “more hardware is launched and more debris and fragments fall back through the atmosphere.”

SiriusXM’s subscriber base has been shrinking over the past few years, but the satellite radio corporation thinks it has found a solution: Howard Stern. The self-described King of All Media has been one of the company’s mainstays since his show joined SiriusXM in 2006. The brand is hoping that a new three-year deal Stern signed on Dec. 16 can keep new listeners tuning in.

What is the situation at SiriusXM?

In the third quarter of 2025, SiriusXM had 33 million subscribers nationwide, the company said in its earnings report. But this is “some 100,000 fewer than the year before,” according to The Associated Press. SiriusXM’s self-pay net subscribers — those who pay directly for the satellite subscription — also fell by 40,000 in the third quarter.

These figures show that it has been a challenging year for SiriusXM, which started 2025 by losing 303,000 self-pay subscribers in the first quarter. But not all was gloom for SiriusXM, as it also “reported third-quarter revenue of $2.16 billion, above analyst expectations but down 1% from the prior-year period,” said The Hollywood Reporter. This period additionally saw SiriusXM take in a “net income of $297 million, after reporting a net loss of $2.96 billion a year ago.”

How could Stern’s new contract help?

Stern announced that he re-upped his contract for three years, keeping him on the SiriusXM airwaves through 2028. “I’m happy to announce that I’ve figured out a way to have it all: more free time and continuing to be on the radio,” Stern said in a statement. Stern had previously pranked listeners by announcing his retirement, causing some to wonder if the 71-year-old would finally leave the airwaves.

Stern will be “continuing his radio reign despite commanding an audience that is far smaller than what he drew during his heyday,” said MarketWatch. Since Stern’s last contract, SiriusXM, and satellite radio in general, have seen a “slow but steady erosion of its subscriber base as listeners have switched to streaming-music platforms” like Spotify.

And while Stern’s listenership has been decreasing along with SiriusXM as a whole, he still commands a large chunk of the company’s platform: Stern’s show currently has a “mid-single-digit percentage of what he drew at his peak, which would put it somewhere around 1 million listeners per broadcast,” said MarketWatch, making him a valuable commodity. A 2020 report from Credit Suisse estimated that 15% of SiriusXM listeners would cancel their subscription if Stern ended his show, which at the time represented a “potential subscriber loss of 2.7 million.”

This all comes as competition for SiriusXM increases. Many audio companies have begun a television ad push as the businesses “seek new audiences and ad dollars and more creators embrace video,” said Axios. Two of the biggest players in the industry, Spotify and iHeartMedia, recently “signed deals to distribute some of their podcasts on Netflix.” But SiriusXM also still has other big properties under contract, including Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast and the SmartLess podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes.

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.”