After months of controversy over the possible use of AI by winners of prestigious awards, the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA is rewarding fiction written with the help of LLMsA prize for AI-written books has launched this week.The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA invites submissions of manuscripts co-written with AI tools, with the winner promised publication. Continue reading...
Patch or go offline, say UK, US and EU agencies as two AI-discovered flaws in PHP, the language behind most websites, allow unauthenticated remote code execution
Clogged grid queues and speculative planning applications threaten the UK’s 2030 datacentre and clean energy targets. Is a national ‘superministry’ the only way out?
UK public bodies awarded 7,994 IT contracts worth £91bn in the year to August 2026, a figure flattered by framework ceilings, while the typical award was worth £164,000
The UK government will investigate Post Office software that predates Horizon and opens up new routes to financial redress for subpostmasters as claims of unfairness continue
Capita has pulled the plug on a planned event for investors, financial analysts and shareholders to prioritise addressing Civil Service Pension Scheme issues
Observers have noted a surge in so-called ClickFix scams targeting the UK's higher education sector as threat actors seek valuable personal and research data
Volunteers and new recruits come together for ‘wikithon’ to put more detail about industry into public domain“Anyone can edit Wikipedia,” the adage goes. But, it turns out, a relatively small number actually do.What is worthy of a digital page in the world’s largest and most-read encyclopedia is decided by roughly 270,000 active volunteers, enthusiasts who populate the online resource with information on anything from 19th-century medicine to TikTok trends. Inevitably, some subjects are sidelined – the global south, notable women – but a new batch of Wikipedian recruits are waging war on one neglected topic: the arms industry. Last week, in a classroom in central London, two dozen volunteers huddled around laptops and free servings of vegan Ethiopian food for what is known as a “wikithon”, an event of collective and in-person Wikipedia editing. Some were veteran editors in their 70s, others young students who had never registered an account before. But their targets include subjects such as Palantir, Project Maven and Nitro-Chem. Continue reading...
Adriana Retyte took her own life after viewing ‘high-risk’ material on the video-sharing platform TikTokA 14-year-old schoolgirl’s death after TikTok served her suicide content has prompted renewed calls for UK watchdogs to crack down on “toxic” social media feeds.Adriana Retyte, a pupil at Langley school in Norfolk, took her own life after she viewed videos and images related to suicide on the video-sharing platform, according to a coroner who last week found her access to the material on TikTok “may have played a significant part in her decision to take her life”. Continue reading...
Intellectual property supported through funding from UK taxpayers via UKRI is not delivering a good return on investment
Ann Altman, the Open AI CEO’s sister, accused her brother of repeatedly sexually abusing her over two decades agoA judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Sam Altman’s sister against him on Tuesday. Ann Altman accused the OpenAI CEO of repeatedly sexually abusing her more than two decades ago, which he has denied.In dismissing Ann Altman’s lawsuit, the US district judge Zachary Bluestone wrote that she had refused to appear for an independent medical examination despite warnings that failure to do so would result in the case’s dismissal. Continue reading...
As SpaceX impacts Ukraine and AI-generated music divides artists and fans, critics are asking what happens when technology has too much control over our livesThis was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it hereHello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while sitting in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Drowning Girl, on view in New York City. Today in tech, we’re discussing the perils of Elon Musk’s one-man global infrastructure, AI-generated music and a Guardian AI conference in Paris. Continue reading...
Google runs a single UK cloud region, so when one London zone lost power, there was nowhere to failover – most services recovered by late afternoon, but courts are still down
Use of tools ‘may result in the transfer of sensitive data’ to China, defense department saysThe US government on Monday ordered its agencies to stop using artificial intelligence (AI) tools from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, as the countries race for dominance in the fast-moving sector.A notice from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the ban on products developed by DeepSeek – and tools created using DeepSeek by third parties – saying they must be removed from IT devices. Continue reading...
Services restored for most users, but power fault stalled hearings and left Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC customers unable to pay or move moneyAn outage at Google’s cloud services in the UK has caused widespread disruption, hitting courts and leaving millions of customers unable to access or send cash at banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut.Google blamed a “power event” for the failure at its London-based Cloud computing operations on Tuesday, which affected its “europe-west2-b zone”. Continue reading...
In his annual speech on threats to the nation, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s intelligence service, MI5, warned that AI had the potential to ‘change the stakes’ on existing and even new bioweapons. To find out why, and how, Ian Sample speaks to Dr Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He explains what has governments so worried and what measures could be put in place to reduce the risksCould AI ‘change the stakes’ in the development of bioweapons?Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...