Techlaw

OpenAI accuses employee who left for Apple of leaking plans for unreleased device

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Hours before Apple and the ChatGPT maker were due to face off in court, a new allegation delayed the showdown An ⁠OpenAI employee who left the ChatGPT maker for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal ⁠account and later ⁠made a presentation ​about the unreleased product to senior Apple leadership, a new filing in the lawsuit between OpenAI and Apple alleges.In the filing ⁠in US federal court in San Jose, California, OpenAI alleged that the presentation happened months ago and that Apple is now making ⁠AI products of its own, citing the release of Apple’s HomeView product this week. Continue reading...

Could AI ‘change the stakes’ in the development of bioweapons?

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Experts say the technology could help terrorists and nation states with production but that significant hurdles remainIn 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. Here we look at how AI might help in the development of bioweapons and the hurdles that remain. Continue reading...

The eyes have it: Reform politician’s ‘smart glasses’ prompt calls for ban in Westminster

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Jason O’Connell’s suspected use of the specs to aid his speech in Senedd reignites debate over AI-enabled devicesIt was a flowing speech packed full of precise statistics – but Jason O’Connell, a Reform UK Senedd member, was not quite the gifted orator he had first appeared. The periodic flashing in his spectacles seemed to give the game away as he spoke for five minutes in the Senedd chamber without a glance at his notes.“Cardiff reviewed 192 roads, following 933 requests, and only four routes have returned to 30mph,” he said as he led the party’s charge to abolish 20mph traffic zones. “£38.3m wasted to implement this policy and up to £8.9bn in an act of economic self-harm.” Continue reading...

Palantir and Sadiq Khan drop legal battle over Met contract

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Dispute related to claims London mayor blocked US tech firm from £50m police deal because of concerns over its valuesPalantir and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, have called off their legal fight over claims the Labour mayor was blocking the US tech company from signing a contract with the Metropolitan police because of its values and ethics.Palantir and the mayor’s office for policing and crime (Mopac) announced on Wednesday they had withdrawn allegations against each other, heading off a high court trial scheduled for January. Continue reading...

Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

Bank of America has been fined £1.2bn for its failings related to anti-money laundering

Why many AI companies are set to fail

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

Is the artificial intelligence bubble about to burst? Analyst Gartner does not expect CIOs will ramp up the amount they pay for AI inference

Nvidia, worth $5.5tn, donates $250m to UK for AI safety research

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Pledge spanning five years from world’s most valuable firm comes as concerns about AI agents have risenThe $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research.The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK government confirmed its AI Security Institute (AISI), which tests advance AI models, will be able to examine cutting-edge technology developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before they are released. Continue reading...

Tool and target: US law enforcement grapple with AI-enabled terrorism and anti-tech extremism

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

From the FBI to local police departments, US authorities are increasingly warning of would-be terrorists using chatbots to plan attacks and anti-AI extremist threats In May 2025, a 25-year-old man detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic, killing himself and injuring four others. For many, it was a wake-up call about the threats to reproductive care facilities. For the FBI, though, it was also a sign of what the agency had feared for years: bad actors were using generative AI to plan and execute terror plots.The suspect used an unnamed generative AI tool that failed to detect his request for bomb-making instructions, law enforcement officers wrote in a previously unreported document reviewed by the Guardian. The privacy of his conversation with the AI chatbot hindered alerting police that someone was looking up how to make a bomb, according to the memo.How extremists could use AI to devise attacks and recruit new membersHow AI could be used to disseminate and produce everything from deepfakes to election misinformation and child sexual abuse material (CSAM)How people seeking information on how to make weaponry or bombs could use AI to circumvent police detectionHow to ensure that officers could take advantage of AI tools in policing, for things like social media monitoring, while managing public concern over the use of these toolsMonitoring social media for opposition to AI and potential extremist attacks on datacenters Continue reading...

NatWest uses Nvidia for natural language banking

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

UK bank is testing Nvidia’s artificial intelligence technology with Royal Bank of Scotland customers

AI has not invented new attacks, it has removed the waiting

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

AI can speed up attacks, with faster reconnaisance, while defenders should use AI to accelerate existing SOC work, but not chase after full autonomy

Amazon uses AI-powered ‘risk’ system to track union activity globally

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

Internal documents disclosed during a Canadian labour dispute show Amazon is using an artificial intelligence-powered risk-scoring system named Atlas to track union organising among its workforce, while training managers on how to handle what it perceives as the ‘threat’ of union activity

Starling Bank claims first banking AI trained on UK sovereign cloud

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 14.10.2026

Starling says ‘transactional foundation model’ will train on more than 15 billion anonymised transactions on Civo’s UK cloud – but the data tokenises in Google Cloud first

Saudi OpenAI employee arrested after recording device found in headquarters

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 14.10.2026

Discovery of ‘sophisticated’ gadget adds to company’s list of privacy concerns after hackings by rogue agentsOpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested.In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”. Continue reading...

AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self-replication on smart devices

Published in Technology | The Guardian on 13.10.2026

Researchers say ‘AI worms’ could soon infiltrate internet-connected devices amid calls for increased guardrailsAnthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model. Continue reading...

Microsoft CVE volumes on relentless upward trajectory

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 13.10.2026

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday drop breaks yet another record, with over 1,400 flaws listed

Journalists subject to unlawful surveillance seek legal costs after ‘unreasonable conduct’ by PSNI

Published in Bank of America hit with £1.2bn fine after money laundering probe on 13.10.2026

Court of Appeal to decide whether Investigatory Powers Tribunal has powers to award compensation for legal costs to victims of unlawful surveillance