Artificial Intelligence News
AI policy sets the rules for how artificial intelligence is developed, deployed and held accountable. Follow AI regulation, copyright disputes, privacy, surveillance and government decisions affecting the technology. Our coverage explains who a proposal applies to, whether it is law or still under discussion, and what it could mean for developers, businesses and the people using AI.
Lead story
Peter Lee, Microsoft’s departing science chief, is expected to advise Mercedes on AI under a one-year agreement, according to Fortune as summarised by Grandprix.com. The reported role could bring AI expertise into several parts of a Formula 1 team, but Mercedes had not confirmed the appointment and Lee’s…
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The AI economy depends on more than chips, code and data centres: it also needs materials such as helium, yttrium and silicon carbide. In The Heart of the Matter, the author argues that physical supply constraints can limit how quickly the industry expands.
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VRChat has opened a community consultation on generative AI after a prominent volunteer stepped back from community work over AI-generated worlds and misleading previews. The immediate change is concrete: deceptive AI-generated thumbnails are banned, while the rules for AI-made worlds and other player-facing content remain up for debate.
Higgsfield Watch
Higgsfield has published a practical guide to automating AI video creation, from batching clips in ChatGPT or Claude to scheduling recurring work and building generation into a product. The useful distinction is how much happens without you: two routes still need a person to start each request, while…
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Warnings that AI could end the world are beginning to sound familiar, and a Fortune essay argues that this is precisely why we should examine them carefully. Its central point is not that the risks are imaginary, but that catastrophe stories can crowd out more immediate questions about…
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Companies are moving beyond AI pilots, but access to tools alone is not producing productivity or business value. At Fortune’s AIQ Summit, executives described a more demanding test: redesign workflows, train people and put governance and costs on the same footing as deployment.
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The 2018 film Annihilation is getting a 4K home-media release in the UK and US this October, and a new essay argues its strange vision of an expanding, uncontrollable intelligence can help us think about AI beyond extinction scenarios. Its more useful question is who gets to shape…
AWS AI Watch
Amazon Web Services researchers say a technique called priming can turn pretrained Transformer weights into hybrid models that combine attention with state space layers, cutting the cost of pretraining those hybrids by over 99%. They also report that the resulting models matched the source Transformers’ reasoning benchmarks and…
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Three US Democratic senators have introduced a bill to create an AI Safety Board within the Department of Commerce. It would set up technical evaluations of AI systems that could threaten national or economic security, putting a concrete oversight proposal on the table as Congress debates how to…
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Denmark is proposing a legal right to control realistic AI-generated imitations of people’s faces and voices, including a requirement for major platforms to remove manipulated content quickly. The bill is not yet law, but its proposed exceptions put an important question on the table: how do you protect…
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An AI tool used by some US law-enforcement agencies can reportedly match an interior photo to a specific property by comparing details with online listings. 404 Media’s investigation raises a practical privacy question: a room can give away its location even when an image carries no location metadata.
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African insurers are testing AI, but relatively few have integrated it into daily operations, according to the African Insurance Organisation’s 2026 report. Its central practical point is that trustworthy data, not simply more data, will determine whether these systems produce reliable assessments rather than pricing errors.
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AI buyers should not assume a contract will protect their organisation if a service misuses data or causes harm. A Diginomica investigation instead points to specific checks on data use, governance and liability that buyers need to handle in-house.
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A New Republic essay argues that effective altruism has helped concentrate money and political influence in parts of the technology world, including debates over AI safety. Its challenge is worth airing, though a sharp critique is not the same thing as proof about a whole movement.
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Several UK universities are changing or ending their Turnitin arrangements after concerns about proposed terms that could allow student work and staff feedback to be used to develop AI services. The dispute is now shaping universities’ software choices, even after Turnitin said it would redraft the terms.
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Singapore’s financial regulator has set out staged expectations for how financial institutions should manage AI, including generative AI and increasingly autonomous agents. The framework asks firms to match oversight and controls to the risks of each use, rather than treating every AI tool alike.
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The UK’s AI minister says a breach of British cyber defences by AI is “likely, if not inevitable”, and says government researchers are evaluating advanced systems including Google’s Gemini. His warning comes alongside plans to prepare for threats involving autonomous agents, though the report describes no specific new…
Watch Desk
Employees’ personal AI agents can reach workplace systems through permissions and credentials tied to the employee, according to a new security article. The practical challenge is controlling what those agents can access without pretending they can simply be kept out.
SAP Watch
SAP is expanding AI across procurement, supplier risk, contingent-workforce management and expense administration. The practical shift is towards assistants embedded in business workflows, with several capabilities planned for release from November 2026 into Q1 2027.
Watch Desk
PacBio and TychoBio plan to use long-read RNA sequencing to build datasets from more than 10,000 samples, supporting AI research into RNA therapies for rare diseases. The collaboration aims to connect the design of candidate treatments with their effects across the transcriptome, including potential unintended effects.
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Kraft Heinz says it has automated about 85% of the work needed to adapt product listings when retailers change their rules, with people still reviewing the final 15%. As AI agents become another route to product discovery, the company’s example shows why brands are reworking how they organise…
