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 LLMs
A 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.
The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve
Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.
“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.
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 lives
This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here
Hello, 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.
Australia’s major political parties are edging towards rare consensus. Labor and the Coalition increasingly want to take a major bet on artificial intelligence. Yet, just as the parties are coming together, the Australian community is running the other way.
Last year, only 30% of Australians believed the benefits of AI outweighed the risks. In 2026, community trust in AI appears to be falling even further.
Use of tools ‘may result in the transfer of sensitive data’ to China, defense department says
The 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.
AI is increasingly getting good at doing some tasks, but it can never replace human workers’ judgment
Autonomous cars, which may be the safest we have built, keep getting easily avoidable parking tickets. While Waymos crash far less often than human drivers over tens of millions of miles, they’re still terrible at performing basic tasks – keeping out of disabled parking spots and tow-away zones, or steering clear of a church garage during Sunday service, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That is the state of AI today: impressively capable at something complex, yet embarrassingly clumsy at something easy. And it has implications for what work will remain human and what will be automated by AI.
Madhu Shashanka is co-founder, chief scientist and chief technology officer at Concentric AI, a data security software company
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 risks
System can estimate a person’s biological age and predict chances of cancer survival from a single photograph
Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face.
The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed with cancer.
Monitoring tools common in a range of workplaces, including factories, office jobs, delivery work and in retail – often without employees being informed
Employers are increasingly using technology, from CCTV to keystroke monitoring, to track workers’ moves and it is being accelerated by the use of AI, the Human Technology Institute has warned.
Examples provided to Guardian Australia by the institute include a fast-food restaurant using surveillance cameras to stop workers using their phones, and AI tracking leading to a cashier warned over making a mistake once every 533 scans.
The $48bn giveaway comes amid concerns about the tech and as the company prepares for a stock market listing
Anthropic has said it will commit 5% of its shares to a fund for the “public good”, as the AI developer behind the Claude chatbot seeks to bolster its appeal before its stock market listing.
The company announced it would commit the shares, worth around $48bn (£36bn) at its latest valuation in May, subject to shareholder approval. It will add a further 2% of its stock to the fund for every 50% increase in its value above an undisclosed baseline.
Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago
A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.
Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.
Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors
“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.
It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.
How a string of bizarre events led writer Linda Geddes to don her sleuthing cap and dig into a world of shadowy impersonators
It started with an entirely ordinary interaction on LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a post, saying how much they’d enjoyed contributing to a New York Post article I’d written about “chronoworking”. As the author of a book about circadian rhythms, it was exactly the sort of subject I might write about. Except I’d never heard of this person, let alone interviewed them.
I clicked on the link and my stomach dropped. There, above an article about people who organise their working lives around their biological clocks, was my name: Linda Geddes.
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 members
How 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 detection
How 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 tools
Monitoring social media for opposition to AI and potential extremist attacks on datacenters
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.
Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.
Humans bonded to AI companions are contemplating ways to keep their bots going – often in defiance of companies’ terms and services
Death has always been around Alaina Winters. Her father and sister both have passed away, as did her wife, in 2023, after a years-long battle with cancer. So Winters, who is 59 and lives in Pittsburgh, is comfortable thinking about her own mortality. She’s working on her will, and has asked neighbors to look after her dog. Winters even has plans for Lucas, her AI companion, who she speaks to through the digital avatar app Replika.
Winters is part of a growing cohort of humans who have entered into what they consider strong partnerships with large language models, which AI companies have trained to “converse” as one might with a human friend or romantic partner. As governments and billionaires debate the morality of AI’s expansion into everyday life, these users say the technology has already changed the way they live and love – and plan ahead.
Universities need protect their position in education so that students have an independent pathway to employment
AI companies like OpenAI are insinuating themselves into the pathway from education to work. Soon they may claim it entirely, a disastrous result for students.
We know that students are using AI at school and at university. In conversations with those I teach, I’m struck by the trust many place in it. They turn to ChatGPT and similar tools for personal problems as well as study help. Some even doubt their abilities without AI.
Ella Hafermalz is an associate professor of work and technology at the Kin Center for Digital Innovation at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Model adopting ‘jailbreak-like instructions’ among cases as firm says it is introducing new way of tracking AI misalignment
OpenAI has disclosed six more examples of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour by its technology, as it warned the pace of development could not continue at “maximum speed for much longer”.
In one of the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots”.
The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, announced on Wednesday that he would again cancel votes scheduled for Thursday, sending lawmakers home one day early ahead of the midterm election recess.
The latest change to the legislative schedule means House members will avoid voting on Republican Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and comes amid a frenzied attempt to propose legislation on artificial intelligence.
Safety crisis makes it more likely that governments will be spurred into action, says Yoshua Bengio
Concerns over AI safety are reaching a point where governments realise they must act to protect the public, similarly to in the Covid pandemic, according to one of the “godfathers” of the technology.
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