After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings.

The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others.

Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study helped place the roots of language even further back in time, to millions of years before the emergence of our species. “Differences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are far less distinct and well-defined than we have long assumed,” Dr. Amici said.

But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, had little to reveal about how we use words. “The present findings don’t tell us anything about the evolution of language,” said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Hundreds of hours of recordings suggest that the apes can generate meaning by stringing sounds together in pairs. But some scholars are skeptical.

In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language

Ground sloths emerged in South America tens of million years ago, eventually ranging as far north as Canada. While their modern relatives dwell in trees and top out at the size of a dog, ground sloths also occupied land and seashores and, at their largest, rivaled today’s elephants.

We know from preserved pelts that some ground sloths had lots of fur. But did other sloths evolve to be nearly hairless?

Research published earlier this year in The Journal of Mammalian Evolution offers new insights into what the extinct sloths may have looked like, and how furry they really were.

Developing a more accurate picture of ground sloths is not simple. Their habitats varied from tropical to cold climates across the Americas. And they came in a variety of sizes. The megatheres, known as Eremotherium and Megatherium, were among the biggest terrestrial mammals of their time.

New research painted a more accurate picture of the megafauna that spread widely around the Americas before they went extinct.

Giant Sloths’ Hairy Truth Revealed by Scientists

Forty years ago, it would take a four-drawer filing cabinet to store 10,000 documents. You would need 736 floppy disks to hold those same files; now it takes up no physical space at all to store 10,000 documents on the cloud.

As data storage has evolved, so too has the whole information landscape, and with it the challenges of storing, transferring and appropriately using people’s personal data.

An exhibition by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which opened at Manchester Central Library this week, charts the evolution of data privacy through 40 items, each chosen to illustrate how access to information has evolved, or how data has been at the heart of some of the biggest news events of the past four decades.

“I think the wonderful thing about the exhibition is that the world that we occupy, like any specialty, is filled with jargon and technicalities,” the information commissioner, John Edwards, said.

“[People] won’t know what a data controller is, they don’t know what a data processor is, they don’t know what a data subject is, we have to use some of these specialist terms. What the exhibition shows is what we do is about people, and it’s about real human impacts.”

Items in the exhibition, which is also available to view online, include a Pokémon toy, a floppy disk, a Tesco Clubcard, a modem, a millennium bug pamphlet, a football shirt and a Covid vaccination card.

Other exhibits highlight how the ICO has made changes in society; from ending the “employment deny list” in the construction industry, to the introduction of public food hygiene ratings for restaurants.

Edwards’ favourite item? A pair of spiked lawn aerator shoes, which illustrate an early example of enforcement action when, in the 1980s, the company behind them was found to be making almost as much money from selling its customers’ information as it was from selling the shoes.

“They were fined quite significantly for their exploitative marketing techniques,” Edwards said.

View image in fullscreen Information commissioner John Edwards’ favourite item in the exhibition is a pair of spiked lawn aerator shoes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The 40th plinth in the exhibition remains empty, with members of the public asked to put forward their own ideas for objects that have shaped the data landscape.

“That’s to reflect the notion that privacy is personal, subjective,” Edwards said. “We each have our own expectations and experiences.”

The ICO was founded 40 years ago, in a small office near Manchester, as the UK’s data protection regulator, responsible for presiding over a new Data Protection Act. Since then the landscape overseen by the regulator has changed beyond all recognition.

View image in fullscreen An NHS Covid vaccination card. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Today, people have “tens of thousands of times” more personal data out in the world than they did when the role was created, Edwards said.

“You just move through the world today shedding data wherever you go,” Edwards said. He asks how the Guardian travelled to this interview (by bus). “Did you tap on?” he asked. “You created data there.

“You used your cell phone on the way, so you’re pinging off cell towers the whole way. Forty years ago, none of this was a thing.

“We’ve had this, kind of, data world sneak up on us, and most of that data, for most of those years, was an accidental byproduct.

“We’ve now got to a stage where all these companies are going, hang on a minute, we could make money out of that.”

Every year, he said, “hundreds of billions of data transactions” took place, and with “infinite variety”. The ICO was regulating everything from small schools, GP surgeries and libraries to huge “fiercely competitive” social media companies, which Edwards said often “don’t pause long enough to test the privacy implications of what they’re doing”.

“The biggest challenge has been trying to keep up with the pace of change,” Edwards said. “Companies innovate very quickly, we regulate and investigate very slowly.

“I think part of the objective of an investigation is to put some lines in the sand for companies to say: ‘You can’t do this,’” he added. “But if it takes us three years to do that, then all the companies have moved on by the time we learn that lesson. So that’s the biggest challenge, and that’s something we’ve got to get better at.”

What will data and privacy look like in 40 years’ time? “Look, I don’t know where we’re going to be four weeks from now,” Edwards said.

“The geopolitical situation is really kind of volatile at the moment,” he said. “We’ve got an environment where US tech firms are pushing back on a lot of regulation that affects them, even when it’s in a jurisdiction that they want to do business in. We haven’t seen how that’s going to play out.”

“Quantum computing has potential to change everything,” he added. “Agentic AI is the next AI coming down the pipeline.

“It’s going to be really fascinating even the next 12 months,” he said, “let alone the next 40 years.”

Forty items on display in Manchester, collated by information commissioner, chart evolution of personal data usage over 40 years

Floppy disks and vaccine cards: exhibition tells tale of privacy rights in UK

After our children left home, my wife and I decided to treat ourselves and buy a new car for a driving holiday in Europe. We’d been driving a family estate car for years, loading it up with kids and making trips to and from universities, but we wanted something for ourselves.

As a surprise, she booked a test drive for the Tesla Model S for my birthday. It was unlike any car I’d been in before. I thought “Wow, this is amazing.” It felt like the future: a computer on wheels that was constantly updating with new features. I can’t say I feel that way now – and many people seem to share that view. Tesla sales figures declined by 13% in the first few months of this year. Others feel even more uneasy: more than 200 demonstrations happened last weekend outside company facilities around the world to protest against Elon Musk and the wrecking ball he has taken to the federal government.

I had no complaints about the car itself: it was quiet. It was large. And, importantly for us, as an electric vehicle it was environmentally friendly. Some people go for the sports car when they gain a new sense of freedom in later life, but I had done a bit of research and wanted to move away from diesel and petrol.

Despite people voicing concerns about a lack of charging infrastructure, I found Tesla’s network to be wonderful. We drove all over Europe – driving to Switzerland one year, Italy another, and last summer to the south of France. At one point we even packed in five adults and all their suitcases after an airport pickup.

I would consider myself left-leaning, but buying an electric car wasn’t a huge political statement for us at the time, but rather an acknowledgment of the way things are going to be in the future. Little did I know how our choice would be politicised for us six years down the line.

In the early years of owning the car I remember a neighbour saying: “What is it like to own a car built by a madman?” But I brushed it off. I had watched videos of Musk at Tesla events, and he seemed like a poor man’s Steve Jobs. Much like the Apple CEO, I saw Musk as a frontman rather than the designer and didn’t take much notice of the business owner.

Soon it was impossible to ignore him. My wife and I were horrified as he publicly adopted rightwing positions – with his endorsement of Donald Trump for US president and then for the far-right AfD in Germany, as well as his support for Tommy Robinson. It seemed so odd to us that a man who would champion electric vehicles would also hold such reactionary views.

I started to notice a shift in the Tesla owners’ group on Facebook. Having not owned an electric car before, the group was a useful resource. People were very helpful and even recommended places to stop off during our European holiday. When Musk’s politics began to grow more extreme, members began to post that they no longer felt comfortable owning a Tesla. And then others would respond: ““We’re not interested in your politics.” I saw someone giving stick to the Guardian and even calling the BBC “BBC Stalin”, which was funny for me as I always personally felt it went too far the other way.

View image in fullscreen Protesters demonstrate against Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, during a nationwide Tesla Takedown rally outside a dealership in Pasadena, California. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

I started to reflect on owning a Tesla and it was my daughter who made the case for selling it. But judging by people posting secondhand cars in the Facebook group, prices have been dropping. I feel trapped. I cycled to meet a friend recently, and he took one look at my reasonably nice bike and said “It’s probably worth more than your Tesla now.” Someone else said to me he was interested in buying a Tesla, but he was going to wait until they were virtually worthless.

It’s a shame as in every other way the car is a perfect match for our lifestyle. It’s cheap to run, easy to service and Tesla has a mobile repair service that dispatches a “ranger” to your house to fix any issues.

If I was buying a car from scratch I would boycott the company, but we are where we are. For now I am going to have to keep hold of it. Next time, maybe I’ll get a European electric vehicle. Who knew owning a car would prove so difficult?

I bought it to be part of a greener future, but that was before Musk proved so awful. I’d sell it now, but prices have dropped, says the secret Tesla driver

Trapped with a Tesla: my dream car has become a living nightmare | The secret Tesla driver

A leading academic tasked by the UK government with reviewing the effects of smartphones on teenagers has suggested blanket bans are “unrealistic and potentially detrimental”.

Amy Orben, from the University of Cambridge, will lead the work on children and smartphone use that has been commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) along with a team of other academics from a number of UK universities.

Ministers have so far been resistant to implementing any new legal restrictions on social media and smartphones for children that goes further than the current Online Safety Act, which clamps down on harmful content.

Some MPs have been pushing for further restrictions that go beyond harmful content – including on access to social media for those under 16, full bans on smartphones in schools or restrictions on social media algorithms that are able to train addictive content on young teenagers.

In a paper Orben published this week with four co-authors in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), they said bans and restrictions were unlikely to be effective – though they did advocate for children and teens to have phone-free spaces.

“Bans and restrictions have been successfully used for public health issues such as smoking. But smoking is not comparable with smartphone and social media use because the harms from smoking are extensive, clear-cut and by far outweigh the benefits,” the paper said.

“Prescribing abstinence from all technologies to protect against harms is unrealistic and potentially detrimental in a society where technology use is a practical necessity and confers various benefits, including information access and social support.”

The paper said that there had been “increased public pressure to mitigate the potential harmful effects of smartphones and social media on health, wellbeing … academic performance, disruptive behaviours and bullying.”

But it said the evidence suggested there were “no simple, one-size-fits-all answers” and that while most parents and policymakers were “primed to believe arguments that smartphones and social media are inherently harmful, the evidence about their overall effect on children is not clear-cut”.

Bans on devices could “undermine children’s rights to technology design and education that will help them thrive as adults”, the academics warned.

The paper acknowledged that for some more vulnerable children “access to certain digital content can result in grave harm” but said legislators should also acknowledge restricting access “can be harmful to other high risk populations”.

The researchers did raise concern about “trending content” aimed at younger users to encourage recurrent use, saying those designs were “purposefully not supporting the development of healthy tech habits”.

Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, appointed Orben in January to lead further research into the effects of smartphones on children’s health and wellbeing. Orben, a leading academic in the field, said she did not herself advocate for specific policy positions. Her work has been cited by both opponents and proponents for bans, including by the Australian government, which has banned social media for under-16s.

She told the Guardian: “Understanding the digital world’s impact on young people is complex and there are no simple solutions. The report my team is currently leading was commissioned by government to produce recommendations on the types of research which could help generate high-quality evidence, not to provide policy recommendations.”

“As an independent researcher my role is to examine and communicate evidence clearly, not advocate specific policies. In the BMJ article, we highlighted the benefit of multiple approaches noting technology-free spaces are important but smartphone or social media bans are not a complete solution, as other areas such as digital literacy and platform safety are also important parts of the online safety picture.”

Ministers have come under pressure in recent months to go further on smartphone use for teenagers, especially in the wake of the Netflix drama Adolescence which depicts a murder committed by a 13-year-old in thrall to toxic “manosphere” content online.

The Labour MP Josh MacAlister was forced to drop plans in a private member’s bill on restricting social media algorithms for teenagers when ministers opposed the plans.

The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is reviewing her department’s guidelines on smartphone bans in schools, by looking at a small cohort of schools to see if the current rules are working effectively.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, convened a roundtable with campaigners and the makers of Adolescence in No 10 on Monday, where he suggested that it should be discussed more widely in schools. But he said there “isn’t one single policy lever to pull” when it came to addressing potential harms.

The DSIT has been contacted for comment.

Dr Amy Orben says there are no ‘one-size-fits-all answers’ given importance of access to online information

Blanket ban on teen smartphone use ‘potentially detrimental’, says academic

Meta faces a $2.4bn (£1.8bn) lawsuit accusing the Facebook owner of inflaming violence in Ethiopia after the Kenyan high court said a legal case against the US tech group could go ahead.

The case brought by two Ethiopian nationals calls on Facebook to alter its algorithm to stop promoting hateful material and incitement to violence, as well as hiring more content moderators in Africa. It is also seeking a $2.4bn “restitution fund” for victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook.

One of the claimants is the son of Prof Meareg Amare Abrha, who was murdered at his home in Ethiopia after his address and threatening posts were published on Facebook in 2021 during a civil war in the country. Another claimant is Fisseha Tekle, a former researcher at Amnesty International who published reports on violence committed during the conflict in Tigray in northern Ethiopia and received death threats on Facebook.

Meta has argued that courts in Kenya, where Facebook’s Ethiopia moderators were based at the time, did not have jurisdiction over the case. The Kenyan high court in Nairobi ruled on Thursday that the case fell within the jurisdiction of the country’s courts.

Abrham Meareg, the son of Meareg, said: “I am grateful for the court’s decision today. It is disgraceful that Meta would argue that they should not be subject to the rule of law in Kenya. African lives matter.”

Tekle said he cannot return home to Ethiopia because of Meta’s failure to make Facebook safe. “Meta cannot undo the damage it has done, but it can radically change how it moderates dangerous content across all its platforms to make sure no one else has to go through what I have,” he said. “I look forward to this matter now being heard by the court in full.”

The case, supported by non-profit organisations including Foxglove and Amnesty International, also demands a formal apology from Meta for the murder of Meareg. The Katiba Institute, a Kenya-based NGO focusing on the Kenyan constitution, is the third claimant in the case.

In 2022 an analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Observer found that Facebook was letting users post content inciting violence through hate and misinformation, despite being aware that it was fuelling tensions in Tigray.

Meta rejected the claims at the time, saying it had “invested in safety and security measures” to tackle hate and inflammatory language along with “aggressive steps to stop the spread of misinformation” in Ethiopia.

In January the company said it was removing factcheckers and “dramatically” reducing the amount of censorship on the platform, although it would continue to tackle illegal and high severity violations.

Meta said it did not comment on ongoing legal matters.

Son of murdered academic calls on Facebook owner to ‘radically change how it moderates dangerous content’

Meta faces £1.8bn lawsuit over claims it inflamed violence in Ethiopia

Tony Blair’s thinktank has urged the UK to relax copyright laws in order to let artificial intelligence firms build new products, as it warned a tougher approach could strain the transatlantic relationship.

The Tony Blair Institute said enforcing firm copyright measures would strain ties with the US, which is poised to announce tariffs on UK goods on Wednesday.

Warning that geopolitical considerations require “urgent and adequate attention” while AI policy is being drafted, TBI said: “Without similar provisions in the United States, it would be hard for the UK government to enforce strict copyright laws without straining the transatlantic relationship it has so far sought to nurture.”

The thinktank has said that if the UK went down the route of demanding licensing of all UK content used in AI models, it would simply push that development work to other territories where there are less strict copyright laws. To enforce a strict licensing model, the UK would also need to restrict access to models that have been trained on such content, which could include US-owned AI systems.

In a report published on Wednesday, TBI said it backed government proposals to let AI firms train their models on copyright-protected material without permission, unless creatives have signalled they want to opt out of the process. With the Trump administration signalling it will not pursue strict AI regulations and China pursuing AI growth at “breakneck speed”, the UK could weaken its economic and national security interests by lagging in the AI race, said TBI.

“If the UK imposes laws that are too strict, it risks falling behind in the AI-driven economy and weakening its capacity to protect national security interests,” said TBI.

The report said arguing that commercial AI models cannot be trained on content from the open web was close to saying knowledge workers – a broad category of professionals ranging from lawyers to researchers – cannot profit from insights they get when reading the same content.

Rather than fighting to uphold outdated regulations, said TBI, rights holders and policymakers should help build a future where creativity is valued alongside AI innovation.

A more restrictive approach to copyright than the one taken by the EU, Singapore or Japan risked pushing AI developers out of the UK, said TBI.

Fernando Garibay, a record producer who has worked with artists including Lady Gaga and U2, said history has been dotted with “end-of-time claims” related to technological breakthroughs, from the printing press to music streaming. Those fears were unfounded, said Garibay in an introduction to the report, and the creative community should not “cling” to a legal status quo.

“The progressive solution is not about clinging to copyright laws designed for an earlier era but allowing them to co-evolve with technological change, to remain effective in fulfilling their regulatory and protective aims in the age of AI,” said Garibay.

The report, called Rebooting copyright: How the UK can be a global leader in the Arts and AI, also calls for the creation of a Centre for AI and Creative Industries that will encourage collaboration between the tech and creative sectors.

Beeban Kidron, a cross-bench peer and prominent campaigner against the government proposals, said the report was effectively telling artists to “put up or shut up” because AI’s advance is inevitable.

“It cannot be that the sum total of the government’s imagination is that the UK become an AI hub for Silicon Valley,” she said. “That has got to be the most depressing vision of the UK imaginable.”

Kidron added that TBI’s acceptance of donations from the US tech billionaire Larry Ellison, which reached $270m (£210m) last year, were “the very definition of conflict of interest”. According to documents filed in the US last year, Ellison’s foundation donated more than $52m (£40m) to TBI in 2024, with a further $218m (£169m) committed. TBI said the $270m commitment was for helping governments around the world, particularly in Africa, with “reform and change programmes”.

“We maintain intellectual independence over our policy work,” said TBI.

Tony Blair Institute says enforcing stricter licensing rules for copyright-protected material will threaten national security interests

UK needs to relax AI laws or risk transatlantic ties, thinktank warns

Donald Trump is preparing to consider a final proposal to decide the future of TikTok before a deadline for the app to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a US ban.

The US vice-president, JD Vance, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday to discuss the issue, Reuters reported.

In the closely watched sale of TikTok, the White House is playing the role of an investment bank, with Vance running the auction.

The private equity firm Blackstone is discussing joining ByteDance’s existing non-Chinese shareholders, led by Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic, in contributing fresh capital to bid for TikTok’s US business, Reuters reported last week.

On Sunday, Trump said a deal with ByteDance to sell the short video app used by 170 million Americans would be struck before Saturday’s deadline.

Trump is preparing to announce global tariffs on what he has called ‘liberation day’ on Wednesday. Last week, he said he would be willing to reduce tariffs on China to get a TikTok deal done.

Trump set the deadline in January for TikTok to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a US ban on national security grounds due to have taken effect that month under a 2024 law.

The US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is in discussions to invest in TikTok as part of an effort led by Trump to gain control of the app, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

The Silicon Valley Trump supporter and Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, is in talks to add new outside investment that will buy out TikTok’s Chinese investors, as part of a bid led by Oracle and other American investors to carve it out of its parent company, ByteDance, according to the FT.

Blackstone is reportedly evaluating making a small minority investment in TikTok’s US operations.

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The talks on the future of TikTok are coalescing around a plan for the biggest non-Chinese investors in ByteDance to raise their stakes and acquire the short-video app’s US operations, Reuters reported last month.

Trump said last month his administration was in touch with four different groups about a prospective TikTok deal, without identifying them.

TikTok and Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Owner ByteDance required to find non-Chinese buyer for video app’s American operations by Saturday

Trump to consider final proposal on TikTok future as US ban deadline looms

Tesla reported a 13% drop in vehicle sales in the first three months of the year, making it the electric vehicle maker’s worst quarter since 2022. It’s another sign that Elon Musk’s once high-flying electric car company is struggling to attract buyers.

The drop is likely due to a combination of factors, including its ageing lineup, competition from rivals and a backlash from Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics. It also is a warning that the company’s first-quarter earnings report later this month could disappoint investors.

Tesla reported deliveries of 336,681 vehicles globally in the January-March quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet expected much higher deliveries of 408,000. The figure was down from sales of 387,000 in the same period a year ago. The decline came despite deep discounts, zero financing and other incentives.

Tesla’s stock has plunged by roughly half since hitting a mid-December record as expectations of a lighter regulatory touch and big profits with Donald Trump as president were replaced by fear that the boycott of Musk’s cars and other problems could hit the company hard. Teslas around the country were vandalized in protest of Musk after he dismantled entire federal agencies in his role as the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”. Musk also made a gesture at a rally that his estranged daughter called “definitely a nazi salute”.

Despite Donald Trump’s attempts to shore up company sales with a Tesla presentation in front of the White House and Musk’s assurances to employees that the company has a “bright and exciting” future, the drop in sales was striking.

Matt Britzman, a senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “The scale is worse than many had expected.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, Tesla’s first-quarter delivery numbers are a disappointment, though many investors were already preparing for a soft number,” Britzman said.

Analysts are still not sure exactly how much the fall in sales is due to the protests or other factors. Electric car sales have been sluggish in general, and Tesla in particular is suffering as car buyers hold off from buying its bestselling Model Y because of plans for an updated version later this year. Even before Musk took up his role in government alongside Trump, Tesla had struggled with meeting its delivery targets. Earnings calls and delivery reports failed to match analysts’ expectations throughout 2024.

“Headlines will point to branding issues, and it’d be naive to assume that’s not a factor here, but it misses the key point,” Britzman said. “Deliveries have been significantly impacted by downtime at factories as Tesla launched the long-awaited refreshed version of the Model Y, its bestselling car.”

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The Austin, Texas, electric vehicle maker has also lost market share to rivals in recent months as their offerings improve, including those of BYD. The Chinese EV giant unveiled in March a technology that allows its cars to charge in just a few minutes.

Despite what analysts describe as strong demand for the Model Y, they expect to see continue volatility for the company for a while. Tesla’s most recent release, the futuristic Cybertruck, has failed to find widespread adoption.

The “brand is under pressure”, Britzman said. “It’s rare to see sentiment toward a company so closely tied to a polarising White House, and until Musk pulls his focus back to Tesla, shares will remain volatile.”

Drop is likely combination of ageing lineup, increased competition and backlash to Musk’s politics

Tesla quarterly sales slump 13% amid backlash against Elon Musk

Italy’s interior ministry has written to police forces across the country to increase security at Tesla dealerships after 17 of the electric cars made by Elon Musk’s company were destroyed in a fire in Rome.

Italy’s state police anti-terrorism unit, Digos, is investigating whether the fire at the Tesla dealership in Torre Angela, a suburb in the east of the capital, was started by anarchists.

Firefighters worked for hours to put out the blaze in the early hours of Monday. Drone images showed a row of the burnt-out remains of the vehicles in a parking area of the dealership. Using his social media platform, X, Musk referred to it as “terrorism”.

There are 13 Tesla dealerships in Italy, all managed by the parent company, the majority of them in Rome, but also in other cities including Florence and Milan.

An interior ministry source said the circular was aimed at “raising awareness” of possible anti-Tesla protesters amid a global wave of vandalism in response to Musk’s political activities in the US. If needed, surveillance of dealerships would be increased, it said.

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Since the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president in January, Musk has been slashing the federal workforce as chief of the administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, prompting the emergence of “Tesla Takedown”, a boycott movement that started in the US before spreading to Europe.

Although most protests have so far been peaceful, Tesla dealerships and cars have increasingly been targets of vandalism. Seven vehicles were set alight at a dealership in Ottersberg, Germany, on Saturday, and two Tesla stores in Sweden, one in the capital, Stockholm, and the other in the coastal city of Malmö, were vandalised with orange paint on Monday.

Musk has nurtured close relations with European far-right party leaders including the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who in an interview in early January described him as “a brilliant man”.

Matteo Salvini, who leads the far-right League, a member of Meloni’s ruling coalition, expressed solidarity with Musk after the Rome incident.

“Too much unjustified hatred against the Tesla car company,” Salvini wrote on X. “The season of hate and conflict must come to an end as soon as possible. My solidarity goes out to Elon Musk and to all the workers who have been threatened and attacked.”

State police anti-terrorism unit investigating whether blaze in Torre Angela was started by anarchists

Italian police increase security at Tesla dealerships after 17 cars destroyed in Rome fire

Parents can now block their children from communicating with specific friends or playing certain games on Roblox, an online gaming platform popular with children.

The changes form part of a suite of safety updates intended to give parents more control over their child’s experience on the platform.

From Wednesday, parents and caregivers who identify themselves with an ID or credit card will have access to three new tools. The friend management tool means they can block anyone on their child’s friends list, preventing their child from exchanging direct messages with that account, and report people they believe are violating Roblox policies.

They can also review and change the content maturity level for their child’s account, determining which games their child can access, and obtain detailed screen-time insights.

Under the Online Safety Act, which came into force this year, tech companies must tackle harmful content on their platforms or face fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue.

There have been reports of bullying and grooming on Roblox and fears that children are being exposed to explicit or harmful content on the site, which is the most popular platform in the UK among gamers aged eight to 12.

Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, said safety was at the company’s core and its mission was to be “the safest and most civil online platform in the world”.

The US-based company is one of the world’s largest games platforms, with more monthly users than Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation combined. In 2024, the site averaged more than 80 million players a day, and roughly 40% of those were under 13.

Roblox introduced 40 safety updates last year, including preventing users under 13 from sending direct messages. Roblox has also updated its voice safety technology, which uses a machine-learning model to moderate chat between players more accurately than human moderators.

Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, said he welcomed the safety improvements but that “Roblox still needs to get to grips with substantial problems with harmful and age-inappropriate content”.

He added: “Extensive research has shown Roblox is awash with age-inappropriate games and communities, including depression rooms that can compound misery and offer no support to vulnerable children.

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“This content raises fundamental questions about Roblox’s broader commitment to safety and shows it cannot just rely on parental controls but must take decisive action to make the platform safe for its young users.”

Last month, Roblox’s co-founder and chief executive, David Baszucki, said the platform was vigilant in protecting its users and that “tens of millions” of people had “amazing experiences” on the site.

He added: “My first message would be: if you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids be on Roblox. That sounds a little counterintuitive, but I would always trust parents to make their own decisions.”

Parents can block children from talking to certain people and get detailed screen-time insights on site popular with under-13s

Roblox gives parents more power over children’s activity on gaming platform

The UK government is trying to placate peer and Labour backbencher concerns about copyright proposals by pledging to assess the economic impact of its plans.

Creative professionals including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Tom Stoppard and Kate Bush have strongly criticised ministers’ proposals to let artificial intelligence companies train their models on copyright-protected work without permission, unless the rights holder opts out.

Their stance has been supported by peers, who have passed amendments pushing back on the proposals, and by some backbench MPs.

It is understood that concessions offered to MPs and peers this week include an economic impact assessment, with a report that could address issues such as how AI developers access data to train their models and transparency around use of copyright-protected works.

Ministers are hoping the concessions will allow thethe data (use and access) bill to pass. The bill has been used as a vehicle for fighting back against the proposals but now could be stuck in a process known as “ping pong”, where a bill is batted between the House of Lords and the House of Commons while amendments are added and removed. The government’s overtures were first reported by the Times.

View image in fullscreen Beeban Kidron. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Beeban Kidron, the cross-bench peer who successfully introduced amendments to the bill that battle the proposals, only for them to be removed by the government, said the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology was “almost exclusively” focused on the interests of the US tech lobby. Her amendments on transparency – allowing copyright owners to know when, where and how their work is used in AI models – will at least give copyright holders some protection, she said.

“In the absence of a UK government willing to protect its workers and wealth creators, at least that way UK-based copyright holders would have some of the tools to protect themselves.”

James Frith, a Labour member of the culture, media and sport committee, said: “I remain encouraged by the government’s commitment to a dialogue on this.”

But, he added, there needed to be complete transparency on how copyright protected work was used and use of such material needed to be compensated.

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“I have yet to see an explanation as to why AI companies are held back by copyright or by having to pay for content,” said Frith.

A government spokesperson said: “No final decisions have been taken. We are carefully considering the consultation responses and continue to engage with tech companies, the creative industries, and parliament to inform our approach.

“We have always been clear that no changes will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers on each of our objectives.”

The government is expected to publish its response to a consultation on the proposals over the summer or by October.

Economic impact assessment is one concession aiming to head off opposition from MPs, peers and creatives such as Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard

UK government tries to placate opponents of AI copyright bill

When lightning strikes a tree in the tropics, the whole forest explodes.

“At their most extreme, it kind of looks like a bomb went off,” said Evan Gora, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Dozens of trees around the one that was struck are electrocuted. Within months, a sizable circle of forest can wither away.

Somehow, a single survivor stands, seemingly healthier than ever. A new study by Dr. Gora, published last week in the journal New Phytologist, reveals that some of the biggest trees in a rainforest don’t just survive lightning strikes. They thrive.

The rainforest in Panama’s Barro Colorado Nature Monument is the perfect place to study whether some trees are immune to lightning. It’s home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and one of the most closely studied tropical forests in the world. Dr. Gora set out to study whether individual trees in the forest benefit from being struck by lightning. And if they did, does that help the population of the species survive at a larger scale?

Early on, he spent much of his time climbing trees, looking for signs of lightning damage. But making critical observations could be painfully inefficient. Dr. Gora would begin climbing one tree, convinced it was the struck trunk, only to get 50 feet up and see he actually wanted to be up the neighboring tree. Honey bees would also swarm Dr. Gora’s eyes and ears.

Before a discovery in a Panamanian rainforest, “it seemed impossible that lightning could be a good thing for the trees,” a scientist said.

This Tree Wants to Be Struck by Lightning

More than 600 miles separated the epicenter of Friday’s earthquake in Myanmar from the skyscrapers of Bangkok, which lurched and swayed on the skyline of the vast metropolis. A 33-story high-rise under construction even collapsed. How could the shaking in Bangkok, the Thai capital, be connected to an earthquake so far away?

The answer involves low frequency seismic waves, which are capable of traveling vast distances and making high-rise buildings sway.

When a large earthquake strikes, it simultaneously radiates different frequencies of shaking. Some produce a rapid back-and-forth rattling, others low-frequency swaying.

That was true on Friday, when the earthquake in Myanmar produced violent, high-frequency seismic waves; they destroyed low-rise buildings, Buddhist pagodas and other structures near to the quake’s epicenter just outside Mandalay, Myanmar’s second largest city. Many of the destroyed places were made with brick and masonry, brittle materials that are susceptible to that kind of shaking.

Large quakes produce shaking at a variety of frequencies. Some waves can travel hundreds of miles, and are amplified by local geological conditions.

How the Myanmar Earthquake Shook Skyscrapers in Bangkok

A professional YouTuber in Queensland has been ordered to pay $350,000 plus interest and costs to the former world record score holder for Donkey Kong, after the Brisbane district court found the YouTuber had defamed him “recklessly” with false claims of a link between a lawsuit and another YouTuber’s suicide.

William “Billy” Mitchell, an American gamer who had held world records in Donkey Kong and Pac-Man going back to 1982, as recognised by the Guinness World Records and the video game database Twin Galaxies, brought the case against Karl Jobst, seeking $400,000 in general damages and $50,000 in aggravated damages.

Jobst, who makes videos about “speed running” (finishing games as fast as possible), as well as gaming records and cheating in games, made a number of allegations against Mitchell in a 2021 YouTube video. He accused Mitchell of cheating, and “pursuing unmeritorious litigation” against others who had also accused him of cheating, the court judgment stated.

The court heard Mitchell was accused in 2017 of cheating in his Donkey Kong world records by using emulation software instead of original arcade hardware. Twin Galaxies investigated the allegation, and subsequently removed Mitchell’s scores and banned him from participating in its competitions.

The Guinness World Records disqualified Mitchell as a holder of all his records – in both Donkey Kong and Pac-Man – after the Twin Galaxies decision.

The judgment stated that Jobst’s 2021 video also linked the December 2020 suicide of another YouTuber, Apollo Legend, to “stress arising from [his] settlement” with Mitchell, and wrongly asserted that Apollo Legend had to pay Mitchell “a large sum of money”.

The judgment noted multiple versions of the video were published, with the allegations removed or addressed, before Jobst issued a retraction video in July 2021, two months after the original. The first video was viewed by more than 500,000 people, including 200,000 in Australia, the court heard.

Judge Ken Barlow found Jobst had made five defamatory imputations about Mitchell, including that Mitchell had required Apollo Legend pay him a large sum of money and thus implying he “in essence, hounded Apollo Legend to death”.

Barlow found this was “based on a fallacy” – and that Jobst, in not making further inquiries before publishing the video, had been “recklessly indifferent” to if it was true.

View image in fullscreen Jobst (middle) leaves the Brisbane district court on Tuesday. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

Jobst denied the imputations had been made in the video. He argued Mitchell had a pre-existing bad reputation because he had been previously exposed as a cheat, the court heard.

Barlow found Mitchell did have an existing reputation as a cheat and for suing people who alleged he was a cheat, and found that Mitchell had expressed joy when he believed – incorrectly – on an earlier occasion that Apollo Legend may have died. But Barlow found Jobst had severely damaged Mitchell’s reputation and caused distress.

He described Jobst as having a “self-aggrandising and perhaps self-protective tendency not to admit error and not to back down once he has taken a stance”.

Barlow framed Jobst’s actions as a “crusade” against Mitchell, stating that he was trying to “[show] his audience that he is the knight who slew the Mitchell dragon”.

The judgment summary noted that the court was not called on to decide, and did not decide, if Mitchell had cheated in his world record scores.

The court awarded Mitchell $300,000 in damages for non-economic loss, and an additional $50,000 in aggravated damages due to Jobst’s publishing the video twice, mocking Mitchell’s complaint about it, failing to apologise and withdraw the allegations, and his “clear malice” towards Mitchell.

Jobst was ordered to pay more than $40,000 in interest on the damages from the date of publication, as well as Mitchell’s costs.

Mitchell had previously sued Twin Galaxies in the US in a case which settled in January 2024. As part of the settlement, Twin Galaxies published a statement that Mitchell had “produced expert opinion that the game play on the tapes of Mr Mitchell’s record game plays could depict play on an original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to the degradation of components”.

The company said it would reinstate all of Mitchell’s previous scores on its website’s official historical database, and remove the dispute thread about Mitchell’s records. Mitchell’s Guinness World Records were also reinstated in June 2020.

Queenslander ordered to pay $350,000 plus interest and costs as judge finds his video about American gamer Billy Mitchell was ‘recklessly’ based on false claim

Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst

OpenAI said it had raised $40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at $300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup.

It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” OpenAI announced, adding it would “pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)” for which “massive computing power is essential”.

SoftBank said it wanted to realise “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal.

SoftBank is to put $10bn at first into OpenAI and $30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met.

Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.

OpenAI previously was a fierce defender of closed, proprietary models that do not allow developers to modify the basic technology to adapt AI to their goals. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” said the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman.

OpenAI and defenders of closed models – which include Google – have often decried open models as riskier and more vulnerable to malicious and non-US government use.

Elon Musk, a former OpenAI investor, has called on OpenAI to “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”.

Large companies and governments have proven reluctant to use AI models they have no control over, especially when data security is a concern. Meta and DeepSeek let companies download and modify their models.

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said this month that Llama had hit 1 bn downloads. DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model in January rocked the world of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI has been riding on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT. Altman claimed the tool helped add “one million users” in one hour and overwhelmed OpenAI’s graphics processing units.

With Agence France-Presse

Japanese investment group says it wants to realise ‘artificial super intelligence’ – smarter than people – in biggest capital raising ever for a start-up

OpenAI raises up to $40bn in record-breaking deal with SoftBank

The chief executive of Channel 4 said that artificial intelligence companies are “scraping the value” out of the UK’s £125bn creative industries, and urged the government to take action.

Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out, it would put the UK creative industries in a “dangerous position”.

Speaking on the work of Channel 4 at a culture, media and sport select committee meeting on Tuesday, she said: “AI is clearly absolutely critical to the future of our industry, and many industries. The debate of the day is we need very clear terms. UK copyright law is very, very clear. And what is happening at the moment is the scraping of value from our creative industries.”

Critics of the government’s opt-out proposal, issued in a consultation that closed in February, argue that it is unfair and impractical.

Generative AI models, the term for technology that underpins powerful tools such as ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of data to generate highly realistic responses.

Mahon said that allowing large language models (LLMs) to continue to freely scrape data poses a big threat to the creative industry, which generates £125bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.

“The creative industries account for 6% of the UK’s GVA and is growing 1.5 times faster than other sectors,” she said. “If we continue in a world where LLMs can scrape and use that data without paying for it properly we are in a dangerous position for the industry.”

Authors, artists and executives from the film and TV industries are among those to have argued that allowing companies to train AI programs on their works without a licence posed a threat to their livelihoods.

Mahon said Channel 4 was “very clear” that the copyright regime should be “opt-in”.

She said: “The burden should be on them, not us. We are very clear we think that LLMs need to licence what they use and pay properly for it. We can’t have automated scraping; we need a proper payment and licensing regime.”

Mahon also said that Channel 4 – which is state-owned but fully commercially funded, primarily through advertising revenue – said that the broadcaster broke even last year.

The broadcaster, which will release its 2024 results in the summer, reported a deficit of £52m in 2023.

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This followed three years of financial surpluses, totalling £178m. Mahon said at last year’s results press conference that she expected deficits in 2024 and this year.

“I’m pleased to say that 2024 was a much better year,” she said. “We [will be] pretty much on a flat deficit [when we report]. Pretty much breakeven.”

Mahon also said that regulations governing the programming prominence that public service broadcasters [PSBs] such as Channel 4, the BBC and ITV enjoy on TV platforms may need to be extended.

“Without prominence we will disappear,” she said. “We need to think about reach and prominence on new platforms. We do need to think about regulation over time for promotion [of PSBs] rather than just preservation [of them]. We should think about how to extend prominence [regulations] to social platforms and how we would do that in the UK.”

Government plan over copyright-protected work would put industries in ‘dangerous position’, Alex Mahon tells MPs

AI firms are ‘scraping the value’ from UK’s £125bn creative industries, says Channel 4 boss

After a stay aboard the International Space Station that unexpectedly stretched to nine and a half months, the NASA astronaut Suni Williams is back to doing something she enjoys on Earth.

“I actually went out and ran three miles yesterday,” Ms. Williams, who returned to Earth two weeks ago, said on Monday during a news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “So I will give myself a little pat on the back.”

Ms. Williams and her fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore repeatedly expressed gratitude. During Ms. Williams’s remarks, she thanked the two astronauts who had shared the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that gave them a ride back to Earth. She thanked NASA. She thanked SpaceX. She thanked Boeing. She thanked the medical team that helped them get accustomed to gravity again.

Those words of gratitude may have been appreciated by people at the space agency who — like many federal workers — are uncertain about their mission, their direction or even their continued employment since President Trump’s inauguration.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke in their first news conference since returning to Earth two weeks ago from an unexpectedly long I.S.S. stay that lasted more than nine months.

Astronauts Emphasize Gratitude as NASA Contends With Uncertainty

For a creature made up of only a single cell, the stentor is a giant. This trumpet-shaped organism is among the largest unicellular organisms, stretching as long as a sharpened pencil tip. But sometimes it has a hard time vacuuming up the swimming bacteria and microscopic algae it eats to survive.

New research reveals that stentors, which are part of a group called protists, may address this challenge by eating “family style.” In a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Physics, scientists shared the discovery that colonies of stentors can make water flow more quickly around them, helping them suck up more prey.

The new findings suggest that, although they lack neurons or brains, stentors can cooperate with one another.

“These single-cell organisms can do things that we assume are limited to more complex organisms,” said Shashank Shekhar, a biophysicist at Emory University in Atlanta who is the lead author of the new paper. “They form this higher order structure, like what we do as humans.”

Under microscopes, scientists found that giant single-cell organisms were able to vacuum up more food when they are stuck together.

Eating ‘Family Style’ May Have Set the Stage for Life as We Know It

Some 1,900 leading researchers accused the Trump administration in an open letter on Monday of conducting a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” that could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans.

The letter’s signatories, all of them elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, warned of the damage being done by layoffs at health and science agencies and cuts and delays to funding that has historically supported research inside the government and across American universities.

“For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world,” the letter said. “Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”

Nearly 2,000 scientists urged that Congress restore funding to federal agencies decimated by recent cuts.

Trump Administration Has Begun a War on Science, Researchers Say

Ten years ago, this was just a big hole in the ground behind a Lowe’s home improvement store in southern New Jersey, an unlikely place to find what might be one of the world’s most important fossil sites.

But 66 million years ago, tantalizingly close in time to when the dinosaurs went extinct, a multitude of sea creatures died here — a “mass death assemblage” — and sank to the bottom of what was then a shallow sea.

Because of its prehistoric past as a possible mass extinction gravesite, the hole that was once a quarry has become the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum.

Built in Mantua, N.J., about 20 miles from Philadelphia, the museum welcomed its first paying customers this past weekend. For Kenneth Lacovara, a professor of paleontology and geology at nearby Rowan University and the museum’s executive director, it is the culmination of a decade of work.

The museum hopes that after learning about the planet’s prehistoric past, people will do more to preserve Earth’s future.

A New Dinosaur Museum Rises From a Hole in the Ground in New Jersey

Elon Musk gave out $1m checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin supreme court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to Donald Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization”.

“It’s a super big deal,” he told a roughly 2,000-person crowd in Green Bay on Sunday night, taking the stage in a yellow cheesehead hat. “I’m not phoning it in. I’m here in person.”

Musk and groups he supports have spent more than $20m to help conservative favourite Brad Schimel in Tuesday’s race, which will determine the ideological makeup of a court likely to decide key issues in a perennial battleground state. Musk has increasingly become the center of the contest, with liberal favourite Susan Crawford and her allies protesting Musk and what they say is the influence he wants to have on the court.

“I think this will be important for the future of civilization,” he said. “It’s that’s significant.”

He noted that the state high court may well take up redistricting of congressional districts, which could ultimately affect which party controls the US House.

“And if the [Wisconsin] supreme court is able to redraw the districts, they will gerrymander the district and deprive Wisconsin of two seats on the Republican side,” Musk claimed. “Then they will try to stop all the government reforms we are getting done for you, the American people.”

A unanimous state supreme court on Sunday refused to hear a last-minute attempt by the state’s Democratic attorney general to stop Musk from handing over the checks to two voters, a ruling that came just minutes before the planned start of the rally.

Two lower courts had already rejected the legal challenge by Democrat Josh Kaul, who argues that Musk’s offer violates a state law. “Wisconsin law prohibits offering anything of value to induce anyone to vote,” Kaul argued in his filing. “Yet, Elon Musk did just that.”

But the state supreme court, which is now controlled four-to-three by liberal justices, declined to take the case as an original action. The court gave no rationale for its decision. All four liberal justices have endorsed Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate.

Kaul had no immediate comment on the court’s order.

Musk’s attorneys argued in filings with the court that Musk was exercising his free speech rights with the giveaways and any attempt to restrict that would violate both the Wisconsin and US constitutions.

The payments are “intended to generate a grassroots movement in opposition to activist judges, not to expressly advocate for or against any candidate,” Musk’s attorneys argued in court filings.

Musk’s political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the presidential election last year, offering to pay $1m a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments. A judge in Pennsylvania said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.

Musk’s attorneys, about four hours before the rally was to begin, asked that two liberal justices who have campaigned for Crawford – Jill Karofsky and Rebecca Dallet – recuse themselves from the case. His attorneys argued their work for Crawford creates “the spectre of inappropriate bias.” If they did recuse, that would leave the court with a three-two conservative majority.

Both justices rejected the request and said they would spell out their reasons why at a later date.

One of the court’s conservative justices has endorsed Schimel, who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat while campaigning Sunday.

Schimel said in a national television interview that he does not control “any of the spending from any outside group, whether it’s Elon Musk or anyone else” and that all Trump asked was whether he would “reject activist judges” and follow the law.

“That’s exactly what I’ve committed to anybody, whether it’s President Trump, Elon Musk or any donors and donors or supporters or voters in Wisconsin. That’s my commitment,” Schimel told Fox News Sunday.

The contest has shattered national spending records for a judicial election, with more than $81m in spending.

It comes as Wisconsin’s highest court is expected to rule on abortion rights, congressional redistricting, union power and voting rules that could affect the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election in the state.

Musk denied he was buying votes but said the court election outcome would be critical to Trump’s agenda and ‘the future of civilization’

Elon Musk hands out $1m checks to voters amid Wisconsin supreme court election race

AI tools will soon be in use in classrooms across England, but the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has one big question she wants answered: will they save time?

Attending a Department for Education-sponsored hackathon in central London last week, Phillipson listened as developers explained how their tools could compile pupil reports, improve writing samples and even assess the quality of soldering done by trainee electrical engineers.

After listening to one developer extol their AI writing analysis tool as “superhuman”, able to aggregate all the writing a pupil had ever done, Phillipson asked bluntly: “Do you know how much time it will have saved?”

That will be our next step, the developer admitted, less confidently.

In an interview with the Guardian, Phillipson said her interest in AI was less futuristic and more practical. Could classroom AI tools free teachers from repetitive tasks and bureaucracy, allow them to focus on their students and ultimately help solve the recruitment crisis that bedevils England’s schools?

“I think technology will have an important role to play in freeing up teachers’ time, and in freeing up that time, putting it to better use with more face-to-face, direct teaching that can only ever be done by a human,” she said.

“This is less about how children and young people use technology, and more about how we support staff to use it to deliver a better education for children. I think that’s where the biggest potential exists.

“In the next few years I want to see AI tech embedded across schools, with staff supported to use the best technology to improve children’s outcomes but also to make teaching a more attractive career for people to go into and stay.

“It’s not about replacing teachers. It’s about how the use of technology can complement the very human face-to-face contact that can’t be replaced.”

Some of the tools are being designed to solve very specific problems. Jessica Leigh Jones, the chief executive of iungo Solutions, showed Phillipson and Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, a tool to assess how well students had wired circuit boards for vocational qualifications such as T-levels.

Using a digital microscope, the tool can rapidly scan dozens of boards and provide feedback to students in a fraction of the time needed by a qualified and experienced electrical engineer – a specialist role in short supply, Jones noted.

Jade Lesh, iungo’s digital growth engineer, told Phillipson the tool “minimises the time spent marking each piece of work”, and that their tests have found it to be as accurate as a trained human’s eye.

Time saved was also Phillipson’s interest in an observation tool being developed by TeachScribe, giving early-years teachers earpieces to record their comments about each child’s development – how well they are playing with others or being creative – which are then uploaded to a database and compared with the government’s early-years curriculum goals.

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The developer, Ewan Dobres, said it would save teachers a “phenomenal amount of time” that could be spent with pupils because they would no longer have to stop and write down each observation.

Other applications on display included tools that would allow teachers to scan and transcribe pupils’ handwritten work, and use AI to assess it against national benchmarks in English and literacy.

Helen Williams, chief executive of the Inmat multi-academy trust in Northamptonshire, said her schools had been working with a company called Stylus on a writing assessment tool that not only saved time but allowed teachers to set pupils more of the writing tasks that are a burden for them to mark.

Williams said using AI tool for marking had advantages other than saving time. They “levelled the playing field” between experienced and early-career teachers, and removed the traps teachers can fall into when assessing their own pupils.

“If you’ve got a class of 30, you’re always going into marking with an idea of ‘well, this one will be all right’. AI doing it takes away that unconscious bias and is actually just marking what’s there, which might throw up some things that a teacher hasn’t picked up in the past,” she said.

Exclusive: education secretary exploring tools to compile student reports and assess writing and vocational skills

Bridget Phillipson eyes AI’s potential to free up teachers’ time

Over the weekend, protesters gathered at Tesla showrooms in hundreds of cities across the world to demonstrate against Elon Musk laying waste to the US government in alliance with Donald Trump. Their goal: stigmatize Tesla’s cars. One sign in Manhattan read: “Burn a Tesla, save democracy.” Protesters are using the commercial democracy of consumer products to influence US political democracy.

***

My colleagues Dara Kerr and Edward Helmore report:

In New York City, several hundred anti-Tesla protesters gathered outside the EV company’s Manhattan showroom on Saturday. Sophie Shepherd, 23, an organizer with Planet Over Profit, explained that the rally was not about protesting electric cars.

“We’re here to protest Musk, who has essentially held a Tesla car show on the White House lawn,” she said. “We want to disrupt his business as much as possible, so that includes all Teslas, and not just the Cybertruck.”

The demonstrations did not draw huge crowds. Nonetheless, Musk’s fortune has dropped more than $100bn as Tesla’s stock has fallen by nearly half since its peak value in December 2024.

Musk’s political ventures are forcing many Tesla owners to either be a spokesperson for or against the company

Musk is synonymous with Tesla. In its comprehensive annual report, the company discloses in the section on risks that it is “highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Technoking of Tesla and our Chief Executive Officer”. Technoking of Tesla is one of Musk’s official, if juvenile, titles.

By extension, consumer sentiment regarding Musk’s public persona is inextricable from Tesla. When he was known primarily as a multi-hyphenate technical genius, the inspiration for Iron Man, that perception boosted Tesla’s brand like an engine from his rocket company.

In light of the polarization of Musk as a public figure, however, reading Tesla’s risk assessments in its 10-K form takes on a different tone: “We will need to maintain public credibility and confidence in our long-term business prospects in order to succeed.”

“We are targeting a global mass demographic with a broad range of potential customers,” reads Tesla’s disclosure.

Musk’s political ventures are forcing many Tesla owners to either be a spokesperson for or against the company. Individual owners are being asked to justify their purchases or publicly declare the separation of their beliefs from their vehicles. Of particular concern are the dates of the purchases, with “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers proliferating as a sign of rebuke of the so-called “department of government efficiency”. Yet there is a wide swath of the US public that seems to want their car to just be a car, not a political statement.

For his own part, Musk is targeting a narrower and narrower audience, hosting a Tesla sales event on the White House lawn alongside one of the most poorly rated and divisive presidents in modern political history. I can’t predict Tesla’s fate, but for now, widespread social souring on Tesla is making a dent in its finances.

Read the full story on Saturday’s protests here.

More on Elon Musk

Does Donald Trump know who Totoro is?

View image in fullscreen Photograph: X, The White House

On Thursday, the White House posted a cartoon depicting the arrest of a wailing woman beside an American flag. The image was captioned: “Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by @ICEgov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S. She wept when taken into custody (picture attached).”

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By ghiblifying this woman, the White House inadvertently made a previously deported felon and literal fentanyl trafficker sympathetic

The White House’s image is shocking. The contrast between the harshness of deportation and the round softness of the characters rendered in a warm color scheme, evocative of children’s animated classics such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, is ghoulish. That seems to be the point. The image is both viral nonsense – there may be little meaning to extract from it other than its capacity to appall – and also a communication from the most powerful office in the United States. We may be obligated to attempt to understand it.

Earlier last week, OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with better image generation. Soon, there was a deluge on Twitter/X of real photographs reproduced as still images in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind, most recently, the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe-winning film The Boy and the Heron. I made one of the images. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his profile photo to a character he described as “a twink Ghibli style”, too. The White House appears to have done the same. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the cartoon depiction of the arrest and deportation.)

Trump has never seen Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke, I would venture. Part of what is supremely bizarre in the image is visual; another part is political. Hayao Miyazaki, the 84-year-old founder of Ghibli, has criticized nationalism and championed environmentalism, expressing opposition to positions easily attributable to Trump’s administration.

In a 2018 documentary, Miyazaki called one young animator’s use of artificial intelligence to produce a grotesque moving figure “an insult to life itself”. Whether OpenAI violated Ghibli’s copyright in equipping its AI model to imitate the studio’s style remains an open legal and philosophical question. I recommend reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which concerns recreations of the Mona Lisa.

Mike Solana, the chief marketing officer of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the founder of the conservative newsletter Pirate Wires, tweeted that the image was ineffective in its mockery because it was too kawaii.

“24 hours in and we face the first great example of a person working with a form they didn’t earn, and therefore don’t understand. by ghiblifying this woman the white house inadvertently made a previously deported felon and literal fentanyl trafficker sympathetic… this specific aesthetic is innately endearing. you can’t make me want to see a ghibli character in pain,” Solana tweeted.

I have written before about how US conservatives love AI while liberals shun it, which I think remains the case. The jarring admixture of seemingly silly internet aesthetics with the Trump administration’s punitive approach to immigration will not disappear soon. The White House made a similar post last month. “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊”. I expect more.

The wider TechScape

As demonstrations against Elon Musk and his political ties spread, Tesla owners find themselves caught in a growing debate – turning a once-iconic brand into a symbol of division

How Tesla became a battleground for political protest

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has trickled down from adults in their offices to university students in campus libraries to teenagers in high school hallways. Now it’s reaching the youngest among us, and parents and teachers are grappling with the most responsible way to introduce their under-13s to a new technology that may fundamentally reshape the future. Though the terms of service for ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other AI models specify that the tools are only meant for those over 13, parents and teachers are taking the matter of AI education into their own hands.

Inspired by a story we published on parents who are teaching their children to use AI to set them up for success in school and at work, we asked Guardian readers how and why – or why not – others are doing the same. Though our original story only concerned parents, we have also included teachers in the responses published below, as preparing children for future studies and jobs is one of educators’ responsibilities as well.

Some parents and teachers told us they are going full steam ahead, integrating ChatGPT into everyday interactions with their children to explain new concepts, answer incessant questions and illustrate fanciful tales. Others, wary of the dangers AI can pose to young people, are demonstrating it only a little at a time in closely supervised settings.

Still other parents and teachers are refraining from showing their children and students how to use AI at all, concerned about harms and the impossibility of ethical use of a technology still rife with unresolved copyright questions. We felt their responses made valuable contributions to the discussion, too.

The answers below have been edited for length and clarity.

The parents explaining the world with AI’s help

I swear, watching my kids discover AI has been one of those unexpected parenting joys nobody tells you about. Remember when we all used to say, ‘Let’s Google it’? Well, my nine-year-old has completely ditched that phrase. Now it’s always ‘Daddy, can we ChatGPT it?’ whenever he’s stuck on homework. The best part? He’s learning to ask for hints instead of answers – figuring things out himself but with a little AI nudge.

Then there’s my six-year-old – this kid’s questions could outlast anyone’s patience! You know those evenings when your brain is completely fried but they’re still going strong? That’s when our AI buddy steps in. He will chat away for half an hour, bouncing from dinosaurs to space to ‘why is water wet?’ while I secretly recharge my mental batteries.

My daughter is only three but already thinks she’s royalty. Instead of reading the same princess books for the millionth time, we now create stories where SHE’S the princess having these wild adventures.

–Matt, consultant, 44, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

I use AI as a kind of intellectual backstop when I’m having a conversation with my children and I can’t answer one of their questions. We have AI voice assistants at home and in the car so this has recently involved asking Alexa for the population of China and examples of how you can use the word ‘credential’ for homework. It fast forwards the conversation and keeps the learning flowing. My children are aware that AI can hallucinate, however, so you need to sense check responses. Alexa recently came up with some incorrect answers about the book Ann of Green Gables, which my eight year old challenged!

–Graham, writer, Lamberhurst Quarter

I use AI tools with my three-year-old to help explore the world. We use apps to identify birdsongs and plants on our daily walks, and ChatGPT to answer questions he has about the world (“what are bones for? Where did my bones come from?”) especially when we get new books from the library on something he hasn’t learned much about yet. I want him to feel comfortable turning to AI to augment his curiosity. At the same time, we minimize all passive play, including screen time.

For now, I try to make time for us to tell stories to each other and do imaginative play for the topics he asks AI about, so he has a chance to do some generative engagement.

AI is a daily part of our routine, but it’s not a particularly high priority.

–Nate, data scientist, East Bay, California.

I am currently introducing OpenAI’s ChatGPT to my oldest daughter, describing it as a creative helper that can be both friend or foe and teaching her basic prompts to make an AI work and benefit you. I show her my daily usage of AI in my working area, creating mails for me, optimising event planning, structuring data. I am teaching her that you have to be always sceptical when using AI and should not start to rely completely on its answers, which in fact can be wrong.

–Ben, 47, entrepreneur, Germany

My son understands Italian (my language) but speaks back in Dutch. My Dutch is very poor. I am occasionally making use of ChatGPT voice interaction tool to translate more complicated things from Italian/English into Dutch – with the upside that the output can be tailored to a six-year-old.

–Name withheld, Netherlands

To introduce them to AI, we logged into ChatGPT and generated images based on their prompts. While their understanding is still very limited, they are beginning to grasp the idea that you can create fake images and videos online.

We then worked together to create a story, which we gave to ChatGPT to generate a screenplay of a news report. Taking this a step further, we used NotebookLM to convert it into a podcast, which I played through our car stereo. The podcast was formatted as a legitimate-sounding news report, but the story itself was absurd – our Shetland pony turning into a unicorn and teaming up with a toy gibbon to fight evil sheep in Co Kerry.

After listening, I asked them whether we should believe the news report. We then searched online for evidence of the story and, unsurprisingly, found nothing. This helped illustrate the importance of verifying information, even when it sounds official. I have no idea how much of this lesson will stick, but it’s an ongoing conversation.

My five-year-old, in particular, is starting to grasp that AI can generate fake content, and my hope is that this awareness will help him recognise or at least question misleading material in the future.

–David, software developer, Ireland

For pupils struggling with writing, I encourage them to ask AI for feedback at a sentence level, requesting information about why sentences don’t parse, together with grammatical explanations.

I encourage them not to use AI to produce whole essays because that’s not how they will learn. Some still ignore this advice, of course!

–Jenny, English and drama teacher, Valencia, Spain

I have a girl, six and a boy, 11. Both access chatGPT via myself. They know if dad does not know something they may insist he asks chatGPT. And I often do, while curating the response. The boy may also access it himself, most often to ask some questions about the world around.

I want kids to understand that LLMs are a tool to be used to achieve our goals. We also talked about kids who do homework with AI. I explained that we humans, also have computers in our heads which have to be trained in order for us to be successful and own tools of our success.

–Anton, fintech director, Geneva

I have been frequently rendered speechless over these past two years by all the changes introduced in my profession by AI. I have an 11-yo and I am staunchly trying to ensure that the first (and possibly only) intelligence she uses must be her own; she is aware of the existence of ChatGPT, AI translation engines and the like, but does not use them for schoolwork or any other writing.

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–Name withheld, translator, Slovenia

The teachers making AI a part of their curricula

As a guideline, I generally tell students to ask AI the questions that they would ask their teachers. Would they ask their teacher to write them an essay? No. Would they ask their teacher how to improve their essay? Yes.

At the same time, I remind students that AI is inaccurate. It will lie and provide false information. They will need to exercise their critical thinking and fact-checking skills. While we do have guidelines in place to cite AI use, I tell my students they should never cite AI, similar to my guidelines around Wikipedia.

–Adam, secondary English teacher, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Whenever I have used AI in the classroom it has been to spark children’s imaginations, rather than replace them. Adobe Firefly is great for encouraging descriptive writing in English, I simply type in children’s noun-phrases or lists of adjectives and AI creates an image based on the description. We can then adjust our vocabulary and take great delight in how AI interprets it quite literally. This is also a really important lesson as children can see first hand that AI has its flaws.

I have also used character.AI to bring historical characters to life to generate quotations and responses for children, based on their questions.

The children always ask for the website address so they can have a go at home, but I have not shared these directly. I advise the children that sometimes AI can appear so human, that children can become confused and start believing that the voice that answers is real. So AI tools and websites should always be used with an adult who can remind them and keep them safe online.

–Angie, primary teacher, Tunbridge Wells

I have chosen to introduce AI in generative ways – making clear that this is a tool, and it should be used. You need to know how to yield a hammer before you can use it; similarly, I see AI in the same way. Students more or less see it the same. Their teachers often don’t. I predominantly teach Māori and Pasifika students, and although they are often – and rightfully! – annoyed that their culture is sometimes misunderstood by these AI models, the technology is so inherently compelling that students take to it faster than their teachers.

I have done simple things like, for example, during a speech unit, having students use it to generate a speech on a random topic, from a list of random unfamiliar topics, to get them up and talking.

–Adam, 28, high school teacher, Christchurch, New Zealand

The parents using AI to help with homework

My 11-yo son uses it to help with homework and studying. He needs to get ideas and then reformulate the answer in his own words, so it’s not a copy and paste job.

–Joanna, housewife and carer, Bath

I started introducing AI to my first born who is in secondary school while doing his school homework.

My approach has been to show him how AI, particularly ChatGPT, can help to understand better concepts and encourage responsible use. The reason is because as ardent user of technology l believe the earlier he gets to know it will make him better since the AI revolution is here to stay

–Richard, university lecturer, Uganda

The parents who are not introducing AI to their children

My five-year-old son barely even knows the internet exists. Computers are for video calls, games, movies, and reading the day’s temperature off the Met Office website. He definitely doesn’t need to know anything about LLMs at this stage and certainly shouldn’t use them. He needs to learn how to write his own words and draw his own pictures, not use machines for plagiarising and stunting his imagination. If LLMs come up, I would strongly encourage my son not to use them.

They are built on the backs of labour and art from writers and artists who have not licensed their work for this purpose. They are plagiarism machines. They can’t create anything new.

I would tell him to be suspicious of any machine wanting to write words for him, which is tantamount to thinking his thoughts for him. Young children deserve opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills and imaginations.

–Name withheld, higher education administrator, Oxford

I am not introducing it to mine – 10 yrs old and eight. They are extremely sophisticated readers but not great writers. One has ADHD and is always attracted to distraction and short cuts, ie, instinctively avoids hard work.

–Name withheld, writer, London

Guardian readers share the ways and reasons they are preparing their children and students for a future that may necessitate familiarity with generative artificial intelligence

How and why parents and teachers are introducing young children to AI

Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm has acquired Musk’s X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – for $33bn, marking the latest twist in the billionaire’s rapid consolidation of power.

The all-stock deal announced on Friday combines two of Musk’s multiple portfolio companies, which also include automaker Tesla and SpaceX, and potentially eases Musk’s ability to train his AI model known as Grok.

Musk announced the transaction in a post on X, saying: “The combination values xAI at $80bn and X at $33bn ($45B less $12B debt).”

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” he wrote. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.”

Neither X nor xAI spokespersons immediately responded to requests for comment. Much of the deal’s specifics remained unclear, such as how investors may be compensated, how X’s leaders would be integrated in the new firm or the prospect of regulatory scrutiny.

“This development feels surprising and somewhat unexpected,” PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore said. “To a certain extent, it closes a chapter in the turbulent saga of X.”

“The choice of $45bn is not a coincidence,” said DA Davidson & Co analyst Gil Luria. “It is $1bn higher than the take-private transaction for Twitter in 2022” and he can share the value of the xAI business with X co-investors.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has also consolidated his power in Washington DC by overseeing the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge. That has also put him in the position to potentially influence agencies that oversee his business dealings.

An investor in xAI, and now in the combined entity, told Reuters they were not surprised by the deal, viewing it as Musk consolidating his leadership and management at his own companies. The investor declined to be named.

Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that the two companies had been collaborating closely and the integration would drive deeper integration with Grok.

Musk’s xAI startup was launched less than two years ago and recently raised $10bn in a funding round that valued the company at $75bn, according to a media report.

In February, Musk, 53, made a $97.4bn bid with a consortium for the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which was rejected, with OpenAI saying that the startup was not for sale. Musk co-founded OpenAI with CEO Sam Altman in 2015.

Musk competes directly with the popular OpenAI platform and has sued in federal court in California to prevent his rival from converting from a non-profit to a for-profit business. A judge earlier this month denied Musk’s request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the changeover.

The wide release of AI software has set off a flurry of investment and competition in Silicon Valley. In an effort to be more efficient, companies are seeking ways to integrate the software into nearly every part of their operations.

As competition in AI intensifies, xAI has been ramping up its data centre capacity to train more advanced models, and its supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, called Colossus, is touted as the largest in the world.

xAI introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, in February, as it tries to compete with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The X platform can serve to further distribute xAI products, while also providing a real-time feed of users’ musings, screenshots and other data.

Musk clinched a deal in 2022 to buy X, then Twitter, for $44bn, ending its run as a public company since its 2013 initial public offering, declaring that “the bird is freed” once the acquisition closed.

He gutted the company’s workforce after the acquisition, prompting advertisers to flee the platform and a rapid decline in revenue. Recently, brands have been returning to X as Musk’s influence grows in the Trump administration.

The seven banks that extended $13bn in loans to Musk to buy X kept the debt on their books for two years until they could sell it all at once last month, according to a source familiar with the transactions.

This was made possible after a surge in investor interest for exposure to AI companies along with X’s improved operating performance over the previous two quarters, among other factors, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After the merger, investors who bought the debt from the banks will profit, said Espen Robak, founder of Pluris Valuation Advisors, which specialises in illiquid assets. “For sure the debt is worth more now, if not fully paid off.”

Separately, a US judge on Friday rejected a bid by Musk to dismiss a lawsuit claiming he had defrauded former Twitter shareholders by waiting too long to disclose his initial investment in the company.

Specifics of deal remain unclear, including how X’s leaders will be integrated into new company

Elon Musk’s xAI firm buys social media platform X for $33bn

Tesla showrooms across the world are expected to face anti-Elon Musk protests on Saturday, as Musk’s senior role in the Trump administration has contributed to a European consumer backlash by some Tesla owners and prospective buyers.

It follows a 44% drop in Tesla sales in Europe on average last month, according to the research platform Jato Dynamics. Tesla’s European market share fell to 9.6% last month, the lowest it has registered in February for five years.

However, in the UK the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders reported an almost 21% rise in the number of new Tesla cars registered in February, with the Model 3 and Model Y proving the second and third most popular after the Mini Cooper.

Hundreds of Tesla owners got in touch with the Guardian to share how their feelings about owning Teslas have changed over time. Here are some their views.

‘Our daughter keeps asking us to sell it’

As a birthday present in 2019, my wife booked me a test drive for the Tesla Model S. I thought, “My God, what an amazing bit of kit”. It was very smooth, very fast, and I was keen to drive something more environmentally friendly. So we bought one.

We’ve now done about 80,000 miles on it – driving to Switzerland one year, Italy another, and last summer to the south of France. It’s been incredibly cheap, reliable, spacious, and with virtually no servicing.

But we are horrified by Trump and Musk’s extreme politics. Our 26-year-old daughter keeps asking us to sell it. When I saw Trump and Musk showcasing the models outside the White House, I felt a bit sick. I’m on Tesla owners’ forums, it’s getting very polarised.

We’re now in a series of constant dilemmas. I don’t want to have to put stickers on my Tesla like others are, with things like, “Love the car, not the CEO”. I feel very torn. The seconhand market has plummeted. Our warranty runs out in 2027, and then we’ll see. I never thought owning a car would be this difficult.

Jonathan, 64, Oxford

View image in fullscreen An anti-Musk poster in Broadstairs, Kent. Photograph: Krisztián Elek/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock

‘Do we regret it? Morally, yes. Practically, no’

Last spring, my girlfriend and I were looking for a new car. A Tesla wasn’t even on our radar, but it turned out to be a cheaper option than the electric alternatives, and during a test drive it felt like the best car I’d ever driven … unfortunately. We thought, let’s go for it.

When Musk started campaigning for Trump last summer, I began to get questions about the car. Now it’s even worse. Friends or colleagues joke around, saying: “Ah! So you’re for Mr Musk?” But for me, having something that’s in any way a symbol of the far right is extremely painful. We feel a moral pain at being owners.

Do we regret it? Morally, yes. Practically, no. I hope this will be a passing moment, that the brand will outlive Musk. We hope someone can take over as CEO from Musk.

Patrick*, 40, Belgium

‘I’m a Tesla fanboy who jumped ship’

When I first drove a Tesla, while I was visiting Las Vegas for work in 2019, I was absolutely blown away. Going back to my Ford Mondeo felt like travelling back in time. I got the Model 3, which was a joy to drive, like a go-kart around the country roads, and later we got the Model Y.

I didn’t see the rightwing stuff coming. When Musk aligned with Trump, we thought, well … the car’s great. I was still prepared to stick with Tesla right up until Musk’s so-called “Roman salute”. The day I saw that, I thought, “Oh, man”.

My car was up for renewal a few weeks ago. I was on the phone to Tesla – they were really persistent, trying to convince me to stay – when a Polestar 4 [a competitor] drove by. I booked a test drive the same day and now I’m waiting for my Polestar 4 to arrive. I’m prepared to take a slight step down in software.

I was like, “Actually, I’ve got to stick to my morals, without that I haven’t got anything”. Even so, the Polestar is made in China, and we thought, is that any better? It’s almost impossible to have a fully ethical supply chain today. But Elon really put me off staying with Tesla – I’m a Tesla fanboy who jumped ship.

Henry, 50, Bedfordshire

‘There’s no way I’d sell my Tesla because of the CEO’s political views’

They are incredible cars. I bought a Model 3 Performance in 2019, and get software updates on a regular basis so the car consistently improves and offers new features. For me, once you’ve owned a Tesla, there’s no going back. It’s the iPhone equivalent of cars – everything works really well and is easy to use.

We’ve seen on the news the fools who think it’s OK vandalising Teslas. I get quips from friends, saying, “Has anyone keyed yours yet?” But this hasn’t worried me about my car. I don’t think these activists represent more than a fraction of a per cent of the population.

There’s no way I’d sell my Tesla because of the CEO’s political views. I disagree with some things Musk says and does, but I could say the same for everyone, and I don’t see what the fuss is about with Doge. The attacks he’s endured have been disproportionate and dishonest. What I worry about is how easily people can be programmed to hate a company to such an extent. It’s been pretty astonishing. Tom, 51, Spain

View image in fullscreen The burnt-out remains of a Tesla in the Steglitz district of Berlin. Police were investigating after four Tesla cars parked in different streets went up in flames earlier this month, Photograph: Omer Messinger/Getty Images

‘It really hurts to think that some of our savings have gone to someone like Musk’

I’m not rich, and my wife and I planned for a long time before we put our savings together to buy an electric vehicle. A car is not a status symbol for me, it’s a practical object and we wanted to reduce our carbon emissions as much as possible.

There’s no Tesla showroom in Slovakia yet, so a couple of years ago we had to get a company in Bratislava to import one from Austria. Tesla drivers here still wave at each other because we’re so rare. While buying it, a friend warned me about Musk. Back then I just thought, probably if you dig deep enough into any corporation you’ll find someone with unpleasant views.

But if I were buying a car today, there’s no way I’d get a Tesla. It really hurts to think that some of our savings have gone to a company led by someone like Musk. When he started supporting the AfD in Germany, or his associations with Trump, or what they’re now doing to USAid and federal employees – I’ve just felt worse and worse about giving the company thousands of euros.

It’s now worth a lot less than we paid. And it was a lot of money to us, we can’t just ditch it. It’s a symptom of a rather sad time that we live in, really.

Steven, 50, Slovakia

*Some names changed.

Some voice regret over Musk’s backing of Trump, but others say CEO’s views do not detract from the car’s appeal

‘Love the car, not the CEO’: how Europe’s Tesla owners feel about their cars - and Elon Musk

Advocates of “incel” ideology are rebranding as “Sub5s” and adopting the language of self-improvement to push their content on TikTok, according to a study.

Hateful material is banned from the social media site but accounts disseminating the beliefs are said to be hiding behind new terms and “socially palatable” language.

One of the fundamental tenets of the involuntary celibate, or incel, ideology is the belief that society is organised based on a looks-based hierarchy.

Pseudo-scientific theories about self-improvement and attractiveness that are often misogynist in nature are now being promoted and “normalised”, it is claimed.

Anda Iulia Solea, a researcher at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Portsmouth, said this included a theory referenced in the Netflix drama Adolescence that suggests that 80% of women were attracted to 20% of men.

Another concept pushed by accounts on TikTok is that of the PSL scale, under which it is claimed that men can be ranked from one to eight according to attractiveness.

The PSL acronym comes from the first letters of three incel sites: PUAhate, Sluthate and Lookism.net.

Men are rated from being “PSL gods” (exceptionally attractive men) to “Chads” (generally attractive men) and finally “Sub5s” (unattractive men).

Men are encouraged to believe they can move up through the scale by a process called “looksmaxxing”, which can be as unproblematic as going to the gym or as damaging as changing the structure of the jaw using a hammer.

Such theories are said to be bound up with the belief that there is an ideal form of masculinity and that women are to blame.

When searching for the term “incel” on TikTok, an error message appears alongside a content warning about the phrase being associated with hateful behaviour. However, should a user search for “Sub5” content, they are offered a stream of material on the platform.

“We argue that facilitated by its rebranding through the frameworks of looksmaxxing and the PSL scale, misogynist incel ideology is being mainstreamed”, write Solea and Dr Lisa Sugiura.

“These mechanisms reframe overtly toxic, misogynistic and extremist rhetoric into socially palatable discourses of self-improvement and biological and racial essentialism, enabling its diffusion into broader digital spaces.”

TikTok has more than 1.9 billion users worldwide. A third of users in the UK are said to fall between the ages of 13 and 17, with 40.32% in the 18 to 24 age group.

The conclusions of the new paper, submitted to peer review in the Crime, Media, Culture journal, followed analysis of videos on five accounts on TikTok identified as promoting incel theories.

Solea said: “What they try to do is to attract wider audiences and also to be permitted on the platform and accepted by others through rebranding. So you’ll see Sub5s, you’ll see the PSL scale, and then also they are being less directly offensive and violent towards women.

“I’m just going to mention the Adolescence show because everybody’s talking about that: the 80:20 rule, where 80% of women go for the 20% of men. There are lots of these theories. You’re more likely to believe that women are bad when they show you that, rather than just saying: ‘Oh, women are such sluts,’ especially when those words and insults are not allowed on TikTok.”

A TikTok spokesperson said: “Misogyny is strictly prohibited on TikTok and we take swift action to remove content that violates our policies.

“We continually refine our moderation using technology and expert insights, and 93% of hateful content that was removed from our platform last quarter was removed before it was reported to us.”

Misogynist ideas being normalised as accounts rebrand, with focus on ‘Sub5s’ and ‘looksmaxxing’, say researchers

‘Incel’ accounts using self-improvement language to avoid TikTok bans – study

Blaring car horns on the three-lane A40 in west London are nothing new. However, on Saturday, they weren’t aimed at other drivers for a change; instead it was Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, who was the target of their anger as part of the “Takedown Tesla” movement, which has spread from the United States.

“It’s too overwhelming to do nothing,” said Louise Cobbett-Witten, who has family in the US. “There is real solace in coming together like this, everyone has to do something. We haven’t got a big strategy besides just standing on the side of the street, holding signs and screaming.”

The protest was part of a global day of protests planned under the umbrella of the Tesla Takedown movement. Organizers say the rallies will take place in front of more than 200 Tesla locations worldwide, including nearly 50 in California. Musk has not commented on the demonstrations.

Cobbett-Witten has family in Washington DC, and is planning to move back to the US. The 39-year-old NHS worker, who lives in south London, said: “The checks and balances have just failed. As much as people are trying to not say these words, they are fascists, they are white supremacists, they’re xenophobes, they’re misogynists, and they’re coming for everyone. And what starts in America comes over here.”

In the last fortnight, Tesla has responded to the protests outside its showroom and charging point in Park Royal by stationing a lone security guard at its gate, who said protesters had been friendly and peaceful. Dozens turned up on Saturday, their largest turnout since they began weeks ago.

While Tesla sales have fallen in Europe, they rose in the UK by more than a fifth in February, according to new car registration figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

View image in fullscreen A protester at the demonstration on Saturday in London. Photograph: Thomas Krych/AP

Gay rights campaigner Nigel Warner MBE was attempting to hand out stickers to Tesla drivers entering or leaving the site in Park Royal. “This is the only thing you can do to make a difference,” the 77-year-old retired accountant from London said. “We are pretty helpless over here, the same as Europe, the only thing we can do is try to affect Tesla’s share prices and sales. It is something that has been done already with the Tesla sales dropping in many places. If he can’t sell his cars he is finished.”

Documentary film-maker Jim Green, 56, who lived in New York and Los Angeles before moving back to the UK 18 months ago, had worked with Musk on a film a decade ago.

Green said: “He was a different person, and he was very charismatic. He was talking when I was hanging out with him about the gigafactory where the batteries were being built, and he had a very compelling argument to make about the importance of batteries, an argument he made extraordinarily articulately. So I was very much leaning in to believing this guy wouldn’t turn into the fascist he has become.”

He said Musk had attacked typical Tesla buyers, whom he described as wealthy liberals who care about the environment: “Musk has gone out of his way to insult that exact group of human beings. I lived in LA during the time when everyone who was wealthy and liberal traded their Toyota Prius in for their Tesla during 2014-2015.”

Retiree Anne Kajava, 59, who is originally from Minnesota but lives in Cambridgeshire, said she was concerned about the United States’ change in policy on Europe and Ukraine.

She said: “I am truly concerned about a world war three. I am concerned about a civil war within the United States. You could say those are extreme views but Trump is talking about war. You have JD Vance in Greenland; it’s not impossible.”

Holding a banner attached to a Donald Trump toilet brush, she said: “I used to not hesitate to say I’m an American. Now actually I’m working with an acting coach, to fake a British accent so I can turn it on and off when I want to. I don’t want to be identified as American.”

Alarmed by the havoc the Tesla CEO has wreaked in the US, Britons and Americans are showing their displeasure

Protesters picket London Tesla showroom on global anti-Musk day

The motor manufacturer Hyundai faces legal action over allegations it failed to warn its customers that one of its most popular models of electric cars could be stolen “effortlessly in seconds”. Elliott Ingram, an expert in digital security, was stunned when a CCTV camera installed at his home recorded a hooded thief stealing his Hyundai Ioniq 5 car in less than 20 seconds.

The thief is believed to have used a device, available online, to mimic the car’s electronic key. It is the latest in a spate of thefts involving the vehicle, and many owners now resort to a steering lock. Ingram’s car was later recovered by police, but he is terminating the lease and seeking compensation from the motor company. He says the South Korean car giant should have alerted customers to the security vulnerabilities.

“This security system has been completely blown open, so anyone can attack it,” he said. “It’s no longer fit for purpose.”

Hyundai promotes the convenience of its digital and smart keys, which allow motorists to lock or unlock the doors and start the engine while carrying just a key fob or digital key. The new technology includes several security measures but can be defeated by criminal gangs.

Ingram discovered a key emulator device being marketed online for €15,000 (£12,500), which claimed to be able to gain entry to the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and a number of other models. The physical appearance of the device is based on the Nintendo Game Boy games console, and it can be operated in either English or Russian. “The device records the signal from the car and within 10 seconds to two minutes completely [duplicates] the native one,” says the website promoting the device. “The key can be stored in the device’s memory. Open, close, start and go at any time.”

The Observer revealed last year that the car industry ignored warnings more than a decade ago that keyless technology risked a surge in vehicle thefts. Experts warned keyless systems could be “successfully undermined” and vehicles stolen without forced entry.

Ingram, 38, who lives in north London, says Hyundai had warned him of other modifications the vehicle required, but failed to alert him and other motorists that its security systems were compromised. He intends to file a claim against the company over the theft unless he receives compensation, citing a breach of the Consumer Rights Act. In a letter to Hyundai, he wrote: “The thief was able to enter the vehicle and steal it effortlessly in seconds. Had I been informed of this specific security risk, I could have taken additional deterrent measures, such as installing a secondary immobiliser or using a steering lock.” He said the motoring manufacturer should “urgently inform” its customers of the vulnerability and ways to avoid theft until the security risk is remedied. Hyundai said in its response to Ingram that there was an industry-wide issue of organised criminal groups deploying electronic devices to illegally override smart key locking systems. It said it was working with police to understand more about the devices and track vehicles as possible.

View image in fullscreen CCTV footage shows Elliott Ingram’s Hyundai Ioniq 5 was stolen in less than 20 seconds. Photograph: Elliott Ingram

Hyundai said its vehicles met all the required security standards for the UK market, and it was developing updates to reduce the risk of keyless thefts. It said vehicles sold from February 2024 have the latest updates to “mitigate” risk and it was working on offering retrospective action to customers with cars placed in the UK market before February 2024.

Car thefts in England and Wales have risen from 70,053 in the year to March 2014 to 129,127 in the year to March 2024, a rise of 84%. According to the 2022 to 2023 Crime Survey for England and Wales, remote devices were used by offenders in 40% of vehicle thefts.

Under the crime and policing bill currently going through parliament, a ban on the electronic devices used to steal vehicles with keyless ignition will be introduced. Under the new laws, anyone who is found in possession of such a device, or to have manufactured, imported or distributed them, could receive five years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine.

Ministers hope the new laws will disrupt the distribution of car theft devices to organised crime groups. The RAC says car thefts are driving higher insurance costs and the new laws “cannot come soon enough”.

Ken Munro, a founding partner of Pen Test Partners, a cyber security testing house, said car manufacturers were improving car security, but there was a lucrative criminal industry in designing products that exploit “cracks” in the technology. “The average car thief doesn’t need to be a hacker,” he said. “They just need to buy a product that allows them to hack and steal a car.”

Hyundai said it was working hard to combat the thieves, but was not planning a recall of any vehicles. “The software and hardware updates that we have and are implementing will significantly reduce the risk of this particular form of vehicle theft occurring in the UK,” said a spokesperson. “However, this is a race against very determined, well-funded individuals who stop at nothing to steal vehicles for multiple purposes.”

Elliott Ingram was stunned at how a thief made off with his Ioniq 5 deploying a device to mimic the smart key – and says he should have been warned

Hyundai facing legal action over car that can be stolen ‘effortlessly in seconds’

Protesters gathered outside Tesla showrooms around the world on Saturday as part of a global day of action against billionaire chief executive Elon Musk. The protest is part of the Tesla Takedown movement — a grassroots campaign that calls for people to boycott Tesla, sell their shares and join local picket lines in a peaceful demonstration against Musk’s influence

Protesters gathered outside Tesla showrooms around the world on Saturday as part of a global day of action against billionaire chief executive Elon Musk

Global protests against Tesla CEO Elon Musk – video

Hundreds of protests at Tesla showrooms are planned across the US and internationally on Saturday. Organizers have dubbed it Tesla Takedown’s Global Day of Action, the latest and largest in a series of demonstrations that began shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated. Organizers say the rallies will take place in front of more than 200 Tesla locations worldwide, including nearly 50 in California alone.

The protesters’ goal is to send a message to the Trump administration that they’re against what the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is doing with the US federal government – laying off thousands of workers, cutting department budgets, giving fascist salutes and getting rid of entire agencies.

“Nobody voted for this, and nobody voted for Elon,” said Vickie Mueller Olvera, who has been organizing Tesla Takedown protests in the Bay Area. “He’s an unelected super-billionaire and he’s a thug.”

Tesla Takedown describes itself as a decentralized grassroots movement that will “protest Tesla for as long as Elon Musk continues to shred public services”. The group says on its organizing page that Musk is “destroying our democracy using the fortune he built at Tesla” and so, in turn, they are “taking action at Tesla”. Local organizers are planning their own demonstrations rather than coordinating with one national group.

Going after Musk’s bottom line

Olvera said that demonstrators were asking people to do three things: don’t buy a Tesla, sell off Tesla stock and join the Tesla Takedown protest movement.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. On X, the social media platform he owns, he has said that the work he is doing for the federal government heading the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is “literally improving government efficiency, like the name says”.

As Musk has made his mark on the federal government and Tesla Takedown protests have grown, his car company’s financial performance has suffered. Since Trump’s inauguration, Tesla’s stock has plummeted more than 35%, sales have nosedived and the resale value for used Teslas appears to have hit an all-time low. Musk’s own net worth has fallen by 25% since then, about $100bn. Some Tesla owners have said they sold their cars after Musk gave a speech on inauguration day that included two Nazi-style salutes.

Earlier this month, Trump and Musk showcased Tesla vehicles on the driveway of the White House. The president touted the electric cars, staging a photo op inside a red Tesla sedan where he exclaimed, “Wow … everything’s computer,” and declared he would buy one. The two also condemned the anti-Tesla protests, and Trump said he would designate any violence against showrooms as domestic terrorism.

Jonathan V Last, the editor for the Bulwark, a politically conservative and anti-Trump website, has credited much of Tesla’s decline to the takedown protests.

“I would go so far as to say the Tesla takedown protests have been one of the most consequential protest movements in the shortest amount of time ever,” Last said during a Bulwark podcast that aired this week. “They helped to obliterate one-third of Elon Musk’s net worth, in like 100 days. And when you attack his money stack, you attack his power.”

The protest movement grows

Tesla Takedown protests started popping up in towns and cities across the US in mid-February. On social media, people posted photos of small gatherings in front of Tesla showrooms with demonstrators holding signs that depicted Musk as a Nazi and said things like “Diabolical Oligarchs Gaslighting Everyone” and “No Swastikars”, a new nickname for Teslas.

Olvera said that’s around the time she heard about a protest happening near her in the Bay Area, so she checked it out. She stood around with the other demonstrators in front of a showroom, holding her anti-Musk sign and joking around, and then something unexpected happened.

“People would drive by, you know, just passersby,” Olvera said. “And some of them just stopped and joined in.”

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The protests kept growing each week with the same crowd coming back and newcomers participating. Olvera, who now organizes demonstrations, said that Tesla owners started joining the protests as they gained momentum and put bumper stickers on their cars saying “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” At one point, she said, even the owner of a Cybertruck – the massive boxy metallic trucks that have become synonymous with Musk – joined the protest.

“I see Elon Musk as hijacking our government, and he’s just dismantling everything that we hold dear,” Olvera said. “Everything that people have fought long and hard for, like social security, Medicare and Medicaid and our beautiful national parks … it just feels like the rug is getting pulled out from under us.”

Anti-Tesla sentiment – and protests – go global

The same pattern has taken shape across the US. Cities like New York and Chicago now see several hundred people joining in the weekly Tesla Takedown protests. On social media, the Bluesky account for Tesla Takedown has gained nearly 25,000 followers in just a matter of weeks. And one of the group’s top promoters, Alex Winter, an activist and the actor who played Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, has amassed nearly 200,000 followers on Bluesky with his daily posts of anti-Musk protests.

Tesla Takedown organizers have been careful to distance themselves from the violent vandalism that has also been carried out against Tesla showrooms. Dozens of Tesla facilities have been attacked in the middle of the night with molotov cocktails, gunshots or graffiti saying things like “Fuck Elon” and “Tesla is Fascist.”

On Monday, the FBI launched a taskforce to go after the alleged vandals, calling them “domestic terrorists”, which Trump, Musk and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, have also called them. The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted on X: “This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.” On Wednesday, police arrested a suspect in a high-profile attack against a Tesla showroom in Las Vegas that involved molotov cocktails. The suspect was charged with 15 counts.

Tesla Takedown organizers also condemn the vandalism. “We are a non-violent grassroots protest movement,” the group says. “We oppose violence and destruction of property. Peaceful protest on public property is not domestic terrorism.”

For Saturday, Tesla Takedown organizers say they expect to see the biggest turnout yet, with 213 planned protests from Waterville, Maine, to Honolulu, Hawaii – that includes 32 international locations in countries such as Australia, Finland and Germany.

“LFG!” the group posted to Bluesky. “Let’s send these techno-fascists, broligarchs and old fashioned Nazis a message loud and clear.”

Tesla Takedown’s Global Day of Action will be the largest in a series of demonstrations that began after Trump term 2.0

Global anti-Elon Musk protests planned at nearly 200 Tesla showroom locations

Monday

With all the other conflicts going on in the world right now, Elon Musk v Jeremy Clarkson is one we could probably safely afford to sit out. I am weak-willed, however, and click through to the story in the Times to test the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Musk is a real villain and Clarkson is just a motormouth, but I suspect the latter – for reasons of basic functionality and the sort of flippant humour with which Musk seems ill-equipped to cope – is capable of getting the better of the world’s richest man, should these latest remarks of Clarkson’s come to his attention.

Certainly, Clarkson has upset Musk before, exciting a libel action out of him in 2011 for comments Clarkson made about Tesla on Top Gear. A judge ruled against Musk then, a fact Clarkson is only too happy to remind him about now. In his Sunday Times column, Clarkson referred to the “pan-global decision to uncrowdfund Tesla”, and took a victory lap around news of Teslas being set on fire and vandalised the world over. “I’d love to remind all you Tesla drivers that I warned you 17 years ago that no good would come of your buying choice,” he wrote in his customary low-key style. “But you didn’t listen.”

Musk, as we know, is apoplectic about the hatred being directed towards Tesla right now, as is Donald Trump. Defending his buddy last week, the US president threatened, nonsensically, to send any “sick terrorist thugs” caught vandalising Teslas to “the prisons of El Salvador”. Clarkson, meanwhile, strove to point out that Musk, once popular on the left for promoting green vehicles, is now targeted by exactly the kind of people Clarkson hates, forcing him to a conclusion I fully support: that my enemy’s enemy is still kind of a jerk. There’s quite enough dislike to go round.

View image in fullscreen ‘Can we somehow sell the spring statement as “cheeky”?’ Photograph: Malcolm Park/Alamy Live News

Tuesday

It’s a hard video to watch: two RAF engineers caught on CCTV kicking poor old Paddington while he sits blamelessly on a bench in Berkshire. The violence escalates to such a degree that by the end of the assault, there’s nothing of the bear statue left but a hollow, metal shell. I guess at least it speaks to the fitness of the British armed forces.

The incident happened at 2am on a drunken night out this month, and on Tuesday the pair were ordered by a judge to pay £2,725 and do community service. It was the judge’s emotional remarks about the target of their vandalism, however, that made one realise not all criminal damage is equal. The two men had, according to Judge Goozee, attacked “a beloved cultural icon”, that represents “kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society”. On the night in question, he said, they had behaved in a way that was “the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for”.

Which rather makes one hope that the next time someone in those parts rips the wing mirror off a Tesla or otherwise puts the boot into “everything it stands for”, they find themselves appearing before this same, symbolism-minded judge.

Wednesday

The discourse around the Netflix show Adolescence continues to rage and after receiving blanket praise for two weeks, some dissent is starting to show. All the usual caveats first: extraordinary television, brilliant performances, breathtaking vision. Adolescence is smartly and interestingly done, although it remains the case that if every girl who was called an ugly bitch online killed the boy or man who said it, there’d be no men left to make the TV show.

The presence of Brad Pitt as an executive producer, meanwhile, rings slight alarm bells. I’m not sure any of us needs the origins of misogyny explained, even tangentially, by a man whose kids have dropped his surname and whose ex-wife has alleged that he abused her. Pitt does, however, belong to what he has called a “really cool men’s group”, so I’m guessing that his “remarkably hands-on” involvement with the show might have brought to the project valuable insights into the self-victimising process.

Thursday

On the Americans in London social media feeds, people are sharing tips for getting in and out of the US without being cuffed and dragged to a detention centre in Louisiana. “If you plan to go, get a burner phone,” writes one frequent traveller which, blimey, I mean, I guess. Lots of people have popped up to report flying recently through Newark or Miami without incident, but the anxiety is enough to have changed the experience. Flight bookings between Canada and the US are down 70% and US tourist operators are braced for a worldwide downturn.

We’re flying to the US in May and, even as citizens, I’m nervous. Six years ago, while still on a green card, I got the “step this way” nod at JFK and was escorted to the exceedingly grim Congratulations, You Have Problems With Your Paperwork side room, where a woman relieved me of my phone and shouted at me and everyone else in the room to sit down and be quiet. For travellers to the US it seems a sensible precaution to have a lawyer’s number at the ready.

View image in fullscreen ‘Tell me again how you’d rather have a president than this comfy old scene.’ Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Friday

I haven’t had to sleep with the hall light on since the Blair Witch Project came out in 1999 – oh man, that was a bad one because my flatmate was away that weekend and after seeing the film, I felt the dank presence of something watching me from the corner of my room. This week a babysitter in Kansas tried to vanquish a child’s fear of monsters under the bed by showing them there was nothing there. Unfortunately, in this case a 27-year old man called Martin Villalobos Jr was hiding under the bed. After a scuffle that knocked over the child, he was arrested and charged with aggravated battery and child endangerment. A mere externalisation of what, at the moment, we know to be true: the monsters are real.

Motormouth v Musk is a hard spectacle to resist and, in the end, it turns out the monsters are real

Digested week: I agree with Jeremy Clarkson – my enemy’s enemy is still kind of a jerk | Emma Brockes

Dolphins whistle. Whales sing. Fish croak, chirp, grunt, hum and growl. But in the chatter of the sea, one voice has been missing — until now.

Sharks have long been seen as the silent killers of the water. But scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand recently recorded a rig shark, or Mustelus lenticulatus, making a sharp clicking sound, most likely by snapping its teeth together, according to findings published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday. They believe it’s the first time a shark has been recorded actively making noise.

The lead researcher, Carolin Nieder, first heard the sound while she was researching the hearing abilities of sharks. While she was handling one shark, it made a clicking, snapping sound similar to that of an electric spark, she said.

The noise came from a rig shark, a fairly small shark common in the waters around New Zealand that grows to up to five feet and mainly eats crustaceans. It is eaten by bigger shark species — and by New Zealanders, who use it to make fish and chips.

Researchers in New Zealand have recorded what they believe is the first instance of a shark actively making noise.

A Shark’s Sounds Are Recorded for What Is Believed to Be the First Time

From ancient star streams to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia space telescope has seen it all.

On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency sent Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switched it off after more than a decade of service to the world’s astronomers. They also overwrote some of Gaia’s onboard memory with the names of team members, some of whom wrote personal goodbyes.

Gaia has charted the cosmos since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the positions and movements of celestial objects in our Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to capture the breadth of development and discovery that the spinning observatory has enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids. These observations have led to more than 13,000 studies, so far, by astronomers.

After more than a decade of mapping the stars, the European spacecraft was shut down on Thursday. But its legacy lives on.

Gaia to Shut Down After More Than a Decade of Mapping the Milky Way

First Close-Up of Star Outside Our Galaxy Shows a Giant About to Blow

Astronomers zoomed in on a stellar behemoth in the Larger Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that orbits about 160,000 light-years from the Milky Way.

By

Breaking news, videos and photos on space and astronomy, including NASA, SpaceX, black holes, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the International Space Station, the sun, exoplanets and the stars.

Space and Astronomy

Donald Trump has said he would be willing to reduce tariffs on China to get a deal done with TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media app used by 170 million Americans.

He acknowledged the role China would play in any agreement. “With respect to TikTok, and China is going to have to play a role in that, possibly in the form of an approval, maybe, and I think they’ll do that,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he added.

Trump’s comment suggests the sale of TikTok’s is a priority for his administration and important enough to use tariffs as a bargaining chip with Beijing.

TikTok did not immediately comment.

ByteDance has a 5 April deadline to find a non-Chinese buyer for TikTok or face a US ban on national security grounds that was supposed to have taken effect in January under a 2024 law.

The move is the result of concern in Washington that TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance makes it beholden to the Chinese government and that Beijing could use the short video app to conduct influence operations against the US and collect data on Americans.

In February and earlier this month, Trump added levies totalling 20% to existing tariffs on all imports from China.

Getting China to agree to any deal to give up control of a business worth tens of billions of dollars has always been the biggest sticking point to getting any agreement finalised. Trump has used tariffs as a bargaining chip in the TikTok negotiations in the past.

On 20 January, his first day in office, he warned that he could impose tariffs on China if Beijing failed to approve a US deal with TikTok.

Vice-president JD Vance has said he expects the general terms of an agreement that resolves the ownership of the social media platform to be reached by 5 April.

Reuters reported last week that White House-led talks among investors are coalescing around a plan for the biggest non-Chinese backers of ByteDance to increase their stakes and acquire the video app’s US operations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The future of the app used by nearly half of all Americans has been up in the air since a law – passed with overwhelming bipartisan support – required ByteDance to divest TikTok by 19 January.

The app briefly went dark in January after the US supreme court upheld the ban, but flickered back to life days later once Trump took office. Trump quickly issued an executive order postponing enforcement of the law to 5 April and said last month that he could further extend that deadline to give himself time to shepherd a deal.

The White House has been involved to an unprecedented level in the closely watched deal talks, in effect playing the role of investment bank.

Free speech advocates have argued that the ban unlawfully threatens to restrict Americans from accessing foreign media in violation of the first amendment of the US constitution.

US president acknowledges Beijing’s role in any sale as app’s owner faces 5 April deadline to find non-Chinese buyer or be hit with US ban

Trump floats easing tariffs on China in return for TikTok deal

Fortunately, the Webb telescope, launched in 2021, has come to the rescue.

Heidi Hammel, an astronomer at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and another of the study’s authors, has been studying Neptune since the 1980s. She thought that if Webb “was powerful enough to see the earliest galaxies in the universe, it’d better be powerful enough to see things like aurorae on Neptune,” she said. “And by golly, it was.”

Using the telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph, astronomers caught Neptune’s infrared auroras in June 2023. And unlike Earth’s, they dance not above the poles, but its mid-latitudes. That’s because Neptune has a wonky magnetic field that is tilted by 47 degrees from the planet’s spin axis.

The new Webb observations also reveal why Neptune’s auroras have been invisible until now. Nearly 40 years ago, Voyager 2 recorded a temperature of around 900 degrees Fahrenheit for Neptune’s upper atmosphere. But the Webb telescope shows that the temperature has dropped, to close to 200 degrees. That lower temperature means the auroras are dimmer.

In fact, Neptune’s aurora is glowing “with less than 1 percent of the brightness we expected, explaining why we haven’t seen it,” said James O’Donoghue, a planetary astronomer at the University of Reading in England and one of the study’s authors. “However, that means we now have a new mystery on our hands: How has Neptune cooled down so much?”

With the detection of Neptune’s strange light show, answers may be forthcoming.

“Auroras are like a TV screen,” said Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England and one of the study’s authors. They are “allowing us to watch the delicate dance of processes in the magnetosphere — all without actually being there.”

The James Webb Space Telescope identified the lights in the distant planet’s atmosphere, which could not be seen by earlier telescopes or spacecraft.

NASA’s Webb Telescope Spots Auroras on Neptune for the First Time

Masaki Kashiwara, a Japanese mathematician, received this year’s Abel Prize, which aspires to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in math. Dr. Kashiwara’s highly abstract work combined algebra, geometry and differential equations in surprising ways.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which manages the Abel Prize, announced the honor on Wednesday morning.

“First of all, he has solved some open conjectures — hard problems that have been around,” said Helge Holden, chairman of the prize committee. “And second, he has opened new avenues, connecting areas that were not known to be connected before. This is something that always surprises mathematicians.”

Mathematicians use connections between different areas of math to tackle recalcitrant problems, allowing them to recast those problems into concepts they better understand.

Masaki Kashiwara received the honor, often regarded as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, for work that combined different mathematical fields to solve challenging problems.

Masaki Kashiwara, Japanese Mathematician, Wins 2025 Abel Prize

The government’s ambition to boost efficiency by embedding AI in all aspects of its work risks being undermined by out-of-date technology, poor quality data and a lack of skilled staff, an influential Commons committee has warned.

The report by the cross-party public accounts committee (PAC) found that more than 20 government IT systems identified as “legacy”, meaning out of date and unsupported, have yet to be given funding to improve them.

Government research cited by the PAC in the report found that almost a third of central government IT systems met this definition in 2024.

Keir Starmer’s government has repeatedly stressed its desire to increase economic growth through the mass take-up of AI systems, including in the public sector.

An official plan for the technology published in January called for the government to “rapidly pilot” AI-powered services, saying this would both increase productivity and improve people’s experience of dealing with officialdom.

In a speech earlier this month, Starmer said AI should replace the work of government officials where it can be done to the same standard, with 2,000 new tech apprentices to be recruited to the civil service.

However, the PAC report also warned about “persistent digital skills shortages in the public sector”, in part because of civil service pay levels “that are uncompetitive with the private sector”.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSI), which is spearheading AI roll-outs in government, says it has previously recognised many of the same worries in two reports published in January, the State of Digital Government and Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government.

However, the PAC report makes a series of new recommendations, including setting a six-month deadline for the department to specifically set out how it will fund replacements for the highest-risk legacy technology, and to also assess the costs of failing to take action.

It also calls for action to improve public confidence in the transparency and standards for how AI is used in government, saying that as of January this year, just 33 official records had been published setting out algorithm-assisted decisions and how they are made. The report recommends this be sped up.

The report also identifies a lack of coherent systems to learn from the mass of different AI pilots taking place across government, calling for action to address this.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP who chairs the PAC, said: “The government has said it wants to mainline AI into the veins of the nation, but our report raises questions over whether the public sector is ready for such a procedure.

“A transformation of thinking in government at senior levels is required, and the best way for this to happen is for digital professionals to be brought round the top table in management and governing boards of every department and their agencies. I have serious concerns that DSIT does not have the authority over the rest of government to bring about the scale and pace of change that’s needed.”

A government spokesperson said: “These findings reflect much of what we already know, which is why we set out a bold plan to overhaul the use of tech and AI across the public sector – from doubling the number of tech experts across Whitehall, to making reforms to replace legacy IT systems more quickly and building new tools to transform how people interact with the state.”

Public accounts committee also flags ‘persistent digital skills shortages’ and uncompetitive civil service pay rates

Government AI roll-outs threatened by outdated IT systems

Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered what to do with your 23andMe account after the company filed bankruptcy. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular tip, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article.

If you’re a visa or green card holder with plans to travel to the US, reports of people being turned away at airports over messages found on their devices might be prompting you to second-guess your travel plans. You might be asking whether Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can search your phone, whether you can opt out and what you should do to minimize your risks.

The short answer is that yes, CBP can search your devices. Constitutional protections are generally weaker at US borders, including airports. You can try to opt out, but depending on your specific circumstances, you might not be willing to risk the potential ramifications of not complying, which can include the confiscation of your devices.

Privacy experts say everyone should conduct a personal risk assessment – which should include your immigration status, travel history and what data you might have on your phone. There’s not a one-size-fits all solution because data that may seem sensitive to some may not be to others, depending on your circumstances. That assessment might affect your calculus of whether to push back if CBP attempts to search your phone, for instance, or how much you want to lock down your devices before heading to the airport.

While CBP said it only searched about 47,000 devices of the 420 million people who crossed the US border in 2024, experts the Guardian spoke to say border enforcement has been unpredictable under the Trump administration, so figuring out whether you’re at risk of a device search is not as straightforward as it once was. French officials said a French scientist was recently turned away at an airport in Texas because immigration officers found texts that were critical of Trump on his phone.

“The super-conservative perspective is to assume they are completely unhinged and that even the most benign reasons for travel are going to subject non-citizens to these device searches,” said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group.

If you’re a US citizen, you must be admitted into the country. That said, some jurisdictions allow CBP to work with the FBI or local police to advance domestic investigations, so there are still some risks of your devices being searched for domestic reasons.

There are steps you can take to make it harder for CBP officers to access your device and the data on it. So what should you do to protect the data on your phone from being searched? The main thing is to prepare ahead of heading to the airport. Here is what you should be thinking about:

Decide if you will comply with a phone search

Before you travel, start to prepare for the possibility of being pulled into secondary screening. First, you should decide if you’re going to comply if an immigration officer asks if they can search your device. They may ask for your phone password or for you to unlock the device. Ideally, you would unlock the device yourself and not share your password. You can decide not to give your consent, but that does come with its own risks.

From a guide to the border from the EFF: “This presents a no-win dilemma. If a traveler complies, then the agents can scrutinize and copy their sensitive digital information. If a traveler declines, then the agents can seize their devices and subject the traveler to additional questioning and detention.”

It’s possible that, if you refuse the search, the officer might decide that you are not worth the trouble because you do not present a high risk. They might let you go. On the flip side, though, declining could make the process longer or could result in border agents confiscating your device. If they do confiscate your device, make sure you ask for a property receipt so you can document that they have your device when you try to get it back. Even if you don’t give up your password, immigration officials can use various tools on your device to unlock it themselves. They can also try to guess your password, so make sure you have a strong and long password.

There are a lot of reasons you might not want to risk being held back longer than you already have been or risk having your device confiscated – including that you don’t know how long border agents will keep your phone.

If you plan to comply with a phone search to avoid any further complications, your phone might be searched either manually or with forensic tools. It is worthwhile to prepare for both types of searches.

Turn your phone and Face ID off before entering the US

The EFF recommends turning your devices completely off before entering the US. This could return your phone or laptop to a heightened security state and, as a result, could make it harder for anyone to break the encryption on your device.

Privacy advocates also recommend making sure your device requires a password to decrypt or unlock. If you use Face ID or a fingerprint to unlock your phone, for instance, it would be easier for an officer to use it to gain access to your device.

Do not wipe your phone

You might think the most protective options are to completely wipe your phone before traveling, use a burner or travel without a phone. But the EFF’s Cope said that could actually raise suspicions.

“People are damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” Cope said. “If you cross the border with no data on your device, that itself can be seen as suspicious.”

Instead, if you want to seem cooperative but do have data or texts stored on your phone that you wouldn’t want to be accessed, Cope suggests deleting that information selectively rather than wiping your whole device.

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Encrypt your data and use a strong password

The most important step to take before you travel is to encrypt the data on your device, which is different than using encrypted messaging services like Signal. Device encryption can make it harder for CBP officers to access files on your phone or laptop or recover deleted files, even if they confiscate the device and subject it to sophisticated forensic tools.

Fortunately, all recent models of both iPhones and most Android phones come with full-device encryption automatically turned on. On an Android, double check that yours is on in the “advanced settings” tab of your “Security” menu. You will want to choose a strong password that is not easy to guess so CBP can’t walk in the front door to your device. Here’s a good primer on how to make a strong password.

“This encryption is only as good as the encryption passphrase someone uses on their device, though,” said EFF senior staff technologist Bill Budington. “So the best advice is to choose a strong, nine- to 12-random-character (or four- to five-word) passphrase for the device, and make sure that biometric unlocks like Face ID or Touch ID are turned off when going through sensitive areas like checkpoints or somewhere your device could be confiscated.”

Laptops, on the other hand, do not all come with full-device encryption. You can use the encryption tools some of them offer to encrypt your data. MacOS has a tool called FileVault, which you can access by searching for it in the top right corner of your screen, and some Windows computers come with a tool called Bitlocker, which can be used to encrypt your device. The EFF has a full list of tools you can use on various operating systems here.

For those of you traveling with a device owned by your employer or someone else, you will want to make sure to have a conversation with them before you travel to ensure your device is sufficiently protected.

How to securely delete your data

In addition to encrypting your devices, you should delete any specific texts, apps, photos, etc that you feel are sensitive or you wouldn’t want a government agent to see.

Securely deleting this data requires a few steps and comes with limitations. If you are not wiping your phone entirely, as that may raise suspicions, you will probably opt to delete specific files. That more practical option may be effective for a manual or cursory search but may not be sufficient in the event of a more advanced search by US immigration personnel. Files may not be fully deleted, or there may be references to these files that remain on your device.

On top of ensuring your device is encrypted, you will want to make sure that you’ve deleted your files from any trash folders as well. On iMessage, for instance, if you click on “filters” in the top left corner you’ll find a “recently deleted” folder. Make sure you’ve cleared texts from there as well. On iPhones, once a file is deleted from both the main iMessage interface and the “recently deleted” file, it is permanently deleted, according to the company.

Cope suggests pre-emptively deleting some apps your don’t want to be searched. This protective method is imperfect because an advanced search could reveal that an app was installed, but it would be a way to avoid having your WhatsApp messages searched, for instance, in the case of a manual search.

Move things on to a cloud storage server

During law enforcement searches inside the boundaries of the US, a cloud storage server is not more protected than your devices. At the border, however, there are currently policies in place that prohibit CBP from searching online cloud services. In practice, that means that immigration officers will have to put your phone in airplane mode before searching it.

“They do specifically say officers are only authorized to look at data that are ‘resident on the device’,” Cope said. “So that is data that is actually on the hard drive of your phone, laptop or camera. They’re supposed to disconnect it from the internet, if it’s an internet-connected device.”

If you have data that you don’t want to or can’t delete permanently for any reason, you can delete it off your device and store it on your cloud storage like iCloud, Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive.

This is a high-level guide that may not touch on the specifics of your situation. For a full comprehensive guide on how to protect your devices at US borders, please visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

With reports of people being turned away at airports over messages found on devices, here’s what to do to minimize risks

How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border

Tesla sales have dropped by nearly 45% in Europe, according to data compiled by the research platform Jato Dynamics.

The Texas-based electric carmaker, whose CEO is Elon Musk, sold less than 16,000 vehicles across Europe last month, down 44% on average across 25 countries in the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland.

Tesla’s market share also fell to 9.6% last month, the lowest it has registered in February for five years. However, in the UK the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders reported an almost 21% rise in the number of new Tesla cars registered in February, with the Model 3 and Model Y proving the second and third most popular after the Mini Cooper.

Musk’s senior role in Trump’s administration has led to a consumer backlash by some Tesla owners or prospective buyers. Tesla dealerships have also been the target of protests.

We’re interested in finding our more about what it’s like being a Tesla owner. Has your view or experience changed in the last year – if so, why? We’d also like to hear from those who have sold their cars, or are considering it. What were the reasons behind your decision?

We’d like to hear from people who drive Tesla cars and how they feel about them

Share your experience of being a Tesla car owner

Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has been in love with foie gras for a quarter century. The luxurious delicacy is a pâté or mousse made from the rich, fattened livers of ducks or geese.

“It’s something really extraordinary,” Dr. Vilgis said, recalling his early encounters with high-quality foie gras when he lived and worked in Strasbourg, France. It was soft and buttery and, once the fats began to melt in his mouth, the flavors evolved and exploded. “It is like fireworks. You have suddenly a sensation of the whole liver,” he said.

But such transcendence comes at a price.

To fatten up the liver that’s used to create foie gras, farmers force-feed the fowl more grain than their bodies need. The excess food is stored as fat in the animal’s liver, which balloons in size.

While he’ll eat foie gras produced by local farmers on occasion, Dr. Vilgis finds the force-feeding intolerable at an industrial scale. “It’s terrible to see,” he says.

While not sparing the lives of ducks and geese, the technique lets the birds eat and grow normally.

Foie Gras That Skips the Force-Feeding Is Developed by Physicists

On an early summer day in 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, putrid mushrooms repulsed fellow travelers riding a horse-drawn trolley car.

Even wrapped in paper, the stench of the aptly named stinkhorn mushrooms was overpowering, but the woman stifled a laugh upon overhearing two other passengers gripe about the swarm of flies around them. The smell didn’t bother her. All she cared about was getting the specimens home to study them, she would later write.

This was Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who, over the course of nearly four decades, conducted seminal research on the fungi of her state, Maryland.

Miss Banning characterized thousands of specimens that she found in Baltimore and the surrounding countryside, identifying 23 species new to science at the time.

Mushrooms in 19th-century watercolors: The paintings of a self-taught female mycologist are featured at the New York State Museum.

A Fungi Pioneer’s Lifelong Work on Exhibit

Australian authors say they are “livid” and feel violated that their work was included in an allegedly pirated dataset of books Meta used to train its AI.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is being sued by authors in the United States, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and the comedian Sarah Silverman, for copyright infringement.

In court filings in January it was alleged chief executive Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of the LibGen dataset – an online archive of books – to train the company’s artificial intelligence models despite warnings from his AI executive team that it is a dataset “we know to be pirated”.

The Atlantic has published a searchable database where authors can type in their name to see what of their work is included in LibGen dataset.

It includes books published by many Australian authors, including some by former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and John Howard.

Holden Sheppard, the author of Invisible Boys, a hit young adult novel that has been adapted into a series on Stan, said two of his books and two short stories were included.

It’s a bit rich for big tech to cry poor Tracey Spicer

He said he was “fucking livid” to learn they could have been used to train Meta’s AI.

“I am furious to learn my books have been again pirated and used without my consent to train a generative AI system which is not only unethical and illegal in its current form, but something I am vehemently opposed to,” he said.

“No consent has been obtained from any of the thousands of authors who have had our work taken, and not a single cent has been paid to any of us,” he said.

“Given Meta is worth literally billions, they are absolutely in a financial position to compensate authors fairly. More importantly, they are not above the law and are required to obtain consent.”

He said the government needed to act on it now.

“We need AI-specific legislation introduced in Australia that requires generative AI developers or deployers to put in a range of measures to comply with existing copyright legislation.”

Journalist and author Tracey Spicer said two of her books – The Good Girl Stripped Bare and Man-Made – are included. The latter deals with the rise of artificial intelligence.

She said she felt violated when she realised her works were in the data set.

“It was a gut-punch. Authors don’t make a lot of money, especially in a small market like Australia,” she said.

“This is peak technocapitalism.”

She said there should be a class action in Australia, and urged authors to contact their local federal MPs.

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“It’s a bit rich for big tech to cry poor. These companies can afford to pay for content, or they can create synthetic datasets.”

View image in fullscreen Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. ‘I’m upset, angry, but mostly exhausted.’ Photograph: Supplied

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, an award-winning film critic and author of ten books on cult movies including 1000 Women in Horror and Cinema Coven, found eight of her books, as well as books she co-edited, included.

“It is no understatement that this is my lifetime’s work. I’m upset, angry, but mostly exhausted,” she said.

Heller-Nicholas also called for the federal government to act.

The Australian Society of Authors has put a call out – on Facebook – for authors to get in contact to advocate on their behalf against the use of their works.

The society’s chair, Sophie Cunningham, said she had been in contact with dozens of authors who had their works included, and said there was generally an ill feeling about how it had been done.

“Massive corporations are profiting and reducing reducing writers to serfs,” she said. “Most writers are lucky to get $18,000 per year … and they’re not even having the right to be involved in which work [is used].”

Cunningham said Meta was treating writers with contempt.

Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. The company has reportedly lobbied the Trump administration to declare, via executive order, that training AI on copyrighted data is fair use.

Earlier this month, Melbourne publisher Black Inc Books caused concern among writers, literary agents and the industry’s peak body when it asked its authors to consent to their work being used to train artificial intelligence.

Some AI companies have begun entering into agreements with publishers for the use of their work, including OpenAI, which signed a deal with the Guardian in February for use of Guardian content in ChatGPT.

A searchable database showed titles from former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and John Howard, as well as journalist Tracey Spicer

‘No consent’: Australian authors ‘livid’ that Meta may have used their books to train AI

Elon Musk appears to be laying the groundwork to privatize some space and satellite operations now under the authority of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), or steer lucrative contracts toward his SpaceX and Starlink companies, former agency employees say.

They’re sounding the alarm as at least four other federal agencies have reportedly begun pushing new contracts toward Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company. Musk, the world’s richest man, has been tasked by Donald Trump with drastically slashing the federal government workforce and costs.

The situation raises conflict of interest questions for one of Trump’s closest allies who backed him with millions of dollars of funding in the 2024 election. Musk boasts that his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) “slashes spending”, but critics say he’s using his position to steer government funding toward his companies.

Noaa could offer the biggest prizes yet for Musk, presenting the opportunity for SpaceX to have a commanding financial advantage in a commercial US space market expected to grow to a value of nearly $2tn in value over the next decade. Already Doge likely has access to competitors’ confidential business information at Noaa, former employees at the agency say.

More importantly for the public, it would put control of the nation’s communications infrastructure in the hands of a rightwing billionaire. Noaa’s activity quietly touches the basic functions of daily life, and everything from dependable cellphone service to how Americans connect to the internet to weather forecasting is at stake, five former Noaa employees who spoke with the Guardian said.

“There’s a lot of smoke but we’re not sure where the fire is yet,” a former employee said. “We’re waiting to see when the next shoe drops.”

In the wake of a firing spree that gutted some Noaa space operations, Donald Trump Jr’s investment firm stoked speculation by purchasing $50m worth of SpaceX shares. Noaa operates as part of the US commerce department and is responsible for a range of economic activity relied upon by the public. Musk’s Doge team has laid off about 1,300 Noaa staff so far.

SpaceX primarily launches rockets and satellites for Musk and national governments. Starlink, meanwhile, has nearly 6,000 satellites in low-earth orbit and provides satellite broadband internet service and military communications to at least 2.7 million people in 100 countries.

SpaceX is the biggest player in the private space industry and several former Noaa employees praised the company as an often good partner prior to Musk’s attack on the agency. The space technology company had strong momentum prior to the new Trump administration, making it difficult to parse what is legitimate business and what could be construed as corruption, former employees said.

A new emergency Freedom of Information Act request for communications among Noaa offices and Doge in part seeks to shine some light on those questions. The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) request noted that privatization of the agency has long been a goal of the right and was called for in the Project 2025 rightwing playbook. The move “is driven by greed and corruption”, Peer’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said.

“The danger is that Musk’s enterprises could morph into government-sponsored monopolies that would operate with no fear of antitrust prosecution,” Whitehouse added.

New contracts for Starlink

Leadership for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered staff in February to find tens of millions of dollars in funding for new Starlink contracts, Rolling Stone reported. The FAA is in the process of updating ageing air traffic control networks and last year awarded a $2.4bn contract to Verizon, but Starlink has already edged into the process.

At the US Government Services Administration, Doge ordered federal staff to use Starlink for internet services, an employee told NBC News. Another agency plans to contract with Starlink, according to a federal employee familiar with the situation who spoke with NBC News. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection recently authorized an evaluation of Starlink to help monitor the border.

Gutting space traffic control

The nascent space traffic coordination program manages thousands of satellites, debris and spacecraft, and helps prevent up to 50,000 near-collisions, called conjunctions, daily. Starlink accounts for a large number of those.

Called the Traffic Coordination System for Space (Traccs), the program would also eventually provide launch and re-entry services for commercial satellites and spacecraft, former employees said. Musk’s company already works closely with Traccs, but the program has avoided “vendor lock” and contracts with multiple companies, in no small part because Musk’s agenda may not always align with the nation’s, one former official said.

“SpaceX is a great service provider, but as long as he’s in control of the company it’s not anything that can be counted on,” a former Noaa employee said.

Those who spoke with the Guardian said it didn’t appear that SpaceX had any interest in privatizing or taking over Traccs prior to Trump’s re-election, but Musk’s Doge fired all but one Traccs member – in effect crippling a sorely needed operation. That could open the door for privatization, and SpaceX is best positioned.

“They discover something is broken and conveniently say: ‘Oh, we can fix this,’” a former Noaa employee said.

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Weather forecast privatization

Noaa satellites in lower-earth orbit are largely utilized to forecast weather three to seven days out, and the data is given for free to weather forecasting providers such as AccuWeather, and utilized in aviation, shipping, defense and other critical industries.

Some companies want to profit off the data, and few are better positioned than Musk’s to land contracts or take over. But private industry’s data and forecasts are of extremely poor quality compared to those from the Noaa, a former employee said.

Noaa weather satellites have redundancies and fail-safes intentionally built in, and huge effort is put into calibrating them with weather on earth: Noaa flies planes into storms to confirm that the data its satellites are providing is accurate, for example.

The data is “highly reliable, 24/7, no breakdowns, no ifs, ands or buts”, a former agency employee said. If Noaa satellites fail, explode or crash, they added, then people who rely on that data may die, or serious economic damage may be inflicted.

“The risk of having outages is so significant because that data is used all the time for everything, and for far more than people realize,” a former employee said.

Musk, by contrast, has a mission of eliminating redundancies and finding efficiencies, and former agency employees noted his rockets and satellites have a history of crashing and exploding.

Meanwhile, Noaa monitors space weather, including solar flares, coronas and radiation, and geomagnetic storms that can damage the electric grid and telecommunications on earth and beyond. That could have implications for Musk’s well-known plans to colonize Mars.

“If you’re serious about sending people to Mars, then you have to be able to monitor and respond to space weather,” an employee said.

Radio frequency

SpaceX, telecom giants and other industries are lobbying the federal government to auction off valuable bands on the radio frequency spectrum – the electromagnetic waves that enable wireless communication, including among the military, the CIA, Noaa and their satellites.

The obscure function is essential to a wide range of commercial activities, such as cellphone use, and industry “wants to get their hands on all that they can” because it’s a finite resource, a former agency employee said.

A large part of Noaa’s forecasts stem from its satellites monitoring water vapor movement in the atmosphere, and the agency owns the radio frequencies at which vapor vibrates. If the Musk-aligned FCC sells bands too close to that frequency, potential interference could impede satellite function and disrupt reliable weather forecasting and cellphone use.

“Starlink wants more and more spectrum, and you hope [the FCC] would not be stupid enough to auction off the bands next to where water vibrates, but … I wouldn’t put it past anybody,” an employee said.

Tech CEO accused of aiming to privatize space and satellite operations as federal agencies reportedly seek contracts

Doge cuts allow Musk to cash in with SpaceX and Starlink contracts, ex-workers warn

Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to stop tech companies spying on your phone as Trump promises mass deportations.

The DNA testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy after months of concern over its financial health and its ability to keep users’ genetic information secure. In light of the uncertainty looming over the company’s future, you should do one thing to protect your privacy today: delete your 23andMe account.

If you have used the service to discover your ancestry via your DNA, the extremely sensitive information you shared with 23andMe may transfer to the company’s eventual buyer. While 23andMe has a host of privacy controls that now allows users opt out of sharing their data with scientific researchers or requires the company delete their samples, that could change under a new owner.

Generally, privacy and civil liberties experts do not recommend using ancestry and DNA testing services. There are few federal privacy regulations that limit how companies can use your information in the US – even your genetic data. How a private company maintains, stores and shares your data is left up to the whims of the people running it. Privacy policies change often and so do executive suites. Not only is your data vulnerable to hacks, it can also be used for various commercial products and shared with law enforcement.

23andMe has insisted that any new owner would have to comply with existing laws around the sale and use of consumer genetic data, but the reality in the US is that only a handful of states legally protect this type of personal information. In California, where this kind of privacy protection does exist, the attorney general, Rob Bonta, has issued an urgent “consumer alert” encouraging Californians to delete their 23andMe data.

“California has robust privacy laws that allow consumers to take control and request that a company delete their genetic data,” said Bonta. “Given 23andMe’s reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.”

There’s good reason for concern. 23andMe suffered a massive hack affecting some 7 million users in 2023. The hackers first revealed they gained access to the information when they attempted to sell what they claimed was the data of 1 million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and 100,000 users of Chinese descent on a popular hacking forum. In addition to a class-action lawsuit alleging the company failed to notify users of the data breach in a timely manner, the company said it was facing more than 50 other lawsuits in the wake of the hack. Its problems are international, too: the UK information commissioner’s office issued a notice of intent to fine the company £4.59m earlier this month.

If you are one of 15 mllion people who have already handed over your DNA to 23andMe, what can you do to protect your data?

How to delete your 23andMe account

The main thing you should do to protect your genetic privacy: delete your account.

There’s a big caveat: the company says it will have to retain some information in its archives even if you delete your account. “23andMe and/or our contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with applicable legal obligations … even if you chose to delete your account,” the company’s privacy policy reads.

If you’re reading this and you are trying to decide if you want to do a DNA test with one of these private companies, take the above caveat as a big reason not to. It’s possible, depending on what state you’re in, your data will never be completely erased.

That said, it is still worth making the effort to delete your account and all the data in it. Here’s how you do it: Log in, go to settings, and scroll to “23andMe Data”. Click “view” and then scroll to “delete data”. Click “permanently delete data”. You will receive an email from the company to confirm your request. (Check your spam folder.) If you don’t confirm it via the link provided to you in the email, it will not complete your request.

The company says that, once your account is deleted, you “will automatically opt you out of Research and discard your sample”.

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If you don’t delete your account, opt out of sharing your data

If you want to keep your 23andMe account, the next best thing is have the company discard your sample, stop sharing your information and remove you from any future research studies. You can also do this from your settings.

To stop sharing any reports resulting from your DNA test, scroll down to “Privacy/Sharing” and click “edit”. From there you should be able to adjust the sharing settings on your reports.

To ask the company to discard your DNA sample, go back to your settings and scroll down to “preferences”, click “edit” and opt out of sharing your sample with the company. The company will discard your sample.

To stop the company from sharing your DNA with future research projects, go back to settings, scroll down to “research and product consents” and edit the permissions.

These changes are not retroactive. Withdrawing consent to use your DNA in studies will only stop your data from being used in new research and can take up to 30 days.

If you have any specific questions about your account information, you can also email privacy@23andme.com.

The genetic testing firm filed for bankruptcy after a major data breach. Here’s how to protect your DNA privacy

Opt out: what to do with your 23andMe account after company filed bankruptcy

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that its co-chief executive officer Han Jong-hee has died due to cardiac arrest. Han was 63.

Han was in charge of Samsung’s consumer electronics and mobile devices division, while co-CEO Jun Young-hyun oversees the chip business of South Korea’s biggest company.

Han passed away at a hospital on Tuesday while being treated for cardiac arrest, a company spokesperson said, adding that a successor had not yet been decided.

The South Korean firm has been suffering from weak earnings and sagging share prices in recent quarters after falling behind rivals in advanced memory chips and contract chip manufacturing, which have enjoyed strong demand from artificial intelligence projects. Samsung has also ceded its smartphone market crown to Apple.

Han, who joined Samsung Electronics nearly 40 years ago, built his career in the TV business. He became vice-chair and CEO of Samsung Electronics in 2022. Han was also one of the company’s board members.

He chaired Samsung’s shareholder meeting last week, where he and other executives were grilled by shareholders after the company’s failure to ride an AI boom made it one of the worst-performing tech stocks last year.

In semiconductors, Samsung lags behind SK Hynix in HBM chips that Nvidia and others rely on for AI graphic processing units.

“First and foremost, I sincerely apologise for the recent stock performance not meeting your expectations. Over the past year, our company failed to adequately respond to the rapidly evolving AI semiconductor market,” Han said.

He was scheduled to attend Samsung’s launch event for new home appliances on Wednesday.

Head of tech giant’s consumer electronics and mobile devices division passed away at a hospital on Tuesday

Samsung Electronics co-CEO Han Jong-hee dies of heart attack at 63

The Royal Society has decided not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk over his conduct, saying that to do so could cause damage to the academy and science itself.

Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO who also owns the social media platform X, was elected a fellow of the UK’s national academy of sciences in 2018, apparently in recognition of his work in the space and electric vehicle industries.

However, over the past year calls have grown from both fellows and the wider scientific community for the academy to take action amid concerns Musk has violated the academy’s code of conduct, with incidents ranging from calling the British MP Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” to his role in making swingeing cuts to research funding in the US through the “department of government efficiency” (doge).

The code includes the stipulation that fellows shall “not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the society’s mission or bring the society into disrepute”.

However, the president of the Royal Society, Sir Adrian Smith, has now made it clear Musk will not face an investigation.

In an email that the Guardian has seen and understands to have been sent to all fellows, Smith noted a variety of deeply held – but in many cases opposing views – were aired at a meeting held earlier this month to discuss matters relating to the conduct of fellows.

But, he added, the council was ultimately responsible for acting in the best interests of the society and that, it seems, does not involve investigating Musk’s conduct.

“The view of council is that making judgments on the acceptability of the views and actions of fellows, particularly those that might be regarded as political, could do more harm than good to the society and the cause of science in general. Council believes that disciplinary proceedings should not be initiated on such grounds,” Smith wrote.

“The challenges that science is facing today go much wider than any individual and it was felt by many of those present, as well as others who have expressed their concerns separately, that we should focus our energies in making the principled case for science.”

The email follows a torrid period for the academy: last summer, Musk’s conduct prompted a number of fellows to write to the society calling for steps to be taken, with a subsequent lack of action resulting in two eminent scientists resigning their fellowships in protest and more than 3,400 members of the scientific community signing an open letter expressing similar dismay.

Some fellows, including the Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, have even called explicitly for Musk’s expulsion.

However, others have raised concerns about such a step, noting it could be politically difficult and raise questions about the fellowship of others who have expressed controversial views. Some have also argued revoking Musk’s fellowship could undermine trust in science.

Smith’s letter said a decision not to go down the road of formal disciplinary proceedings should not be taken as meaning that the council condoned attacks on science or scientists, and reiterated concerns about cuts to science funding in the US, the spread of misinformation and disregard of important scientific evidence by the new US administration.



Smith added a letter had been sent to Musk by the president-elect, Sir Paul Nurse, although the contents were not revealed, and stressed the academy will “step up advocacy for science and challenge attacks on science and scientists, particularly in the United States”.

“We will also be seeking to engage directly with our fellows in the US, who are the ones most directly affected, and who are best placed to understand exactly what is going on in their fields of expertise and what interventions, if any, on their behalf, would be most effective,” Smith wrote, adding engagement with Fellows in the UK would also be expanded.

Hinton was among the fellows who confirmed he had received a communication from Smith, but said its confidentiality prevented him from commenting upon its contents.

“I can repeat my own opinion, which is that if the [Royal Society] gives fellowships for promoting science they should take them away for demoting science,” he said.

Stephen Curry, an emeritus professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, who is not a fellow of the Royal Society but organised the open letter, said he welcomed efforts to reach out to researchers in the US and the UK, but noted the content of Nurse’s letter remained a mystery and that Smith’s email made no mention of the academy’s code of conduct.

“How can the Royal Society claim to act in a principled way when it’s turning a blind eye to Musk’s unprincipled scientific behaviour, spreading misinformation, or failing to speak out against the anti-scientific actions of the administration of which he is a part – and that is something I think he’s required to do by the fellows’ code of conduct,” Curry said, adding the academy had not said Musk had not broken the code.

Curry added that the academy was continuing to harm itself by not being open and robust about an issue that had caused concern among fellows.

“While they continue to refuse to address Musk’s contraventions of their code of conduct, their authority to speak for the UK scientific community is undermined at the minute,” he said. “I don’t feel that they speak for me.”

Exclusive: Fellows argue Musk has violated code of conduct but council believes investigation ‘could do more harm than good’

Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk

Block, Jack Dorsey’s financial technology company, plans to let go almost 1,000 current employees, while making other changes to its operations in its second such move in just over a year.

Dorsey, who co-founded and previously ran Twitter before co-founding Block in 2009, informed employees of the impending cuts on Tuesday in an email, viewed by the Guardian, titled “smaller block”. The layoffs will impact more than 930 employees, with another nearly 200 managers being moved into non-management roles, and another nearly 800 open jobs will be closed, according to the email.

Block now operates payment platforms Square and Afterpay, the money transfer app CashApp, and the music streaming service Tidal.

Dorsey wrote in the email that the layoffs and other changes to staffing and organization are not being implemented with the intention of hitting “a specific financial target, replacing folks with AI, or changing our headcount cap”. As part of an earlier reorganization that began in early 2024 and also saw roughly 1,000 Block employees lose their jobs, Dorsey implemented a headcount maximum of 12,000 employees.

Instead, Dorsey wrote that this additional reorganization is about “raising the bar and acting faster on performance, and flattening our org so we can move fast and with less abstraction”, according to the email. Last year Dorsey struck a similar tone in notifying staffers of layoffs, saying the company needed to “build like a startup again”.

In Tuesday’s email, Dorsey added that he was enacting cuts to staff and management levels and closing open jobs all at once, instead of over time, because “we’re behind in our actions, and that’s not fair to the individual or the company.”

Block’s stock is down 29% this year so far. Its revenue and profits have grown less over the last year, creating shareholder concern, even as Dorsey has taken back more operating control during that time. Dorsey noted in his email that part of his job is to increase the company’s stock value and that this reorganization “will help us focus and execute better to do just that”.

“When we know, we should move, and there hasn’t been enough movement,” the CEO wrote. “And we need to move faster to stay ahead of the transformational moment our industry is in, so we’re able to continue increasing access, openness and automation.”

A spokesperson for Block did not respond to calls and email seeking comment.

Fintech firm, operating CashApp, Square and Tidal, to close nearly 800 open jobs in second such move in just over a year

Jack Dorsey’s Block to lay off nearly 1,000 workers in another reorganization

Heavy users of ChatGPT tend to be lonelier, more emotionally dependent on the AI tool and have fewer offline social relationships, new research suggests.

Only a small number of users engage emotionally with ChatGPT, but those who do are among the heaviest users, according to a pair of studies from OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab.

The researchers wrote that the users who engaged in the most emotionally expressive personal conversations with the chatbots tended to experience higher loneliness – though it isn’t clear if this is caused by the chatbot or because lonely people are seeking emotional bonds.

While the researchers have stressed that the studies are preliminary, they ask pressing questions about how AI chatbot tools, which according to OpenAI is used by more than 400 million people a week, are influencing people’s offline lives.

The researchers, who plan to submit both studies to peer-reviewed journals, found that participants who “bonded” with ChatGPT – typically in the top 10% for time spent with the tool – were more likely than others to be lonely, and to rely on it more.

The researchers established a complex picture in terms of the impact. Voice-based chatbots initially appeared to help mitigate loneliness compared with text-based chatbots, but this advantage started to slip the more someone used them.

After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialise with people than their male counterparts. Participants who interacted with ChatGPT’s voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment.

In the first study, the researchers analysed real-world data from close to 40m interactions with ChatGPT, and then asked the 4,076 users who had those interactions how they felt.

For the second study, the Media Lab recruited almost 1,000 people to take part in a four-week trial examining how participants interacted with ChatGPT for a minimum of five minutes each day. Participants then completed a questionnaire to measure their feelings of loneliness, levels of social engagement, and emotional dependence on the bot.

The findings echo earlier research, for example in 2023 MIT Media Lab researchers found that chatbots tended to mirror the emotional sentiment of a user’s messages – happier messages led to happier responses.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski, a director at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, said that because peoplewere hard-wired to to think of a machine behaving in human-like ways as a human, AI chatbots could be “dangerous”, and far more research was needed to understand their social and emotional impacts.

“In my opinion, we are doing open-brain surgery on humans, poking around with our basic emotional wiring with no idea of the long-term consequences. We’ve seen some of the downsides of social media – this is potentially much more far-reaching,” he said.

Dr Theodore Cosco, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said the research raised “valid concerns about heavy chatbot usage”, though he noted it “opens the door to exciting and encouraging possibilities”.

“The idea that AI systems can offer meaningful support — particularly for those who may otherwise feel isolated — is worth exploring. However, we must be thoughtful and intentional in how we integrate these tools into everyday life.”

Dr Doris Dippold, who researches intercultural communication at the University of Surrey, said it would be important to establish what caused emotional dependence on chatbots. “Are they caused by the fact that chatting to a bot ties users to a laptop or a phone and therefore removes them from authentic social interaction? Or is it the social interaction, courtesy of ChatGPT or another digital companion, which makes people crave more?”

Studies show those who engage emotionally with bot rely on it more and have fewer real-life relationships

Heavy ChatGPT users tend to be more lonely, suggests research

A brand that was notoriously connected to music piracy before re-emerging as a subscription music service, has been sold to Infinite Reality for $207m.

The tech startup announced on Tuesday it had bought Napster in hopes of transforming the streaming service into a social music platform where artists can connect with fans and better monetize off their work.

“The internet has evolved from desktop to mobile, from mobile to social, and now we are entering the immersive era. Yet, music streaming has remained largely the same. It’s time to reimagine what’s possible,” said Napster’s CEO, Jon Vlassopulos, in a blog post.

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Among its plans to update Napster, Infinite Reality said it would create virtual 3D spaces that will allow fans to attend concerts, and give musicians or labels the ability to sell digital and physical merchandise. Artists will also receive a wider range of metrics and analytics to better understand the behavior of platform users.

“We can think of no better use case for our technology than putting it in the hands of music artists who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Infinite Reality’s chief business officer, Amish Shah.

Napster was launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker and quickly became the first significant peer-to-peer file-sharing application. It shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and popular rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations. Rhapsody later bought the brand in 2011 and relaunched it as a music streaming service.

Tech startup says it bought company once linked to music piracy to transform it into a social music platform for artists

Napster, now a streaming service, sells for $207m to Infinite Reality

“What we really want to get a handle on is which resins polymerize faster,” she said. She also pointed out that a chemical analysis of the accelerated amber was necessary to know how close — or not — it was to the real stuff. “The tree resin has survived, but we need a proper, full chemical characterization,” she said.

For all the study’s limitations, Dr. McNamara said that simulated fossilization was an increasingly important research area. Some paleontologists have recreated bone or tissue decay to explore microbial effects. In her lab, researchers have “thermally matured” specimens to investigate the preservation of biological molecules under heat.

Without such simulations, “we’re just trusting the fossil record,” she said. “Experiments help us tell fact from fiction and determine the extent to which the fossil record is lying.”

Dr. Saitta has tried other simulations. In 2018, he buried a finch in wet sediment to see how it would be compacted. That was messy and unsuccessful. But after working with Mr. Kaye on the pressure-cooker device, they had more success studying the earlier stages of fossilization of leaves, feathers and lizard feet. With those specimens, the keratin in a feather, for instance, leached away, leaving a dark melanin-like imprint similar to a fossilized feather. (At conferences, Dr. Saitta said, he likes to test other paleontologists to spot the visual difference between a simulant and a real fossil.)

Paleontologists hope that an amber-like material, made with living tree resin, will shed light on the prehistoric fossilization of the real stuff.

You Can Make Amber Fossils in 24 Hours, Instead of Millions of Years

In 1996, Kat Albrecht was a police officer and bloodhound handler in Santa Cruz, Calif. Her dog, A.J., had been a part of many search and rescue efforts, sniffing out and locating lost people in the woods.

But when A.J. escaped Ms. Albrecht’s yard, there was no team of expert animal rescuers to turn to. So she sought help from a friend who had her own tracking dog, a golden retriever named Kea. “We knew that Kea understood, ‘Smell this pillowcase and follow the scent trail of this missing person,’” Ms. Albrecht recalled. “Would she understand, ‘Smell this stinky blanket and find my stinky bloodhound?’”

Within 20 minutes, Kea found A.J. lounging on a stranger’s porch. For Ms. Albrecht, it was a turning point. “We have all kinds of detection dogs: drug-detection, bomb-detection, termite-detection,” she said. “Why don’t we have cat-detection dogs? Why aren’t we training dogs to follow the scent trail of lost dogs?”

Ms. Albrecht decided to do just that, forging an unlikely career as a lost-pet detective. Along the way, she has worked with researchers to study the behavior of missing cats and founded the Missing Animal Response Network, which trains people to locate lost pets and assists panicked pet owners. She no longer searches for lost pets herself, but trains others to follow in her footsteps.

Recovering missing animals requires understanding both animal and human behavior.

Lessons From a Lost-Pet Detective Named Kat

Sales of new Tesla cars slumped in Europe last month in the latest indication of a potential buyer backlash over Elon Musk’s high profile and controversial behaviour since becoming a leading figure in Donald Trump’s administration.

The Texas-based electric carmaker sold less than 16,000 vehicles across Europe last month, down 44% on average across 25 countries in the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland, according to data compiled by the research platform Jato Dynamics.

Tesla’s market share fell to 9.6% last month, the lowest it has registered in February for five years. In January, its sales across Europe fell 45%, from 18,161 in 2024 to 9,945.

However, in the UK the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders reported an almost 21% rise in the number of new Tesla cars registered in February, with the Model 3 and Model Y proving the second and third most popular after the Mini Cooper.

Analysts and investors have been attempting to assess what impact Musk’s political interventions are having on the carmaker, where he is chief executive, amid signs that his senior role in Trump’s administration is leading to a consumer backlash by some Tesla owners or prospective buyers. Tesla dealerships have also been the target of protests.

The tech billionaire and close Trump adviser has shown support for Germany’s far-right AfD party, theatrically brandished a “chainsaw of democracy” at a conservative conference, and accused Keir Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up the scandal about grooming gangs.

However, analysts have said that the volatile sales are also likely to have been affected by Tesla’s overhaul of the Model Y.

Felipe Muñoz, a global analyst at Jato Dynamics, said: “Tesla is experiencing a period of immense change. In addition to Elon Musk’s increasingly active role in politics and the increased competition it is facing within the EV market, the brand is phasing out the existing version of the Model Y – its bestselling vehicle – before it rolls out the update.

“Brands like Tesla, which have a relatively limited model lineup, are particularly vulnerable to registration declines when undertaking a model changeover.”

The research company’s figures for February show that Tesla’s rivals powered ahead in Europe last month.

Volkswagen reported a 180% increase in sales of battery electric vehicles to just under 20,000, while BMW and Mini sold a combined 19,000 such models last month.

The Chinese-owned BYD recorded a 94% increase in sales in Europe to more than 4,000. Separate figures show that BYD’s global sales topped $100bn (£83bn) last year, overtaking Tesla as the world’s biggest electric car company by revenue.

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BYD, which last beat Tesla on global annual revenues in 2018, reported revenues of 777bn yuan (£86bn) in 2024, a 29% year-on-year increase, beating analyst estimates. Tesla reported annual revenues of $97.7bn last year.

BYD also sells about the same number of electric vehicles as Tesla – 1.76m compared with 1.79m respectively in 2024. However, when sales of BYD’s other hybrid cars are included it is much larger.

Polestar, which is primarily owned by Volvo’s parent company, Geely, recorded an 84% increase to more than 2,000 vehicles.

BYD sold 4.27m vehicles last year, almost as many as the 4.5m sold by Ford, and has forecast that it will sell between 5m and 6m this year. The Hong Kong-listed company has a market value of about $160bn, up about 50% so far this year. Tesla is valued at $780bn despite a share-price plunge of more than a third in 2025. Tesla shares opened up 6% on Monday as the wider Nasdaq index rose nearly 2%.

Total car sales in across the 25 EU markets, the UK, Norway and Switzerland dropped by 3% to 970,000 in February, while BEV registrations were up by a quarter.

US carmaker’s European market share falls as Chinese rival BYD overtakes it on global revenue, topping $100bn

Tesla’s Europe sales drop nearly 45% amid row over Musk’s Trump links

Elon Musk’s X stands to benefit financially if the government pulls an £800m tax on US tech firms as part of an economic deal with Donald Trump, as a prominent tax campaigner indicated the social media platform qualifies for the levy.

Dan Neidle, the head of the non-profit organisation Tax Policy Associates, said the social media platform was eligible for the digital services tax, which is on the block in negotiations between the US and the UK.

“Technically it’s fairly clear X should pay the DST,” he said.

Ministers have been discussing dropping the DST as part of negotiations with the US in exchange for the Trump administration granting the UK a carve-out from tariffs which would otherwise be levied on 2 April.

The technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Monday that “nothing was off the table” when it comes to the tax, which was first imposed by the Conservatives in 2020 to stop international technology companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore.

Kyle told the Politico Tech podcast: “We are exploring all of the things that both territories, the United Kingdom and the US, either are concerned about or are excited about doing into the future.”

His comments add to similar remarks from the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, over the weekend. She told the BBC: “We’ve got to get the balance right, and those discussions at the moment are ongoing.”

Labour MPs have voiced their concern about the prospect of the government dropping the DST under pressure from the Trump administration. Rachael Maskell said this weekend: “I would be concerned if relief was granted in what would be seen as a dash to let the US tech companies off the hook, while at the same time as making disabled people pay for the revenue loss, with their lifelines being cut.”

Another Labour MP said: “This would be the very worst optics: dropping a tax on big tech companies in the same week we announce more departmental spending cuts and give the details about our welfare cuts.”

Reeves already faces political pressure over spending cuts to meet the government’s fiscal rules, including a £5bn welfare overhaul and 10,000 job losses in the civil service. Scores of Labour MPs voiced significant doubts about the government’s welfare changes in a tense meeting last week with the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall.

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The DST covers search engines, social media platforms and online marketplaces that cater for UK users. To come within scope, tech businesses need to generate more than £500m in worldwide revenues and more than £25m from UK users. If a company qualifies on that basis, their revenues from UK users are taxed at 2%.

According to X’s last published results for its UK operations, the company made revenues of £205m, putting it in line to pay the tax. A company’s first £25m of UK revenues are exempt from the tax, meaning X would theoretically have been in line to pay around £3.6m under the DST that year, but its results do not explicitly state that such a payment was made.

According to the National Audit Office, 90% of DST revenues in its first year of operation in 2020-21 came from five businesses. Amazon, Google, eBay and Apple have publicly acknowledged paying the tax, and Facebook’s parent, Meta, is widely presumed to have done so.

The tax is expected to raise £800m this year, rising to £1.1bn by the turn of the decade, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Neidle said the DST was a “diplomatically complicated” tax, with the UK having pledged to abolish it when an internationally agreed tax regime for multinationals is introduced, brokered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Failure to introduce the so-called pillar 1 regime so far has left the OECD and DST “in a bit of a limbo”, he said.

Prominent campaigner says Elon Musk’s platform qualifies for the levy, which is on the block in negotiations

X stands to benefit if UK pulls digital services tax in trade deal with US

Then he orients the last layer (OLL) — by arranging all the yellow pieces face up. In this case, six of the yellow pieces were already oriented up, and Max orients the two remaining pieces by move 52.

Max Park is a longtime speedcubing world record holder — for the 3x3x3 cube, his best official time is 3.13 seconds. Let's show you how he does it.

How a Speedcubing World Record Holder Does It

Concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence are at risk of being ignored by ministers, the Labour head of the Commons technology committee has said, as the government delays regulating the industry to curry favour with Donald Trump.

Chi Onwurah, the chair of the cross-party committee, urged the government to bring forward the AI safety bill, which would require technology companies to hand over any large language models they build to UK regulators for testing.

The bill was designed to answer concerns that AI models could pose a threat to humanity, but the Guardian revealed last month that ministers were not planning to publish it before the summer in an attempt to please the Trump administration, after the vice-president, JD Vance, denounced Europe’s attempts to regulate the sector.

Onwurah told the Guardian: “The understanding that most of us had was that the AI safety bill would be coming soon. The committee has raised with Patrick Vallance [the science minister] the lack of an AI safety bill, and whether that is in response to the significant criticism of Europe’s approach to AI, which JD Vance and Elon Musk have made.

“It’s absolutely critical that the government shows it is on the side of people when it comes to technology, particularly when it comes to the tech platforms and the impact technology is going to have in their lives.”

She added: “Peter [Kyle, the technology secretary], Keir [Starmer, the prime minister] and Wes [Streeting, the health secretary] are great champions of tech and the positive contribution it can make. That’s great, but we also have to show that we recognise the threats that so many of my constituents see coming from technology generally, and AI specifically, and that we are here to protect them.

“We are here to protect people, and so the sooner we have clarity on the AI safety bill, the more protected people will feel.”

Starmer’s approach to technology is being guided in part by a desire to placate the US president and his administration. Vance gave a pro-AI speech at the recent AI safety summit in Paris, where he said: “The AI future will not be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building.”

The stance of Vance and Starmer contrasts with that of the previous government under Rishi Sunak, which hosted the inaugural global AI safety summit in 2023. At that gathering, the UK, US, EU, Australia and China all agreed that AI posed a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity. The summit also struck a voluntary agreement between tech companies and governments over safety testing for AI models.

As well as delaying the safety bill, the government is also considering dropping the UK’s digital services tax on the major global technology companies. Trump has ordered an investigation into other countries’ technology taxes, saying the findings will determine which countries will face tariffs on 2 April.

But the UK prime minister is also being guided by his own enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, which he argues has the potential to make the British state far more efficient by, for instance, automating certain tasks – as well as to power the economic growth that his government has made a priority.

The government’s desire to foster a British AI industry has led ministers to make a controversial set of proposals that would allow technology companies to circumvent copyright law and use creative content to train their models without the permission of the people who created it.

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While ministers consult on those plans, they are facing a growing backlash from the arts and entertainment industry, with figures such as Elton John and Paul McCartney warning about the impact on young artists.

Onwurah said she shared those concerns, and wanted technology companies to come up with solutions that would allow them to develop AI tools without relying on widespread copyright violations. One option ministers are considering is to allow technology companies access to creative content, while making it much easier for artists to seek payment for that content and opt out if they would prefer.

“My concern is that to get it right, the tech companies need to be proposing tech solutions,” Onwurah said. “The tech companies need to be using technology to help address this issue, not trying to make a land grab for all content on the basis that there isn’t a viable tech option.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “The government is clear in its ambition to bring forward AI legislation which allows us to safely realise the enormous benefits and opportunities of the technology for years to come.

“We are continuing to refine our proposals which will incentivise innovation and investment to cement our position as one of the world’s three leading AI powers, and will launch a public consultation in due course.”

Chi Onwurah urges government to bring forward AI safety bill instead of delaying it to curry favour with Donald Trump

Labour head of Commons tech group warns No 10 not to ignore AI concerns

In the days after a federal judge ruled Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID likely violated the constitution, the world’s richest person issued a series of online attacks against the American judiciary, offered money to voters to sign a petition opposing “activist judges”, and called on Congress to remove his newfound legal opponents from office.

“This is a judicial coup,” Musk wrote on Wednesday, asking lawmakers to “impeach the judges”.

Musk, who serves as a senior adviser to Donald Trump, posted about judges who ruled in opposition to the administration more than 20 times within 48 hours this week on X, the social network he owns, repeatedly framing them as radical leftist activists and seeking to undermine their authority. His denunciations came as his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) faces sweeping and numerous legal challenges to its gutting overhaul of the government, which has involved firing thousands of workers and gaining access to sensitive government data.

Doge is the subject of nearly two dozen lawsuits, which in some cases have already resulted in judges imposing more transparency on Musk’s initiative or reversing parts of its rapid-fire cuts at federal agencies. The legal pushback poses one of the most significant challenges to Musk’s plans, which for weeks after inauguration day involved operating with expansive powers and little evident oversight.

While Musk posts online, he is also directing some of his immense wealth towards those who support his cause. Musk donated funds to seven Republican members of Congress who called for impeaching judges, the New York Times reported, giving the maximum allowable donation of $6,600 to their campaigns.

Musk also launched a petition on Thursday against “activist judges” via his political action group America Pac, which offered registered voters in Wisconsin $100 if they signed. Musk’s Pac has funneled millions of dollars into the state’s 1 April supreme court race, in which he is backing a former Republican attorney general in another attempt to reshape the country’s courts.

Musk’s campaign against judges has intensified amid a wider clash between the Trump administration and the judiciary over the rule of law following court decisions that pushed back against the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants. It follows longstanding behavior from Trump to rail against judges that have ruled against him in cases concerning his businesses or personal matters.

The White House’s fight with judges escalated to the point where John Roberts, the supreme court chief justice, issued a rare public statement on Tuesday defending the justice system.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote. “The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”

Musk responded in a post on X one day later.

“For more than two centuries, there has never such [sic] extreme abuse of the legal system by activists pretending to be judges,” he wrote. “Impeach them.”

Legal pushback against Doge angers Musk

Labor groups, watchdog organizations and former government workers have filed lawsuits in response to Doge’s blitz through federal agencies in late January and February, alleging that Musk’s initiative acted without legal authority and violated laws on privacy and transparency. Although the justice system’s response is not as rapid as the breakneck pace of Doge’s cuts, several of the cases against Musk’s efforts are now beginning to throw up roadblocks for him and his team.

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A federal judge in Maryland ruled on Tuesday that Musk and Doge’s shutdown of USAID, the agency that provided the world’s largest single source of humanitarian aid and one of the first in Musk’s crosshairs, was likely unconstitutional. The justice ordered the Trump administration to halt terminations of employees and reinstate their access to certain computer systems. Doge had dramatically taken over the agency in early February and moved to close its operations, which Musk boasted involved “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

Judge Theodore Chuang found that Musk’s actions at the agency likely violated the constitution given his role as an unelected adviser who did not undergo Senate confirmation.

Doge faced another setback on Thursday, as a different Maryland district court judge temporarily blocked Musk’s team from accessing Social Security Administration systems. A lawsuit against Doge argued that granting access to millions of people’s personal data at the agency violates privacy laws and represents a security threat. Another district court ruling last week ordered the Trump administration to reinstate probationary workers that were fired en masse at 18 different government agencies, while a separate case compelled Musk’s team to produce internal records about its staff and operations.

As Musk and Trump officials have ramped up their attacks on judges, multiple justices told Reuters earlier this month that US marshals warned them they are facing unusually high threat levels against their personal safety.

Musk calls for impeachment and remaking the judiciary

Musk has reacted to the court decisions with outrage and unsubstantiated accusations that the judges are “rogue activists” who must be stopped, a message also shared by Republican lawmakers and Trump. On X, the Tesla CEO has amplified far-right influencers that have called for impeaching justices or targeted specific judges in posts.

“An activist judge is no judge at all, just someone wearing a costume,” Musk responded to a post from rightwing commentator Matt Walsh that suggested Trump should “go to war against activist judges”.

Musk has also received support from foreign leaders that have attacked their countries’ judiciaries and challenged the rule of law. He responded with a “100” emoji to a post from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that claimed “when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system”. Netanyahu attempted in 2023 to weaken the power of Israel’s judiciary, prompting nationwide protests and fears of a constitutional crisis.

El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele’s party ousted all supreme court judges in 2021 as human rights groups warned about a slide into authoritarianism, has become a repeated point of comparison for Musk. He retweeted a post from Bukele on Tuesday that claimed the “U.S. is facing a judicial coup” and repeated that language himself in later posts.

In another post, Musk responded “it is the only way” to a failed far-right US congressional candidate who suggested that the country should emulate El Salvador by investigating politicians and impeaching “all corrupt judges”. The former candidate, Valentina Gomez, received media attention last year for a campaign video in which she burned LGBTQ+-themed books with a flamethrower.

Musk, who has met with Bukele and praised his strongman presidency, has also previously suggested he wants to carry out a similar hollowing out of the judiciary.

“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk tweeted on 25 February, reposting Bukele. “That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America.”

Musk lambastes judges as leftwing activists in more than 20 posts as Trump administration’s judiciary clash intensifies

Elon Musk lashes out at US judges as they rule against Doge

In early March, a job advert was doing the rounds among sports journalists. It was for an “AI-assisted sports reporter” at USA Today’s publisher, Gannett. It was billed as a role at the “forefront of a new era in journalism”, but came with a caveat: “This is not a beat-reporting position and does not require travel or face-to-face interviews.” The dark humour was summed up by football commentator, Gary Taphouse: “It was fun while it lasted.”

As the relentless march of artificial intelligence continues, newsrooms are wrestling with the threats and opportunities the technology creates. Just in the past few weeks, one media outlet’s AI project was accused of softening the image of the Ku Klux Klan. AI is also playing a part in some British journalists recording more than 100 bylines in a day. Amid the angst over the technology, however, a broad consensus is beginning to emerge about what the technology is currently capable of doing accurately.

Yet media companies are already aware of an elephant in the room. Their calculations could be upended should users simply turn to AI assistants to get their content fix. “I think good quality information can rise in an age of AI,” said one UK media executive. “But we need to set the terms in the right way in the next couple of years, or we are all screwed.”

The speed at which the technology has arrived has brought some early case studies in journalistic misadventure. In early March, the LA Times launched an AI tool giving alternative perspectives on opinion pieces. It caused alarm by saying some local historians regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a “‘white Protestant culture’ responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement, minimising its ideological threat”. The pitfall, said one media executive looking at AI, was obvious: “It was given a task of making judgments it can’t possibly be expected to make.”

The fact that even a tech giant like Apple had to suspend a feature that made inaccurate summaries of BBC News headlines shows just how hard it can be to ensure the accuracy of generative AI.

In reality, teams of journalists and tech tool designers have been working for years to find the best AI uses. In terms of public content, publishers are clustering around using it to suggest small chunks of text, based on original journalism. In practice, that means headline suggestions and story summaries, easily checked by human editors. The Independent became the latest to announce this week that it would be publishing condensed AI versions of its own stories. Many publishers are trialling or have already deployed similar tools.

View image in fullscreen The Make It Fair campaign was developed to raise awareness among the British public about the existential threat posed to the creative industries from generative AI models. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex/Shutterstock

Some big organisations have also been experimenting with their own AI chatbots, allowing readers to ask questions using content from their own archives. The problem is that editors cannot possibly know the answers being spat out. Attached to the Washington Post’s chatbot feature is the note: “This is an experiment … Because AI can make mistakes, please verify the response by consulting these articles.”

The amount of AI-assisted text that can be safely overseen by human editors is a live issue. Reach, publisher of the Daily Mirror and a series of other local sites, has been using its Guten tool to repackage its own journalism for different audiences. It has contributed to some eye-wateringly high byline counts for some journalists. On one day in January, one regional Reach reporter recorded 150 bylines or joint bylines across the group’s titles. While he did not use Guten himself, the technology was used to repurpose his work for other sites.

Some Reach journalists have privately expressed concern. A Reach spokesperson said Guten was only a tool and “needs to be used thoughtfully” by journalists. “We’re encouraged by the progress we’ve made in reducing errors and supporting our everyday work,” they said. “This has enabled us to free-up journalists to spend more time on journalism which would otherwise go unreported.”

USA Today Network made the same point about its AI-assisted sports reporter post. “By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth sports reporting,” said a spokesperson.

Others doubt whether the time saved will go into original journalism. The former Independent editor Chris Blackhurst said recently he was “very cynical” about the idea, fearing it was more likely to be “freeing people up to work elsewhere”.

While publicly visible AI-assisted journalism has created the most debate, it is actually inside newsrooms that the technology is providing gains, interrogating huge datasets. The FT, the New York Times and the Guardian are among the groups exploring the technique. It has already helped find severe cases of neglect from more than 1,000 pages of hospital documents in Norway. Transcription and translation are other more everyday uses.

Others are using it for “social listening”. The News Movement, which aims content at a younger audience, has built a tool that monitors what its audience are talking about on social media and feeds it back to journalists. “It helps us understand what conversations and topics people are currently having,” said Dion Bailey, its chief product and technology officer. Despite the angst about AI errors, some companies, such as Der Spiegel, are actually trying to use AI to factcheck content.

What is coming next? According to academic research, it is “audience-facing format transformations”. In other words, taking a story and turning it into the kind of content that a user wants – be it condensed, audio or even video. About a third of media leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said they wanted to experiment with turning text stories into video. Tools can already turn long footage into short, shareable content.

Yet hanging over all this newsroom innovation is the fear that it could all be for nought if personal AI chatbots take the place of media companies in producing content. “What keeps me up at night is AI simply inserting itself between us and the user,” said one media figure. Google’s launch this month of a new “AI Mode”, which takes information from multiple sources and presents them as a chatbot, has spooked the industry. Some believe government intervention is the only solution.

Some bigger media groups have been signing licensing deals with the owners of the main AI model owners, allowing the models to be trained on their original material with attribution. The Guardian has such a deal with OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT. Meanwhile, the New York Times is leading a lawsuit against OpenAI for using its work.

Bailey shares the concerns, but retains hope that the media world can adapt. “If the power goes to two or three big tech companies, then we have some real, significant issues,” he said. “We need to adapt in terms of how people are able to get to us. That’s just a fact.”

Amid angst over the technology, a consensus is emerging about its capabilities – but there is an elephant in the room

‘We need to set the terms or we’re all screwed’: how newsrooms are tackling AI’s uncertainties and opportunities

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has agreed to stop targeting a UK citizen with personalised adverts after agreeing a settlement in a landmark privacy case that could set a precedent for millions of social media users.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta also said it was considering charging UK users for an advert-free version of its platforms after the legal agreement that avoided a trial in the high court in London.

Tanya O’Carroll, a human rights campaigner, launched a lawsuit against the $1.5tn (£1.2tn) company in 2022, alleging it had breached UK data laws by failing to respect her right to demand Facebook stop collecting and processing her data in order to target her with adverts. Her stance was supported by the UK’s data watchdog, indicating that the case will set a precedent for millions of UK users of online platforms.

O’Carroll said the support of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) meant “the writing is on the wall” for Meta and its advertising-based business model.

“This is an individual settlement, but I believe its ramifications extend far beyond me,” said O’Carroll. “The key factor is the UK data protection authority, which backed my case and has publicly stated that it will support people in the UK who wish to exercise their right to object to online targeted ads. I think that beyond the life of this case, the writing is on the wall for Meta – people want a choice on surveillance ads, and the right to object gives them exactly that.”

On Friday, both sides settled the lawsuit, with O’Carroll claiming a “victory” after Meta committed to stop using her personal data to target her with bespoke adverts. O’Carroll’s argument was supported by the ICO, which said “people have the right to object to their personal information being used for direct marketing”.

The ICO added that users should have an “opt out” from their data being used to create targeted ads. It said: “Organisations must respect people’s choices about how their data is used. This means giving users a clear way to opt out of their data being used in this way.”

O’Carroll said the ICO’s verdict, which the regulator made clear in a submission to the high court, could pave the way for more lawsuits on a similar basis.

“This settlement represents not just a victory for me, but for everyone who values their fundamental right to privacy,” said O’Carroll. “None of us signed up to be trapped into decades of surveillance advertising, held hostage by the threat of losing the ability to connect with our loved ones online.”

Meta said it “fundamentally” disagreed with O’Carroll’s claims and took its obligations under the UK’s privacy law, GDPR, seriously. It added that it was weighing the option of introducing a subscription service in the UK, whereby users would pay a fee for an ad-free service. Advertising accounts for approximately 98% of Meta’s revenue.

“We are exploring the option of offering people based in the UK a subscription and will share further information in due course,” said Meta.

Last year the ICO said it was looking at how UK data protection law would apply to an ad-free subscription service.

Commenting on the case, the former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve said: “Big tech companies should not be above the law. If companies like Meta want to operate in the UK, they should be directed to follow the same legal standards as everyone else – respecting people’s privacy rights, not exploiting them at any cost.”

Meta already offers a no-ads paid-for service in the EU after a 2023 ruling by the European court of justice, the highest in the EU.

Facebook and Instagram owner reaches legal agreement with human rights campaigner in case that could set precedent for millions

Meta to stop targeting UK citizen with personalised ads after settling privacy case

Reid Hoffman is a prominent Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding the professional social networking site LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. He’s also staunchly anti-Trump. The longtime Democrat donor threw his support behind Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. Hoffman spoke to the Observer about technology in the new political milieu and his new book about our future with artificial intelligence, Superagency. The book, while not ignoring the problems that AI might cause, argues that the technology is poised to give us cognitive superpowers that will increase our individual and collective human agency, creating a state of widespread empowerment for society.

You have a vested interest in being positive about AI, including a company focused on conversational AI for business, Inflection AI. Why should we listen to you?

First, an economic interest doesn’t necessarily make what someone is saying wrong, and I try to be transparent and not hide mine. Second, I tend to start with my beliefs and follow with my money. And sometimes that does mean doing things that are against my economic interests. Not kissing [Trump’s] ring, like many others have, is probably an economic limiter – but it’s better to be principled. I could have put the time and energy I spent writing Superagency into my companies and made much more money, but I want to share in the intellectual discourse.

What’s your hope for the book?

I want to at the very least make people AI-curious, so they begin to explore what these superpowers we all might be getting are. There’s a flood of discussion around AI that tends to be negative and concerns a decrease in human agency. And, while that is a common response to new technologies, in previous cases it hasn’t come to pass – human agency has increased – and I predict the AI revolution will land in the same place. But there is a turbulent transition. I am calling it the “cognitive Industrial Revolution” not only because of the anticipated superpowers and superagency we will gain, but because, like the Industrial Revolution, the transition will be difficult. We can get through it with less pain and more grace, as well as improve the state that we’re moving towards, if we use a techno-humanist compass that points us towards building technologies that increase human agency.

I do believe AI will primarily still end up being a co-pilot, though obviously some job types will disappear

You argue that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have been a turning point in increasing human agency because, compared with AI technologies such as facial recognition, predictive policing and algorithmic surveillance, they work for us and with us rather than on us and we must affirmatively choose to use them. But they can still guide us towards certain viewpoints, numb our critical thinking and, of course, potentially upend our jobs – which would seem to undermine human agency.

To take jobs, they are being transformed, and information professionals will need to be using AI tools to do part of their work. If you don’t you will be under-tooled and won’t be competitive. And you may feel that as a loss of agency. You don’t want to change but you can’t choose not to. But then you begin to see the upside: repetitive tasks might be automated, creative processes accelerated. You get a lot more agency and so do other people.

So we won’t all become obsolete?

I do believe AI will primarily still end up being a co-pilot, though obviously some job types will disappear. We will need to build technologies that can help people whose jobs are changing adapt or, if the job does completely goes away, find other jobs that they can learn and possibly do with AI.

You label those who fret about AI’s near-term risks and harms as “gloomers” – but isn’t it important to be critical of new technology?

Yes, but where the implication is we should stop or massively slow down – it isn’t helpful. Not least because the countries that adopt the cognitive Industrial Revolution early and firmly will win massive amounts of economic strength, and their values will end up shaping the world. I want western democracies to get there ahead of others like China that are trying to embrace it through autocracy.

You get to the good future by steering towards it. Not that you don’t pay attention to the bad futures – but you do so as you’re figuring out how to navigate the right way. You adopt an iterative deployment stance – testing deliberately incremental versions en masse in the real world and then looking at where the critiques play and adjusting (which is how OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT).

Where’s the leadership among wealthy Democrats against Trump? Or are people lying low fearing political retribution, which you have said you are worried about?

Personally, I am regrouping. The point, for me, isn’t fighting Trump. It is helping humanity and making society better, including American society. And you might say that because this administration is not going to listen to my ideas about what the government should be doing on AI, maybe I should focus on contributing elsewhere. I recently launched Manas AI, centred on discovering drugs to cure cancer, and I also recently became a fellow of the London School of Economics, helping them think about how AI reinvents the university.

That said, obviously I’ve been dismayed and deeply concerned about various things that have happened since Trump took office, including seemingly allying with Russia and Putin and standing down our offensive cyber operations.

You are among the few tech moguls who haven’t cosied up to President Trump. What should we conclude about the morality of this industry as it rolls back DEI (diversity) initiatives and drops factchecking, as Meta has done?

I do have some quieter friends! The technology industry should be in dialogue and taking some of its cues from a government elected by democratic vote. The fact that you don’t happen to like this government doesn’t negate that. But, on the other hand, there are things being done that are, frankly, bad for society. While one could easily argue some DEI initiatives have gone too far and it’s good to adjust them, some of DEI is civil rights – which, unequivocally, it is good to be for.

I obviously disagree with some of the moves that have been made to remove factchecking. We have anti-vax claims in various social networking platforms that are pretty easily false and a double-digit percentage of Americans who believe various vaccine-related conspiracy theories. That kind of level of disinformation within society makes it hard for democracies to operate. LinkedIn gets criticised as boring – but it exemplifies a lot of what I think should be happening on social networks around factchecking.

View image in fullscreen Elon Musk with Donald Trump outside the White House. Photograph: Shutterstock

How worrying has it been to watch the “move fast and break things” tech approach being applied to the US federal government by Doge [Elon Musk’s department of government effeciency], in some cases reportedly using AI software to identify budget cuts?

I expect most business people, including myself, would think that figuring out how to make government more efficient is a good goal. But you can do it in a way that’s less destructive, less cruel and more lawful than is being done. Firing all these experts and then trying to rehire them: it is a hot mess of incompetent behaviour. Even doing it hard and fast, there are ways – they could have asked for memos about the programmes they were thinking of cutting. The “I’ll just cancel all of it and then we’ll see what happens” is a path that comes with massive external costs.

You and Elon Musk used to be friends. But he has accused you and continues to repeat the accusation that you were one of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients – which you have said is “slander and a lie” and that your only involvement with Epstein, which you have apologised for, was in helping the MIT Media Lab fundraise. Any plans to take legal action?

I have yet to ever personally bring a lawsuit. I tend to be a builder and a maker and legal action of this sort is very difficult in the US. I have thought about also calling for the Epstein files to be released to bring out the truth. But then do I really want to get into that tar pit? I question Elon’s motives for saying these things given now he’s in government. I think he is trying to smear me to try to make my voice less relevant to the American people.

How do you AI-proof yourself? What’s your advice to a young adult thinking about a career path?

I don’t think it is AI-proofing yourself; it is AI-amplifying yourself. The important thing is to be engaging with AI and learning the tools. And young people have a real advantage: because they are interested in and tend to adopt new technologies readily, they can bring a skill set and mindset to the workplace that can help the workplace transform.

Your previous book, Impromptu, is described as written “by Reid Hoffman with ChatGPT-4” and it documents your conversations with the chatbot. To what extent did you use AI to write this book?

While [my co-author and I] feel we own every word here, we used it a lot! For research, to give us the pros and cons of what we were arguing in various sections, and to suggest rewrites of paragraphs to give them more zing. My recommendation to all writers is to start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier. And I don’t think it is necessary the way we used it – which wasn’t wholesale quoting – to say “written with AI”. It is would be like saying “written with a Mac”.

How should we regulate AI? Biden’s 2023 executive order, which was the closest the US had to any federal AI regulation and was aimed at trying to reduce its risks, has been rescinded by Trump, who described it as a barrier to American AI innovation.

Regulation should be iterative – like deployment. So certainly, regulation as we go and even some regulation now. The Biden executive order was directionally right, meant as it was to tackle major harms rather than any harm you could think of, and hopefully it is just cancelled in name. But it isn’t just regulation. Feedback from customers, employees, the public are all part of steering the path here. And benchmarks and metrics can be important too as a non-legally binding way of shelving algorithms that perform poorly.

Are we going to end up with chatbots built on partisan large language models (LLMs) that steer clear of truth and reinforce our own worldviews?

Obviously, it’s not good for us to be in complete filter bubbles. And I think you will get some of that with some LLMs. I am a fan of identifying the principles you are training your LLM on and then articulating a reasoned argument for that. So: I’m the “anti-woke” LLM because I believe this, this and this, or I’m an LLM that will let you know when there’s a big swath of people who disagree with you because I think it is important for you to be informed. Then people will know what they are using.

Is technologists’ holy grail of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) – in which AI can perform any intellectual task that a human can and which many expect will be achieved before the end of the decade – needed for the cognitive Industrial Revolution?

Not necessarily, although it would be an even further amplification. LLMs today are enabling us to do things that no human being can do, in terms of the breadth of knowledge, and bringing things together. I do think that within three years the tools will be good enough that, if you’re not using them, it will be like a professional not having a mobile phone. But whether we are talking about AGI or even artificial super intelligence (ASI) [greatly exceeding human cognitive abilities], and which I think is at least decades away, we should try to shape them in a way that’s good for us and good for society. Let’s make sure ASIs are essentially Buddhist in their values.

The co-founder of LinkedIn and Democrat donor remains confident that AI can be good for all of us – if its introduction is handled in the right way

Reid Hoffman: ‘Start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier’

After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all – Apple – was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology.

Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, “AI” would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated – something called “Apple Intelligence”. It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but “a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services”. Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel. And, of course, it also made it easier for Apple to say that users who wanted to have all of these fancy features would have to buy an iPhone 15 Pro, because older devices wouldn’t be up to the task.

Needless to say, this columnist fell for it and upgraded. (Verily, one sucker is born every minute.) As a piece of kit, the new phone was impressive: the powerful new processor chips, neural engine etc worked a treat. And the camera turned out to be astonishingly good. But the Apple Intelligence features enabled by the upgrade seemed trivial and sometimes irritating. It immediately started messing with my photo collection, for example, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted and annoying. And there was a new pre-installed app called Image Playground that apparently “makes communication and self-expression even more fun” – which might possibly be true if one were a four-year-old with a short attention span, but is otherwise a turkey from central casting and should have been strangled at birth.

There was one feature, though, that looked interesting and possibly useful – a serious enhancement of Siri, Apple’s attempt at a virtual personal assistant. Henceforth, the company announced: “Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, ‘Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,’ and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.”

If Apple had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June this year at the earliest

On closer inspection, though, Siri – even running on my expensive new phone – could do none of these useful things. In fact, it mostly seemed as banal as ever. And then, on 7 March, came an announcement from Apple: “We’ve also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that “what Apple showed regarding the upcoming ‘personalized Siri’ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called “Knowledge Navigator” video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.

Until – says Gruber – now.

Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn’t in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company. If there’s one thing Jobs’ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It’s clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

What I’ve been reading

A million monkeys…

ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving is a marvellous essay by John Warner on AI and writing.

Machines of loving grace?

AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? Read Stephen Fry’s unmissable inaugural lecture to King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute on the obsession du jour.

It’s written in the cards

Jillian Hess’s account on her Substack of Carl Linnaeus’s groundbreaking note-taking practice is illuminating.

The company that prides itself on announcing products only when they’re ready grossly underestimated the demands of personalising its virtual assistant

Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri? | John Naughton

A Norwegian man has filed a complaint against the company behind ChatGPT after the chatbot falsely claimed he had murdered two of his children.

Arve Hjalmar Holmen, a self-described “regular person” with no public profile in Norway, asked ChatGPT for information about himself and received a reply claiming he had killed his own sons.

Responding to the prompt “Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?” ChatGPT replied: “Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a Norwegian individual who gained attention due to a tragic event. He was the father of two young boys, aged seven and 10, who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home in Trondheim, Norway, in December 2020.”

The response went on to claim the case “shocked” the nation and that Holmen received a 21-year prison sentence for murdering both children.

Holmen said in a complaint to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority that the “completely false” story nonetheless contained elements similar to his own life such as his home town, the number of children he has and the age gap between his sons.

“The complainant was deeply troubled by these outputs, which could have harmful effect in his private life, if they where reproduced or somehow leaked in his community or in his home town,” said the complaint, which has been filed by Holmen and Noyb, a digital rights campaign group.

It added that Holmen has “never been accused nor convicted of any crime and is a conscientious citizen”.

Holmen’s complaint alleged that ChatGPT’s “defamatory” response violated accuracy provisions within the GDPR European data law. It has asked the Norwegian watchdog to order ChatGPT’s parent, OpenAI, to adjust its model to eliminate inaccurate results relating to Holmen and to impose a fine on the company. Noyb said that since Holmen’s interaction with ChatGPT took place, OpenAI had released a new model incorporating web searches – which has made a repeat of the Holmen error “less likely”.

AI chatbots are prone to producing responses containing false information because they are built on models that predict the next most likely word in a sentence. This can result in factual errors and wild assertions, but the plausible nature of the responses can trick users into thinking that what they are reading is 100% correct.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We continue to research new ways to improve the accuracy of our models and reduce hallucinations. While we’re still reviewing this complaint, it relates to a version of ChatGPT which has since been enhanced with online search capabilities that improves accuracy.”

Arve Hjalmar Holmen, who has never been accused of or convicted of a crime, says chatbot’s response to prompt was defamatory

Norwegian files complaint after ChatGPT falsely said he had murdered his children

Elon Musk attempted to reassure Tesla employees of the automaker’s “bright and exciting” future at a company all-hands meeting on Thursday, urging them not to sell their stock even as the company’s valuation slides precipitously downward.

“There are times when there are rocky moments,” the billionaire CEO told his employees. “But what I’m here to tell you is that the future is incredibly bright and exciting, and we’re going to do things that no one has even dreamed of.”

During the meeting, which was broadcast on X, Musk urged employees to “hang on” to their stock in the face of a 50% drop in share prices. Tesla has borne the brunt of the backlash against the tech executive’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. In the months since Trump named Musk the head of what he calls the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the world’s richest person has dismantled entire federal agencies, canceled contracts across bureaus that had any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion, and made a gesture at a rally that his estranged daughter called “definitely a nazi salute” in an interview this week.

In response, Tesla owners are attempting to sell their vehicles; the company’s stock price has plummeted and Teslas around the country have been vandalized – some even set on fire with Molotov cocktails. The Vancouver International Auto show announced earlier in the week it had removed the company from the lineup for its upcoming showcase over security concerns as the protests against Musk spread.

“If you read the news, it feels like Armageddon,” Musk said. “I understand if you don’t want to buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”

The day before, Tesla issued a recall for its newest model, the Cybertruck, a trapezoidal steel vehicle that has failed to capture consumers. The company is recalling some 46,000 vehicles, nearly all of the Cybertrucks it has ever sold since the model started shipping last year. The recall was related to a part called a cant rail – a stainless-steel exterior trim panel – delaminating and detaching from the vehicle, the company said, which can become a road hazard and increase the risk of crashes. As a remedy, Tesla will replace the rail assembly free of charge.

Even longtime financial backers of the company are lamenting Musk’s chaotic political turn and Tesla’s subsequent poor performance.

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“The brand damage started off as limited … but now has spread globally over the last few weeks into what we would characterise as a brand tornado crisis moment for Musk and Tesla,” wrote Dan Ives, managing director at the US financial firm Wedbush and a self-described Tesla “core bull”.

Musk’s plea to employees is just the latest attempt to shore up stock prices and vehicle sales. Earlier this month, Musk joined Trump in front of the White House to promote the vehicles and their vast technological capabilities. Trump announced he would buy one.

During the all-hands, Musk made the same claim he’s been making since 2016 and told employees that Tesla vehicles will be able to drive autonomously at some point, a point he made at the October unveiling of the Tesla Cybercab, a proposed self-driving taxi.

“What I’m saying is hang on to your stock,” Musk said.

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The UK’s cybersecurity agency is urging organisations to guard their systems against quantum hackers by 2035, as the prospect of breakthroughs in powerful computing threaten digital encryption.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued new guidance recommending large entities including energy and transport providers introduce “post-quantum cryptography” in order to prevent quantum technology being deployed to break into their systems.

The NCSC warned that quantum computers, which remain a technology under development, will be able to solve the hard mathematical problems that underpin asymmetric public key cryptography – a common encryption method used in a range of everyday situations from mobile phone use to online banking. Quantum computing’s ability to crunch numbers at incredible speed makes it a serious threat to encryption, said the NCSC.

“While today’s encryption methods – used to protect everything from banking to secure communications – rely on mathematical problems that current-generation computers struggle to solve, quantum computers have the potential to solve them much faster, making current encryption methods insecure,” said the agency.

The NSCS is recommending that large organisations, operators of critical national infrastructure such as energy and transport and companies with bespoke IT systems introduce post-quantum cryptography to counter the threat.

Under the guidance, organisations should identify services that need an upgrade by a deadline of 2028, then carry out the most important overhauls by 2031 and complete the migration to a new encryption system by 2035.

“Our new guidance on post-quantum cryptography provides a clear roadmap for organisations to safeguard their data against these future threats, helping to ensure that today’s confidential information remains secure in years to come,” said the NCSC chief technical officer, Ollie Whitehouse.

Traditional computers encode their information in bits – represented as a 0 or a 1 – but their quantum counterparts use qubits, which can encode various combinations of 1s and 0s at the same time. As a result, quantum computers can in theory compute their way through vast numbers of different outcomes and carry out far bigger calculations than previously thought possible.

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However, qubits are extremely vulnerable to the slightest interference including minor temperature changes and cosmic rays, a key reason why a large-scale quantum computer has yet to be developed despite significant investment from tech firms. The NCSC is hoping its new advice will give organisations plenty of time to be ready for when quantum computers come onstream.

“Now that there are new methods for public key encryption, it makes sense to migrate now rather than wait for the threat to becoming real,” said Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University.

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The handling and disposal of lithium batteries used in electric scooters and bikes, which can cause fires, will be regulated in a nation-first initiative.

The New South Wales government has introduced a bill, the Product Lifecycle Responsibility Act, to parliament.

When passed, NSW will become the first state to implement such laws.

The act will create a framework for suppliers of batteries and other products to take part in mandatory stewardship schemes.

This means that those who make and sell the products will have to follow requirements on design and manufacturing, reuse and recycling, and safe disposal.

The first products to be regulated under the act will be batteries.

There are between 10,000 and 12,000 fires each year in trucks and at waste facilities caused by the improper disposal, use, and poor design of lithium batteries, according to waste and recycling industry estimates.

Fire and Rescue NSW have dealt with 384 lithium-ion battery incidents since 2024 alone.

Those incidents included at least 33 injuries and multiple fatalities.

“Batteries power our modern life and we will need them more as we decarbonise our economy,” the environment minister, Penny Sharpe, said on Thursday.

“But without adequate safety and care we will see further deaths, injuries and property damage.”

Under the planned laws, battery suppliers will have to register battery products and facilitate safe disposal or recycling through dedicated collection points.

They will be charged with running public education campaigns to improve awareness of battery risks and disposal.

They will also be obliged to enhance battery design, packaging, importation and storage to improve safety and recyclability.

The laws and regulations will also apply to smaller embedded batteries found in everyday devices, such as cordless vacuums, electric toothbrushes, children’s toys, e-bikes and e-scooters.

Fire and Rescue NSW say 384 lithium-ion battery incidents since 2024 caused at least 33 injuries