AI firms targeting London’s rare book shops in ‘dystopian’ hunt for training data AI London’s rare book shops appear to have been targeted by AI companies searching for books to train their models, after court documents revealed Anthropic bought, scanned and destroyed millions of physical books as part of a controversial project to feed an insatiable demand for training data. One London-based seller of rare books told Morning Wire [...]
UK government probes OpenAI breach after ‘unprecedented’ hack Tech The UK government is probing the first known case of an artificial intelligence model breaking out of a controlled test by itself and hacking another company’s systems. Officials at the government-backed AI Security Institute (AISI) are investigating the security breach at OpenAI and whether similar incidents could occur at other top developers, a spokesperson told [...]
Government accelerates social media crackdown with midnight curfews Tech Teenagers will face a default midnight social media curfew and stripped-back social media feeds under the government’s latest crackdown on addictive online features – but they will be able to switch the restrictions off themselves. Tech secretary Liz Kendall has announced social media platforms will disable auto-play and infinite scroll-style recommendations and restrict overnight access [...]
GSK says AI is reshaping drug pipeline as Nuvalent deal hits shares June 9, 2026 GSK has said agentic AI is already affecting every asset in its pipeline, as pharmaceutical firms race to use the technology to cut the cost and risk of developing new medicines. Speaking at London Tech Week in Tuesday, Eyal Itskovits, GSK’s director of AI and machine learning, said that the technology has officially become a [...]
UK firms are spending billions on AI – but getting extra admin in return May 14, 2026 UK companies are pouring copious amounts of money into AI, while their employees spend nearly a full day each week doing work that AI was supposed to eliminate, new research has found. According to Workday, one in four UK workers loses seven or more hours a week moving information between systems, chasing down data and [...]
AI’s biggest problem is that it is trained to ‘please you’, warns tech chief May 13, 2026 The biggest risk facing AI may be that it becomes too good at telling users what they want to hear. Anthony Goonetilleke, chief tech officer at software firm Amdocs, told Morning Wire businesses rushing to deploy AI are vastly underestimating a more subtle and potentially more dangerous problem emerging inside LLMs. “There’s another bucket I [...]
OpenAI listing plans hit as Altman scraps robotics spin-off idea May 5, 2026 Tech behemoth OpenAI internally shelved plans to spin off its robotics and consumer hardware divisions, as chief executive Sam Altman tightens focus ahead of a potential IPO that could value the company at up to $1 trillion (£737bn). The proposed restructure, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, would have mirrored Alphabet’s model, separating [...]
UK firms unaware of how their AI data is used overseas April 28, 2026 Most large UK firms do not fully know what happens to their data once it is processed by AI systems abroad, raising compliance and security concerns as adoption continues to rise. According to a recent Harbr Data survey, 61 peer cent of senior tech and data leaders at companies worth £100m or more lack a [...]
Former Deepmind star lands $1.1bn backing for AI startup April 27, 2026 An ex-Google DeepMind researcher has secured one of Europe’s largest AI funding rounds, as investors race to back a new generation of frontier labs beyond large language models (LLMs). David Silver has raised $1.1bn (£880m) for his London-based startup Ineffable Intelligence at a valuation of $5.1bn, in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed [...]
UK is of ‘marginal relevance’ – Nick Clegg dismisses sovereign AI push as ‘dishonest’ April 24, 2026 Nick Clegg has told Morning Wire that the UK’s AI sovereignty debate is “slightly dishonest” due to our “marginal relevance” as a global tech player. The ex-president of global affairs at Meta also said that policy decisions taken in recent years have limited the role the UK can now play in the development of AI [...]