In the coming AI future, Britain must not end up at the mercy of US tech giants | Rafael Behr

After Donald Trump announced a pause to the US operation in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's online propaganda machine was quick to declare victory. Explosive Media, one of the groups behind Lego-style videos mocking Trump, proclaimed it "TACO Tuesday", i.e. that the US President had “chickened out.” Meanwhile, Minecraft, the Minions, and Simpsons-style characters are joining the legions of copycats. Technology Correspondent Peter O’Brien looks at how these videos are actually made.

Company reports earnings on Wednesday and its spat with Donald Trump is sure to come up

President Donald Trump’s White House is contemplating whether the US government should be allowed to screen the most powerful AI models before they become available to the public, a significant shift from his previously laissez-faire approach to the AI industry. In the most recent story about White House AI model vetting, the debate boils down to whether the government should intervene before frontier systems with coding or cyber capabilities get distributed to the public. That’s a not a subtle change. That is Washington asking whether the arms race to AI has evolved to the stage where ‘ship it and see […]

In a week that’s seen a third apparent assassination attempt against President Trump with shots fired at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The suspect, 31 year old Cole Thomas Allen, had booked a room at the Washington Hilton, and taken a selfie in his room which prosecutors say shows him arming up 30 minutes before storming the ceremony. Tackled by secret services before he could run down a staircase to the ballroom, the President and his team were rushed away as journalists dived under tables.

Phone addictions. A big sea lion. And a chore coat.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai arrives for the inauguration of President Donald Trump | Getty Images Over 600 Google employees signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai demanding that Google block the Pentagon from using its AI models for classified purposes, reports the Washington Post. Its organizers claim many of the signers work in Google's DeepMind AI lab, and include more than 20 principals, directors, and vice presidents. According to the Post, the letter says that "The only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them." Anthropic is currently in a legal battle with the Pentagon over being des … Read the full story at The Verge.

This Wednesday Donald Trump claimed that out of respect for him, Iran had agreed to spare the lives of 8 young Iranian women facing execution. But he was quickly struck with accusations that the women were AI-generated. Iran gave conflicting information, both mocking the AI claims but also declaring none of the women faced confirmed death sentences. The reality - as confirmed by two NGOs - is that all parties did not share correct information.

On Tuesday, the president read from the Bible in a taped message. Religious scholars were not impressed This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday Donald Trump, who recently posted an image on social media which portrayed him as Jesus Christ (or, rather, “a doctor”), and who seems unable to stop attacking the pope, read the Bible to America on Tuesday night. Sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, hands resting on a book that looked like a Bible, Trump stared straight into the camera (presumably there was a teleprompter) as he recited from the book 2 Chronicles. It’s a passage which has become fashionable among the right wing, and which quotes God as saying: Continue reading...