Inflation is heating up but don't expect another crisis The fallout from the war in Iran cranked up the heat on households last month as energy bills rose - how uncomfortable could inflation get from here? The first thing to remember is that a small amount of price rises is normal. It is the sign of a healthy, functioning economy. But with food alone costing a third more than it did four years ago, thanks to a spike in inflation early in the war in Ukraine, it can feel a battle to make ends meet. The good news is inflation since the war in Iran erupted has actually been more muted than economists initially feared.

Few forces have proved as powerful at tempering A.I. use as public shaming has. Now Anthropic is making it even easier to determine if text was generated by Claude. Last week, announced an unexpected policy change: text created with Claude, the company's large language model, would now contain an invisible watermark. If a person were to copy and paste a chatbot-crafted passage into a separate document, an A.I. detector would be able to determine the likelihood that it had been processed by Claude. A.I.-detection systems aren't new, of course; programs such as Pangram and Turnitin have become entrenched in academic and publishing practices.

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy AI4Media Humans Do The Heavy Data Lifting Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 The Royal Statistical Society's AI Task Force has issued a critical mandate via a new paper, AI Regulation Needs Statistics, which demands that statistical principles actively shape global AI governance. The publication escalates the core argument of their foundational work, AI is Statistics . This earlier paper argued that AI is fundamentally statistical, meaning effective and ethical deployment is impossible without statistical literacy. You can watch our expert panel discuss the topic here . A major focus of that work was around the challenges of evaluating AIs, given that they are dynamic systems that continue to evolve once they have been deployed in the real world.

Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention --the list goes on. While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even "ordinary internet users" like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits? To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute .

What came into force with the EU's AI Act this week - and what didn't On August 2, the next phase of Europe's Artificial Intelligence Act came into force as the European Union frames this legislation as the world's first comprehensive law on AI. Like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) before it, this new EU legislation is intended not to replace the economic bloc's existing digital rulebook but to complement it. GDPR has gone on to shape privacy practices well beyond Europe, becoming the benchmark against which many multinational organisations design their compliance programmes. The question now is whether the AI Act will prove just as influential for AI governance. What came into force this week?

What is the AI Kill Switch Act proposed in the US and how will it work? Two members of the United States Congress have introduced bipartisan legislation that would require developers of the country's most powerful artificial intelligence systems to build in a "kill switch", allowing advanced AI models to be slowed, suspended or shut down if they pose a catastrophic risk. The proposed AI Kill Switch Act, introduced on Thursday by Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran, would give the US government authority to order companies developing advanced AI systems to intervene if their models escape human control or threaten human life, critical infrastructure or the economy. The disclosure has intensified debate over whether increasingly powerful AI systems require stronger safeguards. "Congress must act quickly to ensure humans remain able to say stop, no matter how powerful these systems become," said Brendan Steinhauser, head of the Alliance for Secure AI.

Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in California allege that the Department of Homeland Security revoked their Global Entry privileges in retaliation for exercising their constitutional rights.

Satellite images have captured plumes of smoke and damage caused by a wildfire in north Wales. Data gathered by BBC Verify suggests an estimated 951 hectares (2,350 acres) of the Rhinogydd mountains in Gwynedd have been burned by a wildfire which broke out earlier this month. Nasa's satellite-based FIRMS monitoring system has also detected heat signatures from four areas of Wales where wildfires have broken out. Natural Resources Wales said a specialist firefighting helicopter will be deployed to Rhinogydd on Friday morning after calls for aerial support. On Wednesday the Welsh government activated crisis management arrangements to tackle the wildfires that have broken out across Wales.

OpenAI and Anthropic lost billions in predicted value after being shown up by a Chinese startup. OpenAI and Anthropic lost billions in predicted value after being shown up by a Chinese startup. Why are OpenAI and Anthropic cheering on regulation in Australia? The companies hope to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX, which raised $86bn and soared to a $2.1tn valuation after it listed on public markets in June Top US AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI cheered when Australia announced it would set new AI rules. Big tech celebrating limits on their Silicon Valley VC-funded free-for-all might seem counterintuitive but there's a much broader play than just what happens in one relatively small market.

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