The report follows a warning on Wednesday from the National Cyber Security Centre, which said that large language models - a type of AI that powers popular chatbots - could not be protected from certain types of attacks designed to persuade them to do malicious things. There were at present "no failsafe measures" that would remove the risk, the centre wrote.

An artificial intelligence has consistently beaten champion drone pilots in races for the first time, achieving lap times no human was able to match. The technology could be used to speed up drones carrying out everyday tasks. The sport of drone racing involves humans piloting small quadcopters around a course at speeds of more than 100 kilometres per hour, with the vehicles subject to g-forces of up to 5 g.

Europe wants its own Open AI. The bloc's politicians are sick of regulating American tech giants from afar. They want Europe to build its own generative AI, which is why so many people are rooting for Jonas Andrulis, an easy-going German with a carefully pruned goatee. Ask people within Europe's tech bubble which AI companies they're excited about and the names that come up most are Mistral, a French startup that has raised $100 million without releasing any products, and the company Andrulis founded, Aleph Alpha, which sells generative AI as a service to companies and governments and already has thousands of paying customers. Skeptics in the industry question whether the company can really compete in the same league as Google and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT launched the current boom in generative AI.

Russian transport aircraft have been reported damaged in a drone attack on an airport in Russia's western city of Pskov – located near the borders of Latvia and Estonia – where explosions, a large blaze and gunfire were reported, a local official and state media said. Russia's state-run TASS news agency, quoting emergency services, said early on Wednesday morning that four Il-76 heavy transport aircraft, which have long been the workhorse of the Russian military, were damaged at the airfield in Pskov, located roughly 800km (some 500 miles) from the border with Ukraine. "The defence ministry is repelling a drone attack in Pskov's airport," the regional Governor Mikhail Vedernikov said on the Telegram messaging app, posting a video of a large fire, with sounds of explosions and sirens in the background. Vedernikov, who was at the scene of the attack, said that "according to preliminary information, there are no victims". The scale of the damage to the airport was being assessed, he said.

The UK's cybersecurity agency has warned that chatbots can be manipulated by hackers to cause scary real-world consequences. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said there are growing cybersecurity risks of individuals manipulating the prompts through "prompt injection" attacks. This is where a user creates an input or a prompt that is designed to make a language model – the technology behind chatbots – behave in an unintended manner. A chatbot runs on artificial intelligence and is able to give answers to prompted questions by users. They mimic human-like conversations, which they have been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data.

A robotic laboratory that can produce and test mechanical structures without human supervision has discovered the most energy-absorbing one measured so far, beating the previous record held by balsa wood. There are many ways to test how tough or resilient a structure is, but one common measure is the energy absorbing efficiency, or the amount of mechanical energy something can absorb without failing.

Microsoft has started a coalition of tech companies and media companies to develop a common standard for watermarking AI images, and the company has said it is researching new methods to track AI images. The company also places a small visible watermark in the corner of images generated by its AI tools. OpenAI, whose Dall-E image generator helped kick off the wave of interest in AI last year, also adds a visible watermark. AI researchers have suggested ways of embedding digital watermarks that the human eye can't see but can be identified by a computer.

"You cannot put a robot in an unstructured environment and then ask it to move around without basically destroying things. It's too much for technology to ask at this moment of time," says Prof Alireza Mohammadi, who established the Robotic Motion Intelligence Lab at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Chatter about artificial intelligence mostly falls into three basic categories: anxious uncertainty (will it take our jobs?); In this hazy, liminal, pre-disruption moment, there is little consensus as to whether generative AI is a tool or a threat, and few rules for using it properly. For students, this uncertainty feels especially profound. Bans on AI and claims that using it constitutes cheating are now giving way to concerns that AI use is inevitable and probably should be taught in school. Now, as a new college admissions season kicks into gear, many prospective applicants are wondering: can AI write my personal essay?

News outlets including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) have blocked a tool from OpenAI, limiting the company's ability to continue accessing their content. OpenAI is behind one of the best known artificial intelligence chatbots, ChatGPT. Its web crawler – known as GPTBot – may scan webpages to help improve its AI models. The Verge was first to report the New York Times had blocked GPTBot on its website. The Guardian subsequently found that other major news websites, including CNN, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the ABC and Australian Community Media (ACM) brands such as the Canberra Times and the Newcastle Herald, appear to have also disallowed the web crawler.