David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg attend a dinner with tech leaders at the White House in Washington DC on 4 September 2025. David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg attend a dinner with tech leaders at the White House in Washington DC on 4 September 2025. How big tech got its way on Trump's AI executive order The US president's reversal on calling for a safety review of new AI models is a green light for tech's unchecked power Only hours before Donald Trump was set to sign a long-awaited executive order on Thursday that would have called for a government safety review of new artificial intelligence models before their release, the president abruptly backed out . Despite growing public backlash to the technology and experts warning new models will pose critical security risks, Trump vowed the US government would not slow down the AI race. During a meeting with reporters on Thursday, Trump cited both American dominance and competition with China and as his reasoning behind the reversal.

'You can't control everything': the rise in plastic surgeons asked to create'AI face' Growing numbers of people are seeking improbable cosmetic surgery based on chatbots' recommendations Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of "AI face", as more and more clients arrive in their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like. Dr Nora Nugent, a cosmetic surgeon from Tunbridge Wells, has seen this first hand. Clients have started coming to her office with photos of themselves beautified by AI and a false expectation that those results are achievable with surgery. She is also the president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, and says many colleagues are having similar experiences. "I can only predict an increase, given the rate AI has been incorporated into every aspect of life," she said.

Sadiq Khan's office blocked Palantir's deal with the Met police, saying there had been a'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules. Sadiq Khan's office blocked Palantir's deal with the Met police, saying there had been a'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules. London mayor accused of'putting politics above public safety' for rejecting deal to use AI in intelligence analysis Fri 22 May 2026 09.45 EDTLast modified on Fri 22 May 2026 09.55 EDT Palantir has accused Sadiq Khan of "putting politics above public safety" after the London mayor blocked its £50m contract with the Metropolitan police in a move that has also led to tensions inside Labour over its involvement with the US tech company. Louis Mosley, who heads Palantir in the UK and Europe, accused Khan of politicising procurement after he rejected a two-year deal for Scotland Yard to use AI to process intelligence in criminal investigations, as first revealed by the Guardian. Mosley said: "What Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer." The Met had planned to hire Palantir, which was co-founded by the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, to automate aspects of investigations.

Trump postpones executive order on AI, citing need to keep'lead' over China The move comes shortly after Trump became the first US president to visit China in nearly a decade.

Spotify said the new tool could create an extra stream of income for artists and songwriters. Spotify said the new tool could create an extra stream of income for artists and songwriters. Spotify and Universal Music Group have agreed on a deal that will allow subscribers to generate song covers and remixes using artificial intelligence. The licensing agreement is the first time the Swedish streaming company will allow listeners to use AI to create content through its platform. It is expected to be in the form of a paid add-on available on Spotify's app.

If you take a sheet of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? If you take a sheet of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? OpenAI has claimed a further advance in AI reasoning after its technology successfully tackled an 80-year-old maths problem. The company behind ChatGPT said it had made a breakthrough with a challenge first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946: the planar unit distance problem. The question posed by Erdős is simple to explain.

Staff at WiseTech have been waiting months to be told if they are among the employees the company is to cut due to advances in AI. Staff at WiseTech have been waiting months to be told if they are among the employees the company is to cut due to advances in AI. WiseTech begins redundancies - but omits'AI' from emails to Chinese employees, workers say WiseTech has begun informing staff that they will lose their jobs as part of redundancies the company has said is due to artificial intelligence advancements - although an email to staff in China omitted the word "AI" after a court case against another company in the country. Staff at WiseTech have been waiting almost three months to be told if they are among the 2,000 people the logistics software company is to cut due to advances in AI. The Australian Stock Exchange-listed company announced in late February it would lay off almost 30% of its 7,000-strong workforce across 40 countries.

The Commonwealth Foundation said all entrants to the prize had avowed that their submissions were their own work. The Commonwealth Foundation said all entrants to the prize had avowed that their submissions were their own work. 'Obvious markers of AI': doubts raised over winner of short story prize Granta publisher says'perhaps we never will know' true authorship of work that won Commonwealth prize A few syntactical tics - and the verdict of an AI detection platform - have sparked a furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI. The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true. "It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism - we don't yet know, and perhaps we never will know," the publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, said.

Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers' jobs around AI: 'Transfers aren't optional' As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it's radically changing some employees' jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that's building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch. Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been "selected" for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI - at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: "Transfers aren't optional." "Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI," wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. "The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best."

A long and bitter legal battle between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Sam Altman has culminated in victory for the OpenAI boss. Musk has vowed to appeal the verdict. But what did the trial reveal about big tech and the global AI race?