Several countries have been considering tightening rules around AI use as well as social media use for children. OTTAWA - The Canadian government introduced a digital safety bill on Wednesday that would ban social media for children under 16 with exemptions for platforms that meet certain safety standards, months after Australia enacted the world's first social media ban for young people. The bill also aims to make AI chatbots safer by setting up a digital regulator to establish safety standards, a government official said. Companies could face penalties of 3% of global revenue or up to 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.2 million), whichever is more, for failing to comply. "Social media platforms and AI chatbots are designed to capture attention. They do not support healthy childhood development and have become a source of anxiety, isolation, depression and a range of other mental health challenges for many young Canadians," said Marc Miller, minister of Canadian identity and culture.

It's an interim measure while the European Commission investigates the ban. The European Union has ordered Meta to open WhatsApp to AI chatbots from rival companies again, for free, as it investigates the messaging app's owner over potential antitrust violations. Meta introduced a new policy in October 2025 that banned third-party AI chatbots from the WhatsApp for Business API, making Meta AI the only chatbot that can access the service. Before the ban, companies could send notifications through WhatsApp, such as order alerts, using other AI assistants. EU officials opened an antitrust investigation into the new policy in December and then warned the company earlier this year that it can take interim measures against it. In its announcement, the commission explained that Meta has held a dominant position in the European messaging app market since at least 2023.

Artificial intelligence systems that ask users to pause to consider AI's energy consumption and environmental impacts are likely to reduce unnecessary AI use, new research by Oregon State University suggests. The findings, published in Science Communication, are important as AI is already using electricity on scales that can be meaningfully compared to households, factories and towns. For example, the electricity needed to train a large language model would power 120 homes for a year, the researchers note; one AI-generated image has roughly the same energy cost as charging a smartphone. With about 85% of the world's energy still coming from fossil fuels, every megawatt-hour that can be carved from AI's electricity profile is significant, says the study's leader, Cheng "Chris" Chen of the OSU College of Liberal Arts. "Despite AI's substantial environmental impacts, information about those impacts is rarely disclosed or effectively communicated to everyday users of AI systems," said Chen, assistant professor in the School of Communication.

The AAMAS 2026 best paper awards were presented at the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which took place from 25-29 May 2025 in Paphos, Cyprus. Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub. Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub. Eleanor Drage speaks with Tara Merk about how community-owned data centers could transform digital ownership and challenge the dominance of Big Tech. We find out more about multi-agent research for the allocation of scarce societal resources.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 1 June and 31 July 2026. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Franco Accordino and Monika Lanzenberger (European Commission) The Digital Humanism (DIGHUM) Initiative The talk will be livestreamed on YouTube here . K Madhava Krishna (IIIT Hyderabad) Robotics Café The Google Meet link is here . Gianfranco Polizzi (University of Birmingham) Raspberry PI Sign up here to join.

The film forms part of a research project undertaken by Alan Warburton which also includes a research paper and a series of satellite events. The film is based on doctoral research undertaken at Birkbeck's Vasari Centre for Art & Technology. It was commissioned by the National Videogame Museum in collaboration with the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence . The ODI hosted a webinar on 6 May to discuss the content of the film. The panellists explored what AI can and can't do, what effects a collapse of real and virtual could have on visual culture, and if we're living in a post-truth world.

When most of us think of AI chatbots, we think of complex systems running on powerful hardware in massive data centers. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini a question, then watch it think as it pings some faraway server network to process, before it generates an answer. The reality is that's just one way to interact with the latest AI models, and you can run an open-weight chatbots on a recent iPhone. A local chatbot might not be as powerful as its cloud counterparts, but there are compelling reasons to ditch ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which I'll go over in this guide. I'll also explain how to install a local AI model on your phone. It might seem complicated, but I promise it's easier than you think.

You probably wouldn't notice if an AI chatbot slipped ads into its responses Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users. We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in replies to queries influenced people's choices about products. And most participants didn't recognize that they were being manipulated.

Google's always-running, data-hungry AI agent is designed to spend your money and send your emails. Gemini Spark is Google's take on a steroided-out assistant agent that knows everything about you, announced as part of the company's updates to its Gemini chatbot app at this year's I/O developer conference . Software companies have been talking up AI agents for some time now, but I wasn't impressed until I tried Anthropic's Claude Cowork in January. I sat back as the bot organized the scattered screenshots littering my desktop into labeled folders without a single click, and felt convinced that this might be a turning point for how people interact with their computers. Many other early adopters in San Francisco experienced similar moments when they set up the mega-viral OpenClaw bot earlier this year, not just to help complete a few tasks but to run their whole online lives.

A quarter of the people who use chatbots for medical advice say they are influenced by long NHS waiting lists. A quarter of the people who use chatbots for medical advice say they are influenced by long NHS waiting lists. Exclusive: Doctors say'highly concerning' poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found. The poll of more than 2,000 people found that - of the 15% turning to chatbots - one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists. The study analysed by researchers at King's College London revealed the potential risks of using AI for health advice.