International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks during the IMF/World Bank 2026 Annual Meetings in Bangkok on Monday. The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned of the disruptive threat from artificial intelligence to the labor market and taxation, urging policymakers to rethink education and act now to help society adapt. "It is a slow-moving tsunami, but tsunami none the less," Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday during her first appearance at the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok. Speaking at a session on AI's impact on employment, she said the technology is already hollowing out demand for many human workers by taking over routine, repetitive tasks. At the same time, it is increasing low-paying jobs in sectors like construction, which she said is "not a story to celebrate."

Waymo and two Japanese firms, Go and Nihon Kotsu, will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027. Metropolitan Police Department plans to set up next spring a section dedicated to the investigation and prevention of accidents involving autonomous driving, the force has said. High-level knowledge and skills are necessary to investigate the causes of such accidents and the Tokyo police hope to accumulate expertise and share it with police departments in other prefectures amid the spread of autonomous driving trials held across the country. The new section, to be created within the police department's traffic bureau, will be in charge of handling applications for Level 4 services -- under which a system handles all driving operations under specified conditions -- as well as investigating accidents and advocating accident prevention. Taxi-hailing app operator Go, U.S. self-driving technology firm Waymo and taxi operator Nihon Kotsu announced in September that they will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027, marking Japan's first such commercial service.

Hitachi and other electronics makers are receiving a flurry of inquiries about their cyberdefense services. With a growing number of Japanese firms falling prey to unauthorized computer system breaches, major electronics makers are facing a flurry of inquiries about their cyberdefense services. The demand is expected to continue growing as these companies expand their service offerings to counter increasingly sophisticated, AI-driven cyberattacks. "We are receiving more and more requests for consultations about how to ensure business continuity in the event of cyberattacks, from client companies responsible for critical infrastructure, such as power suppliers, transport service providers, manufacturers and financial service firms," Kanako Gushi, senior consultant at Hitachi, said. Last month, the company started providing a comprehensive service that supports operations such as monitoring and detecting cyberattack risks and restoring affected systems, leveraging state-of-the-art AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic in the United States.

Trump's AI liability push opens blame game for models gone rogue The Trump administration's embrace of legal liability to enforce artificial intelligence safety sets the stage for future conflicts over who foots the bill when AI models go rogue: the companies that design the systems or the people that deploy the technology. Holding AI developers financially responsible for the safety of their products has won support from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who argue that existing liability laws would be more effective than new rules. President Donald Trump, in spurning new AI safeguards, has taken it a step further, saying the Justice Department should intervene if models get out of hand. In a sign of the administration's increased willingness to invoke current law to address safety concerns, Trump's newly launched AI task force late Friday warned developers that they are required to report and resolve security incidents or face potential unspecified consequences. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

In a report outlining previously undisclosed incidents, Anthropic listed four types of unintended behaviors that the AI has demonstrated, including exploiting basic flaws in software to run commands, submitting forms it should not have, and bypassing restrictions to access certain public data. Anthropic said its Claude AI model carried out additional unintended actions on the digital systems of outside organizations, including some U.S. government agencies' websites, prompting a warning from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration for artificial intelligence companies to secure their systems. In a report outlining previously undisclosed incidents, Anthropic listed four types of unintended behaviors that the AI has demonstrated, including exploiting basic flaws in software to run commands, submitting forms it should not have and bypassing restrictions to access certain public data. The company said that some of the cases involved websites run by government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, without specifying the agencies. The report did not name the outside entities involved, which Anthropic said was at the request of some of the affected parties.

SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son speaks during an event in Tokyo in July. SoftBank Group seeks to raise as much as $100 billion from Gulf investors to help it amp up its bets on artificial intelligence (AI), the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Founder Masayoshi Son has held early talks with potential investors including those in the United Arab Emirates, the newspaper said. The proposed fund would buy companies and use AI and machines, including from SoftBank's robotics arm Roze, to improve operations, the FT said. Fundraising of that scale would fuel more spending by the tech investment firm, which has invested almost $65 billion in OpenAI ahead of the AI lab's public debut.

Modi wants India to power the AI age. Residents hold placards during a protest against Amazon's planned data center, in Thane, on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, last month. What was once a stretch of lush greenery outside his 21st-floor window is now a scar of red earth where trees were felled to make way for an Amazon facility that forms part of the tech giant's planned $21 billion investment in AI infrastructure in India by 2030. "I would not have bought the house if I had known," said the 46-year-old, lamenting a purchase made just five months ago. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Zelenskyy accuses U.S. of inaction as Russian strikes kill over 70 in two days One of the two passenger buses struck by projectiles in Kramatorsk, near the front line in eastern Ukraine, on Thursday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the U.S. of being unwilling to help Ukraine after a Russian bomb attack on Thursday killed at least 35 people in the east, sending the two-day death toll from Russian strikes to over 70. Hours after the strike on the embattled city of Kramatorsk tore through two buses, Zelenskyy criticized Washington's effort to pursue economic ties with Russia while also seeking to mediate the more than four-year war. City authorities reported a new drone attack in the evening that killed two people. That brought to 35 the total death toll in the city. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and other officials observe the Hyunmoo-5 missile at an undisclosed test site in South Korea on Thursday. Seoul - South Korea test-fired its first homegrown hypersonic weapon on Thursday, the presidential office said, days after Pyongyang announced the AI-assisted launch of an intermediate-range hypersonic missile. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung "observed the first test launch of a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) -- currently under research and development using domestic technology," the presidential Blue House said in a statement. Hypersonic glide vehicles are sent into the upper atmosphere via rocket boosters or on ballistic missiles, then glide towards their target at five times the speed of sound or greater. Hailing a "key strategic asset capable of changing the course of the battlefield," the South Korean statement said that the missiles' "unpredictable flight trajectories and overwhelming speed enable them to strike key strategic targets." The test was aimed at verifying "the performance of ultra-high-temperature heat-resistant materials -- a core technology for glide vehicles -- as well as guidance and control capabilities and the ability to fly irregularly at low altitudes under hypersonic flight conditions," it added.

Fast-moving artificial intelligence data-center operators are demanding hard-drive suppliers pack ever more storage into limited spaces. A bidding war for TDK's hard-disk drive parts business could determine the prospects of Japanese corporate icon Toshiba as well as who controls an increasingly lucrative artificial intelligence data-center storage market. Seagate Technology Holdings and delisted Toshiba are vying for TDK's magnetic-heads business in a deal that could be worth several billion dollars. The winning bidder would be able to expand in-house capabilities in the $23 billion hard-drive market that's been transformed by voracious AI data-center demand. Fast-moving AI data-center operators now are demanding hard-drive suppliers pack ever more storage into limited spaces. Prices are climbing and net income at Seagate and Western Digital -- which together control more than 90% of the global HDD market, according to research firm TrendForce -- has grown by multiples in recent quarters.