Academics discover black people'significantly more likely' to be identified when compared with other ethnic groups Essex police have paused the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study found cameras were significantly more likely to target black people than people of other ethnicities. The move to suspend use of the AI-enabled systems was revealed by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which regulates the use of the technology deployed so far by at least 13 police forces in London, south and north Wales, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex. The ICO said Essex police had paused LFR deployments "after identifying potential accuracy and bias risks" and warned other forces to have mitigations in place. LFR systems are either mounted to fixed locations or deployed in vans. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced the number of LFR vans would increase five-fold, with 50 available to every police force in England and Wales. Essex commissioned University of Cambridge academics to conduct a study, which involved 188 actors walking past cameras being actively deployed from marked police vans in Chelmsford.

Google had said'What People Suggest' feature aimed to provide users with information from people with similar lived experiences. Google had said'What People Suggest' feature aimed to provide users with information from people with similar lived experiences. Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world. The company had said its launch of "What People Suggest", which provided tips from strangers, showed "the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe". But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision.

I n rare quiet moments playing Marathon, you may find yourself overcome by the iridiscently pretty planet Tau Ceti IV. This fictional world seems to radiate a chemical glow: powdery pink skies and lurid green vegetation fill the screen alongside supermassive architecture emblazoned with ultra-stylish, neon graphic design. Yet enjoy the scenery for a split second too long and you might catch a bullet, causing your character to bleed an icky blue substance. In such moments, the camera locks - meaning you must stare down at their unceremonious expiry. Marathon's considerable beauty is matched only by its clinical brutality.

The revival of this 90s favourite is a retro-futuristic fever dream that is first incomprehensible, then thrillingly evocative. B ack in the mid-1990s, when I was a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our multiplayer shooter of choice. We all worked on Apple Macs, not PCs, so Bungie's sci-fi opus was one of the only networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of every day, staff from magazines around the company loaded it up and played for hours (usually with Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo). This was the era in which video games discovered club culture - Sony employed the legendary Sheffield studio the Designers Republic to create its box art and licensed the latest dance tunes for its marketing and game soundtracks.

Corporate employees said Amazon's race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and'more work for everyone'. When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. The internal AI tool she's expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like "trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused".

This week has brought more chaos in the feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic. This week has brought more chaos in the feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic. How AI firm Anthropic wound up in the Pentagon's crosshairs U ntil recently, Anthropic was one of the quieter names in the artificial intelligence boom. Despite being valued at about $350bn, it rarely generated the flashy headlines or public backlash associated with Sam Altman's OpenAI or Elon Musk's xAI. Its CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei was an industry fixture but hardly a household name outside of Silicon Valley, and its chatbot Claude lagged in popularity behind ChatGPT.

'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. 'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. T hey are already packing our groceries and delivering shopping. Now robots are coming to the kebab shop, alongside self-service screens and loyalty apps, as takeaways look for ways to tackle rising costs. German Doner Kebab (GDK), a perhaps surprisingly British-owned chain that has been springing up across the country, has turned to technology to keep its fast food business buzzing in the face of rising costs and tough times on the high street.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the'burden of tackling abuse must no longer fall on victims' in an article written for the Guardian. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the'burden of tackling abuse must no longer fall on victims' in an article written for the Guardian. Tech firms must remove'revenge porn' in 48 hours or risk being blocked, says Starmer PM says measure, also applied to deepfake nudes, is needed owing to a'national emergency' of online misogyny Deepfake nudes and "revenge porn" must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or technology firms risk being blocked in the UK, Keir Starmer has said, calling it a "national emergency" that the government must confront. Companies could be fined millions or even blocked altogether if they allow the images to spread or be reposted after victims give notice. Amendments will be made to the crime and policing bill to also regulate AI chatbots such as X's Grok, which generated nonconsensual images of women in bikinis or in compromising positions until the government threatened action against Elon Musk's company .

Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster'a real risk', says leading expert The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned. Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products' capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood. The surge in AI chatbots with guardrails that are easily bypassed showed how commercial incentives were prioritised over more cautious development and safety testing, he said. "It's the classic technology scenario," he said. "You've got a technology that's very, very promising, but not as rigorously tested as you would like it to be, and the commercial pressure behind it is unbearable."

Will the Gulf's push for its own AI succeed? That, and US tech giants' plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone. Can the Gulf states capture some of the US's tech dominance for themselves? I spent most of last week in Doha at the Web Summit Qatar, the Gulf's new version of the popular annual tech conference. One theme stood out among the speeches I watched and the conversations I had: sovereignty.