Microsoft has a new plan to prove what's real and what's AI online A new proposal calls on social media and AI companies to adopt strict verification, but the company hasn't committed to following its own recommendations. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that Russian influence campaigns are currently spreading to discourage Ukrainians from enlisting. It is into this mess that Microsoft has put forward a blueprint, shared with, for how to prove what's real online. An AI safety research team at the company recently evaluated how methods for documenting digital manipulation are faring against today's most worrying AI developments, like interactive deepfakes and widely accessible hyperrealistic models. It then recommended technical standards that can be adopted by AI companies and social media platforms.

OpenAI's President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It's for Humanity In an interview with WIRED, Greg Brockman says his political donations support OpenAI's mission--even if some employees at the company disagree. OpenAI's president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn't consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump's biggest individual donors of 2025. Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc--a super PAC that supports President Trump--in September of last year. The pair also gave $25 million to a bipartisan AI super PAC, Leading the Future, which says it plans to oppose politicians that jeopardize Americans' "ability to benefit from AI."

Rep. Shri Thanedar blasted top Trump immigration officials during a heated House hearing, calling federal officers “thugs" and warning they “better hope" for a presidential pardon.

Silicon Valley's power brokers spent the past year currying favor with President Trump. Two deadly shootings in Minneapolis are now exposing the price of that bargain. It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was " a pretty crazy idea " to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome.

Confirming which users are kids is politically fraught and a technical nightmare. Here's what moves from OpenAI and the FTC tell us. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise when children talk to AI chatbots. For years Big Tech asked for birthdays (that one could make up) to avoid violating child privacy laws, but they weren't required to moderate content accordingly. Two developments over the last week show how quickly things are changing in the US and how this issue is becoming a new battleground, even among parents and child-safety advocates.

Greenland'will stay Greenland', former Trump adviser declares Donald Trump will not be able to force Greenland to change ownership, a former top adviser to the US president has told the BBC. IBM's vice chairman Gary Cohn, who advised Trump on the economy in his first term, said Greenland will stay Greenland and linked the need for access to critical minerals to his former boss's plans for the territory. Cohn is one of America's top tech bosses, a leader in the race to develop AI and quantum computing, and served under Trump as director of the White House National Economic Council. In a sign of how seriously business leaders are taking the crisis, he warned invading an independent country that is part of Nato would be over the edge. He also suggested the president's recent comments about Greenland may be part of a negotiation.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his secret hideout these days, knows he is now a marked man. He will not be sitting on his veranda anytime soon. When discussing what the United States might do next to help the protesters in Iran, US President Trump has mentioned Qassem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The former, Iran's all-important military strategist in the Middle East, was killed on 3 January 2020 in a drone strike just outside Baghdad's international airport on the president's order. The latter, who was the leader of IS, killed himself and two children by detonating a suicide vest on 27 October 2019 when US forces raided his hideout in northern Syria after the approval of the president.

Donald Trump is the only world leader capable of stopping Vladimir Putin from threatening Europe, according to Poland's President Karol Nawrocki. In an interview with Radio 4's Today programme he said the Russian leader was not to be trusted, but that Europe needed to do everything it could to support President Trump in his efforts to end the war in Ukraine. President Nawrocki was already well-known as a firm supporter of Donald Trump even before he landed in Britain for meetings with PM Sir Keir Starmer and others. Now, he says that with Vladimir Putin's Russia threatening his country as well as central and eastern Europe, the US president was the only person who could, as he put it, solve this problem - as well as ending the war in Ukraine. Referring to last September's mass incursion by Russian drones, when more than 20 uncrewed aircraft crossed into Poland from Belarus and Ukraine, President Nawrocki called it an extraordinary situation, adding that until that time, no Nato member state had experienced a drone attack on that scale.

It is extraordinary enough to see the world's top central banker make an unscheduled video statement on social media. My first thought upon seeing the post from the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell was: Is this an AI deepfake? That sense did not go away as I listened to what were indeed the real words of the world's most important financial official. The background here is a long-running spat between President Trump and the man responsible for setting interest rates in the US and indirectly much of the rest of the world. In theory, this has officially been about the cost of a renovation project at the Federal Reserve, the US equivalent of the Bank of England.

Ukraine denies drone attack on Putin's residence President Volodymyr Zelensky has denied allegations by Russia that Ukraine launched a drone attack on one of President Vladimir Putin's residences. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed Kyiv had launched an attack overnight using 91 long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on Putin's state residence in Russia's northwestern Novgorod region. Russia said it would now review its position in peace negotiations. Zelensky dismissed the claim as typical Russian lies, intended to give the Kremlin an excuse to continue attacks on Ukraine. He said that Russia had previously targeted government buildings in Kyiv.