The private phone numbers of several high-profile figures including Australia's Prime Minister and Donald Trump Jr have been published on a US website. Both of their personal contact details remain publicly listed on the site, which uses AI to scrape the internet for information and the BBC has chosen not to name. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's office is aware of the situation - which was first reported by independent Australian media outlet Ette Media - and local authorities are investigating. A spokesman for Australia's opposition leader Sussan Ley, whose private number was also published, said the matter was obviously concerning and they had requested the information be removed. The site claims to have contact details for hundreds of millions of professionals and is used by recruiters and sales representatives.

The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called it "the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use". But Barry Smethurst, 41, a record shop worker trying to travel by rail from Saddleworth to Manchester Piccadilly, did not agree. Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta's WhatsApp AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire. It was the beginning of a bizarre exchange of the kind more and more people are having with AI systems, in which chatbots try to negotiate their way out of trouble, deflect attention from their mistakes and contradict themselves, all in an attempt to continue to appear useful.

Google Home is barely six months old, and Google is piling on new features. On Wednesday at its I/O developer conference in Mountain View, the company announced upgrades focused on personalizing your interactions and making them hands-free. Presented by Rishi Chandra, Google's Vice President for Home Products, the new features leapfrog Amazon's popular Echo assistant in some ways, while in other ways Google is just catching up. "A phone call is still the easiest way" to communicate with others, Chandra said, as he announced the availability of hands-free calling for Google Home. "Just ask the Google assistant to make the call and we can connect you to any land or cell line in the U.S. or Canada completely free," he said.