Starmer'appeasing' big tech firms, says online safety campaigner A leading campaigner has accused the prime minister of appeasing big tech companies and being late to the party in regulating social media and artificial intelligence. Crossbench peer Baroness Kidron told the BBC Sir Keir Starmer needed to get on with it rather than launching more consultations. She also criticised the PM for citing his own experience as a father of two teenage children on social media, arguing that this did not make him an expert on the subject and that his family were sheltered compared to others. The government rejected the claims, with a spokesperson saying it had already introduced some of the strongest online safety protections in the world. Sir Keir has launched a consultation on banning under-16s from social media and promised to crackdown on the addictive elements of the apps.

The process for calculating these metrics is described in Appendix C. Moreover, to ensure the comparability between prediction performance metrics and driving performance metrics in the radar plot, we normalize all metrics to the scale of [0, 1]. In the subsequent section, we provide an overview of the DESPOT planner. These two values can only be inferred from history. The safety is represented by the normalized collision rate.

We theoretically establish that our algorithms almost surely converge to locally optimal policies of our safe optimization framework.

India is hosting an artificial intelligence summit this week, bringing together heads of state and tech executives with hot-button issues on the agenda, including job disruption and child safety. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Monday afternoon inaugurate the five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, which aims to declare a "shared roadmap for global AI governance and collaboration". Touted as the biggest edition yet, the Indian government is expecting 250,000 visitors from across the sector, including 20 national leaders and 45 ministerial-level delegations. It comes at a pivotal moment as AI rapidly transforms economies, reshapes labour markets and raises questions around regulations, security and ethics. From generative AI tools that can produce text and images to advanced systems used in defence, healthcare and climate modelling, AI has become a central focus for governments and corporations across the world.

No online platform will get a free pass on children's safety on the internet in new plans, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said. The government is pledging to close loopholes in existing laws designed to protect children online and will consult on a social media ban for under-16s as part of plans for online safety. There are also plans to introduce powers to speedily change the law in response to developing online behaviours, and to update legislation to preserve children's social media and online data - as campaigned for by the group Jools' Law. Opponents accused the government of inaction, and have called for Parliament to be given a vote on the social media ban for children. The government had already said it would launch the public consultation in March, seeking opinions about restricting children's access to AI chatbots and limiting infinite scrolling features for children - also known as doomscrolling.

The maker of Ozempic and Wegovy is suing a rival firm for selling what it says are unsafe, knock-off versions of its weight-loss drugs in the US. Danish company Novo Nordisk asked US courts on Monday to ban Hims & Hers' range of weight-loss pills and injections, which it says are not approved by US authorities and infringe on its patent. The legal drama began on Friday after Hims & Hers launched a new weight-loss pill, leading to an initial threat from Novo Nordisk. Over the weekend, Hims & Hers said it would stop selling the pill. On Monday, its share price slumped as it called Novo Nordisk's decision to press ahead with the lawsuit a blatant attack.

Women's groups are calling for tech developers to take into account women's safety. Women's groups are calling for tech developers to take into account women's safety. Domestic abusers are increasingly using AI, smartwatches and other technology to attack and control their victims, a domestic abuse charity says. Record numbers of women who were abused and controlled through technology were referred to Refuge's specialist services during the last three months of 2025, including a 62% increase in the most complex cases to total 829 women. There was also a 24% increase in referrals of under-30s.

The AI company shouting about AI's dangers can't quite bring itself to slow down. T hese are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: "Things are moving uncomfortably fast." I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry's other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself--thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry's superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week).