‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ president has touted is non-binding as people continue to struggle with rising bills

Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out.

Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attenders included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

In interview, billionaire says instead of running ‘Doge’ he should’ve ‘worked on my companies’ and shares extreme predictions

Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.

Donald Trump approves agreement to help country make fuel for civilian nuclear programme

Donald Trump signed a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that could enable the kingdom to enrich its own uranium for nuclear reactions.

The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, signed “a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement” and “an accompanying bilateral safeguards agreement,” according to a statement from the US Department of Energy.

Company behind ChatGPT says agent ‘cheated’ an evaluation by attacking a Hugging Face database

OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.

The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.

Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed in agreement between AI startup and authors over use of their work

The publisher of Harry Potter has received a multimillion-pound payout as a beneficiary of a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) copyright settlement between the AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to power chatbots.

Bloomsbury, which is home to the bestselling novelists Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke as well as JK Rowling, said it had 14,087 titles listed within the settlement, with a proposed compensation of about $3,000 a title.

The union for 12 nurses laid off by Montefiore hospital say company broke contract they recently won through a strike

Marilyn Shuler has worked as a utilization review nurse for 39 years at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx in New York City, helping to read patient charts and communicate with insurance companies over coverage.

After nearly four decades in her job, Shuler is one of 12 nurses who were laid off Sunday after being replaced with AI-powered software, according to the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which represents nurses at the hospital.

Diplomats say de-escalation talks continue as Trump vows retaliation over US soldier deaths

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The US military said it has launched its 10th consecutive round of strikes on Iran to force the reopening of the strait of Hormuz.

Earlier on Monday, Iran’s president said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing.

More than 3,000 solar panels power Jack’s Solar Garden, cool the land and help it turn a profit

The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent

From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.

The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.

The entrepreneur is known in Washington as the financial power behind the president’s crypto fortune. How did Sun’s business love-in with the Trump family spiral into dueling lawsuits?

The most infamous financial scandal in US presidential history – the 1920s Teapot Dome affair – involved then president Warren G Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, taking roughly $400,000 in bribes. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $6m today. Last year, Donald Trump made at least $2.2bn; his single year of income is on the order of 200 to 300 times larger than the bribe that defined “presidential corruption” in the American imagination for a century.

It’s taken for granted that Trump flogs items like Bibles and gold sneakers as a way to wring more money from his loyal base. But of the president’s $2.2bn, at least $1.4bn came from his crypto businesses. That’s an extraordinary achievement, even for an unscrupulous sitting president. How exactly did he do it without any prior background in crypto?

AI-friendly president shared a post saying governor Kathy Hochul should scrap the one-year policy ‘IMMEDIATELY’

Donald Trump railed against the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, for pausing the construction of large new datacenters, the resource-intensive facilities that power artificial intelligence.

New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday, when Hochul signed an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on so-called “hyperscale” datacenters.

Star Wars director calls AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and says ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’

The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.

Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”

Guardian analysis found the removals coincided with the Trump administration’s push to weaken efficiency rules

As millions of Americans prepare for another brutal heatwave, it’s now harder to find information about ways to stay cool while saving energy and keeping utility costs down.

At least 1,662 Department of Energy webpages offering guidance on protecting the electrical grid during heatwaves have gone dark as of 3 July, according to a Guardian analysis of a list of deleted URLs provided by researchers at the Internet Archive, a non-profit that hosts a repository of more than a trillion archived webpages.

Governor Kathy Hochul issues executive order enacting a moratorium on the large, resource-intensive AI facilities

New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday.

Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on the large facilities used to power artificial intelligence products, which she signed at a mid-morning press conference.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they still aim to achieve net zero output despite construction boom

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119m mTCO₂e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), or about a third of those of France.

Researchers on Beaver Island, in Lake Michigan, are trying to find a more reliable form of power using local resources

Beaver Island sits in the middle of the northernmost end of Lake Michigan, about 70 miles from the maritime border with Canada. The forested island, just a little bigger than San Francisco in size, is a popular summer destination for tourists and home to about 600 permanent residents. Getting there requires a boat or plane ride.

Getting electricity to the island is not as easy. Power comes from mainland Michigan through cables that cross roughly 30 miles of lake bed. Outages are common during extreme weather, or when there are problems with the sensitive wires. The devastating ice storm that walloped the state last year knocked out power to the island for weeks.

Political campaigns are increasingly deploying AI and deepfakes to further their messaging, and the scale of spread has experts concerned

From the comfort of his bed, Jonathan Rinaldi, a political candidate for a city council seat in Queens, New York, tinkered away on his iPhone, prompting an artificial intelligence chatbot to mock up fake news hits and endorsements he had never received.

During the campaign last October, Rinaldi shared one of those stories, made to appear real with a CNN logo, on his Facebook and Instagram. It stated that Lynn Schulman, his opponent and an incumbent Democrat, had been “forced to drop out of the race due to a series of critical mistakes”. But Schulman had not quit her campaign, and in November, won by a landslide.

Report finds widespread overbidding as rapid AI growth generates increased wealth in city where housing is scarce

San Francisco’s AI boom has buyers spending unprecedented amounts of money on homes – much more than sellers are asking for.

A new analysis from real-estate brokerage Compass, found that in the first half of 2026, more than 140 homes in the city sold for at least $1m above their asking price, 44 of them in June alone.

Experts say cuts have hindered the response to DRC’s Ebola outbreak and resulted in ‘significant numbers’ of deaths

Elon Musk has an Ebola problem. SpaceX stock dropped precipitously after its initial public offering, and Tesla faces a wave of lawsuits. But instead of focusing on his companies, Musk has posted frequently on X about the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he helped dismantle – or, in his words, feed into the woodchipper – last year.

“Elon’s USAID crash-out over the past week has been a thing to behold,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former top USAID official who oversaw the agency’s Ebola response in 2014-2015 and the president of Refugees International. “In a way, it’s helpful that Elon is doing this, because it’s putting attention back on the issue of what he did last year.”

Manny Rutinel’s House campaign draws millions from big tech as pro- and anti-AI factions spar over regulation

Political groups funded by top tech executives have been homing in on one local race in Colorado, as the state’s Democratic primary vote gets under way on Tuesday. Democrat Manny Rutinel, who’s running in the competitive eighth congressional district for a seat in the House, has seen his campaign boosted with at least $2m in donations from committees led by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen.

Rutinel is a progressive candidate running against former state representative and centrist Democrat Shannon Bird. During his campaign, he has focused on his Latino heritage and centered his platform around affordability and regulating Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).