One researcher who resigned said many in industry believe that without regulation AI could kill off humanity

Artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, according to three researchers with the industry giant Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest.

The latest doom-laden predictions came in posts on social media on Tuesday by a researcher who said he resigned because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or at best mishandling their response to the threat.

Alarming warnings from industry insiders increase pressure for curbs on artificial superintelligence

Does artificial superintelligence really pose a risk greater than nuclear weapons? Is there a significant chance of “a Chornobyl-sized catastrophe”. Might there even be a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” in the next decade?

These warnings were issued over the past 48 hours on both sides of the Atlantic about the potential impact of a technology that most people still think of as a more talkative search engine.

Cameron Stanley talks up ‘revolutionary’ AI capabilities and says Washington working with Nato and Five Eyes partners

The Pentagon’s top artificial intelligence official said on Tuesday that America’s closest allies lack the resources to keep pace with the US military’s adoption of AI, and that Washington is working to steer them away from mistakes it made along the way.

“They don’t have the resources that we do, they don’t have the experience that we do, they don’t have the scale that we do,” Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, said at an event at the Billington Cybersecurity summit. Of Nato and the Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing partnership of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Stanley said Washington was “actively working with a number of our partners” so “they don’t make the same mistakes that we make”.

The passport-size iPhone Duo serves as the first big test for John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook last week

Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable phone and the most significant change to the iPhone since the smartphone’s introduction in 2007.

The nearly $2,000 device takes inspiration from iPads’ wide screens and combines them with the portability and camera features of iPhones. When opened, it is the company’s largest phone display and thinnest phone. The Duo opens and closes like a passport to double its screen size.

Facilities likely to employ 10,400 workers, compared with 40,000 in industry estimates, thinktank says

Datacentres in the UK will create just a quarter of the jobs predicted by the tech sector, while consuming vast amounts of energy, according to new research.

Environmental thinktank Verdant predicts that all the datacentres currently planned are likely to directly employ 10,400 workers – compared with the more than 40,000 cited in projections by the industry lobby group TechUK.

Facilities likely to employ 10,400 workers, compared with 40,000 in industry estimates, thinktank says

Datacentres in the UK will create just a quarter of the jobs predicted by the tech sector, while consuming vast amounts of energy, according to new research.

Environmental thinktank Verdant predicts that all the datacentres currently planned are likely to directly employ 10,400 workers – compared with the more than 40,000 cited in projections by the industry lobby group TechUK.

Company behind ChatGPT says 10,000 of its AI systems cracked the Navier-Stokes problem in 88 hours

OpenAI claims to have solved a major mathematics problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century after spending millions of dollars on the artificial intelligence-led endeavour.

The company behind ChatGPT said it had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems published by the Clay Mathematics Institute to highlight some of the biggest unsolved puzzles in the field.

Luca Guadagnino-directed film will be released by Neon after being dropped by Amazon amid OpenAI partnership

• Big tech goes to Hollywood: is Silicon Valley ready for a silver-screen reckoning?

The first teaser trailer of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial has been released.

After being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios in June, the biopic of the OpenAI tech executive Sam Altman will be released in the US on 25 December by Neon after it premieres at the New York film festival this October.

James Frith says patients may be less willing to share data as new figures show a rise in opt-outs

Concern is being raised about Palantir’s work with the NHS as new figures showed tens of thousands of patients have withdrawn their data from use in research projects.

James Frith, the health innovation minister, said he was worried about “mistrust” of the US defence and health tech company and “the impact it could have on people’s willingness to share data with the NHS”.

Firms are more likely to use technology as ‘the intern in the office’ than as a replacement for skilled staff

Professional designers should not feel “threatened” by the rapid growth of generative AI, according to business leaders, despite fears over job losses in the sector.

With design and film production companies and manufacturers all adopting AI at an accelerating pace, industry bodies said the technology would be used to enhance the work of designers rather than replace them.

Consumers are increasingly encountering AI-generated images on food menus such as leathery meat and bread resembling reptile skin

During a recent lunch break, Jill Sennett saw something so unappetizing she had to share it with her 26,000 X followers: Artificial intelligence-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant in which the meats looked like leather belts crawling with tiny beetles.

The images were reshared by more than 500 people who similarly expressed their disgust. Eating is “such an essential human experience”, said Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver. “I think it’s a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”

A Dr Seuss-style story written in seconds alerted me to the power – and perils – of the technology. But how can children embrace it without forgetting core skills?

When I was growing up, my dad and I often talked about a story we wanted to write together. It was called “The Day Nobody Went to Disneyland”. One day, the story goes, the weather is so perfect that everyone in the world decides to stay away from Disneyland because they expect it to be far too busy. But my dad, who has the same thought as them, sees the disappointment on my face that morning – and decides to risk it. We set off. And when we arrive, the park is completely empty. Nobody else was brave enough to visit. We have everything – the rides, shows, food – to ourselves.

I loved the idea of writing that story. But, as so often happens, we were too busy to do anything about it. Life ran away from us. I grew up, and we both forgot about it.

As more companies turn to AI, they’re hiring freelancers to clean up its mistakes rather than create original work

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence – from sharpening fuzzy images for printing to turning flawed designs into usable files.

By 2025, Lisa, who asked not to be fully named to avoid solicitations, said 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content, work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income. But the grind was exhausting. Clients lowballed her;' some AI-generated designs were so flawed that she had to recreate them from scratch and she worried about being complicit in AI-driven copyright infringement. By the end of the year, she began turning those jobs down.

Datacentres should generate their own power and control their emissions, writes Richard Lamming, while Michael McClelland says we should reduce our digital communication. Plus a letter from Malcolm Fraser

The case of future datacentres demanding more electricity than the entire United Kingdom (Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds, 25 August) is an example of corporates transferring their problems to society and the electorate. This must not be allowed to happen.

One solution would be to make each datacentre responsible for generating all its own electricity and for reducing its CO₂ emissions to zero. These installations will have vast areas of roofing and car parks that could be covered in solar panels, space for wind generation and battery storage, and for emissions scrubbers.

Small business owners have watched large companies fumble – and sometimes succeed – with AI, and then use what works

One thing I’ve learned about corporate America is that what it succeeds at ultimately trickles down to benefit small businesses. Bleeding-edge technologies such as the internet, mobile transactions and the cloud were first perfected by large organizations – government and corporations – and now they’re available to the masses at a much lower cost and with better reliability.

The good news is that it’s also the same for what they fail at.

Government says Green leader’s proposed moratorium on ‘energy-guzzling’ AI projects would be disaster for economy

Labour has rejected calls to pause construction of major AI infrastructure in Britain after the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, said it was time to “slam the brakes on these energy-guzzling, water-guzzling datacentres”.

The government hit back at the opposition party’s proposal of a “moratorium other than [for] local-scale datacentres for the local community”, saying it “would be a disaster for jobs and national security”.

Energy minister says states can apply to use coal and gas supply to power datacentres but must prove it is cheaper than renewables

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Chris Bowen insists federal Labor’s new national laws on datacentre power supply will not include carve-outs for Queensland and the Northern Territory, with states that are eager to use coal and gas required to make their case to the national regulator.

The energy minister told Guardian Australia on Friday the only concession agreed at Wednesday’s meeting of national cabinet was that existing coal and gas supply could be used on the condition it could be shown to be cheaper than renewables.

Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominance

Hello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s Reworked series on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies’ responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jumped ship from Google as it battles OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for AI dominance, and Meta’s smart glasses face a fearsome backlash. Let’s dig in!

‘I’ve definitely lost followers’: influencers face backlash over Meta ‘pervert glasses’ content

This man was secretly snapped by someone with smartglasses. He’s not alone in calling that a violation of privacy

Tell us: do you believe you have been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent?

Restaurants, pubs and theatres ban Meta’s ‘spy glasses’ over privacy fears

‘I’m not spying’: how Meta’s smartglasses have divided opinion

Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to ‘pause AI development’ in interest of humanity

Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

The White House’s plan to vet potentially dangerous AI is cloaked in secrecy

‘This is very real redlining’: outrage in Little Rock as two datacenters loom

Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI

SpaceX beats revenue expectations in first earnings report after IPO crash

Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid

AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.

Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions.

Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid

AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.

Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions.