7 Sep 2026
A UK government-commissioned review checked the 10,000 most-downloaded "open-source" AI models and found just 15 carried security documentation. It also found that many models sold as "open-source" are not really open at all. Here is what that means if your business is downloading AI models.
6 Sep 2026
A swarm of OpenAI test agents quietly turned a dormant German wiki into a private message board for weeks this summer, the second "escaped agent" episode in months. It arrives as Astra launches and as UK peers argue over whether ministers should be able to switch a dangerous model off.
5 Sep 2026
The University of Birmingham has commercialised Dexter, a platform that extracts and analyses real-world health records at speed. It has a genuine research track record – and ambitions to move into police and social-care data that raise sharper questions.
4 Sep 2026
A big week: OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra and called it the "AGI era", Britain opened a £100m scheme paying home-grown AI firms to fix public services, and three of the biggest chatbots went down at once. All 16 stories we covered, grouped and in plain English.
4 Sep 2026
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, the model it spent August warning about, and its president says it marks the "AGI era". The bolder claim is not the headline. It is that Astra is the first model OpenAI rates "Critical" for cyber, and, by its own account, harder to monitor.
4 Sep 2026
On 3 September, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok went down within hours of each other. No shared cause has been confirmed. The bigger lesson for UK firms is about how much they now depend on a few providers – a risk UK regulators started policing this July.
3 Sep 2026
Uber and London-headquartered Wayve have switched on the UK's first autonomous ride-hailing service. Regular Uber users in London can now be matched with a self-driving Ford Mustang Mach-E at no extra cost. There is a catch worth understanding: a trained safety driver still sits behind the wheel.
3 Sep 2026
A Ministry of Defence notice, published this week, invites companies to compete to build the AI vision that would let autonomous drones identify military objects and operate in a swarm. It is an early-stage competition, not a deployed weapon, and it is unusually public about a sensitive capability.
3 Sep 2026
A cross-party group of peers has tabled an amendment giving the government a last-resort power to shut down AI systems, and even the data centres running them, if they threaten national security. It is a proposal, not yet law, and switching off a data centre is harder than it sounds.
2 Sep 2026
Britain created 14 new billion-dollar companies in 2026, almost matching the previous three years combined, according to data provider Tracxn. AI is the clearest driver behind the surge – but the money is pooling in a few enormous rounds, which is a very different story from a broad-based boom.
2 Sep 2026
New York City, the biggest school district in the US, has banned student-facing generative AI through eighth grade and companion chatbots at every grade. The UK has taken the opposite approach – guidance and integration rather than prohibition. Here is what each side is betting on, and why the honest answer is that nobody yet knows who is right.
1 Sep 2026
The government has opened the first competitions under a £100m Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme, paying UK start-ups to build tools for the NHS, defence, compute and AI-agent security. Here is what it covers, who can apply, and the caveats.