City minister accused of ignoring £2bn car finance tax loophole
The City minister, Lucy Rigby, has been accused of snubbing taxpayers after she appeared to brush off concerns about a £2bn tax loophole benefiting big banks caught up in the car loans scandal.Rigby was urged to intervene by a member of the parliamentary Treasury committee after it emerged that lenders including Barclays, Lloyds and Santander could sidestep rules designed to ensure banks pay tax on compensation linked to corporate misconduct.Rules introduced in 2015 prevent banks from deducting compensation payouts from their profits before calculating corporation tax, meaning they cannot reduce their tax bill, regardless of the financial impact of their own wrongdoing.However, the Guardian revealed last month that banks will be able to exploit a loophole when they start paying compensation to victims of the £11bn car finance scandal this year.Their motor finance divisions are registered as “non-bank entities”, even though they are part of the larger banking groups, placing them outside the scope of rules.
Specialist lenders involved in the scandal, including the finance arms of car manufacturers such as Honda and Ford, are also exempt.The Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that this would cost taxpayers £2bn over the next two years, prompting Bobby Dean, a Liberal Democrat member of the Treasury committee, to write to ministers calling for urgent intervention.But Rigby’s response, dated 29 December and seen by the Guardian, confirmed that lenders caught up in the car loans scandal would fall outside the 2015 rules.“The bank compensation restriction does not apply to companies that are not banking companies, even if they are within banking groups,” she said.She closed the letter by thanking Dean for “making me aware of these concerns”, adding that she and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, wanted to see the redress issue “resolved in a way that is efficient, orderly and provides certainty for both firms and consumers”.
“This is a complete non-answer from the government,” Dean told the Guardian.“Once again, they have chosen to side with the industry over consumers and taxpayers, just as they have done throughout the motor finance scandal.“We hear from ministers over and over again about tough economic choices, but when big banks avoid £2bn in tax through a loophole, they refuse to take action.”The Financial Conduct Authority closed its consultation on a proposed car loan compensation scheme in mid-December.Its £11bn plan has drawn criticism from consumer advocacy groups and lenders, and the regulator is expected to outline its next steps in February or March.
A Treasury spokesperson said: “It is vital that consumers have access to motor finance to enable them to spread the cost of a vehicle in a way that is manageable and affordable.We want to see this issue resolved in an efficient and orderly way that provides certainty for consumers and firms.”
AI systems could use Met Office and National Archives data under UK plans
Met Office data and legal documents from the National Archives could be used by artificial intelligence systems as the UK government pushes ahead with plans to employ nationally owned material in AI tools.The government is providing funds for researchers to test how Met Office content could be used by the technology, such as in helping agencies and councils know when to buy more road grit. Another project will explore whether legal data from the National Archives – the UK’s repository for official documents – could help medium- and small-sized businesses with legal support.The government has also announced plans to license content from national institutions such as the National History Museum and the National Library of Scotland for AI development.Ian Murray, the minister for digital government and data, said the National Archives plan was “what smart use of the public sector” looked like
Sam Altman’s make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?
Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls “universal extreme wealth”.In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world’s most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations. OpenAI is pushing an aggressive expansion – encroaching on industries like e-commerce, healthcare and entertainment – while increasingly integrating its products into government, universities, and the US military and making a play to turn ChatGPT into the new default homepage for millions
AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed | Heather Stewart
“Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch over your kids?” Elon Musk asked Davos delegates last week, as he looked forward with enthusiasm to a world with “more robots than people”.Not me, thanks: children need the human connection – the love – that gives life meaning.As he works towards launching SpaceX on to the stock market, in perhaps the biggest ever such share sale, the world’s richest man has every incentive to talk big.Yet as Musk waxed eccentrically about this robotic utopia, it was a reminder that major decisions about the direction of technological progress are being taken by a small number of very powerful men – and they are mainly men.In the cosy onstage chat, the World Economic Forum’s interim co-chair, Larry Fink, failed to ask Musk about whichever tweak of internal plumbing allowed his Grok chatbot to produce and broadcast what a New York Times investigation estimated was 1
Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests
Google’s search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions, according to research that raises fresh questions about a tool seen by 2 billion people each month.The company has said its AI summaries, which appear at the top of search results and use generative AI to answer questions from users, are “reliable” and cite reputable medical sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic.However, a study that analysed responses to more than 50,000 health queries, captured using Google searches from Berlin, found the top cited source was YouTube. The video-sharing platform is the world’s second most visited website, after Google itself, and is owned by Google.Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4
How the ‘confident authority’ of Google AI Overviews is putting public health at risk
Do I have the flu or Covid? Why do I wake up feeling tired? What is causing the pain in my chest? For more than two decades, typing medical questions into the world’s most popular search engine has served up a list of links to websites with the answers. Google those health queries today and the response will likely be written by artificial intelligence.Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, first set out the company’s plans to enmesh AI into its search engine at its annual conference in Mountain View, California, in May 2024. Starting that month, he said, US users would see a new feature, AI Overviews, which would provide information summaries above traditional search results. The change marked the biggest shake-up of Google’s core product in a quarter of a century
Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal
The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform.In tests done by the Guardian, GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions. These included queries on political structures in Iran, such as salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mostazafan Foundation, and questions on the biography of Sir Richard Evans, a British historian and expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in his libel trial.Grokipedia, launched in October, is an AI-generated online encyclopedia that aims to compete with Wikipedia, and which has been criticised for propagating rightwing narratives on topics including gay marriage and the 6 January insurrection in the US
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