Condemnation of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot reached ‘tipping point’ after French raid, Australia’s eSafety chief says

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, says global regulatory focus on Elon Musk’s X has reached a “tipping point” after a raid of the company’s offices in France this week.The raid on Tuesday was part of an investigation that included alleged offences of complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.A number of other countries – including the UK and Australia – and the EU have launched investigations in the past few weeks into X after its AI chatbot, Grok, was used to mass-produce sexualised images of women and children in response to user requests.Inman Grant told Guardian Australia: “It’s nice to no longer be a soloist, and be part of a choir.“We’ve been having so many productive discussions with other regulators around the globe and researchers that are doing important work in this space,” she said

Pinterest sacks two engineers for creating software to identify fired workers

Pinterest has fired two engineers who created a software tool to identify which workers had lost their jobs in a recent round of cuts and then shared the information, according to reports.The digital pinboard business announced significant job cuts earlier this month, with the chief executive, Bill Ready, telling staff he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach”, according to a LinkedIn post by a former employee.Pinterest, which is based in San Francisco and has an office in London, said the cuts would affect about 15% of its workforce, or about 700 people, but did not specify which teams or staff members would be affected.Two engineers at the company then wrote code to identify sacked staff.A spokesperson for Pinterest said: “Two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly

Fairphone 6 review: cheaper, repairable and longer-lasting Android

The Dutch ethical smartphone brand Fairphone is back with its six-generation Android, aiming to make its repairable phone more modern, modular, affordable and desirable, with screw-in accessories and a user-replaceable battery.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.The Fairphone 6 costs £499 (€599), making it cheaper than previous models and pitting it squarely against budget champs such as the Google Pixel 9a and the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, while being repairable at home with long-term software support and a five-year warranty

French headquarters of Elon Musk’s X raided by Paris cybercrime unit

Prosecutors have raided the French headquarters of Elon Musk’s social media platform X and summoned the tech billionaire and the company’s former chief executive for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged cybercrime.“A search is under way by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office, the national police cyber unit and Europol,” the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a post on X on Tuesday, adding that it would no longer be publishing on the network.It said in a statement that Musk and Linda Yaccarino had been summoned for “voluntary questioning” in April in their capacity as “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events”. Yaccarino resigned as chief executive of X in July last year.The French prosecutors’ announcement comes amid a hardening of European attitudes to social media firms

From ‘nerdy’ Gemini to ‘edgy’ Grok: how developers are shaping AI behaviours

Do you want an AI assistant that gushes about how it “loves humanity” or one that spews sarcasm? How about a political propagandist ready to lie? If so, ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen are at your disposal.Companies that create AI assistants, from the US to China, are increasingly wrestling with how to mould their characters, and it is no abstract debate. This month Elon Musk’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI caused international outrage when it pumped out millions of sexualised images. In October OpenAI retrained ChatGPT to de-escalate conversations with people in mental health distress after it appeared to encourage a 16-year-old to take his own life.Last week, the $350bn San Francisco startup Anthropic released an 84-page “constitution” for its Claude AI

UK privacy watchdog opens inquiry into X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes

Elon Musk’s X and xAI companies are under formal investigation by the UK’s data protection watchdog after the Grok AI tool produced indecent deepfakes without people’s consent.The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating whether the social media platform and its parent broke GDPR, the data protection law.It said the creation and circulation of the images on social media raised serious concerns under the UK’s data regime, such as whether “appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment”.The move came after French prosecutors raided the Paris headquarters of X as part of an investigation into alleged offences including the spreading of child abuse images and sexually explicit deepfakes.X became the subject of heavy public criticism in December and January when the platform’s account for the Grok AI tool was used to mass-produce partially nudified images of girls and women