Chess: Gukesh joint last in Prague as world champion, 19, struggles for form
India’s Gukesh Dommaraju, at 19 the youngest ever world champion, has had a hard time this year,The teenager has struggled at Wijk aan Zee, where he totalled a modest 50%, and then this week in Prague, where he finished joint last with 3,5/9, scoring his only victory of the tournament in the ninth and final round,Prague was won by Nodirbek Abdusattorov on 6/9, as the Uzbekistan No 1 continued his winning streak from the London Classic and Wijk aan Zee,The best game of the event was this win by the local Czech hero David Navara.
The action-packed game includes queen and rook sacrifices and a pawn promotion, so is well worth playing through.The loser was so impressed by Navara’s creativity that he continued the game until he was checkmated.Final scores were Abdusattorov 6, Parham Maghsoodloo (Iran), Chithambaram Aravindh (India) and Jorden van Foreest (Netherlands) 5, Navara and Nodirbek Yakubboev (Uzbekistan) 4.5, Vincent Keymer (Germany) and Hans Niemann (US) 4, David Anton (Spain) and Gukesh 3.5.
Faustino Oro, 12, Argentina’s “chess Messi”, has been competing at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow this week in search of what could have been his third and final grandmaster norm, and with it the GM title and a world age record.Sergey Karjakin, Judit Polgar and Bobby Fischer are among the previous youngest ever GMs.Oro’s family moved from Buenos Aires to Spain to help his career, and he is already the youngest ever 2500-rated player.Aeroflot Moscow is a major global tournament.The elite six-day, nine-round event included 51 grandmasters and 58 international masters, with a prize fund of 18m roubles (approximately £171,000), and was played at the Carlton Hotel in central Moscow.
The schedule was tight, nine rounds in six days using the time limit of all the moves in 60 minutes plus a 30-second per move increment from move one, which could be an interesting model for English tournaments seeking to minimise costs,The 2026 version was won on Thursday by the double world title challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi, who totalled an unbeaten 7,5/9 and won by a full point,Fifteen players tied for second on 6,5.
The best known of them was Andrey Esipenko, a world title candidate later this month, and they also included Aleksey Grebnev, who defeated Oro.Oro’s two previous GM norms were scored in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and Aeroflot was his last chance to break the world GM age record held since 2021 by Abhimanyu Mishra of the US.The youngster failed by a hair’s breadth, falling half a point short of the record with a total of 5.5/9 where 6/9 was needed, and scoring a rating performance of 2597 where the GM minimum is 2600.At one point, Oro was only on 3.
5/6, needing three wins, two of them with the unfavourable black pieces.He got to 5.5/8, winning a fine strategic masterpiece in the grinding style of his hero Magnus Carlsen in round eight, but the final hurdle, Grebnev, rated 2621 and a former world under-18 champion who reached round five of the 2025 World Cup, proved too difficult.The early moves on both sides were cautious, with all 32 pieces remaining on the board until move 24.While Oro drank his favourite apple juice and launched a probe into the white defences, Grebnev responded with a miscalculation at move 32.
But Oro failed to take advantage, ended up in a lost position, and resigned at move 44, faced with mate or loss of the queen.Meanwhile in St Louis, Mishra, who set the existing GM age record five years ago as a 12-year-old, met the reigning US champion and current world No 3, Fabiano Caruana, in the quarter-finals of the American Cup knockout.He lost 0.5-1.5, but had a fleeting and difficult victory chance at move 18 in their second game.
When Mishra became the youngest ever grandmaster, his achievement was criticised on the grounds that all his three norms for the title were achieved in Budapest in what were termed “norm factories”,However, last year Mishra proved his high quality with a virtuoso performance in the Fide Grand Swiss, where he was close to qualifying for this month’s Candidates in Cyprus,The final upshot is that, with Oro removed from contention, and no younger talents of similar calibre in sight, Mishra’s world age record could now stand unchallenged for many years,4014: 1 Rh8+ Kg5 2 Re5+! f5 (if 2…fxe5? 3 Bd8+ Re7 4 Bxe7 mate) 3 Bd8+ Kg6 4 Bxh4 and White wins with his extra rook,
Trump says he fired Anthropic ‘like dogs’ as Pentagon formally blacklists AI startup
Donald Trump boasted about severing ties between the US military and Anthropic on Thursday, the same day multiple reports said that negotiations between the Department of Defense and the AI startup had resumed.They’re among the latest developments in the twisting rift between the US government and the AI company.“Well, I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired [them] like dogs, because they shouldn’t have done that,” Trump told Politico on Thursday.Hours later, the Pentagon officially designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a move that prevents all government contractors from using the company’s technology
Retailers want ‘delightfully human’ AI to do your shopping, but will the chatbots go rogue?
Major retailers say it won’t be long before sophisticated AI “assistants” plan your meals, organise your parties and do your shopping.But companies, many that are already struggling with their more primitive AI chatbots, will have to balance making the newer, “agentic” bots relatable without them going rogue.AI chatbots were in the news recently when Woolworths reined in its virtual shopping assistant, Olive, after the company’s attempt to have the robot relate to customers on a human level backfired.Customers reported feeling annoyed rather than soothed when Olive told them about its “relatives” over the phone.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailAs one complained on Reddit: “I’m already pissed that I have to call and now I’ve got some robot babbling to me on the phone? Wtf Woolies?”While Woolworths has said it will dial down Olive’s quirky personality, the incident – and further testing by Guardian Australia of a range of retailers’ chatbots – shows the technology still has teething problems
Google Pixel 10a review: cheaper Android is great, but no real advance
The latest smartphone in the lower-cost A-series Pixel line shows what makes Google phones so good, while undercutting the competition on price. The problem is that it differs little from its predecessor, which is still on sale.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more
Sam Altman admits OpenAI can’t control Pentagon’s use of AI
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, told employees on Tuesday that his company does not control how the Pentagon uses their artificial intelligence products in military operations. Altman’s claims on OpenAI’s lack of input come amid increased scrutiny of how the military uses AI in war and ethics concerns from AI workers over how their technology will be deployed. “You do not get to make operational decisions,” Altman told employees, according to reports by Bloomberg and CNBC.“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad. You don’t get to weigh in on that,” Altman reportedly said
Elon Musk takes witness stand in trial over Twitter takeover
Elon Musk took the stand on Wednesday in a trial brought by Twitter investors, who allege the billionaire committed securities fraud as he was buying the social media company in 2022. The class-action lawsuit alleges Musk agreed to buy Twitter but then waffled for months, attacking the company with the goal of bringing down the stock price to get a better bargain.After contentious legal wrangling, Musk did eventually buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, his original offer, totalling around $44bn. Musk testified on Wednesday that he didn’t realize his attacks on the company, mostly done via tweet on Twitter itself, would lower the company’s stock price or hurt its investors
Joy of teaching English in the age of AI | Letter
Your long read (Teacher v chatbot: my journey into the classroom in the age of AI, 3 March) provides human insight into both the craft and purpose of English teaching in the era of developing AI expertise in language. There is no doubt that if the article were fed into AI models often enough, the teacher’s words and techniques could, at some level, be replicated by AI online teachers.However, reading and writing, especially that which explores the writer’s thoughts and feelings, are surely uniquely human activities.As the writer comes to recognise, exploring human experiences through the written word is a highly valuable communal experience. Reading literature aloud in the classroom is the gateway to discussing personal responses to the author’s words
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