Matt Brittin: why the BBC’s new Doctor Who-loving boss may not have much time for sleep

In recent months, Matt Brittin, the Doctor Who-loving fitness fanatic and former Google executive, has made no secret of his desire to make the jump from big tech to the world of broadcasting.At the end of last year, he told an event filled with some of television’s most senior figures that he had wanted to break into their industry “for a very long time”.As the BBC’s new director general, Brittin has not only fulfilled that goal. He has parachuted into the British media’s most powerful – and treacherous – job.The 57-year-old may be a big believer in the transformative power of sleep – one of Brittin’s favourite books is Why We Sleep, by the neuroscientist, Matthew Walker – but his new job is guaranteed to ensure he has less of it

Meta ordered to pay $375m after being found liable in child exploitation case

A New Mexico jury on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties after it found the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users.The lawsuit – the first jury trial to find Meta liable for acts committed on its platform – was brought by the state’s attorney general office in December 2023.It followed a two-year Guardian investigation published in April of that year revealing how Facebook and Instagram had become marketplaces for child sex trafficking. That investigation was cited several times in the complaint.“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” said New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez

OpenAI shutters AI video generator Sora in abrupt announcement

In an abrupt announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI said it was “saying goodbye” to its AI video generator Sora. The move comes just six months after the company’s splashy launch of a stand-alone app with which people could make and share hyper-realistic AI videos in a scrolling social feed.“To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the company wrote in a post on X. “What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”OpenAI first made Sora publicly available in late 2024, but it wasn’t until the company launched Sora 2 and its stand-alone app last September that the video generator reached mainstream attention

Baltimore sues Elon Musk’s AI company over Grok’s fake nude images

The mayor and city council of Baltimore, Maryland, filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI company on Tuesday, alleging that its Grok chatbot violated consumer protections by generating nonconsensual sexualized images.Baltimore’s lawsuit argues that xAI deceptively marketed Grok as a general-purpose AI assistant and X as a mainstream social media site, failing to disclose the risks, limitations and exposure to harm that come with using the platform and chatbot. The suit, filed in the circuit court for Baltimore city, argues that the court has jurisdiction over xAI given that the company advertises and operates in Baltimore.“Grok has flooded the feeds of Baltimore’s X users with NCII (non-consensual intimate imagery) and CSAM (child sexual abuse material),” the city’s complaint states. “Grok further exposed Baltimore residents to the risk that any photograph they uploaded – of themselves or of their children – could be ingested by Grok and transformed into sexually degrading deepfakes without their knowledge or consent”

Protect men and boys from manosphere influencers, Labour MPs tell Ofcom

Men and boys need as much protection as women and girls from harmful influencers and “the worst parts of the internet”, a group of MPs have told Ofcom as they called for the regulator to give specific guidance to online platforms.More than 60 Labour MPs have written to the Ofcom chief executive, Melanie Dawes, urging her to protect men and boys from “manosphere” influencers who may expose them to gambling, sextortion and violent pornography.The Online Safety Act forced Ofcom to give tech platforms guidance on how to tackle “harmful content and activity that disproportionately affects women and girls”, but MPs argued that men and boys are also targeted in specific ways.According to the Gambling Commission, 53% of 11- to 17-year-old boys see gambling adverts online each week, compared with 31% of their female peers, while 91% of sextortion victims are male, according to the Internet Watch Foundation.Alistair Strathern, the MP for Hitchin and a co-chair of the Labour group for men and boys, said the Louis Theroux documentary Inside the Manosphere was “another reminder of a particular way some of the worst of the internet can prey on young men and boys”

Divide between Silicon Valley and ordinary people grows ever larger

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. This week in tech, we discuss a moment of divergence between Silicon Valley and everyday people; deep cuts at Meta to maximize spending on AI; writers caught using AI; and the frightening, fiery crashes of the Tesla Cybertruck.Nvidia hosted a conference last week where it emphasized AI agents – semi-autonomous chatbots that can perform digital tasks for you – as the next frontier in tech. The company announced a toolkit for agents, including NemoClaw, an AI agent software suite for businesses

Amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse material found online surged in 2025

The amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse material found online rose by 14% last year, with the majority of videos showing the most extreme type of content, according to a safety watchdog.The Internet Watch Foundation said it identified 8,029 AI-made images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. It added that there had been a more than 260-fold increase in videos.The IWF said 65% of the 3,443 videos were classified as category A, the term for the most severe material under UK law. The corresponding figure for non-AI videos was 43%, said the watchdog, showing that the technology was being used to create more violent content

MPs urge UK government to halt contract giving Palantir FCA data access

MPs have urged the government to halt its latest contract with Palantir after the Guardian revealed that the US spy-tech company is to gain access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data.The Financial Conduct Authority, the watchdog for thousands of financial bodies from banks to hedge funds, has hired Palantir to apply its AI systems to two years’ worth of internal intelligence data to help it tackle financial crime.But the Liberal Democrats on Monday called for a government investigation into the contract, which the party said could be “a huge error of judgment”, while the Green party said it should be blocked over Palantir’s links to Donald Trump.Questioned on whether the UK was becoming “dangerously overreliant” on US tech companies including Palantir, Keir Starmer told parliament he would prefer to have more domestic capability but added: “I don’t think we’re overreliant.”Palantir was founded by the Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel and it supports the US and Israeli militaries and the ICE immigration crackdown

AI boom risks widening wealth divide, says BlackRock’s Larry Fink

The boom in artificial intelligence risks widening inequality, with only a handful of companies and investors likely to reap its financial rewards, the BlackRock chief executive, Larry Fink, has said.The boss of the $14tn (£10.4tn) asset manager used his annual letter to investors on Monday to highlight potential hazards around the exponential growth in AI, which has attracted rapid investment and become, he said, “central to strategic competition” between global powers such as the US and China.“The massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets,” Fink said. “And now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale