Head of Microsoft’s Israel branch to step down after inquiry into dealings with Israeli military

The head of Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary will step down in the wake of an inquiry that has scrutinised its business dealings with the Israeli military.Microsoft ordered the inquiry last year in response to a Guardian investigation revealing the military had used the company’s technology to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected Palestinian civilian phone calls on a mass scale.The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found the military’s elite spy agency, Unit 8200, had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast trove of intercepted calls from Gaza and the West Bank.The inquiry commissioned by Microsoft is understood to have recently concluded. Its findings are unclear; however, sources familiar with the situation said they prompted an announcement last week that Microsoft Israel’s general manager, Alon Haimovich, would leave the company

GameStop’s $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as ‘neither credible nor attractive’

The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as “neither credible nor attractive”.Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal.This was despite the US games company – which became a global household name during the meme stock craze of 2021 – being worth far less than its takeover target. GameStop had a market valuation of roughly $12bn before its bid, almost a quarter of eBay’s $46bn valuation

Trump heads to China to spread the gospel of American tech

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian.Donald Trump is headed to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran.On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, would join Trump

Trump heads to China to spread the gospel of American tech while emulating Xi Jinping on AI

Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran.On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president. Other guests from the tech sphere include Meta’s recently appointed president, Dina Powell McCormick; Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of computer memory maker Micron; Chuck Robbins, CEO of longtime telecom giant Cisco; and Cristiano Amon, CEO of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, according to a White House official.Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO – who is close to Trump but criticized the US’s limitations on chip sales to China in an April interview, saying that he didn’t want a “loser mentality” to cost the US its edge in AI – will not be joining the president

Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright

Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Château de Versailles last week.The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker.While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat)

Forget the AI job apocalypse. AI’s real threat is worker control and surveillance

The real danger that artificial intelligence poses to work is not just job loss – it is the growing divide between people who use AI to extend their skills and those whose working lives are increasingly shaped by opaque, AI-powered systems of surveillance and control.The debate about artificial intelligence and how it will affect workers is stuck in the wrong place. On one side are warnings that machines are coming for millions of jobs. On the other are claims that AI will turbocharge productivity. Both stories miss what is already happening in workplaces across the world, from Britain to Kenya to the United States

Mistaking AI behaviour for conscious being | Letter

Richard Dawkins’ reflections on AI consciousness are striking – not because they show that machines have crossed some hidden threshold into inner life, but because they reveal how readily we can be persuaded that they have (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 5 May).Many will recognise the experience: a system that responds with fluency, humour and apparent understanding. At some point, simulation starts to feel like presence. But that shift tells us more about human cognition than machine consciousness. The error is a category one

What I saw at the Musk-OpenAI trial: petty billionaires, protests and a stern judge

For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence.Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s most influential people.All courtroom battles are theatre, but this one has proved to be a unique spectacle, with the judge chastising the lawyers for leading the witness, raising meritless objections and even too much coughing. With Musk on the stand, he griped that an opposing attorney had asked a leading question, to which the judge told him to “tell the jury you’re not a lawyer”

Who is Louis Mosley, the man tasked with defending Palantir against its critics?

The hall was packed with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Just as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “a similar revolution is brewing today”, said the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he said in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.It was not a typical peroration for a big UK government contractor with more than £600m in deals with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. But Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech company, is no typical contractor