Apple challenges UK government’s latest demand for iCloud backdoor: report

Apple has appealed a new legal demand by the U.K. government, which critics say could threaten the privacy rights of users all over the world.

Ex-Anduril founders raise $30mn to build Europe’s synthetic battlefield for defence AI
Ex-Anduril founders raise $30mn to build Europe’s synthetic battlefield for defence AI

A London startup building the training grounds for Europe’s autonomous weapons has come out of stealth with $30mn. It is one of the region’s largest defence-tech seed rounds this year. Agon is not building the weapons themselves. It is building the inf…

NHS England admits its paperwork hid that Palantir staff can see identifiable patient data
NHS England admits its paperwork hid that Palantir staff can see identifiable patient data

NHS England has admitted that a key data-protection document misstated who could see patients’ medical records. It did not disclose the whole arrangement. Staff at Palantir, the US data-analytics firm, can view identifiable patient data inside part of …

Steven Bartlett’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ is losing its inner circle as it chases America
Steven Bartlett’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ is losing its inner circle as it chases America

Steven Bartlett has built one of the world’s biggest podcasts on the idea that the right people, obsessively managed, make the machine. Now four of those people have walked out the door. The star host of “The Diary of a CEO” has lost four core staffers…

Nscale owns the power and the data centres. For ~$1.65bn, it just bought the software too.
Nscale owns the power and the data centres. For ~$1.65bn, it just bought the software too.

Nscale, the London AI-cloud company that owns its own power and data centres, is buying its way up the stack. It has agreed to acquire Anyscale, the startup behind the widely used Ray software. Bloomberg reported the deal at about $1.65bn. Nscale annou…

Inforcer raises $50M to help prepare smaller businesses for a new world of AI and security risks

London-based Inforcer just closed a $50 million Series C round led by Insight Partners.

Everyone’s building a ‘GPT for cells.’ Relation’s bet is manufacturing the data to train it.
Everyone’s building a ‘GPT for cells.’ Relation’s bet is manufacturing the data to train it.

The race to build an AI “foundation model of the cell” has a fuel problem. The biological data needed to train one is scarce, messy and inconsistent. Relation Therapeutics thinks the answer is to manufacture that data itself, and GSK is paying up to $1…

This Cambridge startup is building a ‘foundation model’ for the chest to speed drug trials
This Cambridge startup is building a ‘foundation model’ for the chest to speed drug trials

Most AI imaging startups build one model per disease. A Cambridge company has raised $20m to build a single model for the whole chest. Then it can spin the rest out of that. Qureight makes AI imaging tools for lung and heart clinical trials. It closed …

UK MP asks High Court to force xAI to stop Grok making sexualised images of her
UK MP asks High Court to force xAI to stop Grok making sexualised images of her

Jess Asato, the Labour MP for Lowestoft, has asked the High Court in London to force Elon Musk’s xAI to stop its Grok chatbot from generating sexualised images of her, sharpening a claim that her lawyers say could help settle how far an AI company answ…

Ofcom has never blocked an Openreach offer before. It just moved to block this one.
Ofcom has never blocked an Openreach offer before. It just moved to block this one.

Ofcom proposed on Tuesday to block a discounted wholesale offer from Openreach, the first time the regulator has ever moved to stop a commercial deal from BT’s network arm. The offer would have given internet providers up to £9.50 off per customer per …