Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.

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Palantir’s CEO says the platforms will have a vast effect on the electoral landscape … especially women. Is it a warning or a sales pitch?

Don’t you just love AI? It has inundated the internet with slop, destabilized the concept of truth, and made it much easier to bomb people . And that’s just the beginning. As we look towards the future of our brave new world, AI might also disrupt all those pesky highly-educated female voters who keep casting a ballot for Democrats.

To be clear: that assessment isn’t coming from me, a highly exhausted female who wishes the Democrats would work a little harder for people’s votes. Rather, it’s coming from one of the key architects of our glorious AI-driven economy: Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of tech firm Palantir.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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Exceptionally rare ‘fee’ to be paid by investors who took control of US operations from Chinese parent company

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly poised to be paid $10bn by investors as part of a deal to create a US-controlled version of TikTok.

The $10bn, considered by the US government as a sort of transaction fee, will be paid by the administration-friendly investors who took control of TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, according to reporting that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal .

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Features woven into the fabric of platforms have been central to landmark social media harm case in US. How do they work?

It was as “easy as ABC”, claimed the lawyer prosecuting a landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google which heard closing arguments this week. The defendants were guilty, said Mark Lanier, of “addicting the brains of children”. Not true, replied the tech companies. Meta insisted providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.

Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling and constantly chirruping alerts woven into the fabric of online platforms were central to the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s. But how do these features work and what are their consequences? Are they creating addicts rather than users or are they just giving consumers more of what they want?

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First major study on ‘AI psychosis’ suggests chatbots can encourage delusions among vulnerable people

A new scientific review raises concerns about how chatbots powered by artificial intelligence may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people.

A summary of existing evidence on artificial intelligence-induced psychosis was published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry , highlighting how chatbots can encourage delusional thinking – though possibly only in people who are already vulnerable to psychotic symptoms. The authors advocate for clinical testing of AI chatbots in conjunction with trained mental health professionals.

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Datacentre investment boom is one of the biggest infrastructure gambles of this era, and Britain may be uniquely exposed

Stargate was to be the world’s biggest AI investment: a $500bn infrastructure project to “secure American leadership in AI”. Never shy of hyperbole, its key backer, the ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, promised “massive economic benefit for the entire world” with facilities to help people “use AI to elevate humanity”.

Now, OpenAI appears to be dropping out of a part of the deal – the expansion of a flagship datacentre stretching across a swathe of land in Abilene, Texas, which has become one of the most visible manifestations of a frenzy of investment in the chips and power plants required to build and run AI. There has been a breakdown in negotiations over project financing, as well as the timeline of when the expanded capacity might come online.

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Sources tell Reuters layoffs could affect 20% or more of company as plans reflect broader tensions within big tech

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

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Fake pictures look authentic – and authentic ones get mistaken for fake. Here are three rules for navigating the war coverage

The videos look authentic – and they are spreading like wildfire on social media. One, for example, shows Iranian missiles exploding upon the airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. Another shows US soldiers being held at gunpoint by Iranian military.

They aren’t real but – often made with the help of cutting-edge AI – they are wildly misleading. They may get debunked, but somehow that doesn’t make a dent.

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Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. Now Anthropic is fighting Trump officials not over if, but how

The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war – and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley’s rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech’s answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago.

Anthropic’s feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government’s decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.

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