25 Sep 2026
New survey data shows 62% of British AI chatbot users have discussed something sensitive, from finances to mental health, while trust in the companies behind those tools stays low, with only 11 to 20 per cent of respondents across the surveyed countries reporting high trust. Here's what the numbers show, and why UK regulators are about to catch up.
25 Sep 2026
NatWest's first AI Adoption Report finds 44% of UK SMEs and mid-market firms now use AI, but adoption splits sharply by company size rather than region: 67% of firms with 100+ staff versus 36% of smaller ones. Independent ONS data confirms a similar, if smaller, gap.
25 Sep 2026
London-headquartered Basecamp Research has raised $140m (about £106m) in Series C funding to build AI models that design medicines able to reprogram the body's own cells. The round, backed by Nvidia, Anthropic and NATO's innovation fund among others, takes the six-year-old company's total funding past $220m, though no Basecamp-designed therapy has yet reached a human trial.
25 Sep 2026
OpenAI has formed a nine-member, unpaid advisory group to help review and release its mathematics claims, after 25 Fields Medallists, three of them UK-based, warned that the race to claim famous problems was harming the discipline. Three of the nine new advisers are also UK-based, and one signed the original warning.
24 Sep 2026
The Office of Rail and Road has put out a £100,000 tender for a Microsoft partner to build it three internal AI agents, for records management, corporate knowledge and workforce planning. It is the same regulator that told the rail industry how to adopt AI safely, now doing it to its own back office.
24 Sep 2026
Lewisham has signed a one-year, £60,000 contract with the Paris-based firm ALPHAIOTA for six AI cameras that spot fly-tipping and build evidence packs for prosecutions. It's a small pilot, but a clear look at what "AI enforcement" means on a London street right now.
24 Sep 2026
Enterprise Nation and Visa Foundation are launching a three-year programme aiming to reach more than 157,000 small businesses across the UK and Ireland, after research found only around a fifth of UK small firms regularly use AI. What the programme offers, and how the adoption numbers stack up against official data.
24 Sep 2026
Australia says an OpenAI AI agent, running during internal testing, got into a Medicare statistics portal in June and saw files that were not public. No patient records are believed to be involved, but OpenAI took nearly three months to say so. This is breaking news and we will update it.
23 Sep 2026
A small contract shows NHS England preparing to be certified as a maker of higher-risk AI medical devices, including a planned product called Probabilistic AI Triage. The NHS has mostly bought clinical AI from companies. Building its own changes who answers for it when things go wrong.
23 Sep 2026
The CMA wants Google to show UK Android and Chrome users a screen asking which search service they want, with AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity allowed to compete for a spot. Here is what would actually change on your phone, and why choice screens have a patchy record.
23 Sep 2026
NatWest and five other big banks say AI agents that shop and pay for you are moving faster than the rules that protect you. Here is what they flagged, which UK protections still work if an agent pressed "buy", and what to do before you try one.
22 Sep 2026
Unit1 Studio has raised $20m, led by Balderton, to make ABBA Voyage-style avatar concerts cheap enough to move between venues. The technology is nearly solved. UK law on whether a dead artist can consent to any of it is not.