FTSE 100 Live: Gold surges amid Trump tensions; JLR leads growth rebound January 15, 2026 Good morning and welcome back to the City AM liveblog. Rachel Reeves’ report card for 2025 has received another dim review with fresh figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing growth came in at a sluggish 0.1 per cent in the three months to November 2025. This was led by a modest rebound [...]
Forest swerves TfL’s e-scooter trial January 15, 2026 Major bike lenders are snubbing Transport for London’s e-scooter rollout as the capital’s micromobility players question regulations around trials. TfL opened the bidding for the next phase of its e-scooter experiment last week. But major electric bike operators may snub the chance to introduce e-scooters into fleets of rental vehicles across the capital, City AM [...]
Big Tech steps up energy hiring as grid creaks under AI pressure January 14, 2026 Big Tech is increasingly recruiting energy specialists as access to electricity becomes a central constraint on the expansion of AI infrastructure. Energy-related hiring at tech firms rose 34 per cent year on year in 2024, according to Workforce.ai data, and has remained around 30 per cent above pre-2022 levels. The increase reflects growing demand for [...]
Netflix flashes the cash to end Hollywood’s bidding war January 14, 2026 Netfix is reportedly readying an all-cash offensive to secure its long-awaited $83bn takeover of Warner Bros, in a move set to kill off a persistent hostile bid from rival Paramount Skydance. The Los Gatos streaming giant is set to snub the cash and stock bid in favour of a simpler, hard-currency deal, as it aims [...]
‘Ambition and delivery are not aligned’ – Starmer’s AI Action Plan, one year on January 14, 2026 Exactly a year ago, Keir Starmer, with the help of Matt Clifford, promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of the UK’s economy. The so-called AI Opportunities Action Plan, a 50-point blueprint unveiled in January 2025, was meant to turn that rhetoric into results, placing the UK on equal footings with the likes of China [...]
Monzo outage hits app as digital bank wobbles January 13, 2026 Monzo Bank’s customers were left frustrated after the online bank suffered a widespread app outage, temporarily knocking out key features while core banking services continued to work. Shortly after 3 pm on Tuesday, users across the UK began reporting problems accessing parts of the bank’s app, according to outage-tracking site DownDetector. Reports seemed to spike [...]
X outage hits as Grok scrutiny and UK regulation collide January 13, 2026 X has been hit by a widespread outage, leaving millions of its users unable to load posts, photos or entire timelines, a tech stumble that has landed at an acute moment for Elon Musk’s platform. By early afternoon on Tuesday, over 7,000 X users in both the UK and across the pond reported problems to [...]
After Grok, should the UK opt for an Australia-style social media ban? January 13, 2026 When, in December, Australia enacted a nationwide ban of social media platforms for under-16s, critics called it heavy-handed, and easy to bypass. This week, as Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok flooded the social media platform, X, with AI-generated explicit photos of women and girls, some even involving minors, that argument begins to lose its legs. [...]
Uber drivers plot exodus as platform swerves ‘taxi tax’ January 13, 2026 Uber is staring down the barrel of a potential driver exodus as members of its fleet threaten to jump ship to rival apps or return to black cabs, following a new year contractual overhaul designed to swerve a huge VAT bill. Documents seen by City AM show a wave of fury in private messaging groups, [...]
OpenAI could face more hurdles for IPO than Anthropic January 12, 2026 As artificial intelligence giants inch towards the public markets, copyright litigation is becoming an increasingly influential factor in how investors assess risk. And with that in mind, Anthropic appears to be starting from a less complicated position than its larger rival, OpenAI. Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence have said the Claude founder faces “significantly less legal [...]
