Starmer closes chatbot loophole in Online Safety Act February 16, 2026 Sir Keir Starmer is set to target AI chatbots with the UK’s Online Safety Act, warning tech titans that “no platform gets a free pass” following a deepfake scandal involving Elon Musk’s Grok. In a speech on Monday, the Prime Minister is expected to confirm plans to amend the Crime and Policing Bill, so that [...]
Landowners hit as government pushes through 5G rent cuts February 9, 2026 Mobile network operators are set to cut rents on around 15,000 existing phone masts from April, City AM understands, dragging decades-old agreements into a new regime that has already allowed payments to landowners to be cut by up to 90 per cent. The move will bring legacy mast contracts, many signed with farmers, schools, hospitals [...]
ICO opens probe into Elon Musk’s Grok AI over sexualised content February 3, 2026 The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has opened investigations in relation to the Grok AI system and its potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content. The probe into the tech tool owned by Elon Musk’s Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) and X.AI comes after the chatbot made headlines last month over the generation of explicit, [...]
Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla: Big Tech earnings set to test AI bets January 27, 2026 This week marks one of the most consequential stretches of tech earnings season, with results due from Meta, Microsoft, Tesla and Apple, four giants that sit at the heart of both the market rally and the debate over whether Big Tech’s vast AI spending will ultimately pay off. It is the second-busiest week of the fourth-quarter earnings season, with 103 [...]
WhatsApp probe casts shadow ahead of Meta earnings January 26, 2026 Meta heads into a crucial earnings week under mounting regulatory pressure, after the UK watchdog, Ofcom, opened a formal investigation into WhatsApp’s data handling. This comes just days after Meta paused access to its AI chatbots for teenagers worldwide, Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, said it is looking into whether the social media giant provided “incomplete or inaccurate” [...]
Liz Kendall welcomes X’s Grok changes as Ofcom probe continues January 15, 2026 The government has welcomed new safety measures introduced by Elon Musk’s X to curb abuse linked to its Grok AI tool, as the UK’s online safety regulator presses ahead with a formal investigation into the platform. Tech secretary Liz Kendall said she “welcomed” X’s move to restrict Grok’s image generation capabilities, but stressed that regulators [...]
‘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 [...]
Should your business still be on X? January 14, 2026 Ofcom’s inquiry into the systemic risks posed by Elon Musk’s Grok AI for enabling the creation of sexualised images on X has created a significant, foreseeable liability for UK businesses, says Paul Armstrong Many UK businesses seem unwilling to admit it, but they are now operating in dicey waters on X, that. Is it time [...]
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 [...]
Grok AI key to Sport England suspending X account January 13, 2026 Sport England has suspended its activity on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, citing an environment that is “hostile to women and girls”. X, formerly known as Twitter, has been at the centre of a storm relating to its associated Grok AI and claims that it allows users to generate sexually explicit images, including of [...]