Tech, in brief

Rules for children online

The EU proposed keeping children under 13 off social media and switching chatbots off for them. [1] Meta changed its AI assistant after it suggested questions about a mother's young daughters. [18]

Cameras and faces nobody agreed to

A woman found herself posted on Instagram after a date wore Meta's camera glasses. [9] A lawsuit says Meta built face data from people's Facebook and Instagram photos. [14] Meta is reported to be preparing glasses with no camera at all. [7]

Personal data reused or leaked

Revolut, a large online bank, sent customers' passports to scammers posing as a government agency. [35] OpenAI pays contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations. [16] Apple will let apps in the EU ask a softer question about tracking. [17]

Money for AI buildings and chips

Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI models, agreed to lease a 2.16-gigawatt data-centre site in Australia, people familiar told Reuters. [20] Amazon took the right to buy up to $340m of Generac, which will supply its generators. [28] Investors put $90bn into hardware start-ups so far this year. [31]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Tech too.

• Personal details reaching people they were never meant forHigh ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1The EU wants no social media under 13 and one hour a day at 13 and 14. First, every app must find out who is a child.
2. 2Meta readies glasses with no camera
3. 3Filmed on a date without asking
4. 4Meta sued over face data from photos
5. 5Contractors read real ChatGPT chats

The European Commission, which writes the European Union's draft laws, proposed the EU Kids Act on Thursday. [1]

The next test is whether the European Parliament, which asked for 16, and governments like Estonia, which oppose any age ban, can agree one number with the Commission. [2][5]

Companies keep passports, chats and photos long after the job they were collected for, and those copies later get read, reused or stolen.

The company that keeps it can later use it, show it to others or lose it, without asking again.

Passports and selfies were collected to check who customers are, kept on file, and then handed out to someone posing as a government agency.

Conversations were collected to answer questions, kept, and then read by hired reviewers to improve the model.

Photos were uploaded to share with friends, and the lawsuit says Meta later used them to build face data.

Age checks mean apps must collect data about every user, and a tech lobby group already warns that store will attract criminals.

None of us can see which of those copies still exist, or who is looking at them today.

Meta is preparing smart glasses with no camera, codenamed Luna, to show at its Connect conference on 23 and 24 September, the tech news site The Information reported. [7][8]

They would carry six microphones and speakers so the wearer can talk to Meta's AI, and could ship in October. [7]

Meta's camera glasses have been banned from New York courtrooms and Britain's largest pub chain. [8] A slimmer headset, Project Phoenix, is expected in 2027. [8][10]

The camera is what drew the backlash, so Meta's reported answer is a pair without one. [8] Microphones in frames that look like ordinary glasses may raise their own worries. [8]

WIRED spoke to women who were filmed by dates wearing Meta's camera glasses, including one who found the footage on the man's Instagram the next day. [9]

Meta sold more than 7 million pairs in 2025. [9] A small light shows when the glasses record, but it is the only warning and people have found ways round it. [9]

A California bill that passed both chambers would require visible recording lights that cannot be switched off. [9]

The person being filmed never agreed to anything, and the only protection is a light they may not notice. [9] Australia's online safety regulator has asked makers to blur faces automatically. [9]

A proposed class action says Meta turned faces in Facebook and Instagram photos into faceprints, a kind of biometric ID, without consent. [14]

It follows a WIRED report that code for a face-recognition feature called NameTag sat inside Meta's glasses app, downloaded more than 50 million times. [14]

The plaintiffs include a California man and his 10-year-old daughter. [14] Illinois law allows $5,000 for each intentional violation. [14]

Meta paid $650m in 2020 and $1.4bn to Texas in 2024 over earlier face data cases. [14] Meta calls the new suit without merit and says nothing from NameTag has shipped. [9]

OpenAI pays hundreds of contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations and rate the replies, under a project called Lily, the news site 404 Media reported. [16]

Reviewers do not see names, but they can see a summary of what the user has asked before. [16]

A filter strips personal details first, and OpenAI's own page says it can miss some. [16]

The setting that allows this is on by default for free and paying consumer accounts, and off for business accounts. [16]

People who assumed a chat was private may have had it read by a stranger. [16]

Italy's privacy regulator has already fined OpenAI 15 million euros over how it handles personal data. [16]

Also seen in Cyber.

Revolut, a London-based online bank with more than 80 million customers, confirmed that scammers got customers' data by sending requests from a real government agency's email address. [35]

The data included passports, driving licences, birth dates, addresses and possibly verification selfies and statements. [35][36]

Revolut says a 'limited' number were affected and will not name the agency or the countries. [35] It blocked the address and told police and regulators. [35]

A passport copy cannot be changed like a password, so the risk to those customers lasts. [36]

Banks are trained to answer official requests quickly, which is exactly the habit this attack used. [36]

Apple will let apps in the EU show a gentler version of App Tracking Transparency, the pop-up that asks if an app may follow you across other apps. [17]

The new screen drops the word 'track' and offers 'Allow' and 'Reject'. [17]

It follows agreements with some European competition regulators, and only the new version will be used in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Romania. [17] Apps may ask again after a year. [17]

Most people answer the old question by refusing, which cuts income for ad-funded apps like Meta's. [17]

Apple says the screens protect privacy, while its own apps can still show personalised ads from data Apple collects. [17]

A German court ruled that Meta is liable for fake investment ads that strangers placed on Instagram and Facebook, and ordered it to remove them and pay damages. [15]

The case was brought by a German financial website whose logo and founder's image were used without consent. [15]

It reported nearly 260 such ads in August 2024, and Meta took up to 62 days to remove some. [15]

The court said Meta cannot claim it did not know, because its own algorithms choose what people see. [15]

The ruling is not final, and Meta says it is considering next steps. [15]

Meta changed the questions its AI assistant suggests after a viral video from Kalie Robins, an Instagram user. [18]

Under a clip of her singing in the car with her child, Meta AI suggested asking 'Who is the child passenger?'. [18]

It then gathered details and photos of her daughters from her posts and her relatives' posts, including one she says she deleted. [18]

Meta said the feature 'missed the mark' and has been fixed. [18]

An assistant built into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp pulled scattered family posts into a profile of two children. [18]

Meta had already pulled an AI image feature in July after a backlash. [18]

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, showed what its $2,195 Specs augmented-reality glasses can do at an event in Los Angeles on Wednesday. [12][13]

They are a full computer on the face, with displays in both lenses that lay pictures over the real world. [11] Buyers can stream HBO Max, use Spotify and translate speech. [12]

The battery lasts about four hours, and a reviewer found the controls finicky. [11]

Snap has beaten Meta to glasses with screens in both eyes, but at a price most people cannot pay. [11][13] Its first reveal, in June, drew mockery, and Snap's shares fell. [12][13]

Cohere, a Canadian AI company, and Aleph Alpha, once called Germany's AI champion, confirmed they will combine under the Cohere name, with head offices in Toronto and Berlin. [19]

Schwarz Group, which owns the Lidl supermarkets, will invest 500 million euros and supply computing power. [19] Cohere reported $240m of yearly recurring revenue this year. [19]

The deal still needs regulators' approval. [19]

Both sell AI that runs inside a customer's own computers and follows local rules, which governments and big firms are asking for. [19]

Mistral, Europe's leading AI model maker, raised 3 billion euros last week. [19]

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, has agreed to lease a planned data-centre campus in Australia, people familiar told Reuters. [20]

The site is farmland about 250km from Brisbane, planned at 2.16 gigawatts, and would start running in 2027. [20]

Its Singapore-based developer, Zerra DC, says it will buy renewable power and pay for its own grid connection. [20] Australia's foreign investment board must approve it. [20]

OpenAI signed for a Sydney data centre last year, and economists expect up to A$150bn of such investment by 2030. [20]

Australia's government has promised limits on data-centre use of land, water and power from 2027. [20]

C4ADS, a research group funded mostly by the US government, traced three routes by which Nvidia's AI chips, banned from sale to China, get there anyway. [21]

The largest ran through Megaspeed, a firm based in Singapore whose real owner is unclear, and was worth $4.6bn. [21]

Smaller amounts moved through Vietnam, India and Malaysia, and through Chinese universities. [21] Another study estimates about a third of China's AI computing runs on smuggled chips. [21]

The US bans the sales and China discourages the purchases, yet the chips arrive anyway. [21] C4ADS wants more staff for the US office that checks where exported chips end up. [21]

Huawei, the Chinese company that makes telecoms gear and AI chips, will launch two new AI chips in 2027, its rotating chairman David Wang said on Thursday. [22]

The 960DT is due in the first quarter and the Ascend 960PR in the third. [22]

Wang said Huawei has shipped more than 1,000 large AI computing systems to more than 370 customers. [22]

Huawei is the company China relies on to replace the Nvidia chips the US will not sell it. [21][22]

Wang said UnifiedBus, Huawei's way of linking many chips to work as one, is key to its next systems. [22]

Japan and the US are discussing a chip factory worth 2 to 3 trillion yen, about $13bn to $19bn, to be run by GlobalFoundries, the Nikkei newspaper reported. [23][24]

It would come from the $550bn Japan pledged to invest in the US under their tariff deal. [24]

Separately, GlobalFoundries and Marvell expanded a deal for chips used in fast optical links inside data centres, made in Vermont. [25]

GlobalFoundries makes older, specialist chips for cars and phones, not AI chips, so the Japanese money would go to everyday parts. [24] Neither government has commented on the plant. [24]

MediaTek, a Taiwanese company that designs chips for Android phones, launched the Dimensity 9600 Pro. [26]

It is its first phone chip made on the newest 2-nanometre process of TSMC, the Taiwanese company that makes most of the world's advanced chips. [26]

MediaTek sells to Chinese phone makers such as Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, and its stock-market value passed that of Qualcomm, the US phone-chip maker, this year. [26]

MediaTek says phone prices are rising as the AI boom strains supplies, and it still expects to win more expensive phones. [26]

Nvidia put $3.5bn into a MediaTek bond sale last month. [26]

Salesforce, which sells software that companies use to manage their customers, told investors it expects more than $63bn of revenue in the year to early 2030. [27]

Analysts had expected about $59.2bn. [27] At its Dreamforce conference it said up to 1,000 clients have signed up to use its data inside Anthropic's Claude. [27]

Its boss, Marc Benioff, said its Anthropic shares will likely be worth tens of billions. [27]

Software sellers' shares fell this year on fears that AI would replace them. [27]

Salesforce is answering by selling AI through its own products and by holding a stake in an AI lab. [27]

Amazon got the right to buy up to $340m of shares in Generac, a maker of backup power generators, and Generac's shares jumped more than 40% after hours. [28]

Generac will supply generators for Amazon's data centres, with first deliveries worth $2.4bn in 2027 and 2028. [28]

Last week Amazon took similar rights to up to $4bn of Qualcomm shares in a chip deal. [28]

Amazon often takes a stake in the suppliers it depends on, from chips to air cargo. [28] Here it is buying backup power for its own data centres. [28]

Manus, an AI start-up founded in China, is raising about $500m at a $4bn value, twice what Meta had agreed to pay for it, people told Bloomberg. [29]

China's government forced Meta's $2bn purchase of Manus to be reversed earlier this year. [29]

GMI Cloud, which rents out AI computing, is seeking a $300m loan to buy chips for a data centre in Thailand that the Chinese internet giant Tencent will use. [29]

A purchase blocked by China's government left Manus worth twice the price Meta had offered. [29] Lenders now treat the chips themselves as something to lend against, not only the buildings. [29]

Factory, a San Francisco start-up whose AI agents write, test and maintain software for large companies, raised $200m at a $5bn value. [30]

That is more than three times its $1.5bn value in April. [30] Backers include the investment firms Blackstone, Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. [30]

A rival coding-agent maker, Cognition, raised $2bn at a $48bn value earlier this month. [30]

Writing code is one of the most widely used jobs for AI, and investors keep paying more for the firms that do it. [30]

Matter Venture Partners raised $450m for a second fund that backs chip, robot, energy and quantum start-ups, with ASML, which makes chip-printing machines, and TSMC among its investors. [31]

Venture firms put $90bn into this kind of hardware so far this year, up from $23bn in all of 2020, according to the data firm PitchBook. [31]

Its founder, Wen Hsieh, spent 17 years at the venture firm Kleiner Perkins. [31]

AI is shaking up software, the business venture firms used to live on, and money is moving to the physical things AI needs. [31]

Axelera, a European chip start-up, will supply chips to EU-backed AI centres in Italy and Luxembourg, working with the computer maker Dell. [32]

The EU is turning its supercomputer centres into 'AI factories' so European firms and scientists can get computing power. [32]

Axelera makes chips that run AI models rather than train them, and launched a second, larger chip. [32] A Dutch rival, Euclyd, raised 200 million euros. [32]

The EU wants its firms and scientists to have AI computing of their own, to narrow the gap with the US and China. [32]

India's UPI, the phone payment network behind most digital payments in the country, will charge merchants 0.4% on payments above 2,000 rupees, about $21, from 15 October. [33]

Buyers still pay nothing, and small merchants are exempt. [33] Payments of 2,000 rupees or less, more than 95% of merchant payments, stay free. [33]

The operator says running UPI costs about $2.1bn a year. [33]

India made UPI free for merchants in 2020 to get more people using it. [33] Payment companies such as Paytm and PhonePe will share the new fees. [33]

Several Nigerian investing apps went down as people rushed to buy shares in the Dangote oil refinery, Africa's largest ever share sale at $1.6bn. [34]

Traffic on Bamboo, one of the biggest apps, rose tenfold within 30 minutes. [34] Cowrywise and InvestNaija also had problems. [34]

Nigeria's markets regulator told first-time buyers to use approved channels, and analysts warned of fake sites. [34]

Many Nigerians are buying shares for the first time through their phones. [34] The outage showed how much traffic those apps can take before they fail. [34]

The US House of Representatives passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, with only three members voting against. [37]

It sets standards that state regulators may adopt to make data centres using 100 megawatts or more pay for new power plants and lines. [37] The US Senate has not acted. [37]

Environmental groups say it is too weak because states can ignore it. [37]

Rising electricity bills near data centres have become an election issue in the US. [37] The bill leaves the actual decision to each state. [37]

The New York Times analysed thousands of replies to Donald Trump's posts praising AI data centres on Truth Social, his social network. [38]

Comments against AI and data centres outnumbered those in favour by nearly four to one. [38] Many came from users whose profiles showed them as firm Trump supporters. [38]

Several complained about data centres being built in the countryside. [38]

Some of the anger is about sites built in the countryside, where more Republican voters live. [38]

Data centres are drawing electricians and building crews away from housing, argues Breakingviews, Reuters' opinion column. [39]

The US building industry is short about 439,000 workers, and people moving to data-centre jobs get pay rises of 25% to 30%. [39]

Research by Ryan Wang at Yale University found that 100 megawatts of new data centre in a US county raises household fixed electricity charges by 0.7%. [39]

The same workers are needed to build homes, which several Western governments are trying to speed up. [39]

The biggest AI companies will likely spend more than $1 trillion on data centres next year, MIT Technology Review reports. [40]

Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former chief economist of the US markets regulator, worked out what they must earn to break even by 2030. [40]

Her answer is that their productivity must rise 2.7 times. [40] If it does not, she says, they risk falling behind on debt. [40]

It turns the question 'is AI a bubble?' into a number that can be checked against company earnings over the next few years. [40]

Small phone and laptop makers are planning for years of memory shortage, and the boss of Jolla, a Finnish phone maker, expects supply to recover only from 2028. [41]

Contract prices for DRAM, the working memory in every device, are rising 13% to 18% this quarter, after 93% to 98% in the first. [41]

Memory can be almost 60% of the parts cost of a $400 phone, according to Fairphone's boss. [41] Framework reprices quickly, while Fairphone has not raised prices. [41]

Price rises are slowing but supply is not coming back, so cheap phones may disappear. [41]

The research firm Counterpoint forecast phone shipments will fall 13.9% this year, the steepest drop on record. [41]

OWASP, which publishes a widely used list of top security risks, moved 'excessive agency' from sixth to third in its 2026 list for AI apps. [42]

Excessive agency means an AI agent has been given more tools and passwords than it needs. [42] It is the first list partly based on 6,639 real incidents. [42]

Since 11 September, the EU's Cyber Resilience Act makes product makers report an actively exploited flaw within 24 hours. [42]

The danger has moved from what an AI says to what it is allowed to do. [42] The EU law covers products, not how a company sets up its agents. [42]

Base Labs, a research group set up by the AI hosting firm Baseten, launched a safety project with Hugging Face and Goodfire, a company that studies how AI models reach their answers. [43]

Open-weight models are ones anyone can download and change. [43] Hugging Face, the biggest site for sharing them, lists more than 6,000 copies with their safety guards removed. [43]

The partners have not said how the project will work. [43]

Baseten says safety should be built into how open models are trained and served, not added afterwards. [43]

A US Senate committee voted 18 to 10 for a bill letting citizens sue federal officials who pressure companies to suppress lawful speech. [44]

Democrat Maria Cantwell pointed to the head of the US broadcasting regulator pressuring TV stations over the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. [44]

Republican Ted Cruz pointed to the Biden administration pressing tech companies. [44] It still needs the full Senate and the House. [44]

Each party accuses the other's government of leaning on tech and media companies. [44] The bill would let citizens take the officials to court. [44]