transparency

Albania has just promoted an avatar to cabinet rank: Diella, an AI-driven virtual assistant that will now sit—digitally—in the role of minister responsible for public procurement with an explicit mission to make government tenders “100% free of corruption.” Background Diella first appeared on...

Waitaki District Council’s cautious, staff-first rollout of generative AI shows how a small public body can harness large language models for practical gains—while keeping human judgment, privacy safeguards and governance firmly in the driver’s seat. The council’s chief digital officer, Teresa...

Satya Nadella’s blunt acknowledgement — “I think we can do better, and we will do better” — landed during an unusually tense internal town hall and has become the most visible signal yet that Microsoft’s leadership recognizes a widening credibility gap with its workforce. The admission followed...

The Town of Gray is quietly turning a policy conversation into practical public service: after adopting guidelines for generative AI this summer, the town’s communications and IT director has begun using Microsoft Copilot to produce faster, more accessible meeting recaps, is hosting public...

Tech platforms and AI labs are operating on two different rulebooks: the same companies that ban automated scraping of their services in their terms of service are also building the next generation of generative models on training pipelines that — evidence shows — lean heavily on content...

Microsoft’s cybersecurity posture is under renewed fire after U.S. Senator Ron Wyden urged the Federal Trade Commission to open a formal investigation into the company’s default security settings, arguing that Microsoft shipped “dangerous, insecure software” that materially enabled a 2024...

USA TODAY’s experiment — feeding every Week 2 NFL matchup to Microsoft’s Copilot and publishing a pick and a score for each game — offers one of the clearest, most public windows yet into how conversational AI approaches sports forecasting: fast, repeatable, rhetorically confident, and...

Microsoft’s quiet experiment with a new search experience for Bing — an “AI Search” or Copilot Search mode that replaces traditional blue links with a summary-first interface — is more than a cosmetic tweak; it’s a strategic bet that could reshape search behavior, publisher economics, and the...

Microsoft’s announcement of an “urgent” external investigation into allegations that Israel’s Unit 8200 used Azure to store and process recordings of millions of Palestinian phone calls crystallizes a larger, underappreciated shift: the world’s leading cloud providers are not just vendors — they...

AI chatbots are now answering more questions — and, according to a fresh NewsGuard audit, they are also repeating falsehoods far more often, producing inaccurate or misleading content in roughly one out of every three news‑related responses during an August 2025 audit cycle. Background The...

USA TODAY's decision to run every Week 1 matchup through Microsoft Copilot produced a tidy, headline-friendly slate of predictions — and a revealing window into how modern large language models reason about sports: they reward established quarterbacks, prize defensive strength and coaching...

At some point in the early 21st century, the public debate over artificial intelligence shifted from abstract speculation to urgent planning: could the next leap in AI turn into a civilization-scale crisis, and if so, what can people do now to reduce the odds? A high-profile scenario known as AI...

Missouri’s attorney general has opened a formal probe into major AI developers after consumer-facing chatbots produced answers that his office says are unfairly critical of former President Donald Trump — a move that merges politics, consumer-protection law, and the messy realities of modern...

Anthropic’s abrupt switch to an opt‑out model for training Claude on consumer conversations has forced a long‑overdue reckoning: if you want to keep your chats from being recycled into the next generation of chatbots, you must actively say so — and the same is true for ChatGPT and Google’s...

Microsoft’s abrupt dismissals of staff tied to a high‑profile Redmond sit‑in have transformed a months‑long ethical dispute into a full‑scale governance crisis — one that spotlights the collision of employee activism, cloud‑era technical opacity, and the reputational risks facing major vendors...

Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told reporters from his office at the Redmond campus that the company will “investigate and get to the truth” after a Guardian-led investigation alleged that Israel’s Unit 8200 had used Microsoft Azure to store and process vast troves of intercepted Palestinian...

Microsoft’s president doubled down on a promise to investigate the company’s ties to Israel because a cascade of investigative reporting, a forceful United Nations inquiry, escalating employee activism, investor pressure and fresh allegations about large-scale use of Microsoft Azure by Israeli...

The U.S. defense establishment has entered an unmistakable pivot: artificial intelligence is no longer an experimental add‑on but a strategic backbone for everything from logistics and predictive maintenance to intelligence analysis and battlefield decision support. This shift—energized by the...

YouTube’s recent admission that it’s been running an experiment that automatically alters some Shorts during processing has crystallized a deep, practical question for creators and viewers alike: when a platform polishes your work without asking, does “better quality” become a betrayal of...

Microsoft’s Redmond campus erupted into a high-stakes showdown this month as employee-led protesters occupied public spaces, splashed paint on the company sign, and drew law-enforcement intervention — all over one fundamental allegation: that Microsoft Azure has been used at scale by the Israeli...