The Fund for Digital Initiatives of the Eurasian Development Bank has signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of AI and Digitalization. The agreement was signed during the Digital Qazaqstan forum held on 27 March in Shymkent.
According to the text provided, the memorandum outlines a strategic partnership to introduce AI technologies and support digital projects. Areas of cooperation include identifying and implementing joint AI projects, exchanging expertise, and strengthening both sides’ capacities as centres of AI competence.
The announcement says the agreement is intended to deepen the partnership and support Kazakhstan’s strategic objectives for AI development. It also links the memorandum to wider efforts to expand cooperation between the bank’s digital initiatives fund and the ministry.
During the forum, Vice Chairman of the Management Board, Tigran Sargsyan, held a working meeting with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of AI and Digitalization, Zhaslan Madiyev. The discussion covered prospects for broader cooperation, priority projects, and tools to support AI adoption in key sectors of Kazakhstan’s economy.
The text also says Sargsyan described 2025 as a record year for the bank in Kazakhstan, with the most projects implemented in digital public administration, platform solutions, and AI deployment. Madiyev, in turn, proposed creating a registry of Kazakhstan’s open-source e-government component solutions for possible replication across EDB member states.
The announcement presents the memorandum as part of the Eurasian Development Bank’s broader support for digital transformation and AI development across its member states.
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Public concern over big tech companies is growing in Switzerland, according to a new survey by gfs.bern conducted on behalf of the Mercator Foundation Switzerland. A large majority of respondents view major technology firms as primarily profit-driven, while also expressing unease about their broader influence on society and politics.
Survey findings show that 90% of respondents believe big tech companies are mainly motivated by profit, while 94% support stronger protections for children and young people on social media platforms. Concerns extend beyond commercial behaviour, with 84% worried about political influence from the countries where these companies are based and 82% fearing increasing dependence on firms from the United States and China.
Overall perceptions in Switzerland remain mixed: 21% of respondents express a positive view of big tech companies, 40% hold a neutral stance, and 38% report negative impressions. Similar attitudes have been observed across Europe, where surveys in countries such as France and Germany indicate that many citizens consider existing regulatory frameworks insufficient.
Despite concerns about corporate influence, attitudes towards digitalisation itself remain broadly positive. Around 58% of respondents see digitalisation as beneficial overall, and 53% believe it offers personal advantages. However, only 48% think it benefits society as a whole, while 46% perceive its impact on democratic processes as negative.
A strong majority expects public institutions to take on greater responsibility for managing digital transformation. Around 88% support government efforts to ensure transparency in AI decision-making, while 86% want human oversight in critical situations. High levels of trust in Swiss authorities suggest public backing for a more active state role in shaping digital policy and safeguarding democratic values.
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The United Nations Global Mechanism on developments in the field of ICTs in the context of international security and advancing responsible state behaviour in the use of ICTs held its third organisational meeting, focusing on operational arrangements for the newly established permanent forum.
The session, chaired by Ambassador Egriselda López of El Salvador, addressed decision-making procedures, meeting schedules for 2026, and the structure of two dedicated thematic groups (DTGs), which will complement plenary sessions.
Delegations discussed the mechanism’s working methods, with López noting that decisions would be taken by consensus in line with UN General Assembly rules of procedure.
A central point of discussion was the appointment of co-facilitators for the two DTGs, one focusing on ICT security challenges and the other on capacity development. López indicated that she intended to appoint co-facilitators, taking into account geographic balance.
Several delegations, including the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, China, and Belarus, said that such appointments should be agreed upon by consensus among member states. Other delegations, including the European Union, the United States, and Australia, expressed support for the Chair’s approach and emphasised the need to proceed with preparations for substantive work.
Delegations also addressed stakeholder participation, noting that non-governmental organisations, the private sector, and academia would contribute in a consultative manner, while decision-making would remain intergovernmental.
The provisional agenda for future substantive plenary sessions was discussed, with some delegations, including Iran and the Russian Federation, requesting adjustments to ensure alignment with the agreed mandate. Other delegations supported the structure proposed by the Chair, which is organised around the five pillars of the framework for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
The meeting concluded without agreement on the provisional agenda or the appointment of co-facilitators. The Chair said she would conduct informal consultations with member states to address outstanding issues ahead of the first substantive plenary session scheduled for July 2026.
The Global Mechanism is mandated to advance discussions on threats, norms and principles, the application of international law, confidence-building measures, and capacity development, as part of its role as a permanent UN forum on ICT security.
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Anthropic has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian government to strengthen AI safety research and align with Australia’s National AI Plan. The agreement was formalised during a meeting in Canberra between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The partnership establishes collaboration with Australia’s AI Safety Institute, including the sharing of model capability insights, joint safety evaluations and coordinated research with academic institutions.
The agreement also covers the exchange of Anthropic’s Economic Index data to help track AI adoption and its impact across key sectors such as healthcare, agriculture and financial services.
As part of its wider commitment, Anthropic is investing AUD$3 million in API credits for Australian research institutions, supporting projects in genomics, disease diagnosis and medical innovation.
Universities and institutes will apply Claude to areas such as rare disease analysis, precision medicine and scientific training for future developers.
Further initiatives include startup support programmes and exploration of infrastructure investments in Australia, including data centres and energy systems. The collaboration marks an expansion of Anthropic’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with a Sydney office planned in the near future.
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Legislative efforts in France signal a shift toward stricter governance of youth access to digital platforms, with policymakers preparing to debate a ban on social media use for children under 15.
A proposal that forms part of a broader strategy to address concerns over online harms and excessive screen exposure among adolescents.
These measures reflect increasing reliance on regulatory intervention instead of voluntary platform safeguards, as evidence links prolonged digital engagement with risks such as cyberbullying, disrupted sleep patterns and exposure to harmful content.
Political backing for the initiative has emerged from figures aligned with Emmanuel Macron, reinforcing the government’s position that stronger oversight of digital environments is necessary. The proposal also mirrors developments in Australia, where similar restrictions have already entered into force.
A debate that is further influenced by legal actions targeting major platforms, including TikTok and Meta, amid allegations that algorithmic systems contribute to harmful user experiences.
The outcome of the parliamentary discussions in France is expected to shape future approaches to child safety, platform accountability and digital rights governance across Europe.
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In 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Horizon, a VR social experience that allows users to interact, create custom avatars, and design virtual spaces. Zuckerberg saw the platform, later renamed Horizon Worlds, as the beginning of a new era of VR social networks, with users trading face-to-face interactions for digital ones.
To show his confidence in VR, Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook Inc. as Meta Platforms Inc. in October 2021, illustrating the company’s shift toward the metaverse as a broad virtual environment intended to integrate social interaction, work, commerce, and entertainment. Building on this new vision, Meta’s ambitions expanded beyond social interaction and entertainment, with the development roadmap including virtual real estate purchases and collaboration in virtual co-working spaces.
Fast forward to 17 March 2026, and the scale of Meta’s retreat from the metaverse vision has become unmistakable. In an official update, the company said it was ‘separating’ VR from Horizon so that each platform could grow with greater focus, while also making Horizon Worlds a mobile-only experience. Under the plan, Horizon Worlds and Events would disappear from the Quest Store by 31 March 2026, several flagship worlds would no longer be available in VR, and the Horizon Worlds app itself would be removed from Quest on 15 June 2026, ending VR access to Worlds altogether.
Yet Meta soon reversed part of the decision. In an Instagram Stories Q&A, CTO Andrew Bosworth said Horizon Worlds would remain available in VR after user backlash. Even so, the greater shift remained unchanged: Horizon Worlds was no longer a flagship VR project, but a much narrower product that reflected a clear contraction of Meta’s original metaverse ambition.
As it stands, Meta’s USD 80 billion investment seems less like a gateway to a new socio-technological era and more like one of the most expensive strategic miscalculations of the 21st century. The sunsetting of Horizon Worlds was certainly not a decision made on a whim, which begs the question: Why did the metaverse fail in the first place? Does it have a future in the AI landscape, and what does its retreat say about the politics of designing the future through corporate platforms?
Metaverse’s mainstream collapse
The most obvious reason for the metaverse’s failure was that it never became a mainstream social space. Meta’s strategy rested on the belief that large numbers of people would start using immersive virtual worlds as a normal setting for interaction, entertainment, and creative activity. The shift never happened at the scale needed to sustain the company’s ambitions.
One reason was friction. VR headsets were less practical than phones, more isolating than social media, and harder to integrate into everyday routines than the platforms people already used to communicate. Entering the virtual world required extra time, extra hardware, and openness to adapt to a different social environment. Most digital habits, however, are built around speed, familiarity, and ease of access.
Meta’s own March 2026 decision makes that failure difficult to deny. A company still convinced that immersive social VR was on its way to becoming mainstream would not have moved Horizon Worlds away from Quest and towards mobile. The shift suggested that the metaverse had failed to move from technological promise to everyday social practice.
Metaverse’s failure was not just one of convenience. It also struggled because it was never presented simply as a new digital space. It was framed as a future built largely on Meta’s own terms, with access tied to the company’s hardware, platforms, rules, and wider ecosystem. Such decisions made the metaverse feel less like an open evolution of the internet and more like a tightly managed corporate environment.
The distinction mattered because Meta was not merely launching another product. It was promoting a vision of how people might one day work, socialise, shop, and create online. Yet the more expansive that vision became, the more obvious it was that the system behind it remained closed and centralised. A future digital environment is harder to embrace when a single company controls the devices, spaces, distribution, and boundaries of participation.
Meta’s handling of Horizon Worlds clearly exposed that tension. The company could remove features, reshape access, alter incentives, and redirect the platform from the top down. Such a level of control may be standard for a private platform, but it sits uneasily with claims about building the next phase of digital life. In that sense, the metaverse failed not only because people were unconvinced by VR, but because its version of the future felt too corporate, too enclosed, and too disconnected from the openness people still associate with the internet.
Metaverse’s economic contradiction
The metaverse did not fail only as a social project. It also became increasingly difficult to justify on economic grounds. Meta spent heavily on Reality Labs while generating only limited returns from those investments. In its 2025 annual filing, the company said Reality Labs had reduced overall operating profit by around USD 19.19 billion for the year, while warning that similar losses would continue into 2026.
Losses on that scale might still have been acceptable if the metaverse had shown clear signs of momentum. However, there was little evidence of mass adoption, strong retention, or a durable path to monetisation. Virtual land, digital goods, branded experiences, and immersive workspaces never developed into the economic base of a new internet layer.
Instead, the metaverse began to look less like a future growth engine and more like a costly experiment with uncertain returns. The gap between spending and payoff became harder to ignore, especially as Meta continued to frame the metaverse as a long-term strategic priority. What used to be sold as the company’s next major frontier was increasingly difficult to justify in commercial terms.
The broader strategic context also changed. Meta’s own forward-looking statements pointed to increased hiring and spending in 2026, especially in AI. In practice, this meant the company was no longer choosing between the metaverse and inactivity, but between two competing visions of the future. AI was already delivering tangible gains in product development, infrastructure, and investor confidence.
In that competition for attention and capital, the metaverse lost. Meta’s pullback was also not an isolated case. Microsoft moved away from metaverse-first ambitions as well, retiring the Immersive space (3D) view in Teams meetings, Microsoft Mesh on the web, and Mesh apps for PC and Quest in December 2025. The services were replaced by immersive events in Teams, a narrower offering built around specific workplace functions rather than a broad metaverse vision.
The wider retreat matters because it suggests the problem was not limited to Meta’s execution. Another major tech company also stepped back from standalone immersive environments and turned to more limited, use-specific tools instead. A larger pattern appeared from that shift: grand metaverse narratives gave way to practical features, embedded tools, and industry-specific uses. In that sense, the metaverse has not entirely disappeared, but it did lose its status as the next internet.
Metaverse’s afterlife in the age of AI
The metaverse’s decline does not necessarily imply a complete disappearance. What seems more likely is that parts of it will survive in altered form, detached from the sweeping vision that once surrounded it. Rather than continuing as a standalone digital world meant to transform social life, the metaverse may persist as a set of tools, features, and immersive functions folded into other technologies.
AI is likely to play a role in that transition. It can lower the cost of building virtual environments, speed up avatar creation, automate elements of interaction design, and make digital spaces more responsive. In this sense, AI may succeed where the original metaverse struggled, not by reviving the same vision, but by making parts of it more practical and easier to use.
Such a distinction is important because it shifts the focus from ideology to utility. The metaverse was once marketed as the next stage of the internet, yet its more durable applications now appear to lie in narrower settings where immersion serves a clear purpose. Training, design, simulation, and industrial planning are all contexts in which virtual environments can offer measurable value without becoming a universal social destination.
What might survive, then, is not the metaverse as it was originally imagined, but a smaller set of immersive capabilities embedded in gaming, education, industry, and workplace systems. Avatars, digital agents, simulations, and adaptive virtual spaces may all remain relevant, but as components rather than the foundation of a new social order.
The shift also helps explain the political lesson of the metaverse’s collapse. Large-scale investment, aggressive branding, and executive certainty were not enough to secure public legitimacy. Meta tried to present the metaverse as an inevitable horizon, yet users did not embrace it, markets did not reward it in proportion to the spending, and the company itself eventually narrowed the project it had once elevated into a corporate identity.
In that sense, the metaverse matters even in failure. Its retreat does not simply mark the end of an overhyped product cycle. It also reveals the limits of top-down corporate future-making, especially when private platforms try to define the direction of collective digital life before society has decided whether such a future is either desirable or necessary.
Conclusion
The metaverse failed because it asked too much of users, promised too much to investors, and concentrated too much power in a platform model that never convincingly earned public trust. Meta’s retreat from Horizon Worlds makes that failure difficult to ignore, while Microsoft’s parallel narrowing of immersive ambitions suggests the problem extended beyond one company’s misjudgement.
Immersive VR technologies are unlikely to vanish, and AI may even extend some of their useful applications. Yet the metaverse as a universal social future has largely collapsed under the combined weight of weak adoption, unsustainable economics, and an overly corporate vision of digital life. What remains is not the next internet, but a reminder that the future cannot simply be declared into existence by the companies most eager to own it.
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The programme, titled ‘AI Works for Britain’, seeks to address structural barriers that limit professional mobility despite widespread access to digital tools.
New research indicates that a significant proportion of the population feels unable to advance, citing gaps in skills, confidence and professional networks.
While a majority already use AI tools, only a minority report meaningful productivity gains, suggesting that effective utilisation remains uneven across the workforce.
An initiative by Google that focuses on practical upskilling through public training hubs, university partnerships and community outreach programmes.
These efforts aim to move users beyond basic interaction with AI tools toward more advanced applications that can enhance employability, efficiency and business development.
The programme in the UK aligns with broader efforts to position AI as a driver of economic inclusion rather than a source of inequality, with policymakers and industry stakeholders emphasising the importance of workforce readiness in an increasingly AI-driven economy.
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The University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group have launched a four-year research partnership to study how agentic AI tools could support software and data engineering work.
According to the announcement, engineers at Lloyds Banking Group in Bristol, Manchester, and Hyderabad will work with large-language-model-based coding tools on different tasks each quarter. The aim is to measure effects on delivery speed and quality.
The collaboration will also create a PhD position, a Master of Research position, and a postdoctoral research associate post at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Tim Storer said: ‘Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.’
However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations.’
We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project. Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase their software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.’
Dr Shane Montague said: ‘Lloyds Banking Group’s mission to Help Britain Prosper means leading innovation that genuinely improves how engineering gets done, with a focus on delivering enhanced digital services for our customers.’
‘We’re excited to partner with the University of Glasgow to gather rigorous, real-world evidence from day-to-day engineering work, so we can understand what really works and how agentic AI can be applied effectively and responsibly at scale.’
The partners say they plan to publish regular research papers and best-practice documents as the project develops.
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The government of California is advancing a more interventionist approach to AI governance, signalling a divergence from federal deregulatory preferences.
An executive order signed by Gavin Newsom mandates the development of comprehensive AI policies within 4 months, prioritising public safety and protecting fundamental rights.
The proposed framework requires companies seeking state contracts to demonstrate safeguards against harmful outputs, including the prevention of child exploitation material and violent content.
It also calls for measures addressing algorithmic bias and unlawful discrimination, alongside increased transparency through mechanisms such as watermarking AI-generated media.
The evolving policy landscape reflects growing concern over the societal impact of AI systems, including risks to employment, content integrity and civil liberties.
An initiative by California that may therefore serve as a testing ground for future regulatory models, shaping broader debates on balancing innovation with accountability in digital governance.
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Digital infrastructure remains central to modern society, with mobile networks forming the backbone of global connectivity and technological progress. Research efforts are increasingly focused on ensuring that today’s 5G systems evolve into more advanced and intelligent network platforms.
The future 6G era is expected to go beyond traditional connectivity, enabling immersive communication experiences, intelligent machine interaction, and the development of large-scale digital twins.
Networks are anticipated to become cognitive systems, capable of learning, adapting, and making autonomous decisions in real time.
Alongside new capabilities, future networks will further strengthen core requirements such as security, privacy, reliability, and resilience. Advanced distributed processing will be embedded across network architecture to support real-time operations and system stability at scale.
The 6G vision is aligned with the 2030 timeframe, with development built on open and standardised ecosystems that encourage global collaboration. Interoperability will remain central, supporting innovation and universal connectivity across devices and services.
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