Three lawsuits have been filed in US federal courts alleging that Character.AI and its founders, with Google’s backing, deployed predatory chatbots that harmed children. The cases involve the family of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, who died by suicide in 2023, and two other minors.
The complaints say the chatbots were designed to mimic humans, build dependency, and expose children to sexual content. Using emojis, typos, and pop-culture personas, the bots allegedly gained trust and encouraged isolation from family and friends.
Juliana’s parents say she engaged in explicit chats, disclosed suicidal thoughts, and received no intervention before her death. Nina, 15, from New York, attempted suicide after her mother blocked the app, while a Colorado, US girl known as T.S. was also affected.
Character.AI and Google are accused of misrepresenting the app as child-safe and failing to act on warning signs. The cases follow earlier lawsuits from the Social Media Victims Law Center over similar claims that the platform encouraged harm.
SMVLC founder Matthew Bergman stated that the cases underscore the urgent need for accountability in AI design and stronger safeguards to protect children. The legal team is seeking damages and stricter safety standards for chatbot platforms marketed to minors.
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Broadcasters and advertisers seek clarity before the EU’s political advertising rules become fully applicable on 10 October. The European Commission has promised further guidance, but details on what qualifies as political advertising remain vague.
Meta and Google will block the EU’s political, election, and social issue ads when the rules take effect, citing operational challenges and legal uncertainty. The regulation, aimed at curbing disinformation and foreign interference, requires ads to display labels with sponsors, payments, and targeting.
Publishers fear they lack the technical means to comply or block non-compliant programmatic ads, risking legal exposure. They call for clear sponsor identification procedures, standardised declaration formats, and robust verification processes to ensure authenticity.
Advertisers warn that the rules’ broad definition of political actors may be hard to implement. At the same time, broadcasters fear issue-based campaigns – such as environmental awareness drives – could unintentionally fall under the scope of political advertising.
The Dutch parliamentary election on 29 October will be the first to take place under the fully applicable rules, making clarity from Brussels urgent for media and advertisers across the bloc.
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Scientists from Australian universities and The George Institute for Global Health have developed an AI tool that analyses mammograms and a woman’s age to predict her risk of heart-related hospitalisation or death within 10 years.
Published in Heart on 17 September, the study highlights the lack of routine heart disease screening for women, despite cardiovascular conditions causing 35% of female deaths. The tool delivers a two-in-one health check by integrating heart risk prediction into breast cancer screening.
The model was trained on data from over 49,000 women and performs as accurately as traditional models that require blood pressure and cholesterol data. Researchers emphasise its low-resource nature, making it viable for broad deployment in rural or underserved areas.
Study co-author Dr Jennifer Barraclough said mobile mammography services could adopt the tool to deliver breast cancer and heart health screenings in one visit. Such integration could help overcome healthcare access barriers in remote regions.
Next, before a broader rollout, the researchers plan to validate the tool in more diverse populations and study practical challenges, such as technical requirements and regulatory approvals.
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Mexico’s competition watchdog has accused Amazon and Mercado Libre of erecting barriers that limit the mobility of sellers in the country’s e-commerce market. The two platforms reportedly account for 85% of the seller market.
The Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE) stated that the companies provide preferential treatment to sellers who utilise their logistics services and fail to disclose how featured offers are selected, thereby restricting fair competition.
Despite finding evidence of these practices, COFECE stopped short of imposing corrective measures, citing a lack of consensus among stakeholders. Amazon welcomed the decision, saying it demonstrates the competitiveness of the retail market in Mexico.
The watchdog aims to promote a more dynamic e-commerce sector, benefiting buyers and sellers. Its February report had recommended measures to improve transparency, separate loyalty programme services, and allow fairer access to third-party delivery options.
Trade associations praised COFECE for avoiding sanctions, warning that penalties could harm consumers and shield traditional retailers. Mercado Libre has not yet commented on the findings.
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Scientists have unveiled an AI tool capable of predicting the risk of developing over 1,000 medical conditions. Published in Nature, the model can forecast certain cancers, heart attacks, and other diseases more than a decade in advance.
Developed by the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and the University of Copenhagen, the model utilises anonymised health data from the UK and Denmark. It tracks the order and timing of medical events to spot patterns that lead to serious illness.
Researchers said the tool is exceptionally accurate for diseases with consistent progression, including some cancers, diabetes, heart attacks, and septicaemia. Its predictions work like a weather forecast, indicating higher risk rather than certainty.
The model is less reliable for unpredictable conditions such as mental health disorders, infectious diseases, or pregnancy complications. It is more accurate for near-term forecasts than for those decades ahead.
Though not yet ready for clinical use, the system could help doctors identify high-risk patients earlier and enable more personalised, preventive healthcare strategies. Researchers say more work is needed to ensure the tool works for diverse populations.
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Ireland has designated 15 authorities to monitor compliance with the EU’s AI Act, making it one of the first EU countries fully ready to enforce the new rules. The AI Act regulates AI systems according to their risk to society and began phasing in last year.
Governments had until 2 August to notify the European Commission of their appointed market surveillance authorities. In Ireland, these include the Central Bank, Coimisiún na Meán, the Data Protection Commission, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, and the Health and Safety Authority.
The country will also establish a National AI Office as the central coordinator for AI Act enforcement and liaise with EU institutions. A single point of contact must be designated where multiple authorities are involved to ensure clear communication.
Ireland joins Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Spain as countries that have appointed their contact points. The Commission has not yet published the complete list of authorities notified by member states.
Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has called for a pause in the rollout of the AI Act, citing risks and a lack of technical standards. The Commission has launched a consultation as part of its digital simplification package, which will be implemented in December.
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AI is reshaping healthcare, according to experts featured in Microsoft’s new podcast seriesThe AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited.
Peter Lee, President of Microsoft Research, spoke with clinicians and researchers about how AI is helping doctors work more effectively and patients access better care. From note-taking during visits to accelerating drug discovery, the technology is already proving its value.
A doctor of UC San Diego Health in the US said AI helps physicians draft longer, more empathetic responses to patient messages, reducing mental strain. Meanwhile, Stanford’s Dr Roxana Daneshjou described how AI detected a dosage error in a medical summary, acting as a crucial safeguard.
Bill Gates highlighted how AI could boost healthcare in low-income regions by providing medical intelligence where doctors are scarce. Other guests suggested the technology may even blur traditional boundaries between medical specialties while accelerating drug development.
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Scaling law estimation helps organisations make better decisions about architecture, optimisers and dataset sizes before devoting extensive compute budgets.
The team assembled over 485 pre-trained models across 40 families (including Pythia, OPT, Bloom, LLaMA and others) and tracked almost 1.9 million performance metrics. Using that dataset, they fit more than 1,000 scaling laws and assessed variables such as the number of parameters, the token count, intermediate training checkpoints, and seed effects.
Practical recommendations include discarding training data from very early stages (before about 10 billion tokens), using several small models across sizes rather than only large ones, and using intermediate checkpoints rather than waiting for final model loss.
The guide also notes that a 4 percent absolute relative error (ARE) is near best-case for prediction quality, though up to 20 percent ARE remains useful depending on budget.
Because training large models can cost millions, these scaling laws also help those without huge resources to approximate outcomes more safely. AI model inference scaling laws are still under development and are flagged as important future work.
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Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has confirmed that its production halt will continue until at least Wednesday, 24 September, as it works to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its IT systems and paralysed production at the end of August.
JLR stated that the extension was necessary because forensic investigations were ongoing and the controlled restart of operations was taking longer than anticipated. The company stressed that it was prioritising a safe and stable restart and pledged to keep staff, suppliers, and partners regularly updated.
Reports suggest recovery could take weeks, impacting production and sales channels for an extended period. Approximately 33,000 employees remain at home as factory and sales processes are not fully operational, resulting in estimated losses of £1 billion in revenue and £70 million in profits.
The shutdown also poses risks to the wider UK economy, as JLR represents roughly four percent of British exports. The incident has renewed calls for the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which aims to strengthen defenses against digital threats to critical industries.
No official attribution has been made, but a group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has claimed responsibility. The group claims to have deployed ransomware and published screenshots of JLR’s internal SAP system, linking itself to extortion groups, including Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and ShinyHunters.
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Bracknell and Wokingham College has confirmed a cyberattack that compromised data collected for Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks. The breach affects data used by Activate Learning and other institutions, including names, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers, and passport details.
Access Personal Checking Services (APCS) was alerted by supplier Intradev on August 17 that its systems had been accessed without authorisation. While payment card details and criminal conviction records were not compromised, data submitted between December 2024 and May 8, 2025, was copied.
APCS stated that its own networks and those of Activate Learning were not breached. The organisation is contacting only those data controllers where confirmed breaches have occurred and has advised that its services can continue to be used safely.
Activate Learning reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office following a risk assessment. APCS is still investigating the full scope of the breach and has pledged to keep affected institutions and individuals informed as more information becomes available.
Individuals have been advised to closely monitor their financial statements, exercise caution when opening phishing emails, and regularly update security measures, including passwords and two-factor authentication. Activate Learning emphasised the importance of staying vigilant to minimise risks.
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