UK’s OnlyFans tops $3bn valuation amid talks to sell stake to US investor

OnlyFans, the UK adult video platform, is in talks to sell a minority stake to a US investor that will value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).The London-based company is in advanced talks to sell a stake of less than 20% to the San Francisco-based investment firm Architect Capital, according to the Financial Times. Sources familiar with the process confirmed the talks to the Guardian.OnlyFans has decided that offloading a minority stake is the best guarantee of stability for a business dealing with the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky

Finance leaders warn over Mythos as UK banks prepare to use powerful Anthropic AI tool

British banks will be given access in the next week to a powerful AI tool that was deemed too dangerous to be released to the public, as a series of senior finance figures warned over its impact.Anthropic, which has so far limited the release of the new model to a small clutch of primarily US businesses, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, said it would expand that to UK financial institutions.“That is in the very near term, in the next week,” Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK, Ireland and northern Europe operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “As you would expect, the engagement I have had from UK CEOs in the last week has been significant.”Anthropic, which is the company behind the Claude family of AI tools, has said that its latest model, Mythos, poses an unprecedented risk because of its ability to expose flaws in IT systems

US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.The rise of AI chatbots has spurred a boom in the construction of chip-filled warehouses with a hunger for power that is being met, in part, by burning fossil gas. Legal scholars warn the blanket confidentiality clause may fall foul of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus convention on public access to environmental information

Liz Kendall urges UK public to embrace AI as government makes first £500m fund investment

The UK technology secretary has urged the country to “make AI work for Britain”, brushing off fears about its impact on jobs and cybersecurity as the government announced its first investment under a £500m sovereign AI fund. Liz Kendall said the UK had to “seize” the opportunity offered by AI despite concerns underlined this month when US startup Anthropic revealed it had developed an AI model that posed a potentially significant cyber threat. Asked how the government makes the case for embracing a technology that could disrupt jobs and now cybersecurity, Kendall said: “We have to seize this to make it work, for Britain, for our jobs, for solving the biggest challenges we face as a world.”Speaking on Thursday as the government unveiled its first investment in a UK company as part of a £500m sovereign AI fund, Kendall acknowledged “people are worried about the risks and what it means for their jobs”, but AI entrepreneurs also believed they can “make it work … they can create jobs”.In January Kendall admitted “some jobs will go” as AI automates certain tasks and roles, but it would also create new employment opportunities

‘How do I end a call?’: the elderly Japanese people determined to master smartphones

It’s not only young people whose gaze is fixed on tiny screens. But for these users in Tokyo, clicking and scrolling is anything but second nature.“I can’t deal with all of the apps that jump out at me,” says one. “How do I know if I’ve definitely ended a call?” asks another.They are common concerns among the four women and one man attending a beginner’s smartphone class at a public facility for older residents in Nerima in the Japanese capital’s north-west suburbs

Labour and Lib Dem MPs demand ‘shameful’ Palantir NHS contract be scrapped

MPs have queued up to demand the government scraps its £330m NHS contract with the spy-tech company Palantir, calling it “dreadful” and “shameful” in a debate on Thursday, after which the government said it was “no fan” of the US company’s politics.Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs led the calls for Palantir, which also works for Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown and the Israeli military, to be removed as a supplier to the NHS federated data platform (FDP), with one Labour backbencher, Samantha Niblett, questioning whether it could be “trusted as a custodian of the intimate health records of tens of millions of British citizens”.The Lib Dem MP Luke Taylor, who called the deal “shameful”, said: “Palantir and Peter Thiel must have their hands ripped off of our NHS before it is too late.”Thiel, a Trump-supporting tech billionaire, founded the company and has previously said that democracy and freedom are incompatible.In response to the MPs who spoke in a Westminster Hall debate, the government confirmed it would consider whether to continue with the deal when a break clause is due in spring 2027, although £210m of the £330m has already been spent