Flagship

Harris warns tech bosses over AI risk

The U.S. vice president said tech bosses have a “moral” responsibility to protect the public from the risks of artificial intelligence. Kamala Harris warned the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI that the government may regulate the sector following the rise of “generative AI,” capable of creating photorealistic images, computer code, and fluent text. The European Union proposed new AI regulations last week, while the U.K.’s monopolies authority is assessing whether to intervene. AI researchers have warned recently that the technology could be an existential threat to humanity, but others say that over-regulating could stifle progress and allow rivals, such as China, to overtake.

Shaky US banks

Shares in several U.S. regional banks plummeted amid growing worries of contagion. The rescue of First Republic has not calmed jitters despite repeated assurances from regulators about the health of the financial system. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “in the heap of dry tinder that is regional banking right now, the slightest spark seems able to trigger a dangerous blaze.” Nearly half of all Americans are concerned about their deposits, new Gallup polling suggested, while some analysts speculated that worries voiced on social media were “amplifying non-traditional approaches” to reviewing banks’ balance sheets. Authorities may have to consider more aggressive measures, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman wrote: “This is no longer a well-functioning market.”

Ed Sheeran cleared of plagiarism

Ed Sheeran won a copyright case alleging he had plagiarized Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On. The lawsuit claimed that Sheeran’s 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud used chord progressions and other elements from Gaye’s classic. But Sheeran’s legal team said that the four-chord sequence is used in dozens of songs, many predating Gaye’s. Copyright law incentivizes innovation by allowing creators to make money from ideas, but can also restrict it: Authors’ copyright in the U.S. extends for 70 years after their deaths. Sheeran’s lawyer said that if the “basic building blocks” of music can be copyrighted, “all of us who love music will be poorer for it.”

S. Africa allows sanctioned plane in

South Africa allowed a Russian plane sanctioned by the U.S. to land near its capital Pretoria. South Africa is among a number of Global South countries seeking to remain neutral over Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, declining to enforce Western sanctions or offer other support to Kyiv while voicing concern over the wider fallout of the war, such as higher food prices and the reduced focus on global development. The U.S. and its allies “can’t just tune into the Global South’s channel” on the West’s terms, “and then be surprised that not everybody is on board,” the Brookings Institution’s Tanvi Madan said on the Grand Tamasha podcast.

Serbia changes laws after shootings

Serbia was rocked by two mass shootings in two days. A gunman firing from a moving car killed eight people and injured 14 in a village near the capital Belgrade. On Wednesday, a 13-year-old boy killed eight children and a security guard at a Belgrade school. Both suspects were arrested. The government announced changes to gun laws immediately after Wednesday’s attack: The country has many guns left over from the 1990s wars, but the interior ministry said it would move to limit new gun permits and determine whether existing weapons are being stored safely. Many other countries, notably the U.K., Australia, Norway, and New Zealand, have restricted gun ownership after mass shootings.

Fresh scrutiny of US justice

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial ties to wealthy Republicans were back in the spotlight. ProPublica reported that a billionaire donor paid Thomas’s great-nephew’s private school fees, while The Washington Post said a conservative lobbyist paid the justice’s wife tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work. Earlier stories by ProPublica detailed the donor’s gifts to Thomas, ranging from luxury travel to resort stays, as well as the purchase of property in which his mother still lives. The historian Heather Cox Richardson pointed to key Supreme Court votes Thomas took that “dramatically undermined our democracy,” concluding: “It now seems imperative to grapple with the fact it appears a key vote on the court that decided those cases was compromised.”

AMLO disputes graft allegations

Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador — who swept to power on an anti-corruption platform — defended his sons against corruption allegations published this week. Jose Ramón, his eldest, was reportedly living in a Mexico City home belonging to an employee of a media company that’s received tens of millions of dollars in contracts from his father’s administration, according to Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, an NGO. He also previously lived in a Texas home belonging to another government contractor. Meanwhile Mexican news outlet Latinus alleged that Andrés, López Obrador’s second-oldest, helped friends win public works contracts worth $5.6 million. López Obrador said his “children are not corrupt.”

The risks of self-reliance

A growing focus on domestic agricultural production in China and India risks backfiring, experts say. Beijing is using subsidies, public pressure, and stockpiling to push farmers to increase soybean production to reduce the country’s reliance on food imports. But domestic varieties are more expensive and displace other productive crops, which then require imports, Bloomberg reported. India, meanwhile, has ramped up production of key food items such as milk, but as two experts noted in The Indian Express, “achieving sufficiency … does not necessarily mean attaining food security among the population.” The increased focus on self-reliance may also harm other critical efforts, “such as the transition to net zero,” the president of the Asian Development Bank warned.

Microsoft opens up AI Bing

Microsoft finally rolled out its ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine. Until now, users had to join a waitlist, despite Microsoft announcing its partnership with OpenAI back in February. Microsoft hopes that the artificial intelligence version of Bing will act as a “copilot for the web,” allowing users to ask questions in natural language and get understandable answers — and that it will challenge Google’s dominance in search. The new version of Bing will, however, only work in Microsoft’s own Edge browser. At the same time, Microsoft has forced Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, trying to use its ubiquity in other fields to push its browser, not unlike when it packaged Internet Explorer with Windows in the early 2000s.

The crowning of King Charles

King Charles III will be crowned tomorrow. Not everyone is enthused. Le Monde says that Charles, almost 50 years older than his mother was at her 1953 coronation, excites the country less than she did, and Britain is more secular now. But the ceremony still has a sense of ancient strangeness: For more than a thousand years, British monarchs have been anointed with oil at Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s like “visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures,” the historian Tom Holland wrote. The musician Nick Cave, who will attend the coronation, said it will be “not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest” U.K. event of our age.

• Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang visits his counterpart in Pakistan.
• A Nigerian senator convicted of trafficking a street trader from Lagos to Britain is expected to be sentenced at a London court.
• The 32nd Southeast Asian Games open in Cambodia.

Pelé has officially become an adjective. Pelé, as Brazilian footballing legend Edson Arantes do Nascimento was known, was admitted by Brazil’s leading dictionary, Michaelis, as an adjective akin to extraordinary. According to Michaelis, the late great’s name can be used thus: One can be “the Pelé of basketball,” the “Pelé of tennis,” and even the “Pelé of Brazilian dramaturgy.” We aspire to be the Pelé of daily newsletters.

An epic literary adaptation is reviving interest in an ancient south Indian empire. Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan or The Son of Ponni — a 2022 Tamil-language movie dubbed the Indian Game of Thrones — tells the story of a dynasty whose political influence stretched to Sri Lanka, parts of Thailand and Malaysia, and China during its rule between the 9th and 13th centuries. The popularity of the movie, and the novel that inspired it, is drawing more domestic and international tourists to explore the temples of the Chola kingdom in Tamil Nadu, Nikkei reported. A sequel to the blockbuster was released last month.

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