Members of the Save Brick Lane campaign protested against the construction of an AI datacentre in the east London neighbourhood in June. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardia
Investigation finds dozens of ministers and civil servants moved into AI roles as government developed datacentre expansion plans
The UK’s policy on datacentres and AI was developed without any meetings with environmental groups, an investigation has found.
The nonprofit organisation Spotlight on Corruption said a “considerable revolving door” shaped the government’s development of “AI growth zones”, a central plank of the former prime minister Keir Starmer’s AI and economic policy, with 38 ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers hired to positions in AI companies between July 2024 and September 2026.
Meanwhile, even as top officials left government for jobs at OpenAI and Anthropic, government departments largely failed to engage meaningfully with stakeholders outside the technology industry.
Kamila Kingstone, a campaign lead at the NGO, said: “The government totally failed at the most senior level to speak to environmental NGOs or community groups when developing its flagship policy on AI datacentres. This is despite the serious environmental implications of its plans.”
Over 12 months, Spotlight on Corruption filed 40 freedom of information requests to 18 government agencies, seeking details of meetings and investment figures relating to the government’s policymaking on the growth zones, covering the period between July 2024 and June 2026.
Google has illegally stripped the entire area, removing even the top soil. Photograph: Jarno Artika/The Guardian
Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push
Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.
After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
“It doesn’t end. It goes on and on,” says Mari Annala, an ecologist from the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL), looking at drone footage of the former forest from the perimeter.
Earlier this month, Google was ordered by the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) to temporarily stop work on Muhos and another site about 100km south-east in the village of Otanmäki after it failed to complete the necessary environmental impact assessments before clearcutting the land. The news has prompted widespread outcry and a national reckoning over what role, if any, the country should play in the global rush to build datacentres to keep up with rapid AI development.
Last week, Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.
Protesters in New York City take part in the “Freeze AI Now” national day of walkouts on October 20, 2026. (Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
“Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system—including your bank account.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday renewed calls to pause development of artificial intelligence following reporting that unauthorized AI agents are operating inside the systems of major US banks.
Axios’ Madison Mills revealed that Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and other financial institutions are “racing to contain agent risks,” including “situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials,” which “goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”
In AI, an agent is a system that can take actions to complete an assigned task, rather than simply responding to queries or generating text.
According to Mills’ reporting—which cites people familiar with the matter—some agents have contacted bank call centers or appeared to take actions independently of users’ instructions.
Banking executives interviewed by Mills described the problem as “horrifying,” with one official warning of potentially serious consequences for customers’ finances.
The stakes are particularly high, the executives said, when AI agents have permission to make purchases or transfer funds. Banks are also struggling to determine whether activity is actually authorized by customers or whether an agent has gone rogue.
“This is insane,” Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on social media in response to Mills’ report. “We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization.”
“But that is what’s happening right now,” he continued. “Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system—including your bank account.”
The senator added, “Pause AI NOW!”
Sanders has repeatedly warned that the race to create increasingly powerful AI systems is outpacing efforts to ensure their safety. Such concerns are mounting as profit- and ego-driven tech oligarchs race toward the “holy grail” of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.
Earlier this month, Sanders renewed his call for a congressional ban on the development of advanced AI, citing Big Tech oligarchs’ secret preparations for a “catastrophic AI event.”
The senator has repeatedly cited pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton who have warned that superintelligent AI—a development that experts believe could come after AGI—might wipe out humanity, as well as less existential but still potentially devastating outcomes like xAI CEO Elon Musk’s prediction that AI and robots could “replace all jobs.”
Last month, Sanders and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced legislation to pause advanced AI development and ban the creation or deployment of artificial superintelligence. Sanders also wants a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers.
The banking story underscores the growing challenge of deploying autonomous AI systems in consequential settings before their behavior can be reliably controlled or monitored.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon last week announced a ban on outside AI agents from accessing customer accounts.
Sanders wasn’t the only elected official who responded with alarm to the new Axios report.
“This is the exact thing we’ve been warning about for years,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on social media. “AI agents with unrestrained access to your bank account and protected information. When consumer AI agents are accessing YOUR bank account or using YOUR credit card, they must be subject to fiduciary-like duties of care.”
“We need to pass my AI AGENT Act to get some basic guardrails in place,” Warner added, referring to legislation that would establish federal rules for artificial intelligence agents that act on people’s behalf.
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) also weighed in on the report, writing on social media that “the Trump administration and GOP leadership made the deliberate decision to let the AI industry run wild.”
“That was a bad political decision,” he added. “And now it’s become a potentially catastrophic policy decision.”
On the other side of the political aisle, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who has opposed the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent states from regulating AI—said on X, “Imagine a rogue AI agent liquidating your bank account and investment portfolio.”
“If you are the only victim, I suppose you could get made whole by the AI company responsible,” he added. “If rogue agents liquidate hundreds of billions across millions of accounts, the AI company would go bankrupt and you wouldn’t get made whole.”
The new Axios report comes two days after nationwide “Freeze AI Now” walkout protests by students, workers, academics, and others demanding an immediate halt to further AI development until the public has a meaningful say in how the technology is built and regulated.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and co-founder of Google Sergey Brin attend the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit on October 8, 2026 in Washington, DC.(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” said one Democratic strategist.
American voters’ antipathy toward Big Tech companies has become a central theme of campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, according to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday.
The Guardian noted that hundreds of midterm campaign ads attacking data centers have aired over the past two months, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing one another of being pawns of the artificial intelligence industry.
“And it’s not only data centers,” The Guardian added. “The public anxiety over AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it, as well as backlash over encroaching tech like surveillance cameras, has turned the tech industry into a ubiquitous villain this election cycle.”
Silicon Valley has become a punching bag for politicians even as Big Tech moguls have been throwing record sums of money to elect politicians sympathetic to their needs.
Super political action committees (PACs) “funded by tech billionaires are among the top spenders in this election cycle,” The Guardian explained. “Leading the Future, formed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has raised more than $75 million to back tech-friendly candidates. [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk has sunk $366 million into Republican causes, more than he spent on the 2024 presidential election.”
Much of the Big Tech money has been going toward Republican candidates this cycle, even though the industry has traditionally had close ties with elected Democrats.
Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico in recent days has been trying to turn Big Tech money being spent against him into an advantage, highlighting in particular the outsize role that Musk is playing funding the campaign of his Republican rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
After Musk on Wednesday used his platform X to declare that “there is something deeply wrong with Talarico,” the Texas Democrat quickly returned fire.
“There is something deeply wrong with a political system,” Talarico wrote, “that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US senator.”
A report published by The Atlantic on Monday examined how the tech industry’s embrace of President Donald Trump during his second term has given Democrats an incentive to pummel the industry, particularly when polls show a bipartisan hostility to AI data centers.
In fact, Democratic strategists told The Atlantic that data centers have proven to be a top wedge issue capable of getting normally loyal GOP voters to think twice before voting for a Republican candidate.
“Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Democratic strategist Rob Flaherty told The Atlantic. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”
Democratic strategists started pushing the party to take a more populist approach toward the tech industry when polling data “showed surprising concern about AI” even in traditionally conservative rural districts, The Atlantic reported.
Rishi Bharwani, US director of tech regulation advocacy group Reset Tech, said much has changed since Democrats under former President Barack Obama embraced the industry as a positive force for society.
“What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire,” said Bharwani, “and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing. These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.”
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him UpClimate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Protesters gather outside an OpenAI developers conference at Fort Mason on September 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
“Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity.”
A comprehensive new assessment of worldwide health threats published in The Lancet concludes that nuclear war and “malicious use” of artificial intelligence pose existential risks to humanity over the remainder of the 21st century, a finding that comes amid mounting global concern about the implications of rapid AI advancements.
The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, comprised of dozens of experts across a range of fields, identifies 17 leading threats to human health and society, from the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and pandemics to childhood malnutrition, income inequality, conventional war, and air pollution. Two of the threats carry “extinction potential” this century, according to the commission: nuclear conflict and misuse of AI.
“Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity,” The Lancet warned in an editorial accompanying the new analysis, which was presented Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany.
The commission notes that AI’s “potential to advance health and wellbeing is enormous,” but “the risk of catastrophic harm is equally profound.” The authors of the analysis point to several ways in which AI could be “used maliciously,” including the design of bioweapons, autonomous nukes, and invasive ransomware targeting global healthcare and financial institutions.
“The final pathway is loss of control through the emergence of agentic, unaligned artificial general intelligence,” the analysis states. “This loss of control includes AI systems creating subgoals that lead to the seeking of human disempowerment or elimination, particularly if such agents autonomously gain access to financial networks, key infrastructure, or physical tools in the real world.”
Regarding the existential threat of nuclear conflict, the study authors note that a famine stemming from atomic warfare “would affect all regions of the world, including those far from the conflict itself, through reduced caloric availability and cascading food-system failures.”
“The devastation that could result from nuclear war cannot be overstated,” the analysis argues. “The risk is not hypothetical: We found that between 1948 and 2010, 22 nuclear weapon accidents and 21 close calls were recorded. Future nuclear conflicts could occur due to multiple distinct mechanisms, including nuclear exchange arising from international crises between nuclear powers, accidental detonation of nuclear warheads, terrorist use of nuclear devices, and AI deployment of nuclear weapons.”
To avert the most catastrophic possible outcomes and mitigate other threats, the commission calls for “collective action between nations and within nations,” emphasizing that risks posed by AI, nuclear war, the climate crisis, and future pandemics “cannot be solved by governments or other actors acting for their own national populations alone.”
Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and co-chair of the new commission, said in a statement that “the striking finding is not only the scale of these threats, but that humanity still has the agency to act.”
“Across all 17 catastrophic threats, the decisions made by leaders today will shape the health and wellbeing of the next generation,” said Murray. “But delaying action will only serve to shift and increase the costs into the future.”
dizzy: I’m surprised that ongoing climate destruction does not meet the measure of carrying “extinction potential” this century. I certainly believe that it does around 2060.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
