Megan Kirkwood

‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

Have you noticed that digital products and services are getting worse? So have we!

Today we are publishing our new report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future. vimeo.com/1168468796?f...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.”

You can’t trust chatbots.

A.I. Is Giving You a Personalized Internet, but You Have No Say in It

DuckDuckGo "asked users whether they did or did not want to use A.I. About 90 percent of respondents voted 'No A.I.'” wow

"“a concerted regulatory front combining multiple toolkits at once” go for it🤛!

WhatsApp as a Stress Test for Interim Measures in EU’s Competition Law EU regulators consider interim measures against Meta over WhatsApp’s AI policy, signaling a shift toward faster antitrust enforcement in digital markets.

The European Commission’s WhatsApp probe into Meta’s AI policy tests whether interim measures can finally make EU antitrust enforcement move at the speed of digital markets, writes Megan Kirkwood.

Palantir hosts party for MoD to celebrate £240m defence contract The American technology company signed a three-year deal to ‘boost military AI and innovation’, but critics called for a review of its links to Lord Mandelson

"The US company Palantir Technologies is hosting a lavish party for the Ministry of Defence to celebrate winning a government contract" - Absolutely outrageous given the current allegations against Peter Mandelson and his ties to Global Counsel, and current outrage around lack of transparency etc

@openrightsgroup What's really clear is that the mess the UK has really is down to deliberate choices to neglect industry, privatise and contract out, and sell off UK assets thus eroding our tax base.

Cardell: Cloud services up for consideration in soon-to-be-proposed SMS probe The cloud services sector is one of several options under consideration as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority prepares for a potential fourth strategic market status investigation, according t...

globalcompetitionreview.com/article/card... 👀👀👀👀

Examining Brazil’s ‘Ecosystem Approach’ to Digital Antitrust Tech Policy Press fellows Laís Martins and Megan Kirkwood interviewed CADE Commissioner Victor Oliveira Fernandes about competition issues.

What does success look like for digital antitrust? CADE Commissioner Victor Fernandes tells Tech Policy Press fellows Laís Martins & Megan Kirkwood it's not just economic metrics—fairness & competitive process matter too in the digital age.

"One version of the Lab would offer regulatory relief to individual participants, with large technology companies likely to benefit the most [...]. In an alternative version of the Lab, the sandbox will build shared infrastructure and generate knowledge for the entire regulatory ecosystem."

FR#150 – On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm Bluesky built a verification system designed to distribute trust, and then didn't use it when it mattered.

New from me: FR#150 – On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm

Bluesky's decision to verify ICE's account shows that it not set up well to deal with threats where the presence itself is the harm

connectedplaces.online/reports/fr15...

mayor zohran mamdani smiling and walking while holding a full iced coffee

closed up of the iced coffee in his hands

maaaajor photo of our mayor from @alexkrales.bsky.social in which we learn Mamdani is an iced-coffee-in-winter guy

HUGE win for that community, congrats!!!

(thought it was dunkin, which stopped me in my tracks, but no I don’t think the straw is the right shade of orange)

Apple Accuses European Commission of 'Political Delay Tactics' Over App Store Changes Apple claims the European Commission is refusing to let to implement App Store changes, instead using "political delay tactics" to levy unfair investigations and fines. Apple provided the statement to...

Apple Accuses European Commission of 'Political Delay Tactics' Over App Store Changes 😂 www.macrumors.com/2026/01/22/a... TBD soon

“We’re living in a time where it seems like it’s a less secure international order.”

“At which point you kind of have to think, well, can we trust that these systems are always going to be there and always be something we can rely on?”

🗣️ ORG’s James Baker on the need for UK #DigitalSovereignty.

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

... "the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side." www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

... "the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive" ....

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

"To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble" ...

Fediverse Report – #148 – On Protocol Governance On the complexities of protocol governance.

ActivityPub is getting its first formal update path since 2018. I wrote about why this matters, how this leads to some strange and funny power dynamics, and about who actually participate

connectedplaces.online/reports/fedi...

Trump Nominates Company Chief and Republican Donor, David MacNeil, to F.T.C.

Continued defanging of the FTC... www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/u...

Techno-Permacrisis Musk’s latest venture, image generation in Grok that until Wednesday lacked any guardrails to prevent the production of child abuse images and non-consensual sexual images, provoked an Ofcom…

This can't go on 🚨

Musk and his AI indecency engine shows we must shift power away from Big Tech.

Unless we regulate AI, break monopolies with competition and push for #DigitalSovereignty, the UK could be forever locked in a techno-permacrisis.

Read more ⬇️

www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/techno-...

A card that reads "Social media is critical infrastructure. It needs to work for people, not exploit and mislead them. Modal Foundation supports decentralized social tech that helps people create, circulate and discover trustworthy information."

Hi Bluesky! We're Modal Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to making open social tech viable at scale. We grew out of the @freeourfeeds.com campaign and support @eurosky.social. Our work will connect experts, strategists, builders and communities to create a human-centered internet.

UK slams ‘insulting’ X move to paywall deepfake tool The prime minister said far from solving the problem of nonconsensual deepfakes, X’s decision turned the issue into a “premium service.”

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has attacked X's decision to make its controversial AI image generation feature only available to users with paid subscriptions.

WEC Chair writes to Minister and Ofcom over NCII on X - Committees - UK Parliament Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) Chair and Labour MP Sarah Owen has written to Paymaster General and Cabinet Office Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds as well as Ofcom on the subject of non-consensual i...

"Continuing use of the platform lends X a credibility it no longer merits. [...] I strongly urge the Government to reconsider its use of it." - Sarah Owen MP Chair, Women and Equalities Committee

Palantir lands biggest ever UK defense deal The £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence has renewed a debate about Britain’s dependence on American technology.

"...others have warned that the MoD’s reliance on Palantir risks becoming a strategic vulnerability for the U.K. — and flies in the face of the government’s promise to boost the U.K.’s “sovereign capabilities” in AI and other key technologies."

Reviewing European Antitrust Activity in 2025 and What It All Means for 2026 | TechPolicy.Press The EU enters 2026 with a considerable batch of investigations using both traditional competition law and the newer Digital Markets Act, writes Megan Kirkwood.

The EU enters 2026 with a considerable batch of investigations using both traditional competition law and the newer Digital Markets Act, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood. But will all of this activity result in material changes?

Nvidia is Building a Shield of Concentrated Power | TechPolicy.Press Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood presents the final part of a three part analysis of Nvidia’s rise to dominance in the AI market.

Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood considers the antitrust scrutiny Nvidia has recently attracted, and how those efforts, which have largely stalled, are now potentially jeopardized by the ambitions of various countries to build out AI infrastructure and get ahead in the so-called “AI race.”

An analysis of X posts from the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology suggests it is overwhelmingly pro-AI.

I analysed the sentiment of every X post from DSIT that mentioned "AI" this year. Of 122 posts, 110 were positive about AI, and only 7 mentioned its downsides.

🧵 1/2

What Ireland’s Data Center Crisis Means for the EU’s AI Sovereignty Plans - AlgorithmWatch Ireland is now home to one of the highest concentrations of data centers in the world. What began as a quiet build-out of server farms around Dublin has expanded into an industrial presence with an ec...

"The Irish case has seen a consistent pattern: tech-sector growth is treated as inevitable, while climate obligations are accommodated around it. Managing the strained infrastructure comes at the cost of rising emissions and deferred decarbonization" algorithmwatch.org/en/ireland-d...

Nvidia is Building a Shield of Concentrated Power | TechPolicy.Press Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood presents the final part of a three part analysis of Nvidia’s rise to dominance in the AI market.

The final of this series is out! It considers the antitrust scrutiny Nvidia has recently attracted, and how those efforts, which have largely stalled, are now potentially jeopardized by the ambitions of various countries to build out AI infrastructure and get ahead in the so-called “AI race.”