Madhumita Murgia

The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to train artificial intelligence models on the publisher’s archived content, in the latest agreement between the Microsoft-backed start-up and a global news publisher. Under the terms of the deal, the FT will license its material to the ChatGPT maker to help develop generative AI technology that can create text, images and code indistinguishable from human creations. The agreement also allows ChatGPT to respond to questions with short summaries from FT articles, with links back to FT.com.

Britain’s surveillance laws have been deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice in a case that throws into question the fate of the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act. The ECJ ruled the legislation was illegal because it allowed “general and indiscriminate” retention of electronic communications. The judgment said member states could perform “targeted retention of that data solely for the purpose of fighting serious crime” but not the mass and indiscriminate data collection of everyone in Britain allowed by new UK spying regime. This type of legislation “cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society, as required by the directive, read in the light of the Charter,” the ECJ said, referring to the charter of European human rights.