Several hundred demonstrate against Deutsche Welle budget cuts

22.04.2026, DPA

Photo: Fabian Sommer/dpa

Several hundred people protested in central Berlin Wednesday against austerity measures and job cuts at the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

A procession marched from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate in the afternoon.

There, a large sculpture by carnival artist Jacques Tilly had been erected, depicting Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump and an Iranian ayatollah laughing arm in arm – with the slogan "Deutsche Welle cut – autocrats rejoice."

The demonstration was organized by the Verdi trade union and the German Journalists’ Association (DJV). The protest is against €10 million ($11.5 million) in cuts to federal funding, which will force Deutsche Welle to make savings of €21 million this year.

This will affect 160 full-time jobs at the broadcaster, which is headquartered in Bonn, broadcasts in 32 languages and is funded by taxpayers’ money.

“Germany could not give autocrats like Vladimir Putin a greater gift,” criticized DJV Federal Chairman Mika Beuster. “Just now, when democracy is under pressure worldwide, the federal government is cutting funding for Deutsche Welle instead of increasing it.”

Verdi also fears serious losses in reach, “while voices of disinformation are growing stronger.”

Tilly, for his part, called the cuts "political stupidity."

“After all, the broadcaster is an important voice for freedom and democracy in many countries,” the sculptor told dpa.

The broadcaster's director-general, Barbara Massing, has called the cuts "extremely painful" and said they were undermining Deutsche Welle’s competitiveness at a time when a strong German and European presence was becoming increasingly important in geopolitical terms.

Among other things, the Greek service is being discontinued, the journalistic portfolio in other languages is being scaled back and numerous posts across the organization are being cut.

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

Elon Musk ignores French summons to answer questions in probe into X

Elon Musk failed to appear at a Paris hearing on Monday as part of an investigation into his social media platform X. The probe centres on allegations that the platform and its AI chatbot Grok have been used to disseminate child sexual abuse material.


Issued on: 21/04/2026 - RFI

Elon Musk failed to appear in Paris in response to a summons from prosecutors investigating his company, X. © David Swanson/Reuters

"The prosecutor’s office notes the absence of the first individuals who were summoned. Their presence or absence does not hinder the continuation of the investigation,” the prosecutor's statement reads, without mentioning anyone by name.

Musk and the former CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino were summoned as part of an investigation, launched in January 2025, into allegations that X's algorithm was used to interfere in French politics.

The probe was later expanded to include an investigation into X's AI chatbot Grok's dissemination of Holocaust denial – a crime in France – and sexually explicit deepfakes.

French prosecutors suspect tycoon Musk encouraged deepfakes to inflate value of X

While attendance at Monday's hearing was mandatory, French authorities at could not compel Musk, the world's richest person, to appear.

Prosecutors have called the inquiry a “constructive approach” aimed at ensuring X complies with French law.

Musk has accused prosecutors of launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation" and has refused to cooperate.

X has come under scrutiny from regulators and governments in several countries over issues including content moderation, data practices and compliance with local laws.

The French cybercrime unit previously arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov in 2024 for complicity in organised crime carried out on the messaging app, charges his lawyer has described as "absurd."

Who is Pavel Durov, the enigmatic French-Russian boss of Telegram?

Durov wrote Monday that he France is “losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy”, accusing investigators of being controlled by the government.

(with newswires)

What the Palantir CEO’s ‘manifesto’ tells us about the changing face of war


A Palantir post citing CEO Alex Karp's book called for mandatory military service and closer ties between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon while criticizing "hollow pluralism" and warning of a new AI arms race. But Palantir is just one of the tech companies blurring the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington – while growing too big too fast for traditional oversight.


Issued on: 23/04/2026 - 
FRANCE24

By: Paul MILLAR

Pedestrians walk past Palantir's booth during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 19, 2026. © Ina Fassbender, AFP

Data-processing giant Palantir Technologies on Saturday posted a sales brochure cum manifesto that called for Silicon Valley to pledge itself heart and soul to the US military-industrial complex.

“The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” Palantir posted in a 22-point summary of "The Technological Republic" by CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska.

The stakes, it said, could not be higher.

“The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications,” the company said in its post on X.

“One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending,” it read. “A new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”

But the scope of the post went far beyond the usual corporate goal of chasing after defense contracts, going on to propose the introduction of a mandatory US national service and an end to the post-war “neutering” of the Japanese and German militaries. It also suggested a more muscular role for tech companies in fighting “violent crime” and denounced the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures".

The document’s final points have proved some of the most controversial. Having slammed what it described as the “elite’s intolerance of religious belief”, the post called on the US to reject “a vacant and hollow pluralism”.

“Certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful,” the post read.

Just which cultures those might be remained up to the reader's own judgement.

Alternately ridiculed for its would-be warrior-poet prose and pilloried for its full-throated support of US militarism – even as the world reels from the shockwaves of the US-Israeli war on Iran – the backlash owes much to the already-ominous cloud hanging over the company that posted it.
'Optimizing the kill chain'

Launched by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir famously takes its name from the seeing stones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series. Rescued from the island kingdom of Westernesse, these stones allowed the men of the West to see and to speak across vast distances, binding the realms of their Middle Earth colonies to one another until plague and civil war saw them slide into ruin.

What Palantir does is more mundane, though its scope seems as wide-reaching at times. Palantir provides its customers with data-processing software that allows them to pull together information scattered across different platforms and formats. By doing this, analysts can pick out complex patterns that would otherwise remain buried in the raw data, and refine their work accordingly.

It is the nature of these clients, and the use to which these tools are put, that have earned Palantir its somewhat sinister reputation. The US government remains its main client, using its services extensively through its military, intelligence and police forces.

Former Palantir employees are among those criticizing its partnership with the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Is more scrutiny needed of AI analytics giant Palantir?

SPOTLIGHT © FRANCE 24
09:34

Palantir’s products have been widely used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in carrying out the mass and often violent deportations of undocumented migrants.

The Department of Homeland Security awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract last April to build an AI-powered system that would allow the agency to track people to be detained and deported.

Washington’s close allies also number among the company’s clients. The UK agreed to pay the company more than $405 million to help the National Health Service process patient data.

Perhaps most controversially, Palantir has also supplied Israel’s military with AI-powered analytics tools during its brutal Gaza campaign, which killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to UN figures, and left much of the besieged territory in ruins. Holding its annual board meeting in Israel in 2024, Palantir signed a strategic partnership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to strengthen the country’s “war effort”.

The company has not shied away from its militaristic bent. Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar – who was recently commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve – told the New York Times last year that the company was “very well known” for its work finding the US military people to kill.

“You can think about that as you’re optimizing the kill chain from sensor to shooter, they call it doctrinally, but it’s the same thing as: How do I find the enemy targets?” he told the paper.

The West against the rest

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the US-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that the tech company’s close relationship with Washington was born in the early days of the War on Terror.

“Palantir's first big government contract came in around 2003 from In-Q-Tel ... to provide the intelligence community with greater capacity to crunch, sort and share the large quantities of data it had collected,” he said. “The goal was to avoid the failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks, where the FBI and CIA failed to share information which, if looked at together, might have given them enough information to thwart or arrest all or some of the hijackers before the attacks were carried out.”

Palantir’s executives have often championed its willingness to work closely with the military as a unique selling point, even adopting military-style titles for its employees: The company is currently trying to boost the ranks of its “forward deployed engineers”.

It’s a strategy that has reaped hefty rewards. The Pentagon on Wednesday asked Congress for $2.3 billion in additional funding to expand the Maven Smart System, a platform built by Palantir that effectively serves as an AI-powered targeting system for the US military.

The contract had originally been awarded to Google, which was forced to abandon the project after employees revolted against the idea of putting such a tool in the hands of the US military.

Palantir, by contrast, had no such scruples.

Autonomous weapons: Palantir, Airbus engineers seek to calm 'killer robot' fears

TECH 24 © FRANCE 24
03:23

Diederick van Wijk, a research fellow at the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute think-tank, said Palantir’s leading figures saw the corporation as proudly taking on a responsibility that other tech companies had spurned.

“What they believe – mainly Alex Karp as CEO and Peter Thiel as founder – is that Silicon Valley went astray from its founding principle, namely the military-industrial relationship, that Silicon Valley went all-in on consumer tech. And they feel that it's problematic that the companies that wield so much power and data and technology, that they are not more patriotic,” he said.

Although co-founders Thiel and Karp – who bonded in law school over a shared love of political debate – seemingly differ on the precise contours of their belief systems, van Wijk said that both men had long professed a devotion to an idealised framing of Western civilization.

“From the very start they had a very normative idea of what that company should be – so they immediately limited themselves to working for the US and, later on, for Europe, but they always refused to work with Russia and China,” he said. “Which was, in that time with all the early 2000s, ‘the world is flat’ ideas of [US journalist and commentator Thomas] Friedman, they were really an outlier – so there was always this more patriotic or American focus in their business conduct.”

“There was always this idea that this company could really help the West ... be ferocious, ‘protect the fuck out of it’, as Karp often describes it,” he added.
Making a killing

Karp’s call for a renewed focus on hard power in defense of a dangerously decadent West resonates strongly with language adopted by vocal figures within the second Trump administration – particularly Vice-President JD Vance, a former employee of Thiel's during his venture capital days.

The US National Security Strategy published last year focused heavily on what it described as the risk of “civilizational erasure” facing Western Europe as a result of decades of mass migration.

Thiel himself has said he believes democracy to be incompatible with freedom, and recently launched a series of lectures warning about the coming of the Antichrist. Karp, who supported Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s failed bid for the White House in 2024, maintains that he is a progressive fighting for centre-left policies.

Unsurprisingly for a company with long-running contracts with the US military and immigration enforcement industries, Palantir has flourished since Trump’s re-election last year. The company generated $4.5 billion in sales in 2025 alone – more than half of which came from government contracts. News of the former real estate mogul’s re-election added another $23 billion to the company’s market capitalization as investors rushed to buy stock in the company.

The borders between client and contractor have also grown increasingly porous. Trump named a number of Palantir executives to key government roles after his re-election, while the tech company has in turn recruited former lawmakers and government officials.

“Palantir is reaching far beyond its lane. They should be a vendor, providing technology that is useful in carrying out policies determined through the democratic process,” Hartung said.

“Their desire to shape US domestic and foreign policies – and their hiring of former government officials to promote their views, their funding of political campaigns, their use of dark money groups to oppose any candidate who even speaks of regulating AI, their ideology of disruption that has already done deep damage through things like the DOGE (billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency) … is totally inappropriate, not to mention beyond their depth. They know certain things about certain types of technologies, but they are not philosopher kings.”

But while van Wijk said that Palantir executives’ theatrical public statements made it easy to single the company out as a particularly sinister example of Silicon Valley overreach, he warned against missing the bigger picture.

“At some point the technology would have been there anyway, and now we're focusing on this company – but we should focus on the underlying technology or the underlying structure, which is the technology that makes it possible to completely change the dynamic of law enforcement and warfare,” he said.

“But at the same time, they are not trying to hide that they have very peculiar ideas about society, right? If you hear Peter Thiel speak at interviews, that's not how the broader public thinks. He has been consistently anti-democracy, anti-government, anti-deliberative, anti-open society. He is a very outspoken libertarian with very peculiar ideas.”

Still, he argued, Palantir remains just one actor in an industry that remains largely untouched by public oversight.

“I think that's where the unease comes from,” van Wijk said. “It's ominous – the company has a bit of a conspiracy-like nature to it, so it's a very attractive scapegoat for maybe a broader trend in which technology is becoming so powerful and technological companies have been so unregulated that they are able, to a large extent, to do and innovate what they think should be done.”

US-China AI race intensifies as DeepSeek releases 'reduced' cost model


China's DeepSeek on Friday released a new AI model with "drastically reduced" costs that it said was capable of processing extra-long texts to help it complete tasks. The company caused shockwaves last year after it revealed a reasoning model that upended assumptions of US dominance in the sector.


Issued on: 24/04/2026 
By: FRANCE 24

DeepSeek's latest version comes after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model. © Mladen Antonov, AFP

Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model with "drastically reduced" costs Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.

The new version, DeepSeek-V4, "features an ultra-long context of one million words", the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as "world-leading ... with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs" in a separate announcement on X.


The model's context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, "(achieves) leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance", the WeChat statement said.

A "preview version" of the open source model is now available, the company said.

Experts say V4's release marks an "inflection point" in terms of hardware and cost.

"This addresses the long-standing issues of slower performance and higher costs associated with long context lengths, marking a genuine inflection point for the industry," Zhang Yi, the founder of tech research firm iiMedia, said.

"For end users, this will bring widespread, accessible benefits. For instance, if ultra-long context support becomes a standard feature, long-text processing is expected to move beyond high-end research labs and enter mainstream commercial applications," he said.

The new V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being "a more efficient and economical choice" because it has smaller parameters.
'Sputnik moment'

V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters while the V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters, which refine models' decision-making ability.

The model has also been "optimised" for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy, the DeepSeek statement said.

"In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google's) Gemini-Pro-3.1," the statement added.

Last year's so-called "DeepSeek shock" sparked a sell-off of AI-related shares and a reckoning on business strategy in what was also described as a "Sputnik moment" for the industry.

The chatbot performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top American offerings, but the company said it had taken significantly less computing power to develop.

However, its sudden popularity raised questions over data privacy and censorship, with the chatbot often refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

At home, DeepSeek's AI tools have been widely adopted by Chinese municipalities and healthcare institutions as well as the financial sector and other businesses.

This has been partly driven by DeepSeek's decision to make its systems open source, with their inner workings public – in contrast to the proprietary models sold by OpenAI and other Western rivals.

But the White House has accused Chinese firms of vying to "steal" American technology, ahead of an expected summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.

"The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI," Trump's science and technology chief advisor Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.

DeepSeek's Friday announcement also came as Meta said it planned to cut a tenth of its staff as it looks for productivity gains from the rest of the workforce while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Reports said Microsoft was also looking to trim its ranks.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Almost half of all songs uploaded on Deezer are 'fully AI-generated'

20.04.2026, DPA

Photo: Selin Verger/dpa

The music streaming service Deezer on Monday revealed that 44% of all tracks newly uploaded on its platform are fully generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

The Paris-based company on Monday said that it "is receiving nearly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day – accounting for more than 44% of the total daily delivery." This marks a huge increase from last year's 10,000 tracks per day.

Despite the flood of this type of content, "fully AI-generated music currently accounts for only a small fraction of streams on Deezer - between 1-3%," the company said in a statement.

The service attributes this to its targeted countermeasures. Deezer transparently labels AI content, excludes it from algorithmic recommendations and has stopped storing high-resolution versions of such tracks.

The music streaming service is a pioneer in tagging AI-generated music.

"AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artists' rights and promote transparency for fans," said Deezer chief executive officer Alexis Lanternier.

According to estimates, around 25% of music creators' income could be at risk from AI by 2028.

Deezer said it was important to label AI-generated content as such, citing an international survey it commissioned where 80% of respondents said they wanted AI music to be clearly labelled for listeners.

Although 97% of participants in a blind test could not spot the difference between software-generated tracks and human-made music, a majority were against including AI songs in the official charts, according to the study.

• Deezer release

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

EU pressures Google to open Android to rival AI assistants

24.04.2026, DPA

Photo: Nico Tapia/dpa-tmn

The European Union is ramping up its scrutiny of Google, which is part of Alphabet, by urging the tech giant to let competing AI assistants have more access to its Android operating system.

Reports suggest that European Commission regulators are working on requirements that would compel Google to provide third-party AI services like ChatGPT and Claude with the same level of access that it currently reserves for its own Gemini assistant.

This means allowing them to tap into crucial Android features such as voice activation, search capabilities, and integration with other apps.

This push is part of the broader initiative under the Digital Markets Act aimed at ensuring fair competition in the digital landscape. The goal is to make Google enable interoperability so that rival developers can function on equal terms within the Android environment.

If Google doesn't comply once these measures are set in stone, the company could find itself facing a formal investigation from the EU, which might lead to hefty fines.

Google has previously expressed concerns that easing restrictions might threaten user privacy, security, and innovation.

The Commission has started proceedings to clarify how Google can fulfill its obligations under the DMA, including ensuring that access to the hardware and software features used by its own AI tools is available to others.

There's also a separate case looking into how Google can make its search data more accessible to other search engines.

These latest moves highlight Europe's increasing resolve to rein in the power of major tech companies and create a more competitive environment for AI.

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

What is OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, its newest ‘smartest and most intuitive’ model?

Copyright AP Photo/Richard Drew, File

By Roselyne Min

Published on 24/04/2026 - EURONEWS

OpenAI says its new model, GPT-5.5, is particularly useful for coding, office work and early-stage scientific research.

OpenAI has released its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.5, pitching it as its “smartest and most intuitive model yet”.

The company claims the new model is better at understanding what users want and can carry out multi-step work such as writing and debugging code, analysing data, and creating documents and spreadsheets.

Unlike earlier versions, GPT-5.5 is to handle tasks that previously required multiple prompts for step-by-step instructions, plan its approach and keep working until the job is finished, OpenAI said.

Related

• Hackers breach Anthropic's 'too dangerous to release' Mythos AI model, report

The company said this makes GPT-5.5 particularly useful for coding, routine office work, and early-stage scientific research.

GPT-5.5 performed better than its previous model, GPT-5.4, on coding tests to measure complex software work, including command-line tasks and real-world GitHub issue resolution.

The model is being rolled out as of Friday to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, according to OpenAI.

The model will also become accessible via Application Programming Interface (API), which is software l that lets developers and companies connect the model directly to their apps and services. It did not specify when and where it will become available.

Related

• 'Cancel ChatGPT': AI boycott surges after OpenAI-Pentagon military deal

OpenAI said the model includes its “strongest safeguards to date,” and was tested by nearly 200 early-access partners, including companies and researchers working in software, finance, communications, drug discovery, and scientific research.

The launch comes amid growing concern over the safety and control of more powerful AI models and as tech companies try and outpace each other.

Earlier this month, OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview, a model the company said was too dangerous for a full public release yet. Mythos can identify thousands of previously unknown, high-severity vulnerabilities across major operating systems and web browsers.

OpenAI released its own AI model focused on cyber defence, with limited rollout days after Mythos was announced. Called GPT 5.4 Cyber, a variant of OpenAI's flagship GPT 5.4 model, it has fewer restrictions on cybersecurity-related queries when used for legitimate, defensive purposes, the company said.

Meta to cut workforce by 10% as artificial intelligence spending surges

Meta outlined plans to cut about 8,000 jobs on Thursday as it invests heavily in artificial intelligence. The move comes as part of a broader tech-sector shift towards cost control, with Microsoft also weighing voluntary buyouts ahead of next week’s earnings reports.


Issued on: 24/04/2026 - 
FRANCE 24

Meta announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce in order to invest more in AI. © Sebastien Bozon, AFP

Meta plans to cut a tenth of its workforce, looking for productivity gains from its remaining workers as it invests heavily in artificial intelligence.

Meta will lay off about 8,000 employees and leave thousands of other positions unfilled next month, a source told AFP.

The move comes as co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg makes a priority of delivering “superintelligence” in a costly AI race against rivals including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Reports on Thursday also indicated that Microsoft is looking to trim its ranks with voluntary buyouts of some US employees in an unprecedented move by the tech stalwart founded in 1975.

About seven percent of US employees at Microsoft were reported to be eligible for an offer aimed at workers who are senior director level or lower, whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or more, according to a CNBC report.

Microsoft, which has also been pouring billions of dollars into AI, declined to comment.

Meta and Microsoft are both set to report quarterly earnings next week.

Meta in January reported quarterly earnings that topped market expectations, as revenue grew along with investments in AI.

Meanwhile, costs tallied $35.15 billion, an increase of 40 percent from the same period a year earlier, the earnings report noted.

Capital expenses, including infrastructure such as data centres to power AI, were $22.14 billion in the quarter, according to the company.

Meta anticipated capital expenditures in the $115 billion to $135 billion range this fiscal year, driven by increased investment in Meta Superintelligence Labs and its core business.

“I’m looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence for people around the world in 2026,” Zuckerberg said on an earnings call.

Meta is locked in a bitter rivalry with other tech behemoths racing to invest heavily in AI, aiming to ensure the technology generates profits in the not-so-distant future.

Most analysts believe Meta will make the investment pay off by improving advertising efficiency and creating new opportunities, such as with its smart glasses through a partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica.

Meta is ramping up spending to record highs, announcing an array of multi-billion-dollar deals with AI partners and incentivising employees to be more productive by using AI agents for coding and other tasks, according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

Ives reasoned that more layoffs could be in store at Meta this year as part of a strategy to use AI to gain efficiencies.

“We believe that this is part of Meta’s strategy to increasing leverage AI tools to automate tasks that once required large teams, allowing the company to streamline operations and reduce costs,” Ives said in a note to investors.

“We are encouraged by management’s cost-cutting efforts thus far.”

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Meta, Microsoft purge jobs amid AI build-up

Wesley Rahn 

DW with AP, AFP, dpa

24/04/2026 - 

Facebook's parent company said it would slash 10% of its workforce, while Microsoft is offering an early retirement scheme. The cuts come as both tech giants make massive investments in AI.

Social media giant Meta on Thursday announced plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, as it seeks to scale up development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The owner of social media platforms Facebookand Instagram, along with the messaging app Whatsapp, said in an internal memo that the first round of cuts is due on May 20. Along with the cuts, Meta said 6,000 further posts would be left unfilled.

Also on Thursday, US media reported that tech giant Microsoft was planning to offer voluntary early retirement buyouts for around 8.700 workers, or about 7% of its workforce.

Massive AI investment

The job cuts come as both companies increase spending on developing AI applications.

Meta has announced plans to develop "personal superintelligence," which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said will tailor AI agents to the needs and wishes of individual users.

"Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices," Zuckerberg wrote in July 2025.

AI knows what you did last summer  12:34

Meta has warned investors that expenses on infrastructure costs and hiring AI experts will grow to as much as $169 billion in 2026.

Microsoft is spending billions of dollars on expanding a global network of data centers that power cloud computing and AI systems like Copilot. Investor concerns about the costs and eventual profitability of data centers have weighed heavily on Microsoft's share price over the past 6 months.

The early retirement buyout program is a first for the legacy tech giant founded in 1975.

Edited by: Karl Sexton
Wesley Rahn Editor and reporter focusing on geopolitics and current affairs

Amid AI shift, tech firms like Microsoft cut staff and alter pay

24.04.2026, DPA

Photo: Amazon/dpa-tmn

Microsoft is rolling out voluntary buyouts for some of its US employees, a first for the 51-year-old tech giant as it adjusts to the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).

The one-time retirement programme is open to eligible workers at the senior director level and below who have a combined age and years of service totalling at least 70.

Some 7% of Microsoft's US workforce meets this criterion, as per a source familiar with the situation.

Employees are set to receive detailed information on May 7, but those on sales incentive plans won't qualify.

The initiative comes as Microsoft increases its spending on data centres to meet the rising demand for AI-driven cloud services, a trend that's also being seen in companies like Alphabet and Amazon.

At the same time, the software industry as a whole is facing challenges, especially with new AI coding tools from firms like Anthropic potentially upending traditional business models.

Microsoft has already taken measures to reduce expenses, including several rounds of layoffs last year. By June 2025, the company had around 228,000 employees worldwide, with roughly 125,000 in the US.

Alongside the buyouts, Microsoft is also adjusting its employee compensation structure. Managers won't have to tie stock awards directly to cash bonuses anymore, giving them more flexibility to recognize performance. Plus, the company is simplifying its performance review system, cutting the number of pay options for managers from nine to five.

These changes underscore Microsoft's ongoing efforts to streamline operations and shift resources as it prepares for long-term growth in the AI age.

The news comes as US tech giant Meta prepares to cut 10% of its workforce next month as it invests heavily in AI, according to local reports.

The company, which owns social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, told employees in an internal email that the major round of redundancies is to be made on May 20, US media reports say.

Meta had just under 79,000 employees at the turn of the year, meaning the cuts are likely to affect nearly 8,000 people. In addition, some 6,000 vacant positions will not be filled.

The reason given for the redundancies was a desire to make the company more efficient and balance expenditure.

Meta is investing heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure. For this year alone, capital investments of between $115 billion and $135 billion have been promised.

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

Samsung workers rally, call for larger share of AI profits

Muna Turki 

DW with AP, AFP, Reuters

 23/04/2026 

Unions at Samsung are threatening a weekslong strike if demands are not met. A production halt at one of the world's largest memory chipmakers could disrupt global chip supplies.

“Make compensation transparent and remove maximum limits on bonuses!”

 read signs at the protest

.Image: Jung Ui-Chel/Matrix Images/picture alliance


About 40,000 Samsung Electronics workers rallied on Thursday, demanding a larger share of the company's booming profits.

Unions warned they could launch an 18-day strike if their demands are not met, potentially disrupting the production of chips necessary to feed the growing AI industry.

The South Korean giant said it would continue efforts to reach a swift agreement in ongoing wage negotiations.

What are Samsung unions demands?

Samsung unions said the company failed to offer an adequate pay package despite its strong performance. Samsung's shares have surged nearly 300% over the past year, driven by demand for AI chips.

The unions want Samsung to remove the cap on bonus pay, among other demands. The cap is currently set at 50% of the annual base salary.

The unions say that a chip division employee earning 76 million won ($51,000, €44,000) would receive a 2025 bonus of 38 million won ($26,000, € 22,000). This is less than a third of what a worker in a similar role at rival company SK Hynix would receive. Last September, SK Hynix agreed to scrap its bonus cap.

SK Hynix is the direct rival of Samsung Electronics. The two South Korean companies produce together about two-thirds of the world's memory chips.

SK Hynix overtook Samsung to become Nvidia's main supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

This union-led protest took place at largest single semiconductor manufacturing site globally in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on April 23, 2026.

Image: Jung Ui-Chel/Matrix Images/picture alliance

Strikes threaten AI chips supply

Samsung has rejected union demands to remove the bonus cap but says it will offer additional funding so memory division workers, who develop memory chips, earn more than competitors this year.

If talks fail, unions plan an 18-day strike starting May 21. They say a halt of production could cost the company more than 1 trillion won ($700 million, €600 million) per day.

Even a short disruption could damage customer trust and take years to recover from, Samsung officials say.

Chipmakers have benefited from the AI boom, but the Middle East conflict has raised concerns about supply chains. The crisis has restricted access to key materials such as helium and pushed up energy costs.

Samsung, long known for resisting unions, saw its first-ever worker strike in 2024..

Edited by: Alex Berry

UK: Health data listed for sale on Alibaba in China

Mark Hallam

DW with Reuters, AP, open source materia

 23/04/2026 

The British government is investigating how health data volunteered to a charity for research purposes wound up for sale via three vendors on the Alibaba e-commerce site in China. One listing had 500,000 people's data.

Biobanks, in this case in Paris, collect, collate, store and manage samples and health data en masse, making the anonymized data available to accredited researchers

Image: Thomas Samson/AFP

A UK government minister told Parliament on Thursday that data from a health charity, UK Biobank, was briefly listed for sale by at least three vendors on the Chinese Alibaba e-commerce platform.

Ian Murray, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South and a minister of state at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, told Parliament that the charity first alerted the government to the issue on Monday.

He said that the data was no longer listed for sale and that no buyers were thought to have paid for access, thanking the Chinese government for the "speed and seriousness with which they worked with us to help remove these listings."

What did the government say about the data being listed for sale on Alibaba?

Murray said that UK Biobank told the government of at least three listings appearing to sell data that volunteers had provided to the UK charity in a bid to improve research capabilities worldwide.

"At least one of these datasets appeared to contain data from all 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers," Murray told the House.

"I want to reassure the House up front, however, that Biobank have advised that this data did not contain people's names, addresses, contact details, or telephone numbers," he said.

"The government has spoken to the vendor today, and they do not belive there were any purchases from the three listings before they were taken down. Once the government was aware of the situation, we took immediate action to protect participants' data," he said.

The British government praised both China and e-commerce giant Alibaba for their rapid cooperation removing the listings

Image: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto/picture alliance

How did UK Biobank respond?

UK Biobank suspended all access to its research platform as a short-term precautionary response to the incident.

"We have temporarily suspended all access to the UK Biobank research platform, while we put in place a strict limit on the size of files that can be taken off the platform," chief executive Rory Collins said in a message to participants apologizing for the restrictions.

Murray also said that the charity had referred itself to the Information Commissioner's Office for a review of the incident.

"Secondly, we ensured that the Biobank charity revoked access for the three research institutions identified as the source of that information," Murray said.

Biobank's Collins described the actions of the individuals leaking information as "a clear breach of the contract they signed with UK Biobank," saying "they, along with their academic institutions, immediately had their access suspended."

The charity is one of the larger "biobanks" — often government-supported projects seeking to collect and collate various medical data and samples, typically on an anonymized basis — in the world. The systems are often hailed as being among the most important breakthroughs in modern biomedical research, facilitating rapid and easy access to vast datasets for researchers.

"We are still working with Biobank to ascertain from them the specific detail of what has happened. We have asked them to investigate how this data ended up for sale online as a priority," Murray told the House of Commons on Thursday.

Biobanks are hailed as one of the most important new methods of seeking to accelerate and facilitate biomedical research

Image: Erik Simander/Expressen/TT/IMAGO

What other information did the opposition ask for?

Conservative MP Lincoln Jopp, who made reference to his past experience in handling such data breaches as the chief operations officer for a tech company, called the case a "very grave incident."

"UK Biobank is an amazing project with thousands of trusting volunteers," Jopp said. He said he hoped the government would support UK Biobank's efforts to improve security, "including vetting the research institutes which it trusts."

He asked Murray whether the research institutes banned had been from China themselves and also asked how likely it was that the data was now in the hands of the Chinese government. He also asked whether research institutes from "Russia, Iran or North Korea" were among those with access to UK Biobank records, and what kind of data had been listed for sale if not personal information.

Murray said examples of the type of more medically-relevant data that might have been taken included "gender, age, month and year of birth," attendance dates, socioeconomic status, lifestyle habits, sleep, diet, mental health and health outcomes data, among several other things. The minister said that while the charity could not "assure 100%" that individuals could not be identified using such data, Biobank considered the likelihood to be low in most circumstances.

Murray said that as he understands from the charity UK Biobank, Russia, Iran and North Korea were not accredited for access to the database.

"UK Biobank are very strict about who can access, because there is an accreditation process," Murray said. "But secondly, although these three institutions are Chinese in this particular instance, again, the Chinese and Alibaba have been very proactive in helping us, with the British Embassy in Beijing, to take down and whack-a-mole anything else that comes up. And they're currently going through that process."

"Yale, for example, had their accreditation suspended for a breach of data," Murray said. "So this is not a country-specific issue, it just so happens in this particular issue, the three institutions were Chinese."

Edited by: Alex Berry

Security authorities warn Chinese cyberspies targeting smart devices

23.04.2026 

Photo: Sina Schuldt/dpa/dpa-tmn

International security authorities are warning about the risk of Chinese state-backed hackers using a network of infiltrated devices for spying on targeted individuals and companies.

A group of agencies, including the German domestic intelligence service, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, the Australian Signals Directorate and numerous others, warned in a security advisory about "China-nexus cyber actors and their tactic of using large scale networks of compromised devices (covert networks) to route their cyber activity."

A custom-built infrastructure consisting mostly of compromised end devices and large-scale obfuscation networks has been used in various Chinese cyberattacks, said the report, released on Thursday.

Compromised end devices in Germany are also being used for such campaigns, it said.

This particularly affects IT infrastructure for homes or small offices, smart devices and devices connected to the so-called Internet of Things, including networked cars.

The network of compromised devices was apparently used to spy on targets in the political sphere. Sensitive company data is also said to be targeted.

The report warned that the state-sponsored actors could be using the data taken from the networked devices.

It recommended various protective measures, including multi-factor authentication for remote connections.

• Security advisory

(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH