15 May 2026

Welcome

It’s just a quick news digest this week, ’cos I’ve been fighting a throat infection and, overnight, reacting to the flu vaccine. That said, there’s still plenty for you to chew on.

In the news this week

• My usual tradition is to go through Budget Paper No. 2: Budget Measures to see what’s of interest to this newsletter. But iTnews has already done that, noting “a large amount of investment into sustaining technology projects, headlined by $654 million for Digital ID and just shy of $600 million for My Health Record”. It’s quite a list!

• One item that caught the eye of friend of the Cybers Cam Wilson, now the “national AI technology reporter” for ABC News, is a plan to use AI to speed up approvals for new drugs and housing.

• The government will consult with telcos on various legislative reforms.

• The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will establish a dedicated team for Triple Zero problems.

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Elsewhere

• America’s Donald Trump, with Elon musk at his side (New York Times gift link), has been meeting with China’s Xi Jinping. The ABC’s Bang Xiao writes that they must confront the AI cold war. See also some analysis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

• Speaking of the US and AI, “Ideas about AI regulation within the administration appear to be in a state of flux,” writes Tom Uren at Seriously Risky Business. Such understatement!

• Meta has removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram, meaning they can now read all users’ messages and boost their ad targeting.

• Research shows that datacentres are consuming 6% of electricity in the UK and US. By comparison, way back in 2013 some different research showed that the internet consumed about one or two percent of the world’s electricity generation, but that included everything from data centres to broadband connections to the end-user devices and even the wall warts that recharged them.

• “Data centres in space won’t escape conflict on Earth,” reports the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter. “The trickier issue is governance — how these assets will be treated once they become part of a contested space environment.”

• In Utah, not-quite-billionaire Kevin O’Leary wants to build a nine gigawatt datacenter, which is more than double the power consumption of the entire state. “The data centre wants to buy enough water rights for 20,000 households,” writes Pivot to AI.

• Also from Pivot, news that Google has joined Microsoft in imagining you want to replace your computer mouse with yelling at a chatbot.

• Dating app Bumble is saying goodbye to the swipe, replacing it with AI-based matchmaking. Because of course the computer knows your tastes better than you do. Also, more cynically, because every successful match means the loss of two customers so it’s in Bumble’s interest for your matches to fail.

• Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter has banned adult content, seemingly down to pressure from its payment processor Stripe. “The move increasingly seems to be part of a larger shift by companies that move money around the internet to crack down on what can actually be bought, sold, and shared on it,” writes Kotaku, and this generally means enforcing US taste and morals on the entire planet. I hope to find them time to write more on this.

• Not only are AI chatbots giving out people’s real phone numbers, one was even persuaded to cough up its own secret API keys.

• Unsurprisingly, fraudulent citations blamed on AI hallucinations are becoming more common in research papers, up sixfold between 2023 and 2025.

• “It may only take about 10 minutes of AI use for your brain to start rotting,” reads an alarming and somewhat clickbaitey headline from Vice. But the research they cite, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet, seems to confirm the obvious: “If you stop doing the critical thinking needed to solve your own problems and start outsourcing everything to a chatbot, eventually your mental muscles are going to atrophy a little.”

• When it comes to the looming AI jobs-pocalypse, “The story we tell ourselves about technology and jobs has almost always been wrong, at least in the short term,” writes friend of the Cybers Kate Carruthers. Which is true, but unfortunately “the short term” is where we live.

• A German hacker has hijacked robot lawnmowers across the world, which sounds less than ideal.

• The Observer outlines how to become a tech bro in its review of Theo Baker’s new book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University. Going to Stanford University is at the core of it all.

Inquiries of note

• The Senate Environment and Communications References Committee has launched an inquiry into artificial intelligence and data centres. Submissions close 26 June, and the reporting data is 16 November.

What’s next?

Parliament is on break next week, and then the House of Representatives returns on Monday 25 May while the Senate kicks off Estimates hearings.

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