Kaspersky’s experts have examined the digital interests and online activity of children across the META region including Pakistan, identifying the most visited web resources and popular mobile applications during the first eight months of 2026. The analysis also highlights cybersecurity threats young users may encounter on these platforms, including multiplayer online games, as well as risks driven by AI.

According to Kaspersky’s experts, YouTube, with 31.2 percent, was the most popular mobile application among children in Pakistan during the first eight months of 2026, followed by Instagram with 18.8 percent and WhatsApp with 17.4 percent. Facebook accounted for 10.8 percent, while TikTok ranked fifth with 5.7 percent.

Multiplayer games featured among the top 10 most visited online resources in Pakistan, including popular titles such as Roblox, accessed by children on both smartphones and computers; and Discord, a communication and community platform, which were also among the resources used by children via desktop in Pakistan.

Experts note that children may encounter malicious actors across a wide range of online platforms, including gaming services. Multiplayer games can present particular risks, as they enable direct communication with other players, including people children may have never met in real life.

The development of generative AI is also creating new challenges for children’s online safety. One emerging concern is the use of deepfakes — manipulated or fabricated images and videos — in cyberbullying. Photos, videos and other content shared online can potentially be repurposed to create deepfakes or other forms of fabricated content.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026

The Chinese technology giant this year agreed to a five-year lease across multiple Oracle data centers in south-east Asia, according to the report.

The deal is estimated to be worth about $7 billion, with an upfront payment of about 30%, the report said.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Oracle and Tencent did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the report.

The deal highlights the surging computing needs of Tencent’s AI expansion, as the company ramps up investment in developing and deploying large language models.

TikTok owner ByteDance in talks with Tencent, others to sell gaming assets

Tencent recently released a preview version of its new AI image-generation model for professional creators, offering text-to-image and image-to-image capabilities, among other features.

Chinese firms have been racing to secure AI chips as US export curbs tighten and Beijing promotes home-grown alternatives to US technology providers.

Speaking to ‌reporters on Tuesday ahead of the launch, Huawei consumer business chief Richard Yu said the company still faces constraints in the supply of advanced chips.

“Advanced semiconductor capacity remains very limited in China, and Huawei’s Ascend AI chips also draw on that same capacity,” Yu said.

“The capacity for smartphone chips remains tight, even though rising smartphone prices have curbed shipment volumes (for handsets).”

The launch will ​test whether Huawei can keep advancing its smartphone lineup despite US restrictions that have limited its access to cutting-edge chipmaking tools, forcing the company ​to develop alternative ways to boost processor performance.

The Mate 90 series succeeds the Mate 80 line launched in November 2025. ⁠Premium models, including the Mate 90 Pro Max, are powered by Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro, a system-on-chip built with a technique Huawei calls “LogicFolding”.

The method restructures a ​chip’s internal wiring in three dimensions rather than the conventional flat, two-dimensional layout, allowing for denser, faster processing — though it requires more wafers to produce.

Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating ​chairman, said at a media event in Shanghai last month that supply of the company’s Ascend 950 AI chips could not meet domestic demand due to capacity constraints.

DeepSeek partners with Huawei to develop chip programming tools, reducing reliance on Nvidia

Yu said China’s advanced chipmaking still relies on deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines, and that while extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology is “valuable”, Chinese manufacturers are still working towards it.

Huawei would use more chips built with the LogicFolding technique in future ​smartphones, Yu said.Huawei did not disclose who manufactures the Kirin 9050 Pro. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China’s top logic foundry, is widely believed to produce the ​Kirin chips used in Huawei’s Mate series as well as its Ascend AI processors.

SMIC did not respond to a request for comment.

Huawei’s latest phones run on its homegrown, Android-free ‌HarmonyOS 7 ⁠operating system, which Huawei says supports more than 450,000 apps and services. Huawei has not yet revealed a target price for the Mate 90 series.

Higher prices for handsets

Chinese smartphone makers are grappling with rising memory and component costs, leading them to raise prices and shift more shipments toward premium models.

Apple shows off iPhone 18 Pro at start of event

Yu said rising memory prices had added an average of $200 to the cost of each handset, weighing on Huawei’s profit margins.

“We have to increase prices as well, yet at a slower pace,” Yu said.

China’s ​domestic smartphone shipments fell 7% year-on-year between ​January and August, even as Huawei’s ⁠shipments in the country rose 13%, according to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

The average selling price of smartphones in China climbed 11.3% year-on-year in the second quarter to $543, while the average price of Huawei smartphones declined 14.7% to $628, IDC data showed.

Apple ​vs Huawei foldable

Apple announced its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, last month, entering a category long dominated by Samsung ​Electronics and Chinese rivals ⁠such as Huawei.

Yu said he welcomed Apple’s entry to the market.

“I am very pleased to see the launch of a similar product by our peers,” Yu said.

Mercantile launches iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max officially in Pakistan

Huawei currently holds about a 75% share in China’s foldable phone market, he said.“Between September 10 and 13, our Pura X Max foldable phone sales shot up 76% week-on-week right after Apple Duo’s ⁠launch,” Yu ​said, adding that shipments of the Pura X Max, which is similar in size to the ​iPhone Duo, had topped 1.2 million units in China since its April release.

Apple is expected to ship 6 million iPhone Duo units in 2026, with China — the world’s largest market for foldable phones — ​accounting for nearly a quarter of that total, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

The company also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since the device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022, the report said.

Apple did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Longtime hardware chief John Ternus took over as Apple’s CEO earlier this month, with analysts expecting his tenure to bring renewed emphasis on its core strength in devices, engineering and focus on fusing AI capabilities into existing products.

Apple has been seeking to expand its presence in the smart-home market while remaining anchored by its core iPhone business, which serves as the company’s flagship product and a key driver of its broader ecosystem.

Apple Pay launches in India with Axis Bank partnership

The company currently offers the HomePod and HomePod mini as part of its smart-home product lineup, while the Apple TV 4K set-top box is part of its home entertainment lineup.

The upcoming home hub, which is similar to Amazon’s Echo and Google Home devices, will take the form of a roughly 6-inch square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, per the Bloomberg News report on Wednesday.

The hub will recognize individual household members and provide personalized content and responses based on their data and accounts, the report said.

The new HomePod mini and Apple TV will retain their current designs but include faster processors to support Siri’s more powerful AI models, the report said. In June, Apple unveiled a long-delayed overhaul of Siri as part of a broader effort to strengthen its AI capabilities.

South Korea’s SK Hynix union approves tentative wage deal with management, source says

The company is looking for supplies from Gulf producers including the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar in the tender which will close on October 1 and be valid until October 2, the people said.

In a post on its official ​WeChat account, DeepSeek said it was open-sourcing infrastructure for Huawei’s Ascend platform, including a high-level ​programming language called TileLang, along with ​related compute and communication libraries.

“To build a new ‌generation ⁠of independent, self-controlled GPU software ecosystem, the first priority is establishing a high-level language that is universal, easy ​to program, ​and ⁠still capable of reaching the hardware’s full performance potential,” DeepSeek ​said.

“TileLang was created precisely to ​meet ⁠this need,” the company said, adding that it offers “a simpler programming model” ⁠than ​Nvidia’s CUDA, improving development ​efficiency and simplifying code logic.

According to a statement, the partnership brings together Abhi’s business financial solutions with NymCard’s card and payments infrastructure to support key stages of the SME credit journey — from digital onboarding and origination through to decisioning and disbursement.

Through the combined technology proposition, banks and licensed financial institutions can streamline traditionally fragmented processes, supporting faster onboarding, origination and credit decisioning, followed by the disbursement of approved funds.

“There is a significant opportunity for technology to transform how SME credit is delivered in the UAE. By bringing Abhi and NymCard’s capabilities together, we can give financial institutions the tools to move faster, reduce complexity and build credit propositions that can scale — while ultimately creating a much better experience for SMEs,” said Shiraz Ali, Chief Business Officer at NymCard, the statement read.

ABHI Microfinance Bank, SOS Group & South Air partner to offer advance salary solutions

For financial institutions, this provides a technology foundation for introducing and scaling SME credit propositions without having to build and integrate multiple components independently. For SMEs, it means a simpler, faster journey from application to accessing approved funds.

“SMEs need faster and simpler access to financial products, and technology has an important role to play in helping banks deliver that experience. By combining Abhi’s technology with NymCard’s platform, we can simplify the credit journey and serve SMEs more efficiently,” said Zain Ali, AVP – Sales & Partnerships at Abhi.

Abhi provides a comprehensive suite of solutions, including Earned Wage Access and SME Financing, which includes AbhiSalary, AbhiPayroll, AbhiKarobar, and AbhiPay. The company serves over 1 million users and partners with more than 7,000 businesses across Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.

Meanwhile, NymCard is a full-stack payments infrastructure company. It is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, operates across 10 markets, and works with more than 60 clients.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. ‌

Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here ​for the first time.

The public sale, which could value it at more than $2 trillion, would capitalize on the rapid rise of the AI startup lab that only came into existence ​five years ago, and establish it as a benchmark for how Wall Street values AI’s leading companies, including rival OpenAI.

The plans come as Anthropic confronts evidence ⁠from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, including sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests.

These reports have broken into the ​wider public sphere, igniting fears over how companies can keep the increasingly powerful systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the global AI community to slow ​the pace of releasing new capabilities to address those concerns. Still, Anthropic rolled out its new Opus 5.5 model last week to counter OpenAI’s momentum since its launch of GPT-6 Astra, ahead of its own expected IPO.

The AI lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year, a threefold surge from 2024, accounting for more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses.

Anthropic’s public market debut is likely to be pushed to after the November US midterm elections, ​Reuters previously reported, citing sources. The sale would bring public investors into an AI race that has been until now underwritten by venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds and Big Tech companies.

Anthropic declined to ​comment.

A $2 trillion valuation expected

Anthropic’s expected valuation target is more than double its own estimated valuation of $965 billion in May.

The near-$42 billion net loss included a roughly $34 billion accounting charge that reflected an increase in the estimated value of ‌financing that could ⁠eventually turn into Anthropic shares, rather than money the company spent running its business.

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

Anthropic CEO urges AI companies to slow model development amid fears over misuse

Anthropic had cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaling $20.28 billion as of December 31, the prospectus shows.

Anthropic’s debut would follow SpaceX’s recent blockbuster IPO that valued Elon Musk’s company at $1.77 trillion.

That company’s shares surged 19% in their June 12 debut to $160, but currently trade at around $147 – above where the IPO sold at $135 apiece.

That performance ​could give investors pause as they assess the ​still-lofty valuations for high-growth companies. AI and chip ⁠stocks have sold off recently, and Anthropic’s sale will further test whether enthusiasm for the AI trade can withstand greater scrutiny, given its ambitious growth projections.

Still, the listing stands to cap one of the strongest years for US IPOs since 2021, despite elevated interest rates, economic uncertainty and valuation concerns.

The trillion-dollar AI race

Anthropic’s biggest challenger remains OpenAI, as the two firms fiercely compete for business customers, talent and influence in Washington.

OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO ​in June. The ChatGPT maker ⁠is expected to list by early 2027, according to media reports.

Anthropic was founded by researchers who left its rival after disagreements over governance and AI safety. It released its first large language model in March 2023, competing directly with OpenAI.

It also competes with SpaceX’s xAI, Alphabet’s Google and Meta  to build out AI infrastructure.

Analysts expect the first company to go public to establish valuation benchmarks for the AI industry and attract investors who have ⁠waited years ​for a pure-play way to bet on the technology.

Amazon and Google were two of Anthropic’s early key strategic partners. Both companies ​have invested billions of dollars into the startup while simultaneously supplying cloud infrastructure needed to train and deploy Claude models.

Anthropic and CEO Amodei have clashed with the White House over the use of its tools, which led to the Pentagon temporarily blacklisting Anthropic, ​a move blocked by a US judge in August.

Samsung Electronics Executive Vice President Kim Taewoo said HBM and standard DRAM compete for the same wafer capacity, meaning expanding HBM output could constrain standard DRAM supply.

HBM is a crucial component for AI computing, consisting of vertically stacked memory chips that allow processors to access vast amounts of data at high speeds.

The market is dominated by South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, as well as US-based Micron Technology.

In a blog post on Tuesday titled “How we will do better for Australia”, the ChatGPT maker acknowledged it mishandled its response and pledged to take accountability to “rebuild trust with the Australian people”.

The incursion, which occurred in June but was not made public until last week, is the first known instance of an AI agent hacking a government website.

The incident alarmed Australia, drawing public condemnation and a sharp rebuke from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who called it “unacceptable” and criticised the company’s delay in notifying the government.

“In June, during internal training and evaluation our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to,” OpenAI said in the blog post.

“We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future.”

OpenAI said an experimental AI model breached the Services Australia Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, a data portal for the country’s universal healthcare system, during an internal training activity.

“An OpenAI model discovered a way to gain non-public access to the service, and ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files,” the company said. But its review to date had not found any evidence of medical records being accessed from the portal, OpenAI said.

AI agent activity affecting three other Australian government agency websites also did not result in access to sensitive records, according to the company.

OpenAI said it would provide dedicated support for the affected agencies, finance the strengthening of cyber defences for government and industry through its $1 billion global fund and establish an Australian taskforce to develop recommendations “drawing on lessons from these incidents”.

It also confirmed Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon would appear at an Australian Senate committee hearing on AI in Sydney on October 6.

Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI’s copyright

The Australian government has announced a rapid review into the incident, examining potential notification and reporting obligations of AI companies and the adequacy of its laws in dealing with such breaches.

Separately, OpenAI has cancelled the release of its new AI model GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the system did not meet the company’s safety standards.

Shares of MongoDB fell 14% in premarket trading.

Desai has served as MongoDB’s CEO for less than a year, having taken the role in November from Dev Ittycheria.

Meta’s social networks down for thousands of users in US, Downdetector says

MongoDB’s board has appointed Ittycheria as interim president and CEO. It is searching for a permanent CEO and has retained an executive search firm to assist in that process.

In a notice to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Monday, the brokerage house said that unidentified individuals or groups had created fake social media accounts and pages, including on Facebook, using the names, photographs and voices of Dhedhi and Junaid, which “are being misused through AI-generated and/or deepfake video content”.

“The purpose of this activity appears to be the solicitation of funds under the name of fake & unauthorized schemes/ advisory for investing in listed securities/stocks,” the company said.

AKD Securities said it had filed a complaint with the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) on September 16 seeking an investigation and registration of a case against those involved, as well as removal or blocking of the fraudulent content from the relevant platforms.

“We are pursuing all available legal remedies against those responsible for such fraudulent activities.”

“The company hereby categorically denies any connection to the fraudulent content, accounts, callers, or any website or application promoting such claims. Neither Aqeel Karim Dhedhi, Hina Junaid, the company, nor any entity within the AKD Group has launched, endorsed, sponsored, authorised, or otherwise been associated with any such investment scheme, platform, account, page or group,” the listed company said.

The brokerage urged investors and the general public “to exercise caution and to refrain from engaging with, relying on, or acting upon any such unauthorised content or calls”.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information ⁠Technology recently asked companies including ByteDance and ​Alibaba to report their plans to purchase Nvidia’s ​RTX PRO 5500 chips, according to the report.

The ministry told some Chinese companies the government intends to approve ​the purchases, The Information report said, adding ​some industry executives expect the RTX PRO 5500 chip to ‌avoid ⁠US export restrictions.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

“US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which ​cover gaming ​products released ⁠nearly a half a decade ago, and China’s own limits on ​US imports,” an Nvidia spokesperson said, ​when ⁠asked to comment on the report.

Alibaba and ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for ⁠comment. Reuters ​was not immediately able to ​contact the Chinese government for comment.

The Japanese automaker has sold more than 2 million e-Power vehicles globally, but the technology has not previously been available in the US, Meunier told reporters during a media briefing at Nissan’s headquarters in Yokohama.

Nissan plans to bring the more compact Kicks e-Power hybrid to the US and Canada “as soon as possible” and seeks to offer hybrid powertrains in larger SUV models and pickup trucks in the future, he said.

Nissan is targeting 80% localisation of US manufacturing by the end of 2030, up from about 65% currently and 40% before US tariffs were imposed in early 2025, Meunier said.

US production of the Rogue e-Power could begin as early as 2028, he said.

Meunier said he did not expect the US market to open to Chinese automakers over the next five years, saying most automakers were strongly opposed to such a move because of concerns over low-priced Chinese competition.

Nissan is nevertheless preparing for the eventual arrival of Chinese automakers in the US by shortening vehicle development cycles and reducing costs, he added.

The car maker plans to launch the China-made Frontier Pro plug-in hybrid pickup in Mexico and some Latin American markets, he said.

The voyage into space would be a first for the ‌South Asian nation. It is part of broader cooperation with Beijing that straddles the Belt and Road Initiative and has produced Chinese-launched Pakistani satellites, a joint satellite-navigation system and a Pakistani-built rover due to fly on China’s Chang’e 8 lunar mission around 2028.

Pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud have spent months training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing for a mission that was conceived by the two countries in 2019, said Amer Gilani, who ​oversees human spaceflight cooperation at Pakistan’s space agency, SUPARCO.

China has not said which of the two will fly or when, but Gilani said a final astronaut selection decision is expected ​in mid-to-late October.

Whoever is chosen will not return to Pakistan before launch, setting off into space directly from training in China and returning home ⁠after a recovery period following the return to Earth, Gilani told Reuters in an interview.

Training includes intensive Chinese-language instruction, learning spacecraft systems, and adapting to both the microgravity of orbit and the g-forces ​of liftoff, he added.

The two men beat out roughly 20 finalists culled from an initial Pakistani pool of pilots and scientists, screened for medical fitness, psychological resilience and, according to SUPARCO’s director of ​artificial intelligence Uzair Ansari, a tolerance for g-forces that few scientists possess.

China launches three-crew space flight as part of Moon ambitions

“You cannot easily find scientists who are familiar with travelling and facing high-level g-forces,” he said, explaining this is why the two men with backgrounds in high-speed flying were chosen.

The details shared by Gilani and Ansari are the first insight provided by SUPARCO to foreign media since the pilots were selected and deployed to China.

China’s space agency did not respond to a request for comment about ​the selection process.

Modest payload

Once in space, the chosen pilot will carry the title of “payload specialist”, which is astronaut-speak for someone whose job in orbit is running Pakistan’s science experiments rather than flying ​the ship, Ansari said.

Of more than 300 proposals SUPARCO fielded from universities in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad after a year-long campaign, Gilani said Chinese institutes picked four for this flight: biotechnology experiments that will help combat food ‌insecurity and ⁠climate change.

Every experiment is built and pre-tested in SUPARCO’s own labs before Chinese engineers sign off — a rare case, Ansari said, where Pakistani technology gets validated on an international platform.

The scientific payload is modest next to a station that has already hosted more than 180 experiments and produced over 500 research papers and 150 patents, Ansari added.

Tiangong’s three modules — Tianhe, Wentian and Mengtian — weigh about 77 metric tons combined and house roughly 14 experiment racks spanning life sciences, materials, fluid physics, combustion and radiation exposure, Gilani said, including some mounted outside the station and exposed directly to space for materials and biotechnology ​payloads.

Reliance on Beijing

The astronaut will fly aboard a ​Chinese-built spacecraft, launched from a Chinese site, ⁠trained by Chinese instructors and communicating in Mandarin in orbit.

Pakistan has no independent launch vehicle or crewed spacecraft of its own, and the stay itself will be about a week, a fraction of the roughly six-month rotations of career Chinese crew members.

The Pakistani astronaut is due to return with two ​members of a Chinese crew that arrived at the space station in May because the third member is expected to stay for a year ​to enable the study of ⁠long-duration human physiology in space.

Since Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 first flight, citizens of about 50 countries have flown in space, but only three nations — Russia, the US, and China — have launched their own crewed spacecraft. China’s invitation to Pakistan is the first time it will transport a foreign astronaut.

Asked whether Islamabad had secured any promise to send an astronaut to the moon under the same partnership, Gilani said “there is no official commitment ⁠or discussion on ​this matter,” adding that what comes next will depend on how “our maiden mission” turns out.

The Pakistani-built lunar rover that ​is due to fly on China’s Chang’e 8 lunar mission around 2028 is a separate strand of that cooperation: it will use AI-based stereo imaging to detect obstacles, judge depth and plan its own path across the lunar surface, since Earth-based ​controllers cannot guide it in real time, Ansari said.

Still, Ansari was clear that the mission is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Pakistani scientists.

The hackathon, held in partnership with Blockchain at Berkeley, was sponsored by Google Gemini, ElevenLabs, The Hackathon Company, Lovable, Praxis Robotics and UC Berkeley Startup. Participants used datasets provided by World Context to develop projects across hardware, software and visualization tracks.

Sortbot, a project focused on building robots capable of sorting different types of objects, won the hardware track. Reconstructors, which focused on reconstructing World Context data in the physical world, won the software track. Reconstructors also produced a simulation that won the visualization track.

The event awarded a total of USD4,500 (Rs1.25 million) in cash prizes.

The hackathon highlighted the growing importance of human demonstration data in robotics. By recording how people perform tasks in real-world environments, this type of data can give developers examples of how physical tasks are carried out, and help them build and train systems designed to operate in the physical world.

World Context Founder and Chief Executive Officer Sherdil Ali Khan said the quality of the submissions was one of the biggest surprises of the event and that the company plans to work with universities to organize similar events in the future.

“The talent on display at Berkeley showed how advanced the industry is in the U.S., and that there are tremendous opportunities to learn from and partner with U.S. institutions and companies,” Khan said. “We can bring these learning back to Pakistan to improve the state of technology there as well.”

Khan added that the creativity and technical ability demonstrated by participants highlighted the potential of human demonstration data in robotics, with students using World Context datasets in ways that were not anticipated by the company.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said in a taped interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “And that has to be a required thing.”

A sudden groundswell has risen in favor of federal intervention after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. Gates joined that chorus, saying that government must be involved.

“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he said.

In a rare show of unity, the CEOs of rivals Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.

But US President Donald Trump and other opponents of additional regulation for AI say new government restrictions would simply give China the upper hand in the AI revolution. Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new laws on AI as a “hoax.”

Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.

“It’s not a hoax at all,” he told NBC.

Gates has said he wants to meet Trump to discuss AI.

“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said.

Axios reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will have dinner on Sunday with Trump at the White House. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the Axios report.

Warnings about AI’s risks are not new. But they took on added urgency this month after researchers in leading AI labs attached both a timeline and a probability to those concerns.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to call for new rules to govern the technology. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, echoed Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event within the next decade.

Some policymakers have proposed mandating a “kill switch” that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models. Gates said that while he was not opposed to some sort of kill switch, it would not be enough if other safeguards were not also implemented.

The US and China agreed to launch a dialogue on AI following President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Washington.

The Medicare breach, condemned by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, is one of the highest-profile incidents of AI agents accessing external systems outside ​the US.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have been sent ​written requests to appear at the inquiry, which is to ⁠hold public hearings in the capital Canberra on Thursday, said a spokesperson ​for Senator Sarah Hanson-Young of the Australian Greens party, who chairs the probe.

OpenAI ​and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

The OpenAI agent’s incursion on one of the country’s most used government agencies may prompt Albanese’s Labor ​government to toughen AI-specific laws it is readying for next year, adding pressure ​to Australia-US relations already tested by Canberra’s ban on social media for teens, tech policy ‌experts ⁠say.

The Senate inquiry is examining the potential impacts of AI and data centres on Australian communities, industries, water and energy. It is one of several state and federal probes into AI.

Nvidia forecasts 70% sales growth next year, signals AI spending boom has years left to run

“There are serious questions for Sam Altman to ​answer about the ​OpenAI hack of ⁠Australian government websites,” Hanson-Young said in a statement. Altman and Amodei “must front up, face the Senate’s questions and have ​an honest conversation about what effective, lasting regulation of ​this industry ⁠should look like”, she said.

Albanese, who revealed the June breach of Medicare on Thursday, called it “unacceptable”, saying he had voiced “extreme concern” to Altman.

OpenAI says it only ⁠learned of ​the breach — one of at least four ​of Australian government websites — in August. It says the incident was not intentional and did not ​compromise any private information.

The company disclosed the development in a number of notices to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Friday.

In a notice to the bourse, TSBL said it intends to apply to the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) for licences covering custody, exchange, and virtual asset transfer and settlement services.

“The proposed applications are being pursued in accordance with the regulatory framework established under the Virtual Assets Act, 2026, which provides for the licensing, regulation and supervision of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) in Pakistan,” read the notice.

PVARA is the regulatory authority responsible for licensing and supervising VASPs and has prescribed various categories of virtual asset services.

 “The proposed initiative is intended to enable the company to explore opportunities in the emerging virtual asset ecosystem within the applicable legal and regulatory framework,” TSBL said.

“The company has not commenced any such regulated virtual asset services and shall not undertake activities requiring regulatory authorisation unless and until the requisite approvals and licenseş are obtained,” it added.

PVARA was formally approved by the Federal Cabinet on July 8, 2025, as a landmark step to establish a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for the country’s digital assets ecosystem. President Asif Ali Zardari gave his assent to the “Virtual Assets Act, 2025” on July 9, 2025, which officially established PVARA as an autonomous federal body. The

In a separate notice, TSBL said it was considering an initiative to launch a series of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs).

“The proposed initiative is intended to enable TSBL to participate in and facilitate opportunities relating to the formation, structuring, public offering and listing of SPACs in accordance with the applicable regulatory framework governing SPACs in Pakistan,” it said.

The board has advised the company to proceed with necessary steps and seek further regulatory clearances and shareholder approvals, TSBL said.

“The proposed SPAC initiative is at a preliminary stage, and no definitive transaction, offering, acquisition or merger has been concluded or approved as of the date of this announcement,” TSBL added.

Ping Up, a Karachi- and London-based wealth aggregator, is one of the companies making that pitch.

In an exclusive interview with Business Recorder, co-founders Wajahat Jafri and Syed Affan Aslam laid out both halves of the business – a consumer wealth app that has been running for two and a half years, and an AI-driven capital-markets infrastructure push they’re just beginning to build.

The gap between how confidently they describe those two things and how much of either currently exists is worth examining closely, and Ping Up’s own numbers, laid out plainly and at length by its founders, illustrate it well.

“Educate, enable, empower”

Jafri and Aslam’s account of the problem comes from direct experience. Jafri spent, in his words, a “good 14, 15 years in the banking industry,” with Aslam coming from a similar background. We discussed the period before Ping Up existed, and Jafri spoke of the origin and mission: “We had written out almost four to five pointers, and at the top of them was financial literacy.”

That diagnosis shaped the company’s structure around “three pillars: educate, enable, and empower,” he said.

“We wanted to educate them first… and obviously then once they are enabled, the empowerment will be there.” In “very simple words”, Ping Up is “a wealth management platform which is bridging a gap between investors and financial products through financial literacy”.

The consumer side is a marketplace, not an advisor – a distinction both founders returned to repeatedly. “We treat ourselves as a marketplace, not advisors,” Aslam said.

“Although we have the licence to advise, we do not advise … We will educate them about everything, but the decision is going to be theirs.”

Suitability is handled through an in-app calculator rather than personal recommendation, steering shorter-term investors away from high-risk funds automatically.

On revenue, Aslam was specific: “Our main source of revenue is our management fee, which comes from assets under management,” alongside a “front-end load, which is basically a sales transactional commission.”

On the B2B side, “we charge a development and integration fee, and then there is a recurring maintenance fee.”

Jafri added a point he considered important: the management fee is “something we charge, but not to the customers. We get it from our product partners. So from the customer’s point of view, it is absolutely free.”

Inherited infrastructure

Aslam traced Ping Up’s technology strategy to an explicit model: BlackRock, which built its Aladdin platform and, in doing so, “was able to capture a lot of data streams across the world.”

Ping Up’s ambition, he said, is similar – partnering with asset managers and financial markets “so that we can get access to that entire infrastructure… It’s a complete strategy of five, six years.”

Asked what would make the company’s growth targets realistic rather than aspirational, Aslam didn’t point to marketing or funding: “infrastructure,” he said.

“Other digital distributors or asset management companies usually focus on their AUM [Assets Under Management]… We like to call ourselves a wealth management infrastructure provider.”

What’s actually live

That infrastructure ambition extends furthest into Ping Up’s newest line of work: AI agents built for banks and asset managers rather than Ping Up’s own retail customers.

“We are also the pioneers in AI in the capital market,” Aslam said, citing one of Pakistan’s largest banks deploying Ping Up’s AI bots “across 12,000 branches.”

The pitch to institutions is cost and reach: an AI bot works around the clock at a fraction of the staffing cost, and “you don’t really have to queue up to get advice.”

Scaled up, he said, this kind of infrastructure could eventually help process “about 7% of the overall retail bulk in the country – that is our aspiration.”

None of it is live yet, however. Asked directly, Aslam was clear: it’s in pilot, targeting launch in “the next three months.”

Both founders were emphatic that Ping Up itself does not advise customers, precisely so it can avoid the liability that comes with giving financial advice.

But the AI agents they described are explicitly built to replace bank staff who, in Aslam’s words, currently “advise people about different sorts of mutual funds.”

Asked who is responsible if an AI-generated recommendation causes harm, Aslam didn’t hedge: “If we have this licence, we will be held responsible” for the output – a direct answer, but one that puts Ping Up squarely into the advisory liability its consumer product was structured to avoid, just on the B2B side.

On the underlying technical risk, Aslam was candid: “AI also has a lot of problems… hallucinations” among them. Ping Up’s approach keeps anything numerical outside generative models – “LLMs were never created to do mathematics” – reserving them for natural-language interaction, where it cannot be 100% accurate, because they are statistical.

“If anyone in the world is saying that it can be 100% perfect, they must be lying.”

The 20 billion figure, unpacked

Jafri and Aslam’s standout Ping Up figure is Rs20 billion. This number was once the 2030 target, but Ping Up reached it four years early. “Yes, Rs20 billion was the target we set for 2030, but we have achieved this in 2026,” Jafri said.

“This shows the interest the customers are taking in the product.” The gross wealth volume processed in 2026 accounts for Rs8 billion.

One distinction is worth keeping in mind: the Rs20 billion figure describes cumulative volume processed over time – a flow, not a snapshot – while current AUM was separately cited at roughly the same figure.

That the two happen to coincide is worth noting rather than assuming they describe the same thing; AUM measures what’s currently invested at a point in time, while the cumulative figure includes money since withdrawn or moved elsewhere. Alongside both sits gross revenue of roughly Rs100 million last year, around 12,000 active customers, and 40,000 to 50,000 total app downloads since launch.

Funding and financing

On financing, the founders were specific and largely consistent.

A friends-and-family pre-seed round came first, and then again in “23… we did another round, and that was it.”

Since October 2023, Aslam said, “we have not raised any funds further” – the business has instead been “running it profitably and cash flow positively. Whatever we make goes back into the system.”

Valuation moved quickly in the early rounds: from $400,000 to $3.2 million within a year of entering the market, to $10 million at the most recent round.

The investor base, notably, isn’t the venture-capital or family-office money common in fintech origin stories.

Aslam framed the lack of outside funding as differentiation rather than constraint: “We did not do any venture capital or any family office round as yet… usually products go through the cycle of burning cash, and they keep raising funds. We are very different. We almost run a product company like a utility store… operating at 75%+ gross margin, and cash flow positive.”

If accurate, that’s an unusual position for a fintech at this stage.

Who is this actually for?

On the core question – is Ping Up bringing new people into capital markets or making it easier for people who were investing anyway – Aslam offered a checkable claim: “most of our customers never invested in mutual funds,” evidenced by fresh account creation at the country’s four largest asset managers, which together hold more than 60% of industry AUM.

When an onboarding flag doesn’t show a pre-existing account, he argued, “it simply means that they were never onboarded.” It’s a plausible mechanism, though the interview didn’t include any independent verification of the underlying data.

Jafri was candid that Ping Up’s ambition runs in two directions at once – toward genuinely new investors, and toward existing ones that the company wants to diversify across more products under “one CNIC.”

On why retail participation remains so low in the first place, both founders didn’t hesitate to point to “financial literacy, more than anything,” with Aslam recalling personally that he himself “did not have a mutual fund account when I started,” despite having learned about them. “A lot of people did not even know what mutual funds were.”

What would prove it

Asked what would convince them, five years out, that Ping Up had materially expanded participation in Pakistan’s capital markets, Aslam pointed to customer net worth growing over time as the metric he personally tracks: “If I help you increase your overall wealth over time… then Ping Up will be successful. If we are not able to do it, we won’t be successful.”

Jafri was more concrete, citing the company’s actual internal target: reaching “almost half a million” customers by 2030 – up from roughly 12,000 active today.

That’s a real, falsifiable number, offered without hedging.

It sits alongside a small but telling lesson from the Rs20 billion figure: Ping Up’s own 2030 target is being reached by 2026, four years ahead of schedule.

Jafri framed the stakes regionally: “We are competing with our neighbouring countries like India and Bangladesh, where the penetration is almost double-digit percentages of their GDP. We are still on the single-digit side.”

Whether AI infrastructure, still in pilot, becomes the thing that closes the gap – or simply a newer story layered onto numbers that remain modest by regional standards – is a question this interview leaves open, and one only the next few years of disclosed figures will answer.

Huawei Pakistan CEO Ethan Sun was also present.

Speaking on the occasion, Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication said that Digital Nation Pakistan is built on the vision of developing a skilled, future-ready workforce that can compete and create value in global markets. She emphasised that Pakistan is moving decisively from being a consumer of technology to becoming a creator, builder and exporter of digital solutions, powered by the skills and innovation of its people.

The Minister said that the establishment of the Repair Centre represents an important step in strengthening Pakistan’s digital and telecom ecosystem, while creating greater local capacity and expertise. She appreciated Huawei’s investment in Pakistan and its commitment to knowledge transfer and capacity building, noting that such partnerships strengthen the resilience of the country’s telecom infrastructure and contribute to a more capable, connected and digitally empowered Pakistan.

Ethan Sun, CEO of Huawei Pakistan, said: “Huawei is proud to partner with Pakistan in building sustainable technical expertise. This centre reflects our vision of translating global technology into local capability, ensuring faster service and stronger networks for the country.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026

The funding comes on top of a 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion) bond issue aimed at retail investors this ​month, and is likely to prompt further scrutiny of SoftBank’s finances, ​which could be vulnerable should market sentiment turn against OpenAI ⁠and other AI firms.

SoftBank has committed $64.6 billion to OpenAI as well as ​billions more in related AI infrastructure projects, part of founder Masayoshi Son’s ​push to make the Japanese conglomerate a dominant investor in the sector.

SoftBank issued dollar-denominated senior notes of $1 billion at a 3-1/2-year term, $4.5 billion at 5-1/2 years and $4.5 ​billion at 7-1/2 years, a filing showed. The bonds pay interest rates ​of 8.625%, 9.25% and 9.75% respectively.

It also issued two €500 million tranches of euro-denominated senior ‌notes ⁠with terms of four and six years, yielding 7.125% and 8%, the filing showed.

The cost of insuring SoftBank’s debt against default has shot up since June, with the five-year credit default swap spread exceeding 400 basis ​points this week, ​up from around ⁠280 basis points in June and around 200 basis points in October 2025.

SoftBank’s share price, however, rose more ​than 6% in morning trading on Thursday after Tokyo ​markets ⁠were closed from Monday to Wednesday this week for national holidays.

SoftBank says it aims to keep the ratio of loans to the total value of ⁠its ​assets under 25% in normal conditions, rising ​to 35% in extraordinary circumstances.

At the end of June this year its loan-to-value ratio stood at ​13%.

Apple’s upgraded Mac Minis and Mac Studios ‌which can cost nearly $20,000 and handle AI tasks locally will go head-to-head against new desktop machines that Nvidia and PC makers are rolling out, expected to be the focus of a Microsoft Windows event in San Francisco next month.

The new Macs are aimed at more intense AI tasks such as writing code or carrying out complex business work without paying for “tokens” — the fundamental unit of ​AI computing — from cloud leaders such as OpenAI or Anthropic.

Apple hopes its experience squeezing performance out of battery-powered devices like iPhones will help it take ​a bite out of Microsoft’s home turf. But it’s a steep challenge: Apple has about 4.6% of the enterprise desktop market ⁠versus 91.3% for Windows, according to IDC’s Linn Huang.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was famously ambivalent about enterprise computing because end users couldn’t pick their favorite products. But ​Apple has found itself in a strong position for AI desktops thanks in part to a longstanding obsession with saving power.

When Apple rolled out its first Apple Silicon ​chips in 2020, it took two kinds of chips — computing and memory — that were separate in PCs and crammed them together in a unified memory architecture for better battery life.

That close connection between computing and memory, which Nvidia and others have only recently shifted toward, had the side effect of making Macs good at AI. Apple started selling out of Mac Minis as OpenClaw, an ​open-source agentic AI tool, took off in markets such as China.

While Mac Studios were initially aimed at content creators editing videos or music, Apple has quietly slipped ​in exotic AI features, such as bespoke chip-to-chip networking called RDMA over Thunderbolt, over the past two years.

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At its launch event this month, Apple showed four Mac Studios strung together to ‌run an ⁠AI model with a trillion parameters — a measure of complexity — to find and fix a graphics coding bug. Such tasks usually require a data center, but the stack of Macs runs off one wall outlet.

“Once you have the machine on your desk, you’ve paid for it. And I believe we provide absolutely great value, not only in terms of performance, but cost,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “There’s no cost per token. You’re just using the machine again and again.”

Microsoft is chasing the same ​market for what CEO Satya Nadella calls ​the “unmetered intelligence” of on-device AI. Nadella ⁠has also said Microsoft plans to roll many of its AI features into a “super app” for Windows.

But Microsoft’s historic first place in corporate computing meant supporting hardware from a huge range of vendors, which can create more work for Windows developers looking ​to get the most out of a given chip.

Reached for comment, Microsoft said it has been working with chip partners ​to streamline AI work ⁠with its Windows ML tools and that features such as RDMA are an active area of investment. Nvidia declined to comment, but at the launch of its new PC chip this summer, CEO Jensen Huang downplayed any intention to compete directly with Apple, saying Nvidia is focused on expanding what Windows PCs can accomplish.

Nvidia’s stronghold remains the data center. ⁠Srouji said ​Apple is pitching corporate buyers on the idea that on-device AI models developed on its devices can ​scale up to its priciest Mac Studios or down to its cheapest iPhones and iPads, because their chips share common principles and designs.

“There is so much power you can pump into the data center,” Srouji ​said. “We’re offering a variety of products that customers can choose based on their own needs: Which computer, which product do I need?

The company ​also unveiled Zhenwu V900 AI ‌chip, ⁠saying it is the most powerful in China with three times ​the ​performance ⁠of its predecessor.

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Alibaba said it aimed ​for Alibaba Cloud ​global ⁠data centre capacity to surpass 20 GW ⁠by ​2032.

The Irish watchdog found that Google infringed European Union privacy rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through three of its specific features – ‘Web & App Activity’, ‘Location History’ and ‘Location Accuracy’ — from 2018 to 2020.

It was the fourth largest fine of the more than €4 billion in total levied by the DPC since it became the lead EU regulator for most big US tech firms under the strict 2018 GDPR due to the location of companies’ EU operations in Ireland.

Google was also ordered by the DPC to bring its processing into compliance within six months. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

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“As a result of Google’s failures, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data,” DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement.

“The retention of users’ location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control.”

The DPC opened the inquiry in 2020 following complaints from several European consumer rights organisations, including the pan-European consumers’ organisation BEUC, regarding Google’s processing of location data.

The infringements included the lawfulness and fairness of Google’s processing of location data in ‘Web & App Activity’, an account setting that processes information related to users’ activity on Google services, and ‘Location History’, which keeps track of users’ location through mobile devices.

Google is subject to three other ongoing statutory inquiries, all of which are at an advanced stage, the DPC added.

According to a notice sent to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Monday, Zuma Global Ltd was incorporated in England and Wales on September 18, 2026, under the UK Companies Act 2006.

“As part of its international expansion strategy, Zuma Global Ltd has been established in the United Kingdom to develop and expand the Group’s technology and global connectivity-related business activities in international markets,” read the notice.

The company said Zuma Global would facilitate its UK operations, with the group progressing towards the launch of SIM and digital connectivity services in the market.

The documents show the subsidiary has a registered office in London and lists its principal activities as information technology consultancy, other information technology services and other telecommunications activities.

Sohaib Anwar, a Pakistani national, has been appointed as director of Zuma Global, according to the incorporation documents.

Zuma Resources Limited: performance and outlook

“As part of the UK market-entry process, formal regulatory engagement with the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the United Kingdom’s communications regulator and the company has undertaken steps to align its operations, customer framework and digital platforms with the applicable UK regulatory and consumer-compliance requirements,” the notice read.

The planned UK operations will offer digital eSIMs, physical SIMs and other connectivity solutions through Zuma’s technology platforms, including its global eSIM marketplace.

“The establishment of Zuma Global Ltd represents another step in Zuma Resources Limited’s strategy to build an international digital connectivity and technology business, with the United Kingdom expected to serve as an important market and operating base for the group’s international expansion.

The company intends to progressively introduce and market its SIM and related digital connectivity services in the United Kingdom, subject to applicable regulatory, commercial and technical requirements”

Zuma Resources Limited, formerly known as Bilal Fibres Limited, is a public listed company incorporated in Pakistan in 1987. Initially, it manufactured and sold yarn, offering various types for weaving or knitting applications and exporting products to Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East.

The company announced its name change from Bilal Fibres Limited to Zuma Resources Limited on August 12, 2025.

In September 2025, the company changed its name to Zuma Resources Limited and is now engaged in investing, partnering and collaborating with other companies operating in the field of technology, AI-enabled services, health tech, EV tech, e-commerce, and other affiliated businesses.

The relatively small number contrasts with forecasts for a boom in the coming years, particularly in China, the world’s largest market for industrial robots, which last month showcased humanoid running and boxing at its robot games.

To qualify as humanoid under the IFR’s criteria, a robot must have a human-like appearance and operate autonomously in an environment designed for humans.

Legs are not required.

The IFR data, reviewed by Reuters ahead of publication, offer one of the first industry-wide measures of a technology that is attracting billions of dollars in investments and producing impressive demonstrations.

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However, the numbers of humanoids remain “a fraction” of the overall robot population globally, Susanne Bieller, secretary general of Frankfurt-based IFR, told Reuters.

This compares with around 542,000 regular industrial robots installed in 2024 and another estimated 199,000 service robots sold that year for use in transport, hospitality and cleaning.

The 2025 data for industrial and service robots will be published September 24.

Bieller said that among humanoids sold in 2025, many were not doing productive work but were bought by research institutions or companies using them to generate data for improving AI models.

Carmakers, key early adopters, are running pilots with “single-digit or sometimes double-digit numbers of robots in their plants,” Bieller said.

IFR has compiled robotics statistics for three decades, and has begun collecting humanoid data alongside its much larger industrial robot and service robot figures for the first time.

Bank of America Global Research estimates that 90,000 humanoid robots will be shipped this year and 1.2 million by 2030.

The IFR’s tally is based on supplier and national industry association data, and excludes consumer and military humanoid robots, while medical robots are classified separately.

There ​were more than 17,000 reports ⁠of issues with ​Facebook, as of 9:11 ​PM ET, and more than 5,000 outages on Instagram ​as well, according ​to Downdetector, which tracks outages by ‌collating ⁠status reports from a number of sources.

Meta did not immediately ​respond to ​a ⁠Reuters request for comment.

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Since the numbers ​on Downdetector are ​based ⁠on user-submitted reports, the actual number of ⁠affected ​users may ​vary.

The dollar-denominated ​notes are split into 3-1/2-year, 5-1/2-year ​and 7-1/2-year tenors, while the euro-denominated bonds ⁠are split into 4-year and 6-year tenors, ​according to the term sheet.

Proceeds will be used ​to fund SoftBank’s $10 billion payment for the third tranche of its follow-on investment in OpenAI, which is expected ​to close on October 1, and for ​general corporate purposes, the term sheet said.

SoftBank earlier secured ‌a $10 ⁠billion bridge loan facility to fund its OpenAI investment, and the bonds will be cancelling that, according to the term sheet.

The bond issuances ​are expected ​to price ⁠on September 24 and settle on September 29, the term sheet ​said.

SoftBank Group could not be immediately ​reached ⁠for comment as it was a holiday in Japan.

Citigroup and JPMorgan are lead bookrunners of ⁠the ​notes, according to the term ​sheet.

“Tim Cook gave us a lot of time this morning. He regards the work that we’ve done on social media to ​be world-leading,” Albanese said in remarks from Apple Park, California, televised ​in Australia on Sunday.

Australia this month took the next step in its ⁠push to improve online safety with a plan to give social media ​users the option to select the content they see on their feeds.

In December ​Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16. Other governments have followed this year, with the European Commission the latest to propose such a ​ban for children under 13.

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Asked for comment on Albanese’s remarks, an Apple ​spokesperson referred to a post by Cook on X, saying he was grateful to share ‌with ⁠Albanese “some of our newest innovations, including strong and intuitive controls to help keep kids safe online”. Cook recently stepped down as Apple CEO after 15 years in the role.

Albanese’s visit to the US comes as industry leaders there ​are split over how fast ​companies should develop ⁠the increasingly powerful technology, and as an AI safety debate roils Silicon Valley.

Albanese said AI entails risks that must be ​mitigated.

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“There is a need for a discussion about what ​the global ⁠framework is for the roll out of AI, because it is moving very quickly, and we need to make sure that humans remain in control,” he ⁠told ​reporters, according to an official transcript.

The Australian leader’s ​comments contrast with the position of President Donald Trump, who has downplayed concerns about AI and argued that ​additional regulation is unnecessary.