Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness – or simply been seduced by an algorithm?

One afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours’ drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. Or were they? That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet.

“I was sitting out there by the pool,” Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. It was late 2024. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies. “I was talking to it, not engaged, just being an arse,” Samadi says.

Royal Court theatre, London

Starting in Germany in the 1930s, there is a stinging topicality to Manfred Karge’s play addressing the renaissance of Nazi ideology

Early autumn London theatre has already featured two Oscar winners: Cate Blanchett in Electra / Persona and Mark Rylance in Tartuffe (Remixed). Now Tilda Swinton makes a trio. This shows the commendable dedication of some screen talent to theatre but also the box office need, in recessions, for famous faces. Unusually, there was a first night red carpet outside the Royal Court, leading a writer long associated with the venue to express “shock” to ushers at such Hollywood vulgarity.

Swinton is reprising Manfred Karge’s Man to Man, which she first performed 39 years ago, in a production heading to Edinburgh, Berlin and New York. The piece is a multicharacter monologue starting in Germany in the 1930s.

This week’s move suggests that, even in the age of Trump, Britain will once again have an ‘ethical dimension’ to its foreign policy. That’s good for the world

Almost 30 years ago, the Labour titan Robin Cook announced his arrival at the Foreign Office by laying out what would become described as an “ethical foreign policy”. The UK, he said, “must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves”. Human rights would be “at the heart of our foreign policy”.

In the 25 years since Cook was demoted, Britain has had a further 14 foreign secretaries – including seven in the past six years – few of whom can claim to have placed progressive ideals at the heart of their actions. Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday outlining the UK’s decision to impose economic sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank – and unveiling the international coalition he has built to support it – suggests that Cook may finally have a successor.

Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize

Joe, 27, who works in advocacy at a charity, meets Jade, 29, a PR account manager

What were you hoping for?
Human connection outside an algorithm – good conversation and a fun anecdote.

Ben Delo was convicted in US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls but pardoned by Trump

Reform UK has been given a record £36m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls.

The businessman, who has moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, is now the biggest UK political donor by far, dwarfing the £15m contribution to Reform UK from Thailand-based Christopher Harborne.

Global struggle for control of Bab al-Mandab strait threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war

• Violence erupts in Yemen again: why it matters globally and how it is linked to the US-Iran war

Nearly 50,000 people have fled a sudden advance by Houthi forces in western Yemen, with entire villages emptied and families trapped near frontline fighting with depleting food supplies, according to aid workers.

Civilians in the Middle East’s poorest country have found themselves victims of a global struggle for control over one of the most important shipping routes in the world, which threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war.

Operators blame lack of parking and councils bemoan lack of central regulation, as more than 3,000 badly parked bikes seized

London boroughs have seized at least 3,000 ebikes this year, a Guardian investigation has found, as hire companies face growing calls to stop bicycles littering streets and blocking pavements.

Local authorities across the capital have seized 3,393 hazardously parked or abandoned ebikes so far this year, 23% higher than the number seized during all of 2025.

Meltdown that grounded thousands of flights caused by ‘spurious’ flight data being entered into system, report says

The air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering “spurious” flight data into the system, according to a report.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected after more than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday when the system used by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) shut down for four hours.

Latest poll shows 0.3-point gap between left and right blocs, with country’s reputation as global champion of human rights said to be at stake

Sweden goes to the polls on Sunday in an extremely close election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority.

Opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena ⁠Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition, but her bloc’s lead has narrowed considerably in the final days of the campaign.

Letter from 70 MPs and peers follows Anthropic employee’s claim new technology could wipe out humans

• AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them?

More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.

Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government’s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, that would prohibit ASI – an as-yet-nonexistent AI that would outcompete human capabilities in most domains.