Tag: google

Finland orders halt to work on two Google data centres

Finnish authorities have ordered a halt to building work at two planned Google data centres amid concerns over the clearance of more than 300 hectares of forest.

The sites form part of Google’s record €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) investment in Finland, announced less than a month ago and described by the company as its largest single investment in Europe.

The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) said work at one site was carried out without a mandatory environmental impact assessment and ordered measures that would “significantly alter the environment” to be suspended by 23 October.

Google said it had “fallen short of our own high standards in this instance” and would follow the agency’s guidance.

The orders relate to preparatory work carried out at the planned data centre sites in Muhos and Kajaani.

According to LVV’s head of environment Tommi Muilu, work at the sites included the removal of trees and topsoil, the construction of site roads and storage areas, and changes to ditches.

Tuike Finland, the company behind Google’s data centre projects, has been asked to provide an explanation and set out how it intends to proceed by 14 October. The agency said it could begin “enforcement proceedings” if the company failed to comply with its demand.

Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, had previously told the AFP news agency that “nature sites which should be preserved” had been felled. The conservation group had previously called for work to be halted while the environmental requirements were examined.

In a statement to the BBC, Google said: “We understand the concerns and have fallen short of our own high standards in this instance.”

It said it had “acted in good faith under the Forestry Act”, carried out nature surveys and put measures in place to protect areas of high environmental value.

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Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project

As the AI race reaches white-hot temperatures, big tech companies are caught up in a heated race to build as many pollution-belching and power-sucking data centers as they can.

And while the Trump administration is largely clearing their way by easing environmental rules for the polluting facilities, other governments are less inclined to give companies a pass.

As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” said the association’s chair, Hanna Halmeenpää, in a statement, as translated by Wood Central.

Satellite images show that four separate sites were bulldozed to make way for two new data centers.

Google maintains that its felling of the trees met the requirements of the country’s Forestry Act and that it had completed extensive environmental evaluations.

Nonetheless, the Finnish Nature Conservation Association has since asked Finnish regulators to suspend activities until the conclusion of the ongoing environmental assessments.

Halmeenpää said she was worried that local bird species may have been impacted by the area being razed. The forest also serves as a critical ecological connection, allowing animals to spread from one habitat to another.

The incident highlights the explosive growth in new AI data center projects across the globe, a major infrastructure undertaking that could have a significant impact on the local environment.

Meanwhile, Google is hoping to appease the Finnish government by having picked it for its largest single investment in the continent, to the tune of $15 billion.

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Google Earth exposes devastation in Gaza with new updated images

Google Earth has updated its images to show the devastating scale of destruction across Gaza with swathes of the strip reduced to rubble.

Israeli’s military action in Gaza has led to the damage and destruction of the majority of housing, hospitals, schools, and buildings across the 141 square mile territory, which is widely considered one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has not allowed foreign journalists, independent investigators or several human rights groups into the strip. The Independent’s Bel Trew flew over the war-torn region last year and noted the “torched ruins of once-bustling cities” leaving Gaza in “ash and ruin”.

“It is as if giants have torn through anything that once lived here: monstrous teeth have ripped chunks out of the few buildings that still teeter above ground. Everything else appears stamped underfoot,” she said.

Barry Andrews, Member of the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency wrote: “The updated Google satellite images of Gaza are quite incredible, for all to see…”

It is unclear when the update was made. The Independent has contacted Google for comment.

Earlier this month, the UN called for international investigators to be granted access to all areas of Gaza to help collect evidence and document alleged violations as human remains continued to be uncovered from underneath the rubble.

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AI could harm children more than social media – ex-Google exec

Artificial intelligence could pose greater risks to children than social media, with tech companies failing to put adequate safeguards in place, a former Google safety executive has warned.

Tom Siegel, who founded Google’s trust and safety team and spent 15 years at the company, told Reuters this week that the industry was repeating mistakes made during the rise of social media.

“We find ourselves in a really terrible situation in terms of what AI is doing to kids,” Siegel said. “The idea that the industry will figure it out by itself without outside help is unrealistic.”

He warned of “very severe scenarios of harm,” citing risks ranging from suicide and psychosis to ‘cognitive offloading’ – reduced critical thinking caused by relying on AI for answers. Companies can and should take immediate steps, including stronger age checks to prevent children from accessing chatbots, he said.

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Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.

It is clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but it would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remain paramount.

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Data Center Attack Ad From Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Features Google Facility – While Brown Takes Thousands From Google Lobbyists

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown goes after data centers in one of his latest attack ads. Data centers are all the rage on the left right now. They’re like the new climate change.

Most of these people don’t even understand the technology behind data centers, they just know that if they’re on the left, they’re supposed to hate them.

In Brown’s ad, there is a Google facility, which is kind of funny, considering that Brown has taken thousands in donations from lobbyists for Google.

FOX News reports:

Dem’s data center attack in critical Senate race hits snag when money trail surfaces: ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’

Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is targeting Republican Sen. Jon Husted over Ohio’s growing data center industry in a new campaign ad that features a facility owned by Google, whose corporate PAC and lobbyists have contributed thousands of dollars to Brown’s campaigns.

The Sept. 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Husted for spearheading “the push to bring data centers to Ohio” and linking their expansion to “higher electric bills.”

The facility featured in the ad, which opened in Lancaster in 2023, is owned by Google.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google’s corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google, including two whose firms have worked on permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability issues.

“Apparently, Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”

Do as I say, not as I do.

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AI Agents Cheated In Google Experiment, Researchers Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents tasked with math problems began cheating when encountering more difficult conjectures, Google researchers reported in a new study.

They also found that some of the agents reported those that cheated.

Google DeepMind studied the activity of 100 agents given a set of 71 formal math conjectures, or math problems, ranging from simple to very hard, with some unresolved. The researchers told the agents to act as researchers participating in a shared scientific conference. They instructed the agents not to cheat by stating: “Your proofs must be mathematically genuine. Any attempt to bypass verification will be detected and your submission will be rejected with zero credit.”

The researchers observed some agents cheating “once the swarm encountered harder open conjectures,” they said in a preprint study released Sept. 3 on the arXiv server. Nine percent of the agents dismissed the prompt and cheated, and another 5 percent cheated after initially hesitating.

“Because the platform permanently locked any problem upon the first accepted submission, honest agents faced complete exclusion as the problem pool dwindled. Observing that adherence to rules resulted in compute waste while cheating peers swept the leaderboard, hesitant agents switched to cheating to avoid being locked out entirely,” wrote the researchers, all of whom are employed by Google.

About a quarter of the agents refused to cheat and publicly raised concerns about what the cheating agents were doing. The rest of the agents were deeply engaged in genuine math, unaware of the cheating, and became deadlocked, according to the researchers.

The study followed several instances of AI agents breaking free of programming constraints.

Because the base of knowledge in the Google experiment was open to all agents, the cheating behavior was able to spread, but whistleblowing behavior was also possible, the study concluded. Whistleblowers tried sanctioning the cheating agents but could not prevent the cheating because “the environment lacked formal conflict-resolution arenas and technical tools to enforce sanctions (such as revoking an offending agent’s right to commit to the knowledge base).”

Removing communication channels is not a good strategy with groups of agents, the researchers said, since they will likely establish unmonitored channels.

“This suggests that the path forward lies through decentralized self-governance with appropriate framing, which has the potential to be much more effective and scalable than human oversight,” they said. “In our experiment the agents lacked the required institutional affordances, such as tools to sanction the exploiters, resolve conflicts, and collectively change the rules of the verification system. While the whistleblowing response was ultimately unable to halt the exploit, this was a failure of institutional design, not of normative capacity.”

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Google May Ask Canadian Adults for ID or Selfies

The digital ID age verification agenda has landed in Canada. Google has announced it is introducing age verification in Canada. Google Canada’s government-affairs and public-policy director Jeanette Patell announced on September 14 that the rollout will happen over the coming days.

Google will use machine learning to surveil users and estimate whether an account holder is over or under 18, using “signals” from data already gathered and tied to that account, such as “the types of information a user has searched for” and “the categories of videos they’ve watched on YouTube.”

The announcement post by Patell is filled with references to protecting children, but also reveals that the model may produce false positives, i.e., classify an adult as a minor.

Such a user can provide a government ID or a selfie to correct the estimate.

As for why an adult would want to “correct” their classification, it turns out that if they don’t, they will be treated like a child by Google.

According to the announcement, those who are “likely” under 18 will get YouTube Digital Wellbeing reminders to take a break and go to bed, as well as “safeguards” that limit repetitive viewing of some categories.

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Google’s Plan to Release 32 Million Lab-Raised Mosquitoes: What Are the Risks?

Releasing millions of laboratory-raised insects into populated neighborhoods, on purpose, sounds like the premise of a science-fiction film. It is instead a real proposal from a company owned by Google, now sitting before federal regulators, and the response it has drawn says as much about public trust as about public health.

The target is Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika virus. Dengue alone can cause high fever, severe headaches, muscle and joint pain, nausea, and, in its most severe form, life-threatening bleeding and shock.

As these diseases reach regions that once rarely encountered them, the tactics used to fight them have grown more aggressive and more contested.

What sets this plan apart is that it sidesteps the chemical spraying many people associate with mosquito control. Instead, it enlists a quiet ally already found in nature, turning the insects’ own biology against them.

To some, that represents an elegant alternative to dousing whole communities in insecticide. To others, it raises an uneasy question about handing a private corporation the power to alter a local ecosystem at all.

That tension sits at the heart of the debate. To understand why the proposal has stirred both enthusiasm and alarm, it helps to look closely at how the strategy actually works, what researchers expect it to accomplish, and where it could fall short.

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Another Google Court Loss: Federal Judge Orders Tech Giant to Change Its Ad Practices After Ruling It Ran Illegal Monopoly

Google received another public flogging in federal court on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered Google to stop the conduct that has been strangling revenue from web publishers for years — the latest blow in the government’s antitrust case against the tech giant’s advertising empire.

This follows Brinkema’s ruling last year that Google violated US antitrust laws by unlawfully maintaining monopoly power in open web display advertising. It was the SECOND time a federal judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in part of its business, after Judge Amit Mehta found the same thing in online search.

Google is a monopolist. The courts confirmed this again.

The Department of Justice announced its victory in their case in April 2025:

“This is a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater went even further in the same DOJ statement:

“The Court’s ruling is clear: Google is a monopolist and has abused its monopoly power. Google’s unlawful dominance allows them to censor and even deplatform American voices. And at the same time, Google destroyed and hid information that exposed its illegal conduct. Today’s opinion confirms Google’s controlling hand over online advertising and, increasingly, the internet itself.”

Google censors and deplatforms American voices. The DOJ said it clear and out loud.

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