Autumn Crunch

Good morning,

The long, hot summer is almost over and Westminster returns on Tuesday with plenty of deadlines coming up. I've got the latest intel below to help you get ahead of the pack.

News In Brief 🩳

Voicing concerns: More than 80 actors have signed a letter to the government demanding greater protection from AI voice clones. They want legislation to give every person a legal right to own their voice.

Robo-delay: The rollout of self-driving taxis on London's streets is unlikely to go ahead this year, the Guardian reports, due to delays with the DVSA and TfL.

Same here please: Meta has agreed to a long list of restrictions for under-18s on its platforms following a settlement worth up to $17 billion in the US. They include a daily time limit of two hours which can only be lifted by a parent and a ban on displaying the number of reactions on a post. The measures only apply to the US, but the UK wants them to be matched and there is overlap with some of the social media curbs being worked on here, including night-time curfews.

Bottlenecked: A lack of competition in digital markets is holding back Britain’s ability to innovate, a report from the IPPR argues. A third of firms polled said they had decided not to offer a product in the past two years because another company already dominated that market.

On that note: Google has agreed to pay £260m in a class action lawsuit at the Competition Appeal Tribunal which claimed the company levied unfair charges on developers through its mobile app store.

Take me home: Nscale has had a busy summer, reportedly targeting a $3bn valuation ahead of an IPO, and on Thursday the company announced a deal with Anthropic for compute at its West Virginia site.