The regulators noticed first. Did your board?
Eleven days before I wrote about the coming wave of AI-driven cyber attacks, the Bank of England, the FCA and HM Treasury quietly published a joint statement saying broadly the same thing. It landed without much noise on 15 May. If your inbox missed it, you are not alone. Most of the boards I work […]
AI cyber attacks are about to scale. The damage won’t land where you think.
A Sky News piece this week put a number on something the AI labs have been hinting at for months. We may have six to twelve months to harden critical software before AI-driven cyber attacks reach a scale we have never faced. The trigger is a new generation of models. Anthropic released one earlier this […]
Two banks, one message, and what it means for the rest of us
In the space of 24 hours this week, the chief executives of HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in Europe and the largest in the United States, both stood in front of their own people and said something striking. Not striking because it was new. Striking because they said it out loud. AI is […]
The Regulator Is Asking What Good Looks Like. Mortgage Brokers Should Answer Before Someone Else Does
The FCA has opened something called the AI Input Zone, and most mortgage brokers will never hear about it. That is the problem. It is not a consultation on draft rules. There is nothing to object to, no proposal to push back on. The regulator is doing something quieter and, in its way, more consequential. […]
Why Your Clients Are Quietly Borrowing Twice
The second charge mortgage market just had its best month since the eve of the financial crisis. In March 2026, lenders advanced £228 million across 4,129 new agreements. That is the highest monthly figure since February 2008, and it represents a 36 per cent jump in value on the same month a year earlier. Over […]
The EU AI Act is being delayed. What that means for UK businesses
In November of last year, the European Commission published a paper called the Digital Omnibus. Buried in it was a proposal that would delay the most consequential parts of the EU AI Act by almost eighteen months. Last Thursday, after months of trilogue negotiations, EU lawmakers reached a provisional agreement to do exactly that. The […]
What the Asilomar AI Principles are, and why they still matter
In the first week of January 2017, the most influential people working in artificial intelligence gathered at a small conference centre on the California coast. Asilomar is the kind of place that hosts academic retreats and yoga weekends. For three days that month, it hosted what may have been the most consequential meeting about AI […]
How gradient descent works, and why it sits underneath every modern AI system
The algorithm that powers every AI tool you have used this year is older than the personal computer, the internet and the mobile phone. It was first described by the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in 1847. It is called gradient descent. And once you understand it, a lot of the magic around large language models […]
Recursive self-improvement in AI, and why we should care
In October 2017, DeepMind published a paper that should have unsettled more people than it did. Their system, AlphaGo Zero, had learned the ancient game of Go from scratch. No human games as input. No opening theory. No strategic guidance. Just the rules. After three days of playing itself, it beat the version that had […]
Why a quiet appointed representative is now the FCA’s first question
An appointed representative tells its network principal, soon after onboarding, that it does not intend to carry out any regulated activity. The principal keeps the AR on the Financial Services Register for over a year, waiting for the contractual end date to roll around before terminating. The FCA has just confirmed, in print, that this […]