LONDON — The U.K. officially brought its sweeping online safety law into force on Monday, paving the way for stricter supervision of harmful content online and potentially massive fines for technology giants like Meta, Google and TikTok.
Ofcom, the British media and telecommunications watchdog, published its first-edition codes of practice and guidance for tech firms laying out what they should be doing to tackle illegal harms such as terror, hate, fraud and child sexual abuse on their platforms.
The measures form the first set of duties imposed by the regulator under the Online Safety Act, a sweeping law requiring tech platforms to do more to combat illegal content online.
The Online Safety Act imposes certain so-called “duties of care” on these tech firms to ensure they take responsibility for harmful content uploaded and spread on their platforms.
Though the act passed into law in October 2023, it was not yet fully in force — but Monday’s development effectively marks the official entry into force of the safety duties.
Ofcom said that tech platforms will have until March 16, 2025 to complete illegal harms risk assessments, effectively giving them three months to bring their platforms into compliance with the rules.
Once that deadline passes, platforms must start implementing measures to prevent illegal harms risks, including better moderation, easier reporting and built-in safety tests, Ofcom said.
“We’ll be watching the industry closely to ensure firms match up to the strict safety standards set for them under our first codes and guidance, with further requirements to follow swiftly in the first half of next year,” Ofcom Chief Executive Melanie Dawes said in a statement Monday.
Risk of huge fines, service suspensions
Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom can levy fines of as much as 10% of companies’ global annual revenues if they are found in breach of the rules.
For repeated breaches, individual senior managers could face possible jail time, while in the most serious cases, Ofcom could seek a court order to block access to a service in the U.K. or limit its access to payment providers or advertisers.
Ofcom had been under pressure to beef up the law earlier this year after far-right riots in the U.K. instigated in part by disinformation spread on social media.
The duties will cover social media firms, search engines, messaging, gaming and dating apps, as well as pornography and file-sharing sites, Ofcom said.
Under the first-edition code, reporting and complaint functions must be easier to find and use. For high-risk platforms, firms will be required to use a technology called hash-matching to detect and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Hash-matching tools link known images of CSAM from police databases to encrypted digital fingerprints known as “hashes” for each piece of content to help social media sites’ automated filtering systems recognize and remove them.
Ofcom stressed that the codes published Monday were only the first set of codes and that the regulator would look to consult on additional codes in spring 2025, including blocking accounts found to have shared CSAM content and enabling the use of AI to tackle illegal harms.
“Ofcom’s illegal content codes are a material step change in online safety meaning that from March, platforms will have to proactively take down terrorist material, child and intimate image abuse, and a host of other illegal content, bridging the gap between the laws which protect us in the offline and the online world,” British Technology Minister Peter Kyle said in a statement Monday.
“If platforms fail to step up the regulator has my backing to use its full powers, including issuing fines and asking the courts to block access to sites,” Kyle added.
Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.
Laure Andrillon | Reuters
Intel is in talks with other large investors to receive an equity infusion at a discounted price, people familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.
Intel stock slid more than 7% on Tuesday, after rallying earlier this week on a $2 billion capital injection from SoftBank and reports that the Trump administration is weighing different ways to get involved with the company.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Tuesday that the U.S. government must receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for CHIPS Act funds.
Sources told Faber that the chipmaker is now looking beyond SoftBank for an equity boost.
“They need money to build whatever it is that the customers may actually, ultimately want,” Faber said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “And having the CHIPS Act money, which is free, so to speak, no strings attached, become equity is not helpful to them because it’s dilutive.”
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Intel is attempting a turnaround after suffering from years of declining sales and shrinking market share.
The company has struggled to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom in advanced semiconductors and has spent heavily to stand up a manufacturing business that’s yet to secure a significant customer.
Intel has also overhauled its leadership, bringing in Lip-Bu Tan to be its CEO in March, after his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, was ousted in December.
Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump called for Tan to resign, saying he was “highly CONFLICTED.”
The president’s tone toward Tan and the company cooled after the CEO visited the White House to discuss his background.
Bill Gates-backed Robotics startup Field AI has raised $405 million in two funding rounds, with investments from Nvidia‘s venture capital arm and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ family office.
The funding comes during an “aha moment,” founder and CEO Ali Agha told CNBC, as software and hardware reach an inflection point.
“We are growing,” he said. “This funding announcement is to respond to the customer demand.”
The latest round values the two-year-old startup at $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified to discuss financial information.
Along with NVentures and Bezos Expeditions, the rounds included investments from Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Canaan Partners and Intel Capital. Samsung and Gates Frontier, the Microsoft founder’s investment fund, previously invested in the company.
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The Irvine, California-based company also said the rounds were oversubscribed. Agha said most investors approached FieldAI about investing.
Field AI’s latest round comes during a busy period for robotics startups as companies look to beef up their artificial intelligence offerings and improve on efficiency. Two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 startup Gecko Robotics raised $125 million in June to surpass a $1 billion valuation.
Field AI, which includes former Deepmind, SpaceX, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot and NASA employees, creates models used to control robots worldwide and works across sectors, including construction, energy and logistics.
A FieldAI robot.
Courtesy: FieldAI
The “effortless transferability” across environments and limited work on the customer side helps companies scale robots quickly, Agha said.
Agha spent nearly a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and specializes in robotics autonomy and physical AI. Agha said Field AI has added more than 100 positions over the last few months to meet growing customer demands and address labor shortages and safety efficiency needs.
Judy Faulkner, Epic’s 82-year-old CEO, dressed for the occasion in a purple wig with neon green shoes and an iridescent vest, reminiscent of the fictional character Buzz Lightyear from the “Toy Story” franchise.
At the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the crowd that Epic has roughly 200 different AI features in development that aim to assist patients, clinicians and insurers.
“We are combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI,” Faulkner said, in front of thousands of health-care executives packed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.
Epic, one of the largest private technology companies in the country, is best known for its electronic health record, or EHR, software. An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses, and the technology is integral to the modern U.S. health-care system.
Epic’s software, which competes with Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), is used by 280 million Americans, according to the company. Many patients know of Epic because of its user portal called MyChart.
Last week, Epic announced MyChart Central, which will allow patients to log in to MyChart with just one set of credentials, rather than needing a username and password for each health system they visit. It’s equally helpful for health-care organizations, Faulkner said.
“You’ll spend less time handling patient calls and resetting passwords,” she said in her keynote on Tuesday. “Demographic changes like address need to be added only once.”
A new addition to the MyChart portal is the always-on Emmie assistant, which the company said will be able to answer questions about lab results, propose appointment times and suggest relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor.
During Epic’s three-hour presentation, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie as well as other AI assistants the company calls Art and Penny, highlighting new capabilities that are coming in the next year and beyond.
Health-care executives attend UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
The Art assistant is intended for clinicians, and is meant to act as an active AI digital colleague, the company said. Art will be able to anticipate information that a doctor might need, for instance, and can pull up information like blood pressure trends, update a patient’s family history and place orders.
The company also said Art will be able to draft clinical notes, which was one of the most highly anticipated announcements ahead of the conference. AI-powered clinical documentation tools, which are often called AI scribes, can take notes on patient visits in real time as doctors record their encounters, with a patient’s consent.
AI scribes have exploded in popularity as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. Some startups in the space, including Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
Epic said its AI charting tool is being built in collaboration with Microsoft. Epic and Microsoft have been working closely together for roughly two decades, and Microsoft’s DAX Copilot product is already a popular offering within the AI scribing market.
“We’re proud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we can bring our core Dragon ambient AI technology to Epic’s new AI Charting capability to further improve care delivery,” Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a statement.
Epic’s Penny assistant is designed to help with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, such as generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied. It can also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions, Faulkner said. Those two features are already live.
“With all the challenges health-care organizations are facing, we need to make sure our clinicians and our organizations are strong and doing well in order to be able to take care of patients,” Faulkner said.
Epic closed out its executive address by teasing new AI capabilities that are coming to Cosmos, which is a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research. Health systems have to opt-in to participate in Cosmos, and the database currently includes information from more than 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.
Epic said it’s building a set of proprietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data. The company is still evaluating different applications of the models, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to help researchers and data scientists learn more.
Executives said the models could be used to predict a timeline of a patient’s potential medical events, like whether they’re a readmission risk or could eventually experience a heart attack.
“We’re finding that it continues to improve as it sees more patients,” said Seth Hain, a senior vice president of research and development at Epic. “Having only used 8 billion encounters so far, we’re just getting started.”