FCA chief, Nikhil Rathi, warned of ‘adverse consequences’ if challenge made to settlement, court filings allege

The boss of the UK’s financial regulator is accused of threatening a consumer group with “adverse consequences” if it blocked a £9.1bn compensation scheme meant to settle the motor finance scandal.

Legal documents reviewed by the Guardian said the alleged comments by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, amounted to “an inappropriate intervention by a public official”.

An EU export ban on Dutch tech giant ASML’s machines could force the pause we all need

At this point, it should be clear that AI is a choose-your-own-adventure book where every option ends in disaster. Exploding carbon emissions and ecological collapse? Turn to page 37. Other outcomes include some or all of: the bubble bursting and an ensuing financial crisis; mass unemployment via automation; the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarian surveillance states; raving cults who believe the pattern-matching algorithm is a consciousness; terrorists who create devastating bioweapons; nation states that deploy autonomous weapons systems that act on non-human timeframes; nation states or terrorists that hack all the myriad systems we depend on; or an AI that, conscious or not, pursues directives that are at odds with human wellbeing.

Imagining that people such as Elon Musk, the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, Palantir’s Peter Thiel and the Trump administration tech adviser Marc Andreessen will lead us to a utopian future of flourishing environmentalism, social harmony and endless leisure requires hallucination and sycophancy so great that that choose-your-own-adventure scenario could only have been written by ChatGPT.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now

Exclusive: FCA pressures firms to do more to sort 760,000 accounts as watchdog urges families to use free tracking service

Child trust fund providers are being put under the spotlight to check they are treating savers fairly and doing all they can to reunite young people with lost accounts.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said about 760,000 accounts worth an average of £2,000 were yet to be claimed – more than £1.5bn in total – as it launched a review of the market.

Andrew Bailey, in role as financial stability watchdog chief, warns advanced models risk destabilising system

The Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has joined the throng of figures warning about the global risks posed by the most advanced artificial intelligence technology.

In a two-page letter sent to international finance ministers and central bank governors as part of his role as chair of the international Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bailey said “frontier” AI models were “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities”.

Critics say changes by CMA will allow multinationals to obscure their ownership of vet practices

Pet owners have been warned that they could be unknowingly ripped off by private equity firms who have bought local vet clinics, after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) removed requirements for multinational companies to disclose which practices they own.

The CMA recently ran an investigation into the monopolisation of vet practices, and found that the lack of competition and transparency of ownership had led to high prices and a lack of information for customers. Pet owners were often unaware their local vet practice could be owned by an international private equity company.