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Chief Electoral Officer Sy Mamabolo said the partnership removes barriers to direct access to the platforms. He said it allows instant action against people who spread disinformation. He also said a technically flawless election can still lose public trust if citizens are overwhelmed by disinformation.

Microsoft South Africa joined the partnership. Abongile Vanda, its Director of Government Affairs, said: "Free, fair and credible elections depend on people being able to trust the information they see."

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is developing fact-checking technologies. Its researchers say generative AI has industrialised the creation of fake media. They say this floods networks with synthetic video, voice clones and emotive narratives meant to manipulate voters.Share

Anthropic signed a $45bn deal to rent computing power from the first building at the West Virginia site. That deal makes up more than 40 per cent of Nscale's $103bn revenue backlog. Nscale said Anthropic could walk away if financing is not secured by a deadline.

Records seen by reporters show building issues and regulatory scrutiny at the site. Authorities issued stop-work orders over flooding and stormwater controls. The campus covers 2,250 acres and is billed as having 8GW of power capacity.

Reports also say the two companies are in talks to double the Anthropic deal. That would add a second building, and possibly a third.Share

The draft is called the Numbering Plan Fifth Amendment Regulations, 2026. It would apply to new and existing subscribers. Operators would check biometric data when a number is activated or reactivated and when a SIM swap takes place.

Icasa councillor Dikeledi Catherine Mushi, who chairs the Numbering Resources Committee, defended the plan in an interview on The Money Show. She said Icasa had no choice but to introduce biometric verification. She said the authority must make sure every number has a person behind it.

Mushi said the authority chose a less disruptive option. In her words: "We could have chosen to completely overhaul the numbering plan regulations and say, 'let's press a restart button'."

She said biometric checks could verify a person within seconds, as with a fingerprint held by Home Affairs.Share

Moodley leads the CSIR's work on natural language processing and is a principal AI specialist. He said the challenge is enormous and that organisations cannot address it in isolation. The Government Communication and Information System helped host the roundtable.

Moodley said a flood of content has created an environment not seen in earlier elections to this extent. He said it is likely to grow in future. In his words: "You do not know what is real and what is AI-generated."

He described the CSIR's election monitoring process and two tools. The Informed Fake News Advisor Project could benefit fact-checkers, but Moodley said it is still a work in progress. He said the audio search technology could be a game-changer for multimodal content.Share

The video reportedly shows Mandela telling citizens to stop voting for the ANC. It says the party has failed them and calls it corrupt. The video also includes allegations that the ANC stole pension funds.

These are claims made in the video itself. They are not established facts, and the video has not been verified.Share

The study also found that the models give less consistent outputs than before. It reports that oversight by physicians keeps the gains in accuracy while lowering the safety risks. The research is peer-reviewed. Only a short summary of it was available to us, so the sample size, the datasets and the methods are not known. The full paper is needed to judge how strong the findings are.Share

Theia Henderson, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student, is lead author. David Karger, a professor at MIT, is senior author. The system includes a "data guard" that protects user data from malicious or buggy applications. The team tested it with case studies and user tests, including a rideshare app and a shared art canvas. Social.Wiki is still early, and the researchers plan to refine it with a wider audience.Share

Alphabet reported adjusted earnings per share of $2.67, against $3.02 expected. Revenue was $127.58 billion, against $128.22 billion expected. Reports said weak search advertising and Google services revenue hurt the result.

Capital spending in the quarter was $51.36 billion. Alphabet kept its 2026 forecast of $195 billion to $205 billion and said it expects a significant increase in 2027. Alphabet shares fell 10.5% in premarket trading on Thursday.

Microsoft shares rose 3.5% in premarket trading after its cloud business grew faster. Azure grew 48%, and overall revenue rose 19% to $92.28 billion. Deutsche Bank analysts said Microsoft's returns did not lift the gloomy mood in tech.

Fortinet fell 25.4% and ServiceNow fell 19% after their results. Jeremy Saltzberg of Check Capital Management said: "Investors are starting to scrutinize monetization timelines versus the capital expenditure burn rates."Share

Reports put the number of staff in the data at more than 41,000, with one account saying nearly 42,000. The data includes more than 21,000 Border Patrol personnel and nearly 6,600 ICE agents. It lists names, work addresses, phone numbers and job duties.

DDoSecrets said the Department of Peace and the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew supplied the information. Emma Best, a co-founder of DDoSecrets, said the data identifies officials who oversee covert and undercover operations and key deportation-program staff. Best said the aim is to "replace anonymity with accountability".

A Homeland Security spokesperson said the department is aware of a potential breach. The spokesperson said it is working to address the situation. Maia arson crimew built an online search tool for the data, called Icepick.Share

Total revenue of $92.3 billion beat the $90.75 billion that analysts expected. Operating income was $45.9 billion, up 21%. Net income rose 32%. Azure growth also beat the 44% to 45% range that Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood forecast in July.

Capital spending was $45.2 billion, below Microsoft's forecast of more than $50 billion. Microsoft said some third-party data centre capacity arrived late. Microsoft shares rose nearly 4% in after-hours trading.

Microsoft also replaced its three business segments with two. Microsoft Cloud revenue was $63.9 billion, up 30%. Xbox revenue fell 2% to $5.4 billion.

Hood said in the results release: "Results exceeded expectations across revenue, operating income, and earnings per share."Share