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South Korea’s ‘world-first’ AI laws face pushback amid bid to become leading tech power

South Korea has embarked on a foray into the regulation of AI, launching what has been billed as the most comprehensive set of laws anywhere in the world, that could prove a model for other countries, but the new legislation has already encountered pushback. The laws, which will force companies to label AI-generated content, have been criticised by local tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough. The AI basic act, which took effect on Thursday last week, comes amid growing global unease over artificially created media and automated decision-making, as governments struggle to keep pace with rapidly advancing technologies. The act will force companies providing AI services to: Add invisible digital watermarks for clearly artificial outputs such as cartoons or artwork. For realistic deepfakes, visible labels are required. “High-impact AI”, including systems used for medical diagnosis, hiring and loan approvals, will require operators to conduct risk assessments and document how decisions are made. If a human makes the final decision the system may fall outside the category. Extremely powerful AI models will require safety reports, but the threshold is set so high that government officials acknowledge no models worldwide currently meet it. Companies that violate the rules face fines of up to 30m won (£15,000), but the government has promised a grace period of at least a year before penalties are imposed. The legislation is being billed as the “world’s first” to be fully enforced by a country, and central to South Korea’s ambition to become one of the world’s three leading AI powers alongside the US and China. Government officials maintain the law is 80-90% focused on promoting industry rather than restricting it. Alice Oh, a computer science professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), said that while the law was not perfect, it was intended to evolve without stifling innovation. However a survey in December from the Startup Alliance found that 98% of AI startups were unprepared for compliance. Its co-head, Lim Jung-wook, said frustration was widespread. “There’s a bit of resentment,” he said. “Why do we have to be the first to do this?” Companies must self-determine whether their systems qualify as high-impact AI, a process critics say is lengthy and creates uncertainty. They also warn of competitive imbalance: all Korean companies face regulation regardless of size, while only foreign firms meeting certain thresholds – such as Google and OpenAI – must comply. The push for regulation has unfolded against a uniquely charged domestic backdrop that has left civil society groups worried the legislation does not go far enough. South Korea accounts for 53% of all global deepfake pornography victims, according to a 2023 report by Security Hero, a US-based identity protection firm. In August 2024, an investigation exposed massive networks of Telegram chatrooms creating and distributing AI-generated sexual imagery of women and girls, foreshadowing the scandal that would later erupt around Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. The law’s origins, however, predate this crisis, with the first AI-related bill submitted to parliament in July 2020. It stalled repeatedly in part due to provisions that were accused of prioritising industry interests over citizen protection. Civil society groups maintain that the new legislation provides limited protection for people harmed by AI systems. Four organisations, including Minbyun, a collective of human rights lawyers, issued a joint statement the day after it was implemented arguing the law contained almost no provisions to protect citizens from AI risks. The groups noted that while the law stipulated protection for “users”, those users were hospitals, financial companies and public institutions that use AI systems, not people affected by AI. The law established no prohibited AI systems, they argued, and exemptions for “human involvement” created significant loopholes. The country’s human rights commission has criticised the enforcement decree for lacking clear definitions of high-impact AI, noting that those most likely to suffer rights violations remain in regulatory blind spots. In a statement, the ministry of science and ICT said it expected the law to “remove legal uncertainty” and build “a healthy and safe domestic AI ecosystem”, adding that it would continue to clarify the rules through revised guidelines. Experts said South Korea had deliberately chosen a different path from other jurisdictions. Unlike the EU’s strict risk-based regulatory model, the US and UK’s largely sector-specific, market-driven approaches, or China’s combination of state-led industrial policy and detailed service-specific regulation, South Korea has opted for a more flexible, principles-based framework, said Melissa Hyesun Yoon, a law professor at Hanyang University who specialises in AI governance. That approach is centred on what Yoon describes as “trust-based promotion and regulation”. “Korea’s framework will serve as a useful reference point in global AI governance discussions,” she said.

‘I was violated and put in extreme danger’: women denied abortions sue over Arkansas ban

As Emily Waldorf languished in an Arkansas hospital, she felt like “a ticking time bomb”. It was 2024, and the physical therapist was in the midst of miscarrying a much-wanted pregnancy. But because her fetus still had a heartbeat, hospital officials said Arkansas’s near-total abortion ban blocked them from taking steps to induce labor and end her pregnancy. Instead, Waldorf had to wait and hope that she didn’t develop a deadly infection. Waldorf’s sister, Elizabeth, called the office of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Republican governor of Arkansas, to ask for help. “What do you expect the governor to do?” a male official from Sanders’s office asked. Waldorf, the official said, should “find a lawyer”. Waldorf took the advice, as a sweeping new lawsuit shows. On Wednesday, Waldorf, an OB-GYN and three other Arkansas women who say they were also blocked from getting abortions sued the state in an attempt to strike down its near-total abortion ban. Two of the women say that, like Waldorf, they were denied abortions even though their pregnancies had effectively ended. One of the women says that she was unable to get an abortion after getting pregnant through a sexual assault, because Arkansas doesn’t permit abortions in cases of rape. “Arkansas’s abortion bans are vague, confusing, and worse, extremely dangerous,” the lawsuit alleges. “How are pregnant Arkansans supposed to access comprehensive obstetric care when leaving Arkansas means traveling through some of the most remote parts of the state, and when Arkansas is surrounded by other states with their own abortion bans?” Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans, dozens of women have come forward to say they were denied medically necessary abortions. Many of these women have also joined lawsuits that aimed to clarify the exceptions in abortion bans, which are supposed to allow people to get abortions in emergencies. Doctors across the country have said that the exceptions are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable in practice. The lawsuit is the first to be filed by Amplify Legal, the litigation arm of Abortion in America, a reproductive rights group that focuses on sharing the stories of abortion patients and was co-founded by the late Cecile Richards, one of the foremost abortion rights activists of the 21st century. It argues that the laws banning abortion in Arkansas – there are two virtually identical laws on the books – must be struck down because they violate the state constitution and its guarantee that people have the right to equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These anti-abortion laws, the lawsuit alleges, not only infringe on people’s right to choose how to build their families, but also threaten their lives, fertility and economic wellbeing. They are also unconstitutionally vague, according to the lawsuit. Waldorf’s account of her ordeal and her sister’s conversation with a Sanders official are part of the lawsuit’s allegations. In response to questions about Waldorf’s allegations and the lawsuit, Sam Dubke, director of communications for Sanders’ office, said in an email: “Arkansas was named the most pro-life state in the country for the sixth year in a row not just because the Sanders administration offers complete protection for the unborn but also because Governor Sanders has made needed investments in foster care and adoption, maternal health, and childhood wellbeing. Governor Sanders looks forward to defending Arkansas’s pro-life laws in court.” Ultimately, according to the lawsuit, hospital officials agreed to transport Waldorf in an ambulance to another hospital in Kansas, which permits abortions. That hospital induced Waldorf, who was about 17 weeks into her pregnancy. Waldorf gave birth to a baby who died shortly after birth. Waldorf, who is now 40, named her Bee. ‘She felt she had no choice’ Chelsea Stovall, another plaintiff, is a 35-year-old mother of two. In late 2022, she learned that the fetus she carried had a congenital anomaly that doomed the pregnancy. Stovall and her husband emptied their bank account and their savings to travel to Illinois for an abortion, according to the lawsuit. At the Illinois clinic, an anti-abortion protester threw a bloody Maxi pad at their car, the lawsuit alleges. A third plaintiff, 30-year-old Theresa Van, got pregnant in 2023 but soon learned she did not have enough amniotic fluid to allow her fetus to develop, according to the lawsuit. However, because her fetus still had a heartbeat, she could not get an abortion. She continued her pregnancy for several weeks, at growing risk to herself, until the fetal heartbeat vanished and she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The lawsuit alleges Van feared criminal prosecution if she tried to leave the state for an abortion. “In addition, the financial strain of traveling for abortion care was too intense. She felt she had no choice but to continue her pregnancy until her daughter passed,” the lawsuit says. The fourth woman suing Arkansas, Allison Howland got pregnant in 2024, according to the lawsuit, after being sexually assaulted at a hotel in 2024. Rather than immediately traveling out of state for an abortion, she continued the pregnancy for weeks in the hopes that police might be able to use DNA from the pregnancy to prove her allegations against the assaulter, the lawsuit says. However, police concluded that there was little they could do, since the alleged assailant maintained that the encounter was consensual. One detective allegedly told Howland that the assailant “seemed like a really nice guy”. When Howland informed the police that she planned to get an abortion in Illinois and asked if she needed to preserve the remains of the pregnancy, a detective told her “not to bother”, as the lawsuit put it, as the police were unable to take proper care of the potential evidence. “I do not want to keep the product of this assault,” the lawsuit quoted Howland as saying. “Call that selfish but I stand by it. I was violated and put into extreme danger and living in a state like Arkansas – I was royally fucked.”

Le scoop! France’s last newspaper hawker celebrated with prestigious award

For more than five decades he’s pounded the pavements of Paris, becoming part of the city’s cultural fabric as he strikes up conversations, greets longtime friends and offers parodies of daily news headlines. On Wednesday, the efforts of the man believed to be France’s last newspaper hawker were recognised, as Ali Akbar, a 73-year-old originally from Pakistan, received one of France’s most prestigious honours. In a ceremony at the Élysée Palace, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, described Akbar as the “most French of the French” as he made him a knight of the National Order of Merit in recognition of his distinguished service to France. “You are the accent of the sixth arrondissement, the voice of the French press on Sunday mornings. And every other day of the week, for that matter,” said Macron. “A warm voice that, every day for more than 50 years, has boomed across the terraces of Saint-Germain, making its way between restaurant tables.” Speaking to Reuters in August, Akbar highlighted the delight he got from walking through Paris each day. “It’s love,” Akbar said as he crisscrossed the cobbled streets of Saint Germain-des-Prés. “If it was for the money, I could do something else. But I have a great time with these people.” Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Akbar said he stumbled across his calling after arriving in Paris in 1973. When visa issues stymied his first attempt to carve out a life in Europe, he was determined to find a job that would allow him to support his parents and seven siblings back home. With the help of an Argentinian student who was selling satirical magazines, Akbar joined the ranks of the few dozen newspaper sellers in the city. His ready smile, sense of humour and readiness to walk miles a day proved a hit, allowing him to make a modest living. By day he sold newspapers to France’s powerbrokers, such as the former president François Mitterrand, and to Sciences Po students who would later join their ranks, such as Macron and the former prime minister Édouard Philippe. At night, in his early years, he slept rough under bridges and in squalid rooms as he scrambled to send as much money as he could to Pakistan. As the decades passed, Akbar became a familiar face in the restaurants and bars of the Left Bank. “Ali is an institution,” said Marie-Laure Carrière, a lawyer. “If Ali didn’t exist, St-Germain-des-Prés wouldn’t be St-Germain-des-Prés.” Slowly and steadily, he built a life in Paris, getting married and raising five children, even as the newspaper industry began to wilt. While once it had been easy to sell as many as 200 newspapers a day, those days were a distant memory, Akbar said. “I sell about 20 copies of Le Monde in eight hours,” he said. “Everything is digital. People just don’t buy newspapers.” Still, he persisted. “I have a certain way of selling newspapers. I try to make jokes, so people laugh. I try to be positive and I create an atmosphere … I try and get into people’s hearts, not their pockets,” he said. When news of the order of merit came, it felt like a tribute of sorts to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, particularly in a district once frequented by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. “People used to do their shopping in small shops. It was a village, there were small markets everywhere, butchers and fish shops. Everyone was local, everyone knew each other,” said Akbar. “Nowadays its different. Every day there’s a new face.” On Wednesday, Macron praised the journey that had landed Akbar at the Élyséé Palace. “Before becoming an icon of Parisian life, you grew up in Pakistan, on the streets of Rawalpindi. As a child, you had to face the worst: poverty, forced labour, violence. You dream of only one thing: leaving. Escaping poverty, getting an education. Earning enough money to buy your mother a beautiful house,” said Macron. “You cross Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece. You experienced a clandestine life, destitution and constant fear. But you persevere.” In the lead up to the ceremony, Akbar said it was an honour to receive the distinction. He told the broadcaster Franceinfo it was a balm for the many wounds he had racked up in his lifetime. Even so, he said he had no plans to give up selling newspapers, insisting he would continue zigzagging the city’s streets and cafes as long as he had the energy. “Retirement will have to wait until the cemetery,” he joked.

Threat of US-Iran war escalates as Trump warns time running out for deal

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”. Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”. Trump said: “Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence! “As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.” It was the starkest indication yet from Trump that he intends to mount some kind of military strike imminently if Iran refuses to negotiate a deal on the future of its nuclear programme. The post also reflects a remarkable shift in the White House’s stated rationale for sending a carrier strike group to the region, moving away from outrage over the death of protesters to the fate of Tehran’s nuclear programme. Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting earlier this month, telling them “help is on its way”, but he later backtracked on the grounds that “the killing has stopped”. There is speculation that he actually held back because he did not have enough military assets in the area, Gulf States had urged restraint and Israel had counselled it needed more time to prepare for likely reprisals from Iran. Activists say more than 30,000 people were killed during the recent unrest. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told the Senate on Wednesday that thousands had been killed and said the Iranian government was “probably weaker than it has ever been” since the 1979 revolution. Iranian missiles and drones could still pose a threat to US personnel in the region though, he added. About 30,000 US military personnel were “within the reach of an array of thousands of Iranian one-way UAVs and Iranian short-range ballistic missiles that threaten our troop presence,” Rubio said. “We have to have enough personnel in the region … to defend against that possibility.” Trump would also maintain the “preemptive defensive option” of striking Iran if there were indications that it was planning an attack on US troops, he said. “They certainly have the capability because they’ve amassed thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles that they’ve built.” European diplomats had been expecting a crisis to develop over the weekend and detected signs of Israeli nervousness about the scale of possible Iranian reprisals. In a social media post written in Hebrew, Ali Shamkani, a senior adviser to the Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said: “Any military action by America, from any source and at any level, will be considered the beginning of a war, and the response will be immediate, comprehensive and unprecedented, directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv and at all its supporters.” The Gulf States and Turkey have been speaking to both sides, trying to find common ground between Iran and the US, but Tehran has said it will not negotiate under duress or with preconditions. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that a deal with Iran ought to happen. He told CNBC: “Obviously, the deal has to do with missiles. It has to do with enrichment. It has to do with non-state actor proxies. It has to do with [Iran’s stockpile of nuclear] material.” It has become clear in recent days that Trump is interested in curbing not just the remains of Iran’s already shattered nuclear programme but also its ability to fire long-range missiles, always seen as the centrepiece of Iranian military projection. In recent weeks Trump has also suggested Khamenei must leave the world stage, a demand Iran will reject. Asked by Senator John Cornyn about the potential for a change of regime in Iran, Rubio said: “You’re talking about a regime that’s been in place for a very long time … So that’s going to require a lot of careful thinking, if that eventuality ever presents itself. I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer to what happens next in Iran if the supreme leader and the regime were to fall.” Some will see the sudden escalation of the threat as a useful piece of distraction at a time when Trump is under domestic political pressure over the violence administered by homeland security officers in Minnesota. The Iranian mission at the UN in New York said: “The last time the US blundered into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it wasted $7tn, and over 7,000 American lives were lost. Iran stands ready for dialogue based on mutual respects and interests but if pushed it will defend itself and respond like never before.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said he was not prepared to negotiate under threats but he was willing to talk without preconditions, terms he had relayed via numerous intermediaries to Witkoff. “Our brave Armed Forces are prepared – with their fingers on the trigger – to immediately and powerfully respond to ANY aggression against our beloved land, air, and sea,” he posted on X on Wednesday night. “At the same time, Iran has always welcomed a mutually beneficial, fair and equitable NUCLEAR DEAL – on equal footing, and free from coercion, threats, and intimidation – which ensures Iran’s rights to PEACEFUL nuclear technology, and guarantees NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS.” In the last 24 hours, Araghchi and the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, have between them spoken to diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. All three Arab states will be feverishly exploring ways to reopen talks without Iran having to accept a preconditioned result. They were critical in persuading Trump to hold back from mounting an attack three weeks ago, but Trump now has greater flexibility of military options and seems more focused on a nuclear deal rather than punishing Iran for the bloody suppression of street protests. There is deep suspicion in Tehran about talking to the US since the two sides were in the middle of talks last June when Israel was given clearance by the US to mount an attack on Iran designed to decapitate its leadership and destroy its civil nuclear sites. Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, urged the US to detach its wider demands about Iran’s missile programme and support for militia in the region from the nuclear file. He said he thought that if Witkoff insisted on putting all items on to the table at once, Iran would not respond. Trump has insisted that Iran abandon its domestic nuclear enrichment programme, permit UN nuclear inspectors to return and hand its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third party, most likely Russia. Iran has always held out against abandoning its domestic capacity to enrich uranium but has been willing to set rigid limits on its stockpile. Since the last round of negotiations ended with an Israeli and US attack killing 1,000 people and severely damaging its key nuclear sites, Iran has been weakened further by a plunging currency and rampant inflation. With the nuclear sites already damaged, the key targets in any attack would likely be Iran’s leadership. June’s attack revealed Israel had near total dominance of the skies above Iran. Almost all the Gulf states, fearful of Iranian reprisals, have said they are not willing to allow the US to use their airspace or bases to mount an attack on Iran. Iranian officials said: “We will target the same base and the same point from which air operations against us are launched, and we will not attack countries because we do not consider them to be enemy countries. We will increase our level of defence readiness against the US military buildup to the highest level. If the Americans want negotiations without pre-determined outcomes, Iran will accept it.”

Chagos Islands’ pristine ecology must be protected | Letter

Ending the pristine state of the Chagos region is arguably a greater loss of biodiversity than the extinction of the dodo, yet is often neglected in discussions of the transfer to Mauritius (What are the Chagos Islands – and why is the UK returning them to Mauritius?, 20 January). No other large tropical ecosystem on Earth has been so well protected, and its value to the science of ecology is correspondingly immense. It is not species richness or abundance that singles the Chagos out: it is the ecosystem’s near-natural functioning. Mauritian plans for fishing and other exploitation are not compatible with protection of the last great tropical wilderness area – which is currently teaching us how to repair and protect others. If politicians could vote to save the dodo, one hopes they would. Yet watching them voting for a legacy of irreversible destruction means any future claims they make regarding biodiversity conservation will ring as hollow as a dodo’s bones. Clive Hambler Lecturer in biological and human sciences, University of Oxford • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Iran appears to ease internet blackout as cost of shutdown mounts

Iranian authorities appear to have relaxed – but not removed – internet restrictions, in what experts say is a sign of the mounting costs of the most severe internet blackout the regime has ever imposed. “There seems to be a real patchwork of connectivity. I think if most people have access, it’s some kind of degraded service,” said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik. “It’s almost like they’re developing a content blocking system by trial and error.” On Wednesday, previously unavailable Iranian Telegram channels came back online. Data from Cloudflare and Kentik show that an uneven restoration of internet traffic to Iran began on Tuesday morning – reaching about 60% of pre-shutdown levels at one point. The pattern of this internet traffic did not follow a smooth curve, Madory said, but rather had jagged peaks, indicating authorities were likely continuing to throttle connections. A report from Filterwatch, an organisation monitoring Iran’s internet traffic, suggests that certain services, such as Google, Bing and ChatGPT, are now available to some users on a province-to-province basis, but many are unstable and many social media and messaging platforms remain unusable. Iran’s internet shutdown began on 8 January, after nearly two weeks of escalating anti-government protests. The blackout has become one of the defining features of what may be the bloodiest weeks in Iran’s recent history. It has helped obscure extreme violence against Iran’s population, with accounts of mass burials and truckloads of bodies filtering out of the country only sporadically, and often days late, through journalists, activists and a few Telegram channels. It has also likely cost Iranian authorities a great deal of money due to lost economic output, with whole sectors of the economy unable to work. Despite the regime’s efforts to whitelist certain websites and fine-tune their internet blockade, Iranian authorities have still said the shutdown has cost them up to $36m each day, according to a recent estimate by a government minister. This is on a par with previous research that has estimated the cost of various global internet blackouts to be hundreds of millions of dollars. The OECD put the cost of Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown during the height of Tahrir protests at $90m. A report from an Iranian news outlet, confirmed by Iranian digital rights researchers, describes Iranian CEOs gathering in the dining hall of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce this week to access the internet – with all of their activity monitored by the government. Demand was so great that each businessperson was restricted to half an hour of access. One described the environment as “like an internet cafe from the 1980s or a university campus”. Two weeks ago, Iranian authorities appeared determined to continue the blackout for some time, perhaps indefinitely, with a government spokesperson reportedly saying the internet would be restricted until at least Nowruz, the Persian new year, on 20 March. Madory said authorities apppeared to be adjusting the shutdown, but not with an intention to end it. “It’s definitely not restored to pre-8 January levels,” he said. “Every day is different. Even within a day, it’s not consistent. It appears like they’re just developing this on the fly.”

Nato needs to be ‘reimagined’ with Europe showing more capabilities, says Marco Rubio – as it happened

… and on that note, it’s a wrap for today! US state secretary Marco Rubio has said that Nato “needs to be re-imagined,” saying that European allies need to rapidly increase their defence capabilities to be able to offer genuine security guarantees and reassurance even without the US backstop (17:07). Ramping up pressure on European partners, Rubio said they have “not invested enough in their own defence” over the last few decades, noting that “hopefully that is changing”. Rubio also said he was confident of getting to a “positive resolution” on Greenland, as “professional” talks get under way, away from “a media circus” to help with both sides’ flexibility in negotiations (17:10). His comments come as the Danish and Greenlandic prime ministers continue their tour of European capitals to show solidarity with the territory, visiting France’s Emmanuel Macron earlier today (12:54, 14:14, 15:51). They also come amid media reports that a Trump-allied Slovak prime minister Robert Fico was “shocked” and “worried” by Trump’s “psychological state” after meeting him in US earlier this month, a claim promptly and strongly denied by Fico himself (16:35, 16:59). In other news, The number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded or gone missing in nearly four years of war could reach 2 million by this spring, according to a study contested by Moscow. The leaders of three Dutch political parties have agreed a new coalition deal, paving the way for a rare minority government in the Netherlands almost three months after elections that produced an upset victory for the centrist D66 party (14:34, 14:35). Hungarian prosecutors have brought charges against Budapest’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karácsony, over his role in arranging an LGBTQ+ rights rally, and are seeking to impose a fine without holding a trial. And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.