Newsletter
Every edition, in one place. A sober, South African read on AI.
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AI in the tax office, the newsroom, and the fine print
This edition covers a wide spread of AI activity touching South African daily life: from SARS using AI to identify taxpayers who may not be compliant, to a fintech building AI too…
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Access, trust, and the cost of getting AI wrong
This edition covers a cluster of stories about what happens when AI integration goes badly – or gets cut off entirely. The US government's order forcing Anthropic to disable its m…
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Dependency, vulnerability, and who controls the tools
This edition looks at what happens when the AI tools South Africans and their institutions rely on are controlled, disrupted, or left ungoverned by others. A US government order t…
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Policy gaps, access cuts, and who is accountable
This edition covers a week in which South Africa's formal AI policy process stalled, and the questions that process was meant to answer became more pressing. The country's draft A…
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AI at work, at home, and under scrutiny
This edition spans the breadth of where AI is landing in South Africa right now: in a student's workshop in the Eastern Cape, in the shopping habits of millions of consumers, in t…
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Whose AI is it, and does it work for us
This edition looks at a question running through several of today's stories: whether AI systems being built and deployed here actually serve South Africans, or whether they arrive…
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AI in finance, regulation, and who owns the gains
This edition is heavy with financial services: Visa is moving to enable AI-driven payments in South Africa, the Financial Stability Board is urging banks to keep humans accountabl…
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AI in classrooms, boardrooms, and the wild
This edition ranges across several of the places where AI is landing in South Africa right now: schools and universities grappling with what the technology does to learning and to…
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Who governs AI, and who bears the risk
This edition looks at how AI is reshaping financial markets, banking, and identity verification in South Africa, while raising harder questions about accountability and oversight.…
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State AI power and local deployment choices
This edition covers two developments that sit at different ends of the AI landscape: a reported partnership between Anthropic and the US National Security Agency to deploy AI for…
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AI at work, at risk, and at scale in South Africa
This edition covers a wide spread of AI developments with direct bearing on South Africa: from deepfake scams targeting local media figures and AI lending aimed at the underbanked…