The safeguard was the part that broke
Sainsbury's has paused facial recognition alerts at a London store after a shopper was wrongly thrown out, and both the retailer and the software firm agree the technology worked. The human review step is the one that failed, and that step is the whole control.
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Sainsbury's pauses facial recognition after throwing out the wrong man
Matt Arnold, a 46-year-old comedy promoter, was refused service and asked to leave the East Dulwich branch on 6 August after staff linked him to a suspected shoplifter. Sainsbury's has suspended live facial recognition alerts at that store while it reviews its process and retrains staff, but says the cause was human error rather than the software, and quotes a 99.98 per cent accuracy rate with every match checked by a trained manager. Facewatch, which supplies the system, says a correct alert was sent and the retailer mishandled it. This is the second wrongful ejection reported this year, after a case at Elephant and Castle in February, and the wider rollout is still going ahead.
The Register - 02
Free Copilot loses Deep Research today
Microsoft's own support page states that after 18 August 2026 Deep Research is no longer available in the Copilot app, which is today. The replacement is Researcher, and it sits behind Microsoft 365 Premium at 19.99 dollars a month or a Copilot commercial licence, so Personal and Family subscribers lose the feature with nothing in its place. Reports already saved stay in your chat history and can be opened in Word, and Copilot Podcasts and Group Chat go the same day. If someone in the office built a habit around free deep research reports, that habit ends this afternoon.
Microsoft - 03
YouTube counts a view from the first frame from 24 August
From 24 August a view is counted the moment a video starts playing, globally and across every format, which brings long-form into line with Shorts. The old measure survives as Engaged views inside Analytics under Advanced mode, and YouTube says earnings and Partner Programme eligibility are unaffected. Old videos keep their existing totals, so nothing is recalculated. The practical effect is that your view count is about to look better without anyone watching more, which matters if you or an agency report those numbers to anyone.
YouTube - 04
Google opens up cross-user AI agents in Workspace, with identities attached
Announced on 17 August: agents built in Workspace Studio can now run workflows that touch other people's data, with least-privilege agent identities, access management, auditing and data loss prevention wrapped around them. It reaches Business Starter, Standard and Plus, not just enterprise tiers, so a firm on a normal Workspace plan can now have an automation acting on colleagues' files. Worth one decision from whoever owns your IT: who is allowed to build these, and what they are allowed to reach.
Google Workspace Updates - 05
Nvidia guarantees up to 105 billion dollars so OpenAI can lease an Ohio campus
SoftBank's SB Energy will build, own and operate a data centre campus on the old Portsmouth uranium enrichment site in Pike County, and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years, with Nvidia providing credit support for the first 4.25 IT-gigawatts and up to 105 billion dollars of conditional lease and power obligations. To feed 8 IT-gigawatts of compute they intend to build at least 10 gigawatts of new generation, and the first capacity is expected in phases from 2028. Nvidia is also putting 1.5 billion dollars into SB Energy as an investor. The number to keep is not the money: it is that the industry now builds its own power stations because the grid cannot hand it that much.
Nvidia
The Sainsbury's case is worth more than the usual outrage cycle, because everybody involved agrees the software did its job. Facewatch says a correct alert went out. Sainsbury's says the failure was human, and points to its safeguard: every match reviewed by a trained manager. That safeguard is the whole control. It is the reason the system is allowed to run at all, and it is the exact part that gave way, twice this year, in a shop where the reviewer is a manager on a Thursday afternoon with a queue at the self-checkout.
That is the shape of the risk for a firm of twelve, and it has nothing to do with supermarkets. The moment you put AI anywhere near a judgement about a person, sifting CVs, flagging a subbie's paperwork, scoring a complaint, you will be sold the same reassurance: a human checks it before anything happens. Ask who, and when, and what else that person is doing at that moment. From direct experience in construction I know how a sign-off box behaves when the person holding the pen is behind: it gets ticked, because the system in front of them looks confident and the queue behind them does not care. The second thing to write down is who owns the decision. Here the supplier blamed the retailer, the retailer blamed the person, and the man who was marched out of a shop got an apology and a £150 voucher. If your contract for an AI tool does not name the party who carries a wrong output, the answer by default is you.
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