Afternoon.

It’s Friday 11th September: the UK economy has surprised economists by growing, AI is already being put to some fairly alarming uses and battery-powered trains are coming to the North.

Kettle on.

📅 On this day: In 2001, the tragic events of 9/11 took place in the United States. The attacks had enormous consequences around the world, reshaping international security and foreign policy for decades to come.

The UK economy grew by 0.4% in July, considerably better than economists had expected. GDP, if you’ve sensibly forgotten, is basically the value of everything the country produces. It’s the standard measure used to tell whether an economy is growing or shrinking.

Services did most of the heavy lifting, growing by 0.4% during the month. Computer programming made the biggest contribution, helped by continued spending on AI and other technology. Zoom out slightly and the picture is reasonably encouraging. The economy also grew by 0.4% across the three months to July, while GDP was 1.6% higher than a year earlier.

That doesn’t mean everyone suddenly feels 1.6% richer. GDP measures the whole economy, not what’s happening to individual wages or household finances, and these early estimates can be revised later. Still, after economists had expected no growth at all in July, 0.4% is a decent surprise to find lurking in the spreadsheet.

A top safety researcher at Anthropic reckons there's a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade. Evan Hubinger, the company's Alignment Science Lead, says that's his personal estimate. That is very much an opinion rather than a scientific forecast. But this week Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published something rather less hypothetical: a report detailing how people are already trying to misuse its AI.

The company says it has uncovered attempts to use Claude for cyberattacks, surveillance, propaganda and the development of conventional weapons including missiles, drones and bombs. The most concerning cases involved biological research. Anthropic detailed five cases involving scientists using Claude for biological research, including instances where safeguards were circumvented and the purpose of the work was concealed. One involved research into chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus, at what Anthropic said was a military research institute.

One important caveat: Anthropic does not know whether those researchers were actually trying to create biological weapons. Some of the same research could have perfectly legitimate medical uses. Anthropic banned the accounts and says stronger safeguards are needed as AI becomes more capable.

So no, this isn't evidence that somebody has asked a chatbot to make a supervirus and received the recipe. But it is evidence that the question of how powerful AI might be misused is no longer entirely theoretical.

TransPennine Express is getting 29 new battery-electric trains as part of a major order from French trainmaker Alstom. Unlike a normal electric train, which needs overhead wires throughout its journey, a battery-electric train can charge while travelling on electrified sections and then use stored power where there aren't any wires.

Plenty of Britain's railway still isn't electrified, so battery-powered trains can replace diesel on some routes without needing overhead cables installed along every mile of track. The new trains will be built at Alstom’s factory in Derby and are due to start entering service from 2032. Alstom says the order will support more than 350 jobs at the factory and thousands more across its UK supply chain.

They'll form part of the wider upgrade of the TransPennine route, which connects major northern cities including Manchester, Leeds and York. It won’t arrive on Platform 2 tomorrow morning, then. But it is a sizeable investment in replacing diesel trains without waiting for the entire railway to sprout wires.

Britain is building plenty of renewable electricity. The problem is that the grid isn't always capable of moving it to where it's needed. When there's too much wind power for the network to carry, wind farms can be paid to switch off while other generators elsewhere are paid to switch on. These are known as constraint costs, and ultimately consumers help pay for them through their energy bills.

The National Audit Office has warned that delays to the huge programme of new pylons, cables and substations could push those costs substantially higher. They totalled £1.9bn last year and could reach as much as £7.8bn a year by 2030 if grid upgrades don't keep pace. In short: building lots of wind farms is considerably less useful if the electricity gets stuck in Scotland.

A&E departments in England had their busiest summer on record, with around 7.27 million attendances between June and August. There is some better news tucked inside that number. A record 5.46 million patients were also admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours, according to NHS England. Ambulance services were busy too, dealing with almost 2.46 million callouts over the three months. The five heatwaves between May and August didn't exactly help.

The UK government has increased its proposed financial package for Northern Ireland from £1.1bn to £1.5bn over three years. Parties in Northern Ireland's devolved government at Stormont rejected the original offer earlier this week. They still haven't agreed a budget for this financial year and say they need more support from Westminster to avoid cuts to public services.

The extra £400m hasn't settled things. Education Minister Paul Givan said this morning there was still a “significant gap” between what's being offered and what Stormont believes it needs. Talks are continuing today, so one to file under closer, but not there yet.

The Bayeux Tapestry (a famous embroidered cloth) is now on display at the British Museum, in Britain for the first time since it was made nearly 1,000 years ago. Despite the name, it isn't actually a tapestry but a roughly 70-metre-long piece of embroidery telling the story of the Norman conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It has spent almost all of its life in France. Which feels slightly unfair given that most of the plot happened here.

Britain's unusually hot summer hasn't been universally welcome, but English winemakers aren't complaining. Some vineyards are beginning one of their earliest harvests on record, with Nyetimber (a leading producer of English sparkling wine) due to start picking grapes on Monday, around three weeks earlier than usual.

Lots of sunshine means grapes with more sugar, which can produce riper, fuller wines. Nyetimber expects to harvest roughly 2,500 tonnes of grapes this year, potentially enough for more than 1.5 million bottles. There are still a few months until anyone knows quite how good the resulting wine is.

Still, after the summer we've had, it would be nice if all that sweating produced something.

Have a great day.

See you tomorrow.

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