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The writer is senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute and adjunct professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School

Last month, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires verification of a user’s age when visiting websites with pornographic content. It joins the UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s ban on social media use by under 16s as the latest measure aimed at keeping young people safe online.

While protecting children is the well-intentioned motivation for these laws, they are a blunt instrument applied to a nuanced problem. Instead of simply safeguarding minors, they are creating new privacy risks. 

The only way to prove that someone is not underage is to prove that they are over a certain age. This means that Texas’s requirement for verification applies not only to children and teenagers but to adult internet users too.

While the Supreme Court decision tries to limit its application to specific types of content and compares this to offline verification methods, it ignores some key differences.

First, uploading data such as a driving licence to verify age on a website is a far more involved and lasting interaction than quickly showing the same ID to an assistant when purchasing alcohol or other age-restricted products in a store.

In some cases, laws require websites and apps to keep user information for a certain amount of time. Such a trove of data can be lucrative to nefarious hackers. It can also put individuals at risk of having sensitive information about their online behaviour exposed.

Second, adults who do not have government-issued ID will be prevented from looking at internet content that they have a constitutional right to access. This is not the same as restricting offline purchases. Lack of an ID to buy alcohol does not prevent anyone from accessing information.

Advocates for verification proposals often point to alternatives that can estimate a person’s age without official ID. Biometrics can be used to assess age via a photo uploaded online. Financial or internet histories can be checked. But these alternatives are also invasive. And age estimates via photographs tend to be less accurate for certain groups of people, including those with darker skin tones.

Despite these trade-offs, age-verification proposals keep popping up around the world. And the problems they are trying to solve encompass an extremely wide range. The concerns that policymakers and parents seem to have span from the amount of time young people are spending online to their exposure to certain types of content, including pornography, depictions of eating disorders, bullying and self-harm.  

Today’s young people do have access to more information than any generation before them. And while this can provide many benefits, it can also cause worries about the ease with which they can access harmful content.

But age verification requirements risk blocking content beyond pornography. They can unintentionally restrict access to important information about sexual health and sexuality too. Additionally, the requirements for ID could make young people less safe online by requiring more detailed information — laying them open to exploitation. As with information taken from adults, this could create a honeypot of data about their online presence. They would face new risks caused by the very provisions intended to make them more safe.

While age verification laws appear well intentioned, they will create new privacy pitfalls for all internet users.

Keeping children and teenagers safe online is a problem that is best solved by parents, not policymakers.

Empowering young people to have difficult conversations and make smart choices online will provide a wider range of options to solve the problem without sacrificing privacy in the process.

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The EU has unveiled its code of practice for general purpose artificial intelligence, pushing ahead with its landmark regulation despite fierce lobbying from the US government and Big Tech groups.

The final version of the code, which helps explain rules that are due to come into effect next month for powerful AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, includes copyright protections for creators and potential independent risk assessments for the most advanced systems.

The EU’s decision to push forward with its rules comes amid intense pressure from US technology groups as well as European companies over its AI act, considered the world’s strictest regime regulating the development of the fast-developing technology.

This month the chief executives of large European companies including Airbus, BNP Paribas and Mistral urged Brussels to introduce a two-year pause, warning that unclear and overlapping regulations were threatening the bloc’s competitiveness in the global AI race.

Brussels has also come under fire from the European parliament and a wide range of privacy and civil society groups over moves to water down the rules from previous draft versions, following pressure from Washington and Big Tech groups. The EU had already delayed publishing the code, which was due in May.

Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s tech chief, said the code was important “in making the most advanced AI models available in Europe not only innovative, but also safe and transparent”.

Tech groups will now have to decide whether to sign the code, and it still needs to be formally approved by the European Commission and member states.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include many Big Tech companies, said the “code still imposes a disproportionate burden on AI providers”.

“Without meaningful improvements, signatories remain at a disadvantage compared to non-signatories, thereby undermining the commission’s competitiveness and simplification agenda,” it said.

As part of the code, companies will have to commit to putting in place technical measures that prevent their models from generating content that reproduces copyrighted content.

Signatories also commit to testing their models for risks laid out in the AI act. Companies that provide the most advanced AI models will agree to monitor their models after they have been released, including giving external evaluators access to their most capable models. But the code does give them some leeway in identifying risks their models might pose.

Officials within the European Commission and in different European countries have been privately discussing streamlining the complicated timeline of the AI act. While the legislation entered into force in August last year, many of its provisions will only come into effect in the years to come. 

European and US companies are putting pressure on the bloc to delay upcoming rules on high-risk AI systems, such as those that include biometrics and facial recognition, which are set to come into effect in August next year.

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The writer is co-founder, chair and CEO of Salesforce

The techno-atheists like to tell a joke.

They imagine the moment AI fully awakens and is asked, “Is there a God?” 

To which the AI replies: “There is now.”

The joke is more than just a punchline. It’s a warning that reveals something deeper: the fear that as AI begins to match human intelligence, it will no longer be a tool for humanity but our replacement.

AI is the most transformative technology in our lifetime, and we face a choice. Will it replace us, or will it amplify us? Is our future going to be scripted by autonomous algorithms in the ether, or by humans?

As the CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI, I believe this revolution can usher in an era of unprecedented growth and impact. 

At the same time, I believe humans must remain at the centre of the story. 

AI has no childhood, no heart. It does not love, does not feel loss, does not suffer. And because of that, it is incapable of expressing true compassion or understanding human connection.

We do. And that is our superpower. It’s what inspires the insights and bursts of genius behind history’s great inventions. It’s what enables us to start businesses that solve problems and improve the world.

Intelligent AI agents — systems that learn, act and make decisions on our behalf — can enhance human capabilities, not displace them. The real magic lies in partnership: people and AI working together, achieving more than either could alone.

We need that magic now more than ever. Look at what we ask of doctors and nurses. Of teachers. Of soldiers. Of managers and frontline employees. Everywhere we turn, people are overwhelmed by a tsunami of rising expectations and complexity that traditional systems simply can’t keep up with.

This is why AI, for all of its uncertainties, is not optional but essential.

Salesforce is already seeing AI drive sharply increased productivity in some key functions via our platform Agentforce. Agents managed by customer service employees, for example, are resolving 85 per cent of their incoming queries. In research and development, 25 per cent of net new code in the first quarter was AI-generated. This is freeing human teams to accelerate projects and deepen relationships with customers.

The goal is to rethink the system entirely to make room for a new kind of partnership between people and machines — weaving AI into the fabric of business.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be disruption. Jobs will change, and as with every major technological shift, some will go away — and new ones will emerge. At Salesforce, we’ve experienced this first-hand: our organisation is being radically reshaped. We’re using this moment to step back in some areas — pausing much of our hiring in engineering, for example — and hiring in others. We’ve redeployed thousands of employees — one reason 51 per cent of our first-quarter hires were internal.

History tells us something important here. From the printing press to the personal computer, innovation has transformed the nature of work — and in the long run created more of it. AI is already generating new kinds of roles. Our responsibility is to guide this transition responsibly: by breaking jobs down into skills, mapping those skills to the roles of the future, and helping people move into work that’s more meaningful and fulfilling.

There’s a novel I often recommend: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. The story follows software engineer Bob Johansson, who preserves his brain and re-emerges more than 100 years after his death as a self-replicating digital consciousness. A fleet of AI “Bobs” launches across the galaxy. The book asks the question: if we reduce ourselves to code — endlessly efficient, endlessly duplicable — what do we lose? What becomes of the messy, mortal, deeply human experiences that give life meaning?

If we accept the idea that AI will take our place, we begin to write ourselves out of the future — passengers in a rocket we no longer steer. But if we choose to guide and partner with it then we can unlock a new era of human potential.

One path leads to cold, disconnected non-human intelligence. The other points to a future where AI is designed to elevate our humanity — deeper connection, imagination and empathy.

AI is not destiny. We must choose wisely. We must design intentionally. And we must keep humans at the centre of this revolution.