Hi everyone. Welcome to the second instalment of my newsletter on the latest developments in the interactions between artificial intelligence, digital transparency, and human rights. This week, a South Korean high court places tight restrictions on Samsung workers’ strikes and Chelsea flower show collides with the future…
Governance
GPs and hospitals in England to be required to share data to create single patient records
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/gps-and-hospitals-in-england-to-be-required-to-share-data-to-create-single-patient-records?utm_campaign=The%20Week%20in%20Data%20TWID&utm_medium=email&utm_content=418930885&utm_source=hs_email
Overlooked amid Starmer’s death throes and the local elections, last week’s Kings Speech announced the NHS Modernisation Bill. One of its central proposals is a legal requirement for all NHS service providers, including GPs and hospitals, to share patient data in a Single Patient Record. Currently, some emergency information like ongoing medication and known allergies is shared. But GPs often have to wait for emails from hospitals describing their patients’ last visits, which can take weeks to arrive. Proponents of the Bill argue that this centralisation will streamline healthcare provision by eliminating these delays.
Clearly, different service providers’ patient data must be accurate before centralisation into a SPR. That’s not the case. Research commissioned by Healthwatch, an independent body that monitors NHS services’ effectiveness, found that 23% of respondents had noticed errors or inconsistencies in their medical records. 16% of these errors were about their previous medication history. A separate audit of over 30,000 surgical patient records found coding errors in 51% (!?) of admissions.
Given the fragmentation of healthcare services and their varying legal distances from the Department of Health and Social Care which will be the legal data controller and custodian under the Bill, establishing accountability for incorrect data in SPR’s will be extremely difficult. Finger-pointing and buck-passing will abound. On these grounds, the British Medical Association has argued that “while we welcome future discussions on the SPR… GPs themselves must remain the data controller of the GP record”.
The SPR proposals come at an inauspicious time for patient data security.
In February, the government granted researchers from UK Biobank, a database for the long-term study of 500,000 citizens, access to coded GP patient data. Just two months later, this data was found for sale on three separate listings on Chinese website Alibaba. Despite assurances that it was anonymised, researchers were able to identify a patient from just their date of birth and details of a major surgery.
Speaking of accountability, Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned on Thursday — the day after the Bill was announced. I can’t help but notice the timing…
Business and markets
Samsung granted court injunction against imminent strike action in last-minute reprieve — talks resume as unions barred from occupying or locking facilities, obstructing workers
As disputes between Samsung and union representatives of a threatened 45,000-person strike at its memory chip plants reached breaking point, Suwon District Court on Monday partially accepted Samsung’s injunction request that would limit two unions’ planned 18-day walkouts from Thursday. The injunction bars strikers from from obstructing or locking facilities and mandates sufficient personnel to ensure normal safety operations. Strikers will be fined $74,000 per day if this is breached.
One way to interpret this injunction is as the triumph of capital over labour.
It’s significant that the strikes are at memory chip plants. Memory stocks are rallying during a critical memory hardware shortage amid exploding demand. AI stocks have so far driven 80% of S&P 500 gains, and 4/5 of the best-performing US stocks specialise in memory and storage chip production. This memory over-performance is starkest in South Korea, where memory manufacturers like SK Hynix and Samsung have accounted for 70% of its KOSPI index’s 45% year-on-year growth — the fastest globally this year. Samsung’s own share price has more than doubled this year.
No wonder Suwon’s District Court stepped in.
The dispute is far from resolved. Unions have rejected Samsung’s one-time offer of a one-time bonus payout of $340,000 per employee, somewhat overshadowed by SK Hynix’s bonuses amounting of $447,000 per employee this year and $900,000 next year. But the court’s injunction against obstructing facilities and risking manufacturing equipment clearly delineate the boundaries within which strikes are permitted.
Regulation
Anthropic to share Mythos cyber flaw findings with global finance watchdog
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/18/anthropic-ai-claude-mythos-cyber-financial-stability-board-fsb
Anthropic is to hold a closed-doors meeting with the Financial Stability Board to discuss the implications of its new model, Mythos, that it claims can unprecedentedly detect and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The meeting will convene senior economists and central bank officials from across the world, and be chaired by Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey.
Since Anthropic previewed Mythos on April 7th and warned of its ability to find “ground-zero” vulnerabilities in banking systems and other critical infrastructure, there’s been intense speculation about its capabilities and the risk it poses to worldwide digital security. In the two following weeks, cybersecurity stocks lost billions in share prices as markets feared that the offensive capabilities of programmes like Mythos made them redundant.
But third-party analysis of the methodology behind Anthropic’s assessment of Mythos supports a far more nuanced picture than headlines suggest. A centrepiece of Anthropic’s demonstration was Mythos achieving a 72.4% code execution rate against the open-source web browser Firefox 147. Yet, Mythos didn’t actually attack Firefox 147 but rather a JavaScript shell of it which used a testing configuration stripped of important defence mitigations. The 72.4% success rate relied upon two specific and highly-exploitable bugs without which Mythos’s success rate plummeted to 4.4% which is the same as earlier models. Finally, Anthropic’s human contractors only manually reviewed 198 vulnerability reports generated by the model and then extrapolated this to the “thousands of zero-days” claim.
Ultimately, Mythos must be contextualised. It was announced on the same day that Bloomberg first reported Anthropic’s plan to list on public markets. Securing partnerships with names like Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase make it appear a critical part of global cybersecurity infrastructure. But much of the scare Mythos created rests upon extrapolated success rates, unrealistic and weakened test environments, and pre-patched bugs. Until its successful in realistic testing environments and at realistic computing costs (given the rapidly increasing token costs my last newsletter discussed), any concrete decisions made by the FSB will be unfounded.
Culture
Chelsea flower show garden designers clash over use of AI
Big Tech meets small town. Alarmed parakeets scatter from Chelsea’s private gardens as uproar resounds over award-winning garden designer Matt Keightly using AI to design his garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. His soon-to-launch new app, Spacelift, can reportedly create garden designs from scratch, alarming horticulturists who fear competition from such software. Other horticulturists call Chelsea’s permitting of the AI a “betrayal”.
Sure, there’s an aesthetic discussion to be had about whether using AI replaces or complements the designer’s own creativity, etc. etc. But amid all the more serious discussion of AI, I just find this a refreshingly petty squabble that reads like satire. Perhaps the next season of Bake Off will be marred by AI-enhanced recipes or touched-up pictures of cakes. Amid all the doomsday wails and ecological and societal fuckery wrought by AI, there’s some perverse comfort to be had in how people still stubbornly argue about the small stuff.
Yay more centralised government control and collusion with big businesses interests, surely only good things can come of this!