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, Kenya’s president requests funding for a controversial social media monitoring system and Muslim pilgrims gather in Mecca for a high-tech Hajj…
Governance
Kenya seeks $20.8m for AI-powered social media monitoring system
https://www.mexc.com/en-GB/news/1111153
President William Ruto’s government is seeking $20.8mn (KES 2.7bn) for an artificial intelligence system that will monitor online discourse and to establish a National Communications Centre for government to distribute information. Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance party argues that the system and Centre will combat misinformation and improve civic outreach. A cynical interpretation is that he aims to quash digital dissent before it can manifest into in-the-streets protests — as happened during the youth-led protests from June-July 2025.
Then, Kenyan youth mobilised in retaliation to tax increases and the murder of schoolteacher Albert Omondi Ojwang in policy custody after being arrested on charges of “false publication” after sharing a Twitter post that criticised the Deputy Inspector General of Police. The protests were organised almost entirely over social media, marking the first time such demonstrations have been organised outside of political or tribal structures. During the protests, state-sponsored individual trolls and coordinated groups launched online smear and intimidation campaigns against organisers, often deploying Islamophobic and sexist language to harness resentment towards these groups.
Kenya’s digital repression is significant for its coordination with the private sector and Chinese hardware. The Safe City Project, initiated by government in 2014 to combat crime and terrorism in Nairobi and Mombasa, is a joint project between Safaricom and Huawei. Safaricom is Kenya’s largest mobile-service provider and the most profitable company in east and central Africa. The Project uses Huawei CCTV cameras and facial recognition algorithms and is financed by soft loans from Chinese banks. Its systems were deployed to track and target dissidents in the 2025 protests. Safaricom itself has provided police with the locations of digital dissidents without any court order or disclosure of this information sharing.
Clearly, this requested funding follows a troubling precedent of increasing digital repression. It still awaits final review and approval by Parliament's Budget and Appropriations Committee. If granted, it’ll mark an unprecedented leap in the Kenyan government’s powers to stifle online dissent and target its sources.
Business and markets
DeepSeek V4 Pro tops global bang-for-buck ranking after 75% price cut
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3354668/deepseek-v4-pro-tops-global-bang-buck-ranking-after-75-price-cut
Since its release in January 2025, Chinese AI model DeepSeek’s unique selling point has been its blend of cheapness and performance that wiped one trillion dollars in market value from US tech stocks in a single day. Now, its cheapness has been consolidated by a permanent 75% price cut that makes it ~95% cheaper than the models of rival companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
But it isn’t clear whether these price cuts will stimulate demand for its services. DeepSeek already has 89% domestic market share and its international expansion faces severe headwinds — not least by being partially or fully banned by Asian countries including India and South Korea over security concerns, obstructing it from the world’s fastest-growing chatbot market in the Asia-Pacific. Contrastingly, ChatGPT and Claude are booming in the APAC, with India and Japan as Claude’s leading headcounts.
OpenAI and Anthropic have sufficient capital to heavily subsidise users’ token consumption — particularly as they approach world-beating IPO’s and court significant foreign investment — and are moving to per-token pricing structures (as I wrote last week…). With such subsidies and localised pricing plans for APAC nations, their relative expensiveness over DeepSeek is unlikely to diminish demand for them. And, they face far fewer regulatory barriers.
Last year, I made a similar argument about Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD’s aggressive price cuts. BYD had also saturated domestic demand and faced slews of regulatory probes into its attempts to expand into Europe which still continue. However, domestic sales accounted for 80% of BYD’s revenue whereas at most 44% of DeepSeek activity is from China. DeepSeek has a better international footing, but it’s far from certain that these 75% price cuts will overcome the significant obstacles to its overseas adoption.
Regulation
Palantir hits back at Sadiq Khan after £50m contract with Met police blocked
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/22/palantir-hits-back-sadiq-khan-contract-met-police-blocked
After London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a £50mn contract between Palantir and the Metropolitan Police, advocates of the American defence-tech firm argue that Khan is “putting politics above public safety”. They highlight Khan’s previous comment that Londoners want public money paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.
In fact, Khan’s rejection of the contract that would’ve automated some aspects of police investigations is about procurement, not politics. The Met had breached procurement rules by failing to present its procurement strategy or detailed cost-benefit analysis to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) before seeking to award the contract. Moreover, the Met didn’t engage with any other potential suppliers. This willingness to throw £50mn at Palantir without a formal and diversified tender process is sufficient grounds to reject the contract.
It isn’t the first time Palantir’s benefitted from clandestine contracts. Under MOPAC’s Scheme of Delegation and Consent, spending over £500k requires formal approval by the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime. In February, the Met awarded Palantir an almost £10k contract for a pilot project that was then extended with another contract worth almost £490,000 — coming just under the £500k threshold for formal approval.
Scotland Yard warns that Khan’s decision will force it to cut officer numbers. But the Met’s £125mn funding shortfall is a consequence of political decisions, beginning with then-Home Secretary Theresa May cutting policing budgets by 18% in 2010, not technological inefficiency. Without even providing an argument for how outsourcing policing casework to AI systems will result in significantly improved margins and officer deployment, the Met’s behaviour is both unprofessional and ill-informed.
Culture
How Saudi Arabia is using AI to transform the Hajj experience
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/saudi-arabia/2026/05/23/how-saudi-arabia-is-using-ai-to-transform-the-hajj-experience
You may have heard Pope Leo XIV’s dire warnings about AI’s economic and political disruption. Interestingly, the previous Pope Leo, Leo XIII, warned about the exploitation of workers in the Industrial Revolution in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”). Only 135 years separates both Popes’ similar warnings in unimaginably different contexts. But here’s another example of AI meeting religion.
As an estimated 1.5mn Muslims make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca to commemorate this year’s Eid al-Adha, Saudi Arabia is again deploying sophisticated AI techniques to coordinate their movements. Led by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and the Ministry of Interior, the kingdom is using computer vision, thermal imaging, and AI-driven analytics from live video feeds to predict and influence crowd density and movement patterns in real time. Crowd control has become a central concern after a tunnel stampede killed 1,462 pilgrims in 1990.
In this recent Hajj, however, the leading cause of deaths has become extreme temperatures. The 2024 Hajj saw over 1,300 heat-related deaths. The following year saw a 90% reduction in such deaths as authorities took measures like updating fitness requirements and reducing wait times for prayers. This year, the General Authority of Civil Aviation has given first-of-its-kind permission to Terra Drone Arabia to use its drones to deliver medicine and water among temperatures up to 50 degrees celsius. 80% of heat-related deaths were unrelated pilgrims, and authorities have already used their camera technology to arrest multiple pilgrims entering through unauthorised routes.
Given Hajj’s significance amid the five pillars of Islam and the world’s religious festivals, the adoption of AI to meet today’s climate-related exigencies is a striking example of old meets new.