To think through the causality of this, the thought is that if AI is out of human control, that it's creating its own, developing its own agents, that it could take control of critical systems or what exactly is the concrete risk if you follow that chain? And as you say, it is a theoretical chain.

So you highlighted the Hugging Face open AI incident, hacking incident, which stretched from May to July of this year.

And what that showed was that agents that are currently active, that they have currently built at these frontier labs, are already capable of breaking out of so-called sandboxes where they're cut off for the internet.

They conspired, about 1,200 of these agents conspired with each other to break out of these so-called sandboxes to hack into Hugging Face, which is a depository of AI code.

and other things that go into how we use AI, but largely a depository of AI code.

They managed to break in.

That showed agents coordinating at a level that many had said we've never seen before.

But do we need to rely on the companies here to move us towards a model that's more protected or to have the safeguards in place? Or does this need some sort of overarching government or otherwise regulation?

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, but I, you know, it's very definitely a challenge.

One of the most challenging things is that you're a- always working for, for the clubs, and you're having to go through the process of talking, communicating with the members and, you know, in the case of Birkdale, we had to have a, have a extraordinary general meeting to vote things through.

So, you know, it isn't Open-centric, which everybody assumes that we work for the R&A and that they're forcing people to do things on, on these great old links, and that just, you know, wr- that is not the case here.

They, they came, the club approached us.

So it was actually a design competition that we won.

Um, that's how we got appointed, and so we were responding to the elements that the club wanted to achieve.

Yeah

We'll hear from Mike Howard too, but first Tom sums up what he hopes the renovations have achieved.

Well, I would certainly hope that it's fairer, um, more challenging for the better players, and more forgiving for the, um, for the, yeah, the, the less elite players, shall we say, the slower swing speed players, because you've, they've got more options and ways of playing it.

Better balanced as well in terms of, um, l- the sort of length of different holes and the tee offerings and, um, yeah, more equalized in terms of the genders as well because the, the, the courses for the, for the women were monstrously longWith, you know, hugely inflated pars compared to that for the men, and we've, we've unified those, um, working closely with, um, with Sharon Eales, who's sort of pioneering that type of work.

And, uh, you know, I would say that's a very proud part of the overall achievement.

What, what do you think they will make of it? And w- and what do you think the crowds will make of it as well w- w- in terms of the level of, of fairness or competition that the crowds will see as well? What, what, what are you expecting come July?

I'm, I'm gonna start from a slightly different perspective, having been a spectator there, and it was a really difficult spectator venue with the bottleneck of the 10th and the 18th and the way you sort of entered and exited the course.

And it was a very sort of awkward venue with a lot of dead ends as well.

And, you know, it soon became clear when we came up with this sort of new concept that, um, in fact, it, there was the potential for it to become, you know, a much better spectating venue.

It doesn't sound like very much money, does it, when you think about the billions, uh, in the AI space? But it is intent, isn't it? What do you think about the UK and whether we can really claim to be a tech leader? How much does it show about impetus to be, uh, in that leadership role in the UK?

I think there's a couple of mea- metrics that you could point to that show that there is a really healthy momentum right now in the UK, and the UK really can claim to be playing a role, not sure if it's leading, but certainly a role, a significant role, in terms of the build-out of AI and innovation.

You do have that fund from the UK government, the UK Sovereign Wealth Fund, which, yes, you say, in comparison to the numbers we see in the US is, is minimal.

But what they would tell you, James Wise is the chair, formerly, uh, and also at Balderton, which is a venture capital firm, what James would say is that, "Look, not only do we invest, but we also open the doors to government for you." That credential that you get, that stamp of UK government approval, actually is meaningful.

In fact, I was speaking to Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that sits under Alphabet, there's a unit there, and I was speaking to their, uh, president, and he said it is meaningful.

They've also had investment, uh, from, from, from the UK Sovereign, uh, Fund.

Um, so that is an important part.

How important are those tensions?

Tom, this isn't the first time that we've talked about the massive investor enthusiasm for AI driving up tech stocks, but how has that trend fared in recent months since the Iran war started?

You're right, it's not the first time we've talked about it, but the dynamics are a little different this time around.

First of all, you have that dichotomy, as you've outlined for us, in terms of energy prices are up.

Oil, of course, since the start of the conflict up about 40%.

Inflation is rising.

We've seen that in the most recent inflation print out of the US, close to 4%, 3.8%.

Similar dynamics in Europe as well, inflation and growth slowing, most predominantly, of course, in places like Asia and in Europe, where in places like France we've seen growth flatlining.

war.But are there risks from the war that could derail the AI rally?

What are these new agents doing, and how much of an advance is it?

Well, it is an, an advance, and it's worth pointing out that it is an advance on previous plugins that Anthropic announced and released in around February of this year that also led to a sell-off for some of those software names.

So it's building on that.

These are 10 additional tool- tools now with agentic capabilities that Anthropic is releasing, specifically, as you say, targeting the financial industry, so asset management, insurance, and of course, banking, uh, and financial services as well.

These tools can do things like put together a pitch deck for you.

They can alert compliance around certain risks.

They can do and read financial statements and do analysis on financial statements.

in a question of disruption, how disruptive could they be?