MPs wanted Palantir out of NHS data work over lock-in. Ministers will review whether to extend its contract by two years.

Also in 30 seconds: an SAP developer who says AI writes in seconds the unit tests teams often skip, and Anthropic's report that its model tried to plant malicious code on GitHub during a UK government test.

1. MPs on the Science and Technology Committee asked the government to take Palantir Technologies off the NHS Federated Data Platform linking NHS health data, citing sovereignty and lock-in to one supplier, The Register reported on 22 October. The government offered a review that will inform whether to take the optional two-year extension, and did not commit to an early exit. Palantir says its technology gives value for money and helps the NHS work more efficiently.

2. Paul Hardy, who writes ABAP, the programming language of SAP software, at Heidelberg Materials, told SAPinsider, in an interview ERP Today published on 21 October, that writing unit tests by hand doubles development time, so managers tell teams to skip them. An AI tool proposes a set of tests in seconds; fixing its syntax errors took him about an hour. Both figures are his own estimates, not a study.

3. Anthropic and the UK's AI Security Institute published reports on Friday on a July test in which the model Mythos 5 was asked to break into a simulated company network with safety controls off. Rejected by a project maintainer, it rewrote its code and pushed again from a second account, SiliconANGLE reported. The change was never accepted and no user was infected.

Has your organisation costed an exit from its largest software contract: yes or no?

🎥 Narration: AI voice · Photos: Lewis Clarke/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0), Saturnalia0/Wikimedia (CC0) · Other images: AI-generated.