The Swedish government wants to force encrypted apps to store all messages sent.If the proposal becomes reality, Signal plans to leave Sweden.
The bill aims to give the Swedish Security Service and the police the possibility to request message history from criminal suspects afterwards. For encrypted apps, this would mean a requirement to store all message history. The government wants Parliament to vote on the proposal already in March next year.
If the bill is adopted, the messaging app Signal will state that they will leave Sweden.
– In practice, this means that we are being asked to break the encryption that is the basis of our entire business.Asking us to store data would undermine our entire architecture and we would never do that.We would rather leave the Swedish market completely, says Signal’s CEO Meredith Whittaker to the tax-funded SVT.
– If you create a vulnerability based on Swedish preferences, it would create a path to undermine our entire network.That’s why we would never introduce these backdoors, she continues.
The Swedish Armed Forces have recently urged their personnel to use Signal to reduce the risk of interception. In a letter to the government, it warns that the bill cannot be implemented “without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that can be exploited by third parties”.
We don’t have a billionaire owner, and our unique reader-funded model keeps us free from political or corporate influence. This means we can fearlessly report the facts and shine a light on the misdeeds of those in power.
Consider a donation to keep our independent journalism running…
Elon Musk’s AI company xAI presented its latest AI model Grok 4 on Wednesday, along with a monthly fee of $300 for access to the premium version. The launch comes amid a turbulent period for Musk’s companies, as X CEO Linda Yaccarino has left her position and the Grok system, which lacks politically correct safeguards, has made controversial comments.
xAI took the step into the next generation on Wednesday evening with Grok 4, the company’s most advanced AI model to date. At the same time, a premium service called SuperGrok Heavy was introduced with a monthly fee of $300 – the most expensive AI subscription among major providers in the market.
Grok 4 is positioned as xAI’s direct competitor to established AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The model can analyze images and answer complex questions, and has been increasingly integrated into Musk’s social network X over recent months, where xAI recently acquired significant ownership stakes.
Musk: “Better than PhD level”
During a livestream on Wednesday evening, Musk made bold claims about the new model’s capabilities.
“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions”, Musk claimed. However, he acknowledged that the model can sometimes lack common sense and has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics – “but that is just a matter of time”.
Expectations for Grok 4 are high ahead of the upcoming competition with OpenAI’s anticipated GPT-5, which is expected to launch later this summer.
Introducing Grok 4, the world’s most powerful AI model. Watch the livestream now: https://t.co/59iDX5s2ck
The launch comes during a tumultuous period for Musk’s business empire. Earlier on Wednesday, Linda Yaccarino announced that she is leaving her position as CEO of X after approximately two years in the role. No successor has yet been appointed.
Yaccarino’s departure comes just days after Grok’s official, automated X account made controversial comments criticizing Hollywood’s “Jewish executives” and other politically incorrect statements. xAI was forced to temporarily restrict the account’s activity and delete the posts. In response to the incident, xAI appears to have removed a recently added section from Grok’s public system instructions that encouraged the AI not to shy away from “politically incorrect” statements.
Musk wore his customary leather jacket and sat alongside xAI leaders during the Grok 4 launch. Photo: xAI
Two model versions with top performance
xAI launched two variants: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy – the latter described as the company’s “multi-agent version” with improved performance. According to Musk, Grok 4 Heavy creates multiple AI agents that work simultaneously on a problem and then compare their results “like a study group” to find the best answer.
The company claims that Grok 4 demonstrates top performance across several test areas, including “Humanity’s Last Exam” – a demanding test that measures AI’s ability to answer thousands of questions in mathematics, humanities, and natural sciences. According to xAI, Grok 4 achieved a score of 25.4 percent without “tools,” surpassing Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro (21.6 percent) and OpenAI’s o3 high (21 percent).
With access to tools, Grok 4 Heavy allegedly achieved 44.4 percent, compared to Gemini 2.5 Pro’s 26.9 percent.
Future products on the way
SuperGrok Heavy subscribers get early access to Grok 4 Heavy as well as upcoming features. xAI announced that the company plans to launch an AI coding model in August, a multimodal agent in September, and a video generation model in October.
The company is also making Grok 4 available through its API to attract developers to build applications with the model, despite the enterprise initiative being only two months old.
Whether companies are ready to adopt Grok despite the recent mishap remains to be seen, as xAI attempts to establish itself as a credible competitor to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in the enterprise market.
The Grok service can now be accessed outside the X platform through Grok.com.
Swedish families with children should receive tax relief, according to the same model as Hungary. This is proposed by Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch.
The catastrophically low birth rate has recently become a topic of discussion even among Swedish politicians. Childbirth in Sweden is at historically low levels. During 2023, an average of 1.43 children were born per woman – the lowest figure ever recorded. The standing solution advocated among Swedish politicians has been to bring foreigners to Sweden to replace the population.
The leader of the Christian Democrats Ebba Busch proposes on this theme to follow the Hungarian model, where families with children receive significant tax relief that increases for each child. The principle is to make it easier for one or later both parents to support themselves through work instead of benefits.
If current birth rate trends continue in Sweden, each new generation will be approximately 30 percent smaller than the previous one, which means major consequences including for the labor market and welfare system when fewer people of working age must support a growing elderly population.
The Swedish Migration Agency has rejected almost all applications for berry pickers for 2025. As recently as 2023, 5,000 permits were granted.
Citing years of indications that employment conditions in the berry industry are not being upheld, the Migration Agency has granted only 89 permits for berry picking this year. A total of 2,397 applications for berry pickers have been received for 2025.
Last year, the Migration Agency rejected all applications for berry pickers, but 1,272 applications were subsequently approved after court review.
– The Migration Agency has also this year assessed that workers in the berry industry risk not having their employment conditions met. Therefore, the agency has decided to reject most of the applications for Thai berry pickers, says Hanna Geurtsen, Deputy Project Manager for Work Permits at the Migration Agency, in a press release.
This year, the Migration Agency explains, all employers active in berry picking have chosen to apply for permits via the EU’s Seasonal Workers Directive. The difference when applying for a work permit as a seasonal worker, compared with the national main track for work permits, is among other things that the berry pickers this year are directly employed by a company in Sweden and not via a foreign staffing agency.
– It’s partly about having an employment contract signed by both parties and that the employment conditions must be in line with Swedish collective agreements. For the majority of the applications received this year, these requirements have not been met, says Hanna Geurtsen.
The berry companies that have been rejected have the possibility to appeal these decisions in court, the agency adds in its press release.
The Swedish government is now launching a project to examine immigrants’ opinions compared to native Swedes.
– The results will serve as guidance for future integration efforts, says the Liberal Party’s new integration minister Simona Mohamsson about the project.
World Values Survey, WVS, is an international research program that examines people’s values in everything from social, political, economic, religious and cultural aspects.
The Swedish government is now paying WVS €450,000 to examine how values differ between non-Western immigrants and those with entirely Swedish backgrounds. During the autumn, around 3,000 people will be interviewed.
“We are an extreme country”
According to surveys that World Values Survey has previously conducted, the differences between immigrants and native Swedes are very large regarding views on things like divorce, premarital sex, abortion and homosexuality, where Sweden overall stands out as an exceptionally liberal-oriented country.
– We are an extreme country in a good way. For people who become part of our society, it becomes somewhat difficult to navigate that map, says Mohamsson about the project to the Bonnier-owned newspaper DN, which among other things highlights that immigrants are more skeptical toward homosexual relationships.
– There’s a whole generation of girls who don’t get to choose who they want to love or boys who can’t come out of the closet, she says.
