Tech
Jaguar Land Rover profit slumps after cyber attack | Computer Weekly
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) continues to face financial fallout from the devastating 2025 cyber attack on its systems, with sales and profits dropping precipitously during the final quarter of its financial year, even as vehicle production returned to normal.
Describing a challenging year in which it faced multiple headwinds – the wind-down of its legacy vehicles, a more competitive market in China, and US tariffs also compounded the veteran carmaker’s struggles – JLR said fourth-quarter revenues were down 11% year-on-year to £6.9bn, and 21% for the full year to £22.9bn.
Pre-tax profit for the three months to 31 March fell by 48% to £458m, and for the full year by 82% to £2.5bn.
“We recovered well in the fourth quarter as production returned to normal levels, demonstrating the commitment of our people, suppliers and retail partners,” said JLR chief executive PB Balaji, who was parachuted in by JLR parent Tata Motors in November 2025.
“As we look ahead into FY27, we are focused on driving growth … and reducing our break‑even volumes whilst we launch a slew of exciting products,” he said.
The cyber attack on JLR’s systems unfolded in August 2025, and was one of a number of serious incidents linked to the ShinyHunters hacking collective and associated groups that unfolded during 2025 and continues to this day.
JLR had switched off its production lines for around a six-week period in the wake of the cyber attack, with Westminster forced to step in to cover the beleaguered company with a £1.5bn loan guarantee, after the disruption started to spread through its supply chain.
Based on its “hurricane scale” cyber attack matrix, the UK’s Cyber Monitoring Centre has classified the JLR cyber attack as a Category 3 Systemic Event and set the wider economic cost of incident at somewhere between £1.6bn and £2.1bn – and potentially up to £5bn – with almost 3,000 distinct UK organisations potentially affected.
Talion CEO Keven Knight said the losses stemming from the JLR cyber attack would have killed off most businesses.
“The figures will likely be a huge concern for other business leaders as they demonstrate the very real and expensive consequences of attacks,” he said.
“However, recent figures from the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches survey revealed that only 31% of businesses have board members or trustees taking explicit responsibility for cyber security as part of their job,” said Knight. “This figure is far too low.
“With cyber attacks having the ability to significantly impact an organisation’s annual turnover, this means security must be a board priority,” he said. “Boards have a duty to steer their organisations safely and successfully, but this can’t be achieved when they completely overlook cyber security.
“Hopefully these figures act as a catalyst for organisations to improve their defences, because no business leader wants to find themselves in a position where they are reporting millions in losses to investors in their next annual report,” said Knight.
Cyber pledge
In light of the UK government’s plans to create a Cyber Resilience Pledge – pitched at the boards of FTSE 350 companies, Knight said there was a risk that this would turn out to be a largely superficial exercise.
Boards need to understand cyber security and governance from the top down to make informed, risk-based decisions, he added.
Tech
Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shakeup
OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, WIRED has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will now lead the company’s product strategy, in addition to his work on AI infrastructure, OpenAI confirms to WIRED. Brockman was previously assigned to oversee OpenAI products on an interim basis while CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, was on medical leave; the change is now official.
“We’re consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus toward the agentic future, to win across both consumer and enterprise,” Brockman said in a memo to staff seen by WIRED. Brockman added that OpenAI’s products are naturally converging, and that the company has decided to merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified experience.
OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users.
Two other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the core product and platform across consumer, enterprise, and developer surfaces. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into one of the company’s fastest-growing products of all time. OpenAI’s longtime head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, is moving to a new role at the company that aims to revamp enterprise products. OpenAI says Turley will continue his work on ChatGPT, which he has helped grow to more than 900 million weekly active users since he took over in 2022.
The changes are the latest shakeup for OpenAI as leadership aims to refocus the company on a few key product areas, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its forthcoming “everything app.” Last month, OpenAI announced many executive changes, including that CEO of AGI dDeployment, Fidji Simo, was taking a medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI previously said Brockman would oversee product strategy in her absence. The company tells WIRED that Simo remains on medical leave, and worked directly with Brockman on these organizational changes and product strategy.
In the last year, OpenAI has faced increasing pressure from competitors, including Anthropic in coding domains and Google in consumer chatbots. OpenAI leaders are hoping to simplify product offerings ahead of its plan to file for an IPO, which could happen later this year.
Other OpenAI executives left the company entirely last month, including the head of its AI workspace for scientists, Kevin Weil; head of Sora, Bill Peebles; and its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Srinivas Narayanan.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Tech
Companies Keep Slashing Employees’ Benefits for the Worst Reasons
Employee benefits are in the spotlight this week, and that’s because of three recent stories about US companies cutting back on non-wage compensations for workers.
A Texas tech consulting firm with a forgettable name—TTEC—suddenly became a lot more memorable when it suspended its discretionary 401(k) match program for 16,000 employees through at least the end of 2026. According to Business Insider, which viewed an internal TTEC memo, the company plans to invest in AI certifications, AI tools and training, and automation, among other things.
The auditing and consulting giant Deloitte is also reportedly slashing benefits for some workers starting next year. This includes reducing PTO, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family planning services such as adoption, surrogacy, and IVF. San Francisco-based Zoom, meanwhile, has made a smaller-scale change and reduced its parental leave for employees from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for birthing parents.
So what’s the driving force behind this? And are there more cuts to come? The latter is impossible to answer, and the former is unfortunately more complicated than “corporate ghouls go AI.”
First off, “what Deloitte did is completely unconscionable,’” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, the author of several books on work culture and class dynamics, and an oft-cited scholar on these topics. The consulting firm is cutting the benefits of a specific class of internal workers—in admin, IT support, and finance—while leaving intact benefits for people in client-facing roles. An affected worker will see their parental leave cut from 16 weeks to just eight weeks.
“It treats people differently based on the type of job they’re in, and cutting any mother down to eight weeks of paid leave is just outlandish,” Williams says. “When labor is tight, employers are more generous. But once the power shifts, the benefits contract.”
AI certainly is a convenient excuse these days for any corporate decision that harms workers. But the impetus here is also the cost of the benefits themselves. Earlier this year subsidies from the Affordable Care Act lapsed, and people began dropping out of health care plans entirely. Insurers have cited this as one reason they’ve raised premiums.
Sarahjane Sacchetti, a former top executive at benefits administration companies Cleo and Collective Health, who is working on a new health care initiative, told me that the costs of employer-sponsored health plans have increased significantly over the past five years. A survey last year of over 1,700 US employers by the Mercer health care consulting group found that the health care cost per worker was expected to rise on average 6.5 percent in 2026, the highest since 2010. And this was after factoring in cost-reduction measures; otherwise, the cost of a plan would go up by nearly 9 percent.
“This just starts to eat into how you think about total compensation as an employer,” Sacchetti says. That doesn’t mean the corporation is the ‘good guy,’ she says, but the poor state of American health care policy and lack of safety net are responsible for a lot of the stress that plagues undercompensated or laid-off workers.
Williams points out that the US is one of the few countries that doesn’t offer a federal paid maternal leave—putting it in league with Papua New Guinea and Suriname. “This just shows how crazy it is to provide employee basics like pension and paid parental leave through private employers rather than how other industrialized countries do it,” Williams says. Her proposed solution? “The US needs to join the rest of the universe.”
The irony, of course, is that the US government professes to be obsessed with women having more babies. If women in the US are—as celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz put it this week in the Oval Office—“underbabied,” a comprehensive paid federal leave policy would be the obvious place to start. (Oz also said that “making babies” is “the most creative thing the universe knows.” Don’t tell the AI CEOs.)
Tech
Gantri’s 3D-Printed Lamps Are Going Wireless
Gantri, a San Francisco-based company known for making soft, stylized 3D-printed lamps, is going wireless. That’s thanks to a new partnership with the design firm Ammunition.
Gantri 3D-prints its lamps using plastics made from corn-based polylactic acid (PLA) in its Bay Area facilities. The result is a collection of carefully designed light fixtures with gentle curves that aim to make luxury-style lighting feel somewhat affordable. (Prices range from $200 to $500.)
Last year, the company introduced a program called Gantri Made, which allows shoppers to customize their lights and gives third-party designers the ability to build their own designs using Gantri’s foundational pieces.
Courtesy of Gantri
Gantri first partnered with Ammunition in 2020, developing a line of stylish lamps aiming to highlight what premium light pieces could look like. You’ve almost certainly seen something built with Ammunition’s flair. The firm designed Beats by Dre headphones, the Square point-of-sale tablets you see in shops everywhere, and many other projects, from robot coffee machines to Jay-Z’s failed weed vape cartridges.
This Gantri new collab is a range of lamps that include floor lamps, table lamps, and ones small enough to hold in your hand. (Those are rectangular, with designs inspired by piers around San Francisco.) All the lights are wireless and can be removed from charging ports to run for what Gantri says is 10 or more hours of battery life. Gantri is also developing an app to control the lights. They will work with Matter, the connectivity standard that aims to make smart home tech from different companies work together, but that compatibility isn’t expected until next year.
Gantri CEO Ian Yang points out that for most of human history, light sources were something people carried with them—torches, candles, lanterns. Lights staying in fixed places has become the norm, but he wants these wireless lamps to show there’s another way.
“I really think this product is going to change the way that people think about lighting, but also think about the power of digital manufacturing, about this new material that’s plant-based,” Yang says.
The lamps have a custom charging port, which allows them to stand upright and face any direction while still receiving a charge. They also require a custom charger and cannot be charged via USB-C or another cord in a different room. That may inhibit the mobility the lamp promises, as you won’t be able to move them from room to room and plug them in with any USB-C cord lying around—you’d have to bring that proprietary cable with you. But Yang says this was a deliberate choice, even though it was much more difficult than finding a spot for a USB-C connection. He wanted the lamps to feel portable while also having a place for them to become a fixture in a home.
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