UK government to invest £70m in AI to combat £6.4bn benefit fraud, with new investigative powers and civil penalties.

The UK government plans to spend £70m on AI and machine learning to identify and combat benefit fraud, which cost £6.4bn in the previous financial year. The Department for Work and Pensions will give investigators new powers, including arrests and bank information retrieval, while a new civil penalty will punish fraudsters. Critics, however, argue that the surveillance is an affront to privacy.