Google's weather AI gets sharper on rain⁠.

Google DeepMind announced WeatherNext 3 on 3 September, describing it as its most advanced and accurate global weather AI model¹. The company says the new model is more accurate than its predecessors, particularly on rain and snowfall, and that it can produce a global picture at a finer resolution than before².

The output is not staying inside a research lab. Google says WeatherNext 3 will start feeding into the weather information people already see in Search, Google Maps and Gemini³. In other words, the first place most people will meet it is the forecast on a phone, not a paid product.

The release is part of a wider shift in meteorology, in which deep learning methods have been displacing the traditional physics simulations that ran on supercomputers³. Precipitation has long been the hardest part of a short range forecast to get right, and it is the part Google has put at the front of its announcement².

Better forecasts, but check the small print

If your costs move with the weather, this is quietly useful. Construction schedules, delivery routing, retail footfall, outdoor events, groundworks and grounds maintenance all turn on whether it rains on Thursday. A meaningful improvement in rainfall prediction, arriving free inside tools your staff already use, is worth more to most small firms than another chatbot feature. It needs no procurement, no integration and no new supplier.

Two cautions. The accuracy claims here are Google's own and are stated in the company's terms, so we would treat them as a direction of travel rather than a measured result until independent forecasters have had a go. And nothing in the announcement addresses the United Kingdom specifically, so there is no Met Office comparison, no UK availability date and no pricing for anyone who wants the model as a feed rather than a search result. If you are minded to build a decision rule on top of this, remember that a forecast improving on average does not mean it improves on the days that hurt you. The person who cancels the crew still has to own the call.

Also today

• Chrome zero-day forces an emergency update

  Google has issued an emergency Chrome update after a previously unknown flaw was detected, a browser bug that puts billions of web users at risk from hackers⁸.

• Phishing crews borrow a prompt injection trick

  ASCII smuggling, best known as a way of hiding instructions inside text to attack AI systems, is now being used at scale to slip phishing emails past spam filters⁴.

• OpenAI ships GPT-6 Astra with a warning attached

  OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, which it calls its most powerful product yet, as its own chief scientist warns publicly that no one is prepared for the consequences of AI⁷.

• G7 flags harvest now, decrypt later risk

  G7 security agencies have warned about quantum computing threats to encryption, with data stolen today and decrypted years later named as a leading concern⁶.

• Chancellor sets out growth plans

  Chancellor John Healey delivered his Growth Speech on 7 September, published by the government the same morning⁵.