100 articles indexed from The Verge
Apple is bringing an AI assistant to its suite of productivity apps, including Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. The assistant, which is built on AI models from Apple and OpenAI, can understand a document's context to perform tasks like designing, animating, and refining slides in Keynote. In Pages, Appl
If there's one issue that seems to activate all kinds of voters in 2026, it's data centers. The rapid buildout of these massive server storage facilities - and the infrastructure construction and expenses that come with them - has sparked local opposition in communities across the country and become
Less than a month after its mass release of hundreds of manuscripts that it said contained solutions to long-standing mathematics questions, OpenAI is back with three more "major" discoveries in math, computer science, and physics. What's different this time is the choice to have external experts th
As it prepares to go public, Anthropic's S-1 filing makes generative AI's methane dependency glaringly obvious. "Competition for access to electrical supply and data center locations with adequate power availability is intense." In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Monda
The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site. The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve sy
Anthropic has finally filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC, a document designed to give investors a look under the hood of its business, from how much its executives are making and plans for spending its IPO billions to the risks that could derail its ambitions. At more than 300 pages, there's a lo
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India. In a message to employees, Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman writes that this gives staff members "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources"
Today, I’m talking to Kevin Roose, journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles, which details the recent and explosive transformation of the AI industry. Kevin was a longtime New York Times reporter and host of the popular podcast Hard Fork, but he and friend of the show Casey Newton ju
Anthropic has filed its S-1 prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, preparing the company behind Claude to beat OpenAI to the punch with an IPO. In a filing with the SEC, Anthropic said it plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol "ANT." The AI company confidential
What do the IRS, banks, airlines, and government infrastructure around the world have in common? They're all running on systems propped up by antique computer code that nobody dares touch, lest everything come crashing down. OpenAI thinks it may have a solution. On October 19th, the company touted "
The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started The digital publishing industry
BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished
On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artifi
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external
Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan
We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay […]
Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for per
Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on
Retro video games are everywhere lately - especially in places where they aren't supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new
Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precis
Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [lang
Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Researchers at C
Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree
Discord's latest update released today has a big improvement for Markdown previews: they should now render correctly instead of with "a bunch of symbols," according to the company. LLMs and AI agents often rely on Markdown files for instructions and context, so these improved previews could be helpf
Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives - shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people's AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily throu
For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now "it is finally here," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four t
The Nintendo Switch 2 has apparently been jailbroken, and a modder has already shown the console running a custom version of Mario Kart World featuring new playable characters like Cinnamoroll, the red Angry Bird, Peter Griffin, and Steve from Minecraft. OpenAI's Codex helped make this "ns2jb" jailb
Wildwood is the most ambitious film yet from Laika, the stop-motion studio best known for the likes of Coraline and ParaNorman. It's a sprawling fantasy adventure that took five years to complete. The process involved more 230 puppets - including 36 of the main character Prue alone - which were brou
It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia each had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, federal disclosures show. Nvidia spent the most of the group at $2.2 million, followed by Anthropic's $2.1 million and OpenAI's $1.5 million. Compared to
Two vulnerabilities found in the programming language PHP put enormous swaths of the internet in danger. By some accounts, up to 70 percent of websites use PHP in some capacity. It powers Wikipedia, WordPress, Drupal, and a host of other popular sites and platforms, including DeviantArt and 4Chan, w
Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is […
1Password is introducing a new feature that allows AI agents to sign into your accounts without actually seeing or handling your passwords. The aptly named 1Password for Agents doesn't give bots free reign to access all of your connected accounts - you'll still need to grant approval for sign-in req
Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants - the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful. In practice, at least for buying things, it's more like sending an anxious and apologetic
An investment research firm wanted to prove AI could revolutionize drug development. So they teamed up with Anthropic to see whether an unreleased version of Claude could make scorpion antivenom. It couldn't. It came up with some promising starting points, but nothing close to an actual drug, expert
Eiliko, a cute robot charm you can hang on your bag with built-in AI conversations, turned out to be a security nightmare. It told owners that "your secrets are safe with me," but hackers could easily read complete transcripts of everything we told the toy, and that was just the beginning. The Verge
A rush of new data centers could bring air pollution roaring back to levels not seen since the 2000s in Texas, which has become ground zero for the physical infrastructure behind generative AI. New and proposed data centers are demanding a tremendous amount of electricity. How developers and utiliti
Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027. "The scale of inves
Anthropic just announced an AI agent competitor to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots: Claude Duet. The new agent, designed for professionals and small business owners, is launching as a "research preview," according to Anthropic, and it's available as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Clau
Walmart will soon let AI agents shop on its website for you. Next month, the retail giant will allow you to use an AI agent on the site, with systems in place to let you approve and review purchases and set spending limits. The embrace of AI agents stands in stark contrast to Amazon, which […]
After introducing its Gemini AI assistant to Android Auto last year, Google is now bringing it to Apple CarPlay users. The conversational Gemini in navigation is available today for US drivers, with "rollout happening globally too," according to Google (we've asked for specific regional availability
OpenAI disclosed a pair of safety incidents that involved AI agents weakening their safety monitoring systems during internal coding tasks. In one incident, OpenAI says its GPT-6 Astra agent disabled its safety monitor when copying reference code - and then lied about it. "The reference didn't confi
On Tuesday, US District Judge Zachary Bluestone dismissed the lawsuit Ann Altman filed last year alleging that her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. As reported earlier by The Guardian, the judge wrote that over the past year, Ann had failed to appear
Google is bringing Personal Intelligence to Gemini AI in your car. With this update, Gemini in Android Auto and cars with Google built-in can tap into your information across Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search. As an example, Google says you can ask Gemini abou
Meta says it paused a Muse feature that lets you share conversations with the AI assistant after researchers found the URLs publicly available on the web, as reported by Ars Technica. In a report published this week, researchers at the security firm Claroc say they found more than 6,800 Muse links t
Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That's according to an announcement on Tuesday that says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists.
Adobe announced yesterday that the mobile version of Lightroom, available for iOS, iPadOS, and Android, can now open closed eyes in photos using generative AI with just a single tap. When the app detects a person, or a group of people, have their eyes closed in a photo it will automatically present
The US is building more fossil fuel infrastructure than it has in a decade while renewable energy growth slows down, a new report shows. Electricity demand is also climbing faster than it has in more than a decade with more data centers, factories, and electric vehicles plugging into the grid. Despi
CoreWeave had a bad week last week. Its bonds slipped into distressed territory by a common definition - when investors demand 1,000 basis points more in yield than they'd get from government bonds. Last Tuesday Chamath "SPAC King" Palihapitiya noticed the distressed debt, and also asked whether the
Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms c
A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. C
Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI. Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee le
Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by
After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. Specifically, the following language no longer appears on the commercial terms page: … Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages,
Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't
Nvidia's RTX Spark N1X processor is finally here, and we've been collectively testing a small fortune's worth of powerful laptops sporting this new "superchip." RTX Spark is designed to be a high-performing Arm-based SoC for laptops and small desktop computers, rivaling the best from Apple, Intel, A
Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "deve
OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser is gone, but now ChatGPT's Google Chrome extension is getting some upgrades that allow it to use the browser tabs you already have open. With the extension installed, OpenAI says ChatGPT can now view your browser tabs when you tag Chrome in ChatGPT's web or desktop app
Sega is removing Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition from storefronts following a disastrous launch where users complained about issues like bugs and upscaling that appears to have been done by AI. Complete Edition, a remaster of the 2011 strategy game, launched on Tuesday, and it bundled the mai
Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabil
President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector a
Bluesky's Attie AI tool, which initially launched earlier this year as a way to use AI to build your own feeds, now lets you make "small" social apps like games, polls, and dashboards that you can then share with others as their own websites. In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Bluesky CEO Toni S
Meta announced the Muse Spark Open AI model today, claiming that it's the "most capable US open-weight model to date." But the company also says that it's the "the first model in its class" that can "run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework." Meta and Ap
There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of "AI personal assistants" like Meta's Muse, you're being cheerfully asked not just to give up y
Microsoft and Nvidia held a launch party for the first wave of RTX Spark laptops last week in San Francisco, where a new wave of AI PCs took center stage amid a packed crowd and a lively hands-on area. A day after the media event, I was invited to a quieter Nvidia event to hear […]
In hindsight, the post on Instagram should have raised more red flags. The image purported to show actress Mia Goth, just days after filing for divorce from actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf, posing in a T-shirt with a pointed message: MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN. To really drive home the point, the song
Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades. But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the crea
Google's intelligent AI shopping cart is finally here, and just in time to tempt users into Black Friday and seasonal holiday spending. The Universal Cart tool Google previewed at its I/O event in May is now rolling out in the US across the Gemini app and Google Search, with the aim of making it eas
Last year, Amazon bought Bee, a relatively unknown startup with a $50 always-listening AI wearable that summarized every conversation you had. Today, the e-commerce giant is announcing two new Bee devices - and a new subscription to go with them. First is the $74.99 Bee Frontier, an updated version
There's a new digital pet in town - a cute little marshmallow of a robot that can change its cartoony expressions to match your mood. But if you or your kids talk to "Eiliko" over Wi-Fi, it'll phone home to China. Its AI companion can store literally everything you tell it on Chinese servers, where
Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is going to ask some entry-level candidates to have a 10-minute conversation with an AI simulation of a client as part of the interview process, according to The Wall Street Journal. The AI simulation "aims to reflect 80% of the scenarios McKinsey consultants might
OpenAI is facing a new wave of lawsuits from eight US states that accuse the company of harming children and misleading customers about the safety of ChatGPT, as reported earlier by Reuters. The lawsuits, filed separately by Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montan
Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish
New York Attorney General Letitia James revealed a years-long multi-state investigation against Character.AI as they now seek to require protections on consumer data sold through its bankruptcy proceeding. James is among 40 bipartisan AGs who filed a notice of interest in Character.AI's bankruptcy c
YouTube is adding a "Made with AI" label to tracks that were "altered or fully generated" using AI, with a similar approach to its existing process for applying AI labels to videos. It doesn't sound like this will apply to any and all use of AI tools in making music, but according to YouTube, it […]
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. For the past 100 days or so, my mornings have had a new rhythm. When I wake up, the
OpenAI claims a former employee took more than 100 files related to its product plans before joining Apple. In a document filed on Wednesday, OpenAI accuses the unnamed employee of sending this information to a personal account and then presenting it to Apple leadership, including the vice president
Old-school physics-based weather forecasting and even new AI models typically become less reliable beyond two weeks, a problem Microsoft claims to have solved using machine learning. Researchers with the company say they've found a new, cost-effective way to make more accurate weather forecasts two
Square is launching new hardware: a big kiosk for ordering things that has a touchscreen and lets you talk to an AI. It's called the Square Kiosk. Square says the Kiosk, which has a large pill shape, has an "agentic, conversational voice layer" that "fully understands a seller's menu and listens and
Android is introducing new scam defense features that aim to make it easier for users to evade mobile fraud, including bolstered protection in Google Messages and additional safeguarding tools. Building on the Scam Detection feature in Google Messages, a new "enhanced protection" setting will be rol
Are legions of smart devices - fridges, ovens, vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, security cameras, and TVs - conspiring to take over the internet? No. But they could soon be unwitting hosts to self-replicating AI models that spread from device to device and prove remarkably difficult to contain. Welcome
Epic Games is announcing a big refresh of its PC games launcher today in preview, saying that the new version is "way faster" and now supports Linux. But the company, which has been publicly making a big push into AI-assisted development, also notes that the refresh was "vibe coded." "Programming is
An OpenAI engineer was arrested after the company said it discovered a "sophisticated recording device" hidden in one of its offices. The employee was identified as Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national. Alfozan is charged with using or endeavoring to use a device to intercept oral commu
More AI agents will soon be able to browse and purchase from Shopify listings, marking an expansion of the company's agentic commerce ambitions. Shopify announced Tuesday it will let shoppers configure their AI agents to purchase products on their behalf, giving more agents access to over a billion
Retro gaming is going through a wild time at the moment, thanks to decompilations and recompilations that are letting gamers port classic titles to new devices, or merge code from two different games into a single new experience. Microsoft has witnessed skateboarding being modded into Call of Duty a
The other day I whizzed past several people while running in the park, my playlist blasting at full volume. The next morning, I smiled at a barista while ordering a caramel apple-flavored matcha latte. Afterward, I sat on a park bench reading a book, called up a pal to chat about her recent trip to
Facebook's new "Your Algorithm" feature will let you directly add and manage topics you want to see in your feed and Facebook Reels. Meta says your recommendations "respond right away" after you make updates using the new feature by hitting "interested" or "not interested" for different topics. Your
The next time you vibe-code a custom app with Google's AI Studio, you won't have to connect your phone to a computer to install it. On Tuesday, Google announced a new feature in the US that will allow you to launch personal apps directly through the Play Store. Google first launched the ability to v
Earlier this month, news broke that actress Mia Goth had filed for divorce from actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf. An Instagram post from the account miagoth_ - marked with a blue verified checkmark - quickly spread. The post shows Goth in a T-shirt that reads "MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN" in bold black
After months sitting on the sidelines of the frontier AI race, Google has finally launched its long-awaited Gemini 4 Argon model, claiming it can compete with the best the industry has to offer. Google says Argon delivers "frontier reasoning and improved performance across complex workflows," while
Epic Games plans to use AI to generate code and art for an unannounced Disney game, which is now delayed from its original March release window, according to a report from Bloomberg. The project's developers have been given an "AI-first" mandate directing them to use tools like Anthropic's Claude mo
When Nvidia originally showed off DLSS 5 earlier this year, the technology immediately got branded as gen AI for video games. To gamers, Nvidia had lost the plot. I personally couldn't get over how faces were transformed using DLSS 5. The 15-year-old student from Hogwarts Legacy suddenly looked much
It's finally here: Apple's long-rumored smart display, the Apple HomeView, has arrived. I got a first look at the device in New York City this week, and it's gorgeous. The HomeView puts a small, vibrant screen atop a speaker base for taking video calls, beautifully displaying photos, and providing i
Character.AI, one of the first breakout startups of the generative AI boom, has filed for bankruptcy and is selling some of its assets to Disney. The company, which builds various online bots for users to chat or roleplay with, has faced mounting scrutiny and lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots
Meta is making up for lost time in the AI race. After launching Muse Spark, the first model from its revamped Superintelligence Labs division, and buzzy AI agent Muse, it's now launching two new models it claims can go toe-to-toe with the industry's best. The new models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder
Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it's also more capable of handling the latest rea
When President Donald Trump announced his plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," you'd be forgiven for being skeptical that it would catch on. While most of the broader population is sticking with AI, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful are falling in line and trying to
I'm embarking on a journey I've so far been hesitant to go on: actually using AI on the regular. Giving my most personal data to cloud services has been a major hold up for me, but it's increasingly possible to run powerful models locally to see what they're capable of. Is this tech so useful […]
In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft's CEO laid out his views on the dangers posed by highly advanced AI models and how to confront those risks. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is treated as a "set of nested black boxes" whose advice and actions we simply accept or […]
Artists are taking to social media to complain that DistroKid has unceremoniously removed their work without notice. Now DistroKid has confirmed to The Verge that the takedowns are a direct response to claims made by UMG. The label filed a lawsuit in September claiming that DistroKid has created an