The Press

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."

We compiled a list of all the hottest AI wearables, including Muse Charm, Bee, Friend, Plaud, and more.

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 Open Source community." The new rules have set off a firestorm in the comments, and even spurred the creation of a rival sub r/trueopensource. Moderator Wolvereness has waded into the comments to explain that there's nuance and room for selective enforcement, such as "software that incidentally ha...

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 has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their articles or discover their websites for the first time. For years, the relationship between Google a...

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 and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all. Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would have caused them to cut a shot. Or "we might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: 'Oh, actually …...

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 artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded flyers about their wing specials. Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require disclosures on AI content. And it...

Block said that the voice model can run locally on a MacBook M4 Max

A new study found Grok's AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI's GPT favors Democrats, with the two AI models disagreeing in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.

OpenAI will cut frontier models off from the internet weeks after one of its engineers said that solution wouldn't work.

The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a "nap," and summersaulted on voice command.

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 systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement lea...

Turning on Personal Intelligence gives the company more data for ad targeting.

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 Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named "Ronaldo"). We made the first AI model you can have a realistic conversation with that was trained entirel...

Hosted by TechCrunch in partnership with Fidelity Private Shares, the full-day event goes beyond fundraising and AI to explore the realities of finding customers, building teams, sharpening a pitch, developing founder leadership, and scaling companies both inside and outside traditional startup hubs.

Company says foreign-made robotic vehicles are crucial to US chip production.

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 debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it be a better product if it started as an iPad rather than an iPhone? Would we feel differently about...

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 personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads." That means anyone who has connected their Drive, Gmail, or...

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 November 20th "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not." The business terms, which were originally supposed to go into effect on October 30th, appeared to give Meta permission to freely scrape the new sites that use its platforms, while ...

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 AI tools, as hobbyists take apart games and then rebuild them for new platforms. But while AI has supercharged the pace of these ports, it's also tearing apart tight-knit communities dedicated to preserving games. Decomps and recomps - shorthand for decomposition and recomposition - are a form of r...

inDrive plans to begin testing Pony.ai's robotaxis in Kazakhstan's capital in the first half of 2027.

MIT researchers marooned 13 AIs on a virtual island, and they responded by inventing games, mourning a lost ring and, eventually, getting better at their jobs.

Should OpenAI command an over $1 trillion valuation with this round, it would break records as the most highly valued private company ever.

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 precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday. Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and marketing content, it's also supposed to create realistic scenes, digital art, environm...

The next competitive advantage in enterprise AI has less to do with which model you choose than with what you build around it. That’s an important shift. For the past several years, much of the AI conversation has centered on model capability: bigger models, better reasoning, larger context windows, higher benchmark scores. Those advances have…

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' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites," James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab. Initially, Meta's new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into ef...

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 Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web addresses for shared conversations from Muse were named after a conversation's title and written into public DNS. Ars Technica said Tuesday that Meta paused the sharing feature after it reached out about what was going on. In a post today on X, Met...

Mars not depicted. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images 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 to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or "spread the light of consciousness," as he put it in this week's SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don't have the ...

The new feature allows agents to log into a customer's personal accounts while still protecting the private credentials that secure those accounts.

Canva is making its new image model available to all users, promising better, more customizable performance at lower costs.

OpenAI is launching its decision model to the world. Can it compete with the original Jev?

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 helpful for people sharing information about AI projects on the platform. "When you upload a Markdown (.md) file, you'll now see the file rendered all nice and neat and pretty instead of with a bunch of symbols," Discord says. "This includes tables, formatting, all that good stuff. Totally great for whe...

A scalable AI system requires a strong foundation. Data, engineering, platforms, operating models, and governance must converge to work as one. This session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Future conference explores what it takes to build that foundation in a highly regulated environment and how a responsible, trustworthy implementation can turn emerging capabilities, including agentic…

Microsoft’s new AI diagnostic system beat generalist doctors on hard cases, according to a study in Science. But most of the improvement seems to come from the AI models underneath, not from Microsoft’s system itself.

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 through bot proxies? Actually, don't answer that. The more urgent question coming off Meta's quarterly earnings call Wednesday night is more likely to be: "Is he?" Zuckerberg is staking Meta's future on Muse, the personal AI agent it released to the general public last month. It's early days, but Zucker...

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman. | Getty Images 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 times more accurately than human doctors. The findings, published Thursday in one of the world's most prestigious journals, Science, are based on tests pitting Microsoft's AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medic...

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. i jailbroke the nintendo switch 2 so i modded cinnamoroll, peter griffin, hatsune miku, and more into Mario Kart World, a switch 2 exclusive now watch my friends and i get cooked by bots learn more and get the exploit https://t.co/ykjgyfrFRp pic.twitter.com/BOcFhejRz1 - pepsipu (@pepsipu) October 22, 2026 OpenAI's Codex helped make this "ns2j...

Microsoft points the blame for ConnectWise's breach at a China-aligned hacker, which relied on AI agents to rapidly hack into thousands of its customers.

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 brought to life by a team of 49 animators. All told, more than 1,000 artists worked on the film in some form. The painstaking process that goes into making a Laika film offers a distinct counterpoint to the instant progress promised by generative AI tools. Recently Wildwood director and Laika CEO Travi...

The ride share giant previously deployed a much smaller pilot for ChatGPT Work, but is now taking the enterprise agent company-wide.

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 other Big Tech companies with long-established presences in Washington, the sums aren't out of the ordinary. Microsoft, for example, has spent at least $2 million a quarter going back to 2021, and Google regularly spends over $3 million, including this quarter. But it's a clear signal that the thre...

Hackers were already probing the bug before defenders were told it existed.

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, which were temporarily shut down after the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Even governments weren’t immune. But it’s not as simple as updating a few servers. The vulnerability exists in every version of PHP dating back roughly 20 years, many of which are no longer supported. That means some older si...

Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström explains why the rise of AI agents could be good news for the music service.

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 here. The choices we make now are critical.” In his piece, Gates ratcheted up his rhetoric around AI safety, writing that “even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.” In interviews since, Gates has called AI “the most...

Claude Duet is available through waitlist for Pro and Max plan users

Nirva will ship its $249 ambient AI pendant by the end of the year.

DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in one of China's largest funding rounds, just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.

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 requests - but should make it less cumbersome to use Agents for tasks that require them to log into various services. "Agents are starting to do real work on our behalf. The old model where you hand over a credential and hope for the best doesn't work," 1Password CEO Aashish Tripathi said in a press s...

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 teenager out to the store: They require an inordinate amount of instructions and specifications, run into technical problems regularly, and come back with solutions that are not exactly what you asked for. They did, technically speaking, complete a task, just not the specific one you asked them to...

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, experts tell The Verge. Citrini Research, the firm behind the experiment, admitted that "none of us could claim to know anything about AI as it related to biology." That didn't stop it from trying to make a drug from scratch - or publishing a blog post titled "We Wanted to Use Claude to Create a New Drug...