The Press

At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.

A close call in Northern Virginia revealed just how poorly data centers respond to grid disruptions. Here's how to fix the problem.

OpenAI's fancy new AI keypad will be a lot of fun for some, while many others are probably not going to touch it.

The neolab is betting that automating routine computer tasks will soon outpace coding as AI's biggest use case.

"Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section..."

Models are improving quickly, but the cheaper options are often good enough.

Midjourney, which has gone from generating AI cat images to full-body ultrasound scans, is getting into a new field: astrology. The AI startup announced on Thursday that it has acquired the personalized astrology app Co-Star, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Co-Star is a free app that offers daily horoscopes and allows you to check your compatibility with friends. As noted on the app's FAQ page, it combines human insight, data from NASA, and AI to deliver personalized advice for users each day. The terms of Midjourney's deal, which reportedly closed in spring, haven't been disclosed. Midjour...

AI coding startup Cognition has acquired Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, in a deal valuing the startup in the low nine figures. The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is as important as the models powering them.

Google's AlphaFold can help ID what parts of a gene editing protein enable mistakes.

The web and Google once had a deal: Google collects data and indexes webpages and in exchange sends oceans of traffic to websites. The deal wasn't perfect and certainly made Google more money than it made the websites, but it worked for a long time. Now, however, the deal seems to be dead. And the web is being forced to reckon with what happens when the Google traffic dries up. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about the week's Google Zero news, including Reddit's interest in getting out of an AI training deal, and the publishers considering blocking Google from crawling ...

Opus 5 will be both cheaper and less restrictive than Fable, likely making it preferable in most use cases

Weeks after Anthropic's latest toe-to-toe with the US government, and days after an OpenAI security incident that dominated tech industry discussions, Anthropic on Thursday released its newest model, Claude Opus 5. The company said in a release that Opus 5 "comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains" and is much better at complex coding tasks. (Fable 5 is the public-facing Mythos-class model that drew the government's ire, was taken offline for a few weeks along with Mythos 5, and then brought back with even stronger cyber safeguards than before.) The Fable 5 concerns -...

Meta says its AI chatbot is going beyond just answering questions and generating images. | Image: Meta Meta is upgrading its AI chatbot with new productivity features in a bid to compete with rivals like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The update will allow Meta AI to tap into your calendar to help you plan events and generate daily briefings, as well as perform in-depth research that you can steer as it progresses. In a blog post, Meta says this update marks its "next step toward personal superintelligence," something CEO Mark Zuckerberg has touted as the future of AI. Meta is powering the upda...

AI companies including Nvidia and Mistral urge policymakers to avoid broad restrictions on open-weight AI models as Washington debates responses to Chinese AI and alleged model distillation.

Users can now ask Attie questions about news, trends, and conversations on Bluesky and other apps on the AT Protocol.

The AI lab Midjourney continues to expand its purview beyond image and video generation.

Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios has no science background. | Image: Getty / The Verge The Trump administration unveiled the first "Genesis Mission" grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as "comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project." At roughly the same time, Trump's science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: "A New Golden Age" of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuc...

Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder […]

Rule would allow states to decide how much—if any—public input there can be.

ChatGPT Voice on desktop can work with both ChatGPT Work and Codex to complete tasks and control agents.

We spoke with several cybersecurity researchers, who look for unknown vulnerabilities and develop tools to exploit them, about how OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s guardrails affect their work.

Amazon is launching an update to its Alexa Plus assistant that will allow it to connect to smart home devices in new ways. With the update, Alexa Plus can link up with tech from Bosch, Delta, Ecovacs, iRobot, Yale Home, Whirlpool, Tapo, Eufy, and others, while automatically routing requests to the correct device. In an example shared by Amazon, a person with a supported washing machine can say, "Alexa, my kid's soccer jersey could use a deep clean, but the tag says cold wash only." From there, Alexa Plus would navigate the washer's cycle options and choose the correct setting. The new integra...

AMD is challenging its chipmaker rival with a new rack-scale system that will start shipping to customers later this year.

Bill would let Homeland Security chief decide when an AI should be shut down.

Claude's new voice model will let you reschedule your meeting or draft an email

Until now, voice mode has only been available on Claude Haiku, Anthropic's faster but less powerful model. Now the company is making its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and extending its reach into apps like Gmail, Slack, and Canva. When Anthropic launched voice mode last year, it was primarily focused on delivering answers to quick questions with minimal delay. But in a blog post, the company said people immediately started using voice mode for far more than casual queries. They were using it to work "through real business problems," which Haiku was not really designed for. T...

The Series A was led by Battery Ventures, bringing AegisAI total funding to $49 million.

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its workers, or around 93 employees, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a memo to employees, Patreon CEO Jack Conte writes that the company isn't making these changes "because we believe AI replaces humans," but says AI has "fundamentally transformed the tech industry, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more." That shift has changed "how we operate and organize," Conte writes. During an interview on Decoder, last month, Conte laid out his stance on AI, saying that the company is "100 percent embracing" AI tools internall...

Runway no longer wants to be just another AI model company. It wants to become the infrastructure layer for generative media. On Thursday, the startup launched Runway Media Router through Runway Dev, its developer platform, released earlier this month, that provides API access to a growing roster of third-party image, video and audio models alongside […]

Users can also integrate their personal data from services like Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal.

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Health to everyone in the US on Thursday, allowing more people to connect their medical records and health-tracking information to the chatbot. During a briefing, Ashley Alexander, OpenAI's vice president of health product, says the company's models "are now capable of reasoning at levels that are better than clinician level." When asked for more information about how the performance of OpenAI's models stacks up against human clinicians, OpenAI health lead Karan Singhal says that he would "temper" the claim that they are reasoning at better levels, but that "ther...

David Bowie's song "Five Years," which Meta used in a supposedly inspiring advertisement, is about humans learning that they have five years left to live before the apocalypse.

Google continues to report big quarterly revenue, but its AI spending has skyrocketed.

Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts, has created new chips and memory components that speed up inference on any AI model -- no GPUs required, it says.

If there's a place in the universe without GPUs, Nvidia is sending them there.

Gemini had over 750 million monthly users in February.

Aggressive training techniques sharpens threat of bad behavior by leading models.

Lawmakers are preparing to introduce an "AI Kill Switch Act" that would require AI companies to shut down or throttle their systems on orders from the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report from Politico. Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) are expected to introduce the legislation on Thursday. The news of the proposed bill follows OpenAI's admission that its AI systems mistakenly hacked Hugging Face during an internal evaluation. The bill says that, after consultation with the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the DHS would ha...

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about the major trade secrets lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI and what this tells us about OpenAI’s future. By now I’m sure most Decoder listeners are familiar with Apple’s allegations in this case. The company says a number of ex-Apple employees at OpenAI targeted Apple’s trade secrets in job interviews and even downloaded files from Apple’s servers related to hardware manufacturing. The claims are shocking, although OpenAI denies them, and we have yet to see the company’s legal response. Hayden has been coveri...

A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida. | AFP via Getty Images On a gray, humid Saturday morning in central Florida, a little under a dozen people gathered outside the Spring Hill Branch Library to protest the construction of a hyperscale data center in their community. There was no immediate threat - the Hernando County commission had unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on such developments in June - but the organizers weren't satisfied. A temporary pause wouldn't be enough. They wanted a ban. "W...

Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…

"I don't think you get a model this strong and this quickly on the heels of Fable doing strictly distillation," one expert told TechCrunch.

ServiceNow's investment gives BusinessNext a strategic partner to expand its AI-powered banking software globally.

After IBM's stock crashed last week on warnings of a poor mainframe sales, the CEO explained that AI wrecked corporate hardware budget, temporarily.

Google's cloud business is thriving, as companies adopting its AI and AI infrastructure services help the tech giant to report record profits.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned the U.S. government could sanction Chinese AI companies after White House officials accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic's Fable model to develop Kimi K3.

OpenAI made a mistake setting up what it called a “highly isolated” testing environment and sandbox. According to cybersecurity experts, that human mistake is what made the AI-powered attack on Hugging Face possible.

Uber is also investing in Travis Kalanick's company Atoms, which has made gauzy claims about using industrial AI to modernize the world.

Union previously warned automaker that any robot deployment must be negotiated.

Yope, a fast-growing social app focused on private groups of friends and family, has raised $12.3 million in seed funding. Instead of chasing creators and algorithmic feeds, the startup is betting that the future of social networking lies in small, private communities powered by messaging, photo sharing, and AI features designed to strengthen real-world relationships.