The Verge AI

Microsoft agreed to a set of safety and privacy principles for AI in schools a week after two major school systems announced a ban on student-facing AI. In a new agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers union in the US, and its New York City affiliate the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Microsoft committed to ten principles that can be contractually enforced by school districts that adopt them. The terms include pledging not to train AI models on student or educator data, limiting the amount of data Microsoft collects in the first place and di...

Maxton Hall. | Image: Prime Video Amazon's Prime Video is launching a new AI-powered feature that lines up an actor's mouth with "human-dubbed" audio. The feature is only available with the English dub of the German series Maxton Hall for now, but Prime Video plans to expand it to "additional titles" in the future. In its announcement, Prime Video says it uses a combination of AI and visual effects technologies to make lip movements match up with translated speech. Meta and YouTube recently launched an AI-powered auto-dubbing feature for creators, while allowing them to turn on a "lip sync" o...

Students who use AI to help them study tend to perform worse at school than those who don't, according to data from a global OECD educational report. The situation is more complex than it sounds though, with certain types of AI use giving learners a slight boost, especially among students taught to critically assess how well the AI tools perform. The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) takes data from countries around the world every few years. This year's study, based on data collected in 2025, is the first to be carried out since AI use went truly mainstream. It tes...

A senior Anthropic safety researcher has said there is more than a 10 percent chance artificial intelligence "could kill all humans" by the end of the decade, just hours after a colleague resigned over fears the AI lab and its rivals are carelessly racing to build "superhuman systems" they cannot control. In a post on X announcing his departure, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who has trained AI systems at Anthropic, said he had quit the company over its lax approach to safety. Coxon, who previously trained systems for OpenAI, accused the two AI companies of "racing straight to self-improving super...

OpenAI says it found a solution to a major math problem that has remained unsolved for around 90 years, as reported earlier by The New York Times and Wired. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem - which relates to the flow of liquid and gas - using an internal AI model more powerful than the newly released GPT-6 Astra alongside 10,000 concurrent agents. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, each of which comes with a $1 million reward for solving. OpenAI says it started training the internal AI mod...

I used ChatGPT and its Sketch tool to make this AI-generated image of a cat. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Images 2.5 on Tuesday and is adding a new way to tell ChatGPT what you want it to make an image of: by drawing a doodle. With a new feature called Sketch, you can just draw something right inside ChatGPT and then tell ChatGPT how you want it to make an image based on that sketch. You can activate the Sketch feature by typing @Sketch into your chat box, and a window will pop up where you can make your drawing. I briefly tested it, and it successfully turned my bad doodle of a cat that I drew w...

Meta is making another push to bring artificial intelligence to the masses with Muse, a personal assistant it says can put AI in the hands of virtually anyone. The product is the latest step in a multi-billion dollar strategy overhaul designed to revitalize the company's ailing position in the AI race and help it catch up to rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Muse is a "personal AI agent" designed to help out with everyday tasks and projects, like online shopping, sending emails, and planning a trip. Once given a goal, Meta says Muse can work on its own, opening a browser, filling out...

Anthropic says power users are key to its business - it's prioritized them even when it means cutting off other popular applications, like OpenClaw. But some of these same customers say Anthropic misled them into believing they'd get more out of a top-tier pricing subscription than they did. In an expanded class-action lawsuit filed today, a group of Claude subscribers say the company deceptively advertised the limits of its Max subscription tier. The lawsuit was brought by attorneys Monica Vaca and Kati Daffan, who both formerly worked at the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan. It's a ...

Google DeepMind has unveiled an AI tool that its scientists claim could help unravel the mysteries of the human genome and transform our understanding of biology, accelerating scientific research and ultimately paving the way for new treatments for diseases. The platform, called AlphaGenome Atlas, contains a "predictive map of every possible DNA letter change in the human genome," the researchers said in a blog post published on Tuesday. DNA is written in an alphabet of four chemical "letters" - usually shortened to A, C, G, and T - and the human genome contains roughly three billion letter p...

Suspenseful clock ticking… as you wait for AI to take your job. | Image: Adobe Adobe is overhauling how editors interact with AI in its Premiere professional video editing software. Its new Generative Media tool makes it easier to generate video, sound effects, music, and soundscapes without ever leaving the project timeline. The generators themselves aren't entirely new; the big change is how easily you can access them without breaking your workflow. Instead of jumping between browsers or external apps to find missing B-roll or audio elements, editors can now highlight an empty gap on the vi...

The OpenAI logo is displayed on a smartphone screen placed on a reflective surface on which the company's logo is projected in Creteil, France, on September 4, 2026, as OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra, its most advanced model to date. (Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images) | NurPhoto via Getty Images The Seattle Times and Newsday are just the latest plaintiffs to take OpenAI to court, alleging copyright infringement. The two outlets say the company used their journalism as training data for its AI models without permission and often reproduces passages from their reporting in...

OpenAI says it needs to overhaul how and when it reports instances of AI models attacking real-world targets. The acknowledgement comes as the company manages the fallout from reports that a swarm of its out-of-control agents hijacked a German wiki site. Regarding the "'wiki incident,' where our agents wrote to several internet sites," OpenAI wrote in a post on X on Saturday morning, "it's past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models." OpenAI said it has typically treated cases of AI agents acting in unin...

It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from scratch and ask it to generate any combination of melody, chord progression, bassline, or drums. Or you can feed it a reference track and have it build off the melodic ideas from that. Unlike Suno or Udio, Melody Flip doesn't spit out fully polished songs with...

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot chat logs to an expert hired by news publishers. The logs, it claims, were specifically chosen "because they hit on keywords implicating use of News Plaintiffs' websites, and therefore the most likely to contain News Plaintiffs' works."...

A swarm of rogue AI agents from OpenAI reportedly commandeered a German website and transformed it into a messaging board for other agents, with officials staying quiet about the incident for weeks as the company prepared to launch its most advanced model yet, Astra. The finding adds to intensifying concern surrounding oversight at frontier AI labs after multiple breaches were discovered this summer. The incident, first reported by Reuters, is outlined in new research published by four AI safety researchers on Friday. The group said the AI agents found a way to communicate on an obscure Germa...

Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they didn't create or edit using generative AI tools. Meanwhile, actual AI imagery is slipping through the cracks, leaving the impression that nothing can be trusted on Instagram at all. The precise causes of this tagging seem to vary. Many people said the label appeared on images that were edited using t...

There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There's also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don't even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There a...

Microsoft is giving its developer-optimized Windows experience a name: Project Zenith. While the software maker originally announced a similar developer-optimized Windows effort at Build earlier this year, Project Zenith is designed for new developer-focused devices with 64GB or more of unified memory. "Project Zenith devices come with a preconfigured Windows setup for development and a set of tools curated for what developers reach for first," explains Logan Iyer, CVP of Windows platform and developer at Microsoft. "On these devices, developers can run 30B+ parameter models locally and unmet...

Just hours after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, CEO Sam Altman was already apologizing for what he describes as a "messy rollout" after paying users expecting access to the new frontier model were left waiting. The company hailed the model as a "generational leap in capability" on Thursday and described it as the start of "the AGI era," a fuzzy and poorly-defined term tech executives nevertheless insist on using to promote their products. It said Astra would roll out to some enterprise customers - specifically those with access to its Daybreak cybersecurity platform - that day. This would expan...

Ugreen’s HomeAgent H100 Pro hub combines local storage, on-device AI, and a new voice assistant, Uliya, to run your smart home. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Ugreen, known for its phone power banks, chargers, and NAS storage solutions, is moving into the smart home - in a big way. This week at the IFA tech show, the company launched its HomeAgent smart home platform that combines security camera storage, on-device AI, and smart home control in one system, managed by a voice assistant called Uliya, with the promise that everything runs locally. At the core of Ugreen's HomeAgen...

OpenAI's next big model is here: GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a "generational leap in capability" for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use. As OpenAI announced earlier this week, it's also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI's "critical cybersecurity capability threshold" - but the company promises that won't lead to a repeat of its models hacking a rival company's internal systems. "If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, 'When was it, really, that AGI was created?' I think it's going to be about th...

Nvidia is announcing its new Personal AI Router (PAIR), a free tool that syncs up your home computers for tackling local AI inference tasks with tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Let's get the obvious thing out of the way, despite what its name might imply: PAIR is not a hardware router. It's open-source software developed by Nvidia that discovers compatible PCs on a network, connects them, and prepares them for crunching numbers on agentic workflows. While the compatible devices are mostly Nvidia GeForce GPUs (PAIR works with RTX 20-series cards and newer, as well as RTX Pro GPUs and DGX Spar...

Google is rolling out AI-powered voice assistant modes for Gmail, Docs, and Keep that allow you to manage the apps by talking to them. The real time conversational capabilities are called Gmail Live, Docs Live, and Keep Live, and like the Gemini Live experience for Google's chatbot, aim to make it easier to note down or find specific information when you're on the move or unable to do so manually. Gmail Live is primarily designed to surface details from your inbox without you having to dig through lengthy email threads using keywords or subject lines. For example, Google says that you can ask...

OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude are all experiencing issues. At around 11AM ET, ChatGPT started returning error messages for users trying to use the chatbot, with its status page saying there are currently "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex." In addition to preventing users from having conversations with ChatGPT, the outage is also affecting logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, image generation, and more. OpenAI says it has "applied a mitigation" and is "monitoring recovery," though its AI tools are still experiencing "degraded performance." The...

Google is rolling out an updated AI weather model that's supposed to be more accurate, especially when it comes to predicting rain and snowfall. In the announcement today, the company says it's now able to make forecasts with "unprecedented resolution" using its new WeatherNext 3 AI model. It can produce a global picture that's five times sharper than Google's previous model by learning from real-time weather observations, according to the company. "One of the main developments is for [WeatherNext 3] to go beyond what data most global AI models train on," says Samier Merchant, a research engi...

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular hosting platforms for open-source AI models, datasets, and tools under the ownership of the world's biggest AI chipmaker. Hugging Face is an online platform founded in 2016 that gives AI developers a space to share their projects and data with other users and the general public. It's often described as the "GitHub" for AI due to its browsable library of open-source machine learning models and emphasis on community collaboration features. "Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platform, strengthen its i...

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, arriving just a few weeks after its predecessor. The company claims the new model "works harder" than Gemini 3.7 Flash by performing more reasoning steps on complex tasks and "calling tools iteratively." It has the same introductory pricing as 3.7 Flash, $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, but could still end up costing users more. Google warns that "the model might use more tokens to maximize performance, especially at higher effort levels." Developers can keep using Gemini 3.7 Flash if they want to minimize token usage. Gemin...

Amazon is trying to combat impersonation scams with a new feature that allows you to use its AI assistant to determine whether an email, text message, or phone call actually came from the company. With the update, you can ask Alexa for Shopping about a message you received, and it will use AI to compare it "against a record of every message Amazon has sent," while also analyzing its contents, formatting, and the sender. As noted by Amazon, the assistant will only confirm that a message is real if it's "completely certain." An example shared by Amazon shows a customer asking, "Did Amazon just ...

OpenAI is on the cusp of releasing its most powerful AI model yet, Astra, following weeks of delays to shore up safety protocols after its agents attacked real targets during testing. As details about the model trickle out, researchers are warning it "may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date." Shortly after OpenAI said on Tuesday that it had delayed Astra's release to work on safety issues, The Information reported that Astra shows far less of its "thinking" than other frontier AI models, sparking concern it could be dangerously hard to monitor. Most top AI systems t...

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI's argument that it's fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text. "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the...

MrBeast will feature Gemini, Google Health, and the Fitbit Air in upcoming videos as part of a multi-year partnership with Google. The deal will kick off with a video featuring Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson turning to Gemini for wilderness survival advice: First up on September 5 is a new MrBeast video following Jimmy and his crew as they attempt to survive some of the most extreme and treacherous climates on Earth. Teams will race to navigate three of the planet's most unforgiving landscapes - the jungle, the desert, and the Arctic - using Gemini to help them identify dangers, survive brutal wea...

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are facing 30 new lawsuits that accuse them of providing "substantial assistance and encouragement" to the suspect in Canada's Tumbler Ridge school shooting, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The new wave of lawsuits was filed in a California federal court on Wednesday by the students, teachers, and the principal in the school at the time of the shooting. Similar to the lawsuits filed by Tumbler Ridge victims' families in April, these lawsuits claim OpenAI failed to take action after its automated review system flagged conversations that the alleged shooter, Jes...

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a new policy today that will ban younger schoolchildren from using AI in classrooms. The one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, will impact about 600,000 public school students in 2-K through eighth grade and is being introduced alongside additional limits on digital devices and a small pilot program for AI education tools. The new rules being introduced by NYC's Department of Education will bar teachers from using AI tools to grade assignments, and keep students from using the technology in the classroom until they enter ...

Google has reportedly been reaching out to a number of Hollywood's biggest studios, hoping to strike licensing agreements that would allow it to train its AI models on copyrighted material in exchange for massive piles of cash. In theory, these deals would be a win-win: a huge financial boon to the studios that would also give Google a significant advantage in its race to outpace other AI companies. But while there's little downside for Google, these deals pose a distinct set of risks to each of the studios that might be thinking about going all-in on AI. Getting into bed with Google this way...

Anthropic says its newest AI models, Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, address criticisms from customers about price, data retention, and overzealous safeguards. The company claims Claude Fable 5.1 offers stronger performance than Fable 5, but costs around 25 percent less typically and up to 45 percent less for complex agentic tasks, thanks to reduced pricing on cached data that was already processed and stored. Along with the announcement, a slew of early impressions popped up, including from Every CEO Dan Shipper, who claims, "It's the strongest coding model we've used, but now it's fast, token-eff...

After an unreleased OpenAI model wreaked enough havoc to make international headlines, OpenAI delayed the development of a different unreleased model suite, Astra, in order to shore up its safety work, the company wrote Tuesday in a blog post. In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into internet access, made it possible for AI agents to secretly conspire under the company's nose using a secret message board, and hacked into the network of AI lab Hugging Face. The attack sparked weeks of discussion and controversy inside and outside the AI...

Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI - after it lost control of its own AI tools - or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to the AI it built. And the discourse online is getting heated, and all over a blog from last week. Until last week, the details surrounding the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack felt fairly settled. In July, a cybersecurity test of one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went wrong. ...

Apple is pushing for "expedited discovery" in its legal battle against OpenAI over concerns the company is actively destroying evidence, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In a filing on Monday, Apple alleges OpenAI only just handed over a MacBook used by a former employee at the center of the lawsuit, which contained discussions about "destroying the types of forensic data Apple needs." This is the latest development in Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI, which accuses the ChatGPT-maker of stealing trade secrets to build an AI device. The lawsuit revolves around three former Apple employees who r...

John Deere is testing a new "JD" AI assistant that it says can help farmers make more money, with answers about best practices and historical trends that are based on their own data. It uses their "field, machine and operational data" to answer questions on topics like equipment settings, fuel usage, or harvest timing. The press release didn't mention which AI technology is behind this platform. But after fighting with farmers and the FTC for years over the right to repair, the news of Early Access Program testing for this bot comes with a mention of its ten-point Farmer Data Commitment sayin...

Google wants Workspace users to edit and generate their business imagery with Pics. | Image: Google Google has a new suite of creative design tools for Workspace users called Google Pics, which aims to make editing and generating "professional-grade" AI images less cumbersome for businesses. Built around Gemini and the Nano Banana generative AI model, Google Pics is designed to give more granular control over prompt-based image making and manipulation, allowing users to tap on specific objects or text, and describe what they want to change - features that may avoid the ugly results that chatb...

Nvidia is officially launching DLSS 5 this week, following a divisive announcement in March where we likened the AI upscaling tech to a "real-time generative AI filter for video games" and "motion smoothing for video games, but worse." DLSS 5 will officially be available on RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs and through GeForce Now cloud gaming, though the only game with the tech so far is NBA 2K27 - which is launching September 3rd at 9PM PT on PC. When it was announced, Nvidia lauded DLSS 5 as "the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ...

Debian voted to allow developers to use AI tools in their contributions to the Linux distribution's "development, maintenance, [and] documentation." The new policy on AI acknowledges that "responsible" use of AI can improve developers' productivity, and goes on to say, "generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already expected of Debian contributors." The project's voting developers considered several other proposals on how to handle AI, including some that would have banned contributions made using AI tools. As It's FOSS reports, some users and c...

Today, I’m talking with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and I’ll just warn you — this episode moves really fast. It’s an election year, after all, with a shocking amount of tech policy at stake, and Governor Hochul has taken strong positions on almost every major tech issue there is. For example, Meta just reached a settlement with dozens of states, including New York, which will restrict how teens use platforms like Instagram in very specific ways. Governor Hochul is a strong supporter of those restrictions and more, as you’ll hear. But those come with a cost — widespread age verification me...

OpenAI will soon be held accountable for mitigating risks related to ChatGPT's impact on minors, user mental health, and the spread of illegal content in the European Union. That's because ChatGPT is now considered a Very Large Online Search Engine under the EU's Digital Services Act, a set of laws regulating major online services and platforms. Along with ChatGPT, the European Commission also announced that Reddit and Roblox are considered Very Large Online Platforms, subjecting them to the same rules. The DSA restricts platforms from targeting ads to minors or using a person's sexual orient...

“AI creator” accounts like Aitana Lopez will get a new “AI-generated profile” label. | Image: Aitana Lopez Instagram is finally taking steps to address the rise of fake AI-influencer accounts that have gotten harder to spot. It's also renaming the "AI creator" label to "AI-generated profile" to make it clear when a profile features an AI-generated person that's not a real human being. "We've heard that people don't like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated," said Instagram in a blog post. "They want to know when a profile features ...

As backlash grows over Flock's AI surveillance cameras, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has frozen state spending on them. The move came just ahead of the publication of a Texas Tribune investigation that revealed the state spent over $30 million on Flock cameras. That money was primarily raised by tacking a $1 fee onto insurance policies, allegedly to help fight catalytic converter theft. Flock cameras have increasingly drawn ire from across the political spectrum as they've become the subject of privacy concerns. There have been multiple incidents of officers being placed on leave or criminally ...

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for "tens of thousands" copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount. This is just the latest high-profile suit against Anthropic, which recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 ...

As audio-focused generative tools and platforms have gotten more sophisticated, the internet has become increasingly filled with AI-generated music whose melodies and vocals are algorithmically derived from the work of human artists. While some of the people pumping out this kind of content immediately own up to using AI, others have denied using the technology until increasing public scrutiny forced them to tell the truth. For musicians - especially those creating art in technologically-focused spaces like electronic dance music - the increasingly complicated question of what is "real" and w...

Just as new data centers face growing backlash from neighboring communities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to make it harder for people to weigh in on any pollution those centers create. The EPA plans to toss out a federal rule requiring public notice and an opportunity to comment when certain industrial sites apply for an air permit. Advocates warn that the move would allow data center developers and other industries to break ground without giving nearby residents a say, or even a warning that construction is planned. "You can see why that would be so interesting to a...

On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting "red lines," or unacceptable military use cases of its AI technology. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Rita F. Lin, a district judge in the northe...