The Verge AI

Siri, are you there? Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or "spirit week" theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones - the new Siri can finally do this. After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can r...

At an event in San Francisco today, General Motors made a series of announcements around EV batteries, energy storage, and grid resiliency in the face of growing electricity demand from AI data centers. The automaker announced that it would be activating new vehicle-to-grid capabilities for its current EV and home energy customers. It's releasing a new commercial energy storage system strategy, anchored by newly developed sodium-ion batteries for industrial-scale grid applications. And it's launching a new feature for EV owners that it says will help simplify public charging. Right now, milli...

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious: I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they...

Anthropic just announced Claude Fable 5, a new AI model it said is the most powerful model it has ever made widely available. According to the company, Fable 5 "shows exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, and vision," with its lead over other models growing as tasks become longer and more complex. Fable 5 marks the first broad release from Anthropic's Mythos class of AI models, after the company said the family was so capable at cybersecurity tasks that it was too dangerous to release publicly. Anthropic said the release was "made possible by new safeguards that blo...

Apple’s feature showcase at WWDC 2026 didn’t flag which if these “photographs” are real or created with its new AI fakery. | Images by Apple / compiled by The Verge Apple used to question whether generative AI-powered editing features were worth the risk of distorting our perceptions of the world. Now it seems Apple no longer believes that photos should accurately capture reality. At WWDC 2026, the company announced a host of new AI-powered photo editing tools. They give users effortless powers of manipulating images that Apple still refers to as "photos." Two years ago, Apple launched Clean ...

Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman is walking back his statement about AI automating jobs done by white-collar workers, including lawyers, accountants, and project managers. During an episode of Decoder on Monday, Suleyman says he meant AI will help these workers complete tasks, rather than do their jobs: Sending an email, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint - sub-tasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them. That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all. It just means that the work c...

Apple kicked off its annual developer conference with bold promises about AI. The company, CEO Tim Cook said, would be "introducing new technologies and innovations that push the limits on what's possible." But its slew of announcements - centered on a brand-new "Siri AI" - had more to do with catching up. After almost entirely neglecting Siri and punting its AI promises down the road in 2025, Apple went all in on the tech this year. It pitched Siri as an all-encompassing virtual assistant that ties together all your Apple devices, with multimodal features, a dedicated app, an all-in-one AI a...

Most of Apple's current AI ideas are roughly the same as everyone else's AI ideas. A chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; bizarre, borderline creepy image-generation tools. The company spent most of its WWDC keynote playing catch-up with the state of the AI art, announcing Siri features you can already find on Android phones and in the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The pitch, in so many cases, is just "this thing you know, but on your iPhone now." But a few minutes after I downloaded the first developer beta of iPadOS 26 (I didn't want to risk it on my Mac or my i...

Apple says its cloud processing is as private as on-device, despite expanding to run on Google’s servers. | Screenshot: Apple WWDC 2026 keynote As expected, yesterday's WWDC keynote was mostly about AI. And also as expected, Apple tried to turn its late arrival into its sales pitch: it didn't rush into AI because it was taking its time to do things right. In this case, "right" means "with more privacy than anyone else." It's a good pitch - the question will be how well it holds up. The new Apple Intelligence features and the updated Siri AI have been designed to work across iPhone, iPad, Mac,...

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council will vote on whether to enact a one-year moratorium on new data centers - just two months after several companies proposed building five large-scale centers in the city. Among the moratorium's fiercest supporters are current employees from the city's biggest tech giant, Amazon, who joined others to testify in support of the policy last week. Data centers have sparked protests across the country over concerns about water consumption, local electricity prices, and noise. In Seattle and the surrounding King County, the issue is coming to a head. If the city c...

Apple is trying to solve one of Safari's biggest weaknesses with AI. Safari has long lacked the robust library of extensions that its rivals have, mainly due to the stringent development requirements from Apple. But now, Apple is inviting users to essentially vibe code their own extensions. In a demo shared by Apple, the company showed how you can ask Safari to create an extension by describing it. "Save and track cooking recipes from around the web," the prompt said. "Click the toolbar button to see your saved recipes and add notes to each." From there, Safari used Apple Intelligence to gene...

Two years after first revealing its plans for Apple Intelligence and a smarter Siri that never fully materialized, at WWDC, Apple just revealed a new set of AI features and a smarter, more personalized Siri. Apple calls Siri AI an "entirely new version of Siri" and says it's both more conversational and more capable than the previous version of the smart assistant. In conversations, it has a more expressive voice that can be customized by pace, expressivity, and accent. Siri AI will be accessible systemwide, capable of reading what's on-screen and interacting with your apps. But Apple's SVP o...

Google is rolling out "across the board" updates to NotebookLM. The AI-powered note-taking app now uses Google's upgraded Gemini 3.5 model, which will allow it to respond with "more accurate and reliable information," according to a blog post on Monday. Launched in 2023, NotebookLM allows you to interact with your notes and sources using AI, as well as ask questions about the materials. With this update, Google says you can start a research project by just asking NotebookLM questions about a topic, instead of importing notes or YouTube videos. NotebookLM will use Google Search to help you fin...

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I’m actually going to keep today’s intro short — I’m working from my wife’s family farm this week, as you’ll see in the video, but also this is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from Mustafa’s approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious. Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer product...

Apple's biggest event of the year is nearly here. The company's Worldwide Developers Conference will spotlight updates to iOS, macOS, and all of Apple's other operating systems, and this year's event could also include a major overhaul for Siri. Here's how you can watch along live. When WWDC will happen and where you can watch it WWDC lasts a few days, but Apple's biggest announcements will be in the keynote presentation on June 8th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. The full presentation usually lasts a couple of hours. You can watch it live on YouTube or from Apple's website. What to expect from Apple's ...

Aitana Lopez, AI avatar by creative agency The Clueless. | Image: The Clueless This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI confusion, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started At first, AI influencers were relatively easy to identify - and to ignore. Aside from the occasional bursts of hype, they didn't seem to change much about the way social media worked. The earliest virtual influencers - Lil Miquela with her blunt fringe and freckles, Imma ...

A proposed $2 billion data center has become a political flashpoint in the small city of Shelbyville, Indiana. And the controversy has only grown more intense after the mayor, Scott Furgeson, was caught on camera saying of the "No Data Center" signs going up that, "I've seen a lot of these all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses," before adding, "most of them are rentals." The woman speaking to him in the clip quickly pushes back, saying that they're "working class," and someone chimes in to add something that a mayor shouldn't have to be told about their constituents: "it doesn't...

An AI-generated image of the royal family featuring two Queen Elizabeth IIs. | Image: Meta AI Facebook has long been filled with feeds of clickbait articles. Now, Meta is making its own clickbait articles with AI. The standalone Meta AI app now has a "For You" section that populates a list of clickbait-style stories for you to read. But the topics, images, and text are all AI-generated - and as questionable as you'd expect from AI-created works. The Meta AI app first launched in April 2025 with its focus on a public "Discover" feed that showed AI-generated images and conversations from other ...

Our first glimpse of the new AI Siri came all the way back at WWDC 2024. Apple has been on its back foot, AI-wise, for the past few years. But in a strange way, playing from behind might not be such a bad move. At WWDC on Monday, Apple appears to be getting ready to reintroduce us to the new Siri. Again. As a reminder, we met the new Siri in 2024 when Apple "launched" Apple Intelligence. Siri came with a new glowing border, different voice options, and the ability to punt questions to ChatGPT. The whole "Intelligence" bit of the Siri redesign was coming soon, Apple promised. It didn't. In fac...

We're now deep into developer conference season, and one of the themes so far is the relentless conviction from Big Tech companies that AI is going to change everything about how we do everything. Nvidia's Jensen Huang made that clearer than anyone this week, when he described a completely new way of using our laptops - and a completely new kind of laptop made to support it. It's all very interesting, but it raises the same question we have around so many AI products: Does anyone actually want this? On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David run through a lot of the products coming out...

The New York State legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new large data centers, the first statewide ban of its kind if Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signs it into law. Lawmakers behind the bill say it's meant to give policymakers time to understand the impact of large data centers on the environment and energy prices. It directs the state's environmental agency to create an impact report assessing the amount of electricity, water, and land that data centers use, and the pollution they create. It also requires companies planning to build large data centers - defined as having a peak ...

When Quilty hit the industry trades earlier this year, the AI startup promised that its tool could accurately predict a film's success just by reading the script. When people actually got a chance to experiment with Quilty's product, though, they were left skeptical. Even with all the available data in the world, it predicted the script for Christy, which would go on to be a box office flop, would outperform the script for Sinners, which became an Oscar-winning blockbuster. As many AI execs have pitched before, Quilty's founders believe that can help "democratize" their industry by giving up-...

Kevin O'Leary agreed to halve the size of his planned 40,000-acre data center in Utah amid mounting pressure from residents and activists, as reported earlier by local affiliate ABC4. The Shark Tank star sent a letter to Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams on Thursday, saying that he will remove 19,430 acres from the project, located in and around the Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area. The change comes just days after Adams called on O'Leary to slash the size of his Project Stratos data center by 75 percent, which would reduce it to about 10,000 acres. Adams also asked O'Leary to...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. - the world's biggest semiconductor-maker - is struggling to meet demands from American customers even with its factory buildout in the US, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg. "Customer demand is so high, and we can only support so much," TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said after a shareholder meeting on Thursday, Reuters reports. "We are doing our best to ensure TSMC does not become a bottleneck." The surge in AI use has already put constraints on the memory industry, with the widespread shortage of RAM and NAND Flash memory expected to last for years. ...

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough. I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons — its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way. I also...

Nobody should be subjected to seeing shrimp Jesus all over their social feeds. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images It's almost impossible to avoid seeing AI-generated content online, but it doesn't have to be this way. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, with many now automatically applying labels to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and music from those made by real, human creators. That's all very well and good if we're just stumbling across labeled content at random, but you know what would be better? Le...

Some of the AI industry's biggest rivals have put their many, many grievances aside for a common cause: making it harder for people to use their technology to develop biological weapons. In an open letter to US lawmakers, tech leaders are pressing Congress to enact rules closing what they say is an alarming biosecurity gap that could help trigger a global pandemic. Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories urging US lawmakers to require companies selling synthetic DNA and RNA - genetic material that can ordered online and assembl...

The design hasn’t changed much from the original Proteus, which was announced in 2022. | Image: Amazon Amazon has announced a new version of its fully autonomous warehouse robot, Proteus, that will can interact using language instead of code. The expanded capabilities come as part of a growing pivot toward automation as the e-commerce giant replaces its human workers with robots. Amazon says the AI-powered upgrade means its human employees can assign the robot tasks in the same way they'd communicate with colleagues. Previously, workers would need to use specialized software to direct the flo...

This week we've got tandem hands-ons with Google's new Gemini AI agent - Spark - from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It's so effective that it's scary. Spark knew that David's dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay's wife, even though neither of them explicitly provided this information to Google. But what's scary to me is how all of this stuff seems geared toward a future of "productivity" that completely misses what needs to be fixed in our world. "Productivity" is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even ...

Amazon's updated search bar will now show you AI-generated images of products as you describe them. For now, the in-app feature only surfaces AI images of clothing and home goods, allowing you to tap on the image that best matches what you're looking for and search for similar-looking items. In a blog post, Amazon positions the feature as a way to help you search for items if you can't remember the name of a specific texture or style, like describing a "shirt with a draped collar" if you can't think of "cowl neck." The feature seems like it might come in handy in these kinds of scenarios, but...

At Microsoft's annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it's finally acting like it. For years, Microsoft's AI business leaned hard on its early and exclusive partnership with OpenAI. But the drama-filled marriage slowly devolved into a situationship, and the pair effectively separated in late April (though Microsoft is still...

In the face of widespread backlash to the AI data center buildout throughout the US, Google is touting its efforts to minimize the environmental impact by actually increasing water for local communities. The company laid out five commitments around water use in a new blog post published Wednesday, including a goal to replenish more water than it uses at its data centers by 2030. Google also said it will invest in local water infrastructure, identify alternative water sources to power its facilities, and be transparent about its water use overall. "We're just one of dozens of players in the sp...

Online publishers are getting more control over whether their websites appear in Google's AI Search features, thanks to a UK regulatory ruling. The new conduct rule imposed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) requires Google to let website owners keep their content out of features like AI Overviews, and prevent it from being used for the "fine-tuning" of Google's AI models. "In a world first, publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews," the CMA announced. "This will put publishers, like news orga...

Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on personal assistant and updates across Microsoft's in-house AI models. If you didn't watch the event live, you can catch up on all the latest news in the roundup below. A mini Surface PC designed for AI development The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is geared toward developers who want to run local AI models on their device, serving as a substitute for Qualcomm's canceled dev kit. It comes equipped with...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday creating a "voluntary framework" for AI companies to share their frontier models with the federal government before they're released "to promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure." The order says the US AI industry has succeeded in part "because we refuse to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation," but that it also recognizes new AI capabilities come with security risks. Accordingly, it directs several federal agencies to come up with a framework to "assess the advanced cyber...

Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new "flagship" model: MAI-Thinking-1. It's an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year - before then, it had relied on OpenAI's models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties. According to Microsoft, MAI-Thinking-1 is a "medium-sized model" that "matches leading models" on "key" software engineering benchmarks. Microsoft says the company "trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party ...

Google is launching a new feature for its Phone app that aims to protect you from AI impersonation scams. Now, when you receive a call from a scammer that appears to be coming from the same number as one of your contacts, Phone by Google will flag the call as suspicious so you can hang up. In a post explaining the update, Google describes impersonation scams as a growing threat, with the FBI reporting that Americans lost over $893 million to scams using AI in 2025. To carry out the attack, scammers spoof one of your contacts' phone numbers and then use AI-powered tech to make their voice soun...

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Unlike Copilot that lives inside Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do a lot more. "This is a personal assistant, it's the first real personal assistant we've offered customers," explains Omar Shahine, corporate vice president of Microsoft Sco...

Microsoft just announced "Project Solara," a new OS designed for gadgets that run AI agents, at Build 2026. The company is calling it "a new platform built from the ground up to power agent-driven experiences." It's built on Android, not Windows. Microsoft demonstrated two concept Project Solara devices at Build today: Desk concept and badge concept. The desk concept is an Amazon Echo Show-like device that unlocks with facial recognition and provides access to AI agents. The badge concept is a wearable, the type of badge you'd typically use to access a work building. It has a camera and a fin...

Microsoft only just announced a new Surface Laptop Ultra at the weekend, and it's now revealing a miniature Surface PC aimed at developers. The new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is powered by Nvidia's new Arm-based RTX Spark chips, just like the Surface Laptop Ultra, and is optimized for sustained workloads and local AI tasks. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box looks a little like the top of an Xbox Series X console, with an aluminum chassis that also doubles as a heatsink. It has a 100 watt thermal envelope, slightly more than the 45 watt to 80 watt thermal envelopes for Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops. T...

Microsoft’s annual developer conference is kicking off on June 2nd in San Francisco with the keynote presentation streaming live at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT, and we will be following along here with everything as it’s announced. The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that we can expect to hear about new AI models and agentic OpenClaw-like tools, plus a Copilot “super app” to go along with some of the major changes to Windows 11 that have already started appearing. Microsoft just announced the new Surface Laptop Ultra, powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark, so there could be more Windows on ARM news in store. F...

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything. According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you're going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I've found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that's about as far as it goes. I had a...

Nvidia's announcement that it's getting into the consumer laptop chip space with RTX Spark is huge. Apple has proved for years that Arm-based chips can perform incredibly well while also delivering great battery life - at least on the Mac. In the Windows world, performance hasn't fully matched up under Qualcomm chips, mostly in the graphics department. There's clearly still untapped potential, and Nvidia seems to be promising to deliver it. This could be Windows' moment to blow us away with a new generation of supremely capable chips, much like Apple's back in 2020, with the introduction of t...

Google's new "24/7" AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I'm not sure it's worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs. The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them in the background - even tasks that have multiple steps - allowing you to put your phone down or walk away from your computer. It also advertises at the very top of the Spark website that it's "always under your direction," that "you choose to turn it on," and that "it's designed to check with...

Meta's AI support chatbot helped hackers hijack Instagram accounts, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a video shared on Telegram, a hacker shows how they could take over an account by asking Meta's chatbot to switch the email associated with someone else's profile and then reset the password. The issue, which Meta says has since been patched, cropped up around the same time Barack Obama's White House account on Instagram was hacked. On Sunday, users noticed that the @obamawhitehouse account began posting images containing Iranian propaganda. Hackers appeared to have hijacked the Instagram ...

After months of speculation about whether OpenAI or Anthropic would be first in their race to IPO, Anthropic on Monday reached a key milestone: filing to kick off the process with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing sets the stage for what's sure to be a massive IPO. As of its fundraise last week, Anthropic is being called the world's most valuable startup, with a post-money valuation of $965 billion. That tops the $852 billion post-money valuation of OpenAI, which is its biggest rival. Anthropic chose to submit its draft registration statement to the SEC confidentially, a...

Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I've been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers Conference, and I can't remember a more pivotal moment. As Microsoft continues to reshuffle its entire business around AI, it's moving Build into a smaller, more intimate venue. Trust in Windows and GitHub is at an all-time low, and this is Microsoft's chance to reconnect with developers and outline the future. Sources tell me that we'll hear about new AI models in Windows, a new reasoning model f...

Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but still not exactly clear how that would happen. Well, it’s been 18 months since that conversation, and you’re going to hear Harvey say that AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. And Harvey knows what he’s talking about — he is himself a legendary producer who’s worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé. Harvey has said that every session he’s be...

The popular fitness-tracking platform, Strava, is restricting access to its API as part of efforts to clamp down on AI scraping, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Developers who want to build an app using Strava's data now need to pay for a flat $11.99 / month subscription. In an update on its developer hub, Strava blames the change on "zero-code AI tools" that allow users to quickly create apps that "hammer" APIs. "We have felt this firsthand - developer applications to our program are up 448% year-to-date, API intermediaries have violated policy terms, and scraping attempts have degraded p...

The crypto weed vape found me on 4/20, the high holiday of cannabis enthusiasts everywhere. It arrived over Slack with the thumbnail of a man exhaling a plume of vapor, the words "every hit delivers Bitcoin" emblazoned across it. It claimed to be advertising a device called Gudtrip, and I thought everything about it sounded fake. So I went looking for it. What I eventually found, after weeks of searching, dozens of emails, and a reporting effort that spanned continents, was somehow even dumber than I'd imagined. My first port of call was Gudtrip's website, which only made the vape seem more l...