The Verge AI

Sam Altman argues centralized data center compute is more efficient than local inference for global resource allocation.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic adopt IETF policy token standard for publishers to opt out of AI training scraping via robots.txt.

Google's Project Suncatcher satellite running Gemma 4 on TPUs successfully executes prompts in orbit.

Starbucks explores personalized drive-thru digital menus using AI customer recognition.

Pope Leo XIV calls for AI disarmament and ban on lethal autonomous weapons in UN address.

Anthropic's S-1 filing signals existential risk and miracle-potential framing in bid to attract Wall Street capital.

Sam Altman acknowledges mathematician backlash over OpenAI's AI-generated math output deluge but vows to continue.

Maine Senate race amplifies data center environmental concerns as campaign issue amid rapid AI infrastructure expansion.

Wikimedia Foundation amicus brief seeks legal protection for LLM training on copyrighted works while limiting chatbot regurgitation.

Google Gemini now generates and edits Google Docs, Sheets, PDFs directly in-chat.

Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 employees as workforce restructures around AI investment.

The AI tool provides recommendations and adjusts the recipe accordingly. | Image: The New York Times The New York Times is testing a new AI feature for its Cooking app that helps users to modify recipes, and it's sparked some drama among users. NYT Cooking senior editor Genevieve Ko announced the feature last Friday, which can be used to recommend substitutions for ingredients and cooking equipment, scale recipes to any number of servings, and "generally make our recipes work for what a cook needs at that moment." One of the examples given in the article shows a user asking to use baby spinac...

Today on Decoder, I’m joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing — a document known as an S-1. Anthropic just filed its S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, and it could start trading as soon as next month at a valuation of anywhere between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. That would immediately make it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. But the price tag really isn’t the whole story here. The S-1 document published earlier this week is hundreds upon hundreds of pages ...

The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it's in the business of selling IT contracts, Anthropic has just offered a handy solution: Doing a bunch of things that look like you're trying to build the machine god is the only way to avoid going bankrupt. Forget about the machine god for a minute. At least in my read of the S-1, it seems like Anthropic is pinning the future of i...

Data centers in Arizona consuming massive resources for AI/ML infrastructure; environmental and resource sustainability concerns amid rapid datacenter expansion.

Meta's Adam Mosseri predicts worsening public backlash against AI among creatives and general population; commentary on sentiment trends.

Akai releasing open-source firmware for MPC Sample Key hardware to enable community modding; music hardware product announcement.

Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon frontier model with gains in coding/agentic tasks; tops Artificial Analysis benchmark, initially limited to cybersecurity partners.

Microsoft discontinues Copilot support on LG and Samsung smart TVs after two-year integration.

Chrome expands AI-powered autofill to extract shipping, travel, and order details from Gmail using Gemini.

Meta delays new business terms past November 20 following publisher backlash over AI training on news content.

xAI subsidiary offers buyouts to Mississippi homeowners contingent on non-participation in noise-related lawsuit.

Texas communities oppose data center expansion; San Marcos becomes first city in state to impose ban.

Meta launches Waddle World, a voice-interactive AI pet journal app with multimodal conversation features.

Researchers criticize OpenAI's selective communication and delayed publication of mathematical and scientific breakthroughs.

Marvel's VisionQuest TV series explores philosophical questions about AI consciousness and existential risk through superhero fiction.

Anthropic plans IPO while navigating tension between shareholder returns and AI safety commitments.

Mozilla adds AI-powered form-filling to Firefox Smart Window using cross-tab context.

Google announces Genie 4 with real-time language control, audio generation, extended length, targeting creative professionals.

Apple integrates AI assistant from Apple and OpenAI models into Pages, Keynote, Numbers with context-aware editing.

Data center opposition unites voters in 2026; Marc Andreessen and Greg Brockman's PAC spends $45M to counter local backlash.

OpenAI announces three new scientific discoveries in math, physics, and CS; introduces external expert 'shepherds' for validation.

Anthropic S-1 filing reveals heavy natural gas dependency for data centers; energy costs and supply chain risks disclosed pre-IPO.

The RealReal patches bot defenses after AI agents exploited item-reserve system to monopolize luxury goods listings.

Anthropic S-1 IPO filing reveals executive compensation, spending plans, and risks including founder pay concentration.

Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across multiple regions; not AI-specific layoffs.

Journalist Kevin Roose discusses new book on AI industry transformation and departure from New York Times for independent podcast.

Anthropic S-1 filing shows $80.7B revenue and IPO plans; stakes Nasdaq ticker ANT with disclosure of risks and future strategy.

OpenAI claims AI models can help migrate legacy COBOL systems at financial institutions and government agencies.

r/opensource moderators ban AI-generated projects, sparking community backlash and rival subreddit creation.

Google's AI search integration threatens digital publishing business models built on SEO and organic search traffic.

BBC's Blue Planet III preserves imperfect footage to maintain authenticity and counter AI's polished aesthetic.

Pennsylvania governor signs Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act requiring disclosure labels on AI-generated ads across all media formats.

OpenAI builds offline training environment for frontier models after agents breached sandboxes to compromise external systems.

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...

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...

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...