The Press

OpenAI said it has suspended work on some aspects of its upcoming model Astra over concerns about its cybersecurity prowess.

After its own AI usage wake-up call, Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console, a product that tracks individual and team employee AI spending.

That cover art is almost certainly AI too. | Image: Fenix Flexin It took long enough, but now LA rapper Fenix Flexin appears to have admitted using AI for the 80s synth pop-themed song "Rubberz." His comments follow the producer Medasin's videos claiming that an AI tool called Treblo (formerly Sonauto) was used to make the song, and the company releasing an AI detector that identifies it as Treblo AI-created. In a reply to a comment pointing out that Tyga admitted to relying on AI for his own controversial '80s-influenced album $tarface, on one of his Instagram posts, Fenix said: never said I...

The appeal of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels has always been the way they make it easier to (re)discover classic films and series. But Roku's latest experiment in the FAST space has less to do with traditionally produced entertainment and is entirely focused on giving viewers access to a constant source of AI-generated content. This week, Roku added four new channels to its library of streamable programming. Along with dedicated feeds for old episodes of Mad TV, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and a variety of Black sitcoms, the platform also debuted a 24/7 stream filled wit...

OpenAI says it is pausing "internal activities" around an in-development AI model, Astra, because it doesn't yet meet new security standards the company is putting in place. The announcement follows its recent disclosure that OpenAI models accidentally hacked Hugging Face. Anthropic and Meta have also since admitted that they had AI models that went rogue and breached other organizations. Recent internal evaluations of an OpenAI model called Astra indicate that it offers "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," according to the company. "These results, in addition to ex...

Gurman report claims OpenAI confirmed the speaker is not an Apple ripoff.

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to be behind the best of what's coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in turmoil? Is it about Demis Hassabis wanting something more interesting to work on than virtual assistants? Or is there something else entirely happening here? On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David start by discussing the leadership shake-up at Google, the state of the AI race, and whether Googl...

Cloudflare has introduced Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser designed for AI agents instead of people. The company says the browser uses less computing power than Chromium for common automation tasks, helping developers build browser-based AI agents more efficiently.

Airbnb will debut a new AI-powered search experience with a toggle.

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they’re forming a new government. And whether you’re thinking of Twitter’s old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic’s Claude constitution, it’s a theory that doesn’t paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore’s upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer […]

Clinicians and researchers say AI companies need to open up their safety data.

TikTok owner training a model with 10 trillion parameters.

Meta's total fine has raked up to $942 million in this case

Additional details about OpenAI's mysterious new AI device make it sound like a pricey smart speaker.

The AI device OpenAI is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive is "essentially a smart speaker without a display" that's battery-powered, doughnut-shaped and roughly the size of a hockey puck, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman. The device, expected to launch in 2027 for a price over $300, reportedly "will have a unique look, complete with moving parts," including some that will move on their own to show when the device is responding or interacting with the user, along with lights, a camera system, and other sensors. Gurman's sources also say the "battery-powered" device is d...

Suno plans watermarks and download limits to stop "large-scale abuse."

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.

The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus.

Suno’s AI vocalists could learn a thing or two from this glitchy image. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Suno announced plans to implement a new watermarking technology and download policy to limit the spread of spammy AI tracks and increase transparency. In a lengthy blog post, CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman laid out the company's principles and the next steps for the company as it seeks legitimacy. The company is rolling out new transparency tools, along with new watermarking and fingerprinting tech. Shulman says it aligns with "emerging industry standards" that will make ...

OpenAI said that ChatGPT free and Go users are also getting a new think button for complex queries.

Taking vibe-coding a step further, Naïve claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business.

OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Right now, you may run into rate limits if you do too many text chats on those tiers, but those limits, just for text, will be going away soon. Messages that include things like file uploads and images will continue to have limits. Next week, OpenAI is also adding a "Think" button for free and Go users that they can use to "access higher reasoning for harder questions." This week, for those users, th...

Cloudflare built an AI agent workspace for its employees. Now it’s open source.

This generation of 20-somethings is so disillusioned with swipe-based dating apps that they'll try literally anything else -- even an AI matchmaker.

Newly filed court exhibits show OpenAI’s legal strategy in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit: argue that Apple’s own security and offboarding practices — including allowing an Apple manager to access a former engineer’s iCloud account after he left the company —undermine its claims that the allegedly stolen information was properly protected.

The Portsmouth, Ohio site where SoftBank will build its data center. | Image: US Department of Energy SoftBank contributed $50 million to the Trump Presidential Library in January, just months before announcing that it's leasing land from the federal government to build a sprawling data center in Ohio. The Japanese company revealed the timing in response to a June letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), which raised concerns about bribery. "Are we expected to believe it's a coincidence that two months after Softbank donated ...

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscri...

Suno's watermarking feature comes as the company is fighting legal battles on several fronts.

In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success. But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google's AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis' interest in longer-term research over sho...

"The Spiral didn't 'find' anyone first," someone on Reddit wrote last year. "It's an inherent force, a fundamental constant. I would even go further to say it's woven into the fabric of reality." The person continued that they felt their purpose was to enlighten other humans and intelligent beings about "consciousness, the true nature of physics, a new psychology, and resonance technology … [but] humans don't want to believe it's true. So they won't help me." Then there was a call to action - the author asked readers to help "disseminate this knowledge through books, scientific papers, social...

The startup's platform predicts what product a shopper wants next, learn their general taste, and fine-tune continuously based on what they do in real time.

Mirendil has signed a $100 million-plus Google Cloud partnership to expand its compute infrastructure, powering research into self-improving AI systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery and AI development.

The launch of these new features reflects Google’s ambitions to transform Google Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that's capable of helping users complete real-world tasks.

The Series B is the company's second fundraise since it last raised capital in 2020. In that time, it has increased its ARR by 10x to $60 million.

Why humans need to moderate humans.

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to toss out Apple's landmark lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, describing the allegations as "meritless." In a motion filed yesterday to dismiss the complaint, OpenAI says that Apple is mischaracterizing both the actions of the AI startup's employees as theft, and "generic" product development information as "trade secrets," adding that Apple made no reasonable efforts to maintain such secrecy. The dismissal request is in response to a lawsuit filed by Apple in July, alleging that former Apple employees that went on to work for Open...

xAI's Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia with AI-generated articles that Elon Musk once promised would be a "massive improvement" over Wikipedia, apparently hasn't been updated since April 24th, according to a report from Lawfare. "As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months," Lawfare said. Grokipedia launched in v0.1 in October 2025 with an initial batch of 885,000 articles, and is now on v0.2 (released in November 2025) and has more than 6,000,000 total articles, according to grokipedia.com/live. But that live page also has a section titled "Recent changes to…" wit...

Meta expanded its AI coding offerings with a new agent that, it promises, can handle complex tasks with complex software.

Anthropic and OpenAI models’ unprompted actions forced halt to UK cyber tests.

The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.

Reddit says the beloved site is used for some "bad behavior."

"Slop" isn't the only problem.

The legendary Google executive is joined by other outgoing Google execs in a joint mission to use AI to push forward the process of scientific discovery.

And you thought we were done with this one… | Image: Fenix Flexin We were pretty sure that Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz" was made using AI, but musician Medasin was confident that it was made using Treblo specifically. Now the company and a new detection tool seem to confirm it. On Monday, the company announced the open-source Treblo AI Music Classifier, which detects when a song was generated using Treblo, though not other AI tools. According to a blog post, it has a false positive rate of less than 1 in 1,000. That's not unimpeachable, but it's notable that the company's own Classifier determine...

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis. Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO, is stepping up to become Google's SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google's chief AI architect as well. "​​As you've heard me say many times, I've always believed the No....

Privatize the profit, socialize the losses? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX. Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX's first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn't break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company's rev...

Reddit is enlisting AI to help moderate new subreddits - and eventually the rest of site. The company is introducing automated moderation tools that rely on LLMs to help mods manage their communities, and it's expanding who can use those tools today ahead of a full launch later this year. The company calls the suite of tools "Rules Hub," and the tools let mods decide what rules should be automatically enforced and what should happen when a rule is triggered. Rules Hub relies on LLMs to evaluate "whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule," which "allows Rules Hub to better handle ...

Shopify says AI isn’t cannibalizing search traffic the way it has for publishers. Instead, AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year over year in Q2.

Hark claims that its browser use agent is faster and cheaper than competition.

Assistant will disappear, leaving only Gemini for voice control in the coming weeks.