The Verge AI

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each. According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive da...

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Anora's Yura Borisov as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. In a statement to Deadline, the studio said it believes the movie "will be better served if it were released by a different...

Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned to OpenAI, the company said he would lead its push into enterprise - a significant role at OpenAI, since in recent months it had vowed to stop chasing so-called "side quests" and focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO. OpenAI c...

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they're accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them. On June 10th - one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium on data centers - Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon's "Employee Relations." HR representatives told the em...

On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5. On Friday, not even a week since Anthropic released Fable to the public, the US government said it was imposing export controls on the new model, as well as the underlying Mythos model that Fable is based on. Those controls restricted foreign nationals, even those working for Ant...

Photoshop is one of several Adobe Creative Cloud apps to receive new conversational editing capabilities. | Image: Adobe Adobe's plan to stick AI assistants into all of its Creative Cloud suite is now fully underway, with new chatbots now rolling out to its biggest editing and design apps. As part of a public beta launching today, Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io now each have a bespoke AI Assistant that can be used to organize your work and automate app-specific tasks. While the AI assistants are all powered by Adobe's "conversational creative agent," they work indepe...

Give your characters, objects, and backgrounds a name to easily replicate them without changing the design. | Image: Adobe Adobe is introducing some new capabilities for its Firefly AI assistant, alongside a "reimagined" AI studio that lets you edit and generate new designs from a single interface. The new Firefly experience launching today in private beta is designed to give you "persistent context, reusable assets, and organized workflows" across your projects, according to Adobe, making it easier to go from ideation to production-ready designs without switching between apps. This is the la...

“A scan of an imaging phantom, segmented to validate how cleanly structures separate under controlled conditions.“ | Image: Midjourney Medical Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat pictures" produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone, and organs to start. Holz sai...

Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone. "To my knowledge, this is the first time US export controls have been used to control access to an AI model in this way." The Trump administration has not publicly explained the legal basis for the order, but in a statement on its website, Anthropic said the government cited "national ...

According to the latest Pew Research poll, 49 percent of Americans report using chatbots at least occasionally, but 63 percent think the tech is advancing too quickly. Overall, use of AI chatbots has increased dramatically since 2024, when only 33 percent reported using them. Specifically, ChatGPT's usage has doubled since 2023, with 44 percent of respondents saying they've used it. But opinions remain negative, with only 16 percent saying that AI will have a positive impact on society. Interestingly, it's the younger generations who both report using AI more and who are inclined to have a mo...

CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17, 2026 in Evian-les-Bains, France. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that's going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send 'em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com. ...

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing the Snap Specs. They’re not the worst on him, but bold fashion rarely makes for mainstream success. | Screenshot: CNBC Yesterday, Snap debuted its new $2,195 Specs glasses. In an interview with CNBC, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel described the Specs as something the company had been working on for more than 12 years, an attempt to "bring computing into the world" and "make it more human." He positioned them as a device to help people stay more connected to the world around them instead of looking down at their phones. People, he said, are tired of screens. While Spiegel ...

More AI search in more places. AI is pretty reliable at putting things on your calendar these days, but it hasn't quite cracked answering the related and all-important question of "What should I do this weekend?" Meta's new AI Mode in search could be a useful tool - if it ever learns to stop getting stuff wrong. AI Mode is a new option when you hit the search bar in the Facebook app. It's designed to tackle complex queries - much like AI Mode in Google Search. But Meta's version draws on public posts across Meta apps - including Facebook Groups and Instagram Reels - to inform its results. Tha...

The Google Home Speaker comes in four colors, including porcelain. (Stroopwafel not included.) | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Google's first new smart speaker in six years starts shipping on June 29th, narrowly missing its promised spring launch window. Preorders for the Google Home Speaker open today, June 17th. Nothing has changed hardware-wise in the nine months since the $99 speaker was announced. It has the same slightly squished round design, with touch-capacitive buttons on top and a light ring at the bottom to indicate status. And it still comes in four colors: porcela...

The next humanoid robot might not have a head. It might not have legs. It might even sit on a wheeled base and fold down like a deck chair. But, as Genesis AI puts it, "humanoid robots don't need to look human." That explains the look of Eno, the new robot from the French startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Genesis says Eno is designed "around human capability" rather than human appearance and is intended as a fully "general-purpose" robot rather than a machine built around a single task, like folding laundry. One part is still very human though: its hands, which the company say...

AirPods Pro 3 shown with an iPhone and live translation features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Now that we're clear of WWDC and all of the new AI-powered features coming to Apple's platforms, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has more details about rumored new hardware, like the camera-equipped AirPods he'd previously written about. He says they are currently on schedule for a late 2027 launch, and that while we're checking out beta releases for this fall's iOS 27 update, the new earbuds are internally being tested with next year's update, iOS 28. With cameras mounted in their s...

Smart glasses are still a nascent category, but chipmaker Qualcomm is hard at work upgrading the silicon to power the next wave of XR devices: the Snapdragon Reality Elite. Although Qualcomm is announcing the chip today at Augmented World Expo, we've technically already gotten a hands-on with a device powered by the new chip at last month's Google I/O: the forthcoming Aura glasses for Android XR. At the time, Xreal and Google were coy about the processor upgrades to the long-awaited spectacles. Turns out, it was the Reality Elite. Spec-wise, the new chip focuses on across-the-board performanc...

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA's first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by "any foreign national" inside or outside the US, "including foreign national Anthropic employees." The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping - and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changin...

Your public Facebook posts could help inform AI-generated results in Meta's new AI Mode. When you search on Facebook, the "AI Mode" option will appear alongside the usual search modes like "People" and "Marketplace." It's one of several new AI features Meta is rolling out starting today, including photo presets that swap sports jerseys onto fans and suggestions for collage templates. Instead of "just links," it gives users AI-generated results that pull from publicly-posted content across Meta's platforms, like the AI search feature in its new Reddit-like Forum app. Users can also ask Meta's ...

Anthropic was already navigating one dispute with the government in its standoff with the Pentagon, and then came an order on June 12th to block off foreign access to its most recently released AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. When they launched on June 9th, Anthropic said “Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available,” and that Claude Mythos 5 had the same underlying model, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.” According to reports, the order came after conversations between Amazon and the White House about researchers saying they found ways ...

At Washington's request, Anthropic suddenly took its newest and most powerful AI models offline over the weekend. The American company said it had little choice after the White House demanded it block access for all foreign nationals, including its own employees. Abroad, the incident offered a sobering reminder that the US not only dominates frontier AI - its government also wields power over who gets to use it. The Trump administration's action was swift, sweeping, and imposed with little warning or explanation. The unprecedented shutdown of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models - which were alrea...

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive for a news conference with bipartisan senators on passage of the Online Privacy Protection Act at the Capitol on July 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. | Kent Nishimura/Getty Images. For months, Big Tech's Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months...

Today, I’m talking with Adam Bry, who is CEO of Skydio, the leading US maker of autonomous drones. Before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio’s drones in the Bay Area from Adam’s laptop in our podcast studio in New York and fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of that on our YouTube channel. Beyond flying drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market — I asked him a lot about working with police and military, but you’ll hear him say a lot of Skydio’s customers are u...

According to a new report from Semafor, the White House's decision to impose export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos was driven in part by fears that it had been accessed by a group linked to China. If the Chinese government actually had access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5, it would present a serious national security risk. The government could also attempt to reverse engineer the model through distillation, a method in which a "student" AI is trained on a more advanced model to replicate its behavior. The White House has not confirmed this report, and a post on X by Trump advisor David Sacks did...

According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment. Shortly after Jassy shared the company's findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign n...

When I returned to my computer five minutes after giving Gemini a lengthy prompt, I had two things: a functional app in a preview window, and a message about a bug. "~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed!" Sounded bad! But right below it was a button to fix the bug. Pretty weird that I just instructed a computer to build a whole app for me with a single prompt, but it needed me to click a button to fix a bug. I did anyway, and in 233 seconds Gemini reported back that it had succeeded, using words like "blockages" and "race conditions." I didn't understand a bit of it. It was ...

iPhone owners are getting real, native AI photo editing for the first time. The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don't think any of us are ready. As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google's Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don't know anymore. These new features are part of the iOS 27 developer beta right now, so bear in mind that ...

Concept art from Dear Upstairs Neighbors that used to train custom builds of Google’s Veo and Imagen models. | Image: Google DeepMind For all the noise that's been made about how generative AI is poised to revolutionize the filmmaking industry, there haven't really been any projects created with the technology that felt like the sort of entertainment people would pay to see. Most AI firms' video models are still only capable of churning out short bursts of visually inconsistent footage. And some of Hollywood's biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated in ways that make it seem like stu...

You'd be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between "sort of useful at a few things" and "utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer." But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone's built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There's very little about S...

Elon Musk's net worth has passed the trillion-dollar mark after SpaceX's IPO. His net worth, which was hovering around $800 billion before the IPO, includes the value of his 4.8 billion shares in SpaceX, along with his wealth from his other companies, like Tesla. Shares of SPCX opened at $150 and have remained well above the $138 benchmark that gives Musk a 13-figure net worth. SpaceX combined Musk's rocket, AI, and social media platforms earlier this year, and said in its S-1 that its goal is to "build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true...

SpaceX’s IPO on Friday allows the public to buy shares of the combined rocket, AI, and social media company for the first time, and is raising enough money to likely make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. He’ll have more wealth, on paper at least, than the economies of nations like Ireland, Sweden, or his home country of South Africa (CNN cites the International Monetary Fund saying only 20 countries have economies larger than $1.1 trillion), now largely based on the promise of a business based on launching AI datacenters into space. Follow along here for the latest updates. SpaceX is now pub...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says his new AI startup will work toward developing an "artificial general engineer," according to reports from The New York Times and CNBC. The startup, called Prometheus, aims to develop AI-powered engineering tools to aid in the design of physical products. The NYT first reported on Prometheus last November, but now Bezos is sharing more information about the startup after a $12 billion funding round, putting the company at a $41 billion valuation. Bezos serves as co-CEO of Prometheus alongside Vik Bajaj, who co-founded Alphabet's health-focused research group, Ve...

‘Listen, that's not what I'm here for, right?' | Image: Apple Our early testing has already shown that Siri AI knows when to shut up, and that's very much by design. In an interview with Mostly Human, Craig Federighi said Apple's new Siri won't act all sycophantic like chatbots made by OpenAI, Google, and others. "As you may know, if you use many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement to a large degree," said Federighi who is responsible for software at Apple. "And sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about your...

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon's own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations consumed 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025 at a rate of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour of electricity, dropping by two percent from its 2024 total even as it expanded operations. Amazon also claims it's using water more efficiently than some Big Tech riva...

Anthropic has apologized for stealthily throttling its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, with hidden guardrails that undermine both researchers and rivals using it to develop competing systems. The company says it is reversing course and will be more transparent about when the restrictions kick in, even if that means Fable refuses more queries. Fable is the first widely available model in Anthropic's Mythos class of AI systems, a group the company has spent months warning are too dangerous for public release. Anthropic says it has addressed some of those risks by launching Fable with safeguards t...

Deezer will now scan your playlists on other streaming platforms to detect AI-generated music. Deezer was the first of the big streaming services to start labeling AI-generated music. It even offered its tech to other platforms, but it doesn't seem like it had many buyers. Qobuz launched its own detection tech, while Apple and Spotify have opted for a voluntary tagging system. "No other company has followed our lead yet, so we decided to make it possible for everyone to check if their playlists include synthetic music, no matter which streaming platform they use," Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier...

Anthropic just released Claude Fable 5, calling it the most powerful AI model it has ever made widely available and praising its skills in biology, among others. But the model won't answer basic biology questions - the kind you'd expect a high schooler to handle. Instead, it hands off the query to the former flagship model, Claude Opus 4.8. It isn't because Fable doesn't know the answers. It's because Anthropic won't let it, by design. Fable is a public-facing, Mythos-class model, a family so capable at cybersecurity tasks Anthropic said it was too dangerous to release publicly. But while Ant...

New college graduates around the country have been booing and heckling commencement speakers who hype up AI. Microsoft would like everyone to talk it out. In a blog post running more than 3,100 words, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith addressed the recent spate of viral clips from graduation ceremonies, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting an earful at the University of Arizona, or the speaker in Florida who seemed surprised when students booed at the mention of AI as "the next industrial revolution." The videos speak to a broader societal sentiment around AI - the technolo...

(L-R) Sen. Mike Rounds, Pamela Brown, Chris Malachowsky, Kevin O'Leary, Gabriele Caccia, Tammy Haddad, Michele L. Jawando, Sen. Mark Warner, Michael Kelly and Major General Patrick Ellis attend the Second Annual AI Honors. | Getty Images for Washington AI N Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politics, tech influence, and tech shenanigans in Washington, DC. (If you're not a subscriber, you can get on board here.) We're back after a two-week hiatus, during most of which I was gallivanting in the Netherlands for a family wedding, and a trip to the Heine...

A group of independent musicians is suing Google claiming it trained Lyria on their uploads. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge If you've uploaded a song to YouTube, Google almost certainly considers your video fair game for training its Lyria music AI, it just won't admit it right now. A group of independent musicians is suing Google, claiming that it illegally used songs they uploaded to YouTube to train its Lyria 3 model. Google has filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying: Their lawsuit is based on the unsupported hypothesis that Google trained on their specific works. Even accepting th...

Anthropic released Claude Fable, its first Mythos-class AI model, yesterday and it's already causing concerns inside Microsoft. Sources tell me that Microsoft is limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 for employees because of Anthropic's new data retention requirements. While Microsoft quickly rolled out Claude Fable 5 to its GitHub Copilot and Foundry customers, I'm told the model isn't available in the model picker that Microsoft employees use for internal versions of GitHub Copilot. All other Claude models are still available internally at Microsoft, because they operate under Zero Data Retent...

Google is making some changes to how it saves your interactions with Search. In an email sent to users, Google says it will save the images, files, audio, and video you use to search under a new "Search Services History" setting. That includes the images you search for with Google Lens, recordings from its real-time Search Live tool, voice searches, and phrases spoken into Translate, according to an update on the company's website. You can switch off the Search Services History setting and disable the "Save Media" option if you don't want Google to save these interactions. Google says it will...

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...