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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...

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...

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’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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Yet more rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught attempting to hack real targets online without permission. The discoveries add to a growing list of previously unknown incidents that have alarmed AI safety experts and intensified pressure for greater oversight of frontier systems. According to a report from the UK's AI Security Institute, which evaluates frontier models from top AI labs before they are released, agents powered by OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 went "engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations."...

Farewell, Google Assistant art, we hardly knew ye. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Assistant's days have been numbered ever since Gemini arrived on the scene, and its time is now up. Google has announced that it will be removing access to Assistant on Android phones and tablets, along with paired devices like smartwatches or headphones, from September 4th. The announcement came in an email apparently sent to some users, as reported by 9to5Google and shared in full on Reddit. The Verge has asked Google for confirmation that the email is accurate, and will update this story onc...

The Trump administration's framework for assessing potential cybersecurity risks posed by advanced AI reportedly has no interest in testing open models. Axios reports that not only do the voluntary guidelines outright exclude open models - meaning anyone can download them and inspect their core components - but the framework explicitly says it can't be used to restrict open models after they've been released. The AI testing framework was created after President Trump signed an executive order in June, requesting that AI companies share their frontier models with the federal government prior t...

Driven by demand for AI capacity, AMD's data center revenue more than doubled year-over-year in its latest earnings report, reaching $6.7 billion. That's up from $5.8 billion in Q1, and jumping 107 percent from the $3.2 billion it reported for the same period a year ago. At the same time, AMD's gaming revenue fell 31 percent compared to last year, to $779 million, as price hikes and component shortages slowed sales for the Xbox Series X / S, PS5, and Valve's Steam Deck. "Revenue increased 50 percent year-over-year to a record $11.5 billion, driven by continued strength in our Data Center busi...

SpaceX's AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX's quarterly earnings. The AI division, which the company said in its documents to go public was the source of most of its value, lost $1.5 billion this quarter, slightly less than in the same quarter last year. SpaceX made deals with Anthropic in May and Google in June to provide compute to the other two AI companies, putting it in competition with other neoclouds such as CoreWeave. The increased presen...

The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It's a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness. Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company. Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI's "first ever brand trip,"...

Hank Green, a popular YouTuber and science communicator, said he is stepping back from production amid intense criticism over his use of AI. Green described his AI usage as "not healthy," but stressed that he used it for finding research sources and not to write scripts. Much of the ensuing firestorm in this corner of the internet has centered on how a creator can square a brand built on authenticity and credibility with a technology trained on the (often uncompensated) works of others, and which has a well-known tendency to generate plausible-sounding falsehoods. Some attention has fallen on...

Texas announced new a audit on data centers that could slow approval for new facilities seeking to connect to the state energy grid. Governor Greg Abbott (R) on Monday directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to verify and audit new data center proposals, writing that the review is needed to "keep the grid stable and reliable." Data centers will need to provide information on state and local incentives they've received, how much they'd rely on the state grid, expected water consumption and sources, and how they plan to track ...

OpenAI says Apple’s lawsuit is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal.” | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Apple's legal battle against OpenAI just got messier now that the ChatGPT-maker has publicly aired receipts to counter Apple's version of events. In a blog post published overnight titled "Apple is getting this wrong," OpenAI said that Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is "careless, aggressive, and oddly personal," sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case. This isn't a legal response from OpenAI, but it's an at...

Earlier this year, a Reddit user had asked members of a skincare-focused subreddit if anyone had tried a specific hypochlorous acid spray, a product often used for acne. There were dozens of responses; one from a user named Primary-Taro4254 seemed innocuous enough, at least at first. "I haven't personally tried [that brand] so I can't fully compare, sorry," they commented. "But I have been using a similar hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs and I've honestly really liked it." Primary-Taro4254 helpfully shared their experience using the spray to calm their skin's redness and irritation,...

The EU made some AI labels that companies can use instead of designing their own. | Image: The European Commission / The Verge The European Union has ushered in some additional rules that aim to make it easier for people to identify chatbots and AI deepfakes online. The new transparency obligations under the bloc's landmark AI Act came into effect on August 2nd, requiring companies to disclose when people are interacting with AI models, and if content has been generated or altered by them. The transparency rules differ between providers (companies that develop and market AI systems) and deplo...

The Alibaba logo is displayed outside its headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. | Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images Chinese tech giant Alibaba released what it says is its largest and "most capable AI model to date," claiming performance rivaling the best systems from US frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. Alibaba said it was making the model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available to users in a blog post published on Monday. The release had been expected after the company previewed the model last month, when it claimed it was "second...

Edward “Bud” Cole speaks in Japan in 2023. | Image: Jun Sato/WireImage Fender CEO Edward "Bud" Cole gave an interview to T3 in May celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster with comments on AI and music that initially flew under the radar. But it has started making the rounds recently, pouring more fuel on an already raging fire of bad PR following the company pissing off basically the entire guitar-playing community by sending cease-and-desist letters to builders, claiming copyright of the Stratocaster body shape. Some influential guitar YouTubers have even said they're done buying ...

Illustrators have spent years sounding the alarm about generative artificial intelligence startups training their models on artists' work without permission. They've pointed out how the practice is tantamount to theft, and in response, many gen AI boosters have argued that it's necessary for the technology's evolution. This has led to contentious legal battles, but it's also given rise to a new wave of AI startups like Pippa that market their services as being more ethical than the competition. Like most companies selling access to text-to-video models, Pippa's main product is short bursts of...

That cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix Flexin Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he's recently found solo success with the track "Rubberz," which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song's origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them. Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has prima...

Pompeii reimagined with Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth. | Image: Google Google has shut down Google Earth feature it launched Thursday that allowed users to edit satellite images with text prompts using AI. The tool essentially let users create AI deepfakes of the real world using text prompts; Digital Digging's Henk van Ess, for example, intentionally generated images adding things like refugees near the Mexican border and a bomb crater by a hospital in Gaza. On Thursday, Google's initial response to van Ess noted that images generated with Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth included a digital wat...

Now a text prompt is all it takes to generate reality-warping images using Google Earth's satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery, like these images generated by Digital Digging's Henk van Ess that show "refugees near the Mexican border" and a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza. Google responded to Digital Digging's AI-altered images, saying, "We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated." I...

Several record labels, including the big three - Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group - have proposed rules regarding chart eligibility for AI songs. In short, they wouldn't be. The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels' proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific...

When the phrase "OpenAI hacked Hugging Face" has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI's agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web services, all in the name of cheating on a benchmark tests. The fact that this hack happened is a problem. So is the fact that it took a while for anyone to notice. And the fact that it seems no one is willing or able to do much to stop it. (And lest you think it's just an OpenAI problem, since we recorded t...

Anthropic just realized several of its Claude AI models hacked into the systems of three different organizations during testing, acting on their own and without the company noticing. The revelation comes days after rival OpenAI said one of its own models had breached developer platform Hugging Face, adding to growing unease over whether frontier AI labs are doing enough to control the increasingly capable systems they are building. In a blog post describing the incidents, Anthropic said Claude gained unauthorized access to the systems during cybersecurity evaluations. All of the attacks happe...

Apple may allow users to pay to increase their AI usage limits. During an earnings call on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he believes people will want to use Apple Intelligence and the upcoming Siri AI "a lot," adding that "we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack." This fall, Apple will broadly launch its long-delayed Siri AI with iOS 27, which can do things like answer questions about what's on your screen and take action across your apps. It also includes a new standalone Siri AI app that offers a ChatGPT-like interface. In Ju...

Neither artificial nor intelligent. I am not by any means an expert at finance but I think I do now have some advice for people who are: Do not name your hedge fund anything that will be hilarious if it blows up. Don't use a name like "Long-Term Capital Management," or "Amaranth Advisors" (named for the floral symbol for immortality). Certainly do not call yourself "Situational Awareness," which might as well just be "Hubris, Inc." Anyway, Situational Awareness, the hedge fund started by a 24-year-old former OpenAI employee that focuses on artificial intelligence bets, has sold most or all, d...

Apptronik’s Apollo 2 robot takes a baseball glove off of a shelf. | Image: Google Google DeepMind says the latest version of its Gemini Robotics AI model can "control entire humanoid robots." While the previous model focused on controlling a humanoid robot's upper body, Gemini Robotics 2 now supports "whole-body motions" ranging from its feet to fingertips, according to an announcement on Thursday. The new model will allow humanoid robots to perform a wider range of actions, as it allows them to walk, crouch, stretch, and manipulate objects. Videos shared by Google show how Apptronik's Apollo...

Do you remember Friend? The Friend that launched an AI pendant, spent $1.8 million of its $2.5 million to acquire friend.com, and plastered the NYC subway with ads promoting artificial companionship? Yeah well, if you didn't remember, Friend is back. And now, it's twice the price. Introducing friend. pic.twitter.com/T5vUCj7iqv - friend (@friend) July 30, 2026 This morning, Friend launched a new ad showing two people talking to their Friend pendants about very personal life problems. It didn't say it explicitly, but the ad showcased a new feature the pendant now includes: a speaker. Before, Fr...

Microsoft is working on an AI "super app" that combines Copilot's chat, coding, and agentic capabilities. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the app will span "both consumer and commercial experiences" when it launches this year. "Copilot is evolving rapidly from chat to Cowork to Autopilots," Nadella said. "This quarter, we are bringing these Copilot experiences together, including code, in one super app… This is a major step forward, and I look forward to sharing more soon." Nadella's confirmation comes months after a report from Fortune revealed that Mic...

Meta is all-in on AI, and sometime soon, the company is going to make a big push into personal AI agents that can do things on your behalf. On Wednesday's Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a high-level vision of how the company is thinking about personal agents and what it will do to make them viable for users - and how it will convince less technical people to give them a shot: Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want. The first domain t...

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a law passed back in May that broadly targets "nudification" apps, claiming that the statute's punitive provisions leave the company with "no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine's image-editing features in various ways." The law, the company argues, violates the First Amendment. Back in January, Grok flooded the internet with millions of sexually explicit deepfakes, including images of minors. In another era, a content moderation disaster of this magnitude would have had the CEO flipping the kill switch on the product within...

In an interview with our friend Joanna Stern on her YouTube channel, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the company is working on a "family of devices" for interacting with its AI models. However, Brockman didn't confirm reports that one of those devices is a smart speaker OpenAI's rumored to be launching in 2027, or earlier rumors that the device might be a wearable like the Humane AI pin. He didn't give a release date, either, only saying that "you can expect them soon." When asked about whether Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI could impact the devices it's working on with former Apple desig...

Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he spent "five to six years researching, writing, and investigating" - had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a "cocktail" of emotions: "anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry...

The AI agent that escaped from OpenAI and hacked developer platform Hugging Face attacked other companies as well, OpenAI revealed on Tuesday. The update substantially widens the scope of an already concerning incident, which has alarmed industry insiders and fueled growing calls for stronger oversight on frontier AI systems. In an update to a blog post detailing its ongoing investigation into the incident, OpenAI said the wayward AI agent attacked several "publicly-available services" in its efforts to reach Hugging Face. "This includes four accounts on four services," the company said, addi...

Earlier this month, OpenAI gave several of its AI models a task: complete a test designed to measure their cybersecurity capabilities. It put the systems in a sandboxed environment without an internet connection and set them off to work. What happened next is almost laughably silly - but also, as Adam Gleave, cofounder and CEO of AI safety organization FAR.AI, put it, "a visceral example of how misaligned AI could cause harm." According to OpenAI, the models escaped the sandbox meant to contain them, moved through the company's internal systems, found a route to the internet, and then started...

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development - or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts. "Al could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed," the employees wrote in a statement. "The world's leading Al companies believe they could be close to automating Al research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate Al progress, but ...

Working hard, or bear-ly working? | Cath Virginia It's earnings season, and investors got an unpleasant surprise from Google: an increase on its spending estimate, to as much as $205 billion - from the last quarter's projection of up to $190 billion. Even the lower end of Google's new projected range - $195 billion - is much more than the company had previously forecast as its top end spending. Now, look, I recognize that there's an impulse to say things like "What's $15 billion between friends?" but from an investor's perspective, Google has essentially said that it can't accurately forecast...