Daily AI Briefing

Google has released its latest Gemini model, marketing it as a workhorse for coding and cybersecurity work.

Paramount is appointing a new co-CEO ahead of the close of its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Ynon Kreiz, previously Mattel's chairman and CEO, will be joining Paramount to lead alongside chairman and CEO David Ellison. According to Paramount, "Ellison will focus on the company's long-term strategy, creative vision and direction, including its talent relationships, strategic partnerships, technology and capital allocation. Kreiz will focus on the company's day-to-day management

Flow Engineering, which is bringing AI agents to hardware design, also landed Roelof Botha as an angel investor and board member.

A24 pissed off one of the internet's largest horror communities when it announced it was working on an SCP Foundation film, but apparently hadn't bothered to contact the SCP Wiki team, nor did it commit to releasing it under a Creative Commons license as required. Seeing an easy PR win, Neon is cashing in by announcing it's making its own SCP movie. But unlike A24, it proactively reached out to the SCP Foundation Wiki team and has pledged to release it under the Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC B

Google today revealed its next AI frontier model, which it's calling Gemini 4 Argon. The new model delivers "frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense," according to chief AI architect and Google DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu. But the company is limiting access at first to a "set of trusted cyber defenders," and Kavukcuoglu says that Google is "actively engaged in the U.S. governm

New research fine-tunes a small model on a few hundred examples and nearly matches one trained on 24,000. The real lesson hides in its… Continue reading on Towards AI »

The famously fact-averse president rolled out a new AI tool – but its answers don’t conform to his version of reality Donald Trump, in a development that could almost be from a Greek tragedy, appears to have invented something that is willing to do what no one in his orbit will: tell him the truth. The president launched America.gov on Tuesday, an AI platform which the White House says will make it easier for Americans to interact with the federal government and eventually complete services like

macOS gives your models about 10.7GB of the 16GB. Here's what fits, how fast it runs, seven defaults to fix, and a script to test your own Continue reading on Towards AI »

OpenAI's "Decisions API" is a Jev clone that confirms the importance of fast, cheap intelligence.

FTC move is first official US enforcement ⁠action on rogue AI agents, following surge in incidents first reported in July The US’s main trade regulator is conducting an industry-wide investigation ⁠into Anthropic, OpenAI and other ⁠AI labs ​to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers. The investigation by the Federal Trade Commission is the first official US enforcement ⁠action that delves into rogue AI agents, following a surge in incidents first reported in July that h

The $300 million employee tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price.

Sam Altman onstage at OpenAI’s DevDay 2026. | Photo: Hayden Field / The Verge While AI has made plenty of inroads on people's phones and computers, it's largely failed in dedicated devices. But over the next year, two major AI companies, Meta and OpenAI, will attempt to change that. And they're apparently betting on a similar path: testing appetites for physical hardware with their cutesy software agents. "Hardware is hard" is a tech industry mantra. Dedicated AI devices like the Friend and H

What to run on a 16GB, 24GB or 36GB Mac, and a five-minute check that shows which one is fastest for the kind of work you do. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Republicans supported legislation although Democrats said it wouldn’t effectively address energy consumption Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters on consumer electricity bills, calling it a “toothless” attempt to address a top voter concern ahead of November’s midterm elections. The Ratepayer Protection Act failed by a 57-to-43 vote, falling just shy of the 60 votes necessary to advance through the Republican-controlled chamber. Four Demo

Reddit is further limiting who can use the "Old Reddit" experience as part of its efforts to combat scraping and automated traffic. Reddit recently started forcing users to log in to be able to use Old Reddit, but in the "next few months," the company says that you'll have to be logged in and have used Old Reddit within the last six months from when the change rolls out to be able to continue browsing the platform with the classic experience. Reddit says the six-month window covers "the vast ma

Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds, as the company continues tightening access to its trove of user-generated content.

There’s a reason frontier labs have gotten gun-shy about consumer AI — and it’s not because the tech isn’t good enough.

Amazon deliveries could soon come with a new catch: the delivery driver's smart glasses will be snapping photos of anything they see while they're in use, including people and private property. Bloomberg reports that the glasses could take "several thousand captures in a single driver's typical shift," which Amazon plans to upload to its AI Wellspring platform. When asked if customers will be able to opt-out of this, Amazon's Viraj Chatterjee told Bloomberg, "We haven't thought about that." Cha

If you think this shot is amusing, check out the panicked look on Zuckerberg’s face when Trump calls on him to speak. | Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images After hosting a meal with Big Tech leaders on Tuesday, President Donald Trump responded to journalist questions about his artificial intelligence announcements in typical fashion. He said his previous claims regarding fears around AI safety being a "hoax" cooked up by Democrats no longer apply now that he's renamed the technology to "Super In

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. "I will explode your butthole with this poopmaxxer pesto," a calm Gen Z voice announced from my phone's speakers. "And don't worry, it doesn't taste like poop, unless that's what you're into … I don't know if Italians will approve of this, but it's for my … a-butt-a-hole-a!" What fol

This spring, the United States banned all future foreign-made consumer routers - effectively all future routers - unless their makers could 1) convince the US government that they weren't a national security threat, and 2) submit "a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States." As of September 9th, Asus now has an exemption from the ban, just in time to bring its first early Wi-Fi 8 routers here. But Asus has not publicly announced any plan to bring manuf

A coding benchmark shows when API spending reaches $200, while the plan’s real usage ceiling remains unpublished. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Asha Sharma. | Image: The Verge, Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has denied reports that Microsoft is considering selling off its Xbox business. The Information reported in June that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood had been considering spinning out Xbox entirely, and then reported earlier this month that both execs have "more recently supported Sharma's plans to overhaul the unit." "Xbox is not for sale," says Sharma in an interview with The New York Times. "We will do whatever it

Meta says its Muse AI agent cannot access a user’s Messages without explicit permission, disputing a journalist’s account that the agent read his private messages while the required Mac setting was turned off.

Donald Trump and six tech executives voluntarily signed the document, which included a misspelling, committing to safely developing AI The White House misspelled “United States” under the signature of Donald Trump on an accord he signed with AI executives on Tuesday. At the bottom of the accord on “Super Intelligence”, the term Trump has used to rebrand artificial intelligence, the president’s signature appeared as “President of the Unites States”. Continue reading...

By launching an AI agent for food ordering, DoorDash is looking to gain an edge over rivals Uber Eats and Grubhub.

"One of the biggest reasons we are winning against robotics companies is because we are not a robotics company."

Instinct is rolling out human-curated product and travel recommendations, but some users aren’t happy about getting suggestions they never asked for.

Late-night hosts weighed in on Trump’s relationship with tech leaders and the White House’s new AI-powered site On Tuesday night, late-night hosts discussed a Maha summit in Washington DC, the White House’s new AI-powered website and Donald Trump once again falling asleep on live TV. Continue reading...

Andrew Bailey’s comments come as fears grow that rogue models could take financial system hostage Business live – latest updates The governor of the Bank of England has called for the “right to intervene” in the AI industry amid growing fears that rogue models could take the financial system hostage. Andrew Bailey said the risks posed by frontier AI models – a number of which have gone rogue in recent months – were “real and increasingly significant”. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for the

Unprecedented university donation from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin will go toward building a new Miami campus Carnegie Mellon University will receive an unprecedented $3bn donation from the billionaire investor Ken Griffin, making it the largest single donation in the history of US education. Griffin, 57, is the founder and CEO of Citadel, described as the most profitable hedge fund in history. The money is going toward a new Miami campus as well as big investments at the university’s longtime home

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Cerebras Systems CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman will explore the growing demand for compute, energy, and infrastructure, how Cerebras is approaching those constraints differently, and what comes next if today’s AI hardware reaches its limits.

Instead of building its durable execution engine on top of an external database, the company developed its own storage, replication, and redundancy layers. This architecture allows Restate to be exceptionally fast and lightweight.

Three days left to exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Book by October 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT to showcase your startup to 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders.

Airbnb is also launching new services such as meal delivery and laundry in select locations.

Kenjiro Tsuda wins case against TikTok account in landmark Japanese verdict to protect publicity rights A court in Japan has ruled that the human voice has legal protection after a landmark case involving a well-known actor and a TikTok account that he claimed had cloned his “lustrous” baritone voice in its AI-generated videos. Tokyo district court said on Wednesday that voices should enjoy the same protection as publicity rights, at the end of a closely watched legal action brought against TikT

Rapidly expanding AI use within the government is numbing departments to its profound threats. And try arguing with a faceless digital bureaucrat Another day, another apocalyptic warning about the likelihood that rampantly uncontrollable artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, including the problem of being alive. Hot on the heels of disgruntled Anthropic researchers announcing the end of civilisation by 2030, we’ve now had the portentously named Hugging Face incident, as well as

Learn how OpenAI disrupted a campaign to extract protected model reasoning and is strengthening defenses against adversarial distillation.

He knows a thing or two about tech, but what to make of the views of a man who met Jeffrey Epstein 30 times and couldn’t see what a monster he was? The Bill Gates rehabilitation tour is in full swing. After having his carefully cultivated image tarnished by the revelation of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Gates lay low for a while. Now, however, the Microsoft co-founder is once again thrusting himself into the public consciousness, this time with a dire warning about AI. If left unchecked, A

Deepfakes and misinformation driven by artificial intelligence have become a point of deep concern for legislators, advocates and the public An image of Bianca Motley Broom, the mayor of College Park, Georgia, kissing a man who was not her husband in a bar spread far and wide on Facebook. The fact that it was fake is spreading faster, now, but only after it had been seen by thousands of people. “I think this is a sad commentary about where we are in our democracy, and where we are in our politic

OpenAI is partnering with America’s SBDC to expand hands-on AI training and local support for small businesses, alongside a new report on how small teams are using AI.

Swedish-American actor exhumed for bizarre, humourless 99 seconds that give us another reason to resent AI Poor Greta Garbo. Perhaps, in life, she thought her final indignity would be the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore TV sketch from 1970, showing Pete as the legendary recluse standing on the back of a flatbed truck as it rumbles through the crowded city streets, shouting at everyone through a megaphone: “I vant to be alone!” Continue reading...

Relatives of Hollywood legend say her doppelganger could now be used for more glamorous roles She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age. More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role. Continue reading...

More than 25,000 people have been deported to 29 countries under ⁠the policy implemented last year, according to a tally by human rights groups Sign up to the US Breaking News email For some context, it’s worth remembering that Smith had a two-volume report of his findings as a result of his criminal investigations – that resulted in two indictments against the president after his first term. The first focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, while the second on the p