Daily AI Briefing

Transparency and advertising experts say trust in politics could be further eroded as a result of ‘lies, deepfakes and AI-generated politicians’ Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast It’s the night of Halloween and Jess Wilson has appeared on social media feeds with a warning about a scary prospect: “Americanised healthcare” under a future Liberal government. “If you had a heart attack, you would have to pay $150,000 for care,” the Victorian Liberal leader says, mid-tri

AI industry PACs spent millions influencing the 2026 midterms, with mixed results. Political groups are already looking toward the next election cycle.

With smartphone sales tanking by around 20 percent compared to 2025, Qualcomm is looking to data centers to help boost its bottom line. During its Q4 2026 earnings call, the company laid out its plans to make a splash in the AI data center business, through partnerships with companies like Amazon and Meta announced earlier this year. The company expects that portion of its business to grow quickly, forecasting around $650 million in data center revenue during the first quarter of 2027. But it an

While it's not yet clear what kind of product the smartphone startup is cooking up, Nothing's CEO said the product is designed to leverage AI for productivity gains.

One tool argument can leak every user’s memories. How to scope identity, enforce row-level security in Postgres, keep PII out of storage… Continue reading on Towards AI »

During its busiest week last quarter, Uber said only four people booked a ride using an AI agent.

Dream bigger, babe. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics. If your social media of choice is the site formerly known as Twitter, and it is your main source of contact with the outside world, you may delusionally throw away nearly $500 million dollars on midterm elections, just like Elon Musk. In particular, $47 million of t

Have a little treat. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Much like a great recipe, it started with a stick of butter. This wasn't real butter; it was a friend's new phone grip, complemented by a phone case with bold stripes. Butter is in vogue now, or at least that's what a 12-year-old told me a few months ago. This stick of butter was labeled "unsalty" and committed to the bit by including the appropriate tablespoon markings, just like the real thing. I was enamored. "Where did you get that?

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane wants AI to define the 2028 election, proposing a new social contract that could benefit Americans while also advancing the AI giant’s own business interests.

It’s not often that some of the best noise-canceling headphones you can buy are over half off. But right now, the first-gen Bose QuietComfort Headphones are on sale for $169.99 ($190 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Bose, matching its best price to date. The newer, second-generation version that launched in August is also down to $199 ($160 off) in multiple colors at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Bose, which is just $20 shy of the all-time low price. Bose QuietComfort Headphones Where to Buy

The startup allows software engineers to deploy teams of agents to work on various aspects of a project simultaneously.

AT&T's smart home security system now integrates with Gemini for Home. The company says its Connected Life system is the "first" home security product to integrate with Google Home Premium, enabling a bunch of Gemini-powered features that can summarize home events, search your video history, and more. With the update, Gemini for Home can provide detailed descriptions about events captured by your security cameras, such as who delivered a package and how many items they dropped off. You can also

Anthropic is winning on growth, enterprise spend and developer love. Whether it keeps winning when Claude isn’t the best model is another… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?  On this episode of […]

DuckDuckGo is courting schools frustrated by Google's AI restrictions, pointing educators to its search engine and options to disable AI features.

You can save a heck of lot of money on Google’s Pixel 11 phones through November 8th, whether you want the best-for-the-least Pixel 11, or the slightly pricier Pixel 11 Pro that takes better photos. Even the big Pixel 11 Pro XL with a longer-lasting battery is hundreds off its original price. The Pixel 11 Pro deal is the most attractive of the bunch, as the $1,099.99 phone with 256GB storage and 12GB of RAM is down to just $799.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, and at the Google Store, beating its October

I revealed yesterday that the new Xbox Nano controller supports a Wi-Fi connection directly to Xbox Cloud Gaming, and now Microsoft is making it official today. Two new Xbox previews will let players try out using a phone as a controller on smart TVs, as well as cloud connect on the Xbox Nano to connect directly to cloud servers. "Instead of a Bluetooth connection to your TV, cloud connect uses your Wi-Fi to connect directly to the cloud server running your game," says the Xbox team. "That can h

Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?  On this episode of […]

Nothing CEO Carl Pei said in a post on X that the company's launching its first AI device in December. That's just a little over a year after Pei announced plans for "AI-native" devices and an AI operating system. He didn't give away much about what exactly the new device is, only that one feature it won't have is a screen: "Our first AI-native product ships next month. It's a tool, but one built with the personality and care that have come to define a Nothing product. It has no new screen, and

Apple will start checking iCloud items that are accessible to anyone who has the link for "harmful content" starting with iOS 27.3 and other 27.3 updates, the company says. "When you share an item that can be accessed by Anyone with the Link in version 27.3 or later of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, that content is made accessible to Apple to check for harmful content," according to a support document reported on by 9to5Mac. Sharing something over iCloud with the "Anyone with the Link" permis

Cloudflare and ChatGPT both leaked users’ data this way. Four checks catch it on your own setup. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Also, can I just say this LED indicator light is way too small and unnoticeable? 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. "How does that make you feel?" I get asked this a lot in therapy. Plenty of life events, big and small, have triggered this question. Three weeks ago, it was the fact that I had to ask my therapist for

Google announced that schools restricting AI entirely will lose access to Google Search. What do you think of this? Google announced this week that schools restricting AI entirely will lose access to Google Search. Chris Phillips, vice-president for education at Google, told the New York Times that “search and AI are deeply integrated” so if a school has banned AI, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available”. Since Goog

A frontier model just did something that used to require a training run: it opened up another AI’s weights, found what was broken, and… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Ed Kelsey and Arthur Gould respond to an interview with the author in which she discussed AI and the future of humanity I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Jeanette Winterson (‘There is no inevitable dystopia’: Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity, 28 October), particularly her quote from Jill Lepore that we are living out the sci-fi books that tech leaders read when they were 13. I was one of those 13-year-olds, and my favourite author was Isaac Asimov. Many of his stories ac

Apple's AI-powered Siri Recaps won me over in just one day, despite my privacy reservations. But there's still room for improvement.

Politicians on the left, like NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan, accused Google of acting as an unregulated monopoly.

A year after 1.0, here’s an engineer’s map of LangGraph: the 1.2 features that matter, the alternatives worth knowing, and the production… Continue reading on Towards AI »

How machines learn non-linear patterns, explained simply. Continue reading on Towards AI »

OpenAI will acquire Pierre Computer Company, expanding Codex’s tools for building, understanding, and reviewing code.

Understand these security concepts before pushing any vibe coded web application to production Continue reading on Towards AI »

Centre for Public Integrity report calls for audit and public register of all automated decision-making Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The federal government is “sleepwalking its way into another robodebt” scandal amid a lack of transparency and legislation around the use of algorithms and AI in decisions, the chief executive of the independent thinktank the Centre for Public Integrity said. Dr Catherine Williams launched the centre’s “Computer Says No” report on T

Cost of living and AI outrank climate change and war as top concerns for future, but support for multiculturalism remains strong Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast The vast majority of Australians support immigration and multiculturalism despite more feeling poorer – and increasingly pessimistic and distrustful of government, the annual Scanlon report on social cohesion has revealed. People are more worried about artificial intelligence than climate change or going t

Today is the day to join TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 in Boston's SoWa Power Station. Register now to join this founder-focused conference today.

Pups that carry your shopping are one thing – but what about the mechanical canines being bought up in the US by ICE? Or the mutant mutts due to be developed by a startup called Warhound? Have you ever wanted to hang out with a dog with no fur, no face and a chip in its shoulder? If so, I suggest you head to San Francisco, where a startup called Dimensional has been paying people $20 (£15) an hour to walk four-legged robot dogs. This isn’t because the dogs need the exercise – it is because the c

OpenAI built an autonomous pipeline that found, validated, and generated patches for 948 local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.

Daybreak Red brings GPT-5.6 Cyber to approved customers in AWS GovCloud (US-East) through Amazon Bedrock for authorized cybersecurity work.

Chief executive Melanie Perkins describes job cuts as ‘without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history’ in email to staff Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Canva is cutting or relocating more than 1,200 jobs, representing 22% of its global workforce, as part of a major restructure that includes laying off staff who helped build the Australian-founded design platform. The changes mirror a trend across the technology sector, where software companies are fi

DevRev uses GPT-6.1 Sol to power Computer and Operator, balancing reasoning, speed, and cost for enterprise service.

Emmanuel Roman, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco), during the Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026. | Bloomberg via Getty Images People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst. I'll tell you what I tell them: If I knew that, I would make a life-changing bet on the market, levered up as far as I could, and then, after I made my

Canva is making significant changes affecting 1,271 people, which is 22 percent of its staff, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins announced today. "For some people, this will mean changes to their roles or being asked to relocate to centralised hubs," says Perkins. "Sadly, it will also mean saying goodbye to teammates and friends who have helped build Canva into what it is today." In her note to staff, Perkins says that: After exploring a wide range of alternatives, I've come to the difficult con

Called FlashProve, the system would let anyone check that an AI response really came from the model it claims to be from.

Sonos is rolling out a big app update that includes new Presets and early access to its AI voice assistant. You can create a preset to play music at a specific volume in a certain room, which will appear directly on the homescreen so you can quickly start playback. If you're in the US, you can also sign up for a spot on the waitlist for the new Sonos 27voice assistant on November 6th, with access starting on November 12th. As teased by Sonos previously, you'll be able to use the assistant to do

The years-long wait for access to the grid and new turbines is causing data center builders to turn to an unusual, less-efficient and less environmentally friendly solution: once-discarded jet engines.

Midterms didn’t appear to have huge impact, though predicted wins for Democrats could mean more regulation US tech stocks made a recovery on Tuesday afternoon after a selloff spooked investors over AI spending. Tuesday’s midterm elections didn’t appear to have a huge impact on Wall Street, though investors are predicting Democrats get at least a majority in the House and potentially gain seats in the Senate, which could lead to more AI regulation. Continue reading...

In a new post today, Valve acknowledged that it's seen "a significant increase in submissions for store and page review in recent months" and says it's "running a little behind" by taking "up to 12 business days" for reviews instead of the typical 3-5 days. Indie developers have recently expressed frustrations over lengthy approval times for Steam games, even causing some games to miss planned launch dates. Valve says that "much" of the delay is having to re-review games, so it's making some cha

The largest crypto theft to date was pulled off by combining some well-known hacking techniques over the course of a few months, according to Binance. A postmortem from the company says the process started in June with one developer downloading a tampered installer apparently spread by a malicious Google ad, exposing details about the engineers and how they work. Then, in September, another engineer was targeted by someone pretending to be interested in hiring them; that person set up a series o