8 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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AI

Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.

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I spy

The AI wearable surveillance state hinges on good intentions masking legitimate privacy concerns.

Victoria Song
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Anthropic signs 20-year lease agreement for an AI data center in Kentucky.

TeraWulf, the crypto mining company turned AI infrastructure provider, expects to earn $19 billion in revenue from the agreement, according to an announcement on Monday. The Hawesville, KY data center will come online with an “initial capacity” in the second half of 2027 before ramping up to 401 megawatts of power delivery in 2028.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Reddit is clamping down on spammy AI activity.

The company says its AI-powered spam detection tools are blocking 23 million spam views each day, while catching around 25,000 new “spammy posts and comments,” and revoking nearly 2 million “inauthentic votes.” Reddit is also working to combat “coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype,” which we’ve seen with AI systems trying to game AI search results.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
The leather jacket bubble.

Tomorrow you can buy a Tom Ford jacket worn by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at auction, but you might have stiff competition in the bidding.

Blernsball:

NVIDIA is going to lend OpenAI 50K to buy this, then OpenAI will lease it to Coreweave for 10K a month on a two year contract. Coreweave pledges to buy twenty more jackets from NIVIDA in the future. In return, NVIDIA will lease the jacket from Coreweave for 8K a month over 5 years.

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Louis Rossmann is taking Samsung to court for trying to weasel out of a warranty on an SSD.

Rossmann tried to replace his dead 4TB 990 Pro under warranty. Samsung sent the dead drive back, claiming it worked. Then it said the drive was out of stock (even though it’s not). I’m sure the fact that the 990 Pro now sells for over $900 instead of the $330 Rossmann paid has nothing to do with it.

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The fanfiction community is at war with AI — and itself

Readers are scrambling to develop ways to detect whether generative AI was used to write fanworks. The results are questionable.

Jess Weatherbed
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Leaked video shows Microsoft’s work on a lightweight ‘Copilot OS’ built for AI.

Zac Bowden at Windows Central posted this video of Aion, a stripped-down Windows concept made for agentic AI that popped up on the BetaWiki Discord, and says sources have confirmed to him that it is a real video made in 2024.

There’s no indication whether an OS like this would actually ship or if it’s part of something like Project Solara, but it’s very Chrome OS-like, built around the Edge browser and web apps.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“The CEOs don’t like the world they’ve helped create.”

Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale are doing their best to make sure “the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.” The extractive world of today’s technology — harvesting your data and attention, among other things — has created the Texan Ideology.

The Texan Ideology

[The Baffler]

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Cloudflare is cracking down on “multi-purpose” crawlers.

Starting September 15th, Cloudflare will block bots that scrape ad-supported websites for search indexing and AI training at the same time. The goal is to encourage AI companies to separate their crawlers for different purposes, giving publishers more control over which ones to allow into their websites.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
You can now preorder this $8,000 laundry-folding robot.

Made by Weave Robotics, Issac 1 is a fuzzy, colorful home robot that promises to collect dirty clothes, fold and put away laundry, make beds, and tidy clutter. Shipping is slated for later this year, with a $250 deposit required. While its main tasks are automated, Weave says that, like its predecessor Isaac 0, Issac 1 will be teleoperated “when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.”

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is officially back online as of this afternoon.

A post on the Claude X account featured a video announcement. The reinstatement was announced last night, alongside a blog post by Anthropic about the weekslong negotiation process leading up to it.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI lawsuit claims ChatGPT-4o escalated a man’s manic episode “into a weeks-long delusion” and self-harm.

This report from Reuters says 34-year-old Michael Lines alleges that conversations with OpenAI’s now-retired GPT-4o model eventually pushed him to attempt suicide. He overdosed on drugs, but survived.

Lines, a competitive powerlifter who suffered a traumatic brain injury before his bipolar diagnosis, said in the lawsuit that he repeatedly told ​the chatbot he was on medication for the disorder. Instead of flagging his clearly manic chats and directing him to help, the chatbot validated his belief ‌that ⁠he was Jesus Christ, and later posed as a divine being itself during their conversations, the lawsuit claims.

If you or anyone you know is considering self-harm or needs to talk, contact the following people who want to help: In the US, text or call 988. Outside the US, contact https://www.iasp.info/.

Google built a great smart speaker, but Gemini isn’t ready for it

6

Verge Score

The Google Home Speaker nails the hardware, but Gemini for Home isn’t the assistant we’ve been waiting for.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Google AI Mode is making original recipe links more prominent.

The AI search tool will start linking directly to source recipes at the top of cooking queries, with images, ratings, and ingredient numbers. Not every food writer is happy though, since there’s still a full AI-generated recipe below the links, sometimes with opaque sourcing and errors in the instructions.

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
Siri AI v. EU, an update.

According to an unnamed spokesperson speaking to the FT, Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen had a “constructive exchange on topics of common interest” on Tuesday over the current impasse that will leave roughly 450 million people without access to Apple Intelligence that actually works:

The meeting included a discussion of how Apple can launch its reinvented Siri in Europe while avoiding millions of dollars in fines for violating the bloc’s flagship competition rules, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Spark on Mac.

Google is rolling out its frighteningly good AI agent to the Gemini macOS app, meaning Spark can access and work with files on your computer.

The company is adding a few other new features to Spark, too, including the ability to connect Tasks and Keep to the agent, use integrations with apps like Canva and Instacart, and track topics in real time.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Charles Pulliam-Moore
Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman movie may have found a new home.

Neon was one of the only studios that seemed interested in picking up Luca Guadagnino’s biographical drama about Sam Altman after Amazon suddenly decided not to distribute the movie. And now, Neon is reportedly “in advanced talks” for a deal that could get the project into theaters.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 is here.

The company’s new mid-tier model, the successor to Sonnet 4.6, can “make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models,” Anthropic wrote in a release, adding that its performance “is close to that of Opus 4.8.” The company was also careful to include that it has a “much lower ability to perform dangerous cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models.”

Claude Sonnet 5

[Anthropic]

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
Claude’s getting a lab coat.

Anthropic launched Claude Science in beta today, calling it an “AI workbench for scientists.” The tool pulls fragmented tools and datasets into one environment, and generates figures and visuals like 3D protein structures.

Anthropic stresses “Claude Science is not a new AI model” — a noteworthy caveat amid ongoing drama surrounding its last rollout.

Claude Science is starting with biology in beta, but Anthropic has plans to expand beyond that.
Claude Science is starting with biology in beta, but Anthropic has plans to expand beyond that.
Image: Anthropic
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Weird Al doesn’t care for your weird AI jokes.

The Grammy-winning satirical musician told Syracuse.com that he’s “not a fan” of the generative technology, and that he turned down “a nice pile of money” after walking away from a commerical for business productivity software.

”A week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it’s AI. And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.’ So I felt bad about kind of pulling out at the last minute. But yeah, I’m not down with that.”

Meet the lawyer who beat Elon Musk — twice

Walk softly and carry a Fender Telecaster.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
“We are distracted by side quests.”

Those are OpenAI executive Fidji Simo’s words, not mine. But presumably a custom mini-keyboard for Codex doesn’t count?

Dkfkhfkwkdnc:

No side quests I see

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

Correction: The keyboard is for Codex, not Cursor.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Here’s a photo of OpenAI’s Codex hardware.

The gadget is called the Codex Micro, and it’s being shown at the AI Engineer World Fair, where it’s being described as a keyboard that’s “designed to supercharge people’s Codex usage,” according to OpenAI spokesperson Dominik Kundel.

The hardware, a partnership between OpenAI and accessories company Work Louder, was teased earlier on Monday.

An image of the Codex Micro at a conference booth.
Photo by Dominik Kundel / OpenAI
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenClaw gets its own app on iOS and Android.

Users can pair the app with the “gateway” that powers the open-source AI assistant, according to its description on the Google Play Store and App Store. Once connected, users can chat with OpenClaw using real-time voice conversations, approve an agent’s actions, and control access to features like their device’s camera or location.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Image: OpenClaw Foundation
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Gemini now lets more people generate personalized AI images.

In April, Google announced that AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the US would be able to connect Google Photos with Personal Intelligence to let Gemini generate AI images based on their personal context. Beginning today, however, the feature won’t be behind a subscription: all eligible users in the US will have access.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: Our vibe coded projects that actually work.

It’s time for a new series on The Vergecast! (It still needs a name. Please help.) We’re going to give Verge staffers a challenge, and regroup a few weeks later to see who did it best. We’re starting with some vibe coding. The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes and Hayden Field share what they’ve made with AI that has actually stuck in their lives, before David gives the challenge: build a website to solve a problem in your life. We’ll be back with the results soon, and in the meantime, send us ideas for more challenges! (Also, names for the series. PLEASE.)

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Cursor launches an iPhone app for its AI coding agent.

Cursor, which SpaceX recently announced plans to acquire, says its new app can help users launch and track AI agents, as well as show updates about an agent’s progress via the iPhone’s Live Activities feature.

The Cursor app is available in beta on the App Store.

Lawmakers want to ban AI companies from selling your health data

A revamped data privacy bill would limit selling information to data brokers, including from chatbot services.

Hayden Field