9 – 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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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
Hayden Field
Hayden Field
California partnered with Anthropic to make Claude available to all state agencies and local governments.

They will get a 50% discount on access to Claude, as part of a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” that also includes complimentary workforce training, technical assistance, and “workflow input from Anthropic developers,” per a release. On the state level, government employees will use Claude to help draft and summarize documents, analyze information, and supplement day-to-day work, per the release.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Google is putting a cap on Meta’s Gemini usage.

Google has struggled to keep up with demand for its cloud computing power, and Meta has grown increasingly reliant on Gemini for many of its needs. Now, Meta, along with a number of other clients, is being told that Google simply can’t provide the capacity they want. According to the Financial Times:

The decision by Google to cap a large customer’s access to its models offers a rare glimpse into the infrastructure pressures and bottlenecks building across the AI industry. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on chips, data centres and power, even the largest tech companies are struggling to secure enough computing power to support surging demand for advanced models and AI services.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
The Dude abides AI slop, apparently.

Jeff Bridges is best known as an actor. But he’s also a reasonably accomplished musician who’s put out records on Blue Note and worked with T Bone Burnett. Which makes it all the more depressing when he fired up Suno on This Past Weekend with Theo Von.

Anthropic’s Mythos 5 is back

The Trump administration approved a select group of users, but Fable 5 is still nowhere in sight.

Hayden Field
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Apple’s Vision Pro and smart glasses leader reportedly leaves for OpenAI.

With its Vision Pro headset suddenly even more expensive, and plans for smart glasses apparently in the works, Bloomberg reports Apple is losing Paul Meade, the hardware VP who was in charge of those projects. The report says he’ll reunite with former Apple designers, including Jony Ive, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey, at OpenAI, which purchased their startup last year, as the executive shakeup under new Apple CEO John Ternus continues.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
What’s going on with SpaceX bonds?

SpaceX bonds are creating losses for the fast-money types who piled in at the offering. “Bond types either aren’t sure that SpaceX will hang on to its investment-grade credit ratings, or will only get involved if they get paid a fat risk premium for doing so,” the Financial Times explains. SpaceX stock is, as of this writing, trading below its IPO price. Gee, if only someone had pointed out that this company is a stinker.

SpaceX hangover spreads

[Financial Times]

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
An investigation into Mark Zuckerberg’s chain.

You may remember the period when Zuck tried to pretend he was Very Manly (MMA fighting, Joe Rogan appearance). He seems to be walking that back now, like he realized he overstepped with that horrible attempt at streetwear. Gentlemen, if you want to look like a grown-ass man, the kind who is competent and in charge? Make a mood board of Cary Grant outfits. (If you want to go more contemporary, Colman Domingo.) Fashion is only trivial if you’re stupid — your style expresses your persona before you say a single word, and Zuck’s is still “wannabe.”

Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse

The White House standoff could have dire implications for the US AI industry.

Hayden Field
Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Are you extracting enough value from the AI revolution?

I’m not sure there’s an AI agent that can solve the fact that everything costs more and the planet is melting.

Cpt_Slim_Jim:

Imma go out on a limb to say that I have not had any productivity increases from AI be worth the financial burden it has placed upon me and my family.

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

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
ElevenLabs rolls out SynthID support.

The AI audio platform has adopted Google’s invisible watermarking technology to help identify AI-generated content online. SynthID is now included in text-to-speech generations for free users, and will expand coverage to all ElevenLabs audio generations “over the coming weeks.” The watermarks can be detected using the ElevenLabs Audio Detector.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: How to train your data.

Training data is the raw material of the AI industry. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the rest are built on top of oceans of stuff. What is that stuff? Books. Blog posts. YouTube videos. News articles. All of it and more, in virtually incomprehensible quantities. Alex Reisner, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has been investigating training data, explains how AI companies get all this data, why they’d really prefer you not know what’s in it, and whether training data could ever be a fair trade.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Two handlebars are better than one, right?

Outdoor retailer REI has been getting some heat for this (now removed) AI slop ad on Instagram, but the company says Meta is to blame. “Meta auto-enrolled us in an AI personalization tool that produced an inaccurate and inappropriate alteration of a vendor-provided image,” an REI spokesperson told Business Insider.

An Instagram ad for REI showing a bike with two handlebars.
The original image came from a Van Rysel photo shoot featuring cyclist Amity Rockwell, with Van Rysel North America confirming to Business Insider that “Any later alterations were not made by Van Rysel.”
Image: REI, seen via Jeffrey_C_Wheaties
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Nearly 400 local newspapers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft.

The coalition of publishers alleges OpenAI and Microsoft “scraped, copied, and ingested” their work without permission or compensation to train their AI models. This latest legal battle adds to the string of copyright lawsuits OpenAI is facing from publishers like The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
People Inc. CEO says it’s “probably” headed for a confrontation with Google over AI crawling.

Neil Vogel, CEO of the publisher formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, brought up his company’s AI licensing deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft in an Axios interview this week. He noted that while it blocks other unlicensed AI crawlers, it can’t block Google’s since it’s the same one used for Google Search.

According to Vogel, “We would love to do something productive with them, but we’re probably heading towards more confrontation than productivity with those guys.”

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
This week in the big AI data center buildout.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Meta reportedly still hasn’t agreed to allow the US government to review its AI models.

That’s according to a report from The New York Times, which says the White House officials are pressuring Meta to submit its AI models for evaluation, something OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and xAI have already agreed to do.

“While we are working through the details, we hope to sign the agreement soon,” Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan tells the NYT.

Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAIHollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI
Charles Pulliam-Moore
David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: Why Big Tech can’t quit smart glasses.

A huge portion of the tech industry has decided that smart glasses are the next big thing. But why? Smart glasses are incredibly hard to make, hugely socially complicated, and require users to want to wear a gadget on their face. The Verge’s Victoria Song helps us figure out which features, if any, will make smart glasses worth all the trouble.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Superhuman is acquiring GPTZero, an AI content detector.

GPTZero will soon be available in the Superhuman Go AI assistant, which works in “1 million apps and websites,” says Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly. Superhuman adds that its authenticity tools “address both sides of the equation — understanding the provenance of what they read and using AI responsibly while writing.”

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Anthropic introduced “Claude Tag,” a new AI agent Slack integration. 

Claude can join as a member of a company’s Slack to write and merge pull requests, locate sales numbers, analyze data, take on tasks delegated to it, and more, the company wrote in a blog post. To use it, people will tag @Claude in the Slack channel.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
The Cate Blanchett-led ‘Human Consent Registry’ launches today.

RSL Media — the nonprofit founded by Blanchett — is opening up access to a new registry that will allow people to set terms for how AI systems use their likenesses.

Through the registry, people can permit, prohibit, or require payment for AI systems to use their name, image, voice, and other attributes. It will soon let people signal how AI can use their creative works, characters, and marks, as well.