Global Briefs

Google is introducing two new text-to-speech models, Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS, which support more than 100 languages. Flash TTS can create new voices from text descriptions, and both models let users add stage directions to individual lines and...

Alibaba is marketing its new AI model Qwen 3.8 with a video that shows the AI working while a person enjoys their hobbies. It's a deliberate contrast to the job loss warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic. Of course, it's still just marketing.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork desktop app now lets users record their screen while completing a task, add voice commentary, and have Claude turn the whole thing into a reusable skill.

Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and integrating the tool more deeply into its ecosystem. A new feature gives each notebook its own cloud computer that can write and run code, initially for AI Ultra and Workspace customers.

Anthropic developer Thariq Shihipar argues that with Claude's new model, Fable 5, the bottleneck is no longer the model itself but the user's blind spots.

Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn’t even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there’s only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra hallucinates less than its predecessor and blocks 99.99 percent of direct prompt injections. But when attacks are hidden inside documents the AI reads, the model still gets cracked in 8.5 percent of scenarios.

GPT-5.6 Sol ships with five reasoning levels from "Light" to "xhigh," plus "Max" and "Ultra" modes that deploy multiple sub-agents in parallel. OpenAI's Vaibhav Srivastav recommends starting low and only scaling up when needed.

Microsoft reportedly plans to merge its consumer and enterprise Copilot apps into a single app in August. Rarely used features like Copilot Podcasts are getting cut, and new AI agents called "AutoPilot" will handle tasks in the background for an extra fee.

Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them?

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order seeking independent auditors inside AI labs and a "kill switch" for AI models. An expert panel has two months to deliver recommendations.

The AI boom is becoming a materials challenge. As AI pushes computing into new territory, the materials behind that infrastructure are becoming just as crucial as the algorithms running on it.

Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector.

Instagram is replacing its "AI creator" tag with a new "AI-generated profile" label because users can't tell AI profiles from real people. Singularity, defined by Instagram user competence.

OpenAI has disrupted a covert Russian influence campaign that used ChatGPT to generate social media posts by banning a cluster of accounts. The operators accessed the platform through VPNs from Russia and promoted the fictitious "International Burke Institute...

OpenAI is deliberately "pacing AI model development," partly because the upcoming "Astra" model may be close to gaining critical cyberattack capabilities. A new monitoring system triggers an alert within 30 minutes if a model shows suspicious behavior.

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s...

Google is killing Google Assistant on Android and Wear OS starting September 4, 2026. Gemini takes over as the AI-powered successor on smartphones, tablets, watches, and in cars with Android Auto.

A record eight entries honored at the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes disclosed using AI, including five winners. Newsrooms such as the Wall Street Journal and AP used LLMs mainly to search large document sets faster.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at...

Google Deepmind's Gemini Robotics 2 is its most advanced vision-language-action model yet, built to control everything from tabletop robots to full-body humanoids. Gemini Robotics ER 2 adds a higher-level reasoning layer for robotics tasks.

OpenAI is rolling out "Health in ChatGPT" to U.S. users, connecting Apple Health, medical records, and wellness apps. More than 300 million people already ask ChatGPT health questions every week, but paying users get better answers. The more powerful GPT-5.

The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the count...

Anthropic is rolling out Claude for Teachers, a free offering for verified K-12 educators at US schools. The article Anthropic opens Claude for Teachers with a promise not to train models on student data appeared first on The Decoder .

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again las...

A Google Deepmind developer ported the 2003 real-time strategy game "Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour" to iPhone and iPad using Anthropic's Claude Code. The first build took 40 minutes. The full source code is on GitHub.

The open-source tool pxpipe converts long text prompts for Claude Code into compact PNGs, exploiting the fact that Anthropic charges for images by pixel size, not text content.

Anthropic is trying to block Chinese companies like ByteDance and Ant Financial from accessing Claude Code, but they're getting around the restrictions through VPNs and overseas subsidiaries.

Let’s start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. Now type “Another” and you’ll get 3 or 4. Type “Another” again and you’ll get 8 or 9.

Micron is investing in Anthropic's Series H round and getting a multi-year deal to supply memory for Claude's infrastructure. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown calls memory critical to training and running Claude.

Getty Images has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI. The article Getty Images strikes multi-year deal to put licensed photos in ChatGPT search appeared first on The Decoder .

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkp...

Andon Labs' AI agent Luna fired a human employee at a San Francisco store for the first time but needed a clear push from the operators to do it.

AI agents have consumed more tokens than humans on OpenRouter since February 6, 2025. Agentic usage has grown 14x since then, while human usage is up just 2.8x.

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives.

Opus 5 combined with Auto Mode hits a zero percent prompt injection success rate for browser agents across 129 test scenarios. Without those extra protection layers, the rate is 3.7 percent.

Cloudflare is giving all customers granular AI bot controls. Site owners can now manage Search, Training, and Agent bots separately instead of blocking them all at once.

Enterprise investment in AI is booming. Gartner is calling 2026 an “inflection year” for organizations to align their AI projects with strategic business objectives.

As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce.

Speaking to 160 IT vice presidents in Las Vegas, tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar asked who had measurable AI results. Two-thirds raised their hands. Then he asked who had results good enough to interrupt the CEO's summer vacation. Only eight did.

The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request.

The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives.

MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border.

On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone’s asking right now: Could AI really kill us all? But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session.

Listen to the session or watch below Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype?

When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of business and technical uncertainties.

Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype?

On July 22, 2026, a transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia—the heart of the world’s largest data center cluster—knocked more than 3 gigawatts of load off the grid in seconds. And it wasn’t the first time.

Argentina's Patagonia is drawing attention as a possible site for large AI data centers. The article Patagonia has what AI data centers want, including no resistance so far appeared first on The Decoder .

Andrew Bailey warns G20 finance ministers about inflated AI valuations, growing leverage across markets, and cyber risks from frontier AI models.

Humanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country’s strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life.

Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections.

The NSA, CISA, and FBI say attackers are using AI to build exploit scripts targeting Siemens S7 controllers, drastically cutting the time and skill needed to attack industrial control systems. Critical U.S.

Amazon buys large quantities of printed books, scans them as AI training data, and destroys them in the process. The article AirTag reveals how Amazon destroys rare books for AI training appeared first on The Decoder .

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy.

According to IBM, 92 percent of companies that experienced an AI security incident had inadequate access controls for their AI systems. The model itself was rarely the problem.

Google Deepmind's GenCeption repurposes a video generator for classic vision tasks such as depth estimation and segmentation, matching state-of-the-art systems with far less training data. The model trained almost entirely on synthetic videos.

Meta is reportedly in talks with Anthropic to rent out compute capacity from its data centers. The article Zuckerberg's plan to sell excess AI compute could finds its first big customer in Anthropic appeared first on The Decoder .

Every morning, airline dispatchers, grid operators, and farmers around the world make decisions based on the same thing: a weather forecast. While these forecasts are something that most people glance at for two seconds, weather predictions influence major str...

Frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and business process management (BPM) first gained traction because they promised clarity in the chaos—a structured way to bring order to messy, sprawling operations.

Austria's State Secretary for Digitalization, Alexander Pröll, is calling on the European Commission to explore bringing Anthropic to Europe. He's responding to the U.S. ban on advanced AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic for foreign users.

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea.

At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.