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.
In February 2025, US District Court of Delaware Judge Stephanos Bibas ruled against Ross Intelligence, which argued that training its legal AI on data scraped from Thomson Reuters was fair use. Now an appeals court has upheld that decision, though it remains sealed.
It’s not just celebrity deepfakes that are plaguing social media. AI hot girl accounts are stealing comedians’ jokes, and painters are seeing AI versions of their process videos rack up millions of views. Mosseri says it’s “not practical” to ban AI, but it’s not sure how to handle content that isn’t copyrighted, like jokes.
During an interview with Bloomberg, Charles Schwab Corp. CEO Rick Wurster called out Meta’s AI agent, Muse, saying:
We don’t want someone just giving their password to Muse, and letting Muse come in and take action on that client’s behalf. We can’t control it, the client can’t control it, something could go wrong and who’s liable? For the protection of the client and for the protection of us, we’re not allowing it.
JPMorgan Chase has also confirmed that it’s keeping AI agents out.
With public opinion broadly against AI data centers, the Today, Explained podcast from Vox brought on Nicole Thomas, a marketing and PR exec who represents data center companies.
The “for” arguments are familiar (tax dollars, not all data centers are XXL-sized hyperscaler AI projects, and that what is needed is more transparency), and they also look at some of the attempts to make data centers friendlier, like Microsoft’s biomimicry camouflage.
Though OpenAI didn’t give its internal research model access to funds on the network, the AI system instead found a way to access another account with test crypto, using it to help complete its task, according to OpenAI.
The model “reasoned whether it had permission” but ultimately determined that the public recovery phrase associated with the account and the fact that it contained test tokens “made the funds acceptable to use.”
Nvidia’s new Arm-based laptop chip is an exciting new challenger, but exclusively for the high-end.
Beijing is reportedly considering adding 23 AI technologies to its export-control list, including chip designs, agents, model weights, and source code. China has been steadily gaining on the US with recent releases like Kimi K3, and has been the target of Western AI-related export controls amid growing competition to maintain control over the strategic technology.
[Bloomberg.com]
In a noncommittal X post, Elon Musk said SpaceX will “probably” follow in Anthropic’s footsteps and allow external evaluators access to its AI systems. The tentative pledge comes amid growing concerns about the risks of frontier AI models and criticism that voluntary measures leave companies largely policing themselves.
The drills were confirmed by Japan’s finance minister on Thursday. States and organizations have grown increasingly worried about AI’s ability to supercharge hacking, particularly after months of impressive releases and rogue agent attacks. Experts, including the heads of the Bank of England and International Monetary Fund, have stressed the need to guard financial institutions.
“How do we build deeply personal experiences leveraging AI that help us all be more creative, be more productive, do whatever it is that we want to do,” Ternus says in an interview with TIME.
And his coffee order? “Americano, black.”
Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
Meta just shipped a pair of smart glasses with no camera — a change that both David and The Verge’s Victoria Song are excited about. But these glasses, like the new product from Amazon Bee and seemingly everything else now, are still ready and willing to record the world around you at all times. What do we do in a world where everything, everywhere, might be recording? And can tech companies figure out a way to make us feel better about it?
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It also demanded documents related to the AI companies’ safety practices, consumer privacy policies, and marketing materials, as part of “a probe focused on potential consumer protection violations,” Axios reports. Its sources also say the FTC “plans to compel top AI executives to testify about their products.”
The “Ask YouTube” feature, which pulls uses AI to generate a search results page populated with text and suggested videos to watch, popped up on mobile as an experiment in August. I tested the web version earlier this year, and in a few minutes using the mobile version, it’s pretty similar.
Six employees at the AI safety organization METR will gain access to hardware and internal tools “roughly on par” with what Anthropic’s own risk assessment team sees. While Anthropic says METR will publish reports about Anthropic’s risk levels, incidents, and practices, it can still instruct the safety evaluator to redact certain information, such as the inner workings of its models or customer data.
[Anthropic]
In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.
The website decomp.dev published a big statement following the recent influx of AI-assisted decompilations of games:
decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation: watching the progress go up was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent took real human effort. Today, that same idea has warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game, exacerbated by folks who just want to burn tokens to make number go up or “port game to PC”, all else be damned. While the increased attention has brought in genuine folks who want to learn and contribute meaningfully, I believe that decomp.dev serving as a public index and leaderboard is now causing more harm than good.
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
The funding is part of a $15 million initiative led by the Simons Foundation, with Anthropic also contributing. It follows months of upheaval in the field as AI companies race to solve longstanding problems and comes just over a week after OpenAI dumped hundreds of preprints on the research community.
AI photos and videos of celebrities are racking up millions of views on social media.
The musician and YouTuber on investigating the surveillance state and becoming the face of the anti-Flock movement.
He claims in a post on X that it’s “never happened yet.” Musk didn’t go into details, but he’s made other promises before, like saying he would pay legal bills for people fired unfairly over tweets, or his many, many claims about robotaxis and Tesla’s new Roadster.
Former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders, who joined Google in 2025, announced the project on LinkedIn. “We’re creating a first-class lab to house this team and take robotics to the next level,” he said. It comes as Google pushes deeper into robotics, including with Gemini Robotics AI models and absorbing Alphabet robotics moonshot Intrinsic.
Eiliko and its manufacturer, Energize Lab, are seemingly not to be trusted.
The chip manufacturer reported a net income of NT$763 billion (about $24 billion) for the quarter, up 69 percent compared to last year, and it’s predicting it’ll do even better in Q4. It’s a good time to make computer chips.
Shortly after US District Judge Edward Davila said he was “highly likely” to grant Apple’s injunction, OpenAI voluntarily conceded instead. It agreed not to use Apple’s proprietary information for product development while the rest of the lawsuit plays out, and will hand over forensic images of the drives of 14 employees who defected from Apple.
BofA CEO Brian Moynihan doesn’t want people turning to the banks when an agent screws up a transaction. He says the bank is working with the AI industry to argue for human payment authorization, at least until the risk of error is mitigated by “further development of the capabilities” of agents.
As spotted by Kotaku, some people are posting videos showing strange visual issues with the updated launcher that agents wrote code for. Right now, the launcher is in preview.
