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Archives for September 2026

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
Android Central, a good blog, has been gutted.

Staffers don’t know whether the site will shut down — but managing editor Derrek Lee confirms to The Verge that all remaining staff were laid off today. EIC Shruti Shekar confirms she’s been laid off, senior editor Harish Jonnalagadda and senior content producer Nicolas Sutrich wrote they’d been laid off, and senior editor Namarah Saud Fatmi also appears to be gone.

Android Central’s masthead was already down to six staffers after layoffs earlier this year. Earlier today, owner Future PLC announced it would pause its share buyback and focus on reducing debt.

Update, October 1st: Future claims that Android Central “will continue” somehow.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Micron’s DRAM revenue increased 343 percent over the past year.

The chip company said it pulled in a record $39.8 billion in quarterly revenue from DRAM, which has been in short supply. Micron also reported record quarterly revenue for its data center business at $18 billion, up from $1.57 billion in the same quarter last year. Its quarterly NAND revenue also shot up 526 percent to $14.1 billion.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
The Pentagon is working with Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to shape “the future of warfare.”

Musk, Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will co-direct the Pentagon’s Project Meridian, an initiative meant to identify new capabilities and technologies to deploy in the US military, according to a press release:

Secretary Hegseth has commissioned Project Meridian to secure America’s long-term military superiority by identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield. Project Meridian will examine the full spectrum of future warfighting domains, from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier.

Gaby Del Valle
Gaby Del Valle
Two more cops got caught using government databases to track romantic interests.

A pair of sheriff’s deputies in Pinellas County, Florida, were arrested on felony charges by their own department for using official databases to look up women they were interested in — including a 17-year-old girl.

One of the sheriff’s deputies, Karl Gwynne, reportedly looked up a woman on the agency’s automatic license plate reader database 300 times.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Google’s ‘skills’ replacement for Gems is available in Gemini chats starting today.

The reusable, custom instructions for Gemini are also rolling out to Workspace users starting October 5th and in the Gemini app starting October 13th. Google’s shutting down Gems starting in November for individual users, and as early as March 1st, 2027 for Workspace users.

Travis Larchuk
Travis Larchuk
Today’s Vergecast: Dots are OpenAI’s cute lil guys.

Jolly’s got new competition: OpenAI just launched its competitor to Muse and Grok Bot. It’s called Dots, and the headline feature is that it’s also cute, with fuzzy lil triangles and clouds and hearts that you can give access to your personal accounts to do things for you. The Verge’s senior AI reporter Hayden Field joined guest host David Imel from San Francisco, right after OpenAI’s DevDay presentation.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI claims Moonshot extracted its data to train AI models.

In a blog post on Wednesday, OpenAI says it disrupted a “coordinated campaign designed to extract protected reasoning from our models.” The company hasn’t linked the activity to a single actor, but traced a “core cluster” of it to Moonshot, the Chinese company behind the leading AI model Kimi. Anthropic has made similar accusations against Moonshot as well.

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:

The AI Tamagotchis are coming

Personal AI hardware has mostly crashed and burned. OpenAI and Meta are counting on two selling points: It’s useful, and it’s cute.

Hayden Field
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Microsoft Jewel is now on mobile.

If you’re looking for a match-3 game to play on your phone that isn’t Bejeweled or Microsoft’s own Candy Crush, you can try Microsoft Jewel on iOS and Android. The game includes Xbox achievements, and if you sign in with your Microsoft account, your progress stays synced between the iOS, Android, and PC apps.