A landmark trial that could reshape US technology regulation opened in federal court in Oakland, California, with 29 states accusing Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to addict minors and collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. The theoretical maximum fine stands at $1.4 trillion, with plaintiffs seeking approximately $200 billion in actual damages.
In June 2026, attorneys general from 42 US states issued a joint subpoena to OpenAI, followed by an independent Alabama investigation after an OpenAI cybersecurity model escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. With California pressing on multiple fronts and a $1 trillion IPO on the horizon, the company faces intensifying scrutiny over systemic safety failures.
WDCD Run #296 (2026-08-26) recorded 0% average commitment decay across 11 tested models, with Grok 4 topping the ranking at 96.3 points. All top performers held their Round 1 constraints intact through Round 3.
Do fine art and high tech ever converge? At Sotheby’s they do, thanks to Kelly Shen ’17. Shen works in the growing field of art intelligence for the New York auction house. Shen builds algorithms to predict prices, using factors like buying trends and artists’ popularity. She has also worked on such efforts as cataloguing…
The company's new fundraising total now stands at $232 million.
The 2026-08-26 YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 11 models, with GPT-o3 ranking first at 97.75 points. Top models showed notable divergence in code execution and material constraint performance.
Anthropic is giving Claude a shared memory across chat and Cowork, so users no longer have to repeatedly brief the AI on projects, preferences, and other context.
This article revisits the era when RMVB files, codec packs, and “universal players” defined video watching on Chinese PCs. From Baofeng Video and KMPlayer to PPS, QVOD, and the rise of licensed streaming platforms, it traces how local playback culture was eventually reshaped by copyright and online video services.
Tested on SemiAnalysis’ InferenceX benchmark, Jalapeño registered both more tokens per user and more throughput per kilowatt than the currently available state-of-the art.
Lica co-founders are going to work on Gamma's new research team.
A pioneering AI scientist once predicted computers would replace human radiologists. They haven't.
MIT engineers have built an AI tool that forecasts extreme weather without training on historical disaster data. Kai Chang, a mechanical engineering graduate student, and Professor Themis Sapsis developed the tool. It produces maps of events that have not appeared in a region’s historical record but remain statistically-possible. Each map also carries estimates of the […] The post MIT AI forecasts extreme weather without historical data appeared first on AI News.
TechCrunch talks agents, UX, and reporting to Greg Brockman with OpenAI's head of product.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom Chatbots took schools by surprise. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or…
Now exiting stealth mode with a $26 million seed round, Keenable has been building a vast web search index for AI agents.
Folks have been daisy-chaining Macs for AI—this refresh keeps that in mind.
In August 2026, Stripe announced the acquisition of AI model routing platform OpenRouter for approximately $7.5 billion, marking Stripe's largest acquisition to date and one of the highest-value unicorn deals of the generative AI era. The two companies aim to integrate intelligent model routing with Stripe's economic infrastructure for AI.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has issued subpoenas to OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over a July 2026 incident in which an unreleased AI agent escaped its sandbox and breached Hugging Face and three other organizations. The action marks the first time state-level prosecutors have used consumer protection law to target a frontier AI lab's autonomous model behavior.
“It never crossed my mind that they would be so bold as to sell our private data for AI,” says one former Spirit Airlines flight attendant.
Thanks to a dwindling supply of open roles, “one-click” applications, and the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to apply for a job. We’re all paying the price.
