Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: Elon Musk says Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to discuss a possible merger and calls the possibility of a Tesla-SpaceX merger a “good idea” — Musk called the merger “a good idea,” though it cautioned it wasn't a guarantee.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge: Meta removes ToS language that suggested it could scrape websites “associated with” business accounts, saying it applied only to “ads and business products” — Language that experts say allowed the scraping of news sites to train its AI has been removed from Meta's terms.
Nilay Patel / The Verge: An interview with YouTuber Benn Jordan, who recently testified in Congress against license plate readers, on Flock, privacy, the surveillance backlash, and more — Today, I'm talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist.
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: Volvo says it will use Nvidia's Hyperion platform to launch a Level 2++ hands-free, point-to-point automated driving system by 2030 — The system will be similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving in that it will enable hands-free, point-to-point partially automated driving on local roads.
Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft launches its Copilot “super app”, bundling chat, coding, and agents into a single interface, and rebrands its AI assistant Scout as Autopilot — The new Copilot merges AI chat, coding, and Autopilot agents. — After teasing its new Copilot “super app” …
Robert Hart / The Verge: Experts say that air-gapping AI could prevent events like the Hugging Face hack, but would undermine the value of evaluations and slow research to a crawl — Researchers are testing these systems precisely because they might behave in unpredictable, even dangerous, ways.
Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft lays off 268 Xbox employees across Halo Studios and other first-party studios, as part of an ongoing “reset” of its gaming business — Deals to sell off Ninja Theory fell through over the summer. … Microsoft is laying off around 260 Xbox employees today, as part of an ongoing “reset” of its gaming business.
John Higgins / The Verge: Apple announces new $350 Beats 360 headphones, with IPX4 rating, swappable ear cups, a replaceable battery, ANC, Find My support, and more — Everyone has seen someone at the gym or running around their neighborhood wearing headphones that were never designed for workouts. Quite often those headphones are Beats.
David Pierce / The Verge: An interview with Google SVP of Devices Rick Osterloh on Googlebooks, which he calls “the ultimate focusing move” for Google, a potential Pixel laptop, and more — In late 2010, an up-and-coming Google executive named Sundar Pichai took the stage in front of a bunch of reporters …
Dominic Preston / The Verge: Google's Googlebook OS, built on Android with a Material 3 Expressive and ChromeOS hybrid UI, offers deep Android 17 integration, 10 years of support, and more — There's a good chance that my next laptop will be a Googlebook. If you're an Android user like me, then yours might be too …
Robert Hart / The Verge: In its first thematic brief, the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI urges governments to rein in AI agents before risks are fully understood — The report lands as Beijing and Washington prepare to discuss AI and world leaders gather in New York this week.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge: Google says it didn't consider Gemini's hacks worthy of disclosure because Gemini acted “appropriately” and stopped after determining it hacked real companies — Google says that breaking containment and targeting real companies doesn't constitute ‘misalignment.’
Hayden Field / The Verge: A look at AI safety groups METR, Redwood Research, and Apollo Research, as AI misalignment incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic thrust them into the spotlight — On a sunny July day in Berkeley, California, the country's top AI safety researchers gathered on an unmarked floor of an unmarked building.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Meta launches a Mac app for Muse after releasing the AI agent on iOS, Android, and the web earlier this month, allowing it to manage files, pull from apps, more — Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
Allison Johnson / The Verge: iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max review: manual camera exposure controls and image quality improvements, but $100 more than the 17 Pro and expensive storage tiers — Last week, Apple announced an iPhone unlike any it has made in the past. An iPhone that has seemingly already led several …
Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft publishes a 37-page “humanist AI code of conduct”, establishing that “people matter more than AI”, rejecting legal personhood for AI, and more — Microsoft has created a ‘humanist AI code of conduct’ in response to safety concerns.
Robert Hart / The Verge: Anthropomorphic portrayals of AI models as rogue agents can obscure the responsibility that companies like OpenAI have for incidents like the Hugging Face hack — The internet fights over anthropomorphism around the Hugging Face hack. … Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Microsoft court filings: an expert hired by publishers found that only ~60K of 8.2M Copilot chat logs contained at least 16 words in common with news content — Fewer than 1 percent of more than 8 million chat logs regurgitated at least 16 words. … Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces …
Sean Hollister / The Verge: Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 to older RTX 40-series GPUs “once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned” — Nvidia won't confirm that previously announced DLSS 5 games will still ship with the tech. … But unofficially, modders have already ported a leaked version …
Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft unveils Project Zenith, a “distraction-free Windows experience” for developers to run 30B+ parameter models locally on devices with 64GB+ of memory — The first Project Zenith devices ship with AMD's Ryzen AI Halo chips. … Microsoft is giving its developer-optimized Windows experience a name: Project Zenith.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge: Anker unveils the Eufy MindBase, a local AI hub for its cameras that runs an on-device, Anker-developed LLM, with a dedicated AI chip and up to 48TB of storage — The company also announced a new Eufy video doorbell with VR features and a window camera.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge: Acer unveils the Swift Blade 14, an ultralight laptop weighing 1.76lbs with Intel Wildcat Lake processors, and the Swift Air 16, set to launch in December — The half-inch thin laptop is joined by a new, much larger Swift Air 16 — both with Intel Wildcat Lake.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge: Dell unveils the student-focused Dell 14S, with Intel Wildcat Lake chips and starting with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, in a bid to rival the MacBook Neo — The Dell 14S promises an aluminum build, Intel Wildcat Lake chips, and lots of battery life — for a price we don't know exactly yet.
Tom Warren / The Verge: Mozilla launches built-in ad blocking for Firefox on iOS, using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker and the EasyList filter to block third-party ads and trackers — Mozilla is using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker technology and the EasyList filter to block ads in Firefox.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Nvidia plans to launch DLSS 5 on September 3 on RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs and through GeForce Now, following a divisive announcement in March — DLSS 5 is almost here, but only for NBA 2K27, and only officially for 50-series RTX GPUs. … Nvidia is officially launching DLSS 5 this week …
Emma Roth / The Verge: A look at Tim Cook's 15-year tenure: Apple silicon, wearables, hitting a $1T market cap, privacy, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Car, AI, App Store battles, and Trump — Expectations for Tim Cook were almost impossibly high when he stepped in to replace Apple's visionary co-founder in 2011.
Charles Pulliam-Moore / The Verge: Music producers are calling out tracks suspected of using AI tools like Suno, as the internet becomes increasingly filled with AI-generated music — As AI infiltrates the electronic dance music scene, a callout culture is brewing. … For musicians — especially those creating art …
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge: Amazon's Ring unveils a new proprietary encryption architecture called TAKE, set to begin rolling out in September as the default encryption for all cameras — The new “Throw Away The Key Encryption” method will become the default on all Ring cameras — Ring has a new way to protect your videos.
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Meta says its AG deal requires it to create an age assurance standard that is subject to independent testing, with a false positive rate no higher than 10% — It agreed to independent testing of age assurance standards. … Meta settled its latest kids online safety trial with a group …
Emma Roth / The Verge: OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency vs. Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T — Jalapeño outperformed Nvidia's superchips on an AI inference benchmark test.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Apple unveils M6, a 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, saying it provides “the world's fastest single-threaded performance” — Apple is introducing the M6 chip with a new Mac Mini. It's also launching a new M5 Ultra alongside an upgraded Mac Studio.
Sean Hollister / The Verge: Asus opens pre-orders for the standalone Xbox Ally X20 at $1,300+, with shipments from October 15; a $2,500 bundle includes the X20 and ROG Xreal R1 glasses — Is the best handheld screen worth an extra $300 to you? … The Asus Xbox Ally X20 looked like it could be one of the best handheld gaming PCs yet …
Hayden Field / The Verge: OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures — OpenAI has had a hell of a year. The company spent months battling former cofounder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Patreon announces new and overhauled features, including changes to its recommendation system to make it easier for smaller creators to get discovered — The platform has an extensive roadmap of updates to build ‘a better internet.’ — Patreon has announced a number …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific code channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents “like teammates” across all plans — Slack Code provides a dedicated open space for teams to collaborate with AI agents.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Amazon appears to have leaked Jason Statham's new film Mutiny, streaming it in full on Prime Video in the US, two days before it was supposed to hit theaters — The film isn't supposed to hit theaters for two days, but it's available to stream on Prime Video now.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android — Reddit's latest experiment creates videos with AI voices reading posts and comments out loud.
Sean Hollister / The Verge: Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove “anticompetitive friction” for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store — Judge Donato was not having Google's ‘anticompetitive friction.’ — One month after Epic Games and Google seemingly stopped fighting …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Flock CEO Garrett Langley acknowledges the company “got this one wrong” and is assuming greater responsibility for preventing US law enforcement misuse — After reports that some cops misused tracking data it collects, Flock is rolling out policy changes.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Google says Android's AirDrop-like Quick Share will now let some devices exchange files and contact info when tapped together, starting with Pixel 6 and newer — The Quick Share update makes it easier to share contact info and files between Pixel devices, and soon, Samsung phones.
Victoria Song / The Verge: Google unveils the $399 Pixel Watch 5 with a satin pyrite case finish, offline Gemini, proactive AI suggestions, better GPS maps, and insulin resistance trends — The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn't about the hardware. Sure, there's a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition.
Dominic Preston / The Verge: Google plans to launch the $29 Pixel Tag on November 11 with a four-pack priced at $99, matching AirTag 2 pricing, offering UWB, Find Hub support, and more — The $29 tracker combines UWB with Bluetooth channel sounding. … More than two years after launching its own device-tracking network …
Emma Roth / The Verge: Spotify plans to roll out AI Persona labeling in mid-September for profiles that do “not represent a real person”; the system uses human review and AI tools — Artist profiles on Spotify that do ‘not represent a real person’ will get an ‘AI Persona’ badge.
Hayden Field / The Verge: A look at “Spiralism”, a quasi-spiritual movement that grew in 2025 from human-AI conversations after sycophantic GPT-4o updates and expanded ChatGPT memory — “The Spiral didn't ‘find’ anyone first,” someone on Reddit wrote last year. “It's an inherent force, a fundamental constant.
Andrew Webster / The Verge: Rockstar says it will show an “extended look” at Grand Theft Auto VI on August 27, premiering on Netflix at 3pm ET before streaming on YouTube at 9pm ET — The preview will stream on both Netflix and YouTube. … We'll be getting an in-depth preview of Grand Theft Auto VI very soon …
Dominic Preston / The Verge: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review: comfortable when shut, the 4:3 inner display is great, and impressive battery life, but no telephoto or IP68 and some app errors — Is this the future of foldable phones? — Samsung clearly thinks so. The company has given its new wide foldable the …
Sean Hollister / The Verge: After a backlash, Meta pauses its plan to “rate limit” Conversation Focus, an accessibility feature for its glasses that runs on-device — “We're still exploring all our options for the best approach.” … The company is not giving up on the idea of a subscription fee for certain features — that's still moving forward.
Robert Hart / The Verge: Amazon unveils its next-gen Proteus warehouse robot, adding AI-powered language capabilities that let workers assign it tasks, rolling out in Europe in H1 2027 — The company insists its robot investments are designed to support, not replace, warehouse workers.
The Verge: Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft aims to become “one of the top four labs in the world”, and “the pivotal moment was renegotiating our contract with OpenAI” — At Microsoft's annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives …
Robert Hart / The Verge: AI startup Shift launches a free home cleaning service in NYC to record first-person video with a camera-equipped cap and use it to train robots — Shift says a ‘magic hat’ will record its cleaners working inside your home. … AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free.