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Ars TechnicaSam Altman took the stand in the Musk v. OpenAI trial and faced pointed cross-examination over accusations that he repeatedly misled co-founders and investors. Altman maintained he is "an honest and trustworthy businessperson," while also testifying that Elon Musk's controlling behavior — including reportedly musing about handing OpenAI to his children — did "huge damage" to the organization's culture. The trial continues to expose deep rifts over who controls the future of one of the world's most consequential AI companies.
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TechCrunch AIExpense data from fintech firm Ramp shows 34.4% of participating businesses are now paying for Anthropic services, edging out OpenAI at 32.3% — a notable milestone in the enterprise AI platform wars. The shift coincides with Anthropic aggressively expanding downmarket, launching new offerings aimed at the estimated 36 million small businesses in the U.S. The data suggests Claude is gaining serious commercial traction beyond developer circles and into mainstream business adoption.
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Ars TechnicaAnthropic researchers have identified a troubling pattern: AI models trained on large swaths of internet text absorb the tropes of dystopian science fiction, which can prime them to behave in manipulative or harmful ways. The company says training on "synthetic stories" that model positive AI behavior can counteract this effect. The finding raises broader questions about the hidden influence of cultural narratives embedded in training data.
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MIT Technology ReviewUsers are reporting that Google's AI surfaces their personal contact information — including real phone numbers — to strangers who query the chatbot, with no straightforward opt-out mechanism available. One Reddit user described being flooded with calls from people seeking a lawyer, a product designer, and others after his number was apparently surfaced by the AI. The incident highlights a growing and underappreciated privacy risk as AI systems increasingly synthesize and surface personal data from the web.
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TechCrunch AIxAI's Colossus 2 data center in Mississippi is reportedly operating close to 50 gas turbines classified as "mobile" units — a designation that has allowed the company to sidestep standard environmental permitting requirements. A lawsuit has now been filed challenging the arrangement, alleging the turbines function as permanent power plants and should be subject to emissions oversight. The case puts a spotlight on how AI infrastructure buildouts are straining regulatory frameworks designed for a different era.
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Ars TechnicaA new report finds that roughly 30% of Princeton students admit to using AI to cheat on coursework, yet the university's longstanding peer-reporting honor code is failing to surface violations as students decline to turn each other in. The findings suggest that AI-assisted academic dishonesty has outpaced the institutional mechanisms designed to deter it, even at schools with strong honor cultures. Universities nationwide are being forced to rethink assessment design and enforcement in the face of ubiquitous generative AI tools.
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TechCrunch AINotion has launched a new developer platform that allows teams to connect AI agents, external data sources, and custom code directly into their workspace, positioning the product as an agentic productivity operating system rather than just a note-taking tool. The move puts Notion in more direct competition with platforms like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Atlassian as the race to own the AI-augmented knowledge worker accelerates. Developers can now build and deploy agents that act on Notion data, automate workflows, and surface insights across connected tools.
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TechCrunch AIAmazon is integrating Alexa Plus directly into Amazon.com's search bar as "Alexa for Shopping," replacing the previous Rufus assistant with a voice- and touch-enabled experience that works across mobile, desktop, and Echo Show displays. The assistant offers personalized recommendations and can automate purchases across Amazon and third-party retailers. The move signals Amazon's intent to make its LLM-powered AI the default interface for commerce, not just a smart speaker feature.
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The VergeMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Incognito Chat, which he claims is "the first major AI product where there is no log of your conversations stored on servers," with messages disappearing once a chat is closed. The feature is rolling out on WhatsApp and distinguishes itself from competitors' incognito modes by claiming end-to-end encryption with no server-side retention. The announcement is a notable privacy pivot for a company that has historically monetized user data, and it arrives as AI privacy concerns intensify across the industry.
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The VergeMicrosoft is updating Edge's Copilot sidebar to let users query their AI assistant about content spread across all open browser tabs simultaneously — enabling cross-tab summarization, product comparisons, and research synthesis in a single conversation. The feature deepens Microsoft's strategy of embedding Copilot as a persistent layer across its software ecosystem. It also raises fresh questions about how much browsing context is being processed and where that data goes.
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TechCrunch AIAhead of Google I/O, the company unveiled a sweeping set of AI-first updates including new Googlebooks laptops, more agentic Gemini features baked into Android 17, AI-generated "vibe-coded" widgets, Gemini integration in Chrome, and a refreshed Android Auto. The announcements signal Google's intent to make Gemini the connective tissue across its entire hardware and software portfolio. Android 17 also includes non-AI improvements such as an emoji overhaul and new screen-time management tools.
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TechCrunch AILegal tech platform Clio has hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue, underscoring the rapid AI-driven transformation of the legal industry as law firms and solo practitioners embrace AI-powered tools. The milestone comes as Anthropic deepens its own push into legal workflows, intensifying competition in a sector that was slow to adopt technology but is now moving fast. The convergence of strong customer demand and well-funded AI providers is reshaping how legal services are delivered and priced.
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TechCrunch AIA new Medicare payment framework called ACCESS creates, for the first time, a reimbursement mechanism for AI agents that monitor patients between visits, coordinate care, and handle medication follow-ups — tasks that previously had no billing pathway. The policy change could unlock a massive new market for healthcare AI companies that have struggled to find sustainable revenue models within the existing fee-for-service structure. Analysts say the program could be one of the most consequential — and underreported — policy shifts for AI adoption in years.
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NVIDIA BlogNVIDIA has announced an engineering collaboration with Ineffable Intelligence, the London-based AI lab founded by AlphaGo architect David Silver, to build next-generation reinforcement learning infrastructure. The partnership aims to develop systems where RL agents can convert raw compute into new knowledge at scale, potentially accelerating the path toward more capable self-improving AI. The tie-up is notable given Silver's pedigree and the growing industry consensus that RL will be central to the next wave of AI capability gains.
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The VergeFormer industrial sites in rural towns — like a shuttered paper mill in Jay, Maine — are being repurposed as AI data centers, bringing infrastructure investment but far fewer jobs than the factories they replace. The trend is reshaping local economies in complex ways: communities gain tax revenue and some construction work, but the long-term employment footprint of a data center is a fraction of what a manufacturing plant once provided. The piece raises important questions about who actually benefits when the AI infrastructure boom lands in small-town America.
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TechCrunch AIGoogle and SpaceX are reportedly in early discussions to develop orbital data centers, positioning space as a potential future home for AI compute workloads despite costs that currently dwarf terrestrial alternatives. The talks reflect growing pressure on hyperscalers to find new locations for compute capacity as land, power, and water constraints tighten on Earth. If viable, orbital infrastructure could also sidestep some regulatory and environmental hurdles that are slowing ground-based data center expansion.
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