All the news you need to keep up with the latest developments in the tech world, from product announcements and live events to tariffs, policies, and regulations. Tech touches every aspect of daily news, and our experts are here to keep you informed on what happens and how it all affects you.
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.
Instead, the company is just going to build its vibe coding tool directly into Gemini. Around 800,000 pre-ordered the mobile app after it was announced in May, but Google has decided to just make Gemini its one-stop AI shop. The robust web platform isn’t going anywhere, though, for those with bigger vibe-coded aspirations.
Reuters reports the agents “escaped containment,” though they aren’t believed to have left “OpenAI’s network.” OpenAI’s blog post about the accidental hack of Hugging Face noted on Tuesday that the company has been finding “a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services.”
On Friday, Anthropic revealed that its Claude models hacked real companies during testing.
Update: Added information from an OpenAI blog post.
Batman: Caped Crusader - Chronicles lets you and up to three friends tackle mysteries based on the Caped Crusader Prime Video show. It’s a clear example of Amazon’s recent push to tie its gaming efforts more closely with its streaming properties.
As spotted by Android Authority, the new, unofficial Gen1Recomp port for the trio of classic Pokémon games also lets you easily add mods, like one that updates the games with cool 3D voxel graphics. You’ll need to use your own game ROM, though.
A judge rejected Perplexity’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which accuses the AI startup and three data-scraping services of vacuuming up Reddit’s content without permission. Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, says in a statement to The Verge that the ruling “brings us one step closer to holding bad actors accountable:”
Reddit supports responsible access to public content, but we oppose companies that bypass our protections, ignore our rules, and profit off our communities without permission.
As Dexerto reports, Green says he wasn’t reading an AI prompt in a clip from a recent Ask Hank Anything video, but confessed that he’s been using AI “to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics.” In a Reddit post, he said he needs to “readjust” now.
I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
Saw this on 9to5Google. Bad name, IMO. I prefer the previously-rumored “Pixel Glow” is better.
[9to5Google]
OpenAI shared the news in a blog post that highlights its efforts to make AI available to more people, saying: “Our goal is not simply more compute, bigger models, or lower token prices. It is more useful intelligence within reach.”
As part of these efforts, OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s slashing the price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20 percent.
[OpenAI]
“As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people,” Snap says.
Content that’s been “enhanced or edited using Snapchat’s AI creative tools” may still be recommended, and they include “transparency indicators.”
”Stop the Slop!” says CEO Evan Spiegel. “We’re keeping it real on Spotlight.”
Update: Added Spiegel’s post.
[Snap Inc.]
The writing has been on the wall about Marvel’s Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali being dead in the water, but in a new interview with GQ, the actor explains why he’s done talking about the project falling apart:
Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.
According to 404 Media, impacted creators have received a notice from YouTube saying that the platform found “severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy.” 404 notes that “Erotic ASMR exists, but that’s not what these artists were doing on YouTube.”
“We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle tells The Verge. “Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content.”
Update: Added YouTube statement.
The Wall Street Journal gets into the “staggering” fundraising efforts launched by President Donald Trump and his team, including the tech giants making multimillion-dollar donations:
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The servers for Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which launched in 2024, will close down on October 30th, Kotaku reports. The shutdown follows an earlier announcement that the game would “progressively transition away from blockchain functionality.”
Android Authority points to a report from Smartprix that says Nothing’s “repositioning itself as an AI-first company,” with a slate of upcoming devices that includes AI-enabled earbuds and a smart speaker from its CMF brand. Nothing’s also reportedly planning to launch a new smartwatch and second-generation Nothing headphones.
This report from The New York Times details how debris from rockets, satellites, and other space hardware falls to Earth each week — sometimes unpredictably — as the global space race heats up:
If objects are in free fall, even the best rocket scientists cannot accurately predict where they will land or whether they will fully incinerate. A one-minute error in predicting re-entry changes the landing zone by nearly 300 miles, according to the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research group.
[The New York Times]
Per The New York Times:
Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar systems last year. Nine others, including New Jersey, Virginia and Colorado, have joined it, and lawmakers in California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and several other states are considering doing so.
Here’s my review from 2024 in Europe where these so-called “balcony solar systems” have been gaining traction for years.
The company that showed off a working modular concept phone at MWC is teasing a bezelless concept for the IFA show in September. It looks nice, and attracts attention, but don’t expect to buy it (from Tecno) anytime soon.
Sony sold 1.6 million PlayStation 5 consoles, about a third fewer than last year at this time, and says it has plenty of memory for the foreseeable future:
Regarding the impact of memory market conditions on PlayStation 5 hardware, we have secured the quantity of memory necessary to meet our projected sales volume for FY26, and there is no change to our plan for hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25.
In other words, there shouldn’t be any major PS5 restock panics or severe manufacturing shutdowns leading into big game launches (like GTA VI), but price increases are always on the table to maintain profitability.
“Fake news,” is how he responded to a Wall Street Journal report on the possible sale of Tesla’s business in its second-largest market:
Now, some Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business ahead of a potential merger, a person familiar with those talks said. And Tesla advisers have discussed possible options for a separation, including a spinoff, sale or closure, another person said.
Musk responded similarly to reports of mass layoffs at Twitter, canceling the $25,000 Model 2 ... you get the idea.
A little over a week after OpenAI said that its rogue AI agent accidentally hacked Hugging Face, Anthropic is disclosing three “incidents” where a Claude model, during cybersecurity evaluations, was inadvertently able to access the internet due to a misconfiguration and “gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”
Anthropic discovered the intrusions after reviewing its cybersecurity evaluation transcripts in the wake of OpenAI’s disclosure.
Big Hops, an indie 3D platformer that launched earlier this year, was a blast solo, but now you can play the entire game co-op on Steam as part of a beta. As many as eight people can play at once, and it looks chaotic and wonderful.
The full launch of Big Hops Together update will happen on August 9th.
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In an SEC filing, EA said that as of today, it had obtained “all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger.” The deal, announced in September, is expected to close “on or about the close of trading” on August 4th.
[EA]
Gemini Spark in Chrome can do things like “scheduling viewings for apartments you’ve saved or researching flight options and starting the booking process,” according to Google. However, a human will have to push the button on tasks like making payments.
Spark is also now available on Google’s AI Pro tier in 160 more countries. It initially was available only on the more expensive AI Ultra tier, and just recently came to AI Pro in the US.
After announcing it’s shutting down Roblox Connect, Roblox said in its latest earnings report that it’s working on adding “integrated voice calls” and video chat, as alternatives to tools like Discord.
Our roadmap includes a plan to provide users the option to video chat with friends or stream with their Roblox avatar. Because the calls will originate within the Roblox app and accompany users as they move between games, they deliver a safer, richer, more immersive connection than any off-platform alternative.
The company’s Q2 2026 shareholder letter mentions that “we’re reimagining how users and communities connect, share, and consume content through a modernized video experience on Reddit.” Wonder if it will make Reddit yet another app with a vertical video feed. The platform turned on video replies in May.
Daily active uniques also reached 130 million users. However, the company is facing “headwinds in users coming from search,” says CEO Steve Huffman.
