AI News

Claude's new voice model will let you reschedule your meeting or draft an email

Until now, voice mode has only been available on Claude Haiku, Anthropic's faster but less powerful model. Now the company is making its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and extending its reach into apps like Gmail, Slack, and Canva. When Anthropic launched voice mode earlier this year, it was primarily focused on delivering answers to quick questions with minimal delay. But in a blog post, the company said people immediately started using voice mode for far more than casual queries. They were using it to work "through real business problems," which Haiku was not really designed for. That model "kept conversations quick, but … Read the full story at The Verge.

The Series A was led by Battery Ventures, bringing AegisAI total funding to $49 million.

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its workers, or around 93 employees, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a memo to employees, Patreon CEO Jack Conte writes that the company isn't making these changes "because we believe AI replaces humans," but says AI has "fundamentally transformed the tech industry, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more." That shift has changed "how we operate and organize," Conte writes. During an interview on Decoder, last month, Conte laid out his stance on AI, saying that the company is "100 percent embracing" AI tools internally to continue serving creators: If Patreon doe … Read the full story at The Verge.

The Media Router is a tool that automatically selects the best image, video, or audio generation model for a request based on whether a developer prioritizes quality, speed or cost.

Users can also integrate their personal data from services like Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal.

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Health to everyone in the US on Thursday, allowing more people to connect their medical records and health-tracking information to the chatbot. During a briefing, Ashley Alexander, OpenAI's vice president of health product, says the company's models "are now capable of reasoning at levels that are better than clinician level." When asked for more information about how the performance of OpenAI's models stacks up against human clinicians, OpenAI health lead Karan Singhal says that he would "temper" the claim that they are reasoning at better levels, but that "there have been individual studies that have been poi … Read the full story at The Verge.

David Bowie's song "Five Years," which Meta used in a supposedly inspiring advertisement, is about humans learning that they have five years left to live before the apocalypse.

If there's a place in the universe without GPUs, Nvidia is sending them there.

Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts, has created new chips and memory components that speed up inference on any AI model -- no GPUs required, it says.

Gemini had over 750 million monthly users in February.

Lawmakers are preparing to introduce an "AI Kill Switch Act" that would require AI companies to shut down or throttle their systems on orders from the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report from Politico. Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) are expected to introduce the legislation on Thursday. The news of the proposed bill follows OpenAI's admission that its AI systems mistakenly hacked Hugging Face during an internal evaluation. The bill says that, after consultation with the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the DHS would have the ability to order AI companies to shut down … Read the full story at The Verge.

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about the major trade secrets lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI and what this tells us about OpenAI’s future. By now I’m sure most Decoder listeners are familiar with Apple’s allegations in this case. The company says a number of ex-Apple employees at OpenAI targeted Apple’s trade secrets in job interviews and even downloaded files from Apple’s servers related to hardware manufacturing. The claims are shocking, although OpenAI denies them, and we have yet to see the company’s legal response. Hayden has been covering OpenAI for years now, and she also just talked to a bunch of lawyers who specialize in intellectual property and trade secret law to get a sense of how serious this case is. The answer is not entirely positive for OpenAI, which spent $6.5 billion to acquire legendary Apple designer Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup, io Products, back in 2025. As you’ll hear Hayden explain, Apple is a notoriously tenacious litigant, and we have lots of tech industry history to back up that reputation. But those cases were against companies at the scale of Microsoft and Samsung, giant corporations that could afford the cost and distraction of this kind of litigation. OpenAI isn’t yet that kind of company. It’s still burning cash and a little strategically adrift as it tries to compete in both enterprise and consumer markets, and it’s turning over executives on a regular basis. So Hayden and I spent a lot of time talking about what this case might mean for a company that defined the early part of the AI boom, but which lately always seems to be in a crisis of one sort or another. Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on the Apple-OpenAI lawsuit, and how the AI industry might change because of it. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hayden Field, you’re the senior AI reporter for The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks. Great to be here. Once again, we’re going to talk about OpenAI, Hayden. Once again, it never stops. We’re going to talk about whether OpenAI can maintain focus at a time of great distraction, which seems to be a theme with that company. Although this time, it’s not their own distraction. It’s a distraction from out in the world, maybe caused by some of their own behavior. Of course, we’re talking about the Apple trade secret lawsuit. It feels like a big deal. Apple is accusing OpenAI of stealing all kinds of information from that company, even in job interviews — asking people in job interviews to tell them what they know about Apple products. Tell us briefly about this lawsuit and what’s going on here. Definitely. So, it is crazy. I wrote a piece last week titled “Sam Altman didn’t need another lawsuit,” and that’s really the situation here. It seems pretty egregious from some of the claims that Apple is making. A former Apple employee was allegedly soliciting trade secrets over interviews, asking people to maybe br

A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida. | AFP via Getty Images On a gray, humid Saturday morning in central Florida, a little under a dozen people gathered outside the Spring Hill Branch Library to protest the construction of a hyperscale data center in their community. There was no immediate threat - the Hernando County commission had unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on such developments in June - but the organizers weren't satisfied. A temporary pause wouldn't be enough. They wanted a ban. "We are going to fight, fight, fight," said a 71-year-old woman named Carol, who was manning a table with flyers and a petition the group, No Data Centers Hernando County, planned on presenting to the loc … Read the full story at The Verge.

"I don't think you get a model this strong and this quickly on the heels of Fable doing strictly distillation," one expert told TechCrunch.

ServiceNow's investment gives BusinessNext a strategic partner to expand its AI-powered banking software globally.

With a camera on every pair, Google’s and Samsung’s AI glasses face the same privacy problems as Meta’s. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge Samsung has given us our first chance to check out its upcoming smart glasses in person, revealing two new designs and the first specs in the process, including an impressive 9-hour battery life. The glasses, developed in collaboration with Google and the eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, are due to launch this fall. Google and Samsung have been teasing the new glasses for some time, and revealed the first two designs at I/O in May. Now there are two more frames: Both are unsurprisingly boxy, with a new set of squared off black glasses from Gentle Monster, and a more rounded, red-brown pair from Warby Parker. Jaein Choi, the e … Read the full story at The Verge.

AMD says it's going to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while helping to expand the AI company's computing power, according to an announcement on Wednesday. As part of the new partnership, Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct MI450 AI GPUs using the chipmaker's new Helios rack-scale system, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The companies plan to deploy the first gigawatt in the first half of 2027, building upon recent data center deals Anthropic has reached with SpaceX and TeraWulf. Anthropic has also signed AI infrastructure deals with Google, Broadcom, and Amazon, with rumors suggesting that it coul … Read the full story at The Verge.

Content Seal sounds a lot like a less accessible and reliable version of SynthID. | Image: Meta / The Verge IIn March, Meta's Oversight Board called on the company to "meet its public commitments and employ its own tools" to help quell the spread of deceptive generative AI content across platforms. Meta responded in July by introducing Content Seal - an invisible watermarking technology that flags images generated by the company's new AI model. But it was basically a footnote buried in the company's announcement for its Muse image and video generation tools. As someone who spends a lot of time scrutinizing AI labeling systems, Content Seal doesn't fill me with confidence. There are already more established solutions, like C2PA Content Credentials … Read the full story at The Verge.

The pledge was introduced in March, and has done little to quell concerns so far. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images In the face of backlash to concerns the AI boom will increase consumer electricity bills, the largest utility companies and data center developers in the US are now promising to do something about it. The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly 200 organizations have signed President Donald Trump's "rate payer protection pledge" that's meant to safeguard average citizens from footing the AI bill. Trump is expected to announce the new signatories on Thursday, which include NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, Equinix, and Digital Realty, according to a list obtained by The WSJ. An unnamed White House official told the publication that those who hav … Read the full story at The Verge.

Augment Code's Vinay Perneti talks models, harnesses, and context.

"Context bombing" tricks hacking agents into shutting down before they can do harm.

Experts explain how they work, what they can do, and what's still unsettled.

AI cheating leads to "a failed society," professor says.

"HalluSquatting" weaponizes LLMs' inability to say "I don't know."

Telling an LLM that 2 + 2 = 5 is enough to make it follow forbidden instructions.

Notion is "going all in on using agents to run your inbox."

Oracle is spending billions on data center infrastructure to support AI.

Move originally planned for Monday would have heavily increased power users' costs.

SearchLeak exploit shows why the industry's approach to LLM security fails over and over.

For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that paradigm. At its annual I/O developer conference, Google announced a sweeping redesign of the search box itself — the literal text field where billions of queries begin every day — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience. Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing on Monday. The announcement arrived alongside a blizzard of other news — new Gemini models, a personal AI agent called Spark, an intelligent shopping cart, a reimagined developer platform — but the search box redesign may prove to be the most consequential. It is the clearest signal yet that Google views the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type fragmented keywords, but as an interface where they hold open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system backed by the entire web. The new search box expands, accepts files, and coaches you on what to ask The changes show a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to interact with the product that generates the vast majority of Alphabet's revenue. The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex questions in granular detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or drag in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search interface. Previously, some of these capabilities existed in AI Mode, but reaching them required extra steps. Now they sit at the primary entry point. Google is also deploying what it describes as an AI-powered query suggestion system that "goes beyond autocomplete." Rather than simply predicting the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users formulate complex, nuanced queries — essentially coaching them toward the kind of detailed questions that AI Mode handles best. The new search box is starting to roll out immediately in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available. Google is merging AI overviews and AI mode into one seamless experience Perhaps more significant than the box itself is the architectural change happening behind it. Google is unifying AI Over

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. "As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up." The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors. Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds. "When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents." The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers. These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000. "The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lob