Nvidia reported fiscal second-quarter net income of $59.69 billion, or $2.46 per share, for the May-July period, exceeding Wall Street forecasts. The results were driven by continued strong sales of the company's high-end AI chips, which remain central to the ongoing buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
With 2026 primaries mostly wrapped up, Democrats are eyeing several paths to retake the Senate majority beyond their original four-state plan targeting Alaska, North Carolina, Ohio and Maine. Strategists point to President Trump's approval rating dropping below 40 percent—and even near 30 percent in one poll—amid an unpopular Iran conflict and rising gas and grocery costs. In Alaska, former Rep. Mary Peltola leads incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan by over 5 points, while a same-named candidate, Dan J. Sullivan, also made the general-election ballot, potentially confusing voters.
Okta reported quarterly revenue up 11% to over $800 million and net income more than doubling to $116 million, beating Wall Street estimates and sending shares up 19%. The company said new products, including its Okta for AI Agents tool now available to all customers, drove 30% of total bookings, with dozens of new AI-related deals closed including a multi-million-dollar healthcare contract.
A new analysis pushes back on fears of AI-driven obsolescence, arguing that structural bottlenecks will keep humans central to research and development. It frames AI primarily as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement, predicting that human effort will move away from routine technical execution toward tasks that resist easy verification.
A new industry analysis argues that as AI coding agents rapidly improve and handle longer tasks asynchronously, the traditional sequential product development pipeline—idea, product, design, engineering, QA, production—is being restructured. Implementation, once the dominant time cost in this pipeline, is shrinking, shifting the bottleneck to verification and simulation instead.
Gregg Phillips, an election-fraud conspiracy theorist previously ousted from leading FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, confirmed he is still employed by the Trump administration on administrative leave. He was recently seen visiting the Department of Justice with outgoing pardon attorney Ed Martin, though the nature of his current duties remains unclear.
At Black Hat USA 2026, PortSwigger research director James Kettle unveiled an open source AI-driven tool called HTTP Terminator, designed to test whether AI could invent original hacking techniques rather than just find known bugs. The tool autonomously produced new HTTP desync, or request smuggling, attacks and used them to breach real enterprise sites, including several belonging to financial services firms.
Meta reached a settlement of nearly $18 billion with almost all US states over claims it designed Facebook and Instagram to foster compulsive use among children and hid mental health risks. The deal, still pending court approval, requires Meta to impose a default two-hour daily time limit for teens, a midnight-to-6am usage block, and a school-hours notification mute, while Texas separately secured $1 billion outside the main $16.7 billion pact.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent Catholic bishops a letter arguing there was no valid religious basis for refusing to grant vaccine exemptions in Catholic schools, and threatened to cut state scholarships and vouchers if they didn't comply. The bishops publicly rejected his theological reasoning and legal claims, stating that Catholic teaching supports vaccination and that they don't need to justify church doctrine to the state.
Google has moved its AI-responsibility team out of the DeepMind research division as part of an internal reorganization. Researchers within the team have voiced concerns that the shift could compromise their independence and reduce their ability to identify risks in Google's newest AI models.
Jotform's CEO, a 20-year software veteran, describes how AI tools that generate functional code from plain-language prompts are letting non-programmers build working prototypes quickly. He argues this approach is especially powerful for creating minimum viable products and automating repetitive coding tasks, though it still requires oversight from someone who understands the underlying logic.
Apple's Mac Studio, available with M5 Max or the fused-together M5 Ultra chip, offers up to 80 GPU cores, 512GB of RAM and a 16TB SSD, along with more ports than the Mac mini, including four Thunderbolt 5 connections. The Mac mini starts at $899 and covers most everyday needs, while the Mac Studio starts at $2,499 and targets professionals with intensive workloads.