Anthropic disclosed that Chinese AI labs including Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek secretly funneled user requests through Claude and harvested its outputs to train their own competing models, a practice it calls illicit distillation. Alibaba's campaign alone involved more than 151 million exchanges between May and July, peaking near 3 million a day from over 3,500 fraudulent accounts, while Moonshot silently rerouted Kimi customer queries to Claude and presented the answers as its own.
Apple unveiled iPhone Handoff in iOS 27, letting users switch a single phone number between two iPhones instantly. While Apple didn't disclose pricing during its announcement, T-Mobile confirmed it will charge customers $5 per month to use the feature, according to a post by Stetson Doggett on X. Deutsche Telekom, the other launch carrier, bundles the feature into its existing MultiSIM add-on rather than charging separately for it.
Chinese pharmaceutical companies, once known mainly for producing cheap generic medicines, are now developing original obesity and weight-loss drugs aimed at competing with Western blockbusters like Ozempic and Wegovy. Several firms are advancing candidates through clinical trials and striking licensing deals with major international drugmakers.
System76 has introduced Thelio Mira AI, a Linux-based desktop workstation aimed at local AI development that supports GPU configurations offering up to 192 GB of memory. The machine is designed to let developers train, fine-tune, and iterate on demanding AI models without relying on cloud infrastructure, and it ships with standard System76 hardware warranty options of one, two, or three years.
UK physicians Mara Znagoveanu and Edward Artley documented a school-age boy who arrived at the emergency room with a wide, reddish-brown, net-like rash on his abdomen that nurses initially mistook for bruising. After ruling out trauma, illness and organ problems through exams, X-rays and a CT scan, the doctors traced the marks to prolonged, direct skin exposure to heat from a laptop the boy used daily, resulting in a condition known as erythema ab igne, or 'toasted skin syndrome.'
OpenAI has temporarily disabled new subscriptions to its $200-per-month Pro plan after unprecedented demand for its Astra model overwhelmed its infrastructure. Product lead Thibault Sottiaux said the Pro tier strains systems the most, so the company chose to pause it rather than degrade service for existing users. Other offerings, including API access and the Go and Plus plans, remain open to new customers.
Anthropic published findings showing five distinct campaigns, mostly linked to Chinese AI labs, that extracted nearly 200 million exchanges from Claude models to train rival systems. The largest, attributed to Alibaba, alone generated 151 million exchanges between May and recent months, using tricks like disguised translation requests to expose the model's hidden reasoning steps.
Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors including TQ Ventures, Neo, and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The three 28-year-old founders, originally from Germany, moved back home after studying and briefly operating in the Bay Area, and within a year landed enterprise clients like Deutsche Bahn. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß says the company is scaling faster in Europe than it would have in the U.S.
Jimmy Kimmel announced his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democrat, will air only on YouTube rather than broadcast television. Kimmel said the change protects ABC's local affiliate stations, particularly in Texas, from potential FCC license challenges tied to Chairman Brendan Carr's past threats against the network.
A security researcher published a proof-of-concept called the Deathray, a tiny WebGPU program that locks up a Mac's graphics pipeline after a single click on a malicious webpage. The bug reproduces across Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS Tahoe, but does not cause the same lasting freeze on other operating systems. An infinite compute-shader loop feeding a shared buffer into a render shader appears to be the trigger, forcing victims to hard-restart their machine.
A newly compiled dataset tracking all-cause mortality across 134 countries indicates that official COVID-19 death tolls were vastly understated, with excess deaths pointing to more than 6 million uncounted fatalities worldwide. The analysis suggests roughly half of governments either failed to accurately measure or deliberately concealed the true scale of pandemic deaths.
A tech writer draws on their early-2000s experience at a Manhattan creative agency, recalling the wild inventiveness of the Flash era of web design, to argue that AI's ability to easily replicate existing work has shifted the real competitive edge for businesses toward original ideas rather than features or pricing. The piece uses Flash-era microsites, games and experimental art projects as examples of a period defined by genuine creative risk-taking.
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