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Security personnel working at San Francisco offices of major AI firms, represented by SEIU-United Service Workers West, voted this week to authorize a strike. The vote gives union leadership the go-ahead to call a walkout if labor negotiations with contractors fail to produce an acceptable deal.
Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb have both suspended clinical trials of experimental autoimmune therapies after participants died or suffered life-threatening reactions. The companies are now investigating what caused the treatments, once seen as promising, to turn dangerous.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all went down Thursday morning within roughly an hour of each other, though OpenAI and Anthropic did not cite any shared external cause. OpenAI blamed a routing error resolved within about 34 minutes, Anthropic reported elevated errors across several Claude models fixed within roughly three hours, and xAI said its Grok outage stemmed from a failure at its Memphis compute facility that took nearly four hours to resolve.
SpaceXAI apologized after a technical failure at its Memphis compute facility knocked Grok offline for roughly three and a half hours starting around 6:30AM PT Thursday, hitting the service on X as well as its Android and iOS apps. The company also apologized to unnamed 'compute partners,' and around the same time Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT reported their own error spikes, though neither company confirmed a direct link to the Memphis outage.
Nvidia confirmed it will officially extend DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series graphics cards, though the rollout will happen only after performance tuning for RTX 50-series GPUs is complete. The move comes after modders reverse-engineered and ported a leaked version of DLSS 5 to run on older cards, including RTX 30 and RTX 20 series, with mixed results. Nvidia also clarified that gamers will only get a simple on/off toggle for DLSS 5, while granular controls like Structure Intensity and Tone Intensity remain reserved for developers.
Android Authority found new code in a Digital Wellbeing beta build (version 1.47.964183037) showing Google testing a redesigned interface with a Material Expressive look. The changes include a reworked app activity dashboard, multi-app selection for setting shared daily timers, and a restructured Bedtime mode that removes collapsible sections and reorders elements like Bedtime routine and Weekly average.
Studio Sasayuri has adapted Machiko Kyo's wartime manga into an anime film called 'Cocoon—One Summer of Girlhood,' which dramatizes a real historical tragedy from the perspective of girlhood during war. The film is set for a limited theatrical run beginning September 4.
Researchers built 75 synthetic but realistic code repositories across 10 languages, complete with fake company data and real dependency lockfiles, then tasked coding agents like Claude, Codex and Cursor with implementing missing third-party service integrations. Prompts were written from four different user personas—from vague 'vibe-coders' to detail-oriented enterprise engineers—producing 1,163 task variations that were run repeatedly to generate roughly 17,000 total experiment runs.
Market research firm TrendForce projects Apple will raise iPhone 18 prices due to a global RAM shortage, with memory costs for the 256GB Pro model expected to nearly quadruple year-over-year. The report estimates the iPhone 18 Pro Max could start between $1,299 and $1,399, while the foldable iPhone Ultra may launch between $2,099 and $2,299, potentially reaching $3,000.
Market research firm TrendForce forecasts that Apple's next iPhone lineup will carry significantly higher price tags, driven by a global RAM shortage that has pushed memory costs for a 256GB Pro model up nearly 400% year-over-year. The firm expects Apple to absorb some of that cost increase rather than pass it all on, but still predicts the rumored foldable iPhone Ultra could launch between $2,099 and $2,299, potentially reaching $3,000.
Microsoft will begin limiting Xbox Cloud Gaming to monthly hour caps in November: 15 hours for Game Pass Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and 5 for Essential subscribers, after which users must purchase extra playtime. The company says only about 4% of Game Pass subscribers will be affected, and it will also let non-subscribers buy cloud hours to stream eligible owned games.
Adobe announced that Anil Chakravarthy, currently president of its customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations unit, will become the company's next president and CEO effective December 1. He replaces Shantanu Narayen, who is stepping down after leading Adobe for 18 years and will move into the role of executive chair to assist with the leadership transition.