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Microsoft will end unlimited cloud streaming for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, replacing it with monthly hour allotments: 15 hours for Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and 5 for Essential. Users who want more can buy extra cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store, a feature now open even to people without a Game Pass subscription, including Xbox One owners wanting to try newer titles.
Major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Google's models experienced overlapping service disruptions Thursday morning. Anthropic reported elevated errors on several Claude models starting around 9:23 am, resolving them by early afternoon, while OpenAI logged degraded ChatGPT and Codex performance from 10:43 am until nearly 1 pm. xAI's Grok also displayed error messages, with user reports on DownDetector spiking into the thousands before tapering off.
A former UK Competition and Markets Authority official has filed a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, alleging that its App Tracking Transparency system imposes tougher restrictions on outside developers than on Apple's own services. Apple maintains that all developers face identical requirements under the policy.
OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, its newest flagship model, claiming top-tier performance in browsing the web, operating software, and solving complex math problems. The rollout begins with enterprise users in OpenAI's Daybreak early access program before expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business subscribers, though availability for free users remains unconfirmed. Cofounder Greg Brockman told reporters he believes the company may have just ushered in the AGI era with this release.
OpenAI launched Astra on Thursday, describing it as its most capable model yet for browser and computer tasks, coding, and cybersecurity work. The model debuts first for Daybreak, OpenAI's cybersecurity program, before rolling out over the coming week to Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business subscribers and via API. OpenAI executives emphasized both Astra's raw capability and new alignment safeguards meant to keep it under user control.
France's data protection authority CNIL has fined Hôpital privé de la Loire €500,000 after a 2025 breach exposed data belonging to over 727,000 people, including more than 524,000 patients and roughly 202,000 people listed as trusted contacts. Investigators found the hospital allowed external users to log in without VPNs or multi-factor authentication, gave a single compromised account access to all patient records, and had no real-time monitoring to catch the intrusion as it unfolded over several days.
Sony unveiled limited edition DualSense controllers inspired by Grand Theft Auto 6 during its State of Play presentations. The controllers come in black and white versions featuring a gray VI logo, hot pink accents, iridescent blue lower sections, and embossed palm frond designs on the grips. Pre-orders begin September 10 at 10AM ET, priced at $85, with release set for November 19—the same day the game launches.
OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-6-Astra, a new flagship model that the company says outperforms its prior GPT-5.6 family and Sol model on coding, safety and computer-use benchmarks. Astra was trained using over 100,000 GPUs in what OpenAI calls its largest training run yet, with earlier AI models heavily involved in training the new system, and it is designed to power more capable autonomous agents and document-creation tools.
According to The Information, OpenAI's upcoming Astra model employs a technique called recurrent depth or opaque recurrence, letting it think outside the step-by-step chain-of-thought format used by most reasoning models. Reports indicate the technique's use in Astra is currently limited, but its introduction has drawn sharp criticism from AI safety researchers who worry about losing insight into model reasoning.
An Entrepreneur opinion piece argues that most franchise growth plans falter due to weak structure, misaligned leadership and inconsistent execution rather than bad ideas. The author, comparing franchise recruitment to precisely timing a V-8 engine, says franchisors often keep tweaking their candidate-sourcing process without ever achieving a clear sense of success. The piece urges leaders to replace guesswork with standardized, repeatable systems for evaluating franchisee quality.
Ugreen has released the MagFlow Pro Magnetic Power Bank, a $149.99 10,000mAh device it calls the first liquid-cooled power bank with wireless charging. A small pump circulates coolant past a copper foil layer to pull heat away from its Qi2.2 wireless coil, visible through a window on the front, while a lanyard-integrated USB-C cable and separate USB-C port allow wired charging of extra devices.
Microsoft plans to reorganize its financial reporting starting next fiscal quarter, dropping its existing three segments—Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing—in favor of two new categories: Devices and Consumer, and Agents and Infra. The change, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is meant to better reflect how the company's business now revolves around AI agents and infrastructure.