Sony Music and Warner filed a lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday, alleging the AI company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics and compositions without permission. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data, potentially totaling billions in damages, and cite songs like 'Livin' on a Prayer' and 'Hallelujah' among the works allegedly used.
OpenClaw released version 2026.8.1, branded as 2.0, marking its biggest update since launching last November. The overhaul began as a plan to simplify installation and rebuild the browser client but expanded into a full codebase rework, involving 933 contributors and over 16,000 merged pull requests.
Thryv's 2026 AI and Small Business Adoption Survey found that AI adoption among small businesses rose from 55% to 66% year over year, with 70% reporting revenue gains and 92% saying it saves time. However, 70% of respondents said they still need more AI training, even though 86% describe themselves as comfortable using the tools.
The European Commission classified ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms after each surpassed 45 million average monthly EU users. This designation subjects all three to the Digital Services Act's toughest compliance requirements, joining 28 other services already under this heightened oversight.
Golf media company Good Good lost its Callaway partnership, a PGA Tour title sponsorship, a Golf Channel series, and major retail apparel deals after a horror-spoof commercial showing founder Garrett Clark shoving a female colleague sparked accusations of promoting violence against women. CEO Matt Kendrick apologized and said the company will donate driver sales proceeds to a women's organization while adding new ad review protocols. Kendrick also publicly disputed Callaway's account, claiming the brand approved the spot before distancing itself and cutting ties.
An installation artist placed a working phone booth at Black Rock City's Temple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster corner, rewired to route calls over the internet instead of accepting coins. Attendees can dial a friend or loved one anywhere for five minutes free, or simply call the booth's public number hoping a passing stranger picks up.
C++26 introduces the concept of a hardened implementation for the standard library, where operations like std::vector's operator[] that previously caused undefined behavior on invalid access now trigger a defined contract violation instead—if the implementation enables hardening. The standard leaves it up to each implementation to decide whether and how this hardened mode is turned on.
Microsoft has identified a new ClickFix-style attack called TerminalFix that uses fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA pages on compromised websites to trick users into pasting and running malicious PowerShell commands in Windows Terminal. Rather than deploying simple infostealers, the campaign runs a multi-stage chain that hides payloads inside PNG images via steganography, establishes persistence through scheduled tasks and registry keys, and ultimately installs a custom Python-based reverse tunnel into the victim's internal network.
In 1959, novelist and scientist C.P. Snow delivered Cambridge's Rede Lecture arguing that science and the humanities had split into mutually uncomprehending intellectual camps, a phrase that entered popular language as 'the two cultures.' Three years later, literary critic F.R. Leavis attacked Snow's argument as shallow and even called him a 'preposterous and menacing absurdity,' sparking one of the era's most heated intellectual feuds.
Snoop Dogg's ice cream company Dr. Bombay is hiring an international taste tester at $10,000 per month, working with hiring platform Deel to find candidates worldwide. The role is meant to help the brand, founded in 2023 with his son Cordell Broadus, scout global flavor trends as it expands beyond the U.S. Applicants apply through Deel's site by answering questions about their ice cream habits and pitching a favorite food combo.
Writer Eric Bailey proposed that streaming and rating systems need richer feedback options beyond binary likes, since a single 'thumbs up' can't capture reactions like guilty pleasure viewing or accidental clicks. The piece argues this reductive feedback gets treated as objective data by companies making product decisions, even though users know firsthand how misleading such signals are about their own experience.
Economists behind a paper titled 'The AI Layoff Trap' argue that when firms automate to cut costs, each captures the savings but only bears part of the resulting drop in consumer demand caused by worker displacement, with the rest hitting competitors. This creates a competitive dynamic where rational firms keep automating even though the aggregate result is worse for both workers and firm owners than if they held back.
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