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.
Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter results that topped Wall Street forecasts, with adjusted earnings of $1.92 per share and revenue of $19.35 billion, both above LSEG estimates. Revenue climbed nearly 30% year over year, driven largely by rapid growth in cloud infrastructure as Oracle pushes deeper into AI-related data center buildouts. The company raised its long-term outlook, now projecting $8.10 in adjusted earnings per share on at least $90 billion in revenue for fiscal 2027.
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.
Microsoft says threat groups Storm-3032 and Storm-3121 have been calling or texting employees on personal devices since May, posing as internal IT helpdesks to steal credentials and bypass corporate authentication protections. The attackers then abuse the Microsoft Graph API to exfiltrate corporate data at scale, and researchers believe they hand off this access to extortion gangs such as ShinyHunters. No specific breaches have yet been tied directly to these campaigns.
WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast examines a viral resignation from an Anthropic researcher who argued AI could plausibly cause human extinction within ten years. The episode also covers Apple's newly unveiled $2,000 foldable iPhone Duo, privacy concerns around 'always listening' Apple Watch features, and a WIRED investigation into flawed Census Bureau data cited by the Trump administration.
Apple unveiled the AirPods 5 lineup alongside its new iPhones, splitting it into a $129 standard model and a $149 version with a wireless charging case, swipe-based volume gestures, and Live Translation. Both versions now include active noise cancellation and IP57 water resistance, features previously reserved for pricier AirPods.
The EU's Copernicus climate agency reported that August tied with July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured globally, following a summer that also produced the second-hottest June and July on record. NOAA separately confirmed this was the hottest US summer, surpassing the Dust Bowl era, while global average temperatures ran 1.65°C above preindustrial levels.
Mutant has issued a vinyl edition of David Fleming's Emmy-winning score for the show 'Widow's Bay,' packaging the music with detailed extras for collectors. The release aims to capture both the playful and unsettling tone that defines the series.
TrendForce projects Apple will ship 5 million units of its newly announced iPhone Duo foldable in 2026, giving it nearly a quarter of the global foldable smartphone market. That would help offset a broader slump in the category, with non-Apple Android foldable shipments expected to fall more than 20% year-over-year even as total foldable shipments edge up slightly to about 20.2 million units.
Franklin "Frank" Kuo, who helped build the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet system in 1971, has died at age 91. ALOHAnet was the first public wireless packet data network and served as a direct influence on Robert Metcalfe's later creation of Ethernet.
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.