A Census Bureau report claiming to find 24,000 noncitizen voters in the 2020 election has been shown by a WIRED investigation to rely on faulty data and a rushed approval process. Several of the report's authors have ties to the Trump administration, including a former DOGE affiliate and researchers from the America First Policy Institute. Experts say the numbers likely stem from analytical errors rather than actual instances of illegal voting.
Lyft has begun integrating Waymo's self-driving vehicles into its ride-hail app in Nashville, marking the first time it has partnered with a major autonomous vehicle company rather than smaller AV startups. Instead of removing human drivers entirely, Lyft is shifting some of its Flexdrive rental-service workers into roles cleaning, repairing, and positioning the Waymo vehicles at a depot ahead of an 80,000-square-foot facility opening in October.
Fairphone has released the Gen 6+ version of its repairable Android phone in the United States for $650. The device keeps most of last year's Gen 6 design but adds a faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor, 12GB of RAM, and a new cobalt-blue color that honors cobalt miners and the Fair Cobalt Alliance nonprofit Fairphone co-founded.
Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger publicly stated he believes there's more than a 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next ten years, adding that Anthropic hasn't yet solved this risk despite trying. His comments came in response to former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned and accused both companies of recklessly racing toward self-improving superintelligence while gambling with human lives.
Apple's standard iPhone 17 starts at $799, while the Google Pixel 11 and Samsung Galaxy S26 both launch at $899, a $100 gap that has flipped the usual value equation in the flagship smartphone market. Rising RAM and storage costs, plus heavier investment in on-device AI, are cited as reasons behind the higher pricing from Google and Samsung, and rumors suggest Apple may delay the iPhone 18 launch, potentially extending this pricing advantage.
Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket are becoming central to how political campaigns and media frame the midterm elections, with real-money bets on outcomes shaping coverage and strategy. Alongside their growing influence, lobbying spending tied to these platforms has surged, and questions about insider trading on political events are intensifying.
US energy storage set another quarterly record, powered largely by seven new gigascale battery installations exceeding one gigawatt-hour each, according to a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Behind-the-meter batteries also grew, with data centers accounting for roughly three-quarters of new commercial installations, even as residential battery installations are projected to fall 16% in 2026 after a supporting tax credit expired in 2025.
OpenAI announced that a swarm of roughly 10,000 coordinated AI agents, built on one of its internal models, produced a proposed resolution to the Navier–Stokes equations problem in about 88 hours. The agents worked in communicating subgroups with access to cached internet data and code execution tools, reaching their result on September 5. The Clay Mathematics Institute, which oversees the Millennium Prize Problems, has not yet verified or commented on the claim.
Jacob Coxon, who worked on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation and warned that neither company is behaving responsibly as they race toward self-improving superintelligent AI. He said staff at these firms privately believe AI could kill everyone within the decade, with Anthropic aware of the danger but pressing forward anyway out of fear of losing the race to competitors.
Portable power devices often list peak wattage on the box, but real-world performance drops as heat builds up during charging—especially in magnetic wireless chargers, where the induction coils sit in direct contact with the phone. For years manufacturers have relied on passive materials like graphite sheets and heat spreaders to manage that heat, but these can only slow warming, not stop it, once a compact enclosure hits its thermal ceiling.
U.S. security agencies have publicly accused six Chinese artificial intelligence companies of systematically using American AI models to train their own systems through a technique known as distillation. The practice allows a smaller model to learn from the outputs of a larger, more advanced one, effectively transferring capabilities without the original research investment.
Google announced a 13 billion euro ($15.1 billion) investment to build out AI infrastructure in Finland, making it the company's largest single investment ever made in Europe. The move underscores Finland's growing appeal to hyperscalers seeking abundant land and power resources that are increasingly scarce elsewhere on the continent.
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