Visa has open-sourced the Vulnerability Agentic Harness, an 11-stage AI pipeline that detects security flaws, writes fixes, and adversarially tests its own patches in production code, with autonomous patching enabled by default unless an operator restricts it to detection only. The release comes alongside an expanded Visa Consulting & Analytics advisory practice and follows Visa's earlier work with Anthropic's Claude models under Project Glasswing.
Nvidia's stock climbed in premarket trading Thursday following a quarterly earnings report that topped Wall Street forecasts and full-year guidance that exceeded even optimistic analyst projections. The rally comes alongside swirling speculation that Nvidia may be pursuing an acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face.
Politico reports the Trump administration is considering expanding semiconductor tariffs to cover finished consumer electronics like laptops and gaming consoles, and potentially smartphones and accessories, rather than just standalone chip imports. Companies investing in US-based chip manufacturing could be granted exemptions, but building such facilities typically takes years and billions of dollars, meaning near-term relief is unlikely.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee says that although headline economic indicators look solid, persistent price pressures, tariffs, and Middle East conflict make this one of the riskiest inflation environments he's encountered. He also addressed how new Fed leadership under Kevin Warsh is reshaping internal dynamics, and described himself as a 'grim optimist' on artificial intelligence, noting the technology's results still lag its hype.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research found that water droplets sliding down smooth surfaces such as glass, leaves, and Teflon-coated copper accumulate an electric charge. When these charged droplets reached copper plates coated with Teflon, they burrowed through the coating and pitted the metal beneath, an effect not seen when water simply dripped straight onto the plates without first sliding across another surface. The findings, published in Nature, also help explain why water moves more slowly than expected across seemingly frictionless smooth surfaces.
Agroscope researchers enlisted about 1,000 citizen scientists to bury more than 2,000 pairs of organic cotton underwear and 12,000 tea bags at 1,000 sites across Switzerland. After one and two months, participants dug up the items and returned them so scientists could measure how much material had been eaten away by soil organisms, using decomposition as a proxy for biological activity. Private gardens showed the highest soil activity of any land type tested, while lawns showed the lowest.
Meta shelved a broader round of layoffs tied to its 'Project OT' restructuring effort, which aimed to replace larger teams with AI agents and smaller staff groups. Internal data showed AI-generated code volume jumped 220%, but actual product improvements reaching users grew only 36%, while security incidents rose 40% and time spent fixing them climbed 70%.
Bentley let Ars Technica ride in a camouflaged prototype of the Torcal, its debut battery-electric model, shorter than the Bentayga but similarly spacious inside. The SUV shares underlying engineering with the Porsche Cayenne EV and targets roughly 300 miles of EPA range with 400 kW DC fast-charging, producing over 850 PS and more than 1,000 Nm of torque.
Companies are consuming AI tokens at explosive rates, with Google processing over 3.2 quadrillion tokens monthly—seven times last year's volume—while Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Industry voices are proposing nutrition-label-style disclosures that let employees compare a prompt's computational cost against its actual value before using it.
A new report highlights that executives at several S&P 500 companies, including Walmart, DoorDash, and Target, continue to receive large compensation packages even as many of their employees face financial hardship. The findings point to a widening gap between CEO pay and worker wages at firms often categorized as low-wage employers.
Nation-state hacking groups linked to Russia have shifted their phishing campaigns away from email and toward messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp to target European Union officials. In response, EU governments are reportedly working to move away from these popular consumer messaging platforms for sensitive communications.
Leaked images shared by Weibo user Peter show what appears to be an engineering prototype of the Xiaomi 18 Fold, a book-style folding phone with a camera island resembling the rumored iPhone Ultra design. The device reportedly comes in a dark cherry color, echoing speculation about one of the iPhone 18 Pro's colorways.