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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.
Google has introduced WeatherNext 3, its newest AI-driven weather forecasting model, which will feed into Search, Gemini and Maps. Unlike its predecessor, which updated every six hours at a 25km resolution, the new model can refresh hourly and pinpoint conditions down to 5km by incorporating live satellite data instead of older simulation outputs.
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.
Long-range forecasters say early data point to a Super El Niño forming ahead of winter 2026/2027, which is expected to produce a pronounced split-flow jet stream pattern across North America and Europe. The outlook combines ocean temperature trends, historical Super El Niño analogs, and early signs of a weakening polar vortex to project month-by-month temperature and snowfall trends across the US, Canada and Europe.
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.
OpenAI has launched GPT-6 Astra, a new frontier model the company describes as marking the beginning of artificial general intelligence. Unlike prior models requiring custom API integrations, Astra can navigate software interfaces directly—browsers, spreadsheets, desktop apps—executing multistep tasks from voice commands alone. The rollout starts Thursday for enterprise customers via OpenAI's Daybreak access program, with wider availability to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business tiers to follow.
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.