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Trump Mobile is promoting its smartphone with terribly edited photos of other brands' products

Since it was announced in June, Trump Mobile has committed to an increasingly-surreal smoke-and-mirrors approach to its promised T1 smartphone. Despite the initial claims that the phone would be made in the United States, it seemed highly unlikely from the start that it was accurate. The "Made in USA" claims were quietly removed from the Trump Mobile website at a later date. AppleInsider spotted the latest bizarre wrinkle to this story, which is that the actual phone still does not exist. The p

Claude wins high praise from a Supreme Court justice - is AI's legal losing streak over?

J Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Kagan praised Claude's analysis of a complex legal issue. Many lawyers have been caught using ChatGPT poorly in case filings. The legal profession is grappling with its use of AI. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Can AI provide legitimately useful assistance to lawyers and judges? One of the nation's most powerful attorneys seems to think so. US associa

Google's AI Mode Is Getting New Agentic Features for Restaurant Reservations and More

Google's AI Mode is getting new agentic capabilities and expanding to 180 new countries and territories around the world, Google announced Thursday. AI Mode allows you to ask questions directly to Google and it'll kick off a series of searches on your behalf. From there, it will surface relevant information to your query without the need to do any of the deep research yourself. It changes the way you search for things online, and it's getting even smarter with this latest rollout. Powered by De

Inside Walmart’s AI security stack: How a startup mentality is hardening enterprise-scale defense

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now VentureBeat recently sat down (virtually) with Jerry R. Geisler III, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Walmart Inc., to gain insights into the cybersecurity challenges the world’s largest retailer faces as AI becomes increasingly autonomous. We talked about securing agentic AI systems, modernizing identity

AirPods turn into AirTag in this clever use case

AirPods aren’t just the best headphones. AirPods can also act like an AirTag, which happened to a North Carolina family traveling internationally when a pickpocketer stole the bag containing their passport and ID. AirPods help track stolen purse in Italy Karis McElroy shared the story on TikTok: Her mother and stepfather were visiting Venice, Italy, when three people crowded around them on the street. Once they made it to their Airbnb, McElroy’s mom discovered her backpack had been unzipped.

Text.ai (YC X25) Is Hiring Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Founding Full-Stack Engineer Ready to build the next generation of AI-native consumer experience? Text.ai is a consumer-first AI native company, revolutionizing how people communicate in group chats. We're pioneering an entirely new category of consumer AI products that millions will use daily. We are building the first AI-native communication platform, where every conversation becomes intelligent, collaborative, and effortless. We're reimagining how humans and AI work together from first pri

Have You Seen This Rare Rainbow Snake? Florida Wants to Know

As their name suggests, rainbow snakes sport striking, iridescent scales that turn a glossy blue in the Sun. But these beautiful creatures haven’t been seen since 2020, so Florida officials are recruiting the public to help confirm they’re alive and well. In a release published August 18, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) announced it was on the lookout for Farancia erytrogramma, whose populations have been threatened by habitat loss and snake fungal disease in recent ye

Microsoft’s new NFL deal could let you blame Copilot AI for terrible playcalls

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The NFL and Microsoft have extended their arrangement that makes Surface tablets a familiar fixture on gameday sidelines, but naturally, now there’s an AI-powered twist on top. While Tom Brady is no longer actively putting those slates in danger of de

A Huge Number of Grok AI Chats Just Leaked, and Their Contents Are So Disturbing That We're Sweating Profusely

Brace yourselves, because hundreds of thousands of user conversations with Elon Musk's notoriously foul-mouthed Grok chatbot have hit the internet, Forbes reports — and some of them get into absolutely unholy territory. The more than 370,000 chats were made public after users clicked a "share" button that created a link to their chatbot convos, unaware that by doing so, it was allowing them to be indexed by search engines like Google and Bing. Some of them were clearly never meant to see the l

Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist

Renowned publications including Wired and Business Insider have been caught publishing what appears to be AI slop. As Press Gazette reports in a fascinating investigation, numerous outlets have removed features published under the byline of "Margaux Blanchard" after suspicion emerged that the stories were fictionalized and AI-generated. After Press Gazette reached out to the non-profit Index on Censorship over an article by the same author, for instance, the publisher concluded that the piece

MIT report misunderstood: Shadow AI economy booms while headlines cry failure

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The most widely cited statistic from a new MIT report has been deeply misunderstood. While headlines trumpet that “95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing,” the report actually reveals something far more remarkable: the fastest and most successful enterprise technology adoption in corporate history is happening right under exec

Forget GPT-5: OpenAI's GPT-6 might launch sooner than you think

Tharon Green/ZDNET/Open AI/Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways As the paint on GPT-5 dries, OpenAI is already working on GPT-6. The model's biggest differentiator seems to be deeper personalization. OpenAI is keeping an increasingly brisk pace on the path toward AGI. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. At the beginning of August, OpenAI launched its much-anticipated GPT-5 family of models. While the launch was somewhat

Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Thursday that it is reviewing more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation, marking a growing crackdown on foreigners who are even permitted to be in the United States. In a written answer to a question from The Associated Press, the State Department said all U.S. visa holders, which can include tourists from many countries, are subject to “continuous vetting,” with an eye toward any indic

A Decoder Ring for AI Job Titles

A Cheat Sheet for Job Titles in the AI Ecosystem Even when you live and breathe AI, the job titles can feel like a moving target. I can only imagine how mystifying they must be to everyone else. Because the field is actively evolving, the language we use keeps changing. Brand new titles appear overnight or, worse, one term means three different things at three different companies. This is my best attempt at a “Cheat Sheet for AI Titles.” I’ll try to keep it updated as the jargon shifts, settl

How Much Energy Do Your AI Prompts Consume? Google Just Shared Its Gemini Numbers

The explosion of AI tools worldwide is increasing exponentially, but the companies that make these tools often don't express their environmental impact in detail. Google has just released a technical paper detailing measurements for energy, emissions and water use of its Gemini AI prompts. The impact of a single prompt is, it says, minuscule. According to its methodology for measuring AI's impact, a single prompt's energy consumption is about the equivalent of watching TV for less than 9 second

Meta Freezes AI Hiring as Fear Spreads

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is freezing all hiring in its artificial intelligence division. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company characterized the hiring freeze as "basic organizational planning," coinciding with a broader restructuring of its AI division's leadership. It's a notable admission that comes as Zuckerberg has been desperately offering key talent mind-boggling financial offers, reportedly reaching $1 billion — with seriously mixed results — that highlight its frantic attempts

New AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 firmware now available in public beta

If you’re running the AirPods firmware public beta, Apple has a new update rolling out now for AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4. Here’s what you should know. Apple’s big iOS 26-led software launches are coming very soon, including an update for AirPods users. The majority of new features are exclusive to AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4—models with an H2 chip. But if you own one of those models, Apple just shipped new public beta firmware as a way to preview the new features that are coming. The new A

Google is selling a version of Gemini for government agencies

Google has announced plans to sell a custom version of its Gemini AI models for government agencies. "Gemini for Government" includes access to existing tools like NotebookLM, and "Google-quality enterprise search, video and image generation capabilities." The AI platform is in direct competition with similar offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. A big focus of Google's pitch for Gemini for Government is the idea of automating administrative tasks with AI agents. The company touts pre-built

Building AI products in the probabilistic era

I was recently trying to convince a friend of mine that ChatGPT hasn't memorized every possible medical record, and that when she was passing her blood work results the model was doing pattern matching in ways that even OpenAI couldn't really foresee. She couldn't believe me, and I totally understand why. It's hard to accept that we invented a technology that we don't fully comprehend, and that exhibits behaviors that we didn't explicitly expect. Dismissal is a common reaction when witnessing A

Man Experiences Joy For the First Time in Decades After Brain Stimulation Treatment

A man who lived with severe, treatment-resistant depression for over 30 years is now in remission, thanks to a new brain stimulation method that targets selective areas of his brain. The man reported experiencing joy for the first time in decades after the treatment. “He was crying and saying, ‘I’m not sad, I’m just happy. I don’t know what to do with these emotions’,” the study’s first author, Ziad Nahas, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Minnesota, told Gizmodo. Nahas and a t

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s rBio uses virtual cells to train AI, bypassing lab work

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced Thursday the launch of rBio, the first artificial intelligence model trained to reason about cellular biology using virtual simulations rather than requiring expensive laboratory experiments — a breakthrough that could dramatically accelerate biomedical research and drug discovery. The reasoning mod

Google's AI Mode can now find restaurant reservations for you - how it works

SvetaZi/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Google's AI Mode can now suggest restaurant reservations. Users can also now receive personalized dining recommendations. Google is aiming to build a more dynamic and personalized web. AI Mode can now find restaurant reservations, Google announced in a blog post Thursday. Users can now request reservations in local restaurants according to constraints like party size and dietary restrictions, and the system will automat

Building AI Products in the Probabilistic Era

I was recently trying to convince a friend of mine that ChatGPT hasn't memorized every possible medical record, and that when she was passing her blood work results the model was doing pattern matching in ways that even OpenAI couldn't really foresee. She couldn't believe me, and I totally understand why. It's hard to accept that we invented a technology that we don't fully comprehend, and that exhibits behaviors that we didn't explicitly expect. Dismissal is a common reaction when witnessing A

My other email client is a daemon

I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely loose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. Thankfully The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything and there’s a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon! If compiled with -DMAIL and OPTIONS=mail is set in your runtime configuration (the default on Linux), NetHack will periodically check a user specified mbox file ( MAIL ) for new mail, and upon receivin

Honor's Magic V5 Boasts On-Device Live AI Call Translation for Guaranteed Privacy

"Hola! ¿Hablas inglés?" I asked the woman who answered the phone in the Barcelona restaurant. I was calling in a futile attempt to make a reservation for the CNET team dinner during Mobile World Congress this year. Unfortunately, I don't know Spanish (I learned French and German at school). And as it turned out, she didn't speak English either. "No!" she said, and brusquely hung up. What I needed in that moment was the kind of AI call translation feature that's becoming increasingly prevalent

Neolithic people took gruesome trophies from invading tribes

A local Neolithic community in northeastern France may have clashed with foreign invaders, cutting off limbs as war trophies and otherwise brutalizing their prisoners of war, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The findings challenge conventional interpretations of prehistoric violence as bring indiscriminate or committed for pragmatic reasons. Neolithic Europe was no stranger to collective violence of many forms, such as the odd execution and massacres of small

Hackers who exposed North Korean government hacker explain why they did it

Earlier this year, two hackers broke into a computer and soon realized the significance of what this machine was. As it turned out, they had landed on the computer of a hacker who allegedly works for the North Korean government. The two hackers decided to keep digging and found evidence that they say linked the hacker to cyberespionage operations carried out by North Korea, exploits and hacking tools, and infrastructure used in those operations. Saber, one of the hackers involved, told TechCru