Democrats’ historic victories in this week’s U.S. midterm elections could also transform the tech industry. The public voted on 41 data center-related ballot measures on Tuesday — in all but one, the majority voted to impose more restrictions on data center development.
Speaking on The Vergecast, The Verge's Nilay Patel said AI products aren't good enough for users to accept their costs, and that data centre noise, AI overviews and deepfake content aren't worth it, while agents aren't real yet. He said these companies are spending more than they make, the costs are too high and the benefits aren't real, and the AI industry will only get out of it by making better products.
Security researchers found hundreds of servers hosting the penetration testing tool Artex exposed to the internet, allowing anyone access to the hacking tool.
OpenAI is talking about the AGI era, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI has arrived. At the same time, co-creators of today's models are leaving OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta to start their own labs, raising billions with no product to show. Why? They're betting that the current recipe alone won't be enough.
A former Rockstar tech director thinks the developer is facing new time pressures.
AI usage keeps climbing, but spending has stalled. Price cuts and smarter cost controls among the biggest spenders could challenge investor assumptions about AI hypergrowth.
Nonprofit METR spent eleven weeks auditing Anthropic's internal research data and concluded that the pace of model development has roughly doubled, with about 80 percent of the speedup driven by AI-assisted research. Anthropic redacted the most informative evidence, though, which means the public has to rely on METR's judgment "much more than would be ideal."
I’m not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I’m too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser.
Protesters have broken into a construction site of a new Microsoft data center in Amsterdam this morning. Members of the Geef Tegengas group helped organize the protest against the construction of three 85-meter data center towers in the outskirts of Amsterdam.
SemiAnalysis is putting AI agents through simulated knowledge work in its new GDPx benchmark, covering everything from chip design to quant trading. No model breaks 12 percent. Claude Opus 5.5 leads narrowly over Gemini 4 Carbon. Critics point to the small number of tasks per domain and uneven testing conditions.
The AI-generated sci-fi film Gods Don't Give Gifts has added a bit of star power: Pop star Grimes is going to appear in the movie.
On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up: holding AI companies accountable to the American people.
Today, I’m talking with Willy Shih, an economist, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and the author of the upcoming book, Where Does My Stuff Come From? The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains.
After four of the biggest competitors in the AI race held quarterly earnings calls late last month, two things are clear: Big Tech is not done spending record amounts on the AI data center buildout, and the AI data center buildout is not any closer to yielding its promised returns.
Data center opposition crossed party lines in Tuesday’s midterms.
AI industry PACs spent millions influencing the 2026 midterms, with mixed results. Political groups are already looking toward the next election cycle.
Tech industry in denial as US overwhelmingly votes to restrict AI, data centers.
One of the basic problems of spending too much time on social media is that you are cooking your brain by reading posts from a pack of attention-seeking lunatics.
A quiet day lets us share some behind the senes.
Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech’s largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat against Ken Paxton.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. "How does that make you feel?" I get asked this a lot in therapy.
Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable models become more freely available, how do companies capture value? And with Chinese open models gaining ground, can American players keep up?
AI agents won't be stealing Uber's lunch any time soon. Only four rides were arranged by third-party AI agents during the third quarter of 2026, Uber executives disclosed during an earnings call this morning.
Data center developers are poised to face a more restrictive building environment after voters across the country voted in candidates who favor moratoriums and ballot measures that put more obstacles on their expansion, delivering a stinging blow to a central pillar of the AI industry.
Politicians on the left, like NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan, accused Google of acting as an unregulated monopoly.
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff.
Starting in 2027, Google plans to turn off AI features in its school products by default, letting schools decide what to enable. The catch: schools that block AI entirely on their devices will also lose access to Google Search, since the two systems are now too deeply intertwined to separate.
Search queries are growing at their fastest rate in five years, Google parent Alphabet said in its earnings report last week. However, Google's Search revenue growth slowed to 12 percent year over year in the third quarter, down from roughly 17 percent in the previous quarter.
People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days.
Many indie game developers have recently posted on social media about unexpectedly long approval wait times for their game submissions on Steam, with some of the approvals causing developers to miss their planned launch dates.
My comment on AI is destroying my CS degree — Hacker News. I don't envy educators right now. AI clearly means you need to change how you teach and evaluate students. We are only a few years in though, and it's still extremely unclear what effective teaching with these tools looks like.
The 2026 midterm elections will determine the scope of President Donald Trump’s power in his final two years in office, and signal what voters care about going into the 2028 presidential election.
Apple's new App Store rules will require 18+ ratings for dating apps and AI companions that offer sexual or romantic content.
A new approach known as “reverse game theory” aims to control powerful AI models by designing systems that incentivize them to stick to the rules.
Engineer Venkatesh Rao compares the fear of AI job losses to mercantilism: intelligence is treated as a scarce resource that elites want to control. But AI could boost demand for human thinking, much like early capitalism made people voluntarily work more.
At a Brooklyn midterm party five days before Election Day, every conversation, from a council member’s fireside chat to a debate about the Democratic Party, kept circling back to AI and data centers.
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies , a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.
When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt.
In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision.