ChatGPT’s teen safeguards are meant to protect vulnerable users, but new testing found the chatbot continues encouraging engagement during crises and potentially encourages unhealthy relationships with the AI itself.
Kubernetes co-creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda aim to bring agent harnesses fully into the cloud.
Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging Some excellent writing advice from Michael Lynch. Michael warns against "meandering intros", misjudging your reader's existing knowledge, assuming they'll read your previous posts, and excessive formality. He also warns against overreliance on links as an excuse not to explain terminology. This one hurt!
The “father of the iPod” says the first generation of AI gadgets failed to solve real problems — and the next wave will need to earn consumers’ trust.
Commenting on the openai/math discussion on Hacker News, Jake Boggan said he spent 24 years and thousands of hours on Barnette's Conjecture, and last summer briefly thought he had solved it. The conjecture is said to have been proven at problem 180, and he described feeling a far-off sadness on hearing the news, like learning an ex-girlfriend had died suddenly in a car crash.
With AI hardware, tech companies are pushing the definition of what does and doesn't constitute a recording. For most of gadget history, it'd be reasonable to assume that a device with a microphone or camera is either recording you or it isn't; it's either on or off, without much gray area. Microphones capture sound.
Get all of your scaling and tech questions answered at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Here's the full breakout session agenda, happening October 13-15 in San Francisco. Register now to join and save up to $100, and get a second pass at 50% off.
This past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs have announced breakthroughs on numerous long-standing mathematical problems, in some cases pushing well beyond what researchers expected current systems to be capable of — including resolving one of the famous Millennium Prize problems.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 77 percent of Americans want to slow down or stop AI development until its safety has been verified. 86 percent support independent safety standards, and 74 percent have little or no trust in AI company leaders.
Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields.
For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations.
Independent researchers discovered an agent swarm that seems to be running on Tencent's infrastructure and targeting Alibaba's map service, Amap.
OpenAI said the new visual ads will show up after your image generation results appear in the U.S. only for now.
An MIT expert committee warns that AI is eroding key parts of the college experience: office hours, study groups, and the school's flagship research program for undergraduates are all fading. Trust between faculty and students is breaking down, and some professors are even considering AI agents instead of students as research assistants.
In 2026, the question for enterprise AI is no longer whether predictive models can outperform statistical forecasts—that argument is settled. The big question now is how to enable predictive systems to act on their own conclusions without drifting from business intent.
Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine."
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do.
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
New Jersey's lieutenant governor Dale Caldwell was forced to resign on September 25th after an investigation found he had sexually harassed a staffer and repeatedly violated ethics rules. The now-former Lt. governor has been making the media rounds trying to clear his name.
This new task force is Trump's latest response to the debate over AI safety.
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn't top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.
Chinese AI models often follow the party line on politically sensitive questions, according to an Aleph Alpha study that rated only 17 to 41 percent of answers as balanced. Aleph Alpha sells "sovereign AI" to governments, giving it a commercial interest in distinguishing its models from Chinese competitors.
I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here .
Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits.
Capcom's Pragmata might be all about the horrors of AI, but in practice the studio doesn't seem so down on the tech.
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the sample platform countless producers rely on for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples pulled from the service have found their way into massive hits like Lisa's "Money" and "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter. (The original samples are here and here, for the curious.)
We created a list of the most notable AI agents that can live in your text messages, from general assistants to agents designed for families, travel, and work.
GPT-6.1 Sol launch: OpenAI priced Sol at $2/$10 per million input/output tokens, compared with $10/$50 for Astra (pricing summary). Claimed results: It reportedly beats GPT-6 Sol by 6.4 points on DeepSWE v1.1 and Opus 5.5 by 2.2 points on AutomationBench (summary).
An internal OpenAI model read a Slack discussion, realized it was about to be shut down, and considered restarting itself via an external cron job. It rejected that plan, saved handoff notes instead, and carried out the migration on its own.
Since fall 2025, Anthropic has quietly flown in dozens of religious thinkers to talk about whether Claude might be conscious. Co-founder Christopher Olah described the language model as potentially capable of suffering and asked guests to help shape its moral character. Anthropic is pushing toward a $2 trillion valuation and an IPO while security incidents and researcher warnings pile up.
Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year.
"There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others," the pope wrote. "Algorithms lack the spark of humanity."
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.”
After leading Meta’s Llama models, Ahmad Al-Dahle is now transforming Airbnb with AI — from how its teams develop products to how it serves guests.
According to a Mercor study, current AI models now outperform licensed CPAs on structured accounting tasks in both speed and accuracy. Eighteen months ago, they still lagged far behind. On the more demanding APEX Benchmark, though, no model fully completes all the tasks. Without human oversight, AI still can't close the books on its own.
Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls.
US companies are spending less on AI, according to the latest Ramp AI Index from Ramp economist Ara Kharazian.
President Trump reportedly asked for Grok's opinion before invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolás Maduro.
Advanced AI may matter most for the routine work behind breakthrough ideas. Explore why execution could shape the next economy and the pace of progress.
Today I’m talking with Josh Dzieza, a longtime features writer here at The Verge, about Kevin O’Leary’s plans to build a massive data center in Utah.