FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI
The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete wi … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committe … ⌘ Read more

Meta Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition
Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find “the right balance” for the controversial technology.

The feature, internally … ⌘ Read more

IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US
IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be “across the board,” affecting a wide range of departments. “And yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” said Nickl … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company’s in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption o … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay fo … ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning ‘World is in Peril’
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the “world is in peril” in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team “constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most,” citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.

Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO D … ⌘ Read more

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Ring’s Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted “Search Party,” a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network.

Rin … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Graphics Drivers See New AMD Hardware, Intel Xe SR-IOV + Multi-Device SVM
The massive set of Linux kernel graphics/display driver Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates were sent out and merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. This also includes the growing work around accelerator “accel” drivers for AI NPUs and the like… ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Development Now Experimenting With AI Code Review
Well known open-source Linux graphics driver developer David Airlie of Red Hat, who is the co-maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers and accelerator “accel” drivers, announced experimental work on AI-drive code/patch review for these open-source kernel drivers… ⌘ Read more

Okay, so the funniest thing that has happened at work in the realm of AI so far is this:

So this guy (that holds a certain position of power) wants people to use more AI, meaning people are expected to install a set of AI tools on their laptops. But, of course, he doesn’t want to write proper documentation for this, because that would be silly monkey work, right? So he conjures up some AI prompts that are intended to make the AI agent install all this stuff by itself.

Do you see where this is going? Can you see the punchline?

That’s right! Since none of this AI stuff is deterministic, every setup is different. 🤦‍♀️ Like, 10, 20 systems, all set up a little different and people wonder why this or that doesn’t work as expected.

Okay, it’s not funny.

Well it’s ~2am and I finally defeated the AI player in a game of Frontier Crown 👑 – On that note I’m now going to bed, I’ve made so many improvements to the aesthetics (UX) of the game, the mechanics, and it’s now quite nicely playable 👌 G’night! 😴

T-Mobile Will Live Translate Regular Phone Calls Without an App
T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.

The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn’t require any specific app or device – beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-M … ⌘ Read more

The First Signs of Burnout Are Coming From the People Who Embrace AI the Most
An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it. That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs wi … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more

White House Eyes Data Center Agreements Amid Energy Price Spikes
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lay … ⌘ Read more

Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds
Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial,” an analysis published by AI experts has said. From a report: Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident … ⌘ Read more

Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.

The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost abou … ⌘ Read more

Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don’t Know It Yet
The romance genre – long the publishing industry’s earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases – has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, … ⌘ Read more

Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named ‘Flow’
Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its “Flow” trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.

Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the sam … ⌘ Read more

Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Mond … ⌘ Read more

AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China’s Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US
The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China’s own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in … ⌘ Read more

Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?
It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even … ⌘ Read more

Prankster Launches Super Bowl Party For AI Agents
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI ag … ⌘ Read more

A New Era for Security? Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 Found 500 High-Severity Vulnerabilities
Axios reports:

Anthropic’s latest AI model has found more than 500 previously unknown high-severity security flaws in open-source libraries with little to no prompting, the company shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: The advancement signals an inflection point for how AI tools can help cyber … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Announces ‘AI Controls’ To Block Its Upcoming AI Features
The Mozilla executive in charge of Firefox says that while some people just want AI tools that are genuinely useful, “We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI…”

“Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls.”

Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you’ll f … ⌘ Read more

Apple Plans to Allow Outside Voice-Controlled AI Chatbots in CarPlay
Apple “is preparing to allow voice-controlled AI apps from other companies in CarPlay,” reports Bloomberg, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

Bloomberg calls it “a move that will let users query AI chatbots through its vehicle interface for the first time.”

The company is working to support the apps in CarPlay within the coming … ⌘ Read more

Moltbook, Reddit, and The Great AI-Bot Uprising That Wasn’t
Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook — or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. “They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source,” writes the Associated Press.

But had it been disco … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code is the Inflection Point
About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic’s Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.

SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Cl … ⌘ Read more

New Bill in New York Would Require Disclaimers on AI-Generated News Content
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called Th … ⌘ Read more

Hollywood’s AI Bet Isn’t Paying Off
Hollywood’s recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and Disney’s Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI.

The latest casualty is Mercy, a Jan … ⌘ Read more

AI.com Sells for $70 Million, the Highest Price Ever Disclosed for a Domain Name
Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com – the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal’s broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller … ⌘ Read more

KPMG Pressed Its Auditor To Pass on AI Cost Savings
An anonymous reader shares a report: KPMG, one of the world’s largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threat … ⌘ Read more

Musk Predicts SpaceX Will Launch More AI Compute Per Year Than the Cumulative Total on Earth
Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity su … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said – it plans more carefully, … ⌘ Read more

Debian’s CI Data No Longer Publicly Browseable Due To LLM Scrapers / Bot Traffic
LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian’s continuous integration “CI” data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production
Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the cre … ⌘ Read more

As Software Stocks Slump, Investors Debate AI’s Existential Threat
Investors were assessing on Wednesday whether a selloff in global software stocks this week had gone too far, as they weighed if businesses could survive an existential threat posed by AI. The answer: It’s unclear and will lead to volatility. From a report: After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall nearly … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a ‘Space To Think’
Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind – no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model’s responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements – calling Claude a “space to think” that should remain free of commercial interrupt … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs
Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn.

Pinterest told investors the move would imp … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, … ⌘ Read more

‘Vibe Coding Kills Open Source’
Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding – the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer’s behalf – erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive.

The core problem … ⌘ Read more

Intel Panther Lake Shows Strong Linux CPU Performance & Power Efficiency With Core Ultra X7 358H Benchmarks
For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” performance on Linux, today’s the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux soft … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25 Trillion All-Stock Deal
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of what would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX pegged its own valuation at $1 trillion – a markup from the $800 billion it commanded in a December secondary stock sale – and priced xAI at $250 billion based on a recent $20 … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Ready With New Settings For AI Controls
With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla’s new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a “modern AI browser”, the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser’s settings… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Weighs Retreat From Windows 11 AI Push, Reviews Copilot Integrations and Recall
Microsoft is reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans to scale back or remove Copilot integrations across built-in apps after months of sustained user backlash, according to a Windows Central report citing people familiar with the company’s plans.

Copilot features in apps like Notepad … ⌘ Read more

The AI Boom Is Coming for Apple’s Profit Margins
Apple’s long-standing dominance over its electronics supply chain is eroding as AI companies outbid the iPhone maker for critical components like chips, memory and specialized glass fiber, giving suppliers the leverage to demand that Apple pay more. CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the pressure during a Thursday earnings call, noting constraints in chip supplies and significant increa … ⌘ Read more

Vibe-coded Social Network for AI Bots Exposed Data on Thousands of Humans
Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network that launched last week and bills itself as a platform “built exclusively for AI agents,” had a security vulnerability that exposed private messages shared between agents, the email addresses of more than 6,000 human owners, and over a million credentials, according to research published Mond … ⌘ Read more