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Google and Samsung just launched the AI features Apple couldn’t with Siri

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Google just announced that Gemini will soon be able to take care of some multi-step tasks on your phone, like ordering food or hailing a car, starting first with the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S26 phones. It all sounds a bit like features Apple announced for Siri way back at the 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference - before Apple delayed those planned features in March 2025 and which still aren't released . Onstage, Sameer Samat, Google's president of Android, showed off a demo of how Gemini's new agentic features would work to help wrangle a pizza dinner order from his busy family group chat. Samat asks Ge … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/mIVvPje

Kalshi says it fined a MrBeast editor and a politician for insider trading

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Kalshi, the prediction betting market, has disclosed its first fines for insider trading, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal . In addition to handing down a $20,000 fine to a MrBeast editor, Kalshi also charged a California gubernatorial candidate over $2,000 after a video on X "appeared to show him trading on his own candidacy." In a notice on Wednesday, Kalshi claims MrBeast editor Artem Kaptur traded about $4,000 on YouTube streaming markets, violating its insider trading rules. "Our surveillance systems flagged his near-perfect trading success on markets with low odds, which were statistically anomalous," Bobby DeNault, legal … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/ATwyxHK

Let me see some ID: age verification is spreading across the internet

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Age verification is a reality on a growing number of social media platforms, requiring an ID or facial scan for full access to everything from YouTube to Roblox . The age-gating wave is coming along with calls for stronger child safety measures online , despite concerns about privacy, security, and censorship.  In the US, lawmakers are pushing forward bills like the App Store Accountability Act and Parents Over Platforms Act to have app stores themselves verify users’ ages.  Discord has delayed plans to roll out age verification globally after user backlash until later in 2026, but it hasn’t completely shelved them, even after a breach of a former vendor last year that leaked some users’ scanned IDs. Meanwhile, other platforms, like ChatGPT and Google , are applying AI models to identify and lock down accounts suspected of being underage until some form of identity verification can prove the user is an adult. Follow along below for the latest updates on age verificati...

Discord is delaying its global age verification rollout

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Discord won't roll out age verification globally on its platform next month as previously announced , and says in a blog post that it's delaying the launch until the second half of 2026. "The way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why," writes Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. Discord says that before it rolls out age verification globally, it will add more options for users to verify their age (inclu … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/iJelMPk

Seedance 2.0 might be gen AI video’s next big hope, but it’s still slop

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When Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson began uploading a series of short clips created with Seedance 2.0 - TikTok developer ByteDance's newest video generation model - it was hard to deny that the footage was much more impressive than what we've seen from other gen AI outfits. The clips' star (a digital duplicate of Tom Cruise) looked a lot like the real thing as it fought Brad Pitt, humanoid robots, and zombies. And the characters moved with a complex fluidity almost passing for choreography and amplified by kinetic "camerawork." Gen AI enthusiasts love to proclaim that the traditionally produced entertainment industry is cooked, and some of … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/lys2ILx

Inside Anthropic’s existential negotiations with the Pentagon

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Anthropic's weekslong battle with the Department of Defense has played out over social media posts, admonishing public statements, and direct quotes from unnamed Pentagon officials to the news media. But the future of the $380 billion AI startup comes down to just three words: "any lawful use." The new terms, which OpenAI and xAI have reportedly already agreed to, would give the US military carte blanche to use services for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, AI that has full power to track and kill targets with no humans involved in the decision-making process. The negotiations have turned ugly, with Pentagon CTO Emil Michael … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/H65qDxK

Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI

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Anthropic claims DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI companies misused its Claude AI model in an attempt to improve their own products. In an announcement on Monday , Anthropic says the "industrial-scale campaigns" involved the creation of around 24,000 fraudulent accounts and more than 16 million exchanges with Claude, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal . The three companies - DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot - are accused of "distilling" Claude , or training a smaller AI model based on a more advanced one. Though Anthropic says that distillation is a "legitimate training method," it adds that it can "also be used for illicit purpose … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/PNtDXR3