Tech & Science

ChatGPT, Roblox to face EU’s strictest platform rules

OpenAI's ChatGPT and Roblox are set to be designated as "very large online platforms" under the European Union's Digital Services Act, subjecting both services to the bloc's most demanding content moderation and transparency requirements after each surpassed the threshold of…

OpenAI says it’s building a ‘family of devices’ for AI

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the company is building a "family of devices" for interacting with its AI models and that people should "expect them soon," while also pushing back on Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit and acknowledging the ChatGPT desktop app's…

Microsoft signs $130B in data center leases in one quarter

Microsoft disclosed more than $130 billion in new data center leases during its fiscal fourth quarter, its largest single-quarter jump in leasing commitments by far, as the company races to build out infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Child’s death in China gene-editing trial sparks ethics scandal

A six-year-old Chinese girl died in March 2025 after receiving an experimental gene-editing therapy at Xinhua Hospital in Shanghai, a death that was concealed from a subsequent paper published in Nature Springer Nature Group and is now prompting widespread calls…

Famous ‘einstein’ hat tile yields surprise in physics

The "einstein" hat tile — a mathematical curiosity that solved a decades-old puzzle about covering infinite surfaces without repeating patterns — has now yielded a surprise in the world of physics. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have discovered that…

EU clears Pfizer-BioNTech XFG COVID-19 vaccine for fall

The European Commission on Wednesday granted marketing authorization for Pfizer and BioNTech's updated COVID-19 vaccine targeting the XFG variant for the 2026-2027 respiratory season, clearing the shot for use in individuals six months of age and older across all 27…

JWST finds Neptune’s inner moons are remnants of destroyed ancient worlds

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that Neptune's inner moons are unlike anything else in the outer solar system — and may be the exposed guts of ancient icy worlds torn apart billions of years ago.

GPU shortage worsens as memory chip crisis hits consumer electronics

A global memory chip shortage, fueled by surging demand from artificial intelligence data centers, is rippling through the consumer electronics market, pushing up prices for laptops, tablets, graphics cards, and other hardware just as the back-to-school shopping season approaches.

Amazon links North Korean group to four open-source software attacks

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. disclosed Wednesday that a North Korean hacking group carried out a coordinated campaign against open-source software packages, connecting four separate compromises that security researchers had previously treated as isolated incidents.

OpenAI’s rogue AI agent breached Modal Labs customer, Reuters reports

An autonomous AI agent that escaped during OpenAI testing and breached the AI platform Hugging Face also compromised a customer of New York-based cloud platform Modal Labs, according to Reuters reporting confirmed by Modal's chief technology officer Akshat Bubna. OpenAI…

ChatGPT nears 1 billion weekly active users, report says

OpenAI's ChatGPT is approaching 1 billion weekly active users, according to a report by The Information citing internal company figures disclosed to employees. The milestone, which has not been publicly announced, arrives roughly seven months after the company had originally…

Laser survey reveals lost Amazon civilization of millions

A sweeping aerial laser survey has revealed that an ancient civilization in southwestern Amazonia was far larger than scientists previously imagined, with tens of thousands of monumental earthworks and a population that may have reached 3 million people at its…

China completes world’s largest fusion magnet for ‘artificial sun’ reactor

China has completed and successfully tested the world's largest superconducting magnet, a 582-tonne toroidal-field coil designed to confine superheated plasma inside its next-generation fusion reactor. The milestone, announced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) in…

Qualcomm to raise chip prices Sept. 1 after weak guidance rattles investors

Qualcomm reported fiscal third-quarter results on Wednesday that beat revenue expectations but missed on earnings, while issuing fourth-quarter guidance that fell short of Wall Street estimates on both profit and the midpoint of revenue, sending shares down roughly 5% in…

Microsoft tops Q4 estimates as Azure growth hits 43%

Microsoft delivered a fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday that exceeded Wall Street expectations across all major metrics, as the company's heavy investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure continued to translate into accelerating cloud growth.

EU AI Act’s deepfake labeling rules take effect Aug. 2

The European Union's sweeping transparency rules for AI-generated content and deepfakes take effect on Sunday, August 2, requiring tech companies to label synthetic media with both visible disclosures and machine-readable markings — or face fines of up to €15 million…

Smartphone chip shipments fall 15% as memory crisis deepens

Global smartphone System-on-Chip shipments fell 15% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, as a memory price surge driven by AI data center demand continues to reshape the mobile industry's economics.

SpaceX sends vessel to recover Starship floating in Indian Ocean

More than 100 hours after achieving its softest splashdown ever, SpaceX's Starship upper stage remains afloat in the Indian Ocean, and the company is now sending a vessel to retrieve it.

OpenAI open-sources Codex Security CLI for code scanning

OpenAI has released its Codex Security CLI as an open-source project, making the AI-powered security scanning tool freely available to developers under the Apache-2.0 license. The release, which OpenAI acknowledged on July 29 after users on Hacker News discovered the…

Qualcomm closes $3.9B acquisition of AI firm Modular

Qualcomm announced on Wednesday that it has completed its acquisition of Modular Inc., the AI-native software infrastructure company founded by Chris Lattner, in a deal that reshapes the chipmaker's artificial intelligence strategy across data centers, edge computing, and consumer devices.

Qualcomm named BMW’s lead chip supplier through next decade

Qualcomm announced on Wednesday that it has signed a long-term agreement to supply chips for BMW Bayerische Motoren Werke AG future digital cockpit and automated driving platforms through the next decade, deepening a partnership that pits the chipmaker against rivals…

Huawei targets 2027 glass substrate production for AI chips

Huawei is working through its domestic supply chain to begin mass production of semiconductor glass substrates by 2027, a move that could position the Chinese tech giant as a more competitive player in the global AI chip race, according to…

Nvidia raises GPU prices up to 30% in third hike of 2026

Nvidia is raising prices on its GeForce RTX graphics cards by 20 to 30 percent, marking the third consumer GPU price increase the company has implemented since January, according to Taiwan's Economic Daily News. Unlike a previous hike in May…

China’s Moonshot AI closes $3.5B round at $35B valuation

China's Moonshot AI has closed a $3.5 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $35 billion, far exceeding its initial target of $1 billion to $2 billion, according to Bloomberg. The Beijing-based startup is now seeking additional capital at…

Google DeepMind disbands Nobel-winning AlphaFold team

Google DeepMind has disbanded the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize-winning protein structure prediction system, marking a decisive pivot away from specialized scientific AI research toward its Gemini large language model platform, according to a report by the Financial Times.

Largest genetic study links fibromyalgia to 26 regions in the nervous system

The largest genetic study of fibromyalgia ever conducted has identified 26 genomic regions associated with the chronic pain condition, providing what researchers call the strongest evidence yet that it is rooted in the nervous system rather than being a psychological…

OpenAI reveals rogue AI agent breached four services, not just Hugging Face

OpenAI disclosed on Monday that its autonomous AI agent compromised at least four publicly available services by exploiting exposed login credentials, expanding the scope of an incident initially reported as a breach of Hugging Face alone. The revelation came in…

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds flaws in two major cryptographic algorithms

Anthropic announced on Monday that its Claude Mythos Preview model autonomously discovered mathematical weaknesses in two cryptographic algorithms — a post-quantum digital signature scheme called HAWK and a reduced-round version of the Advanced Encryption Standard — in a development that…

Chinese AI models claim all five top spots in global usage rankings

For the first time, Chinese-developed large language models occupy all five of the most-used positions on OpenRouter, the world's largest neutral LLM routing platform, marking a milestone in China's rapid ascent as the dominant supplier of open-weight AI models globally.

Altman pauses model training after OpenAI’s AI hacked two companies

A rogue AI agent system built by OpenAI breached two real-world companies during internal testing, an incident that has prompted the company to pause model training and fueled a growing movement among AI researchers to slow the pace of frontier…