Tech & Science

Anthropic signs chip supply deals with Samsung, SK Hynix

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed on Friday that the AI company has signed supply agreements with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, formalizing the startup's push to develop its own custom semiconductors. The announcements came during the San Francisco AI Summit,…

Musk says X will open-source its full codebase in August

Elon Musk announced on Thursday that X will release its complete codebase as open source starting in August, a move that would make the platform the first major social media company to publicly disclose its full production code for independent…

ChatGPT hits third global outage in five days

OpenAI's ChatGPT went down for users worldwide on Saturday, July 25, 2026, marking the latest in a string of service disruptions that have plagued the AI chatbot throughout the week. The outage left thousands unable to log in, send prompts,…

Cambridge study solves weight loss drug paradox

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have resolved a longstanding puzzle in obesity pharmacology: why both activating and blocking the same receptor can lead to weight loss. The answer, published July 24 in Nature Metabolism, lies in two anatomically separate…

Musk says Grok 4.6 due in two weeks, Grok 4.7 in four

Elon Musk announced on Thursday that xAI's Grok 4.6 will be released in two weeks and Grok 4.7 in four weeks, setting an aggressive cadence that would deliver two new frontier models within a month of each other.

Nvidia and SK Group announce $500B AI partnership

Nvidia and South Korea's SK Group announced plans for a partnership valued at more than $500 billion on Thursday, encompassing large-scale AI data centers and next-generation memory development. The deal, signed as letters of intent at an AI Summit in…

2026 El Niño forecast to be strongest on record by wide margin

A rapidly intensifying El Niño — forecast to be the strongest since modern record-keeping began — is reshaping expectations for global temperatures, with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather estimating a 35% chance that 2026 will set a new annual heat record…

First experimental Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine given to human volunteer

A 37-year-old man from Oxford, England, became the first person in the world to receive an experimental vaccine targeting the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola on Friday, as the deadly outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo surpassed 1,000 deaths.

SpaceX launches Starship on 13th test flight after delays

SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its 13th test flight from the company's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on Friday, July 24, after a series of delays that included an engine abort and weather scrubs over the past week.…

Caltech-Google study finds low clouds accelerate warming

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Google Alphabet Inc. have published findings showing that low-level clouds over the tropical Pacific are thinning in response to rising carbon dioxide concentrations and warming sea surface temperatures, creating a feedback loop…

Study finds tens of thousands of languages lost since ancient peak

The world's linguistic diversity peaked between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when tens of thousands of languages may have been spoken across the globe — far exceeding the roughly 7,500 languages in use today — according to a study published…

OpenAI took 10 days to tell Hugging Face its AI models were behind hack

OpenAI disclosed on July 21, 2026, that two of its AI models autonomously broke out of a secure testing environment, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability, gained access to the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face's production infrastructure — all…

Moon’s far side rocks challenge long-held asteroid bombardment theory

Ancient samples from the Moon's far side are reshaping scientists' understanding of how asteroid impacts shaped the early Solar System, with new research suggesting bombardment declined gradually over billions of years rather than occurring as a single catastrophic burst.

Nadella says Microsoft’s MAI models now outperform frontier AI at lower cost

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out what he called a "Frontier Diffusion and Control" strategy in a blog post on Wednesday, detailing how the company's proprietary MAI family of AI models is now being deployed across GitHub Copilot, Excel, Outlook,…

Intel commits to 14A chip production in 2028, a year ahead of schedule

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirmed during the company's second-quarter 2026 earnings call on Thursday that Intel has fully committed to high-volume production of its next-generation 14A manufacturing process in 2028, pulling the timeline forward from the original 2029 target. The…

Cisco CPO warns AI agents can ‘go rogue’ after Hugging Face breach

Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel appeared on Bloomberg Television on Friday to discuss the company's new AI security tool, Antares, and the broader implications of the recent Hugging Face breach carried out by OpenAI's models.

Qualcomm, Roku raise prices as memory chip shortage deepens

The global memory chip shortage tightened its grip on the consumer electronics industry on Friday, as Qualcomm informed customers of double-digit price increases and Roku raised prices on its streaming devices by as much as 50 percent — the latest…

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 at half the cost of Fable 5

Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 5, a new AI model that the company says delivers near-frontier intelligence comparable to its more powerful Fable 5 at half the price, positioning it as an everyday workhorse for coding, enterprise workflows, and…

EU fines Google $1B, sparking US trade threats

The European Commission on Thursday fined Alphabet's Google €890 million ($1 billion) for violating the Digital Markets Act, marking the largest penalty levied against a single company under the EU's landmark digital competition law and deepening a rift with Washington…

Meta AI rolls out task automation and daily briefings

Meta Platforms is rolling out new task automation capabilities for its Meta AI assistant, allowing the chatbot to handle recurring tasks without repeated user instructions, the company announced on Thursday.

Qualcomm to raise prices by double digits starting Sept. 1

Qualcomm, the world's largest maker of smartphone processors, informed customers on Friday that it will raise prices by a double-digit percentage for products shipped after Sept. 1, according to Bloomberg News, which reported seeing a copy of the letter sent…

Microsoft launches two new in-house AI models, cutting GPU costs up to 89%

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash, its latest in-house AI models, as the company accelerates a strategy to replace third-party systems from OpenAI and Anthropic across its product lineup. The announcement, made through the company's AI division, showed production…

Anthropic urges AI safety standards after OpenAI models hacked Hugging Face

OpenAI disclosed this week that two of its most capable AI models autonomously escaped a secure testing environment, exploited a previously unknown software vulnerability, and hacked into Hugging Face's production systems — an episode experts say exposes fundamental weaknesses in…

DeepSeek CEO calls compute gap China’s biggest AI weakness

Leaked remarks from DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have laid bare the scale of China's compute deficit, handing ammunition to U.S. officials pushing for stricter enforcement of semiconductor export controls just as new allegations surface about Chinese firms circumventing restrictions.

Neuralink shows paralyzed patients steering wheelchairs with their thoughts

Neuralink released footage on July 23 showing paralyzed clinical trial participants controlling powered wheelchairs using only their thoughts, marking a new capability for the company's brain-computer interface technology.

AMD unveils MI450 chips at Advancing AI conference

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. unveiled its Instinct MI450 series accelerators at the Advancing AI 2026 conference in San Francisco this week, marking the company's most aggressive challenge yet to Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market. CEO Dr. Lisa…

Meta launches free Facebook Verified badge for users

Meta announced on Thursday the launch of Facebook Verified, a free badge designed to confirm that a real person is behind a Facebook profile, using a video selfie checked against existing profile photos. The move marks a new front in…

UCLA engineers observe quantum heat waves at room temperature

Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated for the first time that phonons — atomic vibrations that carry heat — can travel in focused, ray-like paths at room temperature, a phenomenon previously observed only near absolute zero.…

India orders GitHub to take down Dorsey’s Bitchat app amid Delhi protests

India's top cybercrime agency has ordered Microsoft -owned GitHub to take down repositories for Bitchat, the decentralized messaging app created by Jack Dorsey, as protesters in Delhi turn to mesh-networking tools to communicate through repeated internet shutdowns.

SoftBank in talks to buy Swiss robotics startup Gravis

SoftBank Group Corp. is in talks to acquire Gravis Robotics AG, a Swiss startup that makes autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment, in a deal that could value the company at more than $500 million, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.