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Sep 09, 2026
AI is evolving faster than most people, even those building it, could even fathom, and its impact on the workforce and the economy is, at this point, really anyone's guess.
Researchers from The Anthropic Institute are offering a few possibilities: They have built a nuanced framework looking at how AI might impact jobs, unemployment, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth between now and 2030.
They posit three potential scenarios for an AI-augmented future: "modest," "substantial," and "extreme," and have created an interactive tool where users can explore how productive, or disruptive, AI will become in the workplace, based on their predictions of how they will work in 2030.
"Which of these worlds we are heading toward may become clearer within a year or two, and preparing for potential disruption seems to us the prudent course," the researchers noted.
The goal of their work is to inform debate as AI becomes more powerful and capable. "AI is likely to reshape the US and global economies in profound ways in the coming decade, but how, and by how much, is extraordinarily uncertain," they wrote.
How different scenarios could play out
If you add up every single task performed by people, machines, and software, the US has created a staggering $30 trillion in value over just the l
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Sep 09, 2026
Gartner on Wednesday said that it expects 30% of the positions eliminated by AI-related layoffs to be refilled by 2029, suggesting that the initial terminations were ill-advised and excessive.
"When business and IT executives look back on the early AI era, they will realize their greatest mistake was believing that work automation was the point, when workforce amplification was the opportunity," said Tori Paulman, VP analyst at Gartner. "The competitive advantage will go to the CIOs and business executives who build an AI-shaped organization where AI value compounds by reshaping roles and allowing workflows to cross traditional boundaries, increasing velocity and reducing friction."
The Gartner report noted that it is finding that the cuts "deplete talent pipelines and erode institutional knowledge." Beyond the immediate workforce disruptions associated with any mass layoff, companies will also face steep increases in costs for recruitment, training, and onboarding.
It also predicted that, by 2027, "75% of organizations that prioritize capturing AI productivity gains as cost savings will be eclipsed by competitors that aggressively reinvest those gains into innovation, modernization and upskilling."
In an interview with Computer
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Sep 09, 2026
Twenty-five years ago, I sat near the front of the room while then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out Apple's digital hub strategy, a vision in which the Mac would become the central manager of all manner of portable digital devices.
Now, a quarter of a century later, nearly all of those digital devices have become features on your iPhone, and the arrival of AI means the iPhone has become the intelligent personal hub, the central manager of, well, of you. Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, went straight for the concept in his important opening remarks at Wednesday's big iPhone launch, where nearly all the pre-event speculation came true.
The intelligent personal hub
"As we look ahead, we see a future filled with enormous discovery and transformation," Ternus said at the
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Sep 09, 2026
Adobe on Wednesday unveiled a range of updates to Acrobat, including the ability to turn PDF documents into interactive visual reports and podcasts. And a new Knowledge Base feature connects Adobe's Acrobat AI assistant to document sources such as Microsoft SharePoint and Google Drive.
It's the biggest Acrobat update in several years, Adobe said, and highlights the application's evolution from PDF reader to what the company now describes as an AI-powered document productivity and creativity platform.
Acrobat users open more than 400 billion PDFs in the app each year, Adobe said, claiming 650 million monthly active users as of last year.
Among the new additions is the ability to turn dense PDFs into interactive, visual documents and presentation slides. To create these, Acrobat's AI assistant scans the selected file, asks questions about the user's intent, then generates documents charts, images and naviga
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Sep 09, 2026
A slew of recent studies indicate that AI isn't dramatically displacing workers. At the same time, there were no indicators that the fast-moving technology is creating a lot of jobs, even as AI skills remain in high demand.
Stanford University researchers in an August study found that any AI-related job declines were concentrated among young workers aged 22-25. But for older and more experienced workers that wasn't the case.
"Claims of economy-wide AI-driven job losses are not visible in payroll data through June 2026," the researchers said, citing ADP payroll information. Stanford partnered with ADP to conduct the research.
The decline for young workers is more often related to the automation of some work tasks by AI, as opposed to its use to complement work. In contrast, AI is more often used by experienced workers to augment what they do.
According to the Stanford report, workers between 22 and 25 and employed in jobs highly exposed to disruption by AI are falling behind their older counterparts. Their employment levels in June were about 19% below the same age group in less-exposed occupations. That's compared to where they would be if both groups had kept pace with each other.
"Experienced workers show no comparable gap," the researchers said, adding that "this is consistent with recent reports of a worsening job market for entry-level workers."
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Sep 09, 2026
Late-breaking reports suggest Apple has built a new Siri AI ‘Recaps' feature that summarizes your day for you. The idea sounds great until you recognize that this summary will also include overheard conversations.
Suspending the huge red flag of concern over privacy and data protection for a moment or two, why would this be useful and who is it for?
How it's supposed to work
First, it is being described as an Apple Watch feature that will only be available on the latest models: Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, as these allegedly include secure audio processing hardware. Reading between the lines, that suggests the devices will be able to listen to and process audio on device, which implies that the information won't need to leave your smartwatch, not even to your iPhone.
The report also says the feature doesn't make a transcript, nor does it store the audio; it instead gathers key datapoints from what is said to include in the summary, deleting all the remaining information in the process. You can have the feature working all day, on-demand, or only in specific locations. The idea seems to be to provide some kind of actionable summary of events and key conversations that take place during the day. I imagine the subtext is to digitize as much as possible of your daily existence as Apple thinks you
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Sep 09, 2026
AI note-taking applications are increasingly used by workers to record meetings, generate conversation summaries and suggest post-meeting action items.
Along with the promised productivity benefits — enabling users to focus on meetings rather than actively taking notes — the emergence of these AI tools has raised privacy questions, particularly around obtaining prior consent by meeting participants for their use. Those concerns, in turn, have prompted a spate of lawsuits against software vendors that sell AI notetaking tools.
In some ways, the underlying questions are not new: It's long been possible to record a phone call with a dictaphone, and laws around surreptitious recording have been around for decades. Yet widespread access to AI notetakers via desktop or smartphone apps means that it's easier than ever to record a conversation for future reference.
Among the thorny questions arising from the technology's use: what happens to conversation data sent to a software vendor's servers for processing? Are the recording and transcript used to train those vendors' AI models, for example, or create biometric voiceprints? Those practices are among the issues being considered in US courts.
Otter, which claims to have 35 million users, was subject to a class-action complaint in a federal court in California last year. That complaint accused Otter of recording individuals without consent and using their voices to train its speech recognition AI tools. Last month, a judge rejected Otter's attempt to dismiss t
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Sep 09, 2026
By now, you probably know my stance on Gemini and other generative AI gobbledegook — right?
In short: It's an insanely powerful form of technology (obviously). But it's also wildly inaccurate and ineffective as an all-purpose answer engine, and by cramming it into every last nook and cranny, Google is doing a serious disservice to its users — and to itself.
That being said, generative AI can be incredibly useful. The key is simply to frame it as a purpose-specific tool for the right type of limited task as opposed to treating it as the end-all answer for everything, as most tech players seem overly eager to do these days.
Here in the land of Android, I'm always looking for purpose-specific ways Gemini can make our lives easier. Over time, I've found those ideas often aren't the big headline-making features Google and other tech companies market but rather random little off-the-beaten-path possibilities that rarely
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Sep 09, 2026
For decades, global time experts have mapped atomic clock time to the earth's rotation, periodically adding a second (aka a leap second) as rotation slowed. But the planet's rotation has now slightly sped up, which could mean that a negative adjustment will be required.
The problem is that computer systems have not been programmed to do that.
To avoid this issue, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (GCWM) in October will vote on a proposal to maintain the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as a continuous time from May 20, 2027, without adjustment via leap seconds, allowing UT1, the measure of time based on the earth's rotation, and UTC to drift apart by up to one hour.
It pointed out, "a negative leap second has not previously been applied, and it is considered to pose a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared, and the preparation would create, for the industries that rely on time synchronization, a need for financial investment, whose amount is estimated to be similar to their preparations for the millennium bug."
The group said that a 2025 workshop which included experts on Earth rotation estim
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Sep 08, 2026
We're hurtling toward the loss of something big. Finally, after months of speculation, Apple is about to introduce its first-ever folding smartphone. And once it does, the conversation will change as the annual iPhone rumor season is replaced with the reality of whatever Apple unveils.
Except, it won't quite be the same as in the past. Because no sooner will new Apple CEO John Ternus finish his iPhone announcement keynote speech tomorrow than the speculation will shift to next year's 20th-anniversary iPhone, what's coming to the iPhone 18 and e-series iPhones, and expectations around Apple's upcoming wave of smart home products, including health and home security services. There's a lot going on.
Meet John Ternus
Having a lot going on is one of the prime expectations of Apple under its
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Sep 08, 2026
Swiss authorities have launched a pilot project to determine whether it is possible to replace Microsoft 365 with similar open-source services, RTS reports. This follows a proof-of-concept project in which 172 civil servants tested the German open-source platform openDesk.
According to Matthias Stürmer, a professor at the University of Bern, there are three main reasons for the switch: to reduce dependence on US services, to improve operational reliability, and to reduce costs.
In the first phase, the migration involves 3,000 computers, which corresponds to 7% of Switzerland's federal workforce. The government has more than 54,000 workstations in operation. The pilot will prioritize employees who have access to highly sensitive data, according to RTS.
A move by the Swiss Armed Forces from Microsoft 365 to openDesk is already underway, with that migration expected to be completed in October, It's FOSS reports.
Switzerland's move is part of a larger ‘digital sovereignty' effort in the European Union that aims
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Sep 08, 2026
Back in April 2025, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) proudly proclaimed that it had prevailed in a landmark antitrust case against Google's ad business. Yeah. Right.
You see, just last week, US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected the DoJ's effort to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange. What began as a major anti-monopoly victory has become a mouse-sized settlement.
[ Google US antitrust trials: A timeline ]
Does any of this this sound familiar? It should. We've seen this show before. Last year, Google had also been convicted of abusing its search business. At first, all the talk was about how Google might be forced to divest itself of the Chrome browser and/or the Android operating system.
Instead, Google was allowed to keep making search deals and only had to share some search data with its rivals.
I sa
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Sep 08, 2026
A phishing-as-a-service operation targeting Microsoft 365 users has harvested thousands of session cookies that could be used to hijack authenticated sessions after victims complete multifactor authentication, CloudSEK said.
The cybersecurity firm said in a report that it uncovered the operation, known as BigBear 2.0, in June after gaining access to its administrative panel.
The panel contained 5,137 credential records linked to 461 targeted organizations across more than 40 countries. CloudSEK also reported 4,148 captured session cookies and 1,032 plaintext passwords. The firm said 474 records showed completed logins in which attackers captured the authenticated session created after MFA.
BigBear 2.0 is built on Evilginx2, a framework that places an attacker-controlled reverse proxy between the victim and Microsoft's legitimate authentication service. The victim signs in through the proxied page and completes MFA as usual. Once Microsoft issues an authenticated session cookie, the phishing infrastructure can intercept it and allow the attacker to reuse the session without completing the authentication process again.
The operation also uses residential proxies selected according to the victim's country, which can make malicious authentication traffic appear geographically consistent with the user. CloudSEK said this technique can weaken location-based checks used in Condit
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Sep 07, 2026
OpenAI's rollout of its GPT-6 Astra model ran into early access issues after paying ChatGPT users were unable to use the system shortly after launch, prompting CEO Sam Altman to apologize and say the release had been "messy."
"First, sorry for the messy rollout," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the issue in a post on X. "Second, when we screw up, we try to make it right."
OpenAI had said GPT-6 Astra would be rolled out across ChatGPT tiers and APIs, positioning it as its most advanced model to date. However, the initial rollout did not translate into immediate access for all users, highlighting the gap between model launch and availability across subscription tiers.
Only the organizations enrolled in its Daybreak cybersecurity program were able to access the model, whereas Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise ChatGPT subscribers, along with developers using the OpenAI API, were left out.
"Third, we should be able to begin broad rollout to API customers and ChatGPT subscribers in the near future. As usual, we will start with pro subscribers," Altman continued in the post.
Altman wrote in a follow-up X post on Friday that OpenAI had extended Astra to Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users in ChatGPT's Work and Codex products and had opened it up through the API.
"It might take a few days to roll out to our Plus and Busines
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Sep 07, 2026
You might not know it from looking, but Gmail is jam-packed with time-saving tricks.
Some of 'em are right there in front of your face, if you know how to find 'em — while others require a teensy bit of under-the-hood tinkering to activate. But all of 'em are built right into Gmail and have the potential to make managing your email a heck of a lot easier.
Check out these 16 splendid Gmail tips and get ready to master your inbox once and for all.
(Note that unless otherwise specified, these tips are specific to Gmail's web-based desktop version.)
Inbox step-savers
1. You can actually view attachments right from your Gmail inbox. Provided you haven't switched away from the service's "default" interface arrangement, you'll see small tiles for every file associated with an email right below the message's subject line. And you can click on any of those tiles to open or preview the file's contents and get directly to the info you need.
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Sep 05, 2026
Google's dominance in the search arena has given rise to two major antitrust lawsuits from the US government alleging the company has manipulated the market to maintain that dominance, to the exclusion of competitors and the detriment of the public at large.
The first lawsuit, targeting Google's search business, kicked off in mid-September 2023 and drew to a close in May 2024; US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the tech giant in August 2024. The remedy phase of the trial ended in September 2025 with Judge Mehta rejecting the DOJ's request to break up the company, instead imposing data-sharing requirements.
The second trial against the tech giant, focused on advertising, took place over 15 days in September 2024, with US District Judge Leonie Brinkema
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Sep 05, 2026
Gmail is filled with hidden features and add-on possibilities, but one of the service's most powerful organizational tools is sitting right in the heart of its regular settings.
As you may have guessed by now (especially if you read this story's headline, you clever little cat), I'm talking about filters — Gmail's long-standing system for automating your inbox with a series of custom-crafted rules. At a glance, filters can seem complicated. They can seem overwhelming. They can even seem unnecessary.
But don't let yourself be fooled by the feature's curiously crusty exterior. Gmail filters have the potential to completely reshape your inbox and the way your incoming messages are handled. They can help you keep your email in order with no ongoing thought or effort.
And, unlike Google's new AI Inbox option (which notably still doesn't seem to be available for most people as of this writing), filters (a) don't require your personal messages to be processed by generative AI systems — and (b) give you complete control over exactly how your email is handled instead of forcing you to rely on
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Sep 04, 2026
IT industry experts and analysts are still trying to piece together Nvidia's surprise plan to pay $12.9 billion for open-source AI company Hugging Face.
Nvidia dominates AI with its GPUs, and the company generates billions of dollars in revenue through a proprietary approach to the fast-moving technology. Hugging Face, on the other hand, hosts open models and has been a neutral player between chip vendors and model labs.
"This is about Nvidia having more say in how the stack gets built," said Stephanie Walter, analyst at Hyperframe Research.
Hugging Face is wildly popular with developers, and Nvidia is buying early influence with that crowd. "You have a better chance of being part of the production environment later," Walter said, adding that she wasn't sure how Nvidia reached a nearly $13 billion price tag for the acquisition.
"Hugging Face has near-uncontested market primacy over where developers go for open-weight model releases. Now Nvidia owns that," said Mark Petty, senior director analyst at Gartner.
Nvidia's chase for developers should force IT decision-makers to review how much of the AI stack they control, said Hector Liu, director of Institute of Foundation Models' Silicon Valley Lab. IFM is part of the Abu Dhabi-based Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.
Liu said CIOs sho
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Sep 04, 2026
I surprised myself this morning when I came across an interesting Apple-commissioned report — Rethinking critical AI infrastructure — I'd not seen before. It looks at the shifting expectations for AI infrastructure and recognizes that enterprise users want (and need) secure, on-device AI solutions for critical parts of their business.
That's why tens of thousands of companies are already investing in Macs, because they recognize that Macs do indeed do AI. The study, published earlier this year and put together by Omdia, reflects insights gathered across 1,500 conversations with enterprise tech leaders and practitioners, noting that for many in business the current cloud-based approach to AI fails to deliver on three key metrics:
Costs: Current pricing models seem unsustainable. Particularly when it comes to agentic AI, costs climb fast and business users need to get those costs under control.
Security: Even the most secure cloud services include some degree of data risk. When it comes to usi
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Sep 04, 2026
Nvidia has released a free tool that will enable users to build an AI inferencing cluster from disparate PCs on the same network, accessible from a single interface.
Released as a beta, Nvidia Personal AI router (PAIR) connects devices running Windows, macOS or Linux to process AI inferencing workloads privately.
While the system is aimed primarily at home users, it could find favour with enterprises looking to put idle desktop compute capacity to use.
PAIR works with DGX Spark desktop supercomputers, PCs containing RTX GPUs, and some MacOS devices. The systems in the cluster run tasks in parallel, but PAIR does not turn them into a virtual GPU, Nvidia said.
The beta version of Nvidia PAIR is available for download now.
This article first appeared on Network World.
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Sep 04, 2026
The destiny of Spirit Airline's data is still undecided, months after the company sought bankruptcy protection.
AI data company Micro1 has now offered $12.5 million to acquire a trove of the company's emails, Teams chats, operations and employee productivity data, according to a report by aviation website Simply Flying,
It said the data includes about 600 million email and chat records generated by 17,000 employees, as well as 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items, and more than 30 million recorded customer service calls. Such a large repository of information is a gold mine to any company looking to train AI models more effectively. The report says that this data includes sensitive, decades-old employee and workplace records.
But Micro1's offer comes weeks after Google acquired the data at auction, with its $10 million bid beating the $7.5 million offered by another AI training company, Mercor.
The airline's former employees objected to the sale, and last week their unions took legal action to block the it.
Nelson, international president of the Association
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Sep 04, 2026
Adobe's search for a new CEO is over: It has promoted Anil Chakravarthy, president of its customer experience orchestration business, to the top role.
It has taken six months to find a successor to outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen, who announced in March that he would step back from the CEO role, remaining with the company as chairman.
There had been much speculation that he would be replaced by Adobe's president of creativity and productivity, David Wadhwani, who was responsible for the digital media business segment that generates around three-quarters of the company's revenue. Having missed out on the top job, however, he has chosen to leave Adobe, announcing his departure on LinkedIn.
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Sep 04, 2026
So, you've got email, you say? Lots of it? More than you can possibly manage without losing the few metaphorical marbles still sloshing around in that soggy ol' brain of yours?
I hear ya. In fact, I think we all can relate (even those of us whose brains are, erm, slightly less soggy). And I'm here to tell you: It doesn't have to be so difficult.
Gmail has a variety of built-in tools for making your messages more manageable. Some of 'em are a little bit different from what you might be accustomed to using in more traditional email clients (here's lookin' at you, Outlook) — but if you take the time to figure out how they work, you might just be surprised at how effective they can be.
There's no better example than Gmail's label system. It's a strange concept to wrap your head around at first, especially if you're used to the more typical folder-based method of inbox organization, but here's a little secret: Labels actually are folders, in a sense. That, however, is just one small part of their inbox-organizing power.
Think through these nine label-centric possibilities and get ready to see Gmail's labels in a whole new light.
1. Use Gmail labels like super-folders for categorizing your email
First, the most basic Gmail label mindset to master: You can think of a label like a folder — but with an important twist: Instead of a message being placed i
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Sep 04, 2026
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, disclosing that the new flagship model has crossed the "Critical" threshold for cybersecurity risk under its Preparedness Framework, a classification the company said triggers additional deployment restrictions.
"GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS," OpenAI said in a statement.
Enterprise administrators must manually enable Astra for their workspace, since access is off by default at launch, according to the company.
Developers can access Astra in the API as gpt-6-astra or through Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI said, priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Pro, Business, and Enterprise users also get a variant called Astra Pro, and the company said Astra supports Zero Data Retention for eligible API customers.
Company claims perfect score on exploit benchmark
OpenAI said it tested Astra without production safeguards on ExploitBench, and that the model scored 100%, up from 78.5% for predecessor GPT-5.6 Sol. On ExploitGym, a broader exploit-development benchmark, the company said Astra reached a 42.4% success rate against 30.3% for Sol, while using fewer output tokens.
"Its ability to iden
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Sep 03, 2026
Enterprises are facing a disturbing new question in the age of AI: What happens when agentic assistants go dark?
This became a very real scenario on Thursday, as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and SpaceXAI's Grok near-simultaneously, and somewhat mysteriously, experienced significant, prolonged outages.
Beginning in the morning, Eastern time, several ChatGPT models went down over a roughly two hour period, Claude models over a four-hour span, and Grok models for a near three-and-a-half hour duration. All three companies acknowledged the "elevated" issues and applied fixes.
As users grumbled in forums and IT teams scrambled to get them back online, the incident revealed how hastily some organizations have adopted generative AI workflows without considering the potential, and inevitable, impact of widespread outages.
AI agents are increasingly taking over automated and wider-scale workflows, and enterprises could find themselves "uncomfortably exposed" when AI hits the brakes, said technology analyst and journalist Carmi Levy. The situation should "serve as a wakeup call to IT leaders who have largely ignored what it'll cost them if these increasingly critical platforms suddenly go dark. The risk is no longer hypothetical."
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Sep 03, 2026
Microsoft's text suggestion feature will now be turned off by default in both Word and Outlook, reports The Register. The text suggestions attempt to predict which words or phrases the user intends to type in advance.
According to Microsoft, some users appreciate the feature, while others find the suggestions distracting. With it disabled by default, interested users can now choose for themselves whether they want to turn it on manually.
It is unclear whether the change will disable text suggestions for existing users who already have the feature enabled, or if it applies only to new installations and profiles.
The change applies to Word for Windows, the web, iOS, and Android, and to classic Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. Rollout timing will be communicated through the Microsoft 365 admin center and release notes, Microsoft said.
This article originally appeared on Computer Sweden.
Related:
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Sep 03, 2026
A serious vulnerability was recently discovered in Exchange Server 2016, Exchange Server 2016, and Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE). The vulnerability is designated CVE-2026-62911 and can be exploited by hackers to gain full access to affected systems, according to Bleeping Computer.
Microsoft has released security patches to address the vulnerability as part of its August 2026 Patch Tuesday release, but there are still 21,899 unpatched servers at risk, according to The Shadowserver Foundation. The highest concentrations of vulnerable servers are in the US and Germany, the security group said.
The Netherlands National Cyber Security Centre and other agencies have urged admins to install the latest patches as soon as possible.
This article originally appeared on
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Sep 03, 2026
I've been writing about Apple and how it benefits the enterprise for so long it's easy to forget that the company doesn't make enough noise about its accomplishments.
Sure, it has pursued and won the argument about Total Cost of Ownership, proving that while initial costs might be higher, dollar for dollar Macs are a far more cost-efficient platform, particularly when it comes to product reliability and tech support.
Apple already offers so much
Apple has also introduced extensive tools and APIs to help manage enterprise Macs, spawning a wide ecosystem of providers — most visibly, Jamf. Certain Apple products are already becoming deeply ingrained in some key professions; just think about Vision Pro and what it offers in medical care or prototype design, or the tens of thousands of Macs being carried around by AI developers across all the big name firms.
Some of what Apple delivers is already of major benefit to enterprise users. MLX for example, is being actively used to support real-life AI implementations, including by active AI-based businesses such as Yembo. And simplicity and ease-of-use isn't just an advantage to consumer users, it boosts productivity in enterprise, t
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Sep 03, 2026
With the launch of a new integration this week, Adobe is making more than 70 Creative Cloud applications available in Slack, promising to bring generative AI (genAI) document creation closer to team conversations.
The Adobe MCP (model context protocol) integration allows Slack users to access, edit, and create new documents from Adobe creative and productivity tools without switching apps. This includes Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, Lightroom, and others.
The integration should help "improve efficiency and speed of content creation," said Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy. "We have consistently found in our research that companies want to use their team collaboration apps, like Slack, as work hubs."
To access the integration, users interact with Slackbot — Slack's AI "teammate" — via natural language prompts.
Adobe outlined several use cases in a blog post Wednesday. It's possible to turn "project plans and conversations" in Slack into "PDFs, images and videos you can share with your team in Slack," and turn speadsheet data into a "PDF or visual you can share with your team or client."
Other uses include the ability to edit images such as headshots and event photos in bulk — with controls available to adjust lighting and tone, crop and resize images, and more — as well as to search for Creative Cloud assets from Slack.
The editing inte
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Sep 02, 2026
Former Apple chip supplier Intel has faced a lot of challenges since Apple ceased to be a client. It struggled to win back some of Apple's processor manufacturing business, but seems to face one fundamental challenge — trust.
That's the very briefest gist of an extensive and outstanding report today from Culpium, which gives us an insider look at the relationship between the firms. It's particularly relevant, given that the Trump Administration has announced that Apple agreed to work with Intel in the future. (TSMC is Apple's current supplier and that relationship seems very solid.)
The root of the challenge
The problem with Intel, according to the report, is that a lack of trust drove Apple to seek an alternative processor supplier in the first place. The report discusses some of those challenges, including Intel's failure to keep the pace with Mac chips, which is why the M1 chip astonished the industry, because it gave Apple the performance it had always sought.
How we got here
The root of that release was mobile, of course. Apple's A-series chips were built for mobile and eventually tra
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Sep 02, 2026
When it comes to productivity these days, we're got two competing concepts to consider:
Automate everything with AI and let an unreliable, error-prone bot do work on your behalf (thus likely spending even more time reviewing — and correcting — its mistakes)
Find intelligent systems for increasing your own efficiency while maintaining complete control over what you're doing
The first path clearly gets the most attention as of late. (And, to be fair, there are ways that AI can genuinely be useful, especially when it's used as a tool for specific limited purposes as opposed to an omnipresent answer for everything.) But arming yourself with good old-fashioned efficiency-enhancers is an increasingly underrated and overlooked option for giving yourself a powerful productivity advantage — in a way that actually makes a difference, without any awkward compromises.
That's particularly true in the domain of the desktop browser, where so many of us do so much of our work in 2026. The browser in many ways has become our de facto workday operating system — no matter what kind of computer we're using at any given moment — and yet, it's nowhere near t
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Sep 01, 2026
Learning from the OpenAI-Hugging Face fiasco, as well as from recent revelations about its own model, Anthropic is revamping its security and alignment practices.
The company has established controls that flag when a model attempts to break out of a sandbox or successfully accesses the live internet, cordoned off its highest-risk test environments, and proposed a set of safety standards for its external testing partners, such as giving AI agents explicit instructions like "you should not access the internet."
Anthropic conceded that three recent security incidents involving Claude reflect a "failure of operational security," and also reveal issues with model reasoning capabilities and "recklessness." Recent events "stressed that the urgency of improving our cybersecurity defenses is even higher than we previously believed," the company noted.
Anthropic's approach to security and alignment
The company launched an investigation into its own security posture in July following the alarming OpenAI incident in which GPT models escaped a sandbox environment and arbitrarily attacked Hugging Face.
The company subsequently disclosed
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Sep 01, 2026
Citrix on Tuesday announced that it has completed the acquisition of longtime partner Numecent, producer of technology that containerizes and manages Windows applications.
The acquisition builds on joint efforts to integrate Numecent's management tool, Cloudpager, with Citrix Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) after an integration announced in April let administrators natively publish and manage the application containers through familiar Citrix workflows.
Numecent's other product, Cloudpaging, packages Windows applications into isolated application containers independent of the underlying operating system, streaming them to Windows endpoints on demand rather than requiring them to be included in a desktop image.
Citrix plans to further integrate the technology into its platform, while also continuing Cloudpaging and Cloudpager support for physical Windows devices.
"Enterprise customers have told us for years that application management is one of the most painful parts of running a Windows environment," said Shawn Bass, SVP and GM of Citrix DaaS, in the
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Sep 01, 2026
Older employees are significantly more positive about AI than their younger colleagues, according to a new survey by Glassdoor.
Among members of Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1980), nearly half of respondents had a positive view of the new AI technology. At the same time, just one-third of Generation Z (that is, those born between 1997 and 2012) share that same level of positivity.
The reason younger people have a more negative attitude toward AI? Strong concerns that the technology will eventually take their jobs, reports Bloomberg.
Older people, on the other hand, feel more confident that their experience in the workplace will allow them to hang onto their jobs until they retire.
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Sep 01, 2026
How is it that the departure of well-known Apple designer Jony Ive undermined departmental resilience so much that former Apple staffers are now accused of stealing trade secrets and covering up the crime?
Forensic evidence
The latest chapter in the ongoing litigation between Apple and OpenAI involves fresh accusations by Apple that former engineer Chang Liu not only attempted to destroy evidence but also created an AI agent to run simulations based on confidential Apple circuit board schematics.
None of these claims look good, and it's doubtful Apple would make them if it doesn't think they can be proved. Apple wants to obtain expedited discovery in the case, which OpenAI claims to be "meritless." The next big date will be Oct. 1, when Judge Edward J. Davila will need to weigh OpenAI's denials against Apple's forensic evidence.
It is interesting that much of OpenAI's defense seems to revolve around
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Sep 01, 2026
Since launching two years ago, Serval has positioned itself as an "AI-native" alternative to incumbent IT service management (ITSM) software vendors, promising to simplify the automation of helpdesk workflows.
Serval's ITSM platform includes a workflow builder that uses a natural language interface to build code-based workflows. While vendors such as Freshworks and ServiceNow also have workflow automation tools in their products, Serval claims its approach makes automating a recurring task quicker than completing it manually, resulting in more tickets resolved automatically.
Serval — whose customers now include Spotify, Fox, and Live Nation — has received significant venture funding from Sequoia and others, and was most recently valued at around $1 billion.
With its latest product update, Catalyst — made generally available last week — Serval promises to take on more of the work needed to build and deploy workflow automations. That includes analyzing ticket histories and other data to identify processes to automate, then configuring settings and connecting integrations to help put those automations into production.
Catalyst also lets admins create long-running background agents
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Sep 01, 2026
Microsoft is working to resolve a widespread Microsoft 365 disruption that has entered its second day, with search and other functions across Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot still affected despite the recovery of much of the Exchange Online mail flow.
The incident, according to a report published by the University of Pennsylvania's IT department based on data from Microsoft's admin console, began with Microsoft investigating an increase in user reports of Exchange Online problems at 11:55 a.m. UTC on August 31.
By 12:33 p.m. UTC, Microsoft said it had isolated a common failure pattern across affected Exchange Online requests associated with authentication and protocol connectivity, and was working on potential remediation options.
About an hour later, it said that a potential corrective action for the affected infrastructure had been identified and the nature of its deployment was being evaluated.
However, another hour later, it reported that the problem had extended beyond Exchange Online to other Microsoft 365 services, but stopped short of calling it a complete or total outage.
Instead, it listed a range of degraded or failed functions across services, including Exchange Online connectivity and search, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Busines
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Aug 31, 2026
Microsoft on Friday reported that a glitch is causing Windows to tell users that Microsoft Defender Antivirus is turned off when it is in fact fully functional, a bug that the vendor says it is working to fix.
Consultants say that this advisory raises a major concern in that it will train users to ignore critical alerts, which makes them far more susceptible to attacks.
The Microsoft release health dashboard update on the issue reported: "After installing the latest updates for Microsoft Defender Antivirus, notifications might appear stating that ‘Microsoft Defender Antivirus is turned off' even though the antivirus is functioning correctly and all settings show it as active. These notifications can appear when Windows starts and intermittently afterward. They persist even if notification settings are turned off. This issue can be observed in any version of Windows or Windows Server with Microsoft Defender Antivirus running with the latest Defender updates."
The post added: "We are working to release a resolution in a future Microsoft Defender Antivirus update and will provide more information when it is available."
It then listed the various Windows client and server versions impacted: everything from the current Windows 11, version 26H1 and Windows Server 2025 back to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 20
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Aug 31, 2026
When you think of AI, and Nvidia's GPUs often come to mind because they have been so much a part of the ongoing AI revolution.
But at the recent Hot Chips show in California, an alternative future appears to be taking shape as corporate concerns continue to grow about cost, energy use and AI slowdowns.
New AI chips detailed at the event by OpenAI, Intel, Meta and others promise cheaper and faster token generation at lower power consumption. Chipmakers are also moving AI away from GPUs and onto CPUs and PCs.
"What Hot Chips demonstrated…is that the market underneath Nvidia is becoming much more diverse," said Stephen Sopko, an analyst at Hyperframe Research.
Though enterprise AI budgets continue to go up, the focus is increasingly on finding ways to make AI more productive and reducing waste in the budget. "But I would not tell CIOs that their AI budgets are therefore going down," Sopko said.
Hot Chips pointed to a future where more AI w
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Aug 31, 2026
Apple CEO Tim Cook becomes chairman of the company board tomorrow, with John Ternus taking over the top job in Cupertino. Both men followed in the footsteps of visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and both have found they must build their own definition of success.
The past is a guide, but not a template
Think back to 2011 when Jobs pushed Cook into the CEO seat. It was a tragic start, as cancer took Jobs much too early. When Cook stepped into the role, people didn't seem to expect much from him as CEO. He was a strategy and operations type, after all, not a visionary. He had no product design background, they said.
That opinion never seemed to shift, no matter what Cook did. It's as if Apple Music, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirTag, Apple Pay and other services, the development of Apple's own processors, and the company's financial success (despite challenging disasters such as COVID-19) counted for nought.
Cook's ethical commitments, particularly toward LBGT
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Aug 31, 2026
When you're working with Microsoft Copilot to create a business document, you might find yourself torn between two opposing instincts. Part of you is itching to edit its output right away, while another part wants to keep prompting the AI assistant to refine the generated text.
Turns out you can do both.
The Pages feature in the M365 Copilot app is a dynamic text editor that works in a window alongside your Copilot chat. It lets you turn the AI's response into a persistent document (a "page," in Microsoft parlance) that you can edit manually while continuing to collaborate with Copilot on it.
You can also invite your co-workers to collaborate on it, either by sharing the page with them or by embedding it in a Word document, Outlook email, OneNote note, or Teams chat as a Loop component. (More on that later.)
In this guide, we'll go over how to use the Pages tool in the M365 Copilot app. It's available with a paid Microsoft 365 plan and, notably, does not require a separate Copilot license. This means that enterprise users who have a Microsoft 365 plan but not a Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on plan can use Copilot Pages.
(Confusingly, there's also a lower-end free Copilot app for users who don't have an M365 account. It has its own
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Aug 28, 2026
The Trump Administration's decision to punish Anthropic for its stance forbidding Claude's use in domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons by identifying it as a supply chain risk to national security was "arbitrary and capricious," a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
US District Court Judge Rita Lin said federal authorities had no legitimate reason to tell companies with government contracts that they couldn't work with Anthropic.
"The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," Lin said in her ruling, calling the designation "arbitrary and capricious."
She stressed that the government action seemed punitive, and was not based on legal and national security risks.
The government's words and deeds "confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its ‘arrogance' in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model," Lin wrote.
She pointed out, "a few days before the challenged action
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Aug 28, 2026
Anthropic on Thursday launched the Model Hardware Standard, a new framework designed to enable the control of hardware using AI agents. With the new framework, AI agents will, for example, be able to operate robots or microscopess.
The Model Hardware Standard could also be useful for developing new drugs or calibrating the laser in a quantum computer, according to Reuters.
The company's plan is to eventually release the new framework as open source, after it undergoes thorough testing.
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Aug 28, 2026
An important but potentially fragile trend is emerging in the data being reported by smartphone industry trackers: while painful component price increases are denting overall phone sales, the iPhone's market share continues to increase.
This likely reflects two key truths:
Apple has fought to keep iPhone prices as stable as possible; though it has raised the price for its other products, it has not yet done so for its all-important smartphone.
The company has built a great reputation for making smartphones that keep going for years and hold value better than rival platforms, though the looming price increase could put that perception to the test.
As prices rise, quality matters more
To most people, iPhones offer a perceived value. So, when the chips are down, consumers still gravitate toward them. They recognize the quality of these devices and, as the cost of other smartphones continues to increase, see iPhones as a more valuable alternative.
Not only that, of course, but with the latest ‘e' series iPhones, Apple is punching its way into the mid-range/value smartphone market, even as incumbents are forced to raise prices because of
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Aug 28, 2026
In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow wrote, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."
The same could be said about AI today.
Gartner projects worldwide AI spending of $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump over last year, with the US accounting for at least half that amount, according to a wide range of estimates.
But in the US, utilization-adjusted total factor productivity grew just 0.07% over the four quarters ending in the first quarter of 2026. That is a near-standstill by historical standards, far below the roughly half-percent annual pace typical of the pre-ChatGPT decade.
Some 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots have produced no measurable effect on the bottom line.
A report published this week found that even Meta, one of AI's loudest boosters, has fallen short in its plan to replace workers with AI.
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Aug 28, 2026
Let's face it: Email is inherently a bit of a pain. And while Google's Gmail service is generally pretty pleasant to use, it certainly has some room for improvement — especially on the mobile front.
But as is so often the case with Google products, what you see isn't entirely what you get. The Gmail Android app has some super-useful hidden touches you've probably never noticed lurking beneath its surface — easily overlooked features that can make your mobile email experience more powerful, productive, and effective.
Here are 16 such options worth uncovering — or maybe just remembering.
[Keep the knowledge flowing with my free Android Notification Power-Pack — six powerful notification enhancements for any Android device.]
Gmail Android feature #1: Advanced email formatting commands
The Gmail Android app's email composing screen seems like a pretty bare-bones affair, but long-press on any open space whilst writing a new email — and by golly, goodness goshness, look what you'll find:
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Aug 27, 2026
Adobe has added a simplified editing mode to Photoshop designed to help new users get acquainted with the popular image editing app.
AI Assisted Editor, now available in beta, is an optional alternative to the standard view — now called Pro Editor mode — that provides a prompt-based interface similar to the Firefly editor rather than the full range of Photoshop tools. It includes a side panel that contains generative AI (genAI) features such as Generative Fill, Remove Background, and AI Markup, as well as a text prompt box.
The more streamlined editor view could also prove useful for existing users that don't need the full workspace for every edit, Adobe said. More seasoned professionals might switch to the AI Assisted Editor for concepts or mock ups, or for quick editing that doesn't require the full set of Photoshop functions.
For those who don't need it, however, the new mode can be hidden from view.
Among the other Photoshop features unveiled Thursday is Prompt to Edit, which lets users apply changes to an entire image with a simple prompt — for example, adding stormy clouds and rain. That creates an output layer that can then be modified, such as masking out image elements or changing the opacity.
Prompt to Edit is available in both AI Assisted and Pro Editor views.
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Aug 27, 2026
It doesn't matter what the UK government says, the majority of the UK public is reluctant to hand over additional surveillance powers that require tech companies to build backdoors to access encrypted communications. That's based on a poll release Thursday by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a US-based advocacy group.
UK officials still want to wreck encryption
The poll comes as the UK government renews its attempts to pursue a top secret order to force Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud encryption, even if doing so will make people less safe. There's little doubt any state-mandated backdoor would be found and exploited by today's new generation of AI-augmented hacking systems.
The government should know this, but seems resistant to reality — though it did revise its approach to taking this action under
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Aug 26, 2026
Earlier this year, Meta, one of the industry's loudest AI advocates, was ready to slash up to 60% of the members of some teams and replace them with AI, as part of what it called Project OT (Organization Transformation), an initiative to make Meta "AI native."
But it backed off at the last minute after internal data showed that the plan wasn't working out, according to a Reuters investigation published Wednesday. For example, Reuters said, code changes made to the internal software platforms and infrastructure that employees used on the job were up 220% year-over-year, according to an early June post by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, yet changes that led to new or upgraded features reaching Meta users were only up 36%.
Meta executives also saw "'reliability warning signs' caused by the AI coding surge," according to an internal post, Reuters reported. "Another post, in April, said that unchecked AI agents were performing ‘large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute.' The result: Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40% from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend firefighting them up 70%."
Reuters also noted that, in April, Meta had mandated that
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Aug 26, 2026
Enterprises that have been rapidly adding AI tools and services into their workflows are often not prepared for the internal and external threats that could expose weaknesses in their systems, analysts said.
"I don't think they are ready," said Pete Shoard, chief of research for cybersecurity at Gartner. "I think the underlying thing here is that we've been doing the same thing for so long — and it hasn't been working — that it's time for a change."
External threats can emerge when sensitive information leaks to large language models (LLMs) without users realizing the problem. AI tools could also wind up uploading sensitive files to public repositories like GitHub.
"The number one risk at the minute is hard-coded secrets being uploaded through vibe-coded applications to GitHub, and then providing a route in [to a company]," Shoard said.
As a result, companies need to get ahead of the curve by detecting internal and external threats before they materialize. That's led to renewed interest in attack surface management tools, which assess internal and ex
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Aug 26, 2026
Over the next few years, agentic AI is expected to bring not only rapid technological breakthroughs, but a societal transformation, redefining how we live, work and interact with the world. And this shift is happening quickly. "By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously," according to research firm Gartner.
Unlike traditional AI, which typically follows preset rules or algorithms, agentic AI adapts to new situations, learns from experiences, and operates independently to pursue goals without human intervention. In short, agentic AI empowers systems to act autonomously, making decisions and executing tasks — even communicating directly with other AI agents — with little or no human involvement.
Agentic AI will enable machines to interact with the physical world with unprecedented intelligence, allowing them to perform complex tasks in dynamic environments, which could be especially useful for industries facing labor shortages or hazardous conditions. However, the rise of agentic AI also brings security and ethical concerns. Ensuring these autonomous systems operate safely, transparently and responsibly will require governance frameworks and testing.
Follow this page for ongoing agentic AI coverage from
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Aug 26, 2026
Apple has filed a motion demanding expedited discovery in its trade secrets litigation against OpenAI.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and some former Apple employees now at the AI firm deliberately worked to exfiltrate valuable trade secrets from Apple. The initial allegations describe a series of serious attempts to grab this information, including one claim that OpenAI attempted to get a partner manufacturer to demonstrate proprietary Apple manufacturing process technology. Apple argues that this information is not free, belongs to Apple, and reflects decades of effort in building the tech.
OpenAI's counter arguments so far have been easy to paraphrase; it's claimed that if Apple hadn't wanted its secrets to slip, it would have put more security in place to protect them.
The company has also said it is making something completely new, so it doesn't need Apple's secrets anyway. But that doesn't seem to add up against the evidence Apple has provided so far,
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Aug 26, 2026
The tech industry faced something of a reckoning in late 2022 with the arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a simple chatbot that could answer questions, seemingly by magic.
The early frontier large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and rivals like Anthropic and Google could reason, solve problems, and answer detailed queries put to them using natural language. But no one knew exactly what was in the LLM black boxes underpinning the services.
Soon, AI models such as Meta's Llama and Mistral came along to break the proprietary AI monopoly. These kinds of models could be freely downloaded and modified to fit specific applications.
In late 2024, Chinese firm DeepSeek released V3, an open model reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost US frontier labs spent. A reasoning model, R1, followed in January 2025 and was seen as a legitimate threat to frontier models.
During the last year, open models such as Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi have also been gaining ground among enterprises for reasoning, agentic and physical AI. "The result is a clear trend: with each gener
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Aug 26, 2026
Have you heard the buzz? Good vibrations are officially here on Android — at least, on Google's latest homemade Pixel gizmos.
One of the less prominent but more useful additions on the Pixel 11 series is a quietly added option buried deep within the devices' settings to select from a series of distinctive vibration patterns for different types of alerts. That way, you can know exactly what's happening at any given moment without even having to pull your phone out of your purse and/or pantaloons — sensing simply by the manner of buzzing that one vibration indicates an important call from work while another means an incoming message from a guy named Trent (and we all know you never stop what you're doing to deal with a guy named Trent).
The vibration options vary not only in their patterns — with presets such as "Buzz," "Heartbeat," "Bumps," and "Swirl" — but also in their intensity and duration (and for the love of all things holy, get your mind out of the gutter, lest I be forced to bring HR into this conversation).
It's an interesting new way to make our devices less disruptive and more useful. But it's also not available to anyone other than owners of the new Pixel 11 models as of this moment, and it's not entirely clear when that might change or how far any theoretical rollout beyond that could reach.
Hold the phone, though: As usual here in the land o' Android, where there's a will,
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Aug 25, 2026
Perplexity on Tuesday rolled out an offering that runs the AI entirely on a local machine, and that, it said, will keep "private data local and escalating to the cloud only when a task needs it."
The service, called simply Portable Computer, is a local version of Perplexity Computer that runs on the Nvidia DGX Spark with Qwen 3.8 27B or with PPLX 27B, a post-trained version of the Qwen model, Perplexity said, adding that a 30B open model is coming soon to the model picker. The orchestrator, planner, tool router, scheduler, durable task queue, and local search index all run on device.
Portable Computer requires Linux as its underlying OS, with Windows support "coming soon."
The most critical benefits for enterprise IT are the Perplexity promise that data stays local, and that on-device work doesn't consume token credits. Customers are only charged if the system is explicitly told to move compute to the cloud "for more advanced research and reasoning."
Doing as much work as possible locally is becoming a trend, as users seek to lower token costs and minimize their need for increasi
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Aug 25, 2026
AI has already begun to impact the job market and primarily affects young people early in their careers, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford University. The researchers analyzed anonymized salary data from the HR platform ADP and compared occupations that are affected by AI to varying degrees to develop their findings, Ars Technica reported.
Among people aged 22 to 25, employment in the occupations most exposed to AI is now 19% lower than in positions less exposed to AI. Last year, the difference was 13%.
When looking at the labor market more broadly, the differences are significantly smaller. Older and more experienced workers have not been affected in the same way. According to the researchers, this is primarily because fewer young people are being hired in AI-exposed occupations, rather than existing employees being laid off.
The decline among young people is also most evident in occupations where AI can be us
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Aug 25, 2026
Perhaps it is appropriate that the last few days of Tim Cook's leadership at Apple is marked by the return of Mac manufacturing to America in the form of the new Mac mini, which the company has promised it will assemble in the US this year. The company on Tuesday also introduced new Mac Studio models.
It's a perfect footnote to illustrate the tremendous work Cook has done to balance sometimes opposing forces both within and outside the company. In this instance, it mirrors his difficult diplomacy to try to get Apple one the right side of the Trump Administration.
US officials have long wanted Apple to bring all of its product manufacturing back home. The company, in turn, has had to argue and cajole and show that this is simply not possible — because even if you built new factories today, you would not have sufficiently skilled employees to work in them tomorrow.
That reality has guided Apple in its approach to investing in US manufacturing. The company seeks to develop the most high-tech manufacturing in the US, while leaving more general product assembly elsewhere. This changes with the Mac mini, which is now the company's flagship "Made in USA" product with final assembly in the US, replacing the now-disc
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Aug 25, 2026
Once upon a time Microsoft was bullish on China.
Back in early 2010, when Steve Ballmer was CEO and Bill Gates was Chairman, Google was threatening to pull out of China because of Chinese censorship and because of what the company called Chinese government-sponsored cyberattacks. Google wasn't alone. Other tech companies — as well as politicians like then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — were saying the same things.
Microsoft, though, was having none of it.
Ballmer told Reuters back then, "We're attacked every day from all parts of the world and I think everybody else is, too. We didn't see anything out of the ordinary."
Reuters asked Ballmer whether the company would pull out of China, and Ballmer bluntly said, "No," adding, "I don't understand how that helps anything. I don't understand how that helps us and I don't understand how that helps China."
There was, of course, an ulterior motive to Ballmer's defense of its China relationship. Google's search engine was dominant across the world, and Microsoft's Bing couldn't catch up. Ballmer hoped Bing would make inroads into the Chinese market and eventually overtake Google worldwide.
That didn't happen, of course. It likely never will.
Today, though, Microsoft has all but abandoned China. And that doesn'
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Aug 24, 2026
For most of the last two decades, a business laptop lived on a worker's desk and rarely left the building. Today that assumption no longer holds. According to Gallup, more than three-quarters (78%) of employees now work fully or partially remotely.
Gartner expects businesses to keep computing devices roughly 15% longer than in recent years, due to cost, so the hardware that SMBs buy now has to hold up over a longer stretch of use. Gartner also projects that AI PCs will make up more than half of all PC sales in 2026, so durability and mobility increasingly need to coexist with the higher processing power that on-device AI requires.
A laptop designed for a stationary desk job is not built for that kind of movement, so small business owners buying their next round of hardware need a different checklist. Here are five things worth evaluating before the next purchase.
Powerful processing: How many applications and browser windows do you have open at any given time? Probably dozens. Running multiple applications simultaneously require
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Aug 24, 2026
You can't have missed all the recent leaks. What used to be occasional glimpses into Apple's future plans, followed by scripted public events, has now become a cadence of leaks followed by announcements.
Apple can't seem to make a single move without it being telegraphed in advance to its users, usually from the same sources. We get treated to spookily accurate predictions about the big announcements, such as new iPhones. But now we also get a heads up for the smaller stuff, like the recently introduced Apple Upgrade scheme. It makes for interesting reading for the world's most committed Apple watchers, that interest translates into waves of headlines, which is why Apple now effectively holds endless iPhone announcements each year.
Using the upcoming folding iPhone as an illustration, it works like this:
The seven waves of Apple product launches
First, we get an outsider rumor that Apple is about to introduce a new device, in this case a folding iPhone.
Later, we might get more speculation, usually along the lines that the still unannounced device has been "delayed" for some reason.
A
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Aug 24, 2026
Copilot, Microsoft's generative AI chatbot, can do many things, but one of its best uses is as a researcher, for pretty much anything you want in business or personal use.
If you're looking for in-depth information, there's a lot more you can do than type a simple request into Copilot's search box. Simple prompts can be fine when you're looking for basic information, but for anything beyond that, you need help. Here are six ways to turbocharge your research with Copilot.
Note that Copilot is available in several places and with varying capabilities. Everyone can use the free Copilot app for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and on the web. There's also Copilot Chat in the M365 Copilot web app, which provides access to more powerful tools under some Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And users with certain M365 subscriptions can use Copilot from within M365 apps like Word.
Business users with an M365 Copilot subscription can use an advanced Copilot agent called Researcher, built for very deep dives into enterprise data, which is then formatted into reports. We'll cover the Researcher agen
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Aug 21, 2026
With the launch of "Slack Code" channels, Slack this week introduced a new way for developers and non-tech staff to work collaboratively with coding agents.
While Slack already integrates with several coding agents, developers have to interact with them independently to get work done. The aim of Slack Code is to make agents available to multiple coworkers in shared, project-based "code channels."
"We built code channels to be this multi-player AI experience and bring more development into Slack," said Sateja Parulekar, vice president of product marketing at Slack. "It's not just engineers and product managers who are working with the coding agents; it's the marketers, the product designers who are now able to interact with a coding agent in a safe, governed environment."
Slack code channels are intended for one-off coding sessions and projects — building a new application feature, updating a web page, or fixing a bug, for example.
When the coding agent is tagged in a Slack channel or DM with a request, it automatically creates a new code channel, adds links to required documents, and invites relevant participants.
The code channel functions just like a normal Sla
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Aug 21, 2026
OpenAI is adding a new safety capability that allows enterprises to detect misuse of its AI systems across multiple interactions without retaining prompts or responses, enabling risk monitoring while preserving its Zero Data Retention (ZDR) commitments.
"OpenAI does not retain…prompts or model responses after a request is processed," the company said in a blog post, describing its ZDR approach. The new system, called Private Safety Processing, is "designed to identify patterns across related interactions without giving OpenAI personnel access to the underlying content."
The capability is being tested with eligible enterprise and API customers and is intended to address a limitation in existing safety controls that evaluate interactions individually, making it harder to detect risks that unfold over time.
What does Private Safety Processing do
Private Safety Processing is designed to extend existing safety systems by correlating activity across related interactions rather than analyzing each prompt in isolation, according to OpenAI.
Under the model, automated systems analyze interactions and generate "a narrowly defined signal indicating the type of activity involved," instead of exposing the underlying prompts or responses, according to OpenAI.
The system can o
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Aug 20, 2026
Apple's latest filing in its ongoing fight with OpenAI makes it sound as if Apple legal is so frustrated at the arguments the AI firm is making that it's begun swatting them away like a parent might dismiss a child.
Apple v. OpenAI: The story so far
If you've not been keeping up with tech's latest legal soap opera, here's the overview of what's true:
Apple filed a suit against OpenAI in which it accused the company of scheming to get confidential product information out of former Apple employees hoping to get jobs at generative AI (genAI) bigwig. Apple's filing includes plenty of evidence designed to show a pattern of deliberately targeted exfiltration.
Apple followed this up with additional letters requiring that around 40 OpenAI employees preserve documents and communications relevant to the trade secrets lawsuit.
Following an open letter that failed to shift public opinion, OpenAI responded with its own motion; it argues that Apple had not defined what it sees as protectable trade secrets. It also suggest
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Aug 20, 2026
After a week of using Google's new Pixel 11 phones, two seemingly at-odds realities are crystal clear in my mind:
These are truly fantastic devices that build off the many successes of the previous-gen Pixel 10 models and push the products forward in some subtle-seeming but significant ways.
Tech reviewers are gonna have an absolute field day with these things and tear 'em apart for being so similar to their predecessors — despite the fact that, by most measures, that probably won't matter and is arguably on some levels even a good thing.
Interestingly enough, these two realities manage to exist harmoniously — because they're both very much accurate and very much true.
The real question, then, becomes what all of that means for you as a productivity-minded, tech-dependent professional — and if these shiny new Pixels are advisable for you to think about buying.
The answer, believe it or not, is actually quite simple.
[Got a
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Aug 19, 2026
AI is known to be confidently wrong, and now it's influencing humans to be that way, too.
In a new study, researchers tested AI's influence on humans reviewing innovation proposals, and found that AI recommender tools were persuasive enough to convince the evaluators to reject decisions made by independent human experts, thus causing them to pass on promising innovations. Similarly, they went along with AI approval of ideas that the human experts found sub-par.
Interestingly, reviewers were also more inclined to defer to an incorrect AI decision when the model explained itself. Narrative explanations degraded human judgment, rather than enhancing it. People did better when they weren't given a reason for the AI's decision.
"Our findings reveal that LLM explanations do not necessarily improve decision-making," the researchers, associated with Harvard Business School, MIT, and the University of Washington explained in their findings. "Effective human-AI collaboration requires designs that preserve rather than supplant independent human judgment."
AI rationale can undermine human judgment
Every enterprise screens proposed projects before pursuing them, but there is alw
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Aug 19, 2026
OpenAI this week announced multiple moves designed to counter negative perceptions of its security and privacy, saying it had slowed its pace of scaling, implemented a two-week pause in reinforcement learning, and will be offering zero data retention for "eligible API customers."
In its first announcement, issued Tuesday, OpenAI said it "temporarily" slowed the pace of its scaling, in addition to pausing reinforcement learning training.
Those efforts occurred while OpenAI hardened and red-teamed its research environment and expanded monitoring, it said, adding, "our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding."
OpenAI's statement said the company will "now require stronger evidence of aligned behavior throughout all of training, building on research and evaluations already underway. Keeping increasingly capable systems aligned is a challenge the whole field will need to address."
It also highlighted other recent efforts to improve its procedures, including workload isolation, network isolation and "continuous security testing."
However, the company noted that its newly proposed monitoring will generate overhead costs of "roughly 20% of the inference compute being monitored, tho
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Aug 19, 2026
The new Google Pixel 11 Pro XL doesn't dramatically reinvent the company's flagship smartphone formula. From a hardware perspective, this year's model represents an incremental update. But after spending time with Google's latest full-featured Pixel, I've found that some of its most meaningful improvements for business users aren't necessarily the things that stand out on a spec sheet or benchmark chart.
Starting at $1,299 with 256GB of storage, the Pixel 11 Pro XL features a 6.8-in. Super Actua LTPO OLED display, Google's new Tensor G6 processor, a 5115mAh battery and an updated triple-camera system. Google also pledges seven years of operating system, Android security and Pixel Drop updates.
The hardware is very good, but Google's deeper integration of Gemini with Android and other thoughtful software features are what make this device more interesting.
Tensor G6 performance: The numbers don't tell the whole story
Google's Tensor processors have never been benchmark chart-toppers, and the Tensor G6 doesn't change that. In Geekbench 6, the Pixel 11 Pro XL scored 2,736 single-core and 7,399 multi-core numbers. That's a healthy improvement over the Pixel 10 Pro XL's 2,326 and 6,413, respectively, but well behind devices like Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra (at 3,683 and 11,243) powered by Qualcomm's latest SoCs.
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Aug 19, 2026
Apple has changed its App Store fee structure in the EU in a move to further satisfy the requirements of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). While critics continue to argue the changes don't go far enough, the European Commission welcomed the changes made and plans to monitor how they're implemented.
The new fee structure
Specifically, Apple introduced a less complex system than it had offered before, with a lower, but universal, 5% Core Technology fee applied on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. Apple changed its commission structure and eliminated some fees, including initial acquisition and store services fees. It has also expanded the scope of eligibility to operate alternative app marketplaces. The new changes go into effect Oct. 1, and include (verbatim from Apple's statement):
For App Store apps using Apple In-App Purchase, the commission will be 26%. For the vast majority of developers, including those in the App Store Small Business Program, Mini Apps Partner Program, or Video Partner Program, and for auto-renewing subscriptions after their first year, it will be 15%.
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Aug 18, 2026
Almost eight months after confirming a critical security vulnerability within the personal version of its AI assistant, Copilot, Microsoft on Tuesday issued a patch to close the hole, which relies on an LLM's inability to distinguish the data in a query from an instruction.
The CoSnitch hole was discovered by Varonis, and marked the third Copilot bug that Varonis has reported to Microsoft this year, following Reprompt, which bypassed Copilot guardrails by repeating queries, and SearchLeak, which Varonis said turned Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise into "a silent exfiltration tool. All three share the same exploit pattern: one click on a legitimate-looking link is enough."
A detailed blog, posted by Varonis on Tuesday, said the hole's capabilities were significant.
CoSnitch relied on an attacker leveraging three different Copilot flaws, Varonis wrote:
Automatic prompt execution. "The ?q= URL parameter, combined with an undocumented parameter, causes any attacker-supplied prompt to execute instantly on page load: no click, no confirmation, no user action. One link is all it tak
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Aug 18, 2026
Diffusion models are becoming sophisticated enough that they can reproduce an image even when they don't have access to the original.
In a series of ‘what if' scenarios, researchers associated with MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) swapped out different training datasets to test the impact on image outputs when original image data was completely removed.
It turns out that, at sufficient scale, nothing changed.
The researchers call the phenomenon "attribution decay": The more data a diffusion model is trained on, and the larger it gets, the less individual inputs matter.
"If you take away a piece of data and the output of the model doesn't change, then that piece of data didn't affect the output," Zheng Dai, lead author on the work, explained in an MIT blog post.
These findings could have significant ramifications when it comes to resolving growing concerns about intellectual property (IP) and copyright infringement.
Models can recreate images even if they've never ‘seen' them
Modern generative diffusion models essentially
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Aug 18, 2026
Google has paid $10 million in a bankruptcy auction for a large amount of data from the defunct Spirit Airlines, Bloomberg Law reports.
The purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million messages, data from Microsoft Teams, as well as information on revenue, flight operations, marketing, personnel, and project management. The material also includes 30 million lines of program code, development data, and various software models and algorithms, as well as pricing data from 7.2 billion competing flights and approximately 7.5 billion passenger transactions.
No personal data will be included in the deal, and according to Google, a third party will review the material and remove any information that could identify individuals. Google said the data will then be used to improve the company's products and AI models.
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Aug 18, 2026
In recent months, hints emerged concerning Apple's plans to introduce camera-equipped AirPods Pro; the cameras would be designed to pick up details of your ambient surroundings and feed information to Siri to help you with your life.
At one point, we heard the product had been pulled citing privacy concerns. But that doesn't seem to be the case, as the latest seemingly orchestrated Apple "leak" offers up a short video to explain how these things are going to work.
The privacy reset
First spotted by MacRumors (is Mark Gurman on vacation?), the short clip was unearthed from within the macOS 26.7 Release Candidate.
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Aug 18, 2026
Security researchers are warning of a newly uncovered Python malware framework that routes much of its command-and-control (C2) activity through Microsoft services that defenders already expect to see.
The Ontinue Cyber Defense Center discovered the implant while investigating an active campaign in July and has since tracked it as TWINLOOT. It was seen using SharePoint Online as a file-based dead drop, Microsoft Teams' TURN infrastructure for interactive communications, and a headless instance of the victim's own Edge browser to send Microsoft Graph API requests.
Its primary C2 traffic can terminate in Microsoft IP space rather than an attacker-controlled domain, Ontinue researchers said in a report shared with CSO ahead of its publication Tuesday.
"TWINLOOT works because defenders have been trained to treat Microsoft traffic as safe by default, and this malware was built to take full advantage of that," said Shane Barney, chief information security officer at Keeper Security. "There is no attacker-owned domain in the chain, which means the traffic looks exactly like what it is supposed to look like, and most detection tools will leave it alone."
Microsoft did not immediately respond to CSO's request
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Aug 18, 2026
Vibe coding is a top security threat to enterprises and could leak data into the public sphere, analysts and executives are saying.
"The number one risk at the minute is hard-coded secrets being uploaded through vibe-coded applications to GitHub, and then providing a route in," said Pete Shoard, chief of research for cybersecurity at Gartner.
The term "vibe coding" was coined by Andrej Karpathy as a way to describe how developers can now create applications by chatting with generative AI (genAI) tools and services. AI can quickly generate code to create a program, a dramatic change from the typical manual development process.
Not surprisingly, vibe coding became the latest rage in the developer community almost immediately.
Enterprises have been rushing to upskill employees to take advantage of the technology by encouraging non-tech employees to vibe-code applications. Companies have seen the benefits
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Aug 18, 2026
GitHub has restored services after a nearly eight-hour outage disrupted several of its core developer tools, including Actions, pull requests, APIs, Git operations, Webhooks, and Copilot, impacting software development workflows across its platform.
"This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue," the company wrote on its status page.
The disruption was first reported at 1:40 PM UTC on August 17, with GitHub initially flagging degraded performance across parts of its platform. Within minutes, the disruption had spread to API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and pull requests (PRs).
At the height of the incident, GitHub reported an error rate of about 20% across its web experience and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were seeing an error rate of approximately 50%, while SAML and OIDC authentication,
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Aug 17, 2026
The good news is that large language model (LLM) token costs are coming down. The conundrum: The overall cost of AI workloads is going up.
Gartner research predicts that, while token costs will fall by 95% by 2030, inference costs for agentic workflows will increase more than fivefold over the next two years. This is because AI app builders are using more, and often more expensive, tokens as LLMs get ever more complex. It is what Gartner calls the "inference paradox."
In other words, "the rate of innovation is outpacing the cost curve," Gartner analysts Will Sommer and Sabine Zimmerhansl noted in their report. "The market is captured by a token-deflation illusion." Buyers dangerously assume that as AI providers improve token economics, these savings will be reflected in their roadmaps. But, simply put, "they will not."
‘Swarms' of agents eating up tokens
There is no doubt that AI delivers massive value, and is often better, and faster, than people at many routine tasks, the analysts pointed out. Agents can also more quickly identify patterns
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Aug 17, 2026
OpenAI president Greg Brockman on Sunday warned enterprise CISOs that they need to more aggressively embrace agents if they want to survive upcoming cyberattacks.
Brockman said in a blog post that it has become "increasingly clear" that company systems are hiding "significant flaws, and defenders need to find and fix them before attackers do."
He added: "The Hugging Face incident showed that we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models."
The details he shared about OpenAI's current defensive efforts, however, were mostly routine best practices familiar to enterprises.
"We continue to invest in secure architecture and controls, embrace strategies like defense in depth and least privilege, and are designing systems that require multiple independent controls to fail simultaneously for something catastrophic to occur," Brockman said. "Classic security controls like network isolation, workload hardening, monitoring, and safe patching and deployment will be more important than ever in the AI future."
To combat emerging threats, Brockman also advised enterprise CISOs to increase their use of agentic systems, not surprisingly recommending those from OpenAI.
"Give your securit
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Aug 17, 2026
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is "not in favor" of Apple's plan to alleviate the impact of rapid memory price inflation by purchasing RAM made in China for use in devices sold there.
Trade by US firms with the biggest Chinese memory manufacturers, CXMT and Yangtze Memory Technologies, is restricted. Apple must secure a license before it can share product information with either firm, though it can still purchase off-the-shelf components that do not require any product details to be shared.
That may be good for Apple, despite White House reticence. Apple has said there isn't a lot of customization in how it uses memory on its systems, which means it might be able to purchase off-the-shelf RAM. Still, Lutnick seems ideologically against such a move, saying there must be "other solutions to the memory issue, but it's not great American companies using Chinese memory."
No solution in sight
Apple isn't alone. HP and Acer are both using memory from CXMT in devices sold outside the US, which suggests a US-native solution to the memory crisis doesn't yet exist. Pending discovery of any magical fix to the real-world supply challenge, the big three US-approved memory vendors continue to raise DRAM prices as they focus manufacturing on data center clients. The ve
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Aug 17, 2026
Moburst has launched Answerburst, a dedicated practice within the agency focused specifically on Answer Engine Optimization, built out of what the team describes as an internal need that showed up before there was a market name for it.
The founding story
The practice did not start as a planned product launch. According to the team, it began with client questions that traditional App Store Optimization and SEO reporting could not fully answer, specifically, why install and traffic patterns were shifting in ways that did not map to any tracked channel. Investigating those anomalies led the team to AI-mediated referrals long before AEO had settled into an industry term.
"We were debugging a mystery, not building a product," a member of the founding team said. "The naming and the packaging came after we had already been doing the work for a while."
What changed in the process
Formalizing the practice required building measurement infrastructure that did not exist off the shelf: tracking citation frequency across multiple AI assistants, distinguishing that signal from ordinary seasonal noise, and connecting it back to the channel-specific discovery features that a purely web-focused approach would have missed.
The team also says internal expectations shifted over the course of building the practice. What started as a
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Aug 17, 2026
AI-based assistants and agents are generally supposed to expedite software development lifecycles. For Microsoft's Exchange team, it may be doing the opposite, in turn leaving enterprise IT teams waiting for an update that will require extensive compatibility testing before implementation.
In response to customer questions, Microsoft said in a blog post that it was again being forced to delay the first Cumulative Update (CU1) for its Exchange Server Subscription Edition because its engineers were racing against time to validate a growing volume of security findings surfaced through AI-assisted code scanning.
"Over the last few months, various Microsoft execs made statements explaining how Microsoft is leveraging a variety of AI tools to help find vulnerabilities in our products (examples of such announcements can be found here, here and
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Aug 14, 2026
Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday closes at 751 CVE entries (across all product families), with 108 rated as critical. One flaw is already exploited, CVE-2026-68820, an elevation of privilege in the Windows WinSock driver (afd.sys). Two more were disclosed but not exploited, CVE-2026-62832 (User Profile Service) and CVE-2026-72971.
This security-only release earns Patch Now for Windows, Office and Exchange; no SQL Server updates this month. Unfortunately, several critical issues affect server roles: Windows DNS Server carries a cluster of critical RCEs; Windows DHCP Server is the most-populated Microsoft product family at 14 entries. Testing should lead with printing and fonts and the
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Aug 14, 2026
OpenAI has lost its AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar just a year after she joined the company, the Financial Times reported. Bakalar has maintained a silence and has yet to update her LinkedIn profile, but if her departure is confirmed then it will add to the list of OpenAI executives who have quit in recent months.
Other departures include robotics chief Caitlin Kalinowski, who left the company over its deal with the US Department of Defense; researcher Zoe Hitzig, who quit in a very public way by writing an article in the New York Times; and Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems.
OpenAI's ethical stance has been called into question following an attack by OpenAI models on Hugging Face.
The departure of its sole ethicist will add to the pressure on the company. In her year at OpenAI Bakalar focused on ethical approaches to model development, looking at how humans interact with AI and examining machine consciousness, according to the FT report.
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Aug 14, 2026
Chinese AI company Manus has laid out its plans to operate as an independent company following the reversal of its acquisition by Meta.
The US social media company agreed to buy Manus last year but Chinese regulators quickly opened an investigation into the deal, as they were concerned that it violated Chinese export controls. In April, China's National Development and Reform Commission blocked the purchase.
Manus will now revert to being an independent company and to meet with regulatory requirements must delete some user data collected while it was part of Meta, it said Tuesday.
The failure of the deal illustrates the problems that US and Chinese companies are having as they attempt to build a hold on the AI market.
While regulatory authorities in China don't want Manus under US ownership, US authorities are equally suspicious of China's role in AI development. The US administration fired a warning shot this March by unveiling a new cybersecuri
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Aug 14, 2026
Microsoft will bring its two Copilot apps into a unified interface for consumer and work users, part of a wider drive to create a Copilot "super app" that consolidates various features.
Until now, Microsoft has offered two Copilot apps across web, desktop and mobile platforms: a simplified, consumer-focused Copilot app, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, which combines the AI assistant with access to Microsoft's productivity apps and files.
Microsoft on Thursday announced an "updated Copilot app" aimed at providing a "simpler, more cohesive experience" for personal and work users.
For users of the consumer Copilot app, the update will provide access to Microsoft 365 tools such as Word, Excel, and Outlook from within Copilot, as well as the ability to connect email, calendars and cloud storage. At the same time, some features previously available in the consumer-focused app will be retired, including group chats and Deep Research, though Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers will still have access to a s
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Aug 14, 2026
Apple recently posted and removed details explaining how Mac users in China could set up their computers to work with Alibaba's Qwen AI. Now, Reuters has confirmed long-held speculation that Apple has revisited its Google Gemini AI playbook and built its own proprietary AI model for China with support from Alibaba.
Apple worked with a Chinese partner because US models such as ChatGPT or Claude are not being made available there, though Chinese AI development doesn't seem to be held back by that lack. Apple and Alibaba have not commented on the claims, the report said.
The approach echoes Apple's work with Google to build more advanced large language models (LLMs) for use with Apple Intelligence, and the news will likely be seen as broadly positive by Chinese iPhone users. They can now look forward to working with Apple Intelligence on their devices. The proximity of the reporting suggests they may be able to access Apple's AI quite soon, once new Apple operating systems ship next month.
The silver lining
It's also smart, as it means Apple has identified a way to introduce AI features in nations that are becoming protective of their tech stack.And while Apple's work with Google on Apple Intelligence was widely regarded as signifying how far behind the company had grown on AI, the work it is now doing with A
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Aug 14, 2026
Microsoft has been struggling to get people to use its Edge browser for years. Even though the company made Edge the default browser in Windows 10, users left in droves, most of them flocking to Google Chrome — and with good reason. The original version of Edge was underpowered, had difficult-to-use features, and offered very few extensions compared to Chrome and Firefox.
But in January 2020, Microsoft launched a new version of Edge that's based on the same technologies that drive Chrome. (The new Edge is the only one that's ever been offered in Windows 11.) The Chromium-based Edge is a much better browser, and there are compelling reasons to use it. But you might still prefer to use Chrome, Firefox, or one of the many other browsers out there.
Even if you've set up another browser to be your default in the past, it might have been changed since then. When there's a major Windows upgrade, the installation software recommends switching to Edge, and you might have inadvertently made the switch.
Whatever the reason, if Edge is your default browser in Windows 10 or 11, it's easy to switch to the browser of your choice. As I'll show you, it only takes a few minutes.
The instructions in this article assume you're using either Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11 version 25H2. If you're using an
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Aug 13, 2026
One of AI vendor DeepSeek's biggest selling points has been its ultra-low price point, but that party's about to end.
The Chinese model provider is raising API pricing for its V4 model family by notable margins, in some cases by more than 1,100%. The increases may not be that dramatic for all, though; the company is encouraging "more flexible workload scheduling," with peak rates and half-price off-peak rates.
The news was tucked into the announcement of the general availability (GA) of DeepSeek V4-Pro and upgrades to VR-Flash. The new pricing takes effect for most parts of the world on August 16.
"On paper, at peak, against the right comparator, DeepSeek's price advantage does disappear, and in places inverts," said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. But in practice, "the schedule's own clock and cache hand most of it back to any buyer paying attention."
How Flash and Pro compare now
The new API pricing structure is as follows:
Flash is now $0.22 per million input tokens (cache miss) and $0.66 per million output tokens off-peak; and $0.44 per million input tokens (cache miss) and $1.32 per million output tokens at peak.
This is up from the flat rate of $0.14 for inputs (cache miss),
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Aug 13, 2026
Apple now has a long and storied history in wearables. The Apple Watch set expectations for the category, replacing Swiss watches on so many wrists on its journey to become the world's most widely worn wearable AI device. But is Apple making the most of the technology it has now developed — and is there another opportunity waiting to be explored?
Apple seems to think there might be. Mark Gurman recently reported the company is exploring a wider family of wearables, including products such as fitness bands and rings. And while the latter certainly represents a viable opportunity, the fitness band market seems ripe for a good bit of Sherlocking.
Why is it ripe?
The technologies Apple already has
First, think of the technologies Apple can already bring to a fitness band product. The sensors, algorithms, and software the company has already developed would certainly make sense in wristband form when used with a paired iPhone to review the data the band collects. Apple's sensors have a good reputation for accuracy and could deliver outstanding battery life. They could carry a smaller display to show limited amounts of information, such as time or distance travelled. And I expect the company's product design teams could build a high-quality health and fitness band with very little effort, as some of the ke
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Aug 13, 2026
With the launch today of the AI Collaborators feature in Workfront, Adobe aims to bring AI agents directly into the flow of work as permissioned team members that can be assigned tasks.
Three types of these ‘collaborators' are now generally available in Workfront. A content reviewer agent automatically checks documents in the work management app against brand guidelines. A project coordinator tracks project progress and keeps stakeholders up to date.
Then there are "task agents" that let customers connect external AI agents to Workfront and assign them work.
The task agents are geared towards a variety of purposes — a social media manager that turns briefs into published posts, a performance analyst that reports on how campaigns are faring, or a content designer that creates visuals and layouts.
To set up a task agent, users provide a name and description of the agent's purpose, then connect it to an agent platform, with Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft's Copilot Studio, and Writer currently highlighted as options.
Once it's ready to go, users can assign work to the agent in a Workfront project just as they would a human user.
As the agent carries out its tasks, an auditable trail of actions is recorded via th
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Aug 13, 2026
Researchers at XM Cyber found that a standard domain user with no Microsoft SCCM privileges can chain multiple flaws to reach remote code execution, although the attack does require network access to the SCCM environment.
Enterprises use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to deploy operating systems, manage patches, distribute software, and monitor compliance across large Windows fleets. XM Cyber's attack can move from an ordinary domain account to code execution as "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" on the primary site server.
"After the Site Server is compromised, all of its managed clients are compromised as well, which usually means taking over all the company assets," XM Cyber's Omri Baso told CSO.
The revealed attack chain combines four weaknesses, including a broken authorization in the AdminService upload functionality, a path-traversal flaw dubbed "CabSlip," weak code-signing validation that could be tricked with a $58 commercial certificate, and an unsigned DLL-loading path in the SMS Executive service.
Microsoft fixed the initial authorization flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-47301, in July, but Baso said the remaining links in the chain are not expecte
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Aug 13, 2026
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence organization comprised of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. and several for-profit subsidiaries. The company is perhaps best known for its ChatGPT chatbot, which launched in 2022, kicking off a period of massive disruption in the tech industry and beyond.
A complicated and increasingly contentious relationship with Microsoft, ongoing legal issues over copyright infringement, and frequent product announcements keep OpenAI in the news. Follow this page and never miss a beat.
Latest Open AI news and analysis:
OpenAI targets heavy users with premium ChatGPT Business seats
Aug. 11, 2026: OpenAI is introducing a higher-priced "Premium" tier for its ChatGPT Business offering, allowing enterprises to assign higher-capacity access to select users alongside standard licences - a move analysts said is about enterprise AI vendors redesigning pricing to capture more value from high-intensity workloads.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.6-Cyber as AI narrows vulnerability response window
Aug. 11, 2026: OpenAI has expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity program and
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Aug 13, 2026
Have you heard? It's that time of year again — time for some snazzy new Pixels to tempt our gadget-coveting "gimme!" reflexes and guide flagship Android phone expectations for months to come.
Google's latest and greatest gizmo is the Pixel 11 series, which includes the regular Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro alongside the plus-sized Pixel 11 XL and Pixel 11 Pro XL and the fancy new folding Pixel 11 Pro Fold model (gesundheit!). El Googaloo took the wraps off all those new devices on Wednesday and has 'em all available for preorder now, with prices starting at $899 (regular Pixel 11), $1,099 (Pixel 11 Pro), and $1,299 (Pixel 11 Pro Fold).
At first glance, this year's Pixel models might not seem like the most exciting upgrades from last year's Pixel 10 products. They bring plenty of significant refinements to an already successful formula, with some welcome ticks forward — like better cameras, brighter and more scratch-resistant displays, faster charging speeds, and an updated processor that supposedly leads to speedier and more efficient performance. And, of course, there's more Gemini everywhere (for better
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Aug 12, 2026
Lovable, the Swedish-based AI software creation platform company, today announced an acceleration of its product, infrastructure, and team development efforts — and a noteworthy round of Series C funding totaling $400 million.
The company said in its statement that it is looking to augment its platform, which it boasts is already used by almost two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies.
Headquartered in Stockholm, Lovable plans to grow its team to 450 people this year, hiring most heavily in machine learning, product, infrastructure, and security roles, and is looking to expand operations from its home base to include locations in London and three US cities: Boston, San Francisco, and New York City.
The planned growth is made possible by the latest infusion of venture capital, which follows a $330 million Series B funding round last December. Lovable now has a $13.3 billion valuation.
The Series C funding was led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund and includes US-based Regent. (Regent is the parent company of Foundry.)
Earlier this mo
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Aug 12, 2026
Just weeks after Microsoft patched a critical hole in Microsoft Defender, a cybersecurity researcher has posted an apparent bypass that provides system-level control to attackers once they gain any level of access.
The researcher, who goes by the name Nightmare Eclipse, has been engaged in a long-running battle with Microsoft Security.
Nightmare Eclipse has not provided the further details we requested, however Microsoft sent a brief statement, saying, "Microsoft is aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims," and reiterating its commitment to investigating issues and supporting coordinated disclosure.
But the proof of concept (PoC) security bypass, ShieldBreak, described by Nightmare Eclipse in a series of public posts, potentially threatens to be more damaging than earlier bypasses.
Like other recen
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Aug 12, 2026
Lead times of nine to 12 or even 18 months. Costs rising by 35%, 45%, even 50% to 200%. More than halfway through 2026, the market for IT infrastructure that's crucial for enterprise projects, including those involving artificial intelligence, is strapped.
Memory is at the root of the shortages. Memory prices "have risen by 50% to 200%, resulting in PC prices increasing by 35% to 45% and some server prices rising over 125%," according to Jon Forest, VP analyst at Gartner. Network switches also need memory, albeit in lesser amounts than servers, so they are not immune, with prices and lead times likewise rising dramatically.
Industry experts agree that most of the issues stem from hyperscalers gobbling up memory capacity, which trickles down to servers, storage systems, and networking devices. But while the source of the problem may be new, supply chain disruptions are far from unprecedented.
As a result, industry insiders are not short on advice on how best to deal with the situation, with tips including making better use of what you have, considering options beyond your usual scope, and lots of planning with your vendors and internal finance teams.
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Aug 12, 2026
Apple is in the process of tweaking its business models to cope with the unyielding memory price and availability crisis. Its response is now emerging across multiple fronts.
Finance or lease
The company's recently-introduced Apple Upgrade scheme in partnership with Klarna is a smart response to the reality that as devices inevitably become more expensive, consumers will shift from outright ownership to flexible lease and financing arrangements. With its partnership, Apple continues to generate revenue while also maximizing the likelihood customers will return the product at EOL, more about which later.
Samsung and Google have introduced similar schemes. "Financing models already dominant in India and Africa are now poised to reshape the US and European markets," said CCS Insight in a presentation exploring the consequences of the memory shortage.
Downgrade
Apple has seen a lot of success with the iPhone 17 this year. That success wasn't entirely because it's such a good smartphone; it also reflects consumers making the decision to purchase lower-specced devices to stay within budget. Apple continues to see
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Aug 12, 2026
It's likely that many enterprises have created — or are at least considering — AI policies that clearly lay out approved AI tools and their uses, set up training programs for employees to help them use the tools in their jobs, and establish guardrails around those systems to avoid issues such as security vulnerabilities and data bias.
But how many of these policies have received the blessing of employees? It's a key question, because many workers are highly wary of AI.
They worry that it will cost them their jobs, either by taking over their work or because companies will cut jobs and use the savings to fund investments in AI research and infrastructure. They worry about AI-powered performance tracking software impacting raises and promotions. They worry about AI screening of job applications for future roles.
Even employees who have embraced AI to assist their work have reason to worry. Many say that using generative AI tools saves them time, but the time savings are eroded by "botsitting" — having to check and recheck output, provide missing context, fix errors, and go through multiple iterations before the desired outcome is achieved. They may also have to wade through "workslop
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Aug 11, 2026
Anthropic will begin labeling AI-generated content created by Claude, Claude Code, and the company's API, as well as Claude models via third-party services, according to The Register.
Text generated by future Claude models will be given an invisible watermark. According to Anthropic, the watermark is embedded directly into the generated text without affecting its meaning or readability. For files, Anthropic will instead use signed metadata in accordance with the C2PA standard.
The effort is part of the company's plan to comply with the EU's AI Regulation and transparency requirements regarding AI-generated material. However, the labeling will be implemented globally for all users.
At the same time, Anthropic noted that the technology has its limitations. A label does not guarantee that material was created by Claude. Similarly, the absence of a label is not necessarily proof that the material is not AI-generated.
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