• PA measles outbreak tops 1,000 cases, largest since disease was eliminated
• TP-Link problems in US grow amid FCC router ban and four state lawsuits
• Chemistry Nobel goes to reactions like those that gave life a hand
• Pediatricians renew call to ban raw milk as anti-science rhetoric reigns
• Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift
• Jaguar Type 01 debuts; now, no one remembers the electric Ferrari
• Trade group crunches numbers on Trump’s impossible push for 100% US-made tech
• Mistral says "Le Chonk" can challenge the best AI models
• Google rolls out improved SynthID AI content detector, now available globally
• AI/ML is becoming a performance factor in motorsport
• Review: Fine, let's talk about Digger
• If you're looking, here's a "good deal" for NASA and the European Space Agency
• Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says
• OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU
• HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service”
• It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane
• Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services
• Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
• Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return
• Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input
| • Sources: Broadcom has been working to arrange more than $50B in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chip; Oracle is in talks on financing for a big chip purchase (Wall Street Journal)
• OpenAI says GPT-6 in ChatGPT's Chat tab is powered by GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go tiers (@openai)
• Sources: former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan is raising a ~$500M fund to back growth- and later-stage US AI startups, prioritizing national security (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
• Anthropic cuts Sonnet 5.5 cache read price from $0.20 to $0.10 and adds monthly API credits: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x, up to $500 shared by Team users (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
• Anthropic prices Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, and $0.50 and $2.50 above, vs. $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5 (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack)
• OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, a new feature that includes graphics and interactive elements like charts, buttons, and forms in answers (OpenAI)
• Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, the first Haiku model with effort controls, for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summary and classification requests (Anthropic)
• Microsoft opens preorders for the $2,599+ Surface Laptop Ultra, shipping from October 16, with an RTX Spark and three USB-C ports; one is magnetic like MagSafe (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
• Microsoft opens preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, with 128GB of unified memory to run local models with 120B+ parameters, shipping in November (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)
• Meta rolls out AI tools to find ads that secretly lead users to CSAM and says it took action against 33.2M pieces of child exploitation content in H1 2026 (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
• OpenAI's first report on teen ChatGPT use says teens spend under 15 minutes per day on average on the chatbot, with less than 2% using it for 3+ hours straight (Reuters)
• Los Angeles-based game studio Gardens Interactive raised a $35M+ Series B led by Lightspeed at a $190M pre-money valuation, taking its total funding to $71M (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)
• Healthleap, which makes AI screening software that helps identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, raised $38M across a $30M Series A and an $8M seed (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
• Los Angeles-based Parallel Systems, which makes autonomous electric freight trains, raised a $100M Series C led by AVP, taking its total funding to $200M+ (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)
• Elon Musk says Grok Bot going forward will use the "best back-end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno, and other leading APIs" (Grace Kay/The Information)
| • The FCC proposes new mid-band spectrum auction and unlocking 800MHz for drones
• Here's what the $6,000 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box looks like
• Microsoft's Surface RTX Spark Dev Box costs an eye-watering $6,000
• Surface Laptop Ultra hands-on: A beautiful beast powered by NVIDIA's RTX Spark
• Disney+ will stream the Super Bowl, along with some Monday Night Football games
• Microsoft may have finally fixed Windows search by turning it into a chatbot
• Here's everything we know about Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra
• Everything announced at Microsoft's Windows and Surface event
• We now have images of the smart home products that Apple and LG are reportedly cooking up
• Cisco is bringing a new agentic framework to its Webex enterprise platform
• Ring's smart lock has a hand crank so it works even if the power's out
• Google's AI detection website is now available
• OpenAI just posted hundreds more results on major math problems
• The Social Reckoning is a timely reminder that we shouldn't trust Meta
• Xreal's Aura Android XR smartglasses will cost you at least $1,279
• Google's experimental Playground platform uses AI to create games for you
• Microsoft Windows and Surface event 2026: Live updates on the Surface Laptop Ultra and NVIDIA RTX Spark
• Ultrahuman now offers on-demand heart rhythm scans
• How to watch the Microsoft Windows and Surface event
• Jaguar's controversial Type 01 EV looks like a '40s gangster car built for the modern electric era
|