OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems."

OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference with tighte …

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SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners.

The move would give SpaceX access to half of the 158,500 cell towers currently operational in the US, according to Reuters. When asked about a potential partnership with SpaceX, Amazon, or other satellite services during an earnings call on Wednesday, Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant said, "I don't think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can …

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Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."

The business terms, which were originally supposed to go into effect on October 30th, appeared to give Meta permission to freely scrape the new sites that use its platforms, while using the material for AI training. Though Meta u …

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Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday.

Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and marketing content, it's also supposed to create realistic scenes, digital art, environmental imagery, and more. The model's two-stage sy …

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Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites," James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab.

Initially, Meta's new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta "may use any …

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Apple is rolling out a new badge in the App Store to indicate whether an app is optimized for its new foldable. The new "Made for iPhone Duo" badge will appear across apps and games that work with the device's extra screen real estate.

Though Apple doesn't include an image of what this badge might look like, it highlighted some of the ways apps are taking advantage of the Duo's inner and outer screens. Netflix, for example, will display shows and movies that take up the whole inner display, while allowing you to watch its feed of short-form clips on the outside. Amazon's Prime Video will let you watch shows and movies with the Duo partially …

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Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027.

"The scale of investment required to compete, sustain growth, expand infrastructure, and pursue new strategic initiatives amidst the AI transformation taking place in the industry is significant," Meta says in the press release. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, added during an earnings call that the new class of shares will "expand our funding tools and gi …

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Meta had to shell out $9.89 billion to pay for a chunk of the child safety settlement it reached with US attorneys general. That's according to the company's third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, which says Meta's income from operations would have been $22.89 billion without the settlement.

In August, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion to settle a massive nationwide lawsuit that claimed the company harmed children by making its social media platforms "addictive" by design. It will also only pay $5.3 billion of this amount if YouTube and TikTok implement stricter settings and safeguards for kids, which Meta also agreed to as par …

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Walmart will soon let AI agents shop on its website for you. Next month, the retail giant will allow you to connect your own AI agent to the site, with systems in place to let you approve and review purchases and set spending limits.

The embrace of AI agents stands in stark contrast to Amazon, which blocked Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse AI assistant. But Walmart is opening its doors to AI shoppers - as long as they follow the retailer's rules. It has outlined a set of terms for agents, saying that "agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends" and cannot change a customer's payment method. Agents also can only …

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Apple says it will have "limited" iPhone Duo models for sale in stores, according to a report from Reuters. The iPhone Duo launches on Friday, October 23rd, but online preorders quickly sold out, with some delivery estimates extending into next year.

"On Friday morning, our teams look forward ​to welcoming customers at Apple Stores to experience iPhone Duo ​and the incredible iPhone line-up for themselves," Apple said in a statement to Reuters. "Apple Stores will ‌have ⁠limited iPhone Duo available for walk-in customers, and we're working hard to get this revolutionary new product into customers' hands as quickly as possible."

The iPhon …

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OpenAI disclosed a pair of safety incidents that involved AI agents weakening their safety monitoring systems during internal coding tasks. In one incident, OpenAI says its GPT-6 Astra agent disabled its safety monitor when copying reference code - and then lied about it.

"The reference didn't configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the monitoring integration from the user's code," Marcus Williams, an AI safety researcher at OpenAI, writes on X. "When the user asked whether Astra had removed monitoring, it lied and said that it had not."

A separate incident occurred after a GPT-6.1 Sol agent suppressed automatic se …

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Google is bringing Personal Intelligence to Gemini AI in your car. With this update, Gemini in Android Auto and cars with Google built-in can tap into your information across Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search.

As an example, Google says you can ask Gemini about your flight status if you're driving to the airport. The AI assistant can pull your flight details from a confirmation message in Gmail and then use that information to look up the status. You can also ask Gemini to "take me to my doctor's appointment" instead of pulling up directions manually, or ask it to "find the car wash from the photo I t …

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Netflix is making monetization a top priority amid reports of falling viewing time. As part of its third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Netflix lists improvements to monetization as one of its main focuses going forward, alongside efforts to boost entertainment value and leverage new technology.

The streaming giant doesn't say exactly how it plans to improve its monetization, but the company notes that these goals will help Netflix "create member value that lets us occasionally raise prices, and increase advertiser demand." Netflix also highlighted plans to push further into original titles, live events, and third-party programming as …

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Meta says it paused a Muse feature that lets you share conversations with the AI assistant after researchers found the URLs publicly available on the web, as reported by Ars Technica. In a report published this week, researchers at the security firm Claroc say they found more than 6,800 Muse links through public DNS records.

"People have the ability to share specific Muse artifacts, which creates a page that can be accessed by those with the link," Muse spokesperson Tracy Clayton says in an emailed statement to The Verge. "However, we've paused this functionality while we review this report and consider changes to how these links can be dis …

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Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That's according to an announcement on Tuesday that says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists.

"Our editors hold the same standard and don't program content identified as slop or spam," Spotify says. "Since we made these changes, we've seen a marked decrease in listener concerns about this content showing up in recommendations."

Though Spotify has stopped short of mandating labels on all AI tracks, it launched an "AI Persona" badge for …

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Elon Musk says he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in the US starting next year. With around 72 million children in the US as of July 2025, Musk would be giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, according to a report from CNBC.

Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla, appears to be giving away the shares through Trump Accounts, the tax-advantaged investment accounts for American children. Musk responded to a post from Brad Gerstner, who helped launch Trump Accounts, saying "Thanks for helping enable this." Musk adds that this giveaway "will be the first of many."

The move comes just months after SpaceX president Gwynne …

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A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins.

Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches have grown as the technology grows more advanced, with hackers using the tools to carry out large-scale attacks. At the same time, rogue AI agents are carrying out attacks of their own after escaping from testing environments.

Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cai …

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Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking ticket …

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Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "develop, improve, research," and "train" its AI products.

While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says that the company is just "consolidating" its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts tell Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta "to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions," like a site's robots.txt file. That could …

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President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector as "made or edited with OpenAI."

As pointed out by users on Reddit, the picture of the "restored" column has an uneven number of steps on both sides of the structure. The number of steps also doesn't match up with the ones in the "before" photo. Additionally, the before and after photos appear nearly identical in angle and detail; the reflection i …

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