A growing number of AI coding tools now dispatch dozens of AI agents to work on a task in parallel rather than relying on a single model. Here is what an 'agent swarm' actually is, why it changes the cost calculus of building software with AI, and what tradeoffs it introduces.
The European Union has fined AliExpress a record $625 million under its Digital Services Act after the online marketplace failed to remove listings for unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics despite repeated warnings. The company says it is shocked by the size of the penalty.
Index funds are marketed as one of the safest, most passive ways to invest, spreading risk across the whole market rather than betting on individual companies. As SpaceX moves toward a stock market listing at a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion, ordinary index fund investors may end up owning a slice of it, whether they intended to or not.
Google's parent company Alphabet is reportedly developing a new chip aimed at making its Gemini AI models run far more efficiently. Here is why custom silicon matters so much to AI companies right now, and what a more efficient Gemini could mean for costs and capability.
A US court has given final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over its use of copyrighted books to train AI models, closing one of the most closely watched legal cases in the AI industry. The deal resolves this specific dispute but leaves the broader question of AI training and copyright unsettled.
An engineer shared the lessons learned after selling 2,500 units of a small MIDI recording device they designed themselves. The experience illustrates why building a hardware business differs so sharply from software — and why it's often more accessible than assumed.
A hobbyist developer has built an emulator that mimics Intel's discontinued Itanium (IA-64) processor architecture, capable of booting real versions of Windows. The project shines new light on a chip architecture widely considered a commercial failure but still fascinating from an engineering standpoint.
Climate change and urbanization are letting mosquitoes spread into regions where they previously couldn't survive, raising the risk that diseases like malaria and dengue reach places that have never seen them. Experts say early-warning monitoring systems, while costly, are the most effective way to prevent outbreaks.
A rocket developed by an Indian private space company has become the country's first privately built vehicle to reach orbit, succeeding on its very first attempt. The milestone is seen as a turning point for India's fast-growing private space industry.
Netflix has announced it paid $587 million in cash to acquire InterPositive, an AI-powered filmmaking startup co-founded by actor and producer Ben Affleck. The deal is one of the largest recent examples of a streaming platform investing in AI to cut production costs.
Prior authorization — one of the most hated bottlenecks in US healthcare — is now being automated with AI by both insurers and hospitals. But experts warn the same technology that promises to speed up approvals could just as easily make the standoff between the two sides worse.
For years, charging was the single biggest headache of any long electric-vehicle road trip. Real-world charging data collected on a 600-mile road trip shows just how much that picture has changed — and where the friction still hasn't disappeared.
A claim that GPT-5.6 was used to help close a decades-old open question in convex optimization spread quickly through the math community following an OpenAI proof announcement. Here's what convex optimization actually is, and why the claim — still being scrutinized by mathematicians — generated so much attention.
The city of San Francisco has taken legal action against Apple and Google over so-called "nudify" apps that use AI to generate non-consensual explicit images from ordinary photos, arguing the companies continue to profit directly from hosting them. The case targets app-store commissions as much as the apps themselves.
A flaw in TP-Link's Kasa smart cameras, unnoticed for six years, leaked a home's GPS location with no authentication required. Here's how these IoT vulnerabilities happen, and how to protect your smart home devices.
The Google-backed FireSat satellite program aims to catch small, newly ignited wildfires far earlier than traditional weather satellites can. Here's how the system works and why early detection matters so much.
TikTok is testing an opt-in tool that lets creators scan for unauthorized AI-generated images of their own face, verified through an identity check with Jumio. YouTube has already rolled out a similar tool to all adult users.
Data analytics company Databricks has reached a $188 billion valuation in its latest private funding round, becoming one of the world's most valuable private tech companies. The company is cementing its position in enterprise AI infrastructure with published research on open-weight models.
San Francisco's City Attorney has sent letters to Apple and Google saying AI-powered 'nudify' apps that fabricate nude images violate state law and must be removed from their stores. Here's how these apps work and why regulators are acting now.
SpaceX halted its second attempt to launch the newest Starship V3 vehicle just after its engines ignited, without immediately explaining what went wrong. Shares of the company fell in after-hours private trading before paring some of the losses.
Coca-Cola says production at its Fairlife dairy unit will remain suspended in the United States after a ransomware attack, the latest in a run of cyberattacks hitting food and beverage manufacturers. Here is what is known so far, and why the sector has become a recurring target.
Workers at a Hyundai auto factory have gone on strike over the company's plan to deploy 25,000 Atlas humanoid robots, starting with US plants in 2028. The dispute reflects a wider tension in manufacturing as automakers move humanoid robots from pilot programs toward production lines.
Keeping a human in the loop is the default answer to worries about autonomous AI agents making mistakes. But as agents take on more tasks, engineers are finding that the humans reviewing them grow fatigued and start rubber-stamping — turning a safety mechanism into a formality.
CD sales climbed 16% year-over-year in the first half of 2026 in the US, according to research firm Luminate, reversing decades of decline. The growth is being driven by collectors, K-pop fandoms and listeners priced out of vinyl — and some buyers aren't even playing the discs.
Payments company Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly made a joint offer worth more than $53 billion to acquire PayPal, according to people familiar with the matter. Here's what such a deal would mean for the online payments industry, and why it would face serious regulatory hurdles.
As Christopher Nolan's big-budget adaptation of The Odyssey draws crowds to theaters, a small studio is racing to release its own AI-generated take on the same story. It's the latest example of a growing category critics call AI slop movies: cheaply made, algorithmically assisted films riding the coattails of bigger releases.
A newly disclosed Windows vulnerability, dubbed HiveLegacy, emerged the same day Microsoft shipped a record number of security patches, a coincidence that highlights how zero-day flaws and the routine patching cycle interact. Here's what a zero-day actually is, and why Patch Tuesday hasn't solved the problem.
A hack that exposed internal source code at AI music generator Suno appears to reveal the company scraped decades of audio from YouTube to train its models, reviving a familiar fight over how generative AI companies source the material they train on. Here's the underlying pattern behind these recurring disputes.
Thinking Machines, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has released its first open-weight model, Inkling, after a year and a half spent building infrastructure largely out of public view. The release is a bet against the industry's dominant one-size-fits-all approach to AI.
Google is marking the 25th anniversary of Image Search with a redesigned, AI-powered gallery that continuously updates based on a user's interests. The overhaul is a reminder of how far the tool has come since launching as a simple keyword-matching feature.