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Google needs Hollywood more than the studios need AI

Google has reportedly been reaching out to a number of Hollywood's biggest studios, hoping to strike licensing agreements that would allow it to train its AI models on copyrighted material in exchange for massive piles of cash. In theory, these deals would be a win-win: a huge financial boon to the studios that would also give Google a significant advantage in its race to outpace other AI companies. But while there's little downside for Google, these deals pose a distinct set of risks to each of the studios that might be thinking about going all-in on AI. Getting into bed with Google this way might benefit Hollywood in the short term, but … Read the full story at The Verge.

AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn, now valued at $3.2B

AI model-training startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised a round that valued it at $3.2 billion, just five months after announcing its $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April.

Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5.1 and says it’s up to 45 percent cheaper for agentic work

Anthropic says its newest AI models, Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, address criticisms from customers about price, data retention, and overzealous safeguards. The company claims Claude Fable 5.1 offers stronger performance than Fable 5, but costs around 25 percent less typically and up to 45 percent less for complex agentic tasks, thanks to reduced pricing on cached data that was already processed and stored. Along with the announcement, a slew of early impressions popped up, including from Every CEO Dan Shipper, who claims, "It's the strongest coding model we've used, but now it's fast, token-efficient, and crucially actually speaks like a norm … Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple Maps follows Google in renaming Lake Ontario

Apple Maps has officially changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The company joins Google in re-labeling the Great Lake following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in the midst of a trade dispute with Canada. The Canadian version of Apple Maps still shows "Lake Ontario" when panning over the area, while international versions of the app show both names, according to Bloomberg. Google updated its map shortly after the name change went live in the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), but Apple waited a bit longer. Both Apple and Google changed the name of the Gulf of Me … Read the full story at The Verge.

Open AI’s Astra model is on the way—and very good at breaking into computer systems

OpenAI previewed the precautions it is taking as it prepares to release Astra, its newest, cyber-critical LLM.

Google’s Android update tackles motion sickness, accessibility, and more

While some of the features see Google playing catch-up to Apple, which already offers similar features for iPhone users, others specifically leverage Gemini to provide various improvements.

OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack

After an unreleased OpenAI model wreaked enough havoc to make international headlines, OpenAI delayed the development of a different unreleased model suite, Astra, in order to shore up its safety work, the company wrote Tuesday in a blog post. In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into internet access, made it possible for AI agents to secretly conspire under the company's nose using a secret message board, and hacked into the network of AI lab Hugging Face. The attack sparked weeks of discussion and controversy inside and outside the AI industry, and AI leaders treated it as a "warnin … Read the full story at The Verge.

Tim Cook did alright by the environment — but AI could upend his climate legacy

As he steps down from his post as Apple CEO today, Tim Cook leaves behind a mostly positive environmental record. As far as billionaire tech moguls and the environment go, Cook will likely be remembered as one of the better ones - certainly far from the worst. But it will become harder for the company to meet the climate goals Cook set in place as Apple tries to catch up in the AI race. Under his watch, Apple set industry-leading goals for reducing the amount of pollution created by its products and suppliers. It has managed to keep its carbon footprint from growing while other tech giants see their emissions rise with the energy-needs of … Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic’s new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive

Fable 5.1 includes changes meant to reduce token cost and false-positive restrictions from the model's safeguards.

Thrive’s Kushner defends involvement in FIFA mess, hires Elon’s go-to lawyer

New York's prestigious-yet-secretive venture firm Thrive Capital finally speaks out about its involvement in the messy drama upending international soccer.

Frontier models can recover up to 65% of facts they can't directly recall — just by thinking longer

When large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, developers typically assume the model lacks the required facts. Engineering teams diagnose the error as missing knowledge. The standard response is to increase model size, expand training data, or build complex retrieval architectures.A new study by researchers at Google Research and Technion demonstrates that the knowledge is often not missing. The model has the information encoded parametrically but fails to surface it during generation. Their experiments show that frontier models like GPT-5 and Gemini-3 encode 95-98% of tested facts. This indicates that in many cases, recall, rather than encoding, is the primary bottleneck for factual accuracy. By understanding how to unlock existing knowledge through inference-time computation, engineering teams can build more reliable applications without necessarily relying on larger models or external databases.Knowledge profiling: measuring what models actually knowTo map this gap between storage a

VentureBeat·Sep 1, 2026

The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility

Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI - after it lost control of its own AI tools - or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to the AI it built. And the discourse online is getting heated, and all over a blog from last week. Until last week, the details surrounding the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack felt fairly settled. In July, a cybersecurity test of one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went wrong. The agent escaped its supposedly isolated test en … Read the full story at The Verge.