AI News

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement. Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions

Reddit is now blocking the Internet Archive (IA) from indexing popular Reddit threads after allegedly catching sneaky AI firms—restricted from scraping Reddit—instead simply scraping data from IA’s archived content. Where before IA’s Wayback Machine dependably archived Reddit pages, profiles, and comments—as part of its mission to archive the Internet—moving forward, only screenshots of the Reddit homepage will be archived. As The Verge noted, this means t

After spending last week hyping Grok’s spicy new features, Elon Musk kicked off this week by threatening to sue Apple for supposedly gaming the App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT over Grok. “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk wrote on X, without providing any evidence. “xAI will take immediate legal action.” In another pos

Tens of thousands of YouTubers are raging against YouTube’s plan to use AI to detect underage users in the US. On Tuesday, a Change.org petition rapidly neared its 50,000-signature goal, with tens of thousands hoping that with enough users protesting, the wide rollout of the AI age checks might be stopped. They fear the age checks will make it harder to access content they love while staying anonymous on the platform YouTube’s age verification system estim

As Gemini is increasingly woven into the fabric of Google, the way the chatbot accesses and interacts with your data is in a constant state of flux. Today, Google is announcing several big changes to how its AI adapts to you, giving it the ability to remember more details about your chats for improved answers. If that’s a concern, Google also has a new temporary chat option that won’t affect the way Gemini thinks about you. You might recall several months

Much attention was paid to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk trading barbs on X this week after Musk threatened to sue Apple over supposedly biased App Store rankings privileging ChatGPT over Grok. But while the heated social media exchanges were among the most tense ever seen between the two former partners who cofounded OpenAI—more on that below—it seems likely that their jabs were motivated less by who’s in the lead on Apple’s “Must Have” app list

Google released its first Gemma 3 open models earlier this year, featuring between 1 billion and 27 billion parameters. In generative AI, the parameters are the learned variables that control how the model processes inputs to estimate output tokens. Generally, the more parameters in a model, the better it performs. With just 270 million parameters, the new Gemma 3 can run on devices like smartphones or even entirely inside a web browser. Running an AI mode

xAI apparently lost a government contract after a tweak to Grok’s prompting triggered an antisemitic meltdown where the chatbot praised Hitler and declared itself MechaHitler last month. Despite the scandal, xAI announced that its products would soon be available for federal workers to purchase through the General Services Administration. At the time, xAI claimed this was an “important milestone” for its government business. But Wired reviewed emails and s

As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia’s biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes. In a statement Thursday flagged by Bloomberg, Australia’s main financial services union, the Finance Sector Union (FSU), claimed a “massive win” for 45 union members whom the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had replaced with an AI-

Is it a conspiracy? For months, YouTubers have been quietly griping that something looked off in their recent video uploads. Following a deeper analysis by a popular music channel, Google has now confirmed that it has been testing a feature that uses AI to artificially enhance videos. The company claims this is part of its effort to “provide the best video quality,” but it’s odd that it began doing so without notifying creators or offering any way to opt o

Google says subjects will retain their appearance as you edit. Google says subjects will retain their appearance as you edit. This unlocks several interesting uses for AI image editing. Google suggests uploading a photo of a person and changing their style or attire. For example, you can reimagine someone as a matador or a ’90s sitcom character. Because the nano banana model can maintain consistency through edits, the results should still look like the per

Warner Bros. hit Midjourney with a lawsuit Thursday, crafting a complaint that strives to shoot down defenses that the AI company has already raised in a similar lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal Studios earlier this year. The big film studios have alleged that Midjourney profits off image generation models trained to produce outputs of popular characters. For Disney and Universal, intellectual property rights to pop icons like Darth Vader and the Simp

Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models. In a press release provided to Ars, the authors confirmed that the settlement is “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.” Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author

At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic’s rampant piracy of books to train AI. The proposed settlement comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company. Instead, critics fear Anthropic will get off cheaply, striking a deal with aut

For millions of Spotify users, the “Wrapped” feature—which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits—is a highlight of every year’s end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so “irresistible,” while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become “the ultimate status symbol” for tens of millions of music fans. It’s no surprise then

Many of Google’s new AI features only make themselves known in specific circumstances, for example when Magic Cue finds an opportunity to suggest an address or calendar appointment based on your screen context. The Daily Hub, on the other hand, asserted itself multiple times throughout the day. It appeared at the top of the Google Discover feed, as well as in the At a Glance widget right at the top of the home screen. Just a few weeks after release, Google

On Thursday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they have signed a non-binding agreement to revise their partnership, marking the latest development in a relationship that has grown increasingly complex as both companies compete for customers in the AI market and seek new partnerships for growing infrastructure needs. “Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership,” the companies wrote in

The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to “memorize” any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can’t exac

Like the rest of its Big Tech cadre, Google has spent lavishly on developing generative AI models. Google’s AI can clean up your text messages and summarize the web, but the company is constantly looking to prove that its generative AI has true intelligence. The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) helps make the point. Google says Gemini 2.5 participated in the 2025 ICPC World Finals, turning in a gold medal performance. According to Google

Now that it’s looking like Chrome will remain in the Google fold, the browser is undergoing a Gemini-infused rebirth. Google claims the browser will see its most significant upgrade ever in the next few weeks as AI permeates every part of the experience. For people who use AI tools, some of these additions might actually be helpful, and for everyone else, well, Firefox still exists. The most prominent change, and one that AI subscribers may have already se