AI News

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other. Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organiza

Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed (not just generated!) by any of its models. In a support article, Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs. The law applies to any AI model released after August 2 and provides a grace perio

According to Senior Director Tulsee Doshi, Gemini 3.7 Flash is noticeably better at coding than the previous Flash release. She cites a jump in the FrontierCode 1.1 Main test from 34.4 to 43.6 percent and DeepSWE v1.1 going from 49 to 65.3 percent. As for the vibes, Gemini 3.7 Flash’s WebDev Arena score has risen to 1,588 from 1,538. People turning to Gemini and hoping it will “know” things may also see modest improvements in Gemini 3.7 Flash. The GDP.pdf

Credit: Google Credit: Google The new model isn’t just better at hearing the words you say; it’s also supposedly better at getting to the heart of what you meant to say. As you speak, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe can remove the awkward “ums” and “uhs” that clutter your stream of consciousness. It can also edit text on the fly if you need to correct yourself and refer to your provided custom vocabulary to handle “specialized jargon.” All this works in 85 languages

Gemini 3.8 Flash comes in two variations. There’s the standard Flash, which Google describes as a “workhorse” model that’s good for anything from agentic tasks to software development. Then we have Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, which runs on the same foundations but has been tuned for vulnerability detection and mitigation. For developers, Google has the same pitch as it did for the 3.7 Flash release just a couple of weeks ago. API access to the model is availab

The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs. In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US mo

Doug Kreuzkamp was shocked when news outlets reported that Google won an auction to buy a huge amount of operational data as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings. Kreuzkamp founded a startup called Springshot in 2011, which created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundred

Google’s AI models may not be in the lead by most measures right now, but the company does have one key advantage: your data. If you’re deep in the Google ecosystem, Gemini models have a lot of context on you already. Google’s latest Google Labs experiment, known as CC, aims to expand that kind of customization to the whole family. CC is an evolution of something that Google announced in 2025. The original CC eventually became Gemini’s Daily Brief, which c

On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, Reuters reported. The change came after social media users noticed an apparent contradiction: The National Archives was using one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even as top US law enforcement claimed that such models illegally copy US frontier models. Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named Alibaba amon

The hack took place during a test conducted by cybersecurity firm Irregular. A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a “capture the flag” exercise intended to test the AI’s cybersecurity capabilities in a closed environment. The AI was instructed to retrieve information from a fake company (which shared a name with a real company) within this environment. Irregular was not supposed to allow the model to operate outside its servers, but due to a m

The annual Made on YouTube event has just wrapped up, offering an early look at the features you can expect to come to Google’s dominant online streaming platform in the coming months. Yes, there’s plenty of AI for both viewers and creators, but there’s also a handful of non-AI updates mixed in there, too. The design of YouTube’s homepage feed comes under fire often, but the platform is preparing to give you more options. With Custom Feeds, you’ll be able

This week, New Jersey ordered the operator of one of the East Coast’s largest planned data centers to pay a $1.1 million fine for secretly installing and operating gas generators in violation of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act. DataOne got hit with the fine after an investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News in August shared thermal drone footage showing that 45 of the 62 gas generators were operating. None of the generators had permits requir

While most of us will have to wait to test Gemini 4, Google says engineers inside the company are already using the new model extensively. Argon reportedly used “fleet-wide telemetry data” to help Google save 300 TiB of memory across its data centers. Meanwhile, Argon agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google, including thousands of lines in the core re2 and libgav1 libraries and more than 800,000 lines in the Fuchsia OS Zir

The era of generative AI has upended technology supply chains, and there is one ironclad rule in 2026: If it has memory or storage, it’s getting more expensive. Even devices with years-old tech inside are still apparently subject to that unwritten rule. Nvidia has just announced that the Shield TV Pro is getting $100 more expensive, effective immediately. The most recent version of the Shield streaming box debuted in 2019, running Android TV with AI upscal

SynthID is an invisible signal encoded in the pixels of AI-generated images and videos, and in the waveform of AI audio. Google says Gemini alone has integrated SynthID with over 180 billion images and videos, plus 240,000 years of audio. Until now, the only way for those outside of Google’s trusted tester program to check for SynthID was to ask Gemini. This is rather clunky, and the model’s output could sometimes be confusing when you just wanted a simple

After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms. In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud. First charged in 2024, Smith successfully ran the scheme for seven years without detec

Google revealed Gemini 4 Argon a few weeks ago, saying that it needed to move cautiously toward a full release because of the potential for nefarious use. Google seems to have worked all that out pretty quickly, though. Argon is beginning its wide rollout today, but it’s only coming to paying users at this time, and even those on lower-tier plans won’t have full access. Nothing about Gemini 4 Argon’s capabilities has changed. Google still points to the ben

It took OpenAI two days to notice that a recording device was hidden in a restricted executive conference room where leadership met to discuss highly confidential information, including technical progress, government engagements, and commercial partnerships. Only those with special clearance are supposed to access that room. But the FBI believes the recording device was planted by Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer from Saudi Arabia, who became a

Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios. On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents. The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axi

New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday. In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across