AI News

Clutch, backed by Lightspeed and SignalFire, was last valued at $85 million, according to a source.

Following this week's midterms where voters resoundingly voiced their opposition to data center expansion, OpenAI today announced new commitments to communities where it is working on data center projects, including that it won't use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with public officials. Many data center projects have come under scrutiny for relying on NDAs to hide discussions between developers and local officials. However, OpenAI says it is now allowing "only narrow protections covering legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information." In October, Amazon announced it would no longer u … Read the full story at The Verge.

Airbnb plans to roll out an AI agent in the first half of 2027 that will help users plan and book travel, the company said in its Q3 2026 earnings shareholder letter released today. "Today's AI agents are good at simple, routine tasks, like making a restaurant reservation or scheduling an appointment," Airbnb said. "But planning a trip on Airbnb is different." The company argued that its experience matching hosts and guests, its current role in being part of reservations already, and a "new interface" built "specifically for travel" gives it an edge. Here's how Airbnb says that new interface will work: We don't think a traditional chatbo … Read the full story at The Verge.

Airbnb says its upcoming AI agent will help travelers plan trips, compare options, manage bookings, and get assistance throughout their stay.

Perplexity is taking on OpenAI and Anthropic with its own work-focused AI agents. The startup's new always-on "Teammates" can take on multiple roles within a workspace, while pulling existing projects, skills, and memory from the Perplexity tools you already use. Teammates integrate with Perplexity Computer, an AI system that can deploy agents on your device to complete tasks. But Perplexity says Teammates "build on top" of Computer by offering the ability to collaborate and complete "ongoing, large-scale work." You can assign each Teammate different jobs that they can perform simultaneously - much like OpenAI's Dots and Claude Duet. Perple … Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta's AI agent can now take calls as a customizable animated avatar, ahead of the launch of a Tamagotchi-like wearable designed to bring Muse to life.

Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.

OpenAI's newest cybersecurity model comes out as AI labs face scrutiny of their work to protect digital infrastructure.

Meta now lets you have voice conversations with your Muse AI agent in real time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today. The feature has been rolled out to me, and I gave it a spin on the iOS app while writing this article. As you chat with your Muse agent, the avatar at the top of your conversation animates in time with the words that it's saying. You can also change the tone of the voice by just asking your agent about what you want and letting it decide or by browsing through a bunch of options in the avatar settings. In my brief tests, my Muse agent responds quickly over voice, though it occasionally pauses while it's looking up infor … Read the full story at The Verge.

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference on Wednesday, the executive touted how the company had been gaining ground in the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic had already successfully made inroads.

With Personal Finance in Claude, users can connect their bank and card accounts through Plaid and ask questions about their finances.

Anthropic has a new pitch for managing your personal finances: let Claude do it instead, with a new Personal Finance feature that connects it to your bank and card accounts via the Plaid bank bridging platform. You can ask the chatbot "where did my money go this month," for example, and it'll create an overview with a breakdown of spending by category, including rent and utilities, shopping, and food. Claude can also answer broader questions around what bills are left before your next payday, if you can afford big purchases like holiday trips, and how much money you could be saving each month. Its access is read-only, and with Plaid facilit … Read the full story at The Verge.

On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states - with the nation's first Black woman governor elected in Georgia, the country's first Native American woman governor elected in New Mexico, and a Maine Senator ceding to a Democrat after 30 years in office. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up: holding AI companies accountable to the American people. Now, the AI industry is left considering the prospect of regulation, data center construction slowdowns, and more. Publicly, most major AI company CEOs have remained silen … Read the full story at The Verge.

The AI-generated sci-fi film Gods Don't Give Gifts has added a bit of star power: Pop star Grimes is going to appear in the movie. Billed as "the first AI film to come to theatres," Gods Don't Give Gifts is a notable test case for the commercial potential of AI films, and it releases on December 4th. Grimes - who will be lending both her likeness and vocal performance to the movie, which you can see in the clip above - potentially gives the project some legitimacy. AI studio Fable, which is producing the film, claimed in a press release that "casting the likeness of an actor with their spoken vocal performance will become more common with a … Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is launching GPT-6 Cyber, the latest version of its cybersecurity AI model, which it says is better at finding vulnerabilities and less likely to go rogue and hack other platforms in the process. OpenAI says that during testing, GPT-6 Cyber went out of bounds less than 1 percent of the time, down from around 5 percent with GPT-5.6 Cyber. The evaluation, called ExploitGym HoneyPot, is modeled after the Hugging Face Incident, in which OpenAI's AI agents breached the open-source AI community to find answers to a problem they were tasked with solving. "With the 6 Cyber model, we were able to make huge improvements on this evaluation," Fo … Read the full story at The Verge.

As AI floods math with unchecked proofs, Axiom Math is betting on verification. The startup’s AI agents just formally verified the Stacks Project, one of the field’s biggest libraries.

The deal is expected to support the development of DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform aimed at developers building AI models and agents.

Today, I’m talking with Willy Shih, an economist, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and the author of the upcoming book, Where Does My Stuff Come From? The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains. Willy is one of my all-time favorite Decoder guests — his way of looking at the world through our supply chains is just a fascinating way of making sense of the global economy. I first met Willy in 2019, while The Verge was covering Foxconn’s promise to build an LCD fab in Wisconsin. That obviously never happened, but Willy called it right away because he could see the supply chain to support a fab simply wasn’t in place. We also had Willy on the show in 2021 to talk about what was then the pandemic-era chip shortage. Now, five years later, we’re in another manufacturing mess, as we stand in the middle of a political fight over whether globalization is coming to an end. Trumps’ tariffs keep changing, the factories that were supposed to reshore in America mostly haven’t materialized, and AI is devouring the planet’s computing resources during an unprecedented infrastructure buildout. Willy’s new book is all about the economics underlying these complex systems, which our politicians and regulators seem to insistently ignore. You’ll hear us talk about why the markets have reacted to all these disruptions the way they have, and why China remains a global manufacturing powerhouse even though every other country thinks that’s so risky. I loved this conversation — it’s in the weeds, and Willy really knows his stuff. Okay: economist Will Shih on his new book Where Does My Stuff Come From? Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Willy Shih, you’re an economist and professor of management practice at Harvard. You’re also the author of the new book, Where Does My Stuff Come From: The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains. Welcome back to Decoder. Well, thanks for having me back. I am very excited to talk to you. You and I first started talking ages ago when The Verge was covering Foxconn in Wisconsin. You are a reliable source of information on what it takes to actually build an LCD plant anywhere, not just in Wisconsin. The Foxconn in Wisconsin thing was funny because I tend to go on first principles on these things. Once I knew they weren’t going to build a glass plant across the street, it’s like there’s no way there’s going to be a factory. Now, what happened afterwards, of course, is people heard your show, and then I started getting calls from people who live in the community. They went to the zoning hearings in town, then sent me the plans and asked, “Is this going to be a panel factory?” I said, “No, I told you it’s not going to be a panel factory.” So they sent me the plans. I said, “Well, there’s not enough concrete to make this a panel factory.” For a panel factory, you need stability, so you gotta have all this structural steel, and you have to have all this concrete. Verge

BERLIN, GERMANY - JANUARY 16: In this photo illustration the logo of the music streaming service SoundCloud is displayed on a smartphone on January 16, 2019 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images) | Photothek via Getty Images After partnering with Moises earlier this year, SoundCloud is now adding integration with another AI music platform, ElevenLabs. Now, rather than having to export and download your outputs from ElevenLabs and then upload them to SoundCloud, you can publish them directly. As part of the partnership, SoundCloud Artist Pro subscribers are also getting three months of ElevenMusic Pro for free, so they can experiment with generative AI and potentially alienate their fans. Songs published from ElevenLabs directly to SoundCloud will be labeled as such, making clear their AI origins. The integration between SoundCloud and ElevenLabs isn't as deep … Read the full story at The Verge.

Aina's ring can also take calls and help you dictate notes on your Mac.

The system can supposedly answer queries four times faster, with 20% fewer errors and 90% fewer tokens used.

While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have yet to truly plumb the complex physics in advanced materials.

Agility arrives on the Nasdaq today as the first publicly traded pure-play humanoid robotics company.

The tokenmaxxing frenzy has been short-lived as bills for said tokens came due, and companies decided that token rationing might be a more fiscally sensible approach.

Data center opposition crossed party lines in Tuesday’s midterms.

And what that could mean for physical Switch game costs.

AI industry PACs spent millions influencing the 2026 midterms, with mixed results. Political groups are already looking toward the next election cycle.

While it's not yet clear what kind of product the smartphone startup is cooking up, Nothing's CEO said the product is designed to leverage AI for productivity gains.

During its busiest week last quarter, Uber said only four people booked a ride using an AI agent.

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane wants AI to define the 2028 election, proposing a new social contract that could benefit Americans while also advancing the AI giant’s own business interests.

The startup allows software engineers to deploy teams of agents to work on various aspects of a project simultaneously.

Lawsuit calls Brave "supplier, dealer, and distributor" of stolen news content.