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iRobot has announced a new flagship robot vacuum, which it will showcase at IFA in Berlin this week, the company's first big tech trade show in years. The Roomba maker will be exhibiting under its new owner, Picea Robotics, the contract manufacturer that purchased the once-troubled American robotics company out of bankruptcy in January. The […]

At 5:21 p.m. Eastern on Friday, June 12, Anthropic received a United States government directive. By nightfall, two of the most capable artificial-intelligence models in the world had gone dark after a Commerce Department export-control directive prompted Anthropic to take them offline worldwide. The directive required Anthropic to prevent access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether that person was inside or outside the United States. It extended even to Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. Because the company had no reliable way to verify every user's nationality in real time, it suspended both models for everyone . The controls remained in place until June 30. On July 1, Anthropic restored Fable globally. Mythos took a narrower path: after government approval on June 26, access returned to a set of United States organizations while Anthropic continued coordinating with the government over broader domestic and international access. That sounds like a short outage with a happy ending. It was neither. I have spent years building systems where a dependency going unavailable is not an abstraction. Once software is woven into a product or an operating process, access to it becomes part of the architecture. A model that can be withdrawn immediately under a company-specific determination and factual rationale no customer could have read is no longer only a technical dependency. It is a bet on unpublished policy. The United States needs to govern frontier A.I. It also needs companies, researchers, investors, and customers to know what the rules are before the government enforces them. June showed how far apart those two needs remain. The security concern was real The government's concern was not invented. Fable and Mythos shared the same underlying model, but Fable was released with strong safeguards for general use while Mythos, with fewer safeguards, went only to a small group of defensive-cybersecurity partners. Anthropic says My

Sonos unveiled a bunch of new stuff today at its open house event. There's the $699 Beam Ultra soundbar and the $449 Ace Ultra headphones, plus several under-the-hood app updates (some coming sooner than others). While the show floor was a less than ideal venue to judge audio quality of either new product, a private […]

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 […]

New Apple CEO John Ternus sent out his first staff memo, thanking his predecessor Tim Cook, and quickly turning to what the company will do next, reports Bloomberg. "We have a huge launch next week that's going to be phenomenal. Thanks for everything you've all done to make it possible," writes Ternus, referring to the […]

Apple is pushing for "expedited discovery" in its legal battle against OpenAI over concerns the company is actively destroying evidence, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In a filing on Monday, Apple alleges OpenAI only just handed over a MacBook used by a former employee at the center of the lawsuit, which contained discussions about "destroying […]

New features are rolling out across the Android ecosystem starting today.

Google announced new features coming to Android devices as part of this month's feature drop update. Among the highlights are the introduction of Motion Assist - Android's version of Apple's Motion Cues feature, which tries to reduce motion sickness by overlaying dots on your screen that move in response to a vehicle's movements - as […]

Smart homes have gotten really good at making things really complicated. Turning on a light can involve multiple steps, compared to just flipping a switch. Homey, the Dutch-based smart home platform owned by LG, thinks it has a solution. This week it launched the Homey Portal, a touchscreen smart home controller that looks very promising, […]

GoPro suddenly looks like a very different company than it did just last week. First, YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach became the company's single largest shareholder, without disclosing that in a sponsored review that came out a week later. Now, almost the entire company has been bought by Starman Holding for $285 million in cash, which […]

John Deere is testing a new "JD" AI assistant that it says can help farmers make more money, with answers about best practices and historical trends that are based on their own data. It uses their "field, machine and operational data" to answer questions on topics like equipment settings, fuel usage, or harvest timing. The […]

Google has a new suite of creative design tools for Workspace users called Google Pics, which aims to make editing and generating "professional-grade" AI images less cumbersome for businesses. Built around Gemini and the Nano Banana generative AI model, Google Pics is designed to give more granular control over prompt-based image making and manipulation, allowing […]

After launching a budget-friendly flood sensor last month with impressive battery life, Shelly announced a new $49.99 security camera today that can be used without any additional subscription fees - although that's still an option if you want to expand its capabilities. The Shelly Camera will be available soon from the company's online store and […]

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At an event in New York City, Sonos announced two new audio products - the Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar and Sonos Ace Ultra headphones, details of which were found in an FCC filing in early August - and a major update to its audio operating system dubbed Sonos 27. It's the biggest single Sonos announcement […]

As much as any Apple product released during his time as CEO, Tim Cook's tenure will be remembered for its ruthlessly efficient tight-rope walk between an autocrat in China and a would-be autocrat in the US. During his 15 years as CEO, Cook steered Apple through relations with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US […]

Florida is banning Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers across state highways, as reported earlier by NBC News and local news outlet WUSF. In a memo on Monday, Florida's Department of Transportation says it's revoking permits for all license plate readers, adding that they must be removed from state highways within 30 days. […]

Mozilla is officially launching ad blocking for Firefox on iOS today, after testing the feature over the past few weeks. The new built-in option will block most third-party ads and trackers before they load on an iPhone, reducing bandwidth use and decluttering mobile websites. Mozilla is using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker technology and the EasyList […]

Just a few weeks ago the only midrange OLED options available were from LG and Samsung. But after Sony officially announced the Bravia 6 last week, Roku has now launched its first-ever OLED TV - the Roku Pro Series - which will be followed by the step-up Pro Series LX next month. The Roku Pro […]

Nvidia knows that DLSS 5 left a bad first impression. In March, many gamers took one look at Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace Ashcroft's DLSS 5-ified face and declared it AI slop. So this week, the company's re-introducing its controversial "neural rendering" with firm messaging about how it "preserves artistic intent," "respects the rendered frame," […]