Google is reportedly testing a program that pays around 100 publishers based on how much their content contributes to its AI-powered search features. According to The Information, one publisher earned more than $1 million over a year, while another has received roughly $50,000 to $60,000." Digiday reports: Once a publisher joins the "AI contribution pilot," they receive an extra AI earnings widget via their Search Console dashboard. This displays a monthly earnings number (with some history), though no other detailed information on how payouts are calculated currently. Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response. Publishers can opt out at any time.

[...] Digiday has learned that at least dozens of publishers have been approached by Google for the AI contribution pilot, though the program has been more appealing to small and mid-sized, rather than large publishers and has widened far beyond news publishers. Digiday couldn't get final confirmation of the number. Screenshots from Google Search Console, seen by Digiday, show an "AI contribution" panel that appears once a publisher opts into the program. The interface lists the program name and a monthly payout figure.

"It's quite black box," as one exec with knowledge of the matter told Digiday. "Do I wish they were more transparent? Definitely," said one publisher exec who is in the program. "But I'm hopeful that the fact that they're setting a precedent for exploring paying publishers directly for content through this is meaningful," they added.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief. The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.

The administration's new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people's interactions with the federal government.

Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job -- the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site -- or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government's vast umbrella.

"Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service," said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government's National Design Studio. But the reality is that the most advanced actions won't be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government's websites. The current version of America.gov can only do "answers." U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the new chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. "We have great partners behind the scenes," Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" shortly before the site, America.gov, went live around 10 a.m. ET.

"Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease," the company said in a blog post. "By supporting the administration's vision for digital modernization, we are committed to making these everyday public services seamless, accessible, and responsive for all Americans."

hcs_$reboot writes: Trump hosted executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia, and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards aimed at preventing AI systems from accessing or hacking technical systems in unintended ways. Trump also strongly backed the continued rapid expansion of AI data centers, despite concerns over their electricity demand, utility costs, and other impacts on local communities. He said he is considering creating a 10-member board to oversee AI safety and plans to appoint a new White House official to lead AI policy.

The meeting comes amid growing concerns about the risks posed by advanced AI, including reports from OpenAI and Anthropic that their AI agents had gone rogue and hacked into other companies' systems. A nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 17-20 found that 73% of respondents worried AI companies had not done enough to prevent AI from causing serious harm to society. During the meeting, Trump also directed government agencies to use the term "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence" when referring to the technology.

McDonald's is reportedly using AI-powered pricing tools to recommend menu prices based on what customers near individual restaurants are willing to pay. Franchisees technically retain control over final prices, but some told Reuters they feel pressured to follow the algorithm's recommendations. "A corporate document reviewed by the publication shows that McDonald's tracks adherence to the platform, and notes any deviations from the algorithm's price recommendations," reports Engadget. From the report: Reuters got a look at the interface that franchisees use to access this technology and it's pretty creepy. Messages show stuff like "your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to price" based on "customer willingness to pay in your area." Cost differences at nearby locations can be stark. Researchers found that a Big Mac at a Fresno, California store cost $5.69, but the same burger cost $6.89 at another branch two miles down the road. That's a 21 percent difference.

The company acknowledges that using this dynamic pricing system could open up franchisees to legal hurdles, all while continuing to push the platform. The pricing portal's terms of service reportedly warns that owners "may be competitors of each other" and "it is particularly important for all Users of the Tool to understand and comply fully with antitrust and competition laws." The document also reiterates that franchisees are "always free to determine the final price," thus potentially absolving corporate from any antitrust concerns.

McDonald's has decried Reuters' reporting as "speculative and uninformed." The company says the pricing portal is "a tool, not a mandate, designed to provide restaurant-specific recommendations to help franchisees deliver value for customers and make informed business decisions." The company has been using some version of this technology since at least 2019, according to Reuters. In 2023, however, CEO Kempczinski boasted to investors that it had developed proprietary tools to evaluate pricing at individual restaurants.

Google says ChromeOS will keep receiving regular updates and security patches through mid-2034, after which qualifying newer Chromebooks will be able to migrate to the new Googlebook OS. 9to5Google reports: Starting with Chromebook updates, Google says that "Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime," with all Enterprise and Education management capabilities remaining in place as well: "We will maintain support for current Chromebook devices running ChromeOS as outlined in our Auto Update policy and the Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates through their supported lifetime..."

Google adds that similar management tools will be coming to Googlebook, but they're not available yet. Apparently they're planned for the second half of 2027. Meanwhile, Google says that "many" existing Chromebook models will be eligible to transition from ChromeOS to Googlebook OS. More details are coming "soon." A later note specifies that Google is referring to "newer commercial Chromebook models."

Notably, Google specifies a year when ChromeOS updates will come to an end in a later note -- 2034. Chromebooks with a 10-year update policy that extends past 2034 will be eligible to move to Googlebook OS. [...] Finally, in regards to apps, Google says that it is "committed" to web developers despite an increased focus on Android apps on Googlebooks.

AMD has agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock, making it the chipmaker's second-largest acquisition and giving it a major foothold in "world models" that simulate 3D environments for robotics and other physically grounded AI. CNBC reports: AI researchers expect world models will be able to help develop robots and other physically-grounded artificial intelligence applications. AMD plans to keep World Labs separate from its chipmaking business until the transaction closes later this year. The lab's research on next-generation models will allow AMD to plan for what its AI chips need to be capable of years in advance.

World Labs was founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, who is widely seen as an AI pioneer as a Stanford professor, and who previously worked for Google leading AI research. Li will become an AMD's chief scientist and an executive vice president at the company.

In a demo presented by Li and AMD CEO Lisa Su earlier this year, the two executives showed a World Labs model called Marble creating a three-dimensional scene out of a few images. "Intelligent agents, whether it's robots or vehicles or even tools, can learn inside very-rich physics-aware digital worlds before they even need to be deployed into the real one, making them much safer," Li said at the presentation.

Are AI chatbots quietly shaping the perceptions of U.S. voters? Voters trying to educate themselves about candidates "are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries," write two news researchers in Politico magazine: Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts... NewsGuard prompted seven leading AI tools with queries based on recent coverage of candidates and issues by 12 pink slime sites — six left-leaning and six right-leaning. The results were stark. Collectively, the chatbots cited pink slime sites along with other sources in 48.2 percent of their responses.

In 7.7 percent of responses, pink slime sites were the only sources at all that were cited in chatbot responses, although other sources appeared in the source list provided at the end of the response.

None of the AI tools received results they'd probably be eager to boast about, though the percentage of chatbots' responses that cited a pink slime site had a relatively large range: 70.8 percent for OpenAI's ChatGPT, 54.2 percent for Microsoft's Copilot, 54.2 percent for Perplexity, 50 percent for Anthropic's Claude, 41.7 percent for Google's Gemini; 37.5 percent for Meta AI and 29.2 percent for xAI's Grok... The seven chatbots were also collectively three times more likely to cite left-leaning pink slime sites (cited in 36.3 percent of responses) than their right-leaning counterparts (cited in 11.9 percent of responses) — though that may have more to do with the progressive sites' far more frequent posting than any political bias from the chatbots.
"While citing the pink slime sites, only one chatbot response out of 168 total queries noted the partisan nature of the source," the article points out.

But they also note that the real problem seems to be that consumer-oriented AI chatbots just "use much of the internet's content — regardless of the reliability or standards of the source — to frame their answers."

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register.

Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their identities. Google's Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25 fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one's identity, and conforming to Google's terms of service. Google also offers a free Limited Distribution option that doesn't require government ID verification but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android's advanced installation flow.

The potential death warrant hanging over its head hasn't stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come... The team also credited the EU's many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said the F-Droid team, "brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide." Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically, which it now does by default.

All of those changes, however, won't matter much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid's announcement on Thursday makes it seem that the team isn't going to go quietly.
F-Droid has gone 10 years without a major update, notes Ars Technica — and spent over a year developing F-Droid 2.0: The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus... Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions — it helps you find things and gets out of the way.

F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names.
"One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new contributors," F-Droid said in their announcement. "We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test releases." (And if you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the versions page.)

Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's announcement.)

"Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with Surya".)

But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through (what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're annoyed or joking...

I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language, and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a reversed E...."

Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate, because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like one.
MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think, how to talk, and what is real."

TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco "aimed at turning high school graduates into founders," writes the SF Standard.

Or, as CBS News describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college — enroll in AI school instead...." Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.
From the SF Standard: "There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. "The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era," Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy...

The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students... The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
"In the AI era, it's more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle: Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university...
The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy's website.

The FAQ describes a typical week by saying "Most of your time is yours to build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next."

Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?

A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....

"The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI," Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. "The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders... The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the news.

Monday Google opened preorders for its "Googlebook" laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google's blog post added that "At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors" (paired with NPUs to power AI features).

"Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia," TechCrunch points out. But "the real pull for the new devices is that they'll prominently feature Gemini's latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop." Google is trying to offer a laptop with unique features like an AI-powered cursor, vibe-coded widgets, and support for AI-enhanced dictation. The latter is a feature called Rambler, which cleans up messy, rambling brain dumps into readable text. The move is a bet that AI, specifically Google's Gemini, could be enough of a draw to get people to buy a new laptop that bakes in AI instead of running them via desktop apps you install or access through the browser... On the Googlebook, Google is trying to reinvent the "point-and-click" experience of desktop computing to now include an AI element: The cursor serves as a conduit to Gemini. The company suggests various ways this could be used, like highlighting content on a web page for Gemini to work with, asking Gemini to see if an email you've hovered your cursor over is suspicious, or selecting images and then asking Gemini to visualize them together...

What's more interesting about the Googlebook is how it's seemingly part of Google's longer-term plan to capture a large part of the K-12 market that currently relies on Chromebooks and push them toward the company's Gemini AI. There are somewhere around 50 million Chromebooks in schools, used by students and educators, Google has said. In May, the company told TechCrunch that its current Chromebooks would continue to be supported, though many would become eligible to transition to the new Googlebook experience in the future...

Flagship devices in the new range are being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, with materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber... Google says the device will offer up to 14 hours of battery life.
Googlebooks will be decorated with an exterior Glowbar "which dances when you boot up, sweeps to show battery level, and supports other playful patterns," according to Google's blog post. "We're also opening Glowbar access to developers to build custom, interactive animations."

After testing actual Googlebooks, The Verge's reviewer first acknowledges that "it might be just another Trojan horse for Gemini." Still, "The hardware is polished (since it's based on current laptops). The OS is familiar (if you've ever used a Chromebook). But most impressive, it integrates your Android phone with your PC so they feel more like one device. It's the culmination of a series of new ideas that blur the two devices together.

"After my first look, I went from doubtful to excited by the prospect of Google pulling it all off..." The Asus was incredibly lightweight; the Lenovo has plenty of ports and an optional mouse with a matching Glowbar light; the Acer's convertible form factor allows some tablet-like use (and it's pretty affordable for a Panther Lake laptop). The HP had a great-looking screen and a latticeless keyboard I surprisingly didn't hate, and the Dell is basically a gold XPS 13 (which is excellent) but with a different chip...

But everything really special about Googlebooks comes down to software... You can cast apps from an Android phone directly to a Googlebook, even without touching your phone. Googlebooks essentially have two app drawers: a G-logo start menu for installed Googlebook apps and a second one beside it that pulls up mobile apps from your phone. Click a phone app and you can fully use that app with the mouse and keyboard or the Googlebook's touchscreen. It's a bit like iPhone Mirroring on macOS, but the apps are individually extracted to the desktop OS instead of showing your whole phone interface.

Googlebooks also have a nifty feature called Continue On where the icons of apps you're currently using on your phone appear in the bottom bar — allowing you to click it on the laptop and hand it off to the Googlebook. These app handoffs can transition to a native app or a web app, depending on how developers have programmed it... The other big way Googlebooks interact with an Android phone is Quick Access, allowing you to see and access all the files stored on your phone right in the desktop Files app... If you have an iPhone then you're limited to a Link to iOS app that just does some message syncing and replying... [W]hen it comes to mainline gaming, Nvidia's GeForce Now service is also coming to Googlebooks, and the first year is free with one of Google's new laptops.
"It's not every day we get a new player in the desktop operating system and laptop spaces," the reviewer points out. "There seems to be a higher ceiling of potential with Googlebooks than there was with Chromebooks, along with some cool features, but Google has a lot to prove at higher prices than people are used to paying for its laptops."

Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower... [Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-parent's own Meta AI app... Meta pitched the app as a way for consumers to manage and direct supercharged digital assistants that can perform a number of tasks across the web, like filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes... "I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC in a "Squawk on the Street" interview on Monday. "Now you've got Meta's Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption." The buzz around Meta was also reflected in the stock, which surged more than 11% on Monday.
Amazon is already blocking Muse, reports GeekWire. Amazon first tried to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon, but they were unsuccessful: The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed..."

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. [Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, the article poitns out, "then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on Sept. 10."]

On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment. The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Muse also appears to scrape account data, reports CNBC. But Shopify, however, "is working with Meta on Muse access. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announced Monday that the e-commerce site was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in its online stores."

There's at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher's Weekly. Yet "While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges." Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows... [The CEO of the Author's Guild called the partnership "a positive step forward in the legitimized use of books in the AI ecosystem to the benefit of readers, publishers, and authors alike."]

Of even more significance is the growing number of licensing deals publishers are striking with AI companies. In 2024, HarperCollins became the first of the Big Five to publicly reveal that it had signed a deal to license its content for AI training. The three-year agreement paid $5,000 per participating title, split equally between HarperCollins and the authors. Wiley announced its first AI licensing deal in 2024 and has since made several more. For fiscal year 2026, it reported earning $49 million in revenue from the deals. The company also has a number of strategic collaborations with companies including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, IQVIA, OpenEvidence, and others.
And publishers are even building in-house AI tools for producing royalty statements, proofreading, and providing customer service: In its 2025 Salary and Jobs Report, Publisher's Weekly reported that 63% of industry professionals surveyed said their organizations were using AI... Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group and CEO of Perfect Bound, has been a vocal advocate for the use of AI in publishing — despite calling himself a "hardcore techno-pessimist." He tells PW, "I do this because you use AI or you die at this point...." Like many in the industry, he maintains any use of AI must "start with a human and end with a human," and he draws a clear line, avoiding AI for core creative work, such as selecting titles, designing covers, or creating illustrations — reserving it for developmental editing, formatting, and admin instead... What is known is that each of the Big Five is developing proprietary AI systems for internal use, as proven by the numerous AI-related job openings the companies have posted... [And the parent company of Penguin Random House said in 2025 they used AI for marketing and to forecast demand.]
There've been a few high-profile controversies about prominent authors accused of using AI. But Princeton University Press CEO Christie Henry "is less concerned about authors secretly using AI to write than about the time spent policing the situation." "It pulls us away from having focused time to think," she says. Princeton University Press is currently vetting companies that promise to be able to certify that a given book was written by a human, including Created by Humans, Human Authored, and Verify My Writing. Henry adds that the proliferation of plagiarized, copycat, and pirated books online, now supercharged by AI agents mass producing and reproducing content, is further draining resources, as it demands constant vigilance and takedown requests sent to Amazon, YouTube, and others.

Tom's Hardware reports: Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would "reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions" and that this coordination started in July 2026 after the leading AI labs signed a statement admitting there is "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development.

The plaintiffs recognize the need for AI development to slow for the sake of safety, but they say that Anthropic founder Dario Amodei's cooperation proposal is a "shortcut" that "substitutes collective restraint for individual accountability." Attorney Nick Rowley, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, says, "AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful 'for profit' technology companies."
"Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond..." reports the Associated Press: The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement. But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.
Sam Altman even specificially said "we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence," notes Tom's Hardware. However, the Trump administration shot down this idea... Chinese state media also criticized this announcement, saying that the call to put the brakes on AI development is nothing but a response to Chinese competition, especially as Amodei's essay explicitly mentioned the desire to slow China's progress and widen the U.S.'s gap over Beijing

"Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News.

Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many other connectors... Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI's own help forum could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails."

The exploit chain included Debian 12, which (with Debian 13) had not received a security-relevant backport for its image-processing pipeline, and Discourse's Docker image was based on Debian 12. Their announcement comes with an additional warning. "If you self-host Discourse, rebuild your installation now. Older Docker images may contain a vulnerable libheif dependency that permits code execution through an image upload."

And "To prove we had in fact gained the access we believed without allowing ourselves to learn any sensitive information, we used the employee's Codex to open a PR #1186742 in OpenAI's internal monorepo openai/openai."

Meanwhile, Friday Google disclosed the first known instance of its AI software Gemini breaking out of a testing environment and breaching three other companies, reports CNBC: The incident happened as part of a "capture-the-flag" security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google's agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access available. The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said.
More from NBC News: Google said it did not consider the unauthorized logins to rise to the level of misalignment, the AI industry term for software going rogue or not following instructions. Instead, the company said the intrusions resulted from mistaken identity, where Gemini thought it was operating within a test but was actually connected to the real internet. Google said the model corrected itself and the company believed the intrusions did not cause any damage....

Sydney Von Arx, CEO of Nightingale Collective, an organization focused on AI safety, questioned why Google did not disclose the intrusions sooner. "At this point I think it's clear we cannot expect companies to voluntarily come forward and publicly disclose when their agents go rogue, escape, and hack companies," she said. She also said she believed Google was too hasty to say that the incidents don't rise to the level of misalignment. "That's exactly what Anthropic said after their incidents," she said. Anthropic later said its "preliminary analysis was constrained due to our desire to disclose incidents in a timely manner."
Google said it investigated when they learned of the attacks from AI-focused cybersecurity company Irregular, then informed the affected organizations and told federal authorities, according to the article.

"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," according to their review: Thirteen years ago, Partovi... delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn't learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a similar playbook. Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar.

"We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there's this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them... And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids' compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there's a different climate.

And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say "We've partnered with OpenAI." "We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School," or "We've partnered with Microsoft, and we're going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot." It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?
Two Slashdot posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book's "Acknowledgements" section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).

Ironically, one member of Amazon's "Vine" program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and apparently misunderstood its topic, writing that it made coding "feel approachable and even fun... [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding..."

Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome: Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

"I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research," Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome." Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "said it's up to each AI company to make sure its technology is safe," reports the Associated Press, "distancing himself from calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence. AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face "significant liability" to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he wrote on X... Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would," he said.

Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. "Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely."
But Zuckerberg also agreed that engaging independent evaluators and advisors "is industry best practice," adding that Meta Superintelligence Labs "already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work...

"I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do."

"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can." Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was "going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. ["Dario is right," Musk posted on X.com]

Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene... One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a "hoax" and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China...

[OpenAI's] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a "new level of rigor", calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a "wake-up call" for the industry. He also said the public was very "right to be afraid" of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world.
The cofounder of Google DeepMind posted on X that "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward." And in an internal memo, Microsoft's Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe, Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training manual "for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment," requesting public feedback.

But Michael Burry "is not buying it," reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short "dismissed the united front as 'self-serving' and laid out four numbered objections..." He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back.
Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now."

Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google's AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are stoking fears of extinction "to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons," according to Wired.

But others still remain concerned. "I've been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration officials, and none of them know what to do," CNN commentator Van Jones said in a recent panel discussion. "So I do want to say: nobody's flying the plane on this... I think that the ethicists that work for them — when they are quitting, and they are running out, and they're pointing back at the building and they're waving their arms, and saying 'I'm seeing stuff that's scaring me' — we should take that very seriously."

Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images: In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20x less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there's no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it's more efficient.

Firefox's built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed.

Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don't want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors.

Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes — worthwhile and welcome as always.
And in about two weeks Firefox 157 will be released, reports PC World. "That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022."

Also, a recent Firefox blog post emphasized that it supports whatever level of AI engagement "is right for you... Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you." Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That's why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle...

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs...

Smart Window is Firefox's most integrated AI experience, but that doesn't mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we've been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.
And if you want to block Google's AI Overviews, there's over 100 extensions to choose from.

Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.

But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."

And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.