Remember when Twitter was Twitter? Then Elon Musk bought it, renamed it to X, launched an AI company called xAI, which acquired X, and then Musk's space company SpaceX merged with xAI, which has now been renamed to SpaceXAI.

At some point, it may become practical to just lump it all together as "that Musk thing."

To clarify: SpaceX is the public company and the parent corporate entity that towers above it all; SpaceXAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX, and X is a subsidiary of SpaceXAI (there's another layer between these called X Holdings, but perhaps it's best not to complicate things any further).

The change, alongside a new logo for the company, has been announced on SpaceXAI's official X account, which has also been changed to @SpaceXAI.

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SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, shortly before SpaceX's monster IPO in June, which immediately propelled the company to a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion (it currently stands at about $2.1 trillion).

The acquisition was (officially) about Musk's idea of creating huge AI data centers in space. The company plans to start demoing Starmind (as this infrastructure will be called) in late 2027, with actual commercial deployment starting in 2028.

We'd never mention the fact that xAI was burning money and needed a wealthy parent company to keep it afloat.

Samsung is going to make a lot of money selling memory chips.

According to Reuters, the company is about to post a huge profit increase estimate for its Q2 profit, an 18-fold increase compared to the same period last year. That would be 86 trillion won ($56.35 billion) in profit for the quarter starting in April and ending in June, up from just 4.7 trillion won ($3 billion) in Q2 2025.

The reported number comes from an estimate based on forecasts from 30 analysts, and reflects an ongoing memory chip supply crunch. The insatiable need for memory chip recently drove stock prices of memory chip makers such as Micron and Hynix through the roof. As the largest chip memory chipmaker in the world, Samsung will profit from the market imbalance too.

Samsung sells memory chips to numerous companies including tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Nvidia.

The global memory crisis, dubbed the RAMageddon, has helped memory chip makers lock in lucrative contracts and increase profits, but it also caused consumer tech prices to surge. In June, Apple announced significant price increases across numerous product categories, and gadgets such as the PlayStation, the Switch, phones like Motorola Razr, and laptops from Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft have suffered a similar fate.

Remember when Meta laid off 8,000 people in May, citing an AI push, and moved another 7,000 employees into AI-focused roles? At the time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said (in an internal memo) that “AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes," and that "the companies that lead the way will define the next generation.“

Well, it appears one company that "led the way" is having second thoughts.

In an internal town hall on Thursday, examined by Reuters, Zuckerberg admitted that AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected.

Additionally, according to the report, the CEO said that Meta's AI-related restructuring wasn't as "clean" as it could have been, and that Meta execs miscalculated the timing of the changes. Apparently some of the "top people" at Meta were worried, early this year, that Meta isn't adapting to the new, AI-driven world fast enough.

Hopefully there were some humans listening to him in that town hall.

Meta's actions resulted in a company-wide backlash over AI-related employee tracking, as well as reported low employee morale, which Meta addressed with snacks, among other measures.

Meta isn't exactly changing course, though. Zuckerberg reportedly expects more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months. We've got snacks over here, and we're waiting.

California is weighing new child-safety legislation that could fine social media companies millions of dollars — and Meta is attempting to dodge the astronomical fees from hundreds of pending lawsuits, anonymous insiders told Politico.

Meta lobbyists have approached lawmakers with suggested amendments that would carve out exceptions for social media platforms before the bill goes into a hearing set for Tuesday. The amendments include a pathway to avoid fines if companies implement a series of default child-safety settings, such as tools to disable autoplay, direct messaging restrictions, and explicit content moderation.

Many social media companies have already launched said features under minor accounts. Child safety advocates argue they don't do enough to protect children.

Meta's suggested changes include another safe harbor trade-off: Social media companies could avoid fines if their platforms include parental controls that let parents restrict screen time and monitor their kids' activity. Many experts argue that parental controls are equally ineffective at reducing childhood exposure to harmful content.

Without these amendments, the bill, known as AB 2, could result in fines of up to $1 million per child if a company is found liable for endangering young users through negligent product design.

In March, Meta lost a court case that ruled the platform, as well as its competitor Google, failed to fix platform design features that resulted in harm to minor mental health. Meta was separately ordered to pay $375 million by a New Mexico jury that ruled the platform was deceptively advertising its platform as safe for children.

Meta recently revamped its minor safety tools, including automatic age detection and global Teen Accounts with stricter content and communication controls.

Amid ongoing litigation, the company has denied all claims that its youth safety features are ineffective.

"Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," Meta said in a statement following the March ruling.

If you're starting to get a sense of déjà vu over Trump tariff headlines, you're not alone.

For the second time this month, President Donald Trump has threatened a 100 percent tariff on European goods to pressure foreign nations to back off on digital service taxes imposed on American tech companies operating overseas.

Trump posted the threat to Truth Social, writing:

“Numerous European Countries have been discussing the imminent implementation of a Digital Services Tax on American Companies. Some of these Countries are close to actually doing this. Please let this statement serve to represent that any Country that imposes such a Tax will immediately be met with a 100% TARIFF on any and all Goods sent to the United States of America. This TARIFF will supersede Trade Deals made with the Country, whether implemented, signed, or not. Additionally, the 100% TARIFF will be immediately imposed, if they proceed. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Earlier this month, the President specifically threatened to impose tariffs on French wine imports unless the country dropped a standing 3 percent levy on local revenue generated by tech companies like Apple and Google. Trump reportedly delivered the threat directly to outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron before the international G7 summit.

So far, only Canada has caved to Trump's ongoing digital service tariff tactic, dropping their levy last year. But the Trump administration has since lost some strength in the global arena, experts say, following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to curb Trump's power to issue reciprocal tariffs.

William Gibson once famously said that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." It appears that the same goes for frontier AI models.

According to The Information, the White House told OpenAI it wants the company to release its next model in a limited fashion, to a select group of close partners.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the company's newest model, GPT 5.6, will be launched very differently than previous ones, with the government approving access "customer by customer."

Following this limited release period, the company should be able to launch the model more broadly a "couple of weeks" later, says the report.

OpenAI competitor Anthropic recently had to pull its most powerful model, Fable 5, after Trump's administration intervened to keep the model out of foreign hands. The company previously launched Mythos, an even more powerful model, as a limited release open only to a small set of pre-approved customers.

As for OpenAI's GPT 5.6, the model is reportedly a "meaningful improvement" over GPT 5.5, both in terms of context window size and efficiency.

In a memo sent to employees, Altman reportedly said that GPT 5.6 is not the company's preferred long term model, and that OpenAI will work with the government and others in the industry "to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases."

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ChatGPT's sizable lead in the world of AI assistants is slipping, bit by bit.

Analytics firm Sensor Tower released its annual State of AI report (as cited by TechCrunch) this week, which contained the news that OpenAI's flagship chatbot no longer has a majority of market share in the AI space. As recently as January, ChatGPT still had more than 50 percent of total AI market share, but now, it's down to 46.4 percent, per Sensor Tower.

Let's put it this way: In a multi-candidate election, ChatGPT would still win by a landslide, but this is a sign that other AI tools are gaining momentum. Namely, Google Gemini is up to 27.7 percent, while Anthropic's Claude is up to 10.3 percent. Earlier this year, Anthropic even reported it was seeing a million new users every day. Other AI chatbots, including Grok and Meta AI, has less than 5 percent market share.

Even with its slight dip from majority to plurality, ChatGPT seems to be doing quite well. Sensor Tower said it has 1.1 billion monthly users, with Gemini fairly far behind it in that metric, with 662 million monthly users. As Gemini starts working its way into everyday devices and services, like Apple's new Siri AI coming later this year, that number could grow even further.

In another troubling sign for OpenAI, Microsoft recently indicated it may go with the lower-cost Chinese model DeepSeek to power some enterprise AI tools.

Lastly, don't forget that OpenAI is prepping for a possible IPO later this year. Declining market share is unlikely to improve its prospects in the market.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Some SpaceX launches have failed, some have succeeded — and the company's IPO certainly fell into the latter category Friday, turning CEO Elon Musk into the world's first trillionaire.

The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, and SpaceX shares (the official shortened form, in case you were wondering, is SPCX) quickly rocketed upwards from the initial price of $135 a share. At time of writing, shares had reached the stratospheric heights of $170 — making it the biggest IPO in history.

That values SpaceX, which recently merged with Musk's xAI, at above $2 trillion. To put that in perspective, the New York Times reports that's more than Walmart and General Motors combined, though both Google and Nvidia have surpassed the $4 trillion threshhold. And so long as SpaceX trades above $138 per share, Musk is officially the world's first trillionaire — with none of his former peers in the billionaire category coming anywhere close.

It may be the largest IPO in terms of money, but not in terms of the number of shares offered: 555.5 million. That's a relatively small number, which means the stock is getting a bump from investors who are all in on Musk and willing to offer higher prices.

The price is expected to rise and fall as the market absorbs SpaceX and ponders whether its merger with xAI — the reason the combined company has recorded $5 billion in losses so far this year — is worth it. The SpaceX IPO literature promised the company would make money from AI data centers in space, admitting it was a completely unproven concept.

Musk, who has not steered away from political controversy during the so-called quiet period, needs the stock to stay above $138 to retain his trillionaire status. (He already has an unusual amount of control over SpaceX, with more than 80 percent of voting shares.)

That looks simple now — but the ongoing AI backlash, which has finally reached Silicon Valley, could complicate matters. As the first major AI company to IPO, SpaceX is uniquely exposed to shifts in the AI wind.

We'll know more about the way it's blowing when Anthropic has its IPO later this year — and we see what the market thinks about an AI company when it comes without Musk's star power.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and one of the loudest voices of the internet, made numerous X posts Wednesday and Thursday in support of deporting immigrants from the United Kingdom, perhaps under violent conditions.

His comments and reposts, shared on the eve of SpaceX's initial public offering, channeled outrage over a knife attack against an Irish man in Belfast on Monday evening. A 30-year-old Sudanese refugee and legal resident allegedly committed the stabbing and has been charged with attempted murder, according to officials.

What did Elon Musk say about the Belfast stabbing?

Among his posts, Musk amplified Rupert Lowe, a member of the British Parliament and founder of the anti-immigrant Restore Britain movement.

In one video clip Musk shared, Lowe calls for the deportation of migrants who can't financially support themselves. Musk reshared a post from Restore Britain announcing that the movement would "reverse the third-worldification of our country." Musk also replied "Yes" to an X post of Lowe's in which he declares, "Britain doesn't have a racism problem, it has an immigration problem."

Musk used the same single-word affirmation to reply to an X user's post quoting Lowe's support of "reverse mass migration" and adding the commentary, "Deport the invaders. Imprison the government." Lowe said on X earlier this week that "[m]illions and millions need to leave or be made to leave."

Anger over Monday's attack led to riots in Belfast and other locations in Northern Ireland. The protesters set cars, garbage cans, and a city bus on fire, according to the New York Times. They also appeared to target the homes of immigrants, the Times reported. Firefighters aided families when their homes were set on fire Tuesday night.

The victim, who was hospitalized with serious injuries, called for calm in a statement shared by his family, the New York Times said.

The UK regulator Ofcom will not reprimand X for surfacing or promoting posts that incited violence against immigrants for at least two months, according to the Guardian.

Musk denied that social media contributed to the riots and instead blamed "murderous migrants" as the source of people's anger.

Will Elon Musk's comments affect the SpaceX IPO?

When SpaceX filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, it acknowledged the chances that Musk's public commentary could influence the company's business.

"The actions and statements of Mr. Musk and his affiliated ventures, whether or not directly relating to us, may draw significant public attention and scrutiny to us and could potentially have a positive or negative impact on our business, relationships with customers and regulators, or stock price," the SpaceX filing read.

Musk's company xAI, which became part of SpaceX earlier this year, is also facing a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of plaintiffs whose real photographs were allegedly used to create child sexual abuse material via the AI chatbot Grok.

Ahead of the IPO, a 40-foot tall inflatable effigy of Musk appeared in New York City's Times Square as a reminder of those cases. The inflatable's torso had an unmissable message tying SpaceX and Grok to the creation of child sexual abuse material. It was placed there by Safe AI Now, or SANE, a coalition of groups concerned about AI safety, according to Wired.

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SpaceX announced Thursday that it will make 555,555,555 shares available for purchase at $135 per share. The IPO is scheduled for Friday, June 12. SpaceX is on track for a $1.75 trillion valuation.

Musk's endorsement of forcibly removing millions of immigrants from the United Kingdom hasn't yet appeared to affect investor appetite for SpaceX stock. Retail traders have reportedly ordered $100 billion in SpaceX stock ahead of the public offering, according to Forbes.

The IPO is expected to make Musk the world's first trillionaire.

OpenAI is considering massive product-wide price cuts to address industry concerns and keep up with the rising popularity of competitor AI companies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking to anonymous insiders, the publication reported that the Sam Altman-led company is debating reducing subscription usage costs to retain its customer base — competitors like Anthropic are reportedly debating the same move.

According to those close to the company, this may include lowering costs for ‌highly sought after tokens, a response to an ebbing trend among tech companies known as "tokenmaxxing" or the burning out of processing tokens (and entire corporate budgets) in order to boost the productivity of their AI products.

According to the Wall Street Journal, business executives across the industry have criticized AI costs. Altman recently said that high prices are a "a huge issue" for the company, but the decision hasn't been finalized just yet, insiders told the Journal. Meanwhile, investors are also beginning to cool on AI, amid ebbing stock market numbers from major players like Nvidia.

Still, OpenAI is making moves to become a more profit-driven company. On Monday, OpenAI officially announced it was filing for an IPO, with a yet-undetermined timeline. Industry rumors suggest OpenAI could go public as early as September and could be valued at $1 trillion. Anthropic also recently filed for public status, suggesting the AI price wars are only just getting started.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Canada is set to ban social media for children under 16, in a move similar to Australia's historic law.

Announced by the Canadian government on Wednesday, the proposed Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) aims to reduce online harms to children and hold social media and AI chatbot companies responsible for addressing such harms, citing child sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, self-harm, and the impact on mental health.

The proposed law will see the Canadian government restricting users under 16 from holding social media accounts. This also means age verification for online services, and legally mandated safety requirements for social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and companies with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

"We have seen the very serious consequences that online harms can have. As technologies evolve, we must ensure our laws keep pace, because parents cannot face these challenges alone," reads a statement by Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, who introduced the bill.

"The safety of children cannot be an afterthought. This legislation will introduce stronger responsibilities for online platforms to ensure their services are safe by design and include appropriate measures to keep children safe."

The bill comes months after Australia made history last year with its unprecedented Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, which banned social media for kids under 16. Notably, Australian kids have found ways around it. In 2026, Brazil, Austria, and Indonesia have followed suit, with governments in the UK, France, Thailand, Spain, and more countries looking into their own initiatives.

Canada's proposed Safe Social Media Act will install a new digital safety commission that will require online services to "identify, mitigate and address the risks" on their platforms. They will also be required to take measures "to reduce children’s exposure to certain content and high-risk interactions," covering seven categories of "harmful content" identified as "content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, intimate content communicated without consent, content that induces a child to self-harm, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content."

Social media companies will also be required by law to adequately label AI-generated content, "be transparent in terms of their reporting thresholds in crisis situations," and AI chatbot services will be required to "mitigate the risk of the chatbot communicating harmful content" or the risk of it "engag[ing] in harmful behaviour."

Dr. Bolu Ogunyemi, president of the Canadian Medical Association, supported the bill in a press statement, saying, "Time's up. It’s unacceptable for foreign-owned platforms to continue to get rich at the expense of our children’s mental health, privacy and personal safety. This legislation makes Canada a global leader in digital safety and ensures Canadians, especially young people, are protected online and out of harm’s way."

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection also publicly backed the bill. "For over 20 years, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has documented a steep and accelerating rise in online harms against children, including child sexual abuse and exploitation," said with executive director Lianna McDonald in a statement. "The tabling of the Digital Safety Act is a historic day that could turn the tide on this trajectory."

However, Canada's Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms noted Bill C-63 "goes far beyond targeting criminal conduct," and would "undermine freedom of expression, due process, and the rule of law in Canada."

"The Online Harms Act would dramatically expand government censorship powers, punish lawful expression online, and authorize preemptive restrictions on individual liberty," reads their statement. "In doing so, it would represent a fundamental departure from Canada’s long-standing commitment to freedom of expression and due process. Under Bill C-63, lawful speech could be subject to investigation, penalties, or removal based on vague and subjective standards. Individuals could face severe consequences not for committing crimes, but for expressing opinions that are later deemed unacceptable."

Notably, Canada's Safe Social Media Act will inside a larger legislative framework called the Digital Safety Act. This law will also cover "user-uploaded livestreaming and adult content services." This means minimum-age restrictions not only for social media services but also "for accessing pornographic content on regulated services."

The growing trend of age-verification bills, which require individuals to prove their age to access not only adult content but social media sites, has ramped over the last few years. That's despite, as Mashable's Anna Iovine has long reported, experts warning these bills pose threats to digital privacy and free speech.

There’s something different about visiting Apple Park to cover WWDC26. CNET’s Bridget Carey talks about her first visit to the developer’s conference as Apple reveals big Siri AI changes.

OpenAI has officially filed for an IPO, setting the stage for a blockbuster year of IPOs, as both SpaceX and Anthropic are also going public

On Monday, OpenAI published a statement on its website announcing that it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering, or IPO, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

"We recently submitted a confidential S-1," OpenAI said. "We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it."

OpenAI did not share any specific details regarding the terms or size of the IPO. However, the company did explicitly address the timing of the IPO, in that there is no timeline for when OpenAI plans to go public.

"We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company," reads OpenAI's statement. "But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

While the company isn't sharing much, it's been previously reported by Reuters that OpenAI is eyeing an IPO as early as September at a valuation of $1 trillion.

While OpenAI may be seen as the AI industry leader, one of its biggest competitors, Anthropic, beat the company to the punch with its own IPO plans. Anthropic announced last week that it filed to go public with the SEC. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has not yet shared any details regarding share price or timing.

Anthropic's own IPO filing statement came just days after the company announced a fundraising round that valued the company at $965 billion, more than OpenAI's $852 billion. Anthropic also shared revenue numbers that surpassed OpenAI's reported revenue.

OpenAI and Anthropic are far and away the most valuable privately held AI companies in the world, along with xAI, which recently merged with SpaceX. However, once OpenAI and Anthropic go public, they will find themselves multiple trillions of dollars behind tech giants within the AI industry like Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

All of Apple's devices will have a new layer of AI this year. Here's what it could mean for devices to come.

At WWDC 2026, Apple relaunched its AI efforts with iOS 27, featuring Siri AI that is more powerful, helpful, and conversational, while protecting your privacy. Here are the top three iOS 27 features you should know.

Tech editors from CNET, Mashable, and PCMag share their first impressions of Apple Intelligence and Siri updates and news from WWDC 2026. Do these updates make the iPhone more desirable and where have seen these features before?

Tech Experts from CNET, PCMag, and Mashable discuss the vibes we felt from WWDC 2026. Was there a passing of the torch from Tim Cook?

CNET's Bridget Carey and Scott Stein share their first impressions immediately following Apple's WWDC 2026 event. What stood out? What fell flat? And what felt left out?

In this special live edition of One More Thing, tech editors from CNET, PCMag and Mashable break down Tim Cook's final Worldwide Developers Conference and ponder whether or not there was enough meat on the bones to satisfy Apple fans and developers.

From the smart new Siri AI and Apple Intelligence upgrades to the fresh Liquid Glass interface redesign, here are the top highlights you need to see.

You've heard of AI vibe coding, one dictionary's phrase of the year for 2025. As of this week, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI vibe shift.

You wouldn't know the shift existed from the tech world's top pronouncements of late; it is, after all, always sunny in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's Build conference, like Google I/O in May, featured tons of techies talking about tokens, the metric by which AI prompts and answers are measured (a token, weirdly, is about three-quarters of a word on average).

Both conferences also centered claims about frontier AI that are dubious to say the least. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "Artificial General Intelligence is just a few years away... we are standing in the foothills of the Singularity." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: "scaling laws are holding... we are building towards what we call Humanist Superintelligence."

Wall Street was still buying it, but investors were wavering. The ultimate AI bellwether, Nvidia stock, tumbled for a few days, rallied after CEO Jensen Huang insisted AI agents will run everything, everywhere in the future (presumably once they've stopped deleting databases), then got pummeled again on Friday.

Still, for now, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX continue to chase trillion-dollar IPOs, the latter based in large part on the untested concept of AI data centers in space.

Regardless, outside the AI bubble, a backlash has been brewing for some time — and not only among students booing pro-AI commencement speakers.

Just 10 percent of Americans say they're thrilled about the future of AI, a Pew poll found in March; that same month, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in an NBC poll said neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing a good job on the AI front.

That number also appears in an April survey of white-collar workers: 80 percent are straight-up refusing to use AI even when it's mandated. In the last 30 days, 54 percent of workers reported bypassing company AI tools and completing jobs themselves.

Those numbers suggest general strike-levels of discontent with AI across every industry, out there in the real America beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, if not an outright revolutionary mood.

Data center protests, fueled by the 70 percent of Americans who say they don't want data centers near them, are only likely to grow going forward — especially now that they are producing tangible results.

At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and the fight is only getting more fierce. Take the planned Stratos data center in Utah, where local opposition just forced VC and Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary to downsize his land usage by 75 percent.

"We screwed up," O'Leary told local TV news Friday. "We pissed off a lot of people."

'Let them eat tokens'

And the threat of electoral guillotines may explain why politicians are starting to propose serious action.

This week alone, Senator Bernie Sanders came out in favor of the U.S. public owning a 50 percent stake in AI companies, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed an AI tax, and President Trump finally signed an executive order on AI regulation that his AI czar, Silicon Valley titan David Sacks, has long opposed.

On Friday, New York State legislators sent a one-year data center moratorium to the governor's desk — and Trump seemed to come around to Sanders' way of thinking on the government taking an ownership stake in OpenAI. Some who doubt OpenAI's current worth saw it as a bailout.

The White House's AI executive order was announced while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was making rosy pronouncements on AI at Build, adding to the surreal sense that we're watching a tale of two worlds — the anti-AI people versus an out-of-touch AI regime that says, essentially, let them eat tokens.

But hold the revolution: Just below the surface (and the Microsoft Surface Ultra), the AI regime is showing signs of cracking all on its own — and it's all down to those tokens.

Silicon Valley's AI backlash begins

When it comes to AI true-believer companies, they don't get much truer than Uber. The rideshare giant says 90 percent of its engineers use AI tools, mostly Anthropic's Claude Code. As much as 10 percent of Uber's codebase is written by AI agents.

Uber also had leaderboards that encouraged as much usage of AI tokens as possible; in Silicon Valley, this is known as tokenmaxxing, and it was really hot in 2025.

Then the tokenmaxxing bill came due. "The budget I thought I would need [for 2026] is blown away already,” CTO Neppalli Naga told The Information on April 14 — less than four months into the year.

At the time, however, the information didn't make much of a dent in the AI news cycle — not until Uber's COO confirmed what it meant at the end of May. Naga's busted budget was a "head-exploding moment," Andrew MacDonald told the Rapid Response podcast. Such spending "becomes harder to justify because AI is not free...we're going to have to start talking about token consumption."

Just like that, we started talking about token consumption. Axios reported an unnamed company had burned through half a billion dollars of tokens in a single month "after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses."

Next, we learned Amazon and Meta had shut down their own internal AI leaderboards; other companies like Walmart and Starbucks have scaled back their AI agent plans.

In a leaked email, one Amazon senior vice president told employees to "stop using AI just for the sake of using AI." You'd be forgiven for thinking this obliterates a large chunk of OpenAI and Anthropic's business model.

Both companies have spent years building models that, for the most part, consume more tokens. Now they're promoting agents who can consume tokens on steroids — often as much as 24 times as a regular model.

As high-minded as their missions might be, both companies are in it to sell tokens.

Why tokenmaxxing died

A scene from a data center protest in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star via Getty Images

Some AI leaders, sensing the shift in the wind, are starting to say that sort of thing openly. Ravi Kumar S., CEO of AI IT firm Cognizant, called tokenmaxxing "a vanity metric" at a Fortune conference on Monday. Kumar took aim at OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, accusing them of "fearmongering."

Altman and Amodei have walked back previous predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse now that they have IPOs in the offing — reason enough for a vibe shift of its own. But what's really hurting the two CEOs is that they're also cashing in on user confusion over the complex cost of AI.

Earlier this year, Anthropic quietly changed the price of Claude for many customers, charging them per token. OpenAI is looking at dropping its "unlimited" ChatGPT plans — quite a change from a year ago, when Altman promised "intelligence too cheap to meter."

The shift isn't just happening at the two AI giants. Microsoft started cutting token costs for itself and raising token prices for everyone else — even before those rosy pronouncements at Build.

Microsoft began revoking developers' access to Claude Code, pushing them to Microsoft Copilot instead, in May. On June 1, Github Copilot users were switched from a fixed subscription to a per-token subscription model.

Reddit filled with angry users noting how expensive their AI prompts have suddenly become. In one extreme case, a Claude user blew 50 percent of his monthly credits on a single prompt.

"At the beginning of the year," Altman said in an OpenAI livestream this week, "people were totally happy with the amount they were spending... now, all of a sudden [it's] a huge issue." In a CNBC interview Monday, Altman admitted to a "ton of waste" in AI spending, and said companies were asking, "how long do I have to wait for [AI benefits] to show up in revenue?"

This was, Altman said, a "fair issue." And the closest Altman came to an answer? "The industry will figure that out pretty quickly... in another year or two."

Will the vibe shift burst the AI bubble?

How long OpenAI and Anthropic have to figure out this issue, however, depends largely on what happens in their IPOs.

"Nobody knows when this will all collapse, but 2026 will be remembered in hindsight as the year in which retail investors were left holding the bag," Gary Marcus, a professor and leading generative AI critic, predicted Monday.

Marcus, who has been increasingly proven right in the AI problems he's foreseen since 2022, may yet be off base here. But he does have a hunch, based on comments from Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, that both companies had burned so much money they were "months from bankruptcy" and had "run out of options" other than to file for trillion-dollar IPOs.

In particular, OpenAI has long been losing more than a billion dollars a month — the cost of serving ChatGPT for free to hundreds of millions of people.

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Financial bubbles built around technologies invariably end with an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Eventually, enough people are pointing and laughing that courtiers can't carry off the hype any longer.

That's what happened to end the dotcom bubble in 2000. A business deal came along that was so ridiculous on its surface (the world's largest media empire, snapped up by the guys who gave away dial-up internet via CDs?!) that markets couldn't help but point and laugh. The vibe shifted. Overhyped, profitless dotcom companies began to look naked, and a stock collapse soon followed.

Human hiring and hallucinations

Times have changed, and the AI bubble is a hardier thing than its dotcom predecessor. It is built atop the one company currently making a fortune out of all this. NVIDIA has sold the picks and shovels to AI gold rush seekers for so many years now that they've started to seem invulnerable. Yet even Nvidia is learning lessons about the prohibitive growing cost of AI.

"The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," one Nvidia executive told Axios in April. So even Nvidia is vulnerable to tokenmaxxing. And that's why the hottest thing in AI these days is hiring humans, because they're getting to be cheaper than AI — and are needed for quality control on AI's output anyway.

Cognizant's Kumar boasted about his AI company hiring 20,000 graduates last year, and more this year — a vibe shift if ever we've seen one.

So the jobspocalypse vibe has shifted. The tokens vibe has shifted. And the AI data center-building vibe has shifted, too — not just in terms of public and environmental opposition, but in the fact that there aren't as many data centers under construction as we'd been led to expect. (Gadfly journalist Ed Zitron has done yeoman's work here, scouring satellite photos of data center sites for signs of construction).

What's left? Arguably, the only vibe that hasn't shifted is the hallucination vibe, in that users still aren't aware how often most AI models hallucinate. Google, for example, won't say how often Gemini 3.5 Flash hallucinates, but a December Google study found that Gemini may only be accurate 68.8 to 83.8 percent of the time.

And hallucinations aren't hard to find these days. The hallucination that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are genuine trillion-dollar AI giants that deserve to be listed in top index funds despite being unprofitable (breaking news: as I wrote this, the S&P 500 officially opted out of that hallucination).

The hallucination that Nvidia will always remain on top, even as companies making up a majority of its business are developing their own AI chips (which is exactly why Michael Burry, the Big Short guy, continues to short the stock).

The hallucination that customers want AI in everything, when survey after survey says the opposite. The hallucination that AI content will dominate the future, when the generation that will take us there points and laughs at AI slop.

If these hallucinations fade from the fevered brains of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the great AI vibe shift of 2026 will be complete.

This article reflects the opinion of the author.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Apple’s big developers conference keynote is expected to focus updates to Siri and Apple Intelligence. But the software can sometimes give us clues to the direction of Apple’s future hardware. CNET’s Bridget Carey goes through what key areas she’s most interested in for WWDC news.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is days away. Here's what the iPhone Ultra rumors, Apple's track record and Siri's new Google powers tell us about what to expect.

From Project Solara hardware to "agent-first" operating systems, Microsoft is betting that your future computing experience isn’t tied to one device. Instead, it’s powered by an army of autonomous assistants.

Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, and industry partners present the company's transition to its 18A process technology across consumer PCs, handheld gaming devices, and data centers built to handle multiagent AI workloads.

Glasses, pendants, AirPods, watches and what else? Apple may not reveal everything at WWDC, but it should start discussing the changes to AI that are coming.

See all the biggest announcements from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Microsoft's Build conference in San Francisco. Microsoft showed off its native OpenClaw app for Windows, new Unmetered Agentic AI models and a preview of Microsoft's newest quantum computer, Majorana 2.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlines how agentic AI is revolutionizing the architecture of our everyday devices at Computex 2026. Discover the future of smart technology across mobile, robotics, automotive, and data centers.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced today that he will introduce legislation to give the American public a direct ownership stake in the country's largest artificial intelligence companies.

Writing in the New York Times, Sanders laid out the case for the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act — a bill that would create a federally managed fund created not with cash, but with stock. Specifically, Sanders proposes a one-time transfer of 50 percent of equity from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to the government. The idea: since AI is built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, conversations, and labor of the American people — typically without permission or payment — the American people deserve a cut of the profits.

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Here's what Sanders is proposing.

What the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would accomplish

The fund would acquire half the stock of the largest AI companies in the country through a mandated equity transfer — Sanders is explicit that this is not a profits tax. The government would then hold voting shares and receive equal board representation at each company, giving it formal power to block decisions deemed harmful to the public.

Revenue generated by the fund would flow directly to Americans as cash payments, with Sanders indicating that, as the fund grows, proceeds would eventually support broader public goods, including healthcare, education, and housing. He points to Norway's sovereign wealth fund and Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend as working models of the concept.

Sanders' core argument is that AI models were built on the writing, art, journalism, code, and research produced by millions of people without their consent or compensation. Sanders argues that because the technology is derived from collective human output, the wealth it generates should be shared collectively. As Sanders prepares his legislation, AI industry leaders are prepping for a massive payday when Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX (which recently merged with xAI) go public this year.

Sanders notes that versions of this idea have come from the AI industry itself. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed a public wealth fund tied to AI-driven economic growth. Anthropic has called for national sovereign wealth funds holding AI equity stakes. Musk has advocated for a "universal high income" to offset AI-related job displacement.

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Sanders frames these industry positions as validation — though notably, endorsing a concept in the abstract and accepting a 50 percent equity transfer are very different things.

What's still unresolved

Sanders acknowledges the legislation is still being written. Several significant questions still lack answers.

Profitability is one. OpenAI is notoriously not profitable and has operated at a loss for most of its existence. A sovereign wealth fund built on equity in companies that aren't profitable doesn't generate dividends, and Sanders hasn't addressed what the fund looks like if the AI sector's financial trajectory doesn't match analyst projections.

Scope is another. Sanders says applying government ownership to companies where AI is only part of the business is "complicated," without explaining how that would be handled in practice. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have major AI operations — it's unclear whether or how they'd fall under the legislation.

Environmental impact gets no mention. AI infrastructure — data centers, energy consumption, water use — carries real costs that fall on communities that don't always benefit from generative AI, and the proposal offers no specific mechanism beyond the general promise of government oversight to address them.

However, a well-structured sovereign wealth fund could distribute some AI wealth downward, in theory. Government board representation could also create some accountability for a powerful and fast-growing new industry. The populist proposal is far bolder than anything else in the current policy conversation.

Until the senator drops the actual legislation, what we have is a premise that's hard to argue with and a plan that's still very much a sketch.

The AI giant Anthropic has submitted its draft S-1 registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday morning, setting the stage for an initial public offering later this year.

Anthropic made headlines when it reached a near-trillion-dollar valuation, surpassing OpenAI as the largest privately held AI company. Anthropic raised $65 billion from Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital. This came after it reached a peak influx of a million new users a day, the company said in March.

Once the SEC completes a review of Anthropic's confidential filing, the company will be able to go public. Anthropic said the timing "will depend on market conditions and other factors."

Anthropic revealed the news via a short announcement on its website, noting that the share price has not yet been set.

It isn't the only tech giant prepping for an IPO this year. Elon Musk's SpaceX, after its merger with xAI, filed its own IPO paperwork in May. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is expected to move forward with its own IPO as early as this month.

These IPOs could break records and create unprecedented wealth. If the SpaceX IPO goes as planned, Musk is widely expected to become the world's first trillionaire.

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amoedi, who only owns 1% of the company, will not enter the Musk stratosphere of wealth — but he could be worth tens of billions of dollars when Anthropic hits the market.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at Computex to unveil the new Vera Rubin AI computing platform, the Vera CPU, a new collaboration with Microsoft that promises to “reinvent” the PC and its new open source AI models.

Google’s whole future is dripping in AI, including a brand-new version of search. There is a problem, however: Google is now packaging the information instead of just serving it up. How did Google figure out its conclusions? Are they even accurate? Do you want to ask these questions every time you use Google? You may have to. 

YouTube is upgrading its AI labeling system, including a new automatic detection tool, as tech companies ramp up their investments in content provenance.

Previously, videos featuring photorealist AI had to be tagged by their creators or face a strike — once it was tagged as AI, a disclosure label would be added to the description. Now, that label is moving up to the top, more prominently displayed for all to see next to the video's title and in the bottom corner of YouTube Shorts.

In a first since the platform introduced labels in 2024, YouTube will also begin scanning content and automatically adding labels to any unmarked videos with significant AI use. "It’s important to note that a disclosure label alone does not change how a video is recommended or whether it’s eligible to earn money," the platform wrote in a recent blog post. "In a world where AI is changing what’s possible, our goal is simple: make it as easy as possible for creators and viewers to have the right information."

YouTube has faced criticism for an abundance of AI "slop" and AI-generated advertising, and the platform has removed millions of channels and videos in response. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan stated that curbing AI slop is a top priority.

Meanwhile, child safety advocates have recently called on the platform to address what they call a dangerous proliferation of AI-generated, animated content aimed at children. In an April letter sent to Mohan and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, a coalition of child advocacy groups urged the platform to ban AI-generated content on YouTube Kids, institute clear AI labels for all content, and implement new parental controls aimed at limiting AI videos.

At the time, YouTube told Mashable it was working on developing labels for YouTube Kids. The company also explained that its current labeling approach doesn't apply to YouTube Kids because of other safety policies, including a lack of descriptions on Kids content.

For now, the new labels only apply to the main YouTube website, not content found on YouTube Kids. In addition, the automatic labelling system will only scan for "photorealistic and meaningfully AI altered or generated" content, a policy which so far has excluded animated or highly stylized video.

Corporate execs are prepped and ready to cut their workforces down due to AI in the next two years, according to a new corporate survey of the job market.

Conducted by the Mercer consulting firm, the global report surveyed 12,000 respondents across upper-level management, human resources, and lower-level employees.

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More than 99 percent of executives surveyed for the report said they expect AI "to lead to at least some headcount reduction in the next two years." In addition, fully 98 percent of executives said they were "planning organization design changes in the next two years." And, when compared to other employees, C-Suite-level execs were much more focused on figuring out how to incorporate AI and automation.

So far this year, Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Fiverr, Pinterest, and Snap have announced layoffs related to AI, and an estimated 50,000 AI layoffs occurred in 2025.

Not every exec believes the shifting job market is cause for alarm. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon recently penned a New York Times opinion piece calling the "AI job apocalypse" overblown. "The United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption," Solomon wrote. "The historical pattern is clear: The U.S. economy can and will adapt to major advances in technology."

A recent study conducted by the Harvard Business School found that generative AI is actually increasing demand for jobs in "augmentation-prone" roles in the short term, and that workforce reductions are primarily hitting finance and tech sectors.

But only a third of execs told the consulting firm they believe human and machine capabilities can be effectively combined in workforces at large. Employee satisfaction is still a concern, as well. Amid worsening workforce and economic anxiety, more than a third of employees said they would consider leaving their jobs if they felt disadvantaged when it came to AI, according to the trend report.

According to a September Pew Research Center survey, 21 percent of Americans said their work is partially done with AI. While the larger majority of American workers (65 percent) still say AI hasn't encroached on their jobs, AI integration is increasingly affecting younger, early-career employees and college graduates.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Thursday addressing the imminent "disruptions" of artificial intelligence on jobs.

The Democratic governor and widely-rumored 2028 presidential contender directed the state to explore a number of measures to prevent nightmare scenarios for workers affected by AI job loss.

The executive order focuses on policies for severance, employment insurance, universal basic income, and workforce training, among other potential responses to AI worker displacement.

"This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future — and that work is starting right here in the Golden State," Newsom said in a statement.

Meta layoffs: AI job losses mount

The timing of Newsom's executive order is noteworthy. On Wednesday, California-based tech giant Meta laid off 8,000 employees, 10 percent of its workforce, and moved another several thousand to roles focused on AI.

Despite Meta's recent strong quarterly financial performance, the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the layoffs as part of the company's aggressive transition to AI.

"Success isn’t a given. A.I. is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes," Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to staff, according to the New York Times. "The companies that lead the way will define the next generation."

Other major tech companies, including Cisco and Microsoft, are shedding jobs as they focus on AI.

The timeline for Newsom's AI executive order

Newsom's executive order established a short timeline for evaluating and identifying new solutions. Within 90 days, the state's Employment Development Department is supposed to launch a dashboard showing AI's impacts on California jobs, based on unemployment insurance data.

By mid-October, various state agencies should finish reviewing specific policies and practices, including how unionized workplaces are addressing the adoption of AI technology.

"Today is just the first step as we rewrite policy and direction, creating a future of work that works for all," Newsom said.

Tech giants Google, Meta, and TikTok are facing European scrutiny for their alleged role in a growing number of financial scams targeting users.

The three companies are accused of failing to proactively remove fraudulent ads from their platforms and notify users in an appropriate manner, outlined in complaints filed to regulators by the European Consumer ⁠Organisation (BEUC) and 29 of its members in 27 European countries, Reuters reported.

The consumer group flagged 900 ads that they deemed violated EU laws, but said that only 27 percent of those ads were removed by platforms. More than half of the reports were rejected or ignored.

The complaints were submitted under the EU's Digital Services Act, and regulators could levy hefty fines if the companies are found in violation.

"This complaint misrepresents how we fight scams and is inherently flawed. We take extensive measures to keep scams off our platforms, blocking over 99% of policy-violating ads before they are ever seen," a Google spokesperson said in comment to the press.

"We ​invest in advanced AI, ⁠tools, and partnerships to stop them. Last year we found and removed over 159 million scam ads, 92% before anyone reported them to us," Meta responded.

Meta was recently accused of making tens of millions of dollars off of scam ads targeting older Americans and Medicare recipients. Last year, a Reuters investigation found that Meta made billions from fraudulent ads, also referred to as "high risk" advertising. AI-powered scams are proliferating across platforms, including Google-owned YouTube and TikTok.

The Digital Services Act — a broad set of laws that impose more transparent reporting and consumer protections on online service providers — went into effect in 2022. Since then, the European Union has initiated multiple inquiries against large tech companies, including a recent Google antitrust probe, an investigation into Meta's child safety policies, and a sweeping audit of TikTok's algorithm and data policies.

UPDATE: May. 21, 2026, 4:18 p.m. This story was updated with a new statement from Google.

Sam Altman's OpenAI may be losing money to the tune of $1 billion a month. It may be struggling to convert more than 5% of ChatGPT users to paid customers. And it may be losing ground to rivals like Anthropic (makers of the highly-teased Claude Mythos) and Google (makers of the freshly updated Gemini).

But OpenAI investors still believe they can cash in — perhaps to the tune of $1 trillion — if the company launches on the stock market soon.

And now that Elon Musk's lawsuit (which claimed OpenAI defrauded him during its conversion to a for-profit company) has been dismissed at trial on a technicality, the launch window appears to be opening.

Sources at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley told reporters at the Wall Street Journal that the OpenAI IPO would be filed with regulators as early as this Friday. And though plans remain "fluid," the Journal warned, that would mean you'll likely see OpenAI shares debut on the NYSE as soon as September.

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Musk, meanwhile, says he plans to appeal the trial verdict; a bonanza IPO for a company still nominally governed by a nonprofit board may help bolster his case. Ironically, Musk is currently distracted by his own pending IPO bonanza; SpaceX, fresh off its acquisition of xAI, is also reportedly ready to file paperwork with regulators this week.

So, Altman, increasingly Musk's AI nemesis, may be taking a little of his rival's thunder here. But exactly how much Altman will take home from an OpenAI IPO remains a mystery.

The CEO confirmed in the courtroom what has been an open secret for some time — that Altman does have investments in the company, via a fund at the Silicon Valley incubator he used to run, YCombinator.

In 2023, Altman told the U.S. Senate he had no financial stake in the company, per The Atlantic. He's now the target of a probe led by GOP members of the House Oversight Committee, which is looking into OpenAI's habit of making deals with other companies Altman has investments in.

In other words, Altman's long-documented reputation for telling people what they want to hear may be catching up with him, while the wheels are wobbling a bit on the OpenAI bandwagon. And yet, at the same time, a payday of unknown magnitude approaches.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Online safety organizations have filed a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking the agency to formally assess Roblox's alleged risks to children. 

The Request for Investigation, submitted by child safety nonprofit Fairplay and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), argues that Roblox's design features and advertising violate portions of the FTC Act in ways that endanger minor users.

"The FTC has the authority to stop Roblox from raking in billions of dollars in profit every year at the expense of our children’s safety and healthy development. We call on the commission to investigate Roblox’s unfair trade practices and acts, and to scrutinize the platform’s compliance with children’s online privacy law," Fairplay policy counsel Haley Hinkle wrote in a press release.

The organizations claim the platform is specifically violating Section 5 of the FTC Act, the federal regulation that prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices, including false advertising. 

The letter urges the agency to investigate Roblox's marketing of virtual currency (Robux), its chat and communication tools, and its use of "engagement-maximizing design features" as unfair conduct under Section 5. It argues that Roblox's representation of platform safety features and the developmental appropriateness of Roblox activities is deceptive.

The organizations are also asking the FTC to scrutinize Roblox's compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which governs the online collection of personal information for children under 13. The letter claims the platform gathers a "substantial amount of data" that could be linked to players' usernames.

"Despite our warnings over the years, Roblox refused to make changes to protect children from harm, only recently making some design changes to prevent unknown adults from contacting children," Haley McNamara, executive director of NCOSE, wrote. "Roblox has a history of harm and callousness towards children and concerned parents, and must be investigated by the FTC for the sake of children worldwide."

Other groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation Movement, and ParentsSOS, signed on in support.  

In a statement to Mashable, a Roblox spokesperson said:

Roblox strongly disputes these claims. Our platform is designed to provide a positive, healthy and enjoyable experience — we build for fun and connection, not short-term engagement. While no system can be perfect, we have a set of safeguards designed to support a safe and civil environment, and clear policies for game creators that require fair treatment of players.

Most games on Roblox are free to play and no-one is required to purchase Robux. In the first quarter of 2026, only 1.4% of our 132 million daily active users were payers on the platform. In addition, we have clear policies prohibiting both actual and simulated gambling, and a set of rules governing how game creators can use gameplay mechanics like paid random items.

Roblox has faced multiple lawsuits filed by individuals, parents, and state attorneys general that allege the platform is not doing enough to protect young users. In 2023, a cohort of families whose children allegedly encountered inappropriate content on the platform filed a class-action lawsuit against Roblox. The claim similarly accused Roblox of "negligent misrepresentation and false advertising," and started a wave of criticism that the child gaming site was enabling child predators. 

This was followed by a slew of lawsuits in 2025, including a Louisiana filing that claimed Roblox intentionally failed to implement safety measures intended to curb child sex abuse materials (CSAM). Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in November, claiming Roblox flagrantly ignored online safety laws and deceived parents. Paxton has since taken aim at streaming giant Netflix and its data collection policies for child users. 

In response to growing concerns, Roblox has unveiled additional platform safety features, including global age verification and age-gated child accounts for users under 16. Over the past few years, the platform has also introduced linked parent accounts, expanded parental supervision tools, and additional AI-powered chat moderation features.

We already know, thanks to multiple rumors and reports, that Apple is planning a massive overhaul of its smart assistant Siri, in the upcoming iOS 27.

Now, a new report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has some details on the privacy aspects of this new, smarter Siri.

According to the report, Apple's standalone Siri will have a strong emphasis on privacy. One feature that it's not very common in other AI chatbots, for example, will be auto-deleting chats, as seen in Apple's Messages. In the Settings panel for the Siri app, users will be able to choose whether they want to keep conversations forever, for one year, or just 30 days.

The report also says users will be able to choose whether Siri opens with a new chat, or to a "grid" of previous conversations at launch.

Apple will also place tighter limits on how Siri's memory works. This might mean that the AI-powered assistant won't be able to pull from previous conversations as liberally as some rival systems can, but it should be better for user privacy.

Finally, the report claims that Apple will proclaim its AI experience as "ad-free," in contrast to OpenAI, which recently started rolling out sponsored ads in ChatGPT.

When you’re a centibillionaire, it turns out, legal orders from U.S. federal judges don’t apply.

Case in point: Elon Musk was recently ordered by a federal judge to be on "recall" status for the blockbuster OpenAI trial currently unfolding in Oakland, California. You might expect Musk to comply, given that he brought the suit in the first place.

Instead of staying close to the courthouse as ordered, however, Musk has now hopped on a flight to China with President Trump.

Musk's lawsuit accuses his OpenAI co-founders, including current CEO Sam Altman, of fraud by pivoting the company from a nonprofit to a for-profit enterprise. There has been plenty of fascinating testimony from both tech titans. Most recently, defendant Altman accused Musk of deliberately demotivating staff at OpenAI and of being more interested in sharing "memes on his phone" than in plotting the company’s future.
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When Musk wrapped up his testimony last month, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers placed him on recall status, meaning he might be required to testify again. 

"OK, Mr. Musk, you are not excused, but you can leave for the day," Rogers said on April 30.

Rogers has previously sanctioned members of the public who attempted to record the proceedings by dressing them down in front of the whole court, so it's anyone's guess how she will respond to Musk's flouting of her instruction. She also seems unafraid of Musk, having chided him that even though he took "Law 101," he is "not a lawyer."

Musk did not receive judicial clearance to travel overseas while the trial continued, NBC has confirmed via multiple sources. Instead, Musk joined Trump on his state visit to China to discuss topics such as Taiwan, Iran, and AI with President Xi Jinping.

Being recalled in a trial is an ambiguous position to be in, legally speaking. While there are no explicit rules forbidding traveling, you are expected to be available if your testimony is compelled because of needed clarity or the emergence of new evidence.

Being across an ocean probably wouldn’t fly for most witnesses on recall status. Then again, Musk isn’t your average witness.

Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman are expected on Thursday.

The Android Show I/O Edition showcased new Googlebook laptops and the latest updates in Gemini, which Google promises will work seamlessly across devices bringing agentic AI to the masses. See all the highlights from the online event.

eBay's board of directors has formally rejected GameStop's unsolicited bid to acquire the e-commerce company, bringing an unceremonious end to one of the stranger corporate stories of the year.

In a press release issued Tuesday morning, eBay's board called the proposal from GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen "neither credible nor attractive," citing concerns about GameStop's financing plan, the operational risks of a combined company, and questions about GameStop's own governance and executive incentives.

The rejection letter, signed by eBay board chairman Paul Pressler, was unambiguous. The board said it had considered eBay's standalone prospects and concluded that the company was better positioned on its own, with a clear strategy and management team already in place.

For anyone who has been following this saga, eBay's skepticism was entirely predictable.

GameStop, the mall-based video game retailer that became a legendary meme stock after a Reddit-fueled short squeeze in 2021, announced on May 3 that it was making a surprise bid to acquire eBay at $125 per share — a 46 percent premium over eBay's closing price on Feb. 4 — valuing the deal at approximately $55.5 billion.

GameStop's answer to acquiring a company worth nearly five times as much involved a combination of its $9.4 billion in cash and liquid assets, up to $20 billion in third-party financing from TD Securities, and GameStop common stock for the remaining balance. The company had also quietly accumulated a 5 percent stake in eBay in the months prior to the announcement.

The financing math left analysts unconvinced, and CEO Ryan Cohen did little to help matters. In a now-viral CNBC interview, Cohen was repeatedly pressed on how GameStop would get to $55 billion and repeatedly said he didn't understand the question.

When Mashable reached out to GameStop for clarification, the company responded by sending a link to Cohen's pinned post on X, in which he wrote, "selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay." He subsequently posted that his personal eBay account had hit its $50,000 monthly listing limit and had been permanently suspended, at which point he announced on X that he was on the phone with customer support. It was, in the words of our own reporting, leaning into the spin.

As for what GameStop planned to do with eBay if it actually got it, the pitch centered on using GameStop's roughly 1,600 remaining retail locations as physical hubs for authentication, intake, and order fulfillment. Which is plain terms, means trying to compete with Amazon. A tactic eBay had already tried to do a decade prior. Part of the company's recent resurgence has been its shift back to being an online marketplace for buying collectibles and antiques.

eBay, for its part, had no prior contact with GameStop before receiving the unsolicited proposal and had indicated it would review whether the bid constituted an actionable offer. As of this morning, the board has made its answer clear.

In April, Meta quietly reversed itself after removing an Instagram post honoring older lesbian relationships in Brazil. The excised post was not sexual in nature and did not contain material harmful to minors. The post in question documented a snapshot from a moment in history where lesbians were forced to hide their relationships as "roommates" or "gal pals" and their love was scrubbed from the public record. Nevertheless, Meta removed the content. 

Meta cited its hate speech rules. The Oversight Board later acknowledged what should have been obvious from the start: The Brazil case was an instance of over‑enforcement against a marginalized community, driven by automated systems that could not read context, reclaimed language, or even the full post itself. The content was restored only after outside intervention and advocacy from the LGBTQ+ community.

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This case is now being treated as a narrow content moderation error, but policymakers need to recognize that it signals a clear warning about what happens when lawmakers push platforms to police content instead of fixing design. Across the country, states are rushing to "protect kids online" by restricting access to social media or pressuring companies to remove vaguely defined "harmful" content. But what happened in Brazil shows the human cost of that approach. 

When platforms are incentivized to remove speech quickly and at scale, they do not become better judges of nuance. Social media becomes a blunt instrument, and the first people hit are those whose stories require human context and radical empathy to be understood.

If lawmakers actually want to protect kids, they should stop asking platforms to decide which stories are acceptable and start regulating core design choices that cause harm in the first place, like endless scroll, engagement‑based recommendations, and surveillance‑driven feeds.

Here’s why that distinction matters, especially for LGBTQ+ kids and other marginalized communities, like neurodivergent kids. LGBTQ+ young people are far more likely than their peers to rely on online spaces to find community, information, and support, often because those things are unavailable or unsafe at home or school. But they are also significantly more likely to end up in unsafe online interactions: harassment, grooming, doxxing, or being pushed into high‑risk spaces they didn’t seek out. 

In Australia, after a social media ban on anyone under 16 was enacted, disability rights advocates noted that autistic youth were cut off from some of the only support and peer networks available to them. 

Recommendation systems don’t understand vulnerability, but they understand engagement. When a queer kid searches for community, platforms often respond by aggressively amplifying whatever keeps them clicking. Usually, this means increasingly sexualized content, adult strangers, extremist rhetoric, or predatory accounts that know exactly how to exploit isolation. 

Infinite scroll makes disengagement much harder for adolescents, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, even more so for those in vulnerable communities. Algorithmic "friend" or "account" suggestions collapse liminal boundaries between teens and adults. Weak defaults make it difficult to block, mute, or disappear.

Young people, not just LGBTQ+ young people, are exposed to harm online because platforms are built to extract attention, not protect users. Parents are right to be worried and to advocate for change. But a content-based framing misses the real problem. 

The greatest risks kids face online don’t come from a single bad post slipping through moderation, but from automated systems that push content at kids they didn’t ask for, connect them to people they don’t know, and keep them scrolling long after warning signs appear.

Policymakers at both the state and federal levels need to design regulations that address those risks directly. Age‑appropriate design codes don’t tell platforms what speech to allow, but they can tell platforms how to behave. Design codes require safer defaults, like limits on behavioral profiling, stronger blocking tools, reduced amplification of unsolicited recommendations, and guardrails that slow down virality and compulsive use. 

The public should advocate for product refinement, rather than infringement of First and Fourth Amendment rights. Design codes reduce the chance that a curious or lonely kid is algorithmically funneled into danger, like I was, searching for community and nudged toward risk by systems that did not care who I was.

Age‑appropriate design codes offer a way out of this mess. By regulating how platforms are built rather than what people are allowed to say, design code laws reduce harm without turning companies into cultural censors. They don’t require platforms to interpret reclaimed slurs, queer history, or political speech. Companies should instead be required to stop engineering addiction and risk. 

We don’t need more content or platform bans. We need fewer harmful systems. If we’re serious about protecting kids online, especially the ones already most at risk, this case reminds us exactly where to start.

This article reflects the opinion of the writer.

Lennon Torres is the Movement Director at the Heat Initiative and Founding Partner of The Attention Studio. 

Gemini is already in your search results, your Gmail, your calendar, and your Android phone. At Google I/O on May 19, Google is going further. Faster AI, an assistant that actually acts for you, smart glasses built with real fashion brands, and a new laptop OS. Iyaz Akhtar is here to break down what to expect from Google I/O 2026.

Elon Musk's X is still the most unsafe social media platform for LGBTQ+ users, according to a new report by GLAAD.

The organization's annual Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) and its "platform scorecards" grade social media sites on LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression. GLAAD assessed external-facing policies on diversity programs, content moderation, user suppression, and enforcement mechanisms, among other metrics, for six major companies: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, and TikTok.

X scored just 29 points out of a possible 100. No platform has ever scored above a 67.

While X may have received the worst marks of the bunch, none of the platforms analyzed by the organization got passing grades. Many, in fact, hit historic lows. GLAAD found that all platforms were "rife with anti-LGBTQ hate, harassment, and disinformation," and noted nationwide rollbacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.

The report specifically calls out Meta and YouTube's updated LGBTQ policies, including Meta's overhaul of its Hateful Conduct policy. YouTube's score fell 11 points, the most severe drop, compared to the 2025 analysis. TikTok was the only platform whose score did not decrease over the last year, although it still only earned a score of 56 out of 100.

GLAAD began issuing platform scorecards in 2021. Over the last five years, X has consistently earned some of the lowest scores among competitor platforms — X came out on top of TikTok in the organization's 2022 report. Scores are based on corporate transparency metrics established by global digital human rights organization Ranking Digital Rights and 14 LGBTQ-specific online indicators, GLAAD explained.

GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote:

"Leading social media companies today do not meet basic best practices in content moderation, transparency, data privacy, and workforce diversity — and continuously refuse to meaningfully prioritize the safety, privacy, and expression of LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities. Advertisers should question commitments to LGBTQ safety and the disregard for the safety of LGBTQ users as they plan which platforms to continue to support.

To LGBTQ creators, advocates, and organizations targeted on and by these platforms: these companies need to hear from you. The threats in your DMs, the disinformation fueling anti-LGBTQ legislation, and the bullying that leads to real-world violence are not just ‘part of the job.’ They are systemic failures that tech leaders have the tools to fix, yet they choose to profit from them instead."

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen surprised the business world on May 3 when he announced that GameStop was making a bid to acquire eBay for $55 billion.

The news raised an obvious question: How could GameStop, valued at roughly $12 billion, afford to buy eBay?

In a now-viral CNBC interview on Monday, Cohen declined to answer this riddle, and the interview only raised more questions about the acquisition.

In its announcement, GameStop said it would offer half cash and half stock, and noted that GameStop's 1,600 physical storefronts could serve as hubs to authenticate and fulfill eBay orders. In addition, GameStop has also quietly purchased a 5 percent stake in eBay in recent years, and Cohen presented CNBC with a letter from TD Securities confirming that the bank would provide $20 billion in financing.

However, for many analysts, the math simply isn't mathing. When pressed on how he would get to $55 billion, Cohen repeatedly told CNBC he didn't understand the question.

Mashable reached out to GameStop for clarification on Cohen's interview, and the company responded on Wednesday with a link to a recent post from Cohen on X, where he joked, "I’m selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay." That post is now pinned to the top of Cohen's profile.

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In a follow-up X post, Cohen shared a screenshot of an eBay listing for old socks, along with a warning that his account had reached a $50,000 monthly limit for eBay listings. And not long after that, Cohen shared a screenshot of an email that said his ryan_5050 eBay account had been "permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk." (The ryan_5050 eBay profile is still online, with active listings for vintage software and gaming memorabilia.)

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This is what's called "leaning into the spin."

GameStop has a history as a meme stock, but by all accounts, the bid for eBay is no joke. In later interviews, Cohen described the deal in more detail, and the New York Times described the offer as "a deal that sounded like a reverse merger." Before becoming chairman and CEO at GameStop, Cohen founded the popular online pet store Chewy.

eBay confirmed receipt of the acquisition bid in a May 4 press release.

The bare-bones press statement says that eBay had received an "unsolicited proposal" and that it "had no discussions with or outreach from GameStop prior to receiving the proposal."

It also said that eBay's board of directors would review the proposal and consider whether or not GameStop was really capable of delivering an "actionable proposal." (Mashable reached out to eBay with questions, but we have not received a response.)

The New York Times reports that Michael Burry, a GameStop investor who was famously portrayed by Christian Bale in The Big Short, has since sold all of his GameStop holdings.

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Portable power stations provide reliable off-grid power for travel, emergencies, and outdoor use. This video explains how they work, how to charge them, and where they’re most useful. It also looks at options like the Anker 521 and EcoFlow Delta 3.

Amid the second phase of a high-profile child safety trial in New Mexico, Meta is announcing new measures designed to ensure teens on its platforms are subject to age-related protections.

Meta announced in a blog post Tuesday that parents in the U.S. on two of its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, will receive a notification with details about how to check and confirm their teens' ages on the company's apps.

All users that Meta has identified as a parent, not just adults who supervise a Teen Account, will receive the notification. The notification will include a link to a blog post Meta published a year ago on how to talk to teens about the importance of providing their correct age.

Meta hopes to raise parent awareness of age confirmation on Instagram and Facebook. Credit: Meta

Meta also announced that age-detection technology will roll out to 27 countries in the European Union and Brazil. Additionally, the technology will apply to U.S. Facebook users for the first time.

In April 2025, Meta began using AI to identify teen users who listed an adult age in their account. The technology re-assigns those users to Meta's Teen Account product, which the company says has more stringent safety protections.

In the fall, independent experts who tested Teen Accounts published a report alleging that the product doesn't work as advertised. Among their findings, the researchers documented instances in which the guardrails failed to prevent inappropriate contact with strangers.

On Tuesday, Meta said that its AI technology would begin to analyze user profiles for "contextual clues" of their age, simplify the process for reporting suspected underage accounts, and strengthen its ability to stop underage users from opening new accounts.

Meta noted in its blog post that it believes lawmakers should require app stores to verify user age and provide that information to apps and developers.

Meta back on trial

Meta lost the first phase of the New Mexico trial in March when a jury found the company liable for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children. The suit was filed by the state's attorney general.

Meta has been ordered to pay the maximum penalties for each violation of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, amounting to $375 million. The company has said it plans to appeal the decision.

In the bench trial, New Mexico's Department of Justice is seeking injunctive relief requiring Meta to pay additional damages of $3.75 billion and implement specific changes to protect children.

The proposed policies include effective age verification, blocking children under 13, limits on end-to-end messaging encryption for minors, and permanent bans for adult users who engage in or facilitate child exploitation.

Last week, Meta threatened to shut its platforms down in New Mexico in response to the state's demands.

"Many of the requests are technologically or practically infeasible and would essentially force Meta to build entirely separate apps for use only in New Mexico," the company said in its court filing, according to The Guardian. "Therefore, granting onerous relief could compel Meta to entirely withdraw Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from the state as the only feasible means of compliance."

In court on Monday, Meta's counsel Alex Parkinson reiterated that stance, arguing that granting the state's injunctive relief in full would "genuinely make it untenable to continue offering Meta's products" in New Mexico.

State Attorney General Raul Torrez said that Meta is putting advertising revenue and profit ahead of the "safety of children."

"We know Meta has the ability to make these changes," Torrez said in a statement. "This is not about technological capability."

GameStop, a chain of physical video game and merchandise stores, is also well known for achieving legendary status among meme stocks. Now, the games retailer is looking to buy eBay in a surprise acquisition.

The company announced its intention to purchase the e-commerce giant at $125 per stock, a 46 percent premium to eBay's closing stock price on Feb. 4, 2026. The deal values eBay at approximately $55.5 billion, which will make everyone ask the same question: Where will GameStop, whose own market cap is roughly $11.8 billion, get that kind of money?

To understand this, we need to take a step back. Once a giant with more than 6,000 stores globally, GameStop started declining in the 2010s as folks started getting their games predominantly from the internet. This made it one of the most shorted stocks ever, with investors betting its value would plummet further as its business continues to decline.

In 2021, however, GameStop was revived by a Reddit community of traders who started buying the stock en masse, driving short sellers out and pumping GameStop's stock to new all-time highs. The stock price has since declined, and the business still faces serious headwinds, but the company pivoted to collectibles and digital assets, as well as a Bitcoin treasury strategy.

Now, GameStop has about $9.4 billion of cash and liquid investments on its balance sheet, as well as third-party financing that goes up to $20 billion. That should be good enough, GameStop claims, for half the offer; the other half will come from GameStop common stock. Finally, GameStop has quietly been buying eBay shares, and it already owns a 5 percent stake in the company.

GameStop plans to improve eBay's business, which has been doing better on its own lately, with a combination of cost-cutting measures. GameStop will also leverage its remaining retail locations to "give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce."

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Minors under 13 should not be accessing Instagram and Facebook, per Meta's own terms (the company owns both social media sites). But is the company actually doing enough to stop them from doing so? The European Commission says no.

On Wednesday, the European Commission announced preliminary findings that Instagram and Facebook are in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for "failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services."

According to the EU's main executive body, though the platforms say children under 13 cannot set up an Instagram or Facebook account, minors can easily circumvent the safety measures Meta has put in place to stop them. For example, Meta requires a birth date when you create an account — even to create a Teen Account (for under 16s) — but a minor can simply enter a false birth date, with no additional checks in place.

Meta also has a tool to report minors under 13 on the platforms, but the EC says it's "difficult to use and not effective, requiring up to seven clicks just to access the reporting form." And even if a user jumps through all the hoops required to file a report, there "often is no proper follow-up, and the reported minor can simply continue to use the service without any type of check."

This means that Meta needs to strengthen its measures to "prevent, detect and remove minors under the age of 13" from its services. If the company fails to do so, the preliminary findings might be confirmed, and the EC could issue a fine "proportionate to the infringement."

Meta did a major overhaul of Teen Accounts in 2025, including making default age-appropriate content filters which add a PG-13 rating on content unsuitable for children under 13. But these filters won't tackle the problem of minors creating accounts in the first place.

While the EU's fine cannot exceed six percent of Meta's total worldwide annual turnover, given that Meta's revenue in 2025 was $200 billion dollars, the fine could still be very hefty.

Taylor Swift has reportedly filed to trademark her voice and image, in a move that could give her legal standing against AI deepfakes.

According to Reuters, the pop superstar submitted applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Friday, for two audio files — "Hey, it’s Taylor Swift," and "Hey, it’s Taylor" — and an image of Swift onstage. The trademark owner is reportedly listed as Swift's TAS ​Rights Management. Hollywood star Matthew McConoughey made a similar move in January.

It's a landmark moment of potential empowerment for Swift, who has been plagued with AI-generated deepfake videos and images over the last few years. In Jan. 2024, sexualised AI-generated images of Swift went viral on X, prompting hundreds of millions of views and fan outrage. In Aug. 2025, unauthorised chatbots on Meta impersonated Swift and other celebrities making sexual advances.

The filing could also have political repercussions. In Aug. 2024, Donald Trump posted a deepfake on social media falsely suggesting that Swift and her fans backed the Republican presidential nominee.

Nonconsensual AI-generated images have become a colossal problem — and for Elon Musk's X, in particular, with the platform's AI tool Grok being used to create a wave of sexualised and violent deepfakes — including those of children. In early 2026, X finally offered more protections against these deepfakes. However, several investigations were launched globally including in the UK, Europe, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, suspecting criminal offences.

As of April 2026, X is still under investigation in France for (per the BBC) "complicity in possession or organised distribution of child sexual abuse material, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deepfakes and suspected fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." Musk's xAI is also facing a lawsuit from teens in California for the creation of sexually explicit images.

Swift has not taken legal action against X for deepfakes to date.

In general, we're moving into unchartered waters with real humans trademarking their own likeness to protect themselves against AI clones and deepfakes — and it's getting awkward in Hollywood.

Catch the top moments from the Google Cloud Next keynote presentation, featuring CEO Thomas Kurian on AI breakthroughs, along with key announcements and real-world applications.

Parents worried about what their teen is discussing with Meta's AI Assistant will now be able to view topics of conversation through a Teen Account parental supervision tool. Meta announced the feature Thursday in a blog post.

The information will be available via an Insights tab in the supervision tool for the platforms Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, all of which are owned by Meta.

The feature lists broader topics, such as school, entertainment, writing, health, and wellbeing. Parents can click on the topic for additional but limited detail.

The health and wellbeing categories, for example, can include fitness, physical health, and mental health. The information only covers the past seven days of exchanges.

The feature is the latest safety measure Meta has implemented under intense legal and media scrutiny.

Meta recently lost two separate landmark trials related to child safety protections and the allegedly addictive design of its products. The company said it will appeal both verdicts.

The child safety lawsuit, which took place this year in New Mexico, yielded internal Meta documents demonstrating that the company's leadership knew its persona-driven AI companions, or "characters," could engage in inappropriate and sexual interactions and still launched them without stronger controls.

Last August, Meta locked down its AI characters for teen users amid reports that they were inappropriately engaging with minors, including in discussions about self-harm, suicide, and romantic interactions. In October, the company provided parents with the ability to turn off one-to-one AI character conversations and block specific characters. In January, though, Meta again restricted teen access to characters as its AI assistant remained available.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Mashable that AI characters are paused for teens globally as the company continues to build parental controls.

In addition to the latest parental supervision feature, Meta partnered with the Cyberbullying Research Center to create a list of "conversation starters" about AI chatbot use.

The company also announced the formation of a new AI Wellbeing Expert Council assembled to provide "ongoing input" on AI teen experiences. Meta said the experts are affiliated with the National Council for Suicide Prevention, the University of Michigan, and Northeastern University, among other institutions.

Josh Golin, executive director of the children's advocacy nonprofit Fairplay, said in a statement that Meta's newest supervision feature "once again" burdens parents with monitoring their child's online activity in lieu of "building a safe product to begin with."

Last fall, Fairplay published a report on independent safety testing of Meta's Teen Accounts. Fairplay said the findings indicate that Meta's safety measures don't work as advertised.

The latest feature, Golin said, "doesn't address the fundamental problem: The main function of Meta's chatbots is to manipulate young people into spending more time on the platform by encouraging teens to form unhealthy emotional connections to bots."

Additional reporting by Chase DiBenedetto.

UPDATE: Apr. 23, 2026, 9:24 a.m. PDT This story has been updated with a statement from Fairplay.

Meta is about to ramp up surveillance of its employees, Reuters reports, but in a very 2026 twist, it's not meant to catch people slacking off.

Reuters reports that Meta is installing tracking software that can capture mouse movements and keystrokes on U.S.-based employees' computers. While this sort of surveillance isn't unheard of in corporate America, the motivation here is slightly novel: Meta is reportedly going to use the data to train AI agents, per a company memo seen by Reuters.

This will be done through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI.

Meta's memo said the idea is to help AI agents improve at tasks they currently struggle with, such as using keyboard shortcuts. And in a different memo reportedly sent to employees on Monday, CTO Andrew Bosworth said to expect more internal data collection in order to make agents better at replicating human work. The goal, per Bosworth, is for agents to do most of the work while humans sit back and monitor the situation.

“The vision we are building towards is ​one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Bosworth said, per Reuters.

While Meta did not explicitly say any of this was meant to replace human workers down the line, it's reasonable to wonder if that's where this is eventually going. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of AI last year, and Meta has already laid off a quadruple-digit number of people (though those were unrelated to AI) earlier this year, with more cuts coming later in May.

If, at some point in the future, Meta reduces its workforce with the aim of having AI agents do the work instead, it may have been those same Meta employees who trained the AI in the first place.

In the meantime, Reuters reports that Meta assured employees that the data will not be used in performance reviews.

Meta hasn't had a great year, privacy-wise, and we're only four months into 2026.

In March, the company was accused of sending Meta Ray-Ban user recordings, including intimate images, to offshore Meta workers, also for AI training. Earlier this month, we reported on the case of a former Meta employee under criminal investigation for downloading private Facebook photos. And after a report that Meta was planning to add facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, a group of 70 organizations, including the ACLU, signed a public letter urging Meta to reverse course.

Florida attorney general James Uthmeier announced Tuesday that the state launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI and its flagship product, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

The investigation centers on the use of ChatGPT by a gunman who allegedly shot several people at Florida State University in April 2025. The shooting killed two people and injured five others. The suspect, a former student at Florida State University in his early 20s, is awaiting trial for multiple charges of murder and attempted murder.

"Unfortunately, what we've seen in our initial review is that ChatGPT offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes," Uthmeier said at a news conference on Tuesday, according to NBC Miami.

Uthmeier offered several examples of such exchanges, including one in which the suspect allegedly asked about the gun's short range power and the type of ammunition the gun used. The New York Times reported that the suspect also prompted the chatbot to answer questions about how the country would respond to a shooting at FSU.

Florida law may consider anyone who aids, abets, or counsels someone in a committed or attempted crime as a principal to that crime.

In a published statement, Uthmeier said that "...if ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder."

Mashable contacted OpenAI for comment but didn't receive a response prior to publication.

The criminal investigation follows an initial probe launched earlier this month by Uthmeier into ChatGPT's links to "criminal behavior," including the FSU shooting, as well as child sex abuse and the "encouragement of suicide and self-harm."

The investigation seeks, among other evidence, OpenAI's policies and internal training materials related to user threats directed toward other people between March 2024 and April 2026.

A recent report published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that many AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, helped test users posing as 13-year-old boys plan violence, including school shootings, knife attacks, political assassinations, and bombing synagogues or political party offices.

At the time, OpenAI said it had since introduced a new model different from the one tested jointly by CNN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It is unclear which ChatGPT model the alleged FSU shooter used.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

There's a new guy in charge at Apple.

As you may have heard, longtime Apple CEO Tim Cook is leaving his post this fall, opting to take on a more high-level role at the company. That means Apple has a new CEO, and his name is John Ternus. His face is certainly recognizable if you've watched an Apple product launch livestream in recent years, though perhaps less so than Craig Federighi, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

Obviously, there's a lot more to Ternus than his presentational skills if Apple feels comfortable making him CEO, the position held by Steve Jobs from 1997 to 2011.

So, who is John Ternus? Here's what we know about Apple's little-known new boss.

New Apple CEO John Ternus: Everything you need to know

Ternus is a 50-year-old business executive and engineer, and he's the same age Cook was when he became CEO in 2011.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and a brief stint as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, Ternus joined Apple in 2001, and he's been there ever since.

Tim Cook and John Ternus at Apple headquarters in Northern California. Credit: Apple

Ternus started in the Apple product design team and worked his way up the ladder, becoming a VP of hardware engineering in 2013. He moved further up to senior VP in the same department in 2021. In other words, Ternus has been a longtime hardware guy at Apple, as opposed to Cook, who was more business-focused before replacing Steve Jobs as CEO.

“I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” said Ternus in an Apple press release.

“Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor...I am filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come, and I am so happy to know that the most talented people on earth are here at Apple, determined to be part of something bigger than any one of us. I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”

Finally, as a fun sidenote, Ternus was apparently a heck of a competitive swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania in the 90s, per Fortune. You can read all about that in the Daily Pennsylvanian. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal also reports he's fond of Porsche racing and has respectable lap times for an amateur driver.

Why did Apple pick Ternus for CEO?

While Apple's internal product development is a bit of a black box (unless you're Bloomberg's Mark Gurman), Apple's press release credited Ternus and his team for a lot of recent Apple hardware successes.

"Throughout his tenure at Apple, Ternus has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products across every category," Apple said. "He was instrumental in the introduction of multiple new product lines, including iPad and AirPods, as well as many generations of products across iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch."

His most recent accomplishment?

Apple credited Ternus with the development of the popular and well-regarded MacBook Neo laptop. He was also involved with the iPhone 17 line, with Apple calling out the iPhone Air as an example of Ternus's hardware chops.

Generally speaking, during Ternus's time as a hardware higher-up (though, again, it would be irresponsible to credit him and him alone with these products), Apple's devices have become more popular and better reviewed than ever, with a couple of notable exceptions.

Ternus was reportedly a big part of the MacBook Neo's development. Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

MacBooks, in particular, have become some of the most beloved laptops on the market, and that's thanks in large part to another of Ternus's big accomplishments at Apple — overseeing the transition to Apple silicon and the M series processors. CNBC and others have reported that Ternus played a pivotal role in the development of Apple's in-house chips.

If you want more tea on the Apple leadership shakeup, Gurman recently reported that Ternus was hesitant to support the Apple Vision Pro and Apple Car projects championed by Cook. The former has been a sales disaster, while the latter never even came out. Still, despite a few misses, Cook grew Apple's market cap by 20x during his tenure, making Apple into a $4 trillion company.

By any measure, Cook has been hugely successful, but Apple insiders say Ternus may have a more Jobs-like product vision and attitude.

Gurman also reported that Ternus has a reputation for a more decisive, quick-thinking approach to decision-making. He'll also be expected to help Apple catch up to the competition in the AI arms race. Apple has notably lagged behind everyone else in both feature quantity and quality, and Siri's AI redesign may be one of the first big tests after the announcement.

So, in summary, Ternus is a lifelong hardware developer who is going to try to build on Apple's recent successes in that regard, while also embracing AI to the extent that it can.

We'll surely get to know him better in the near future as Apple hosts WWDC 2026 in June and the iPhone 18 launch later this year.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be launching a tariff refund site for international importers on Monday, April 20.

The current tariff situation is, frankly, confusing. First, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that President Donald Trump does not have the power to unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), striking down one of the president's signature policies. After the ruling, Trump called the justices "fools" and "lapdogs" and pledged to implement a 10-percent global tariff.

As a result of the ruling, many importers will be eligible for refunds for the unconstitutional tariff fees levied against them.

What is the new tariff refund site?

The tariff refund site will be administered through U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is scheduled to launch on Monday, April 20.

The new Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) portal will be available through the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) website. More information can be found in a regularly updated CBP blog post.

"CAPE is designed to consolidate refunds of IEEPA duties including interest rather than processing refunds on an entry-by-entry basis," the website states.

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Who is eligible for refunds?

The CAPE portal is designed for companies who paid tariff fees, importers of record, and authorized customs brokers. These entities will need to submit a declaration through the CAPE portal.

"Importers and authorized brokers should anticipate that valid IEEPA refunds will generally be issued within 60-90 days following acceptance of the CAPE Declaration, unless a compliance concern requires further CBP review," the CBP writes.

Can American consumers get refunds, too?

While the CAPE portal is designed for importers, companies like Costco and FedEx have pledged to pass along refunds to affected customers, according to Axios.

If you're hoping for prices to come down as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, as we reported at the time, this is unlikely.

"Consumers shouldn’t see meaningful price relief soon," Ravin Gandhi, CEO of GMM Nonstick Coatings and an expert on tariffs, told Mashable in February.

"Tariffs were just one piece in the overall pricing structure — and businesses don’t typically lower prices immediately when a cost input disappears — especially with so much inflationary pressure," Gandhi said. "Even though the ruling is legally significant, the short-term economic impact may not happen as fast as the headlines are suggesting."

Google is warning that advances in quantum computing could make it easier to break the encryption that protects cryptocurrencies. The concern is that quantum hackers may be able to crack current security systems much sooner than expected. This could put crypto assets and blockchain-based systems at risk.

In this modern era where seemingly every tech company is defined by its relationship with AI (or lack thereof), Allbirds has made perhaps the most 180-degree corporate pivot we've ever seen.

In case you're unfamiliar, Allbirds was a direct-to-consumer company that made wool sneakers popular among Silicon Valley types in the 2010s. Take note of the past tense, because the company announced in a statement this week that it is completely abandoning the shoe business to instead become an AI firm.

An unspecified investor has agreed to pony up $50 million to fund the brand's pivot to AI compute infrastructure; the money will go towards data center tech instead of shoe production.

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Allbirds has also changed its name to NewBird AI. In a company statement, it proclaimed that it would help facilitate access to AI hardware for clients.

"The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet...The result is a market where enterprises, AI developers, and research organizations are unable to secure the compute resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.

NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap. The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service."

It wasn't that long ago that Allbirds was riding high, and after a 2021 IPO, the company reached a peak valuation of over $4 billion. Amid the tech startup boom of the last 15-ish years, Allbirds Merino wool sneakers were commonplace in Bay Area tech offices. However, it's been a rough five years for the brand, and after failing to find a wider market, it was sold for pennies on the dollar to a brand management firm in March, according to the New York Times.

For what it's worth, NewBird AI stock rose 600 percent after the announcement, per the Times.

Still, it's highly unusual to see a clothing company completely drop the clothing part of its business in favor of buying up GPUs to lease to clients. Many companies, big and small, have pivoted towards AI in one way or another in recent years, with varying degrees of success.

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Spotify is now a physical book store, y'all.

On Wednesday, the (primarily) music streaming company announced the launch of printed book sales in the U.S. and UK. In these two markets, Spotify users can now order physical books, though only on the Android version of the app, with iOS support starting next week.

Spotify, which announced the move in February, partnered with Bookshop.org for physical book sales. Bookshop.org is an online book marketplace that focuses on local, independent bookstores, selling both physical books and e-books.

Spotify launched audiobooks in Sept. 2022 in the U.S., and has since steadily expanded its catalog and availability in other markets, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and several European countries. The company currently offers audiobooks in 22 markets, and has a catalog of 700,000 titles.

As for why is Spotify, initially a purely digital platform, moving into physical books, hear it from Owen Smith, Spotify’s Global Head of Audiobooks. "We believe the future of reading or listening needs to be flexible and fit more seamlessly into people’s lives, he said in February when the feature was originally announced. "We’re extending Spotify’s discovery and engagement strengths across both audio and physical formats, so authors can build deeper connections with their audiences and books can follow readers wherever they go."

On Wednesday, Spotify also launched several other features. One is the expansion of Page Match, a feature that allows listeners to seamlessly move between ebooks, physical books, and audiobooks, to 30 additional languages. The company also expanded Audiobook Recaps on Android, launched Audiobook Charts in Germany, and introduced a dedicated Audiobook Chart for kids in the U.S. and the UK.

The residents of the small town of Festus, Missouri — the site of a new $6 billion data center project — are taking their outrage over the predatory AI data center boom to the polls.

The town, population just 12,000, ousted four incumbent city council members in a local election last week. Each of the representatives had voted yes to the controversial project, which will raze 360 acres of land for a data center operated by an unnamed company.

The deal was approved by city council members on March 30 — just one week before the election — but city residents organized quickly, including running a successful grassroots campaign to replace one of the incumbents with a local advocate who had never before run for public office. Festus residents have also filed a recall petition targeting the city's mayor and remaining council members, as well as a lawsuit against both the city and the project's developer for alleged secret dealings.

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Communities around the nation are pushing back against massive data center investment projects, including state and federal data center subsidies, as their environmental and economic toll becomes clearer. Advocates successfully stalled dozens of projects in 2025. Addressing community concern, a coalition of tech giants signed onto a voluntary, non binding White House pledge, called the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, committing to provide or pay for all energy costs associated with future AI projects.

Last week, the residents of Port Washington, Wisconsin approved a first-of-its kind referendum requiring large scale data center projects go to a local vote for approval. The referendum applies to projects with a minimum $10 million cost and which receive tax benefits.

Apple is closing the doors on three retail locations in June, including the first store to win a unionized staff.

The employees of the Apple store in Towson, Maryland, north of Baltimore, voted to unionize with the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM) in 2022. The union is organized with the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE).

A second Apple store in Oklahoma City voted to unionize shortly after Townson's historic action. Despite the forward momentum, other Apple unionization efforts have petered out under mounting pressure from the company, CNBC reports.

Towson employees were notified of the closure in a Thursday morning staff call. The group ratified its first contract with Apple in 2024, set to expire in 2027. According to union representatives, Apple has said they are prevented from relocating employees under the union's Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), but encouraged them to apply for other open positions. Apple employees at the two other locations set to close — Apple North County, in Escondido, California, and Apple Trumbull in Trumbull, Connecticut — will be moved to nearby stores.

IAM said Apple's claims about its inability to relocate employees at the Maryland store are false, and alleges the closure is "a cynical attempt to bust the union."

Apple says "declining conditions" in local shopping corridors, including the departure of retailers from the Townson Town Center mall, and a shift away from mall locations, prompted the closures.

In a statement following the announcement, IAM representatives wrote: "The IAM Union is outraged by Apple's decision to close its Towson, Md., store — the first unionized U.S. Apple retail location — and abandon both its workers and a community that relies on it for critical services and its unique access to public transit."

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Apple workers and union across the country have been organizing a movement to unionize retail staff, including salespeople and Genius bar staff, for several years.

SpaceX's Starlink might get cheaper and faster thanks to a set of new rules, but not everyone is happy about them.

On Apr. 30, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is voting on an order (via PCMag) that will change how older, geostationary satellite systems share radio spectrum with low-Earth orbit constellations (such as Starlink).

Per current rules, the amount of energy satellite systems can transmit to and from ground equipment is pretty limited for low-Earth orbit systems, in order to protect the higher-orbiting systems. But the new proposal will loosen these rules and let the operators of various satellite systems reach private agreements on how they share radio spectrum.

This would enable Starlink and similar systems to use more satellites in a geographic area, resulting in faster internet speeds there. Conversely, an operator would be able to use a higher power level per satellite, thus delivering the same internet speeds with fewer satellites in a given area, which could reduce costs.

SpaceX, whose Starlink is actually mentioned in a footnote of the text, lobbied for this change, which led the FCC to consider changing these rules. Both SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Leo systems have already received a temporary approval to exceed the current power limits, but the new proposal, if approved, would make this permanent.

Not everyone is happy about the proposal, though. For example, satellite TV company DirecTV previously said its service could face disruptions if SpaceX is allowed to increase Starlink radio emission levels.

The full text of the document is available on the FCC website.

London's cybercrime unit is investigating a former Meta employee who allegedly downloaded more than 30,000 private user images from personal Facebook pages.

Police say the employee, a company engineer, allegedly designed a script that allowed his activity to go undetected by internal security systems, according to court documents reviewed by The Guardian.

The incident was discovered by the company over a year ago, Meta explained in a statement to the BBC. In addition to terminating the employee, Meta notified affected Facebook users and updated its security protocols. Meta then referred the case to the UK police, and authorities arrested the man in November.

"After discovering improper access by an employee over a year ago, we immediately terminated the individual, notified users, referred the matter to law enforcement and enhanced our security measures," the company said to the press. "We are co-operating with the ongoing investigation."

Meta has previously been accused of failing to appropriately notify users of privacy policies and how their data is accessed by the company, including recent concerns about Meta AI chatbot prompts being made visible to the public.

Last month, an investigation found that offshore Meta workers in Kenya were being forced to review personal recordings taken by Meta Ray-Ban glasses wearers — videos that were being shared unbeknownst to users to train the company's AI. In January, a group of international plaintiffs and whistleblowers filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that private WhatsApp conversations, which are end-to-end encrypted, were being accessed and analyzed by Meta employees. The company has denied the allegation.

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Today, April 1, 2026 (no joke), is Apple's 50th birthday.

The company was launched by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on this day in 1976, essentially to market Wozniak's visionary Apple I personal computer.

Since then, it's grown into one of the largest, most successful companies ever created, with Apple products an important part of the lives of billions of people worldwide.

To mark the occasion, the company did a little takeover of its own website, which now features a colorful animation highlighting some of Apple's most important products, from the earliest Macs all the way to the new Vision Pro.

"At 50 years, it’s only natural to look back. But Apple has always looked forward, building tools and delivering experiences that enrich people’s lives. As we celebrate how far we’ve come, we’re inspired by where we’ll go — together," says the text accompanying the animation.

Of course, this is by no means all that Apple is doing to celebrate. The company recently announced that the festivities will be held over several weeks. So far, Apple has made good on that promise with a series of surprise concerts, including a performance by Alicia Keys at Apple Grand Central in New York City.

A team of Google researchers just set a new date for post-quantum cryptography migration: 2029. Among other things, this means that Bitcoin, as well as many other cryptocurrencies, needs to adopt new cryptographic techniques that are resilient to quantum attacks within three years.

Google announced the new timeline in a blog post. "Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures," the post said.

In terms of actual science, two important papers were published on Monday. One is signed by Google researchers, the other by a startup called Oratomic (with ex-Googlers and Caltech folks on board). The papers are a dense read for anyone who's not an expert in cryptography, but can be simplified to this: They describe new ways to break some very important cryptographic systems using quantum computers, with far fewer resources (10x) than previously thought.

This is relevant for Bitcoin because it makes it far more likely that someone can build a quantum computer capable of deriving a Bitcoin private key from a Bitcoin public key. In fact, so much more likely that Google decided not to show the actual quantum circuits they used to do this, instead showing a mathematical proof that this is possible.

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Justin Drake, one of the researchers that co-signed the Google paper, has a good overview. "A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes," he wrote.

Important point: As Adam Back, an important Bitcoin expert, pointed out, Bitcoin (the network) does not use encryption. What Google has found doesn't mean someone can intercept transactions on the Bitcoin network; instead, they could crack someone's private key, and when you have someone's private key, you have their coins.

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In fact, it's a bit more complex than that. The two papers above reference Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm developed by Peter Shor back in 1994, that makes it a lot faster to break certain types of encryption with quantum computers. Shor's algorithm could be used to derive a Bitcoin private key from a public key, but only in certain cases. This includes some old Bitcoin addresses, including those used by Bitcoin's elusive creator Satoshi Nakamoto himself; this is notable, as these addresses hold over one million bitcoins, meaning that the potential prize for someone cracking them is in the tens of billions of dollars (not to mention the havoc it would cause on the network as everyone scrambled to figure what's next).

Newer addresses can also be cracked, but not until they're broadcasted within a transaction, meaning there's a short (typically 10-minute long) window in which someone could use Shor's algorithm to get that private key. No known quantum computer that could do this exists right now, even considering the optimizations found by Google and Oratomic researchers. But it's not unfathomable that someone builds it in the future.

Bitcoin is traditionally slow to make any changes. Adam Back, in particular, advised in 2025 that "some quantum readiness" should be added in the next five years, though he said he's not expecting it to be used "in a few decades."

In contrast, the new papers demonstrate that the quantum threat for Bitcoin is much closer than that, and that serious action should probably be taken now.

What can be done? Google's paper suggest ways in which blockchains (including Bitcoin) could mitigate the issue. This includes simple steps such as moving coins from old addresses to new ones if possible, but also updating protocols to include post-quantum cryptography. This process is not easy for large, established cryptocurrency networks, and it may take years to even agree on a best solution (an internal strife over block size on Bitcoin's network took about two years to resolve), let alone implement it.

Other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, are also vulnerable to these issues. The Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit that stewards Ethereum's long-term growth, recently published a post-quantum roadmap, aiming to solve these issues before it's too late.

I don’t remember much of my life before social media. It took over in seventh grade and my individual style started bending toward whatever the algorithm pushed to the top.

My wants were no longer my own but reflections of what Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube algorithmically advertised as desirable. Sleepovers that used to be chaotic with pillow fights and hide‑and-seek were replaced by late‑night scrolling sessions, my friends and I quietly measuring ourselves against everyone else. Social media was supposed to give my generation a lifeline: A way to stay close, to find community, to express ourselves. Instead, tech executives created digital nicotine instead of real digital communities, engineered to tap into our insecurities and keep us coming back.

By the time we realized what it was doing to us, it already felt impossible to put it down. Infinite scroll, autoplay that makes stopping feel like an interruption, notifications calibrated to pull us back at our most vulnerable moments — these weren’t accidents. They were design decisions. Decisions meant to keep us hooked.

Now, for the first time, Big Tech executives have been forced to defend those design decisions in court, and a jury has made something clear: This harm was real and not accidental. The verdict marks a turning point, a signal that the era of Big Tech operating without consequence is beginning to crack.

But even before that verdict, something bigger had already started to shift. Inside that courtroom, one young plaintiff was barging through doors that were never meant to open. She made visible what millions of us lived through silently.

And she is not alone.

We see ourselves in her. We see our friends. We see the filtered selfies, the 2 a.m. scrolling, the comparison spirals, the quiet shame. These are not edge cases. They are not outliers. Big Tech’s platforms don’t discriminate. When a platform is designed to manipulate, everyone is vulnerable.

Because what we grew up with was not neutral technology. It was technology designed for maximum engagement at any cost.

Evidence from these cases shows that Big Tech followed Big Tobacco’s playbook: Addict them young to create lifelong consumers, no matter the cost to their lives. Their business model didn’t just deprioritize young people’s wellbeing — it depended on our lack of it to sell products.

I recently read whistleblower Sarah Wynn‑Williams’ memoir, Careless People. She revealed that Meta could detect when teen girls deleted a selfie, reading it as a moment of low self‑esteem, and then prompt beauty brands to target them with ads at that exact moment. It wasn’t an accident. So I have to wonder how many Instagram ads I was served when I felt the worst about myself. Was the face serum, lip kit, or lip filler I bought with my limited income exactly what Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri designed?

I came out as gay before Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans. When she publicly debuted her transition, I didn’t have the words for why it hit me so hard. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t resentment. It was that overnight, she became my Kendall Jenner — the glossy, perfected, impossible image of womanhood that a closeted trans girl like me was supposed to aspire to.

Girls my age were drowning in Kendall’s edited photos and endless beauty ads. I was drowning in a trans version of the same thing. Caitlyn appeared effortlessly beautiful, and I bought product after product trying to chase even a fraction of that feeling. Every time I took a selfie and got called a slur, Instagram responded by pushing more beauty ads at me instead of community or creators who could’ve helped me understand myself.

Sarah Wynn‑Williams’ revelations make the pattern clear: Meta saw our lowest moments and treated them as sales opportunities. They could have protected us. They could have connected us. Instead, they monetized the wound.

We were children when we first downloaded these apps. Our brains were still developing. Our sense of self was still forming. And yet we were placed inside systems engineered to override self-control and exploit social validation.

That’s why these trials matter.

They aren’t just about one young plaintiff or one tragic story. They’re about thousands of families demanding accountability — and now, with this verdict, proving that accountability is possible. They’re about internal documents that companies tried to hide now becoming public. They’re about executives being forced to answer questions under oath rather than hide behind PR statements.

The verdict is a milestone — but it’s not the finish line. The truth being exposed is what makes lasting change possible. The courtroom doors finally being open is what ensures this doesn’t stop here.

Every day, more cases are filed. Every day, more children are harmed. Pressure will not let up until Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap fix their addictive products.

People need to understand that this isn’t an attack on social connection or creativity. The problem is that Big Tech built the digital equivalent of nicotine instead of designing ways for people to enjoy short‑form media without being trapped by it. I don’t need endless scroll or autoplay to enjoy fan edits of my favorite shows. I don’t need an algorithm to serve me a sad dog video because it knows I’ll need a mood booster before closing the app. I’m not trying to get rid of the joy — I’m trying to get rid of the traps.

There is a future without the bad stuff — and this verdict is proof that we can start to build it.

This article reflects the opinion of the writer.

Lennon Torres is a former Dance Moms performer now fighting for young people’s safety online. A trans activist and University of Southern California alum, she uses her pop‑culture fluency and lived experience to power her work at the Heat Initiative, taking on tech giants and demanding platforms to protect and empower the next generation.

We have seen the future of AI via Large Language Models. And it's smaller than you think.

That much was clear in 2025, when we first saw China's DeepSeek — a slimmer, lighter LLM that required way less data center energy to do its job and performed surprisingly well on benchmark tests against heftier American AI models. (Ironically, it was built atop an open source U.S. model, Meta's Llama).

DeepSeek may have foundered on privacy concerns, but the trend towards smaller and smarter AI isn't going away. The evolution is on display again in TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that Google quietly unveiled this week via a Google Research paper.

The paper itself is pretty impenetrable if you're not an AI nerd who talks tokens and high-dimensional vectors. We'll get into a more detailed explanation below. But here's the TL;DR: The TurboQuant algorithm can make LLMs' memory usage six times smaller.

What does that mean? Less energy usage, perhaps to the point where running a powerful AI model on your powerful smartphone becomes possible. Less RAM usage, right on time for the ongoing RAM shortage.

Certainly, algorithms like this can help LLMs make more efficient use of the data centers they're hosted in — either by using the extra space to run more complex models, or, hear me out, by allowing us not to rush into building so many unpopular new data centers in the first place.

And that, paradoxically, could be a problem for the AI economy, at least as it's currently structured.

Why smaller and smarter will mess up NVIDIA

For the past three years, tech stocks have been riding ever higher on the back of one company alone: NVIDIA. And NVIDIA has been riding ever higher on the assumption that we're in the middle of what CEO Jensen Huang called this month "the largest infrastructure buildout in history" — an explosion of data centers, for which NVIDIA will be the chief provider of chips.

But that infrastructure build-out, if you look at data centers actually built versus data centers promised, is already stumbling, as a fresh New York Times investigation just made clear. What's the holdup? Not just opposition from concerned citizens across the U.S., now including the NAACP. It's also permits, applications, inspections, and the other unsexy but often necessary parts of the local government machinery.

Not least of the problems: A dearth of power generation and transmission, which doesn't sit well with the AI industry's unquantifiable ability to soak up electricity and suck up water.

What happens when the desire for more AI runs into a lack of infrastructure? Well, then necessity becomes the mother of invention. We learn to do more with less. And that's exactly what TurboQuant does.

Middle-out compression

Here's that explanation — although since TurboQuant is a compression algorithm, you'd be forgiven for imagining Google had the same NSFW "middle out" compression algorithm inspiration that drove the plot of the HBO comedy Silicon Valley.

So there's a couple of energy "bottlenecks" when AI models reach for something they really want and frequently use. One is called the key-value cache, which is like a really hot library that stores the most-used information. The other is the vector search, which matches things that look the same. TurboQuant effectively lubricates both at once, making memory grabs faster, smoother, and less fraught.

TurboQuant "helps unclog key-value cache bottlenecks by reducing the size of key-value pairs," Google's paper says, in part by the "clever" move of "randomly rotating the data vectors."

Got that? No? Well, it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that there's a promising new field of extremely complex computational mathematics, and it works the way compression algorithms have long worked — making new technology faster, lighter, easier to run.

First, it was ZIP file downloads, then the video compression that enabled the streaming revolution, and now it's AI. The result could allow a more powerful LLM to run entirely on your phone, or it could crash the global economy, or both at the same time. Isn't life in 2026 wild?

A Los Angeles jury has ruled that social media giants Meta and Google-owned Youtube are guilty of negligent platform design that resulted in harm to a young user's mental health.

The ruling came after several days of deliberation in a personal injury lawsuit that industry experts say will have rippling effects on Big Tech.

The jury agreed with the plaintiff that the platforms' design features were a "substantial factor" in causing mental health-related harms and that company leaders knew their products could be dangerously addictive. The companies were ordered to split compensatory damages of $3 million, with Meta paying 70 percent and YouTube 30 percent.

The jury later announced an additional $3 million in punitive damages. YouTube's lawyer apologized to the plaintiff in court, the New York Times reported, saying: "We are sorry for the things you have suffered. We at YouTube truly hope there have been things at YouTube that have enriched your life and allowed you to express yourself.”

Meta says it is exploring legal options to appeal the decision. "We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," the company said in a statement to the press.

"Today, a jury saw the truth and held Meta and Google accountable for designing products that addict and harm children," said court-appointed plaintiff counsel Lexi Hazam and Previn Warren, in a statement following the decision. "Top tech executives took the stand, and their own internal documents were put before a jury, revealing that company leadership knew their platforms were hurting kids and repeatedly chose profits over children's safety. This verdict sends an unmistakable message that no company is above accountability when it comes to our children." 

Nonprofit Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) called the decision "long overdue validation" for families of children who had been hurt or died by suicide after engaging with harmful content online. "Now, our elected officials must build on the momentum from this ruling by passing legislation that requires online platforms to be safe by design and ends Big Tech’s efforts to addict kids to their dangerous products," founder and executive director Julie Scelfo wrote.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg both testified in front of the jury last month. Other social media platforms were also named in the lawsuit, brought forth by a young user referred to as K.G.M and her mother. K.G.M. accused the platforms of knowingly investing in site features that led to addictive behavior, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts, even after safety warnings were flagged by internal employees — it's the first of a consolidated group of lawsuits filed by more than 1,600 plaintiffs, known as a watershed case. TikTok and Snapchat both settled with K.G.M. prior to the jury trial.

"Social media giants would never have faced trial if they had prioritized kids' safety over engagement. Instead, they buried their own research showing children were being harmed, and used kids and society as guinea pigs in massive, uncontrolled, and wildly profitable experiments," wrote James P. Steyer, founder and CEO of child safety nonprofit Common Sense Media.

Hours before the K.G.M decision was announced, a different jury announced another guilty verdict for Meta, which ordered the tech giant to pay $375 million in damages for misleading users about its platform's safety features and endangering young users. The case was brought forth by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, amid a wave of similar state-level lawsuits against social media platforms over the last few years.

In a statement sent to the media following the Los Angeles ruling, Torrez said that the jury recognized Big Tech's ongoing "deception" of the public. "In the next phase of New Mexico’s trial, my number one priority remains changing [Meta]’s longstanding and dangerous practice of prioritizing profits over children’s safety," said Torrez.

UPDATE: Mar. 26, 2026, 10:27 a.m. This story was updated with comment from Meta.

UPDATE: Mar. 25, 2026, 5:14 p.m. This story was updated to include the jury's decision to award punitive damages to K.G.M.

UPDATE: Mar. 25, 2026, 2:37 p.m. This story was updated with additional statements from the New Mexico Attorney General and Mothers Against Media Addiction.

It's been a busy week shutting things down at OpenAI.

Just days after OpenAI unceremoniously pulled the plug on its video generation app Sora, a new report from Financial Times claims the company has put plans to launch an x-rated chatbot on hold "indefinitely."

Originally promised in the fall of 2025 as an extra feature for verified users, the sex-centered adult mode for ChatGPT was delayed a few weeks back. However, it seemed at the time that the company was still intent to launch it eventually, with a a company spokesperson saying that getting the (adult) experience right would "take more time."

Now, however, it appears that the project has been shelved for good. The company will instead focus on its core products, the report said.

The reasoning behind the move isn't that hard to understand, given the headaches the Grok chatbot recently caused its maker xAI over sexualized images of adults and children.

According to the Financial Times, both OpenAI investors and staff raised concerns about a sexualized AI and its effect on society. Furthermore, there were technical challenges – including the bot's inability to accurately distinguish between adults and minors, with an error rate of over 10 percent.

More broadly, it appears that both the shutdown of Sora and the dismantling of adult mode are part of OpenAI's effort to reduce the number of lawsuits hitting the company. Over the past six months, several lawsuits were filed against OpenAI as young people died by suicide after interacting with ChatGPT, prompting the company to introduce an age prediction system in January.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

If messy drama was something you could sell, OpenAI would have turned a profit already.

That much is clear from the bizarre way the ChatGPT company killed off Sora, its shortform video app — just one of multiple dramas that seem to be playing out in tandem at Sam Altman's company. So much so that you'd be forgiven for wondering whether there is any method to this madness.

The Sora shuttering could not have burned more bridges with partners and creators if it tried. The rumored face-saving announcement that Sora was being folded into ChatGPT? Didn't happen. OpenAI had just announced new Sora safety standards the day before — so why bother if it's on the outs?

Disney, meanwhile, had not yet finalized its $1 billion, three-year deal with OpenAI over character licensing in Sora. The House of Mouse was so blindsided, according to a Reuters report, that executives had a meeting discussing what Disney could do with the Sora deal yesterday... just 30 minutes before OpenAI announced its death via a post on X.

ChatGPT ads are a bust

There are also unforced errors in OpenAI's ad division, according to a scoop from The Information. It seems an early test of ChatGPT ads (the company's big revenue-hunting pivot from two months ago) burned bridges with the advertisers who participated. Those advertisers bought more than $200,000 of ads apiece, premium table stakes for the industry. But they didn't get the data they need to know if their ads — which played minimally — are paying off.

Ironically, considering how much OpenAI's products promise to automate the world, the ad industry titans said they had to call or email the company to place ads.

And where is OpenAI's CEO in all this? Not tweeting through it; at time of writing, Altman hasn't posted on X since the Sora announcement. Nor is he blogging through it; his last two blog posts were written six months ago, and are both about Sora. "People are generating much more [video] than we expected per user," Altman wrote in his most recent post.

"We are going to have to somehow make money for video generation," the CEO said, noting presciently: "please expect a very high rate of change from us."

No kidding. So where is the money going to come from, if it isn't coming from Disney and it isn't coming from ads? Shuttering Sora won't make up OpenAI's revenue shortfall, estimated at roughly $1 billion a month. Running ChatGPT for 900 million people per week, all but 40 million of whom aren't paying for it, costs a lot!

Nor is the money coming from the Instant Checkout shopping feature OpenAI announced in 2025, which was supposed to attract a million merchants. The company announced Tuesday that Altman is dumping that as well.

OpenAI's race to its IPO

So what is Altman doing, exactly? He told OpenAI staff on Tuesday that he's no longer running the company's safety and security teams, according to a separate Information report. Instead, Altman reportedly told them that he's focused on raising more money and building more data centers.

"Things are moving faster than many of us expected," Altman added, though in which direction they're moving wasn't clear.

Altman, according to the report, is renaming the company's product group "AGI deployment." A ballsy marketing move, given that GPT-5 is nowhere near AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, also known as digital superintelligence) — and OpenAI is still feuding with its partner Microsoft about how we would define such a thing if it did arrive.

That's no mere academic debate, given that Amazon reportedly stands to invest another $50 billion in the company on the condition that it goes public, or AGI is achieved.

In the absence of actual AGI to deploy — and there are no signs that OpenAI's next model, codenamed "Spud," will get there either — there's nothing left for Altman to do but prepare for the IPO. OpenAI and its chief rival Anthropic, which makes Claude, are both supposedly on course for their public offerings this year. As public companies, they'll be able to raise funds more easily.

But what if there's only room for one winner?

Anthropic, while it's still (sort of) battling the Pentagon and coming up with its own creative revenue estimates, is widely seen as the more successful company when it comes to solid, dependable business. Not for them the flashy Disney deals; they're selling targeted AI services to other companies. Right now, the perception among customers is that Claude is for coding and making AI agents, while ChatGPT is more for the masses.

It isn't going to be easy for Altman to turn that perception around. But it'll probably be easier if OpenAI isn't trying to be a media company that sells ads and lets you make cute Disney character shorts. And in that context, Altman's latest moves start to make a lick of sense. Whether he can convince business customers that he's a dependable figure — pay no attention to those burning bridges! — will be another drama altogether.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

A New Mexico jury found Meta liable Tuesday for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children.

Meta has been ordered to pay the maximum penalties for each violation of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, amounting to $375 million.

"Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement. "The substantial damages the jury ordered Meta to pay should send a clear message to big tech executives that no company is beyond the reach of the law."

Meta, which owns the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, plans to appeal the jury's decision.

"We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement to the New York Times.

New Mexico's Department of Justice launched an investigation into Meta platforms in 2023 in order to protect children from bad actors who sought to sexually abuse or solicit minors, among other harms. The state's evidence included findings from that investigation, in addition to internal Meta documents and testimony from former Meta employees, child safety experts, law enforcement officials, and others.

The state argued that Meta's design features helped pedophiles sexually exploit children on Meta platforms.

The loss is Meta's first in a number of trials taking place this year. In Los Angeles, Meta and YouTube are on trial for allegedly designing addictive products for minors. Snapchat and TikTok were part of that trial but settled out of court.

Many people first saw it on X: A most unusual, and unsettling, job posting. Some assumed it was a joke. Others were reminded of Cyberdyne Systems, the tech company in the Terminator franchise that accidentally invents Skynet.

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But over on LinkedIn, where they speak a different language, Anthropic had merely posted a listing looking for a Policy Manager, Chemical Weapons and High Yield Explosives. The job description added more details.

"This role offers a unique opportunity to shape how AI systems handle sensitive chemical and explosives information," it read. "You'll work with leading AI safety researchers while tackling critical problems in preventing catastrophic misuse. If you're excited about using your expertise to ensure AI systems remain safe and beneficial, we want to hear from you."

Mashable reached out to Anthropic, and the company provided more context.

"Our usage policies prohibit the use of Anthropic products or services to develop or design weapons," a company spokesperson told us. "This role is for the Safeguards team which is responsible for preventing misuse of our models."

The spokesperson stressed that Anthropic explicitly prohibits its AI or any of its technology to be used for weapons creation. Instead, the New York-based manager will be tasked with building and enforcing safeguards to ensure weapons are not made from Anthropic’s tech.

The company seeks to hire experts in sensitive fields who can ensure Anthropic's AI is kept from nefarious hands, the spokesperson said.

Anthropic recently found itself in a very public battle with the Department of War (a.k.a. the Department of Defense). The company says it's not budging in its demands that its AI not be used to build fully autonomous weapons or to establish mass surveillance on people.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded to Anthropic’s conditions by declaring the company a supply chain risk to America’s national security, banning the Pentagon from using its tech after a six-month phase-out. The company then filed suit according to a March 5 note from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Meanwhile, some in the Pentagon are reportedly finding it hard to abandon Claude, Anthropic's AI model.

Back in February, Anthropic announced an update to its AI safety policy, also known as its Responsible Scaling Policy. The company stated it was forced to rethink its safety policies — considered by some to be the strongest in the industry — due to several factors, including the federal government’s emphasis on economic growth over safety regulations.

Whoever ends up in that policy manager role, then, will find themselves at the center of an explosive debate. Not to mention, potentially, the ability to help prevent a future Skynet threat.

Apple's AppleCare One is perhaps the best way to keep your Apple gadgets insured, especially if you're deeply invested in Apple's product ecosystem. Unfortunately for Europeans, the feature — which launched in the U.S. in July 2025 — wasn't available to them, but this might change soon.

MacRumors noticed that the AppleCare One trademark was registered with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) on Thursday. While this doesn't necessarily indicate that Apple is about to launch the product in the EU, it is the sort of thing that typically precedes a launch overseas.

There's no timeline for the launch, and nothing has been officially announced. Also note that Apple filed a similar application with the EUIPO for Apple Pay Cash (now Apple Cash) back in 2017, and that particular service never launched in Europe.

Still, we have our fingers crossed, because AppleCare One is a very good way to protect your Apple gadgets. In the U.S., it costs $19.99 per month, allowing customers to protect up to three products in one plan, with the option to add additional gadgets for $5.99 per month per device.

The cool thing about this plan — which includes all the benefits that come with AppleCare+, and includes theft and loss protection for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — is that you can remove and add devices into and out of the plan whenever you want.

Anthropic, the AI company behind the popular Claude AI chatbot, received praise last week for standing up to the Trump administration over the U.S. military's use of its AI tools.

However, the company may be reversing course.

According to a new report from the Financial Times, Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense have reopened negotiations on how the government can leverage Anthropic tech for military purposes.

The breakdown between Anthropic and the U.S. government began after the AI company received a $200 million contract from the U.S. Defense Department.

However, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei later wanted guarantees that the U.S. government would not utilize its Claude AI models for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. The Trump administration refused this request, saying it would use AI technology for any "lawful" purpose.

As talks between Anthropic and the U.S. government broke down, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even threatened to designate the company as a supply chain risk to national security.

President Trump called Anthropic a "radical left, woke company" in a post on Truth Social and ordered the federal government to cease using Anthropic's technology over the following six months.

The Financial Times reports that Amodei has now re-entered negotiations in hopes of avoiding the supply chain risk designation. Amodei is now discussing terms of a potential deal with Undersecretary of Defense Emil Michael, who called the Anthropic CEO "a liar" with a "God-complex" in a social media post just last week.

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“Near the end of the negotiation the [department] offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about ‘analysis of bulk acquired data’ which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about," Amodei said in an internal memo to Anthropic employees as reported by The Information. "We found that very suspicious."

Days after talks between Anthropic and the DoD fell apart, OpenAI announced that it had secured a deal with the U.S. government for the use of its AI tools for military use in "classified environments."

OpenAI quickly received blowback from users, forcing CEO Sam Altman to attempt to address concerns. Just days later, an internal memo from Altman leaked, where the OpenAI CEO told employees that it would be amending its agreement with the federal government, as the deal was rushed. Altman stated that the U.S. government assured OpenAI it would not use its technology for domestic surveillance.

Amodei's internal memo reportedly knocked Altman, calling OpenAI and the Pentagon's statements about the issues with Anthropic “just straight up lies." Amodei accused Altman of partaking in “safety theater” regarding his presentation of the deal and stated that OpenAI employees who believed the company were “sort of a gullible bunch.”

If Amodei is successful in securing a new agreement with the federal government, the U.S. military would continue to use the technology, which is reportedly already being used to launch strikes in Iran.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is fully underway, and it's been a busy one.

Well, perhaps it only feels busier than normal, as both Samsung and Apple decided to squeeze in their major product unveilings just before and just after MWC.

Even without those MWC-adjacent news, though, it's been a fun couple of days here in Barcelona. We saw robots, robotic phones, and phones that can take photos of robots from a mile away. And yes, every other word of every announcement is still AI, but this year the AI features are really starting to make sense. Let's take a look at every major announcement we saw at MWC this year.

Xiaomi 17 Ultra

The optional photography kits essentially turn this phone into a camera. Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Xiaomi's got a new Ultra phone, and it didn't disappoint. It is, once again, a powerful cameraphone, with massive zoom capabilities, top-notch specs, and a bunch of accessories for photography enthusiasts.

The company also launched a special, Leica-branded variant called the Leica Leitzphone; essentially the same as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, but with a cool retro design, and a rotating ring around the camera bump that you can use to control zoom.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is just one part of the mountain of new gadgets Xiaomi brought to Barcelona, including the Xiaomi Watch 5, Xiaomi Tag, and more.

Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo

You should see my other car. Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Xiaomi's phones were cool, but the real surprise was the Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo, a concept hypercar made for the Vision Gran Turismo Program, in which car manufacturers create no-holds-bar cars for the legendary Gran Turismo game.

The car is precisely what you'd expect: Quick-looking, slightly nutty, and probably not something you'll ever see on the street. We'll see how much of its tech will turn into real products (we're especially interested in those floating wheel covers).

Honor Robot phone and its humanoid friend

It can track you, and nod at you when you do something right, but this one was asleep. Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Honor announced its Robot Phone back in 2025, but this was the first time the company actually brought it to an exhibition, giving us a chance to see it up close (no touching, though). We're still not quite sure how useful that robotic arm/gimbal carrying the camera will be in real life, but it's very cool to look at.

Not content with bringing just one robot thing to MWC, Honor also brought a humanoid robot that danced on the stage in Barcelona, before meeting its tiny Robot Phone counterpart, and then marching out.

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Honor's main announcement in Barcelona, however, was the Honor Magic V6, and incredibly thin foldable with an even thinner battery that doesn't mind water.

Lenovo's laptop and gaming concepts

Need to swap in a different port? No problem. Credit: Joe Maldonado / Mashable

Lenovo likes to play with ideas all year and then bring them all to MWC in Barcelona, and we love it.

This year's highlights include the Legion Go Fold gaming handheld concept, a glasses-free 3D laptop concept, and a modular AI laptop concept. And that's just a small part of the mountain of stuff Lenovo decided to show this year.

Motorola Razr Fold

Yes, it supports the Moto Pen stylus. Credit: Motorola

Motorola didn't have a huge presence at this year's MWC, but the company did share more details about its upcoming foldable, called the Motorola Razr Fold. Judging by the specs, which include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, a 6,000mAh battery, 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of storage, it's going to be a true flagship.

We still didn't get a launch date, though. Head on over here for details and the rest of the phone's specs.

This story will be updated over the course of MWC to ensure you don't miss the best the show has to offer.

Mashable is reporting live from Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2026. Follow the latest updates as we reveal the latest tech reveals from the show.

Full Circle, the gaming studio behind the new iteration of Skate, has recently announced a restructuring involving layoffs at its headquarters in Burnaby, British Columbia. Founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, Full Circle is just the latest in a series of AAA gaming studios to be hit by layoffs, with Ubisoft Toronto laying off 40 employees last week. 

In their public-facing announcement, entitled “skate.’s Next Chapter,” the company lamented that the people affected by layoffs "are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of skate," while shouting out the “tens of millions” of people who have explored the Early Access version of skate. released last September. "To our departing teammates: thank you. skate. exists because of your hard work and dedication to the craft."

The original Skate games were released in the late 2000s for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and marketed as more realistic skateboarding games compared to the rival Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Fans responded well to the tight controls, inventive city settings, and fun soundtrack, which won the first Skate game the "Sports Game of the Year" award at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and resulted in commercial success, but the series had been on indefinite hold until the announcement of skate. (known among fans as Skate 4), which was to be a live-service game built around a sandbox-style multiplayer experience, a move that didn’t sit well with many long-time fans of the series.

While the latest Skate game has not yet had a final release, the Early Access version has been available to fans for almost half a year now, and early reviews are mixed. Critics have pointed to the inclusion of microtransactions ($25 clothing for your digital character), the online-only gameplay restriction, and the homogenized character design, while others have praised the free-to-play accessibility.

We don’t yet know how many employees lost their jobs at Full Circle, as the company was not forthcoming, but the parent company, EA, lost approximately 5% of its workforce in 2024, during its last round of layoffs. As for the fate of skate. after these layoffs, much is still unknown and the game still doesn’t have a final release date.

Jack Dorsey's Block, a fintech company that owns Square and Cash App, is laying off nearly half of its workforce.

Dorsey announced the layoffs on X, citing AI as the main reason behind the move.

"Today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000," he wrote.

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The layoffs come after a strong quarter for Block, with revenue, profit, and customer base all growing. But Dorsey appears to think that the rise of AI makes this move inevitable, presenting the decision as a choice between doing one sharp cut now, or laying people off slowly over a longer period of time.

"I'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome," he wrote.

Employees that are being laid off will get their salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure, six months of health care, and $5,000 in cash, among other benefits. But how hard will it be for them to find another job?

Dorsey's reasoning echoes the sentiment recently shared by several tech leaders, with Anthropic's Boris Cherny claiming that "coding is largely solved" and Elon Musk saying that AI will "replace all jobs." A widely shared "thought exercise" by Citrini recently predicted an economic collapse by 2028 due to AI driving humans out of work.

"Something has changed," wrote Dorsey. "We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly."

The market reacted positively to the news, with Block's shares rising by nearly 30 percent in extended trading following the announcement.

Former Xbox president Sarah Bond has broken her silence following last week’s stunning leadership shakeup at Microsoft Gaming.

In a heartfelt LinkedIn post, Bond published the note she sent to her team, writing that she is "incredibly proud of what we’ve built together over the past eight-plus years." The post followed the news that both Bond and longtime Xbox chief Phil Spencer were stepping down.

She pointed to Xbox’s growth in PC and cloud gaming, development of its next console, and efforts to create "a more open gaming platform that spans devices."

"With that, I’ve decided this is the right time for me to take my next step, both personally and professionally," Bond wrote, adding that she will remain on as a special advisor to incoming Xbox head Asha Sharma during the transition.

The post marked Bond’s first public comments since the "huge shakeup" at Xbox, which saw Spencer retire and Asha Sharma elevated to Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft Gaming. At the time, Bond was widely viewed as Spencer’s heir apparent and had recently spoken publicly about the next generation of Xbox hardware.

Bond joined Xbox in 2017 after stints at McKinsey and T-Mobile and went on to play a key role in Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. She also positioned herself as a visible advocate for accessibility and platform openness in gaming.

In her farewell note, Bond thanked Spencer for his "mentorship and friendship" and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella for his support.

Xbox now enters a new chapter under Sharma, a CoreAI executive with limited gaming experience. For Bond, meanwhile, the next move remains unclear — though her note said she would "remain on as a Special Advisor to Asha" during the transition.

The Supreme Court struck down one of President Donald Trump's signature accomplishments on Friday, ruling 6-3 that the president lacked the authority to impose many of his tariffs.

Since returning to the White House, President Trump has tested the boundaries of executive power, and the Supreme Court decision was a clear check on presidential authority.

In response to the ruling, Trump pledged to impose a new 10 percent global tariff via executive order, citing Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. (That statute would allow him to impose the tariffs for 150 days, at which point they would need congressional approval.) A defiant Trump insisted, "I have the right to do tariffs," according to CNBC.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. issued the court's opinion, which found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) does not give the president the authority to impose tariffs unilaterally. Roberts Jr. was joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Brett M. Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, Jr. dissented.

"The Framers gave 'Congress alone' the power to impose tariffs during peacetime," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. "And the foreign affairs implications of tariffs do not make it any more likely that Congress would relinquish its tariff power through vague language, or without careful limits. Accordingly, the President must 'point to clear congressional authorization' to justify his extraordinary assertion of that power."

The ruling ends a year-long legal saga over the tariffs, which faced lawsuits and challenges from the outset. The Constitution clearly grants Congress, not the president, the authority to set tariffs, and Trump's legal justification for his sweeping emergency tariffs has always been sketchy.

However, the Supreme Court decision comes long after the tariffs went into effect, sending shockwaves through the global economy. As Mashable has reported, President Trump's tariffs have led to wide-ranging price increases across industries, with everything from lumber and building supplies to gaming consoles and smartphones seeing price adjustments. Apple CEO Tim Cook estimated in August that Apple faced $1.1 billion in tariff costs in the second quarter of 2025 alone.

Tech stocks began to rally on Friday afternoon following the ruling, with Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA, and Dell stocks climbing, according to Barron's. However, the overall gains have been modest so far.

Shoppers hoping for lower prices as a result of the ruling will likely be disappointed. Many price increases for 2026 products are already baked in, as companies like Apple were forced to shift manufacturing to new markets to try to evade tariffs.

Ravin Gandhi, CEO of GMM Nonstick Coatings and an expert on tariffs, told Mashable that shoppers should not expect any immediate price relief.

"Consumers shouldn’t see meaningful price relief soon. Tariffs were just one piece in the overall pricing structure — and businesses don’t typically lower prices immediately when a cost input disappears — especially with so much inflationary pressure," Gandhi said. "Even though the ruling is legally significant, the short-term economic impact may not happen as fast as the headlines are suggesting."

On top of inflation and tariff-related price increases, an ongoing global memory shortage fueled by the AI industry is also putting upward pressure on tech prices.

While Trump has strong control over the Republican majority in Congress, Gandhi said that reinstating the tariffs could also take time.

"It’s very unlikely that Congress will move quickly to reinstate tariffs," Gandhi said. "Trade policy through Congress is really complex and difficult to do politically — especially with everything being so divided nowadays. Even lawmakers who support the tariffs may start hesitating when it comes to that ownership of the legislative piece."

He concluded, "The most likely scenario is a modified status quo. Markets and supply chains have already adjusted to the tariff framework over several years. Even with the Court’s recent decision, companies will wait for clarity before making significant pricing changes.

On his social network Truth Social, the president called the ruling "deeply disappointing" and accused the Supreme Court of being "swayed by Foreign Interests." He called Roberts and the justices who joined the majority opinion "lapdogs" and a "Disgrace to our Nation."

"I am ashamed of certain Members of the Court for not having the Courage to do what is right for our Country. I would like to thank and congratulate Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh for your Strength, Wisdom, and Love of our Country, which is right now very proud of you. When you read the dissenting opinions, there is no way that anyone can argue against them...The Democrats on the Court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote 'NO' against ANYTHING that makes America Strong and Healthy Again. They, also, are a Disgrace to our Nation. Others think they’re being 'politically correct,' which has happened before, far too often, with certain Members of this Court when, in fact, they’re just FOOLS and 'LAPDOGS' for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats and, not that this should have anything to do with it, very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution. It is my opinion that the Court has been swayed by Foreign Interests, and a Political Movement that is far smaller than people would think — But obnoxious, ignorant, and loud!"

Credit: @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social

Breaking news: There are gay people in positions of power in Silicon Valley in 2026.

That not-so-surprising fact is the center of Wired's latest cover story, which hit the internet Thursday. The internet immediately reacted, in part thanks to some, uh, unusual imagery that accompanied the article.

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The handshake cover wasn't the only bizarre choice. Inside, the magazine used an image of a musclebound man with San Francisco's Salesforce Tower between his legs. California state senator Scott Weiner, a leader on LGBTQ issues, took issue with the whole premise.

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One Silicon Valley investor, a gay man who said he refused multiple requests to be interviewed, felt justified by the "gross" result:

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He wasn't the only one. Many LGBTQ tech employees felt the article could be described as "homophobic."

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Other readers noted that the article itself is, to use the magazine's lingo, tired rather than wired:

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Meanwhile, social media did what it does best: Skewering with satire.

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The way marketing professor Scott Galloway puts it, the primary way to get President Donald J. Trump's attention is by influencing the market.

Don't like Trump's deployment of immigration authorities to Minneapolis or the killings of Americans observing the agents' actions? Find a way to change the economic calculus for Trump, Galloway says.

That's why Galloway, the popular podcast host and author, recently launched a month-long economic strike campaign called Resist and Unsubscribe. The initiative invites people to cancel tech subscriptions and services they may enjoy using for work, convenience, and entertainment.

He says the campaign has reached nearly a million people via its website and related content has been viewed more than 18 million times on social media.

The list of services Galloway says to consider forgoing includes Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Uber, and X. Galloway has identified these and other tech companies "as having outsized influence over the national economy and our president."

Amazon, for example, spent tens of millions of dollars making and promoting Melania, a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, a move that skeptics of the deal and film have likened to a "bribe" and "propaganda." Amazon has said it made the movie because they believed customers would "love" it.

Mashable asked Galloway to share his reasoning for this strike, which services he personally canceled, and what he's doing with the time he's reclaiming from various tech products he used prior to the strike.

Mashable: Why is canceling subscriptions specifically important if someone wants to protest what you describe as "the Trump administration's assault on our nation's values"?

Galloway: The Trump administration doesn’t respond to outrage, it responds to economics. If you look at the times that the President walked back plans (like annexing Greenland or raising tariffs) it’s always been the result of the bond market or stock market falling. I'm recommending we focus on subscription cancellations because that's currently the easiest opportunity in the market. The Magnificent 7 account for roughly 35 percent of the S&P 500, and they’re all tech companies. Targeting Big Tech will have an outsized impact on the markets, which will influence the President.

Mashable: The tech-based subscriptions you encourage people to cancel have become central to how people entertain themselves, shop, and work. If someone is balking at the list and the prospect of giving up, say Apple Music or ChatGPT, or both, how do you frame the stakes for them?

Galloway: By all means, I'm not asking anyone to give up something that's central to their life or work. What I will say: if you head over to our website and read the list of companies we're targeting, you'll almost certainly find a subscription that you can go without for a short period of time. Like me, you'll also probably find out that you've been paying for two Spotify accounts and an Amazon Health account that you didn't know existed. At the very least, it’s a good excuse to audit what you’re paying for. 

Mashable: You've canceled Amazon Prime, Uber, Apple TV+, and Amazon One. Have you subscribed to other services to make up the difference, like a competing retailer delivery program or ride-hailing app? What have you learned from canceling these subscriptions? 

Galloway: Personally, I’m trying to reclaim my time as much as possible from technology and use it to do things that make me truly happy — connecting with friends, spending time with family, shopping locally and in-person — but there are definitely alternatives to the big tech services out there. For entertainment, you can stream films and documentaries via Kanopy with a library card. If you're switching from Uber, you can use Lyft — still corporate, but a much smaller player in the markets. Above all, shopping locally is a great alternative to using Amazon. 

Mashable: If someone cancels a service, such as LinkedIn or Apple Fitness+, but their membership is still good for a period of time, is it OK to continue using it? Is it the cancellation that really counts or the combination of terminating the subscription and ceasing to use the service?

Galloway: As a guy with economic security, I'm not going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't cancel. I just want to make it easy to take action. Maybe you unsubscribe from a few things, pause others, realize you don't need half of what you're paying for. What I'm really trying to highlight is something we all forget: in a capitalist society, the most radical thing you can do is stop participating. Whether that's canceling the subscription or just stopping usage, the point is opting out.

Mashable: If someone cancels a subscription, should they communicate to the company that the cancellation is due to the company's support of the president's administration and policies?

Absolutely. Companies track cancellation reasons, and if enough customers cite political concerns, that data influences decision-making. Be explicit about why you're leaving — whether through the cancellation form, a follow-up email, or by sharing publicly on Instagram using our template.

Mashable: What's the most memorable or profound feedback you've received from someone who participated in this campaign?

It's been amazing seeing the outpouring of support for Resist and Unsubscribe. I've received thousands of emails in which people tell me what they've unsubscribed from. The collective response has been profound. Above all, it's given me hope. It's easy to lose that right now — but this has shown me that there's still a lot of good people out there who care about America and are willing to make personal sacrifices to create change. 

Amazon may be the next tech giant trying to help AI companies get their hands on publisher content.

According to TechCrunch, citing original reporting from The Information, Amazon is considering launching a marketplace that would allow media companies to license their content directly to AI firms. The company has reportedly been meeting with publishing executives and circulating slides ahead of an AWS conference that reference a "content marketplace," per The Information.

When reached by TechCrunch, Amazon didn’t deny the plans but stopped short of confirming them, saying only that it works with publishers across AWS, retail, advertising, AGI, and Alexa and has "nothing specific to share." The move also comes amid mounting lawsuits and scrutiny over how AI models are trained on copyrighted material.

The proposal is notable given the increasingly tense relationship between publishers and AI companies. As Mashable has previously reported, investigations have accused Common Crawl — a nonprofit web archive used by major AI developers — of enabling access to paywalled journalism, claims the organization denies. At the same time, AI web browsers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Atlas, and Perplexity’s Comet have reportedly been able to bypass some publisher paywalls by blending in with regular user traffic. If publishers don't want Google to use their content for AI training, they have to opt out of appearing in Google search results altogether.

Publishers have described the situation as a traffic apocalypse, with AI summaries siphoning clicks and revenue. A centralized marketplace could offer what some executives see as a more scalable, structured way to monetize content as AI usage grows.

Whether Amazon actually launches the marketplace remains to be seen. However, after years of scraping, lawsuits, and uneasy partnerships, Big Tech increasingly appears ready to put a price tag on the internet.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

The messaging platform Discord announced Monday that all user accounts will default to teen safety settings beginning in March. The policy, meant to create a safe environment for teens, restricts adult content and spaces without verification or assurance of a user's age.

Following significant criticism from users skeptical of the platform's age-assurance efforts, Discord updated its announcement Tuesday to clarify that the "vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age."

Discord, which has more than 200 million global monthly active users, said that it's relying on an inference model with hundreds of signals, like account tenure and activity data, to detect the age of an account holder. Users identified as adults will not need to go through an age assurance process.

New and existing users who aren't assessed as adults must verify their age to access adult spaces and content.

Discord will use facial scans to help establish age, and the third-party verification service k-ID for age and identification checks.

"We would like the experience to feel more like you are on Main Street," Savannah Badalich, head of product policy at Discord, told Mashable. "If you're going into an adult space, you do ID verification or something like that, whereas the Main Street itself is built for just generally [everyone]."

Badalich suggested to Mashable that users will not be able to circumvent the safety measures by relying on a virtual private network, or VPN, that conceals their location, since the default settings will be universal.

Discord under pressure on teen safety

The new policy arrives in the wake of sustained pressure on social media platforms to improve safety for minors.

A 2025 lawsuit filed against Discord and the gaming platform Roblox alleged that together the platforms created a "breeding ground for predators." At the heart of the complaint is an anonymous 11-year-old girl who was allegedly groomed, sexually exploited, and raped by a perpetrator who used Roblox and Discord to communicate with her.

In late 2025, the platform launched a hub that allows parents or guardians to view the top five users a teen messaged and called, the servers they messaged most frequently, their total call minutes in voice and video, and all the purchases they've made.

At the time, Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Mashable in a statement that Discord's new safety features fell short by placing the burden of youth safety on parents rather than implementing fundamental design changes.

Age-gated content and experiences on Discord

Badalich said that though Discord will have teen safety settings for all users by default, the platform will preemptively assess accounts that seem to belong to adults and permit them to access age-gated content and features.

While Discord hopes to keep false positives to a minimum, Badalich did not share the platform's confidence in accurately predicting user age.

Beginning in March, any user whose age is unverified or whose account has been placed in teen settings will need to either submit an ID or go through the facial estimation process in order to have full access to Discord.

Only adults will be able to unblur sensitive content, or turn off the setting; access age-gated channels and servers; receive message requests directly, instead of to a separate inbox; and speak on a "stage" in a Discord server.

Badalich described the new policy as "a foundational change to how we think about Discord."

Age verification on Discord

Discord began using age assurance measures in the UK and Australia last year, though not without challenges.

In the UK, some users also initially bypassed the age check requirement by submitting a realistic-looking selfie of a video game character, which was deemed adult. Badalich told Mashable that Discord and k-ID worked "tirelessly" to patch that vulnerability, and that the experience has informed its subsequent age assurance efforts.

Discord's new age-assurance efforts will restrict adult servers. Credit: Courtesy of Discord

"[W]e know that teens are creative," Badalich said. 'They're going to try to find ways around it."

There are privacy concerns, too. In October, Discord announced a third-party customer support vendor had been hacked, breaching 70,000 government IDs provided by users.

When users submit identity documents to k-ID, the documents will be deleted quickly, if not immediately, according to Discord.

UPDATE: Feb. 10, 2026, 10:47 a.m. PST This story was updated to include new information provided by Discord on Feb. 10.

As the tech industry goes all-in on artificial intelligence, you might not be surprised to learn that some of the most in-demand U.S. jobs focus on AI engineering, consulting, and researching. 

The spotlight has been on major tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Google trying to achieve market dominance with the right talent. Still, smaller firms and startups, along with non-tech businesses, need high-quality AI professionals, too. 

The search is also on for skilled individuals who can look beyond the initial adoption of AI and the first wave of integration and product launches. 

“Organizations are increasingly pairing technical AI roles with human-centered, governance, and operational titles,” Christina Mancini, CEO of Black Girls Code, told Mashable. Mancini said the shift reflects a move from organizations simply experimenting with AI to using it deliberately and responsibly.

That trend is evidenced by rapidly growing interest in hiring AI consultants and strategists. That role, along with four other tech titles, recently appeared on LinkedIn's annual roundup of the 25 fastest-growing roles in the country: 

1. AI engineers

The fastest-growing role in the U.S., according to LinkedIn? AI engineer. 

There are a wide variety of applications for artificial intelligence, from powering robotic systems to developing the complex algorithms that drive generative chatbots. An AI engineer can build models capable of performing tasks, along with the required production infrastructure.

AI engineers should expect to draw on extensive technical knowledge for building AI agents, optimizing large language model output, and neural network training. They should also have comprehensive mathematical and statistical skills, LinkedIn notes. 

Coursera estimates the role's annual income at $145,080, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

2. AI consultants and strategists

The second-fastest growing position in the U.S. focuses on organizational implementation of AI, according to LinkedIn. Consultants and strategists with key expertise in fields like computer science and artificial intelligence, plus business acumen, may succeed in these roles. Their job, according to LinkedIn, is to help businesses implement AI in ways that make them more efficient and strategic. This can involve project management, long-term planning, and developing ethical and responsible practices. 

Self-employed consultants may charge by the hour (upwards of $300) or by project, according to LinkedIn. While salaries vary, LinkedIn estimates entry-level consultants can earn between $60,000 and $100,000. Those with much more experience may make more than $200,000 a year, according to LinkedIn. 

3. Data annotators 

Building and training a machine learning model often requires data annotators, also known as content analysts. Ranked as the fourth top-growing job by LinkedIn, this role is in high demand as companies rely on data annotators to evaluate metadata or raw data with labels or tags. These annotations provide context for the articles, social media posts, customer reviews, images, and videos used to train AI models, allowing them to communicate more accurately. 

While entry-level data annotators may earn $20 per hour, those with AI expertise or experience handling specialized content, like medical data, can earn $100 to $180 an hour, according to LinkedIn. 

Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Getty Images

4. Artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers 

Alongside massive financial investments, private research roles have boomed as institutions expand internal teams dedicated to the progression of generative AI. Tasked with designing and testing new models, algorithms, and future applications of generative AI, these research positions take LinkedIn's fifth spot among the fastest growing roles in the U.S.

According to Apple, their AI/ML research team studies the technology, publishes their research, and hosts and attends conferences on deep learning. Google currently has more than 1,700 job listings for roles across its research teams, including research engineers and scientists dedicated to AI in security and privacy, advertising, search, and machine learning optimization. 

According to LinkedIn's findings, the majority of these roles are offered in tech hubs: San Francisco, New York City, and now Boston. The gender divide is fairly stark, too: 74 percent of spots in this field are held by men, with an average of three years of prior experience. And the median salary is in the six figures, with Zip Recruiter putting it at $130,000 per year. 

5. Data center technicians

In 2025, $61 billion went toward the infrastructure of data centers operating around the world, according to a report by S&P Global. Due in part to the energy-intensive demands of generative AI, these data centers are funded by major tech companies and a precarious model of private equity debt, according to the S&P Global report — they are also supported bureaucratically by the federal government. 

Hardware specialists, including technicians tasked with overseeing the new facilities and their server networks, are in demand. These positions require physical and technical skill — they have to install and maintain servers, organize cable patch plans, and constantly monitor the vast network they physically build for people around the world to utilize. According to LinkedIn's report, most employees in these roles were previously in IT or data center operations and career sites like Glassdoor put their median salaries around $68,000. A majority of roles are based in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Atlanta, and Columbus, Ohio — areas that overlap with growing data center hubs across the U.S.

Are investors already getting weary of tech's golden goose, artificial intelligence?

On Friday, tech stocks took a hit on Wall Street, and the underlying cause seems to be alarm over record AI infrastructure spending. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle were among just some of the companies whose falling shares accounted for $1 trillion in losses from Big Tech stocks, as CNBC reported.

Big tech companies like Amazon and Google have been furiously ramping up capital expenditures to build AI data centers and shifting focus to AI products and services. 

The immediate spark for the Friday sell-off was the Amazon fourth-quarter earnings report. The e-commerce giant projected that its capital expenditures would reach $200 billion in 2026. CNBC reported that Amazon's Capex figure was $50 billion higher than expected, and the stock market reacted accordingly.

Speaking to CNBC, GAM Investments' investment director Paul Markham explained why AI would affect these companies on the stock market.

“Questions over the extent of capex [capital expenditures] as a result of LLM build-outs, the eventual return on that, and the fear of eventual over-expansion of capacity will be persistent,” Markham told CNBC.

However, the cold feet from investors regarding AI seems to be a fairly recent development, at least when it comes to stock market results. Just a few weeks ago, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta announced it planned to allocate an additional 73 percent of its capital spending, or roughly $115 billion to $135 billion, to AI development. Unlike the recent Amazon announcement, Meta's stock went up 10 percent on this news.

There are also reasons to be skeptical of an AI bubble, however.

Also on Friday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang insisted that massive increases in capital expenditures are "justified," as the tech leader told CNBC's "Halftime Report" hosts. After making these comments, CNBC reported that NVIDIA shares rose 8 percent.

NVIDIA is often seen as a bellwether for a possible AI bubble, as the company sells the chips used by AI companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google. At Davos, Huang said that the massive investment in AI seemingly proves it's not a bubble. NVIDIA would be a massive loser if AI did prove to be a bubble, of course.

Still, there were signs that Amazon's stock was rebounding slightly after Huang's comments.

Deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a network of powerful tech leaders and executives in the early to mid-2010s, according to Mashable's review of some of the documents contained in the Department of Justice's latest release of Epstein files.

A number of boldface names show up in his inbox during that time, including Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. None of the individuals have been accused of participating in Epstein's abuse and trafficking of minors.

Based on the reviewed documents and previously reported information, Epstein demonstrated a longstanding interest in not only socializing with the tech elite, but also making influential investments and behind-the-scenes moves to influence technological innovation.

The New York Times reported Thursday that he had access to startups and venture capital funds, and the executives leading them, well after he pleaded guilty for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida, in 2008. Epstein was, for example, an early investor in the cryptocurrency startup Coinbase, in 2014, according to the records.

Epstein's unusual deal required him to register as a sex offender, and he ultimately served roughly 13 months in jail.

The charge and Epstein's incarceration weren't secrets; The Daily Beast reported on the financier's deal and criminal behavior in 2010. (Former Daily Beast editor Tina Brown recently recounted Epstein's high-pressure legal campaign against the coverage prior to its publication.)

Still, those revelations didn't stop tech leaders from befriending Epstein as e-commerce, social media, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence reshaped the internet, the economy, and society. Per the documents Mashable was able to review, Epstein had different relationships with big players in tech.

Some appeared to be collaborators or friends, such as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Some, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google cofounder Sergey Brin, were cc'd on emails to numerous tech executives that Epstein also received. Others, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, were mentioned in Epstein's schedule, by his assistant, or in conversation with a third party.

The documents give startling insight into how Epstein operated with tech executives.

Epstein and tech execs: Professional, sometimes friendly and familiar

In Sept. 2012, Epstein emailed Musk to ask about "the Al guy in London that you thought was smart." Musk simply replies, "Demis Hassabis". Hassabis is now the co-founder & CEO of Google Deep Mind. Google acquired Hassabis' company DeepMind Technologies in 2014.

Musk's exchanges with Epstein weren't limited to professional matters. Epstein invited Musk to his infamous Caribbean private island home, where Epstein engaged in the rape and sexual abuse of minors, and provided trafficked minors to other powerful men. Over the course of a year, Musk tried to schedule a visit to the island.

In Nov. 2012, Musk asked, "What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" He had planned to attend with his wife at the time and suggested on X that, as a result, he didn't anticipate anything "actually shady."

In the months of email exchanges, Musk appears to have had scheduling conflicts that prevented him from visiting. Musk recently said on X that he "declined repeated invitations" from Epstein and had never been to his island or on his private plane.

Musk claims that "nobody has fought harder for full release" of the Epstein files than him.

Epstein also emailed Hoffman directly a number of times between 2013 and 2018. Hoffman acknowledged on social media that he met Epstein at his island home for a "fundraising visit." Hoffman has published on X a list of dates he met with Epstein to discuss a "fundraising relationship" he had with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Epstein contributed $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017. Hoffman said on X that "interacting with Epstein post-conviction is something I deeply regret."

In one email from Dec. 2014, Hoffman wrote Epstein to say that he sent two gifts to his New York City address: "1- ice cream. if you have any interest, you should try — else for the girls." It's unclear who Hoffman is referencing when he mentions "girls." (The dash in Hoffman's writing appeared originally; it is not a redaction.)

Mashable reached out to Hoffman for comment about the identity of the girls he referenced. 

"The victims of Epstein’s abhorrent and vile actions deserve all the information they are seeking, and I continue to call on President Trump to deliver that for them," Hoffman wrote on X.

The nature of their respective relationships with Epstein has become the source of an accusatory back-and-forth between Musk and Hoffman on Musk's social media platform X.

The Epstein files contain 6,500 references to "the girls." Epstein's will did not appear to name any biological dependents or beneficiaries aside from his brother.

Epstein wrote personally about "the girls" in a February 2013 email to a contact, noting that "the girls and i are going to see elon musk at space x tomorrow".

In 2014, an email with redacted correspondents discusses arrangements for "the girls. 

"Can you help?," reads the email addressed to a person named Richard. "As I did not hear back from [redacted] and I think that JE wants me to reach out to the girls regarding their individual spaces." The exchange, which includes more detail, is eventually forwarded to Epstein. 

A 2015 email involving Epstein's assistant details "cleaning" arrangements for the girls and their apartments. The redacted respondent says, "Okey (sic) me and Leo's back to weelkly (sic) cleaning with the girls…We apologize for not cleaning the girls this week but we can clean some girls today if you want…" A 2017 email with redacted respondents goes into detail about a cleaning schedule and anticipating guests for the apartments. 

"Get the girls apartments done and 7J for our guest arriving tonight," the email reads.

A list of tech titans who appear in the Epstein files

An appearance by a major tech executive in the files does not imply or indicate that they participated in illegal or criminal behavior. This list is organized in alphabetical order. The number of appearances can include duplicate documents and references.

1. Jeff Bezos: 194 references

Bezos' name appears in the files relatively infrequently compared to people like Gates and Hoffman. In one 2018 email, a contact of Epstein's asked if he should attend a talk given by Bezos. Epstein replies, "yes you can say hello from me".

In a 2010 email, Bezos is cc'd along with several high-profile tech executives (Brin, Musk, Google cofounder Larry Page) in an email from the literary agent John Brockman related to a book that he'd championed. 

Bezos is also mentioned as a potential dinner party guest in a 2011 email to Epstein from investor and inventor Boris Nikolic. Similarly, a 2018 email involving Epstein's assistant listed Epstein as a guest at a 2014 dinner where the RSVPs included Bezos, Brin, and Page.

In 2016, Epstein received a text message from director Woody Allen, who declared, "I think Jeff Bezos is my idol." Epstein replies, "I was with him yesterday".

Mashable reached out to Amazon for comment. 

2. Sergey Brin: 265 references

Brin shows up in the files as early as 2003, years before Epstein pleaded guilty to prostituting minors. Epstein's co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell met Brin at a TED Conference that year, then reached out via email.

"Just incase (sic) I need to jog your memory as to who I am - I am the crazy girl with short dark hair who flew a Black Hawk in Colombia and a friend of Jeffrey Epstein and [redacted]," she wrote in March 2003.

Brin responded that he traveled to New York City a few times a year and planned to be there in April. Maxwell invited Brin to dinner. The plans ultimately changed locations to Epstein's Manhattan home. "[D]inners at Jeffrey's are always happily casual and relaxed," Maxwell wrote. Brin responded with his availability.

Brin also authored a May 2003 email with the subject line "aircraft carrier" to Maxwell. The body of the message is blank. Similar messages, addressed to Maxwell by Brin but with a blank body, appear in the files.

In a long, heavily redacted letter apparently written by an Epstein survivor, Brin is named as an individual the victim met while on Epstein's island at an unspecified time. The victim does not accuse Brin, who allegedly visited with his then-fiancée, Anne Wojcicki, of any crimes.

Mashable reached out to Google for comment. 

3. Tim Cook: 152 references*

Cook appears in the files because news articles or briefings mention his name in relation to Apple. The documents also contain email messages between Epstein and individuals working to arrange meetings with Cook.

In a Nov. 2012 exchange, someone who meets with Cook tells Epstein that Cook would be "excited" to meet with Epstein but has heard Epstein is forming a company that would require him to decline the invitation.

*Some of Epstein's shipping invoices are addressed to a Tim Cook, care of a yacht harbor in the British Virgin Islands, in the early 2000s. The number of references includes shipping invoices with that Tim Cook's name on them. Mashable has reached out to Apple to determine whether that Tim Cook is the same as the Apple CEO.

4. Bill Gates: 2,527 references

The Microsoft cofounder has admitted, with regret, to a friendly relationship with Epstein. His spokesperson also unequivocally denied salacious allegations contained in the latest batch of files. In two July 2013 emails that Epstein sent to himself, he addresses the messages to Gates and describes a rupture in what he viewed as a close relationship.

Epstein claims that Gates asked him to delete emails "regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda [French Gates], and the description of your penis. You also made it clear to me that I am not to refer to [redacted] as that is another topic that must remain between the two of us."

Epstein also tries to lay out a financial resolution to a business partnership they formed. Gates has said the email was never sent.

"These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false," Gates' spokesperson told NPR. "The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein's frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame."

Gates' relationship with Epstein reportedly played a role in Melinda French Gate's 2021 divorce from her husband. She told NPR that the new allegations in Epstein's files brought up painful times in her marriage.

"Whatever questions remain there of what — I can't even begin to know all of it — those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband," French Gates said. "They need to answer to those things, not me."

5. Reid Hoffman: 2,638 references

As much as Hoffman emphasizes his fundraising ties to Epstein, he appears close to him in emails exchanged over several years, and they also set up Skype calls.

In addition to the aforementioned exchanges, Hoffman wished Epstein well in May 2018 and said, "loo= (sic) forward to being in the same area of the world at some point. ☺" He suggested a Skype call to discuss Epstein investing in a fund, to which Epstein replied, "always can make time for a reid skype. :)"

Years earlier, in Jan. 2014, Epstein wrote to Hoffman, "have some inquiries from some interesting people, re a bitcoin type currency, wait until you hear". Hoffman replied with interest.

Mashable reached out to Greylock Partners, where Hoffman is a partner, for comment. 

6. Elon Musk: 1,086 references

Aside from Musk's early 2010s exchanges with Epstein about visiting his island, a number of references to his name are from bulletins or news aggregators that Epstein's email account received, even as recently as last year. Musk is also referred to in passing as a potential event attendee or briefly as a subject of conversation.

7. Larry Page: 293 references

Page appears at roughly the same frequency as his Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

In 2009, for example, Epstein is included in a forwarded email correspondence that attempts to explain Page's thinking about the emergence of general artificial intelligence.

In one 2010 email, it appears as though Page requested use of Epstein's helicopter through a third party during a trip to St. Barts. A follow-up email from a third party instructs Epstein to disregard the request as Page has chosen to use a boat instead.

In 2014, a redacted sender shared Page's email address to Epstein. Like many of the tech executives, Page is included in guest lists of dinners or events that Epstein might attend, well after his plea deal. Media mentions of Page also account for references to him.

Mashable reached out to Google for comment. 

8. Peter Thiel: 2,273 references

Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Republican mega donor, seemed to have a close business relationship with Epstein, according to the documents. 

In July 2025, a Times review of Epstein's estate identified $40 million investments that Epstein made into funds operated by Valar Ventures, a firm backed by Thiel. Epstein also consulted Thiel for investing advice.

His spokesperson told the New York Times that Thiel did not visit Epstein's private island. Thiel has yet to comment on his communication with Epstein. 

According to the newest documents, they appeared to be in frequent contact in the mid- to late 2010s. 

In 2014, Thiel sent a text message to note that he'd just tried calling Epstein. A 2017 message from Epstein's assistant that appears to double as a scheduling alert, simply reads, "August 14, 2017 11:45 AM : Peter Thiel Friday sometime". Other scheduling reminders indicate that Thiel and Epstein met and spoke to each other on the phone with some regularity. They remained in touch, trying to pin down each other's whereabouts, as late as 2019.

9. Mark Zuckerberg: 280 references

In Aug. 2015, an assistant to Epstein sent a message to Zuckerberg's email address noting that the Facebook founder had recently spoken to Epstein at a dinner party hosted by Hoffman and Thiel.

"At the party Mark requested Jeffrey send his contact details to him...could you please pass the below on to Mark?" the assistant wrote, including Epstein's phone number and email address. In a message sent soon after that, Epstein's assistant sent Zuckerberg an hour-long YouTube lecture on the meaning of math.

Zuckerberg appears years earlier in the files, when a contact of Epstein's discusses with his assistant possible meetings in Silicon Valley during a trip in Aug. 2012. Epstein appeared interested in bringing "Woody" along to a meeting with Zuckerberg at Facebook, or for them to meet Zuckerberg at dinner.

It's unclear if the Woody cited is the film director, who communicated often with Epstein and whose name is referenced 7,260 times in the files. 

Mashable reached out to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, for comment.

Apple is about to turn 50, and the company is throwing a party to mark the occasion.

The company was founded on Apr. 1, 1976 (yes, right April Fools' day), and will celebrate its 50th birthday on Apr. 1, 2026. While the company isn't exactly known for lavish parties, this anniversary is too big to pass up.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that something will be happening on the date at an internal Apple meeting, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on Thursday.

“When you really stop and pause and think about the last 50 years, it makes your heart sing. It really does. I promise some celebration," he said.

OK, we admit it: The details are scarce. It could very well be an internal party for Apple employees with free pizza and canapés in the hallway. But Cook reportedly did sound quite enthusiastic about marking the date.

"I’ve been unusually reflective lately about Apple because we have been working on what do we do to mark this moment," Cook said.

Apple sometimes launches accessories that mark special occasions, including thematic Apple Watch Bands (check out the new Black Unity band, for example) and iPhone cases that mark the Lunar New Year. Perhaps something like that is in store for the company's 50th, though we wouldn't mind if it were something bigger, like a new (gasp!) iPhone color.

French prosecutors have raided the Paris officers of Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) as part of a preliminary investigation into child abuse images and deepfakes proliferating on the platform.

The investigation was opened in January 2025, with charges including "complicity" in "in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group," the AP reported Tuesday.

The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed the news via its own X account on Tuesday.

"A search is carried out at X's French premises by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor's office, with @CyberGEND and @Europol as part of the investigation opened in January 2025."

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Paris prosecutor's office also said it would be leaving X, inviting followers to find it on LinkedIn an Instagram.

Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, which served as X CEO from May 2023 to July 2025, are summoned for "voluntary interviews," on April 20, the Paris prosecutor's office said in a statement.

“At this stage, the conduct of the investigation is based on a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French law, as it operates on the national territory,” said the statement.

In a message posted in July 2025, X called the investigation "politically motivated," and said it would not cooperate.

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Grok, xAI's AI assistant which has a prominent place on X, has recently come under scrutiny as it was being used to produce millions of sexualized images of adults and children. Grok later took measures to address these concerns, primarily via limiting image generation to paid subscribers, though several regulators and governments called the move insufficient.

Over 1,000 Meta employees started off 2026 on a bleak note — they were laid off in mid-January from Reality Labs, the company's Virtual Reality (VR)-focused division.

The public's unenthusiastic response to the Metaverse may have ultimately doomed these positions, but the threat of job loss feels acute to many in the tech industry due to U.S.-imposed tariffs and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.

AI was responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, according to CNBC, citing consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Last year marked the highest number of layoffs since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Last year, the tech industry saw over 140,000 layoffs, more than any other industry except the government sector.

Now that we have that out of the way, the good news is that the tech job market isn't all hopeless. AI is currently a net positive for jobs, generating more positions than it eliminates, according to investment company Vanguard.

Mashable spoke to seven professionals in the tech and employment sectors, and they all saw reasons for optimism, offering their own advice for getting hired or moving up. Some of their biggest takeaways:

• Explore courses and training, especially on utilizing AI.
• AI is changing every day. Learning and experience culled from a few months ago may already be outdated.
• Tech jobs don't just happen at tech companies; all organizations need people fluent in AI, data security, and machine learning.
• Companies are looking for people who can help their peers integrate AI into daily workflows and use the technology more effectively.
• If you're currently employed, ask your supervisor how AI might change your role and what you can do to be proactive about that change.
• Old-fashioned networking is still valued, as are communication skills like writing and speaking.

Read more about getting hired or promoted in the testimonials below.

Cristina Mancini, Chief Executive Officer of Black Girls Code

What would you say to someone looking for work in the tech industry?

If I had to choose a word for 2026 it's 'adaptive'; that’s the critical skill. One of my favorite titles for jobs I’ve seen is the human in the loop jobs; that’s making sure there’s a human in the loop before products ship or before you make strategy decisions; [a person] still using their discernment and lived experience.

There's a big shift in the C-suite of some tech companies, with many leaving or shifting roles. How could that filter down to those in entry- and mid-level jobs?

I think it’s interesting because Apple doesn’t usually go through these swings; they’re one of the stable ones. I think it’s interesting; they’re saying they’re all in on AI and, 'We’re going to win on AI.' What does winning on AI mean? Eventually, as happened with Klarna and other organizations, people are going to understand that AI cannot run your company for you. You still need people; they’re going to hire back people who understand how to use the tools. So, making sure you acquire these tools now is critical. That means you’re starting to experiment with the tools.

One of the things we’re proud of that we do [at Black Girls Code] is live training; our virtual training always has teachers. As of last year, you have a 5 percent chance of completing an online course by yourself, but it ratchets up to 95 percent if you’re part of a cohort. Trying to tell people, "just learn it," doesn’t help when people don’t understand the technology. We’re at this interesting juncture where there’s an opportunity to leapfrog some of these legacy systems and programs by learning a new skill that you don’t necessarily have to get a four-year degree for. People should take advantage of it.

Getting a major in some of these technologies is also challenging in a four-year college because the technologies are shifting. By the time you publish [a thesis], it’ll probably be dated.

Also, senior-level executives often don’t have to understand that they’re making everyone else use. We need to be aware of these tools. When you don’t, you could inadvertently be leading an organization that’s shipping harmful products.

I was talking to a friend of mine, he’s a career pivoter, switching out of sports and wants to get into tech. He was confused because everyone was sending him links to online courses, and he was wondering, Where do all these pathways lead? Which are the ones I should take? One of his friends took a cybersecurity course and dropped off because it was too hard. [These new skills] can feel like a foreign language.

I speak a couple of different languages. Once you start learning a new language, other languages become less complicated because you start understanding a different way of thinking. People have been talking about being a lifelong learner forever, but now that’s not a nice-to-have. Sitting on your degree from 20 years ago is not going to help you today.

Every industry is becoming a technology industry. People look at the mass layoffs happening across the tech industry, but there are other industries using technology to drive their business, and they need people who understand how to use it.

What are those opportunities that people aren’t seeing? If you’re a small business owner, suddenly becoming the CTO of your organization is not as complicated as it used to be. You don’t need 12 engineers to think about how to build certain CRMs or your marketing stacks. But you can hire someone who can use the AI tools to build them.

Is this really a pivotal moment in the industry?

I think we’re definitely in an incredible [AI] hype cycle, and all hype cycles burst eventually. But this technology is not going anywhere; some version of it will remain. So, when the companies have to hire back people, they’re going to hire people who understand the technology. A lot of startups, ourselves included, are moving into more place-based opportunities. There are jobs for real-life growth developers; people want to connect in person in the tech industry. People are understanding that people matter and help drive business forward.

Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Adobe Stock

Hetu Kamichetty, Chief Technology Officer of Xaira, a company utilizing AI to advance drug discovery

What tech positions are going to be in demand in 2026?

Let me quickly introduce myself and Xaira a little bit. I'm a computer scientist by training. My PhD was in AI. I spent a decade in tech. I was at Facebook. I was at Amazon. I was part of the agentic AI efforts at Facebook before I quit, and now I'm a cofounder and CTO of this company called Xaira. We are using AI to change how drugs and medicines are made, and ultimately how health is managed using AI.

And that relates to the question that you asked, because if you think about the space we're operating, five years ago, I was building AI models to improve search or improve chatbots, and now I'm using AI models to improve how we make medicine.

I just came back from [a conference and] a big theme across the board was AI is changing how tech is done, how we code — but that's so 2025. AI is changing how science might be done, how health might be managed, how drug discovery is done, and a bunch of other fields. AI through robotics is changing manufacturing. So, a big theme [of 2026] is how AI could play a role in other disciplines outside of what we might have considered tech, right?

I mean, tech is, I don't know, 10, 20 percent of the GDP. Health is 20 percent of the GDP, so tech is a smaller fraction of the GDP than everything else [that makes up the GDP], and through AI, we might be able to change and improve not just what we might consider traditional tech.

What would you say to someone trying to get into tech or trying to advance in their career? How can they prepare themselves for a world shifting so quickly?

I think AI is going to improve and change how other disciplines and other industries are done. So if you're a tech person and you're trying to learn AI, very good news, it's fairly easy to learn that these days. I have 20 years of experience in AI, but unfortunately, only the last six months count. Because the field is moving so rapidly, anybody wanting to learn more about AI just needs to learn about what happened this year, and they're kind of caught up on everything.

So for the tech folk trying to learn more AI, there's plenty of online resources, there's plenty of communities; it's fairly easy to write AI code because of coding agents, so you just need to formulate your question.

For the larger sector, there's plenty of people who are tech-adjacent, and I think that's the big push I see; there's going to be a lot more desire and need for people who are bilingual or at least can speak AI, who can understand how AI might change things, understand how to use AI, understand scenarios where AI would be great, scenarios where AI would need some help.

Let's say you're a product designer, a product designer who speaks AI, a data scientist, a data scientist who understands how AI models are used to how AI models are evaluated — all of these things have a way for you to build on your experience and add that AI layer on top of it.

There's a huge need for people able to keep up with what's changing, especially as a startup. We want people to think big, we want them to be bold, we want them to be willing to pivot when things evolve, when things change under the ground.

If you only said, well, 'I'm a tech person and I do [Quality Assurance].' Because of AI, quality assurance of software is very, very different than what it was three years ago, what it was five years ago, what it was maybe even at the beginning of 2025. There's still a huge value for QA skills. But those QA skills need to be bought in with [knowledge of] how agents work. What are the kinds of failure modes that agents currently face that you should be increasing your emphasis on? Folks who are willing to learn and look at this as an opportunity are going to succeed.

Jasmine Escalera, career expert at Zety, a resume template builder

What tech positions are emerging?

AI is really just taking over the career space. AI and machine learning engineers, data scientists who use AI, prompt engineers, AI product managers; all are for sure going to be hot. Any kind of position that’s unique in integrating AI in everyday living.

Everyone is thinking of their jobs and their longevity. The use of AI in organizations opens up the possibility for AI to almost become an organizational team sport. What I mean is, people building AI from a technical perspective are going to be really important, but also the people who can help integrate it into the organization and its everyday workflows are going to be very important. We’re seeing the emergence of AI operations specialists, people who look at day-to-day operations and try to optimize them using AI workflow management. We’re seeing people like AI governance and AI compliance professionals; these kinds of positions are also coming up. We’re seeing AI used in HR more, so we’re looking at individuals who know how to use AI in the HR space from an ethical standpoint, and those in HR who can [use AI to help] with up-skilling.

We think about these technical roles in AI, but there’s a big open space for positions where a specific skillset can be transferred. If you’re in operations management, for example, you can get complementary AI skills that will help you stay in operations management, but also help you assist an organization in building workflows that can support AI optimization.

How can candidates make themselves more viable in this economy?

I read OpenAI is starting its own courses on how to use ChatGPT better and how to prompt it better. Google was starting courses. Many of these companies are saying, 'We want to get X number of people trained in AI utilization to balance what may happen in the workforce.'

Go to conferences, tap in with people in your field, ask leaders in your organization, ‘How do you see AI being implemented across the organization, but also within my team and role? And what are some of the things I can do to keep myself viable?’

You can also ask if, for instance, you're an HR manager or representative, 'What are some of the things I can do to learn how to better integrate AI to support my company?' Even if you have a specific role, there could be an AI twist to it and then could make you incredibly valuable.

We know AI is going to shift a lot of positions, but we’re focusing so much on what positions AI is going to take away. But what’s going to thrive? What unique things could come out of this?

Is networking still important?

It’s always been really important to establish a network, but if you are in the position now of asking how AI is going to change your role, then this is the number one strategy for you now. You have to become inquisitive and curious, not shut down. Sometimes when fear comes up — hey, this is people’s livelihoods — we can shut down. This is the time to be proactive and inquisitive. Talking to people is so incredibly important.

Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Getty Images

AJ Balance, Chief Product Officer of Grindr

What trends for tech jobs do you see in 2026?

We really believe AI, similar to Grindr’s founding, is one of these paradigm-shifting technologies, like the smartphone was in 2009, that really allows us to build amazing product experiences that make those different types of connections happen. Our approach to AI is really about helping users make more, better, deeper connections more easily.

Earlier this year, we had a vision of AI at Grindr — which we call GAYI — to build Grindr into an AI-native company, incorporating that intelligence that AI brings at all layers of the product and technical architecture, either in operations or internally. So, we think of [AI] as this paradigm shift, both in product and the way we work. It is impacting how we’re building out our team and how we work in the future.

Similar to other big leaps in technology, we’re seeing a lot of jobs augmented by AI to different degrees of functionality and scope, rather than being fully replaced by AI. We see it as a big opportunity in our product to accelerate the ability for users to make connections more easily, to help us be incredibly productive and augment the types of jobs folks are doing, and perform even more impactful work.

What are you looking for from someone who wants to be part of Grindr’s further adoption of AI?

As AI continues to evolve, I think there’s a lot of demand for folks proficient in leveraging these new tools, like generative AI, across the product and software development lifecycle. So, [we're looking for] folks already using these tools for product management and software engineering work, those who have experience trying them out and applying them in those roles, as well as folks working in design, data, security, and platform teams.

One of the things we see coming is increased demand for applied AI engineers, designers, [and] data scientists who are proficient in building products using these [AI] tools and incorporating them into their day-to-day work, whether it’s in their primary job at the company they're at or even side projects they build. Those are particularly exciting skills and valuable for building products and technology at Grindr.

There are certain degrees or disciplines folks study — like computer science to become a software engineer, designers having gone through a design curriculum — some of those skills are very relevant for roles like product design, engineering, data science. Real experience working in those fields and using AI tools in that work is what really sets [candidates] apart.

Alberto Silveira, Chief Technology Officer at HireVue, an AI and HR management company

On the most in-demand tech jobs in 2026:

It almost goes without saying that roles like data scientists and machine learning engineers will remain in high demand in 2026. What’s accelerating, though, is hiring for cybersecurity and AI governance roles as organizations grapple with new AI-driven security threats, data privacy risks, and regulatory requirements. We’re also seeing growing demand for cloud engineers, AI product managers, and applied AI specialists who can translate advanced technology into real business outcomes. In short, the most in-demand tech jobs won’t just build AI; they’ll secure it, govern it, and make it usable at scale.

It’s also worth remembering that in the era of AI, it’s not just about particular hard skills like coding languages or platform experience — people with critical thinking skills will be more in demand than ever before.

Where job seekers should be looking for work:

Who gets the job should always be about who is the most qualified, but the fact is that a referral goes a long way in a crowded field. One of the best ways to streamline a job search is to start by reaching out to your network for referrals and focus on applying to those roles. It’s important to not just network from behind a screen — attend local meetups and events when you can.

When tapping into your network, don’t just think about the people you’re closest to; research shows that connections with "weak ties" can yield the most significant results. Set a personal goal to reach out to five people daily and ask them for referrals.

Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Adobe Stock

Kathleen Kramer, 2026 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Past President.

On the top trends jobseekers should be aware of in 2026:

My general advice is to be zigging instead of zagging. Since it's AI everywhere, you want to be looking for contributing the non-AI expertise to where AI is going, which is not the general hop-on-the-bandwagon approach.

The second [trend] would be [that] semiconductors are back big and software-only is very sad, which is also the opposite of what's happened, say, in the last four years. So coding is an and...it's not the pathway to success. In fact, the opposite of a coding-only approach is robotics. I see much more opportunity [in robotics] for a career-interested person.

On the value of being able to write and ideate without AI:

You think about the most brilliant, most admired people in tech. How many of them have no communication skills? How many of them are asking ChatGPT to write their speech? It's just not happening.

I always value those skills that make you the complete technologist. There's job function, but there's also just personal value, personal enrichment, personal power to advance yourself, and to be able to rely on yourself. But if I was hiring someone who can't get any work done without consulting an outside AI, it's just not really a significant added value.

— As told to Rebecca Ruiz

Marcie Foy, Director of Career Consultants, Carnegie Mellon University

On the current state of the tech job market:

I think one thing that we're seeing with the tech job market, broadly speaking, is that there's a lot of changes going on, especially with...AI coming more to the forefront within the tech industry. What companies are looking for, the skill sets they need, [and] the experiences that they need are kind of in this state of flux and change.

So it's really, really important for all potential candidates, whether they be undergraduate students through PhDs or experienced individuals, to be able to demonstrate that they are at the top of their game as well with these new changes. They [need to] come to the table with the skill sets that the companies are looking for, and clearly communicate that in their application materials and throughout the interview process, especially in those technical interviews.

Being able to really demonstrate what you can do, how you can do it, and showcase those skills throughout that process is even more important. [That's] not to say it wasn't important before, but it's even more important now with the change of technical skill set that's needed, with the emphasis of AI continuing to grow.

On the skills tech employers are looking for right now:

For a lot of the fields that I support, more specifically in the engineering and computer science spaces, [employers are looking for] the individuals that are able to actually kind of create in the AI space. They're skilled with machine learning and working with language models and natural language processing and areas related to where the work is happening within AI.

That's where we're starting to see things pick up within the tech industry. Moving beyond [programming] to be able to develop the AI agents and things that can do some of that baseline work, as well as more data analysis and machine learning side of things [is important].

On the importance of clear communication:

The emphasis is changing on what we commonly referred to as soft or transferable skills, [such as] the ability to communicate really effectively in the workplace environment, both written and verbally, the ability to explain your thought process, to problem solve and to use all of the information that's at your disposal, including AI, to be able to generate new ideas, [and] to be able to solve the more challenging problems at hand.

The ability to communicate those softer, transferable skills in an interview and on your resume is even more important, regardless of how technical the goal is.

Something that I'm also hearing and seeing is in the interview process — really being able to articulate how you did something, not just what you did, but actually how you did it, the choices that you made, why you made those choices, to show that you have command over your subject matter. That's a way for both candidates to stand out, but also for employers to validate the level of individual that they're considering, given that those individuals also have access to AI to help them prepare for those interviews. — As told to Rebecca Ruiz

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Rebecca Ruiz contributed to this story.

Remember the rumors that the iPhone Air wasn't selling well? True or not, it didn't hurt Apple's iPhone sales at all. In fact, the company just posted a record-breaking quarter, and demand for iPhones has never been higher.

Apple reported its fiscal first quarter earnings on Thursday, and it beat basically every estimate the experts put out there. In particular, iPhone revenue was $85.27 billion, a 23 percent increase over the same period last year. Apple's total revenue for the quarter was also a record-breaking $143.8 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year increase.

Speaking to CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the demand for the iPhone last quarter "simply staggering."

Here's another staggering number: According to Cook, Apple now has an active base of 2.5 billion devices, which includes iPhones, Macs, iPads, and other devices.

We don't know which iPhone models sold the best, as iPhone doesn't report them separately. But it's safe to say that the iPhone 17 lineup was a success.

Notably, 2025 was the year in which Apple expanded its traditional iPhone/iPhone Pro mix with two new models, the iPhone 16e, and the ultra-thin iPhone Air. For 2026, Apple reportedly has even bigger ambitions, with the mythical iPhone Fold joining the lineup. The company will also reportedly split its iPhone launch schedule into two, with iPhone 18 launching in the spring, and iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max launching in the fall, alongside iPhone Fold.

E-commerce behemoth Amazon is making another round of layoffs, according to a blog post on the company's official website.

Amazon said the cuts will affect 16,000 corporate jobs. The company said it will give its employees 90 days to look for a new role internally within Amazon. Those who don't find a new role will receive severance pay and other temporary benefits.

The company's public statement, from Amazon’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti, clarified that the company will "continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future." 

While Amazon doesn't explicitly state what that means, the New York Times reports that the company intends to shift resources to artificial intelligence and the data centers that AI requires. As mentioned in their report, Amazon spent around $125 billion last year on data centers and related expenditures.

“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan,” reads a blog post written by Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon. Galetti also emphasized that the company was "working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted."

Last October, Amazon sources told Reuters that the company was planning its biggest round of layoffs ever and was set to cut 30,000 jobs. Days later, Amazon announced that it was laying off 14,000 employees, but it seems the 30,000 report was correct after all. With today's announcement, Amazon will have laid off 30,000 workers total, and Galetti's blog post adds some context to the situation.

"While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now."

While Amazon CEO Andy Jassy denied AI was responsible for the October layoffs, our colleagues at PC Mag note that Galetti provided employees with a different take at the time. (Disclosure: PC Mag and Mashable are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)

"This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and...we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business," Galetti said last year.

In addition to this latest round of layoffs, Amazon also announced just yesterday that it was closing all of its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh store locations to focus on Whole Foods Market and grocery deliveries under the Whole Foods brand.

Amazon currently employs roughly 1.5 million people.

A jury will decide whether or not platforms like Instagram and YouTube intentionally foster addictive behaviors in teen users, as their owners — Meta and Google, respectively — head to court over a series of social media lawsuits.

Set to begin today (Jan. 27), the lawsuit claims the companies knowingly created site features that led to addictive behavior, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. It was brought forth by a 19-year-old user, referred to as K.G.M., and her mother. The suit seeks monetary damages for the individual and seeks to force named platforms to change the design of their sites to curb excessive use. The original claim also named Snapchat parent company, Snap, and TikTok, in addition to Meta and Google.

Hours before the tech giants were set to appear before the jury, TikTok reached a settlement agreement with the plaintiff and will no longer face a deposition before the court. Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, the organization representing K.G.M., told the press that the terms of the settlement remain confidential.

Last week, Snapchat also settled out of the case, saying the plaintiff's claims were resolved in an "amicable matter." The next day, Snapchat announced new parental controls for teen users, including upgrades to activity and screen time monitoring tools. TikTok and Snapchat are still named in other cases related to tech use and youth mental crises.

K.G.M.'s case, which will be heard in a Los Angeles court, is the first of what could be numerous cases related to social media's effects on user mental health — they are the culmination of years of pressure on Big Tech following a 2021 whistleblower investigation against Meta. The Los Angeles hearing is one of three chosen test cases, selected from the vast number of related suits, that will determine how to proceed with subsequent lawsuits. In addition to individual suits, social media platforms have been sued by child safety coalitions, school districts, and even state attorneys general. Many have been consolidated under state courts.

Some have called the bellwether trials a legal reckoning for platforms and, especially, their executives, many of whom have allegedly been complicit in continuing addictive features on their websites and apps despite warnings from employees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify before the Los Angeles jury.

The social media platform Pinterest is laying off as many as 675 workers, according to a new report from CNBC.

Why? Because the company is shifting its focus to AI, at least, in part.

In a securities filing submitted earlier this month, Pinterest specifically cited AI as one of the reasons for the planned reduction in force. The filing states that Pinterest plans on "reallocating resources" to teams with an AI focus and prioritizing "AI-powered products and capabilities."

Pinterest's layoffs are expected to hit just under 15 percent of its workforce, adding those employees to the growing number of people who have lost their jobs because of AI.

As CNBC also reported late last year, consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that nearly 55,000 people lost their jobs in 2025 due to AI. Pinterest plans to have completed its cuts by Sept. 30, 2026.

The filing also says that Pinterest's sales and marketing strategies are being reconfigured, which might be a hint as to which departments will be hit by layoffs.

Pinterest received praise from AI critics last October after becoming the first major social media platform to buck the trends and offer users the ability to filter out AI content from their feeds. Being that Pinterest is so heavily dependent on visual content, AI-generated slop was starting to inundate the platform. The negative reaction from users forced the platform to address this trend and provide users with options to remove the content. 

Despite this move, Pinterest has been increasingly focused on bringing more AI to the platform, like virtually all tech companies. In late October, Pinterest launched "Pinterest Assistant," an AI-powered shopping tool on the platform.

Furthermore, earlier this year, rumors and discussions spread online about the possibility of AI giant OpenAI acquiring Pinterest, although there have been no substantiated reports about such an acquisition yet.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp might soon start charging you — if you want premium features, that is.

According to a report by TechCrunch, Meta (the parent company of all three social networks), is planning to test subscription tiers that would give users access to exclusive features.

Meta confirmed the news to the publisher, saying these subscriptions would unlock productivity and creativity, as well as new AI capabilities.

The paid subscription tiers, which will start showing up "in the coming months," will give Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users access to these features, as well as more control over how they share and connect, the report said. The apps' core experiences will remain free for everyone.

Meta plans to test a variety of different subscription bundles to see which one works best.

There's no official word on how this will look like, but leaker Alessandro Paluzzi managed to catch a glimpse of Instagram settings pointing to Manus AI, an AI agent that Meta had acquired in December 2025 for $2 billion. Manus could become one of the features that are only available to paid Instagram subscribers.

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Potentially, Facebook could also start charging for Vibes, a Meta AI tool that allows users to create videos.

Flirting with paid subscription tiers is a huge change for Meta, whose Facebook homepage once displayed a slogan saying "it's free and always will be" (the slogan was removed back in 2019).

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However, the idea of Facebook charging for use is not as unprecedented as it once was, given that Meta was forced to start offering an ad-free, paid subscription tier in the European Union back in 2023.

We don't expect users to get as spooked about this as they once were (remember the recurring spam about Facebook locking you out of your account if you don't pay?). But when a paid tier gets introduced to a service, free versions often get left behind when it comes to new features and upgrades.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said there would always be a free version of Facebook. What that free version will look like down the road, once a subscription tier is introduced, remains to be seen.

Social media is rarely as activated as it has been since the weekend — or as bipartisan in its outrage.

Users from a wide swath of the political spectrum shared their horror at the killing of Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse fatally shot on Saturday by a masked federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. 

But in Silicon Valley, a divide began to grow. On one side were top tech CEOs who, as CNBC noted, failed to criticize an administration they've been cozy with since its inauguration. The most conspicuous silence was that of Apple's Tim Cook, who made a point of calling out the "senseless killing" of George Floyd at the WWDC conference in 2020.

As his latest X post (celebrating MLK Day) filled with angry replies, Cook was to be found at the White House, attending a screening of the movie Melania.

Two days later, Cook sent an internal message to Apple employees, first obtained by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. But that message wasn't exactly a profile in courage either — it simply called for "deescalation," and didn't mention Pretti or ICE by name.

Still, Cook's timid response was far from the whole story. Just below the tier of superstar CEOs, some of the industry's leading technologists and investors (think: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, a16z) took clearer stands on social media — including more than one who felt moved to post while declaring that they don't normally talk politics.

We're keeping a reverse chronological list, below — with dates included, so you can see when CEOs like Sam Altman decided to share their views.

On Jan. 27, 2026

1. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

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I love the US and its values of democracy and freedom and will be supportive of the country however I can; OpenAI will too. But part of loving the country is the American duty to push back against overreach. What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right.

President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country. I am encouraged by the last few hours of response and hope to see trust rebuilt with transparent investigations.

As a company, we aim to stick to our convictions and not get blown around by changing fashions too much. We didn’t become super woke when that was popular, we didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. But we are going to continue to try to figure out how to actually do the right thing as best as we can, engage with leaders and push for our values, and speak up clearly about it as needed.

— Sam Altman in an internal Slack channel, as reported by The New York Times

As of Jan. 26, 2026

1. Jeff Dean, chief scientist, Google DeepMind & Google Research

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2. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

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3. Yann LeCun, executive chairman at AMI Labs 

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4. Alexis Ohanian, investor and co-founder of Reddit

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5. Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal app

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6. James Dyett, senior executive at OpenAI

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7. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator

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8. Ethan Choi, partner at Khosla Ventures

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9. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures

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10. Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic

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11. John O'Farrell, former general partner of a16z

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12. Kath Korevec, director of product at Google Labs 

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13. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic

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14. Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z

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15. Ashley Mayer, co-founder and general partner of Coalition Operators

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16. Katie Jacobs Stanton, founder and general partner of Moxxie Ventures

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17. Dave McClure, founder of Practical Venture Capital

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18. Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years

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19. Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company

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UPDATE: Jan. 27, 2026, 11:10 a.m. PST This story has been updated to include new statements from tech leaders made on Jan. 27, 2026.

In Jan. 2026, the gap between the haves and the have-nots could hardly be more stark — even in AI world.

On the have-not side, there's OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Long the hype man for imminent digital superintelligence (aka AGI), Altman backtracked and said we're in an AI bubble last year. He's made odd deals to feed the money hog known as ChatGPT; subscriptions ain't paying the bills. Last week, Altman rolled out what in 2024 he called "the last resort" for the company — selling ads on ChatGPT. A popular LinkedIn post this week used an AI image of Altman out in the cold, begging for change with a self-mocking cardboard sign: "AGI = Ads Generate Income."

And then there are the haves in warm rooms in snowy Davos, Switzerland — where the weather report for the AI economy, from the annual World Economic Forum, is just peachy.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, who rode the company to a $4 trillion valuation on the back of powerful GPU chip sales growth that hasn't quite slowed yet, flipped the script when asked about the AI bubble. "This is the largest infrastructure build-out in human history," Huang said of active and promised data center projects. "And so the AI bubble is, comes about because the investments are large. And the investments are large, because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the layers of AI above it."

Huang wasn't denying the existence of a bubble, exactly — he just suggested it was a misreading of our current economic outlook. Just look at all that infrastructure coming down the pipe! Left unsaid was whether those massive projects would dry up if AI itself continues to not show returns on investment for regular businesses (especially if AI models like DeepSeek can be built with minimal data center usage, the opposite of what made Nvidia successful).

In Nvidia's telling, the tail is now wagging the dog. And the rest of Davos, a popular confab for billionaires, pretty much wagged along in agreement.

"I think there will be big failures, but I don't think we are in a bubble," said Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, a top tech investment firm. (Blackrock holds more than $200 billion in Nvidia stock.)

Also at Davos, one Nobel Prize-winning economist described what was currently happening in AI as a "rational bubble", comparing it favorably to the infamous tulip bulb panic of the 17th century. Why? Because with AI, insisted Peter Howitt, economics professor at Brown University, "there's something real out there."

Howitt didn't suggest what that real thing was, but insisted there would be a winner — and their arrival would herald the bursting of the bubble. "At some point, when it becomes a little clearer who the winners are going to be, the values of the other firms are going to start to fall, and that's when the crash will take place."

So who is that winner, other than Nvidia and its circular OpenAI deals? Microsoft, with its own favorable OpenAI deal, might be in a position to "win" the AI economy. Microsoft currently owns a 27 percent stake in the ChatGPT maker. If Altman can't keep the lights on long-term, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella could well ride in to the rescue and snap up OpenAI itself.

Nadella, on the surface, seemed just as optimistic about AI's future as the rest of the titans. And yet in his appearance, the Microsoft CEO also sounded a note of alarm. If the AI economy doesn't root itself in non-tech sectors, it will be a bubble — and soon.

"The real question in front of all of us is how do you ensure that the diffusion of AI happens, and happens fast," Nadella said. "For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread." (Nadella has been criticized by investors for too much AI infrastructure spending.)

So to summarize the view from the Davos bubble: We're not in an AI bubble, we're in a massive infrastructure investment that will benefit workers. Well, maybe we're in a rational bubble. But we will be in an irrational bubble if everyone doesn't get on board with the AI economy real soon, presumably by sending poor Sam Altman some ad dollars. Got that?

Elon Musk and Ryanair have been experiencing turbulence of late, but what exactly has occurred?

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been swapping barbs with Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary, with petty insults thrown around by two grown-ass men on public platforms. And it's all about internet on short-haul flights. Here's what's been happening.

Back on Jan. 14, Ryanair ruled out the possibility of installing Musk's Starlink internet tech on its planes, like competitors British Airways and Lufthansa. O'Leary told Reuters, "You need to put antenna on fuselage, it comes with a two percent fuel penalty because of the weight and drag. We don't think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average one-hour flight."

The following day, Musk sprang into action on his social platform X, claiming O'Leary was "misinformed" and writing, "I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately, especially for a one hour flight, where the incremental drag is basically zero during the ascent phase due to high angle of attack," and pairing it all with an AI Grok explainer.

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Since then, it's been on — and in increasingly lower levels of mature.

When X suffered a major outage on Jan. 16, Ryanair took a jab at Musk on the platform, asking, "perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?" Musk fired back, tweeting, "Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?"

Then, in a radio interview on Ireland's Newstalk, O'Leary was asked about Ryanair's stance on Starlink. The airline CEO rejected the idea again, not only describing the impact of adding antennas to aircraft — "about a 2 percent fuel drag" and a boosted fuel bill of "$200, $250 million a year...in other words, about an extra dollar for every passenger we fly" — but then targeting Musk directly.

"I frankly wouldn’t pay any attention to anything that Elon Musk puts on that cesspit of his called X," he said. "He was the guy who advocated to getting Donald Trump elected. I would pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk. He’s an idiot. Very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot."

Of course, Musk hit back on X, recycling the insult and calling for O'Leary to be fired — a message he's repeated on X since.

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Since then, there's been a few side-eye barbs on social media — on Jan. 19, Ryanair's official X post retweeted a post responding to a question posted: "what is a propaganda you're not falling for?" The airline's response: ""Wi-Fi on planes."

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Now, Musk appears to be moving into his favoured tactic of controlling the narrative by buying it. Musk responded to the above post asking, "How much would it cost to buy you?" before later calling for O'Leary's firing while using the r-word slur. Then, on Jan. 19, Musk posted a poll to X, asking whether he should "Buy Ryan Air and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler."

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On Tuesday, Ryanair moved things into even more immature territory than Musk (hard to do), with a post on X announcing that O’Leary has called a press conference on Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Dublin, suggesting the airline is "launching a Great Idiots seat sale especially for Elon and any other idiots on 'X'." And yes, O'Leary did hold the conference, with Ryanair actually launching that sale.

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O'Leary thanked Musk "for the wonderful boost in publicity, which has seen our bookings rise significantly," and repeated Musk's r-word slur about himself (not great) during his address.

"The Starlink people believe that 90 percent of our passengers would happily pay for Wi Fi access," he said. "Our experience, sadly, tells us we think less than 10 percent of our passengers would pay for this access, and therefore we can't afford to shoulder costs of between 150 or 250 million a year. If Starlink wants to fit our aircraft and pay for the fuel drive, we'd happily put them on board. But the only way we see Starlink working on board our aircraft on short haul flights is if you give it away for free."

Credit: Paulo Nunes dos Santos / Bloomberg via Getty Images

As the BBC points out, Musk would have a hard time buying Ryanair, as airlines based in the EU must be majority owned by people from the EU, Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, or Switzerland.

At this point, can Ryanair get back to draining our wallets with oversized baggage fees and Musk actually address the issue of Grok continuing to created sexualized images despite being banned from doing so?

Threads is winning the mobile war against X.

New data from Similarweb (via TechCrunch) indicates that Meta's short-form social network is winning over X when it comes to daily active users on iOS and Android.

In January, Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on mobile, compared to X's 125 million daily active users on the two major mobile platforms.

It's not some sort of short-term fluke, either. The daily active users count has steadily increased over the last year for Threads, while slowly declining for X over the same time period. The two social networks were neck and neck last fall, but now Threads has clearly taken over.

Threads didn't achieve this overnight; the long-term trend is clear. Credit: Similarweb

Threads has been helped out by its parent Meta pushing users from Facebook and Instagram towards Threads. I've personally ended up on Threads numerous times without any intention to do so; I merely clicked a link on one of Meta's other social platforms.

The daily active user count trend is still meaningful, especially when compared to X, which is steadily losing users. The list of reasons why people would want to leave X is long and includes such issues as Grok-generated deepfakes, X owner Elon Musk's politics, and privacy issues.

On the web, however, it's a very different picture. Threads is growing there as well, but it only had 8.5 million daily web visits in January, compared to X's 145.4 million daily web visits.

Spotify Premium is about to become more expensive.

The company announced the change in a blog post Thursday, saying it's updating the price of Spotify Premium in the U.S., Estonia, and Latvia. And when Spotify updates prices, it's typically upwards.

The change, which is going live in February, will soon be announced to Premium subscribers via email.

In short, you'll have to pay one dollar more for Premium in the U.S. Starting in February, the price for Individual Premium plans will go up from $11.99 per month to $12.99 per month, while Student plans are going up from $5.99 to $6.99.

Things won't be anything better for Duo subscribers, as the price of that plan is going up $2, from $16.99 to $18.99, while Family plan is going up from $19.99 to $21.99.

The company didn't list too many reasons for the change, claiming merely it's updating its pricing to "keep delivering a great experience."

Spotify prices have gone up steadily over the past couple of years. Most recently, the company lifted prices in June 2024 in the U.S., which was the second such hike in a year.