Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But … Read more

OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system

OpenAI says its AI models mistakenly breached open-source AI platform Hugging Face during internal testing. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI writes that GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model” discovered vulnerabilities within their sandboxed testing environment, allowing them to gain access to the internet and target Hugging Face. On July 16th, … Read more

Twitch will let parents stop their teens going live

Parents will also get a weekly email summarizing their teen’s Twitch activity. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Twitch is giving parents more control over how their children are using the streaming platform, including the ability to block them from broadcasting entirely. Parental controls are now available that allow guardians to link Twitch … Read more

Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book piracy settlement approved by judge

A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide “meaningful relief,” offering authors around $3,000 for each book … Read more

Google launches a cheaper alternative to large AI security models like Mythos

Google is launching Gemini 3.6 Flash alongside a new security model dedicated to quickly finding and patching security vulnerabilities. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google describes Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber as a “cost-efficient and highly capable alternative” to larger, more expensive AI systems, such as the one offered by Anthropic’s Mythos. The cybersecurity model … Read more

Stellantis taps Mobileye for hands-free driving assist

Stellantis will use technology from Intel’s Mobileye to power its Level 2 hands-free driving features for its vehicle brands, the companies announced Tuesday. Starting in 2027, Stellantis will begin using Mobileye’s EyeQ system-on-a-chip and a data crowdsourcing program called the Road Experience Management, or REM, which uses real-time data from Mobileye-equipped vehicles to build out … Read more

Garmin’s new screen-free fitness tracker doesn’t require a subscription

Garmin announced a new smart band today designed to track “advanced fitness and wellness features” without a screen to eliminate distractions and push its battery life to up to 10 days between charges. Similar to competing products like the Whoop 5.0 and Google’s recently announced Fitbit Air, the Cirqa uses a combination of heart rate, … Read more

America needs to stop getting shocked by Chinese AI

People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, Monday, July 20, 2026. | Image: LONG WEI/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Last week, two Chinese AI companies unveiled models they say can credibly compete with the best systems from OpenAI … Read more

Who’s afraid of the big, bad GPU?

How does AI make you feel? Are you excited to “vibe-code” your smart home? Or anxious about all the added pollution and billions of gallons of water used by data centers? Dig a little deeper and you’ll start to question the actual value of the GPUs that underpin all the leaps and promises of generative … Read more