The project ran under the internal name Cannes, and a Meta contractor called Covalen managed it. WIRED reported that hundreds of contractors created dummy under-18 accounts. They sent prompts and images to competitors’ chatbots, then logged the replies in spreadsheets. The effort was active as recently as April 21, 2026. The targets were OpenAI’s ChatGPT, […]
Amazon built Prime Day to keep shoppers inside its own marketplace. This year, AI shopping sent its best customers in from outside: a chatbot made the recommendation. US shoppers spent a record $26.4bn across retail sites during the four-day Prime Day event, according to Adobe Analytics. The more interesting number is not the total. It […]
Britain’s competition regulator has decided that the cheapest place to buy a digital subscription should not be the one place an app is forbidden from mentioning. On Tuesday the Competition and Markets Authority proposed allowing UK app developers to steer users toward payment options outside Apple and Google’s stores, a change aimed squarely at the […]
Your browser has been busy on your behalf. This week brought two reminders that Chrome can put things on your machine you never agreed to. One came from Google. One came from an impostor. Both used the same quiet machinery. Chrome runs on billions of devices, which makes it one of the most powerful pieces […]
Google is making Gemini’s personalized AI image generation free for all eligible users in the United States, removing a paywall that had restricted the feature to Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers since its launch in April. The expansion, announced on Sunday, lets any US user aged 13 or older generate images informed by their Google […]
Waymo robotaxis are no longer available on Uber’s app in Phoenix, ending a nearly three-year partnership in the city that served as the first test of whether the two former courtroom rivals could work together. Both companies confirmed the split to TechCrunch on Monday. Waymo said the vehicles have already been folded back into its […]
Google is adding SandboxAQ’s ‘large quantitative models’ to its cloud marketplace, pairing Gemini with AI trained on scientific equations and laboratory data. The large language models that power most of the AI industry are very good at words and surprisingly unreliable at numbers. Google’s latest move is an admission that, for science, a different kind […]
