Microsoft has unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, its first in-house advanced reasoning AI model. Jay Peters reports for The Verge that the announcement came at Microsoft’s Build 2026 developer conference, alongside several other new models targeting image generation, transcription, voice, and coding. Microsoft describes MAI-Thinking-1 as its new “flagship” model and a “medium-sized model” that “matches leading models” …
OpenAI’s AI agent Codex has grown far beyond its origins as a tool for software developers. According to two new publications from OpenAI, the system now counts more than 5 million weekly active users and is increasingly used by professionals across industries to handle the routine, time-consuming work of modern office life. OpenAI writes and …
Anthropic has raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, pushing its post-money valuation to $965 billion. The San Francisco company has now surpassed OpenAI as the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. OpenAI’s last valuation stood at $730 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. A broad …
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8, a new version of its most advanced publicly available AI model. The update arrives just 41 days after its predecessor, Opus 4.7, and brings measurable improvements in coding performance, agentic tasks, and — notably — honesty. The model is available immediately at the same price as before. Standard pricing …
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has defended his company’s AI-driven transformation of Search while acknowledging growing publisher concerns about vanishing web traffic. Nilay Patel posts for The Verge’s Decoder podcast an in-depth conversation with Pichai after Google’s annual I/O developer conference, covering everything from internal restructuring to the timeline for artificial general intelligence (AGI). …
A new generation of AI tools is reshaping how software is built and, according to their most devoted users, how work itself is done. Steven Levy reports for WIRED on the rapid rise of AI agents, tracing how two tools — Anthropic’s Claude Code and the open-source project OpenClaw — have ignited what many in …
AI data centers consume roughly 0.04 percent of all freshwater used in the United States each year. That figure, including both water used inside data centers and water used by power plants to generate their electricity, comes from Andy Masley, writing for his own publication. He argues that fears about AI draining water supplies are …
Artificial intelligence is changing what jobs exist, what they require, and what they pay. New roles are emerging at AI companies and across industries, while researchers and economists debate how fast and how deeply automation will affect employment overall. Business Insider has identified several new or resurgent job categories driven by AI adoption. At the …
Google has announced a series of updates to its AI-powered creative platforms, Google Flow and Google Flow Music. The changes were revealed at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, and include a new AI model, an agentic assistant, custom tool-building and mobile applications. Google Flow is an AI creative studio that lets users generate, …
Stability AI has released Stable Audio 3.0, a new family of generative audio models trained on fully licensed music data. The release includes four models designed for different devices and use cases, three of which are available as open-weight models that anyone can download and modify. The four models are: The small and medium models …