As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining…

Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes. Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says…

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company. Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same…

Five men have pleaded guilty to running laptop farms and providing other assistance to North Koreans to obtain remote IT work at US companies in violation of US law, federal prosecutors said. The pleas come amid a rash of similar schemes orchestrated by hacking and threat groups backed by the North Korean government. The campaigns, which ramped up nearly five years ago, aim to steal millions of dollars in job…

Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’s counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version. Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart…

Oracle has been hit harder than Big Tech rivals in the recent sell-off of tech stocks and bonds, as its vast borrowing to fund a pivot to artificial intelligence unnerved Wall Street. The US software group founded by Larry Ellison has made a dramatic entrance to the AI race, committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next few years on chips and data centers—largely as part of…

Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes to the point where readers believe they can identify AI writing by its overuse alone—although people can overuse it, too. On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom…

Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign aimed at dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much more measured in describing the significance of the discovery. Anthropic published the reports on Thursday here and here. In September, the reports said, Anthropic discovered a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign,” carried out by a…

Google recently decided that the freedom afforded by Android was a bit too much and announced developer verification, a system that will require developers outside the Google Play platform to register with Google. Users and developers didn’t accept Google’s rationale and have been complaining loudly. As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that “experienced users” should have an escape hatch. According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns…

On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking, two updated versions of its flagship AI models now available in ChatGPT. The company is wrapping the models in the language of anthropomorphism, claiming that they’re warmer, more conversational, and better at following instructions. The release follows complaints earlier this year that its previous models were excessively cheerful and sycophantic, along with an opposing controversy among users over how OpenAI modified…