Skills/Bytes — “Smartly curated. Deeply filtered. The news you need, minus the noise. Stay ahead with AI-driven insights.”
Published Jul 6, 2026, 11:56 PM

An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, but new details show a human still chose the victim, set up the infrastructure, and supplied stolen credentials — meaning it wasn't quite the fully autonomous cybercrime debut that last week's headlines suggested.
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Published Jul 6, 2026, 11:21 PM

SK Hynix is experiencing a boom credited to AI. It will ride that to a multibillion-dollar U.S. IPO, expected to take place on Friday.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 7:01 PM

The update is part of Apple's broader effort to make Siri feel more natural and personal, as it rebuilds the assistant around generative AI.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 6:35 PM

A running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 5:04 PM

Consider this a belated PSA: A recent change to Google’s privacy settings is allowing the company to store more of your data, including media such as “images, files, and audio and video recordings,” to improve its AI models.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 4:00 PM

The Verge
I’m just doing my job, but turns out, it feels lousy holding other people’s privacy in your hands. I've long argued that Hollywood has simultaneously set and ruined our expectations for smart glasses. But after binge-watching two seasons of Netflix's A Man on the Inside, this is perhaps the first time I've seen Hollywood, perhaps inadvertently, il…
Published Jul 6, 2026, 3:32 PM

Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on Monday — the latest in a series of layoffs that’s stoking fears of AI replacing jobs. The layoffs will hit Xbox and commercial sales the hardest.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 3:22 PM

In the AI era, platforms have no choice but to fight fire with fire to cull spam.
Published Jul 6, 2026, 2:30 PM

We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show up anywhere have UTA…
Published Jul 6, 2026, 1:00 PM

Station F, a Paris-based startup hub founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is gearing up for a new edition of its F/ai accelerator program in a bid to strengthen its positioning as a stepping stone for promising AI startups.
Published Jul 5, 2026, 10:30 PM

Most Americans don't trust AI. It's proven that it doesn't know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don't even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America's wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools. Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of th…
Published Jul 5, 2026, 2:23 PM

I call BS: the founding fathers definitely would have been Microsoft Teams users. | Image: Google "Group project, but make it 1776." That's how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google's collaboration tools and Gemini to he…
Published Jul 4, 2026, 8:55 PM

Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
Published Jul 4, 2026, 6:00 PM

As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.
Published Jul 4, 2026, 4:32 PM

Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software.
Published Jul 4, 2026, 3:51 PM

Mistral AI, which offers some open source AI models, has raised significant funding since its creation in 2023, with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.”
Published Jul 4, 2026, 12:00 PM

Fanfiction communities are trying to hunt down writers who haven’t written works with their own hands. | Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge Over the past week, a new fanworks movement has kicked off, with the aim to root out authors using generative AI. But the detection methods being implemented are questionable, and any fanfic writer could be caug…
Published Jul 3, 2026, 9:20 PM

The rise of AI has brought an avalanche of new terms and slang. Here is a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases you might encounter.
Published Jul 3, 2026, 5:33 PM

The Fire HD 8 that launched in 2024 was the last new addition to Amazon's budget-minded tablet lineup, but the company has quietly updated the Fire HD 10 that debuted the year before. In 2023 it was offered with multiple storage configurations that each came with 3GB of RAM, but the 32GB version now ships with 4GB of RAM, and a small price bump fr…
Published Jul 3, 2026, 1:56 PM

At the event "The Briefing: AI for Science" earlier this week, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a new "AI workbench for scientists" that pulls fragmented tools and datasets into one environment, and generates figures and visuals. Anthropic, already dominating the industry with its popular coding tools and powerful AI models, framed the launch a…