The Verge

Character.AI files for bankruptcy

Character.AI, one of the first breakout startups of the generative AI boom, has filed for bankruptcy and is selling some of its assets to Disney. The company, which builds various online bots for user...

4 days ago

The Social Reckoning is flopping at the box office

As important as some of the messages in The Social Reckoning are, the movie has been drastically underperforming at the box office. Per Variety, Aaron's Sorkin's follow up to The Social Network only g...

4 days ago

Meta has some Wonder Full new AI models 

Meta is making up for lost time in the AI race. After launching Muse Spark, the first model from its revamped Superintelligence Labs division, and buzzy AI agent Muse, it's now launching two new model...

5 days ago

Elon Musk has donated over $276 million to Republican midterm efforts

Elon Musk has handed out at least $276 million to Republican groups since July, The New York Times reports, making him both the party's top known donor and the biggest established midterm donor. $158 ...

5 days ago

The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over the last week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused online bot traffic to plummet - but in reality it's probably not the kind of bot activ...

5 days ago

Mechanism’s first Switch 2 case is as awesome as I hoped it would be

Most companies have slowed down releasing new Switch 2 cases, but one of my favorite accessory makers recently debuted its first, after a few delays. The $49 Basecase from Mechanism is a snap-on shell...

5 days ago

No Man’s Sky is coming to the iPhone and iPad

The No Man's Sky universe is about to get a little bit smaller - but in a good way. Hello Games announced that its long-running sci-fi exploration game will be coming to iOS, with versions for both th...

5 days ago

Android is the best and worst thing about Googlebooks

My first week with the new Android-powered laptops has been about as rocky as anyone's, but I've slowly learned to like them, even if love still feels a ways off. Every moment that's impressed me has ...

5 days ago

The OnePlus 16 is the company’s most interesting phone in years

Today the OnePlus 16 launched in China, the company's first flagship phone since quitting both the US and European markets this summer. As luck would have it, it also looks like the company's best pho...

5 days ago

Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs

Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost an...

5 days ago

How Apple can win the smart home

This week, Apple is hosting its first-ever dedicated smart home event. While the company hasn't shared details about what it will reveal at the "Welcome Home experience" in New York City on Tuesday, O...

5 days ago

Inside the mini factory where GM builds its EV future

If you're driving through GM's sprawling campus in Warren, Michigan, you'd likely ignore the pair of adjacent, anonymous white buildings tucked away in the upper reaches of the 710-acre space. Inside ...

5 days ago

A college in Illinois tried to cancel its Flock contact and it refused

In April of 2025, Elgin Community College had six Flock safety cameras installed to "enhance the safety and security of students." But by September of that year, the school's administration grew conce...

5 days ago

Silicon Valley is falling in line with Trump’s attempt to rename AI

When President Donald Trump announced his plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," you'd be forgiven for being skeptical that it would catch on. While most of the broader popu...

6 days ago

The new Apple TV could have a built-in mic and a remote with a speaker

The latest rumors are that the new Apple TV will have a built-in microphone, while the upgraded remote will get a speaker. The mic would let users control the set-top box using Siri without having to ...

6 days ago

NASA dumped over 800GB of Artemis II data online

If you thought you'd seen all there is to see from the Artemis II mission, you're wrong. This week NASA posted over 800GB worth of science data, images, and videos on the Artemis II: Sights & Soun...

6 days ago

George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch is a slow-burn feminist occult drama

George A. Romero is obviously best known as the father of the modern zombie movie. But between inventing the genre with Night of the Living Dead and his outbreak horror, The Crazies, Romero made two m...

6 days ago

What to expect from Apple’s ‘Welcome Home’ event

We are quickly coming up on Apple's "Welcome Home" launch event, where we expect a host of smart home-related announcements. We are expecting refreshes to Apple TV and HomePod Mini, as well as a brand...

6 days ago

Vurt wants you to look at vertical videos as a genre of their own

From Disney Plus to HBO Max, almost every major established streaming service is experimenting with ways to get into vertical content. It's clear that these companies see video-focused social media pl...

6 days ago

Why the LeapPad couldn’t survive the iPad

For multiple years, the hottest toy in the United States was a book. But not just any book: a smart book that could play sounds and respond to taps and help kids learn to read. However, buying it came...

6 days ago

Horror is big business

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how pervasive horror has become, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback, arrives in our subscr...

6 days ago

Learning to use local AI is exciting, overwhelming, and frustrating

I'm embarking on a journey I've so far been hesitant to go on: actually using AI on the regular. Giving my most personal data to cloud services has been a major hold up for me, but it's increasingly p...

6 days ago

Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are ‘compromised’

In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft's CEO laid out his views on the dangers posed by highly advanced AI models and how to confront those risks. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is.....

6 days ago

DistroKid has been quietly taking down songs in response to UMG lawsuit

Artists are taking to social media to complain that DistroKid has unceremoniously removed their work without notice. Now DistroKid has confirmed to The Verge that the takedowns are a direct response t...

1 week ago

Ledger wallet tampering suspected after reports of crypto thefts

Reports have been mounting that users of the Ledger crypto wallet have seen their accounts drained, and suspicion is that it's related to reseller CryptoBillis and a bit of spy hardware. Ledger has as...

1 week ago

K-pop star Sunmi loves Notion and ear cleaning videos

Sunmi is an undeniable force in K-pop. She first made her debut as a member of the Wonder Girls back in 2007, one of the first K-pop acts to really break through in the West. The English version of......

1 week ago

Anthropic is cutting off its internal evaluations from the internet

After a recent spate of high-profile incidents in which AI agents escaped containment, Anthropic is cutting off internet access for all internal evaluations. In a report Friday, the company detailed "...

1 week ago

Will Warner Bros. kill Skydance — or will David Ellison kill Warner Bros?

Today, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the Channels podcast, about the gigantic Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and the future of the company now simply...

1 week ago

AI agent makers are promising privacy — will they deliver?

At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." OpenAI would spend...

1 week ago

LG’s RGB LED TV is good for certain situations, but an OLED is better

When it comes to TVs, the LG name has long been synonymous with OLEDs, continually leading Samsung and Sony as the top OLED manufacturer. But 2026 is all about RGB LED TVs. Almost every major company ...

1 week ago

The techlash has gone Hollywood

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 147, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I missed you all, and also you can read all the old editions at the I...

1 week ago

The director of Fjord takes the ‘risky position’ of moderator

Cristian Mungiu's sixth feature, Fjord, concerns a family on trial. They seem like good people, God-fearing. They've just moved from Romania to a small hamlet nestled in the fjords of rural Norway. Th...

1 week ago

My brief romance with an AI bird feeder

It started off promising enough. Dozens of tiny, colorful birds were drawn to my garden just a few weeks after I mounted a $350 $269 Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2 Pro. "Looks like Great Tit!" read the first A...

1 week ago

Decade-old RAM is making a comeback

CPU makers have noticed that the seemingly unending RAM price hikes are making it tough for a lot of us to upgrade our PCs. Their solution? A return to last-gen DDR4 RAM. Intel and AMD are making new ...

1 week ago

Anthropic’s AI gave Philadelphia police a fake tip about an unsolved homicide

An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the P...

1 week ago

Ohio blogger found guilty of harassment for sending Shrek nude to senator

A jury found an Ohio political blogger guilty of telecommunications harassment after he sent an explicit image of Shrek to a Republican state senator. On Friday, a judge ordered DJ Byrnes, owner of po...

1 week ago

‘Pure insanity’: Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop

"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity." Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tr...

1 week ago

Brendan Carr says he’ll let Pete Hegseth decide whether TV networks can air the public execution

FCC chairman Brendan Carr said he will defer to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on whether TV networks can air the planned execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad. The P...

1 week ago

Nikon microscopic video competition winner disqualified for using generative AI

Nikon says the video that originally won first place in its Small World in Motion contest "did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI." BBC reports that the original first place...

1 week ago

Google teases Fitbit Edge launch next week

It looks like Google is getting ready to take the wraps off its rumored Fitbit Edge next Monday. In a post on X, Google posted a picture of what appears to be the side of the fitness tracker, with......

1 week ago

Amazon’s new Kindles appear to have a light leak problem

Some users are reporting that the new Kindles have a light leak issue that is especially apparent when using dark mode. The latest base-model Kindles have a flush bezel that gives them a sleek appeara...

1 week ago

Microsoft tries to spark new life into Windows

When Microsoft released Windows 11 five years ago, it felt like an operating system that was still being renovated, a work in progress. You'd think by now that those renovations would be complete, wit...

1 week ago

Frances Haugen hopes The Social Reckoning will inspire more whistleblowers

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was mostly unfazed watching Oscar-winning actress Mikey Madison play a character named after her in The Social Reckoning, except for one thing: the wrist warmers....

1 week ago

Apple and LG leak shows new ‘tap to control’ HomeKit features

A post on X from "pdfu," who has previously posted leaks and renders of suspected Apple features and LG smart home gear, shows new details of rumored Apple Home accessories from LG. According to the n...

1 week ago

YouTube, Meta, and Twitch won’t say if they’ll allow the US government to live stream an execution

YouTube, Twitch, Meta, and X aren't saying whether they'll allow the US government to livestream an execution on their platforms. The four companies didn't respond to The Verge's requests for comment ...

1 week ago

The AI is in the computer

It's gadget season, and a lot of companies are launching a lot of new products. But whether it's Microsoft dropping a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet, or Apple diving headlong ...

1 week ago

Trump’s attempt to rename AI is looking awfully artificial

President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary"; he changed "fake news" ...

1 week ago

Instinct was the buzziest AI agent around — can it survive Muse?

Before there were cute little guys, there was Instinct. In August, the startup got its AI agent to market with an unusual playbook: invite-only, no marketing, and barely so much as a website. And yet,...

1 week ago

A week with Googlebooks: four notes from our testing so far

Google's new operating system is off to a rocky start. The five newly launched Googlebook laptops have hardware that ranges from great to excellent, but the software in its current state is the weak p...

1 week ago

Meta is banning TikTok ads across its platforms

Meta has banned ads from TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance across the US and several other countries as the rivalry between the major social media operators heats up, as reported earlier by Bl...

1 week ago