The Verge

Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a preview of its hotly anticipated next-generation AI model V4 on Friday, saying that the open-source model can compete with leading closed-source systems from US rivals including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. DeepSeek says V4 marks a major improvement over prior models, especially in coding, a capability that has become central [...]

We love to muse over how "real" photography is defined here at The Verge now that generative AI is so prolific, and the World Press Photo competition might have the answer. The prestigious award celebrates the best of photojournalism, where capturing reality is paramount. The winning entry for 2026 - "Separated by ICE," captured by [...]

The alien world of Saros feels like it has been touched by King Midas. The sky is golden after another impossibly frequent solar eclipse; rocks, specifically those of the precious resource Lucenite, radiate a shimmering amber. Even the body of our gruff hero Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli) is liable to turn deep, opulent [...]

We knew someone made over $400,000 on suspicious Polymarket bets around the US operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, but now we have a name: Gannon Ken Van Dyke. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced Thursday that Van Dyke is in custody, on several charges, including using confidential government [...]

Microsoft started teasing a mysterious Discord and Xbox Game Pass partnership yesterday, and a new leak appears to have detailed exactly what's coming. Discord Previews has uncovered a new Xbox Game Pass "Starter Edition" that is bundled with Discord Nitro. The Starter Edition reportedly includes "access to over 50 games from the Game Pass library," [...]

Claude users can access more apps with Anthropic's AI now thanks to new connectors for everything from hiking to grocery shopping. Anthropic already supported connecting numerous work-related apps to Claude, like Microsoft apps, but this expansion focuses on personal apps like Audible, Spotify, Uber, AllTrails, TripAdvisor, Instacart, TurboTax, and others. Some of these apps, such [...]

Under the guidance of consummate bully / chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is taking steps toward cracking down on children's entertainment that in any way explores the complexities of gender identity. On Wednesday, the FCC's Media Bureau announced that it is soliciting comments from the public about whether the TV ratings system has made sound [...]

Portable audio and home theater upgrades can be very pricey, which is why we make a habit out of telling readers when there are good deals happening. With that in mind, here's a friendly reminder that a heap of refurbished Sonos gear is steeply discounted, and will be until the company's sale ends April 24th. [...]

Meta is planning to layoff around 10 percent of employees in May, according to a memo from the company's chief people officer, Janelle Gale, published by Bloomberg. That means approximately 8,000 people will see their jobs cut. Meta will also be closing around 6,000 open roles, according to Gale. The cuts follow Meta's significant investments [...]

Microsoft's new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has laid out a new strategy for what she describes as a "return of Xbox." In a joint memo with Xbox Chief Content Officer Matt Booty, Sharma and Booty lay out their vision for the future of Xbox that will be judged on daily active players and the priorities [...]

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma held an all-hands meeting this morning and laid out her strategy for a "return of Xbox" with employees. While rebranding Microsoft Gaming back to Xbox was part of the agenda, Sharma also revealed that Xbox is looking into "reevaluating" Xbox exclusive games and windowed releases of titles. It's a hot topic [...]

A bill introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from converting warehouses and similar buildings into immigrant detention centers, an attempt to slow President Donald Trump's mass deportations campaign. The Ban Warehouse Detention Act would also forbid Immigration and Customs Enforcement from developing other "non-traditional" detention facilities. "ICE and [...]

The bright yellow livery of Spirit Airlines may soon disappear from the skies. The country's seventh-largest airline has been in financial trouble for years: It hasn't turned a profit since 2019 and filed for bankruptcy twice in the last two years. Despite all that, its leaders predicted that the airline could exit bankruptcy and return [...]

Anthropic's tightly controlled rollout of Claude Mythos has taken an awkward turn. After spending weeks insisting the AI model is so capable at cybersecurity that it is too dangerous to release publicly, it appears the model fell into the wrong hands anyway. According to Bloomberg, a "small group of unauthorized users" has had access to [...]

OpenAI just announced its new GPT-5.5 model, which the company calls its "smartest and most intuitive to use model yet, and the next step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer." OpenAI just released GPT-5.4 last month, but says that the new GPT-5.5 "excels" at tasks like writing and debugging code, [...]

Ikea shared a sneak preview of three pieces from a new experimental collection, set to be fully revealed at an annual company event on May 13th. One of the pieces is an inflatable chair that looks like a far cry from the cheap and lumpy inflatable furniture popularized in the '90s. This isn't the first [...]

The 2026 edition of Motorola's stylus phone is plenty appealing. My review unit is a charming lilac color, has a pleasantly textured back panel, and includes a MicroSD slot and what might be the last surviving headphone jack on a mainstream phone sold in North America. The namesake stylus is no longer just a fancy [...]

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy week. Sharma held an internal town hall with Xbox employees today, just days after announcing an Xbox Game Pass price cut, commenting on the status of the Xbox mobile store, and teasing a mysterious Xbox and Discord partnership. One of the items on the agenda for the [...]

If you've ever wished your laptop keyboard was better tailored to your workflow, the Keychron V1 is a solid upgrade. It doesn't cost as much as most other mechanical keyboards, but it still offers a lot of the same flexibility. And now through April 25th, you can buy the wired board for $44.99 ($30 off) [...]

It feels like not a week has gone by this year without a senior Microsoft executive leaving the company. Some departures have triggered sweeping shakeups of Microsoft's biggest businesses, while others have seen fresh faces replace veteran employees. Executive departures at Microsoft are nothing new, but the pace feels notable this early in the year. [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel, and 5 GB hard drive, Apple's pioneering music player now looks like the [...]

Microsoft is changing up its annual rewards and performance programs today, and offering long-serving employees in the US the ability to voluntarily retire. It's the first time in Microsoft's more than 50-year history that the company has offered such a voluntary retirement program. "Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, [...]

Following teasers and leaks, DJI has officially announced its new entry-level Lito 1 and Lito X1 drones that both weigh less than 249 grams so they're not subjected to registration requirements in many countries. Neither drone is currently available in the US, but European pricing starts at 339 (around $397) for the Lito 1, and [...]

It hasn't been that long since Stranger Things ended, but even still fans are clearly clamoring for more. The finale was overshadowed by a conspiracy about a secret episode, and an otherwise standard behind-the-scenes documentary became a hotbed for theorizing. Of course, given the scale of Stranger Things, Netflix was never going to let the [...]

Today on Decoder, I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on this show. I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops [...]

Earlier this month, millions of OpenClaw users woke up to a sweeping mandate: The viral AI agent tool, which this year took the worldwide tech industry by storm, had been severely restricted by Anthropic. Anthropic, like other leading AI labs, was under immense pressure to lessen the strain on its systems and start turning a [...]

Apple is about to become a very different company. This September, Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and will be replaced by John Ternus, the current head of hardware. But the shift is bigger than just a CEO transition - it's the most significant move yet into a world where Apple's executive team isn't [...]

Govee announced its first solar-powered lights today. They include a 6W panel with an integrated 4,800mAh battery that can be recharged with a single full day of sunlight (though if the weather's looking a little overcast, you can still charge it over USB-C). The Govee Outdoor Solar String Lights are available now through the company's [...]

Microsoft is rolling out a new Agent Mode inside Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint this week. Previously described by Microsoft as "vibe working," the Agent Mode is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience in Office that Microsoft has been trying to sell to businesses. "When we first shipped Copilot, foundation models [...]

Honor has announced the 600 and 600 Pro, which it calls "accessible flagships," and they look... familiar. Especially in that orange. The Pro makes the iPhone comparison especially obvious thanks to its triple rear camera - it even has the same flash layout - while the 600 is just a hair subtler because it drops [...]

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump claimed to have secured the release of eight Iranian women condemned to execution for protesting the regime. Only the night before, he had posted on Truth Social about the imminent executions of these women, quoting a screenshot that included a collage of eight glamorously backlit, soft-focus portraits. The photos of [...]

Tesla vehicles with the company's Hardware 3 (HW3) computer actually won't receive unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD), CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday's Q1 2026 earnings call. Approximately 4 million Tesla vehicles operate on the HW3 platform, meaning that a significant chunk of Tesla owners - including customers that paid for the feature when they bought [...]

X is putting its AI chatbot, Grok, in charge of your timeline. In an announcement on Wednesday, X product head Nikita Bier says Premium subscribers on iOS can get early access to a feature that allows users to pin specific topics to their home tab, which Grok will then use to curate the posts you [...]

Tesla released its 2026 first-quarter financial earnings today, providing another look at the progress of Elon Musk's $1 trillion bet to transform his company into a leader of AI and robotics. Tesla said it earned $477 million in net income on $22.4 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in April 2026. That's a [...]

"I know a bubble when I see one." That's what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who led the push to create a new consumer financial regulator in the wake of the 2008 recession, told a crowd at a Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator event in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Warren warned of what she called "striking" parallels to [...]

OpenAI is giving users of its Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans access to cloud-based "workspace" agents available in ChatGPT that can perform business tasks. In its blog post, OpenAI gives examples of agents like one that finds product feedback on the web and sends a report in Slack and a sales agent that can [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge readers about tech politics, political tech, and how they're muddying the waters of Washington, DC. My birthday is this week, and if you're not a Verge subscriber but would like to wish me a happy birthday, you should subscribe here, because that would be the best [...]

A former employee of Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson has filed a lawsuit alleging that she faced "intentional infliction of emotional distress" from harassment at the YouTuber's production company, was asked to work during maternity leave, and was wrongfully fired just a few weeks after returning from leave. According to the lawsuit, plaintiff Lorrayne Mavromatis and other [...]

Coffee is what gets many of us through the workday, and a proper smart mug can keep it hot for hours so you can maintain your focus without constantly getting up to reheat your cup. Thankfully, if you don't own one, the 14-ounce Ember Mug 2 is now available for $97.49 ($52 off) from Amazon, [...]

Humans have been building ping-pong playing robots for decades, such as Omron's FORPHEUS that challenged amateur competitors at CES 2017. What sets Ace apart from the rest is that the robot, which was developed by Sony's AI division, is the first that can hold its own against top-ranked human players and occasionally even beat them [...]

Several US federal agencies are taking up Anthropic's new cybersecurity model to find vulnerabilities, but one is reportedly not getting in on the action: the nation's central cybersecurity coordinator. On Tuesday, Axios reported that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) didn't have access to Mythos Preview, which Anthropic has touted as a powerful tool [...]

Microsoft has started teasing a new Discord and Xbox Game Pass partnership, just a day after lowering prices of its Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscriptions. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says the company is partnering with Discord again "as we continue to make Game Pass more flexible for our players." It's not [...]

Google's AI meeting notetaker is no longer limited to Google Meets - Gemini can also generate summaries and transcripts of in-person meetings now, as well as meetings on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, as first reported by 9to5Google. Support for in-person meetings was previously limited to alpha users and only available on Android. Google's support page [...]

Microsoft first revealed it was building an Xbox mobile gaming store to take on Apple and Google all the way back in 2022. Former Xbox president Sarah Bond even went on stage at a Bloomberg event nearly two years ago and promised the store would launch in July, 2024. Now, it looks like Microsoft has [...]

It took Tim Cook years to launch Apple into major new hardware categories, such as the smartwatch. But John Ternus could start his tenure right away with an ambitious new project: smart home hardware. All signs point to a strong lineup of new smart home devices coming potentially this fall, putting Apple back in the [...]

When the price increases for PlayStation 5 consoles went into effect on April 2nd, we weren't sure when the next time a good discount would happen. Surely, not for at least a couple months, right? Well, now just a few weeks later, Sony's direct-to-consumer site is offering the slim PS5 console with no disc drive [...]

Meta employees' activity at work is now being used to train the company's AI agents. As reported by Reuters, Meta is installing a tool it calls Model Capability Initiative (MCI) on US-based employees' computers that runs in work-related apps and websites, recording mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screenshots. The data from this tool will [...]

I've recommended several OLED gaming monitors to readers over the years, and I've finally taken my own advice to buy one. Alienware's new 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED has all the features that I want and a low $350 price that was too tempting to ignore. The AW2726DM model has five things that make it stand out [...]

Yesterday Microsoft announced some surprising news: at a time when everything in gaming is getting more expensive, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was actually getting a price cut. Going forward, the subscription service will drop from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, less than a year after getting a major hike. But there's a caveat. Along with [...]

Ever since BMW first announced its "Neue Klasse" next-generation electric vehicle architecture and design language way back in 2021, the question on many fans' minds was when the new technology would reach the automaker's flagship 7 Series. Well, that moment has finally arrived. Today, at events in New York City and Beijing, BMW unveiled its [...]