The Verge

Uber beat out Waymo in launching a commercial robotaxi service in London, the city's first. The vehicles use autonomous driving tech developed by Wayve, a UK-based startup, and will initially feature safety drivers behind the wheel. The launch is a milestone for Uber, which has been plotting a UK launch with Wayve for several years. [...]

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, arriving just a few weeks after its predecessor. The company claims the new model "works harder" than Gemini 3.7 Flash by performing more reasoning steps on complex tasks and "calling tools iteratively." It has the same introductory pricing as 3.7 Flash, $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million [...]

Summer is winding down, but REI's Labor Day sale is here to help save you some bucks on gear that'll let you get the most out of your upcoming outdoor expeditions. There are many, many discounts, from men's and women's clothing and REI Co-op gear to equipment for camping and hiking and more. The sale [...]

1Password faced immediate backlash from customers this week over a $300,000 pledge in support of a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published overtly racist blog posts that include comments calling for deportation of ethnic minorities in Europe. The popular password manager is now a "distinguished corporate patron" of Omacom, the [...]

Amazon is trying to combat impersonation scams with a new feature that allows you to use its AI assistant to determine whether an email, text message, or phone call actually came from the company. With the update, you can ask Alexa for Shopping about a message you received, and it will use AI to compare [...]

I think automakers are finally getting the memo. Rather than try to reinvent the wheel with its new electric vehicle, Range Rover just made one that looks nearly identical to its lineup of gas-powered SUVs. They didn't try to pass off some sleek, spaceship-looking pod as a Range Rover. Sometimes familiar designs are the way [...]

The doors to Europe's largest consumer tech show haven't opened to the public yet, but there's already plenty of news coming out of IFA 2026 in Berlin, Germany. If you're already struggling to keep up with what has been announced, here are some of the best new gadgets and upgrades from the show - including [...]

OpenAI is on the cusp of releasing its most powerful AI model yet, Astra, following weeks of delays to shore up safety protocols after its agents attacked real targets during testing. As details about the model trickle out, researchers are warning it "may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date." Shortly after [...]

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from [...]

MrBeast will feature Gemini, Google Health, and the Fitbit Air in upcoming videos as part of a multi-year partnership with Google. The deal will kick off with a video featuring Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson turning to Gemini for wilderness survival advice: First up on September 5 is a new MrBeast video following Jimmy and his crew [...]

US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema declined the Justice Department's request to make Google sell off parts of its ad tech business, accepting milder remedies to restore competition to markets it illegally monopolized for years. Brinkema said she would adopt most of the behavioral changes proposed by the parties, with some modifications. But those won't [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. My mom was a dramatic woman prone to overreacting. When I was a snotty teen, I told her she needed [...]

Verge readers can get a discount on Belkin's SoundForm Mini 2 wireless headphones. The kid-focused on-ear headphones feature an 85-decibel volume limit and easy controls, and a mode that lets them beam audio (wired or wirelessly) to a second pair without extra hardware. Readers can use the code VERGE25OFF to save 25 percent on up [...]

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are facing 30 new lawsuits that accuse them of providing "substantial assistance and encouragement" to the suspect in Canada's Tumbler Ridge school shooting, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The new wave of lawsuits was filed in a California federal court on Wednesday by the students, teachers, and the principal [...]

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a new policy today that will ban younger schoolchildren from using AI in classrooms. The one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, will impact about 600,000 public school students in 2-K through eighth grade and is being introduced alongside additional limits on digital devices and a [...]

When Google ignominiously exited the European thermostat market last year, it pointed its customers to Tado. This week, the German-based smart home company is launching its Smart Thermostat X (2nd gen), and aiming to attract European Nest users who haven't already jumped ship. Google shutting down the servers for its 1st- and 2nd-gen thermostats drove [...]

The New York Times has prepared some exclusive goodies for its subscribers: a weekly drop of bonus puzzles based on the publication's popular games. Five to six new puzzles will be released every Wednesday, each featuring "a twist" on games like Wordle, Strands, Connections, and Crossword that are designed to keep puzzleheads playing with fresh [...]

Believe it or not, the Tesla Cybercab is coming. Nearly two years after Elon Musk first unveiled the gold-tinted, gull-wing-door sporting, steering-wheel-free, two-seaters as the future of Tesla's autonomy efforts, the company is finally putting them into operation as part of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Public rides are here, and as Musk fans [...]

Last week, I powered on a 26-year-old copy of Pokemon Pinball, one of the best Game Boy games ever made. My save file was no more. The Charmander I'd caught for my daughter, the high scores we'd set together... gone. Before flash memory, Nintendo cartridges used tiny watch batteries to save their games, and those [...]

In 2007, the US was on the cusp of an economic recession, and Buddy Rizer was tasked with finding Loudoun County, Virginia, a new way to make money. Rizer's earlier career as a radio DJ didn't exactly make him an obvious candidate to find a solution, but he was looking for what he called a [...]

Acer is announcing a new laptop poised to rival the MacBook Air's thinness and lightness - and in the process, it cops another laptop's name. The Acer Swift Blade 14 (not to be confused with the Razer Blade 14) is a productivity machine weighing just 1.76 pounds / 799g and measuring as little as 0.51 [...]

For the last few years, PC gamers on the go have had a choice: Buy a gaming laptop, or pick up one of the many Steam Deck-inspired handhelds that are a fraction of the size but a lot less versatile. Acer's latest concept device, Project DualPlay Mini, is an attempt to upend that dichotomy by [...]

Microsoft is getting ready to roll out its memory integrity security feature of Windows 11 to more devices next month. The kernel-level protection feature is designed to stop malicious code or drivers running on a Windows 11 machine, but Microsoft previously warned it can also impact PC gaming performance. "Windows quality updates will begin enabling [...]

Dell's new Dell 14S laptop sounds a lot like a MacBook Neo: it comes in four colors, is aimed at students, and it starts with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Announced at IFA 2026, the 14S is meant to sit below the recently launched XPS 13 and offer another affordable laptop option as [...]

iRobot has announced a new flagship robot vacuum, which it will showcase at IFA in Berlin this week, the company's first big tech trade show in years. The Roomba maker will be exhibiting under its new owner, Picea Robotics, the contract manufacturer that purchased the once-troubled American robotics company out of bankruptcy in January. The [...]

Google has reportedly been reaching out to a number of Hollywood's biggest studios, hoping to strike licensing agreements that would allow it to train its AI models on copyrighted material in exchange for massive piles of cash. In theory, these deals would be a win-win: a huge financial boon to the studios that would also [...]

Anthropic says its newest AI models, Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, address criticisms from customers about price, data retention, and overzealous safeguards. The company claims Claude Fable 5.1 offers stronger performance than Fable 5, but costs around 25 percent less typically and up to 45 percent less for complex agentic tasks, thanks to reduced pricing [...]

Apple Maps has officially changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The company joins Google in re-labeling the Great Lake following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in the midst of a trade dispute with Canada. The Canadian version of Apple Maps still shows "Lake Ontario" [...]

Best Buy is celebrating Labor Day all week long with big deals, including a deep discount on the Lenovo Yoga 7i 2-in-1, taking its original $1,1199.99 price down to $749.99. It's a capable configuration for the price, with a Core 7 Ultra 256V processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 512GB SSD. The IPS touchscreen [...]

After an unreleased OpenAI model wreaked enough havoc to make international headlines, OpenAI delayed the development of a different unreleased model suite, Astra, in order to shore up its safety work, the company wrote Tuesday in a blog post. In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into [...]

Sonos unveiled a bunch of new stuff today at its open house event. There's the $699 Beam Ultra soundbar and the $449 Ace Ultra headphones, plus several under-the-hood app updates (some coming sooner than others). While the show floor was a less than ideal venue to judge audio quality of either new product, a private [...]

As he steps down from his post as Apple CEO today, Tim Cook leaves behind a mostly positive environmental record. As far as billionaire tech moguls and the environment go, Cook will likely be remembered as one of the better ones - certainly far from the worst. But it will become harder for the company [...]

Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI - after it lost control of its own AI tools - or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to [...]

New Apple CEO John Ternus sent out his first staff memo, thanking his predecessor Tim Cook, and quickly turning to what the company will do next, reports Bloomberg. "We have a huge launch next week that's going to be phenomenal. Thanks for everything you've all done to make it possible," writes Ternus, referring to the [...]

Apple is pushing for "expedited discovery" in its legal battle against OpenAI over concerns the company is actively destroying evidence, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In a filing on Monday, Apple alleges OpenAI only just handed over a MacBook used by a former employee at the center of the lawsuit, which contained discussions about "destroying [...]

Google announced new features coming to Android devices as part of this month's feature drop update. Among the highlights are the introduction of Motion Assist - Android's version of Apple's Motion Cues feature, which tries to reduce motion sickness by overlaying dots on your screen that move in response to a vehicle's movements - as [...]

HarperCollins probably dropped a pretty penny to get Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson and James Pattterson to collaborate on their newly-released novel, The Most Dangerous Games. But Semafor reports that the publisher might have a hard time making that money back to the the book's very, very low sales. Read the full story at The Verge.

Smart homes have gotten really good at making things really complicated. Turning on a light can involve multiple steps, compared to just flipping a switch. Homey, the Dutch-based smart home platform owned by LG, thinks it has a solution. This week it launched the Homey Portal, a touchscreen smart home controller that looks very promising, [...]

If you missed the release promotions for the recent round of Samsung Galaxy phones, you're in luck. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra is $300 off at Best Buy, the best deal we've seen since the phone launched last month. The phone impressed us with its rear triple camera setup, excellent battery life, and [...]

GoPro suddenly looks like a very different company than it did just last week. First, YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach became the company's single largest shareholder, without disclosing that in a sponsored review that came out a week later. Now, almost the entire company has been bought by Starman Holding for $285 million in cash, which [...]

John Deere is testing a new "JD" AI assistant that it says can help farmers make more money, with answers about best practices and historical trends that are based on their own data. It uses their "field, machine and operational data" to answer questions on topics like equipment settings, fuel usage, or harvest timing. The [...]

Sony announced three new tower-style party speakers that will now be the largest options in its ULT Power Sound lineup. The new ULT Tower Max, ULT Tower 7, and ULT Tower 5 all feature expanded connectivity including USB-C, RCA, and XLR ports for connecting to audio gear using physical cables. The new models also come [...]

Google has a new suite of creative design tools for Workspace users called Google Pics, which aims to make editing and generating "professional-grade" AI images less cumbersome for businesses. Built around Gemini and the Nano Banana generative AI model, Google Pics is designed to give more granular control over prompt-based image making and manipulation, allowing [...]

After launching a budget-friendly flood sensor last month with impressive battery life, Shelly announced a new $49.99 security camera today that can be used without any additional subscription fees - although that's still an option if you want to expand its capabilities. The Shelly Camera will be available soon from the company's online store and [...]

At an event in New York City, Sonos announced two new audio products - the Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar and Sonos Ace Ultra headphones, details of which were found in an FCC filing in early August - and a major update to its audio operating system dubbed Sonos 27. It's the biggest single Sonos announcement [...]

As much as any Apple product released during his time as CEO, Tim Cook's tenure will be remembered for its ruthlessly efficient tight-rope walk between an autocrat in China and a would-be autocrat in the US. During his 15 years as CEO, Cook steered Apple through relations with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US [...]

The multitrillion-dollar home of the iPhone, Mac, and so many other tech gadgets has a new leaader, as Tim Cook has been replaced as CEO as of September 1st by former hardware boss John Ternus. How will we look back on Cook's legacy, and what will Apple look like under the leadership of Ternus and [...]

Florida is banning Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers across state highways, as reported earlier by NBC News and local news outlet WUSF. In a memo on Monday, Florida's Department of Transportation says it's revoking permits for all license plate readers, adding that they must be removed from state highways within 30 days. [...]

We're not even half a day into September, and two new smartphones have already launched: the Poco F9 Pro and F9 Ultra. We're expecting more this week, as the IFA trade show kicks off in Berlin, before we get new iPhones a week after that. And that's only the beginning of what promises to be [...]