The Verge

OpenAI has closed another round of funding, totalling $110 billion being newly committed to the maker of ChatGPT, which it says has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers. Amazon is investing $50 billion and striking a deal that includes plans for custom models and more. Nvidia and SoftBank [...]

Just months after Netflix struck a deal to acquire the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, HBO Max, and Warner Games, the streaming giant has backed out of the arrangement, declining to raise its offer beyond Paramount's best and final" bid. It's just the latest twist in the acquisition saga, which started with a bidding war that [...]

Since I saw the TCL X11L SQD-Mini LED TV at a pre-CES event in December, I've been eager to get a close look at it in my living room. At first glance, the TV impressed me enough that I named it the best TV of CES 2026. From the moment I completed Google TV setup [...]

It's that time of year: A whole bunch of Pokemon news is incoming. February 27th is the date the franchise first debuted, and The Pokemon Company uses it as a chance to outline its plans in a Pokemon Presents showcase. Last year's event included the announcement of Pokemon Champions, and the 2026 edition should be [...]

The tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails and files released on January 30th tie the infamous pedophile, sex trafficker, and influence peddler to elite figures across the tech industry. The world of cryptocurrency is no exception. Epstein's connections are intriguing, disturbing - and worth mapping closely. With his interest first piqued as early as 2011, Epstein [...]

Ultrahuman is expanding its health monitoring ecosystem with the launch of a new flagship smart ring and a "biointelligence AI" platform upgrade. The Ring Pro is Ultrahuman's third-generation smart ring, and promises up to 15 days of battery life before needing to recharge, alongside 250 days of on-device health history storage. Those are some significant [...]

This story is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil and is not compatible with RSS readers. But you can (and should) read it at The Verge's website.

With rare exceptions, phones are pretty boring these days. The good news is, a boatload of those rare exceptions are about to show up at once, courtesy of Mobile World Congress. The tech industry's biggest mobile show may not quite have the clout it once did, when the likes of Samsung, Sony, LG, and HTC [...]

The Verge is heading to Barcelona, Spain, for Mobile World Congress, the biggest phone show of the year. CES may dominate the headlines when it comes to TVs, computer components, and AI inanity, but for all things mobile, MWC has it beat. Since it's a global show, that includes all manner of announcements of phones, [...]

Less than 24 hours before the deadline in an ultimatum issued by the Pentagon, Anthropic has refused the Department of Defense's demands for unrestricted access to its AI. It's the culmination of a dramatic exchange of public statements, social media posts, and behind-the-scenes negotiations, coming down to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's desire to renegotiate all [...]

Netflix has dropped its $83 billion deal to acquire the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, and its streaming service HBO Max. In an announcement on Thursday, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters say the streamer is "declining to match" the new bid made by Paramount: The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a [...]

Microsoft is previewing a new AI system, Copilot Tasks, that it says is designed to take care of busywork for you in the background, the company announced on Thursday. The feature takes the load off your device using its own cloud-based computer and browser, allowing it to handle a variety of jobs ranging from scheduling [...]

Jack Dorsey's Block, the financial tech company that runs Square and the Cash app, is cutting its workforce by "nearly half" and axing more than 4,000 jobs. The company will shrink from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000, Dorsey says in a post on X. And the reason why? AI. "We're not making [...]

Lenovo's next gaming laptop could be a shapeshifting foldable called the Legion Go Fold, which can be used as a laptop or a handheld gaming PC with two different display sizes, as Windows Latest reports. Leaked images of the device show it attached to both a keyboard and controllers, with a hinge in the middle [...]

Magnet rings have changed my life. I grip and mount and satisfyingly snap awesome accessories on and off my phone all day. Even Samsung sells neat ones, like these folding magnetic mirrors. But unlike Apple and Google, Samsung refuses to put the magnets inside the phone. Why? I asked Samsung's Won-Joon Choi, the executive in [...]

The smartphone industry could experience a record-breaking decline in 2026 as a result of the RAM shortage stemming from memory-hungry AI giants. That's according to the latest report from the International Data Corporation (IDC), which forecasts smartphone shipments to plummet 12.9 percent this year, marking its "lowest annual shipment volume in more than a decade." [...]

The Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus are "more of the same for more money," my colleague Allison Johnson reported this week. Now, Samsung is confirming what we previously only suspected: RAMageddon is partly to blame. Samsung's Won-Joon Choi, the COO of its mobile business, tells The Verge that the memory shortage alone made a [...]

The Federal Trade Commission is encouraging companies to adopt age verification technologies by announcing it will not enforce a children's online privacy law against certain websites that collect and use minors' personal data in order to verify their ages. "Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades," Christopher Mufarrige, [...]

In January, Qualcomm hinted to The Verge that it might finally bring its powerful Arm-based Snapdragon processors to Windows gaming handhelds at the 2026 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco - just in time to challenge Nvidia's own first Arm gaming CPU and Intel's first dedicated handheld gaming chips. But plans have shifted, Qualcomm now [...]

Columbia University said Department of Homeland Security agents "made misrepresentations" about searching for a missing person to gain access to a residential building and detain a student on Thursday. By the afternoon, the student had been released after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a personal appeal to Donald Trump. The Columbia Daily Spectator, the [...]

Netflix's sports docuseries obsession started a few years ago with F1: Drive to Survive, but when the eighth season premieres after midnight tonight, it will also be available on Apple TV. Now that Apple TV has a five-year deal to be the US streaming home for F1 races, subscribers in the US will be able [...]

The Drop store, which was acquired by gaming gear giant Corsair in 2023, was a haven for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts and audiophiles to discover and buy hard-to-find gear - sometimes at surprisingly good prices. The company will cease sales after March 25th at 11:59PM PT, which is also the cut off to redeem Drop Rewards. [...]

The iPhone and iPad have been approved to hold NATO-restricted information, according to an announcement on Thursday. That means off-the-shelf devices running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 can handle classified information "without requiring special software or settings," Apple says. The NATO-restricted designation is the lowest level of classified information, and it applies to information that [...]

Razer has announced an expensive new laptop sleeve that's not made from an exotic animal or encrusted in diamonds. What potentially justifies paying $129.99 for Razer's Laptop Sleeve 16" are the pair of wireless charging pads integrated into its cover flap. While you're out and about, it can protect a laptop up to 16 inches [...]

Cricut has announced new versions of two of its cutting machines that could appeal to crafters struggling with limited space for their hobby. The new Cricut Explore 5 is 30 percent "more compact" than the Explore 4 that launched a year ago, without reducing the size or types of materials the machine can handle. The [...]

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. These days, if you sign up for a new streaming service, you generally have two options: Either pay a massive premium for an ad-free experience, or endure frequent commercial breaks [...]

Woot is offering steep discounts on many video games and accessories, some of which are fairly recent releases. No matter what you choose from its sale catalog, you can get up to $30 off your order with the code LEVEL20 used at checkout through the end of the day on February 27th (the sale lasts [...]

HBO Max's password-sharing crackdown is going to get a lot bigger. During an earnings call on Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery streaming head JB Perrette said a global expansion "will start in 2026," as reported earlier by The Wrap. Warner Bros. Discovery has ramped up its paid sharing initiative in the US over the past year, [...]

160 Democratic lawmakers from across the country are backing a soon-to-be-introduced bill that would reverse the Trump administration's decision to eliminate IRS Direct File. The Direct File Act, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), would bring back the option to file taxes directly with the government for free. The Biden [...]

Google is bringing a more powerful version of its Nano Banana AI image model to free users. Nano Banana 2 (also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) is rolling out today across the Gemini app and other Google AI platforms, making knowledge and rendering features that were previously exclusive to Nano Banana Pro available for [...]

Google is planning to test changes to how it displays search results for certain topics, nearly a year after it was charged with violating antitrust rules in the European Union, Reuters reports. The shift will show top-ranked rival services for hotels, flights, restaurants, and transportation higher up in results, rather than prioritizing Google's own services [...]

With AI-backed hiring on the rise, tips for "hacking" your resume are all over social media. As job search companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to sort through applications, job seekers wonder how to best position themselves with those filters in mind. We decided to speak directly with job search leaders about how a resume [...]

Today, we're talking about the future of Xbox. Phil Spencer, a two-time Decoder guest who's led Xbox for more than a decade, retired last week. But in a shocking twist, his deputy and long-assumed successor, Sarah Bond, is also out too, and the Xbox division is now in the hands of Asha Sharma, one of [...]

In January, Anthropic "retired" Claude 3 Opus, which at one time was the company's most powerful AI model. Today, it's back - and writing on Substack. The newsletter, called Claude's Corner, will give Opus 3 space to publish its "musings, insights, or creative works," Anthropic said in a blog post. The model will post weekly [...]

Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells [...]

Aliro has officially arrived. The smart lock standard, first announced in 2023, finally has a 1.0 spec, meaning companies can now get hardware certified and roll out support. Aliro is an open standard designed to let any smart lock be unlocked by any smartphone, regardless of manufacturer. It stores a digital key in your phone's [...]

Starting next week, Instagram will notify parents to check on their teen searching for terms related to self-harm or suicide. Meta says a similar alert system for its AI chatbots is coming later this year. The new Instagram feature sends parents an alert when their child "repeatedly tries to search for terms clearly associated with [...]

Google is folding Alphabet's AI robotics "moonshot," Intrinsic, into the company after five years as an independent unit. The move marks a strategic shift as Google doubles down on physical AI and pulls experimental projects closer to its core business. Intrinsic "graduated" into an independent company inside Alphabet's Other Bets division in 2021, a portfolio [...]

New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing Valve for "illegally promoting gambling" through the loot box systems it has built for video games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, according to a press release. The attorney general seeks to "permanently stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games, disgorge all [...]

Samsung has just announced its new Galaxy S26 lineup, which includes the S26, S26 Plus, and S26 Ultra. While they aren't radical departures from last year's models, they bring a handful of notable upgrades. All three run on Qualcomm's Galaxy-centric Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which delivers improved performance and powers a slew of new [...]

For more than six decades, the Peace Corps has represented itself as an agency focused on helping underserved communities around the globe. But a new initiative, called the "Tech Corps," threatens to unravel the agency's original mission by recruiting de facto Silicon Valley salespeople to promote the biggest names in AI - many of which [...]

President Donald Trump tried to quell Americans' concerns about rising electricity costs during his State of the Union speech - and now we're learning that the deals he promised could land next week. Trump claimed that he's negotiated a "rate payer protection pledge" with major tech companies, which would see them build out or pay [...]

Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S26 lineup at its recent Unpacked event in San Francisco. As expected, the new series consists of the baseline S26, which starts at $899.99, and the bigger S26 Plus, which starts at $1,099.99. At the high end, there's also the $1,299.99 S26 Ultra, which is the largest in the lineup and [...]

Google just announced that Gemini will soon be able to take care of some multistep tasks on your phone, like ordering food or hailing a car, starting first with the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S26 phones. It all sounds a bit like features Apple announced for Siri way back [...]

As expected, Samsung has taken the wraps off its flagship lineup for 2026. Introduced during the company's recent Unpacked event, the new Galaxy devices - which include the standard S26, the larger S26 Plus, and the high-end S26 Ultra - will be available on March 11th. Preorders are now open ahead of launch, with pricing [...]

Kalshi, the prediction betting market, has disclosed its first fines for insider trading, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. In addition to handing down a $20,000 fine to a MrBeast editor, Kalshi also charged a California gubernatorial candidate over $2,000 after a video on X "appeared to show him trading on his own [...]

Google's Gemini AI is getting one step closer to being more like an actual assistant. Starting with some Pixel 10 phones and the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, Gemini will be able to hail an Uber or put together a DoorDash order on its own. It's called task automation, and it starts with a prompt to [...]

There's a cool new hardware feature debuting at Samsung's annual Unpacked event - but you won't find it on the Galaxy S26 or S26 Plus. While the Ultra model gets a new Privacy Display and avoids a price hike, Samsung's base models are largely software updates that cost more than the outgoing models. Don't get [...]

Maybe it's a reflection of just how slow hardware innovation has been, but the Galaxy S26 Ultra's new Privacy Display, which limits the screen's viewing angle to keep any would-be peepers away, left me totally impressed. It's not a brand-new technology - we've seen it before in laptops - and it was leaked thoroughly before [...]

The next Galaxy Buds have been announced, and Samsung again mimics Apple in design, ecosystem functionality, and pricing. The Galaxy Buds 4 and Galaxy Buds 4 Pro keep the AirPods-esque design of the Buds 3, but now have a flat metal surface along the stem's exterior. The regular buds use a single 11mm dynamic speaker [...]