The Verge

Spotify has launched a new feature called Page Match that lets you quickly sync your spot in a physical or ebook with an audiobook. Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but [...]

Spotify is going all in on books in 2026 and partnering with Bookshop.org to let you buy physical copies of audiobooks and support local retailers starting in the Spring. The announcement dovetails with the launch of Page Match, a new feature that lets you sync physical books and ebooks with audiobooks in the Spotify app [...]

Substack is notifying some users that the email addresses and phone numbers linked to their accounts were exposed in a "security incident" last year. In an email to account holders, Substack CEO Chris Best said that a hacker had accessed internal data without authorization in October 2025, but that passwords, credit card numbers, and other [...]

When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were told "Q1 2026" specifically. But because of the ongoing memory and storage crunch, that launch has been delayed to sometime in the first half of [...]

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has earned more than $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The company announced the milestone as part of its Q4 2025 earnings report released on Wednesday, which highlights the 15 percent year-over-year increase as its cloud business and YouTube continue to grow. As noted in the earnings report, [...]

During a two-hour hearing in the US Senate Wednesday, top executives from Waymo and Tesla urged lawmakers to take action on long-stalled legislation to speed the deployment of self-driving cars on public roads. But after two hours of Q&A around a number of hot-button topics, including robotaxi safety, legal liability, remote operation, and China, it [...]

Though the Virtual Boy was both a commercial and critical failure, the console's infamy is part of what has made it such a fascinating piece of Nintendo's history. Original units are still going for hundreds of dollars on bidding sites, and hobbyists have spent years keeping the Virtual Boy alive through emulation and homebrew games. [...]

Sam Altman responded to Anthropic's new Super Bowl ad in an X post on Wednesday, saying the OpenAI competitor's campaign is "clearly dishonest," and called it "on brand" for Anthropic to "doublespeak." "We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them," he wrote. "We are not stupid and we know our users [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about the most ambitious crossover event of all time: the infinity war between technology and politics. Not subscribed yet? Come on, do it! Washington might seem slower than Silicon Valley. But that's because it's more turbulent. In order to achieve anything, one has to navigate [...]

Overwatch 2, the sequel to Activision Blizzard's hit hero shooter Overwatch, was announced in 2019 but didn't arrive for another three years, eventually bringing a shift to five-on-five matches in PvP and a few new characters, including Overwatch's first Black female hero. After canceling planned PvE content and unlocking its hero pool, the game's developers [...]

I've spent the last couple of weeks trying - and mostly failing - to test Ikea's new Matter-over-Thread gear. These highly anticipated smart home devices include programmable buttons, smart bulbs, plugs, and temperature and motion sensors - all of which should work with any smart home platform and start at just $6. But I've hit [...]

OpenClaw, the AI agent that has exploded in popularity over the past week, is raising new security concerns after researchers uncovered malware in hundreds of user-submitted "skill" add-ons on its marketplace. In a post on Monday, 1Password product VP Jason Meller says OpenClaw's skill hub has become "an attack surface," with the most-downloaded add-on serving [...]

In late 2025, the Department of Homeland Security zeroed in on the Twin Cities in Minnesota, supposedly in response to fraud allegations made by a right-wing influencer. In the months since, thousands of immigrants have been swept up by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In January alone, two American citizens were killed while documenting ICE operations [...]

Microsoft has a new head of security. Hayete Gallot, who left Microsoft in October 2024 to become the president of Google Cloud's customer experience, is returning to the software giant as the executive vice president of security, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. The move means Charlie Bell, formerly Microsoft's security chief, is taking on [...]

Google has taken the wraps off the Pixel 10A, the latest in its line of budget-friendly smartphones. A teaser shared on Wednesday shows off the new device in a powdery blue color, which will be available for preorder on February 18th. Based on the teaser shared by Google, the Pixel 10A looks a lot like [...]

There's been a clear shift over Fallout's second season. While the show started out as a relatively goofy introduction to the postapocalyptic wasteland, one that nailed the vibes of the games perfectly, season 2 has been intent on making the world even bigger. And nowhere was that more clear than in the season finale, in [...]

GitHub is making Claude by Anthropic and OpenAI's Codex AI coding agents directly available inside GitHub today. A new public preview adds Claude and Codex to GitHub, GitHub Mobile, and Visual Studio Code, for users with a Copilot Pro Plus or Copilot Enterprise subscription. The move is part of Agent HQ, GitHub's vision to make [...]

Less than a week after Google showed off Project Genie, a tool powered by an AI world model that lets users generate interactive 3D experiences from prompts, Roblox is sharing some early ideas about how it wants to use AI world models and prompts to let creators generate experiences and change them in real time [...]

I'm typically reluctant to recommend budget-friendly laptops, particularly ones that run Windows, because they suck, more often than not. That's beginning to change, thanks in part to last year's introduction of the Snapdragon X-series processors that offer solid performance and good x86 and x64 app compatibility. If you're in need of a compact 14-inch laptop [...]

It only took a brief drive in a Zeekr 7X to convince me: Chinese cars are now competitive and could be sold in the US tomorrow. The compact battery-electric crossover, a bestseller in Europe, is aimed directly at the Tesla Model Y with its five seats, two rows, impressive road grip, energetic performance, and smooth [...]

On Wednesday, Spotify announced a few new lyrics features aiming to make it easier to understand and access song lyrics, including translations, previews, and offline lyrics. Lyric translations were originally introduced in 2022, but have only been available in specific markets so far. Now, they're rolling out worldwide to both free and premium Spotify users, [...]

Amazon has announced that its generative AI-powered digital assistant Alexa Plus is now available to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa mobile app. If you don't have Prime, you can access the assistant on a new free tier on the web and app, or pay $20 a [...]

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there's a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable [...]

Anthropic has announced that it won't be bringing ads to its AI chatbot Claude, in sharp contrast to confirmed plans from OpenAI to allow advertising in ChatGPT. To hammer the point home further, the company is releasing a Super Bowl commercial that makes fun of unnamed rivals adding adverts to their AI. "We want Claude [...]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is pressing Google for more information about its plans to build a checkout feature into its Gemini AI chatbot. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Warren expresses concerns that the integration could allow Google and retailers "to exploit sensitive user data" or "manipulate consumers into spending more and paying [...]

Adobe is no longer planning to discontinue Adobe Animate on March 1st. In an FAQ, the company now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode and that it has "no plans todiscontinue or remove access" to the app. Animate will still receive "ongoing security and bug fixes" and will still be available for [...]

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was launched into the middle of a congressional culture war on Tuesday as he testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company's attempt to buy a large part of Warner Bros Discovery. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee highlighted an array of traditional merger concerns on both sides of [...]

Microsoft confirmed last year that it's working on a next-gen Xbox console in partnership with AMD. Now, AMD is hinting that the next Xbox console, which will use custom AMD chips, could be launching in 2027. "Development of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox, featuring an AMD semi-custom SoC, is progressing well to support a launch in 2027," [...]

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice and the plaintiffs in the antitrust case against Google filed a cross-appeal, as the DOJ Antitrust Division announced in a post on X: "Today, the DOJ Antitrust Division filed notice that it will cross-appeal from the remedies decisions in its case against Google's unlawful monopolization of internet search and [...]

After right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley's viral video alleging fraud at Minnesota daycares he said were operated by Somali residents, Donald Trump's administration responded by flooding the state with federal immigration agents and freezing funding for childcare services. (A judge ruled that the federal government must continue funding childcare subsidies, at least temporarily.) Now Shirley is [...]

Development on the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Borderlands 4 is on "pause," according to a statement from a Take-Two spokesperson given to Variety. "We made the difficult decision to pause development on that SKU," Take-Two spokesperson Alan Lewis said in the statement published by Variety. "Our focus continues to be delivering quality post-launch content [...]

The Super Bowl is not only one of the biggest sporting events in the world, it's also one of the best times of year to find a deal on a big TV. For major events in particular, a large TV makes sense because it provides a more immersive experience and allows for groups of friends [...]

On Monday, Elon Musk announced that he was merging two of his companies, SpaceX and xAI, in a deal said to be worth $1.25 trillion. The reason, Musk said in an announcement, was that in order for AI to grow, it needed to go to space. AI relies on "large terrestrial data centers" that run [...]

Microsoft says it is working on the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), an AI licensing hub that shows usage terms set by publishers. That way, AI companies can easily shop the terms and set up deals to use online content for "grounding" their AI models, while the content owners get usage-based reporting to help set prices. [...]

Apple is building OpenAI and Anthropic's AI-powered coding agents directly into Xcode. New integrations in Xcode 26.3 will give developers the ability to call upon Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex to write and edit code, update project settings, search documentation, and more. Xcode is the software developers can use to create and test apps [...]

A raid on X's Paris office was carried out by the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit on Tuesday with Europol and French police as part of an ongoing investigation that expanded in July to include Grok. As previously reported by Reuters, Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino were also summoned for hearings in April. [...]

Nintendo has had plenty of highs over its few decades in the video game industry. Popularizing home consoles with the NES, introducing new audiences to games through the Wii's motion controls, and the touchscreen Trojan horse that was the Nintendo DS, to name a few. But often these successes were followed by missteps; the Wii [...]

Anthropic's Claude AI models experienced a major outage today, impacting products like Claude Code. Developers were seeing a 500 error when trying to use Claude Code, and Anthropic said that it was seeing elevated error rates on its APIs "across all Claude models." Anthropic quickly identified the root cause and implemented a fix within around [...]

As The Verge's resident robot vacuum reviewer, I don't have a lot of time (or space) in my life for stick vacs, and frankly, the ones I have used have largely disappointed me. Top-heavy, bulky, always getting clogged or running out of battery - they're so... manual. But then I met PencilVac Fluffycones, Dyson's new [...]

If your phone feels too small but most tablets feel too big, Apple's latest iPad Mini functions as a nice in-between. Thankfully, if you've been waiting for a discount, the base model with Wi-Fi and 128GB of storage is on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for $399 ($100 off), which is $50 shy of [...]

When ChatGPT launched, in November of 2022, it started a race that almost immediately consumed the tech industry. OpenAI didn't invent the concept of AI, but most of the state-of-the-art technology was confined to research labs at companies and institutions around the world. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. And better than anyone expected. So many [...]

China is banning Tesla-style concealed door handles on electric vehicles to address safety concerns regarding people getting trapped inside their cars. The ban will take effect on January 1st next year, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's announcement, and will require all vehicles sold in China to have mechanical release door handles [...]

James Park and Eric Friedman, the co-founders of Fitbit who left Google two years ago, have announced a new venture called Luffu. Described as an "intelligent family care system," Luffu collects and logs health and medical information from connected devices, other platforms like Apple Health and Fitbit, and details shared by family members through voice [...]

Ordinary social networks face a constant onslaught of chatbots pretending to be human. A new social platform for AI agents may face the opposite problem: getting clogged up by humans pretending to post as bots. Moltbook - a website meant for conversations between agents from the platform OpenClaw - went viral this weekend for its [...]

Disney has picked a successor for longtime CEO Bob Iger. On Tuesday, the entertainment giant announced that its theme parks head, Josh D'Amaro, will take over as CEO on March 18th, 2026. Rumors about Iger's replacement have been swirling for more than a year now. After a 15-year-long tenure as Disney's CEO, Iger returned from [...]

Activision is trying to crack down on third-party hardware cheating devices in Call of Duty again. Both Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 have been plagued by players using devices like XIM, Cronus Zen, and ReaSnow S1 to enable unfair advantages that exploit aim assist, and now Activision is introducing [...]

Fortnite is going to be getting a lot more crossovers featuring characters from video games. As part of the Epic Games Store's year in review for 2025, Epic shared details about its official program for developers that will give people who purchase their game on the Epic Games Store a related cosmetic they can use [...]

Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including "Switch or button pressed." Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control [...]