The Verge

OpenAI's next "low-key research preview" has arrived. This time, it's not ChatGPT, but a coding agent dubbed Codex that is being made available to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team subscribers starting Friday. By drumming up comparisons to how ChatGPT was first described, CEO Sam Altman and other company leaders are positioning Codex as the company's [...]

Four years after the company released its first wireless arcade-style controller, 8BitDo is debuting a new version that's almost one-third as thick as the original. Its new Arcade Controller managed to slim down by ditching the original's joystick and focusing on only buttons in a unique layout. Often referred to as a leverless controller, or [...]

The US Army is done relying on contractors to repair its equipment. Earlier this month, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll committed to including right-to-repair provisions in all existing and future contracts with manufacturers, a change Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told The Verge will put an end to our dependence on giant defense contractors who charge billions [...]

When Fortnite players meet Darth Vader in the game's ongoing Star Wars event, they will be able to speak with the Sith Lord directly, and he's going to respond with a voice that sounds exactly like James Earl Jones. Though Darth Vader has previously appeared as an NPC (and a battle pass skin) in Fortnite, [...]

Microsoft says it has found no evidence that the Israeli military has used its Azure and AI technology to harm Palestinian civilians or anyone else in Gaza. The software maker says it has conducted an internal review and engaged an external firm," to perform a review, after some Microsoft employees have repeatedly called on the [...]

At this point, there are more than enough ways to play Street Fighter II. But Project Justice and Plasma Sword? Well, those are something entirely different, and much harder to find. And Capcom has made the smart decision to continue to make some of its more obscure fighters the focal point of its growing library [...]

It's not TV, it's HBO. No, sorry, it's HBO Go. And also HBO Now. But now it's HBO Max, except wait, now it's not HBO at all? It's just Max? Actually, I'm being told it is once again HBO Max. Thank you for joining us on this wild and utterly nonsensical branding journey. Please keep [...]

Charter and Cox have announced plans to merge in a $34.5 billion deal that will create a cable and internet behemoth. The two telecom companies say the merger will allow them to aggressively compete" against larger broadband companies and mobile providers that have rolled out internet plans of their own. Charter, which currently has 31.5 [...]

One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery. I went to sit down in my front room, and the shade was still shut - it was out of battery. I walked down the hall and found a beached robot vacuum [...]

Acer is announcing a whole slew of new laptops at the Computex 2025 computer show in Taiwan, including the Swift Edge 14 AI that weighs half a pound less than the MacBook Air, and the Predator Triton 14 AI for a mix of both gaming and content creation. There are over a dozen new models [...]

Anthropic has responded to allegations that it used an AI-fabricated source in its legal battle against music publishers, saying its Claude chatbot made an honest citation mistake." An erroneous citation was included in a filing submitted by Anthropic data scientist Olivia Chen on April 30th, as part of the AI company's defense against claims that [...]

If you've spent any time on the internet, you may have seen the "what I expected vs. what I got" memes. If I could make one for Doom: The Dark Ages, in my expected column I'd reference the earlier Doom games - Eternal and the 2016 soft reboot of the franchise. But for the "what [...]

When it launches next summer, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Greek epic The Odyssey will be historic in more ways than one: it will be the first feature film ever shot entirely on IMAX film. The Odyssey isn't the first film to be shot entirely using IMAX hardware - that honor belongs to Avengers: Infinity War [...]

Wooting set the standard for gaming keyboards with the original 60HE three years ago, and now it's ready to launch a successor with an upgraded design. The 60HE v2 will be available later this year with true 8K polling, a new closed-bottom switch, and an aluminum case that should all add up to a faster [...]

After xAI's chatbot Grok spent a few hours on Wednesday telling every X user that would listen that the claim of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious, the company has blamed the behavior on an unauthorized modification" to Grok's code. Wednesday's hours-long outburst saw Grok insert discussion of alleged white genocide in South [...]

Meta has filed a motion for judgment on the antitrust case it's currently fighting in court. The motion argues that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has failed to produce any evidence that Meta unlawfully monopolized part of the social networking market, something the government argues it did through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The [...]

Epic Games has been waiting for Apple to approve Fortnite for the US iOS App Store for nearly a week, and now Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is using X to try and put pressure on Apple. On Thursday, he highlighted examples of Fortnite lookalikes that are currently on the App Store and made a direct [...]

TikTok will interrupt teens' feeds with guided meditation after 10PM. The platform has been testing the feature with a wind down" prompt, but now it'll show the notification with guided meditation by default to all users under 18. TikTok's wind-down prompt initially only played calming music to remind teens to take a break from the [...]

Watching the behavior of our tech overlords has answered questions I'd never thought to ask. How do you NDA an army of baby mamas? Is there anything more embarrassing than impersonating Benson Boone? (Also, who is Benson Boone?) And now, the latest: how long after a sovereign ruler of a repressive state murders one of [...]

Coinbase says cyber criminals bribed and recruited" support workers to help steal customer data and trick victims into sending money to attackers. As a result of the attack, bad actors obtained the names, addresses, phone numbers, government IDs images, account data, and partial social security numbers of a small subset of users," according to a [...]

After five years, I was still happy with my phone, even though its battery had started the inevitable process of slowing to a stop. But Donald Trump's tariff nonsense pushed me to make a decision: buy a new phone or fix the old one now, before the prices go up. The answer was clearer than [...]

YouTube now has a chart that tracks the top 100 podcasts in the US. The Joe Rogan Experience took the number one spot during the week of May 5th to the 11th, followed by Kill Tony, Rotten Mango, and 48 Hours. YouTube will update the chart every Wednesday and rank each show by watchtime, according [...]

Pinterest has apologized for a recent wave of over-enforcement" that erroneously deactivated many accounts. The platform has experienced some weird moderation issues in recent weeks, and outraged users reported their accounts had been suspended without warning or explanation. In response to many appeals, the platform cited unspecified community guideline violations. The company initially addressed ban [...]

May and June are rarely considered the best time of year to land a streaming deal, though that doesn't mean there aren't ways to save if you can forgo big-name services like Netflix and Hulu. Now through May 30th, for instance, both new and returning subscribers can sign up for a year of ad-supported Peacock [...]

Garmin's back with a bunch of goodies for runners. That includes two new Forerunner watches, a new chest strap, and several new running and triathlete features that won't be paywalled behind its newly launched Garmin Connect Plus subscription. On the watch front, there's the $749.99 Forerunner 970, which replaces the 965 as its top-of-the-line running [...]

Audio-Technica's engineers are seemingly working overtime to elevate the design of the record player. Following the reveal of its floating, glowing Hotaru turntable last month, the company has announced its new AT-LPA2 featuring a chassis and platter made from transparent acrylic. With electronics like its power supply and playback controls packed into a separate unit [...]

You might want to prepare for things to pay more at Walmart. The company's CFO, John David Rainey, told CNBC that the Trump administration's tariffs are still too high" and that consumers could see higher prices likely towards the tail end of this month, and then certainly much more in June." We're wired for everyday [...]

Sony's WH-1000XM6 noise-canceling headphones have arrived three years after their popular predecessors. That's a longer gap than usual for the lineup, but don't expect any earth-shattering changes. Whereas the 1000XM4 to 1000XM5 upgrade brought a significant design overhaul, this time Sony is mostly focusing on sound, noise cancellation, and quality-of-life hardware refinements, rather than messing [...]

Microsoft has been quietly killing off a number of Surface devices over the past few years. At first it was the Surface Headphones and Surface Earbuds that started to disappear, then came news of a changed "hardware portfolio" amid 10,000 job cuts at Microsoft in early 2023. A year later, Microsoft then killed off the [...]

Google is rolling out a handy update for Chrome on Android, as it will now allow you to zoom in on text without affecting the appearance of the webpage. You can use a slider to enlarge text, and then set it for one page or for all the sites you visit. Previously, when you zoomed [...]

Netflix is working on a new type of ad that will use AI to let advertisers marry" their product with the streaming service's shows and movies. This may sound like Warner Bros. Discovery's plan to turn its IP into commercials, but during Netflix's Upfront event on Wednesday, the company demonstrated an example that placed the [...]

Last Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Newark mayor Ras Baraka outside a detention center. Baraka was trying to visit the facility - which opened recently and is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison company - with members of New Jersey's congressional delegation. Baraka was not only denied entry but arrested [...]

Threads is making it easier for creators to share personal links with their communities and followers. The link-sharing update announced today now allows Threads users to add up to five links to their account bios and provides performance insight that shows how many people have visited links shared in posts and profiles. Meta previously only [...]

President Donald Trump told Apple CEO Tim Cook that he doesn't want the company to move iPhone production to India. I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday," Trump said during his visit to Qatar. You're coming in with $500 billion, but now I hear you're building all over India... We're not interested in [...]

You're about to start seeing even more characters from Warner Bro. Discovery's films and series popping up in ads for stuff like condiments and insurance. In addition to its plan to start calling HBO Max by its proper name again, WBD announced this week that it's launching something called the WBD Storyverse," a new ad [...]

We weren't that impressed with the Hummer EV when it first came out - too big, too expensive, and crazy inefficient - but we did appreciate the novelty of the Crab Walk feature that let the massive truck rotate all four wheels to drive diagonally at low speeds. Our reviewer, Emme Hall, called it the [...]

It's not the next mainline entry in the series, but Atlus did announced a new Persona game today. It's called Persona 5: The Phantom X, and it's a spinoff that's launching on both mobile and PC on June 26th. As the name implies, The Phantom X is set in the same universe as 2017's Persona [...]

You can't buy the Huawei Watch 5 in the US, but it has an interesting twist on health tracking. Most smartwatches and fitness trackers measure your metrics from a sensor array that presses into your wrist. The Watch 5 has that, but it also adds a new sensor on the watch's side that measures EKGs, [...]

The Motorola Razr Ultra is something special, but it's not quite Ultra. It's gorgeous. It's a delight to use, and even after several generations of this revamped Razr flip format, checking bus arrival times on the outer screen still feels like getting away with something. This phone is a lot of things - but Ultra [...]

Roblox is going to let creators sell physical items from their games. The company has been testing its tools to do so since last year, but today, it's announcing that it's opening up its Commerce APIs to eligible Roblox creators. Shopify is the first integrated partner" for the APIs, and if a creator or brand [...]

At its best, Netflix's Love, Death, and Robots creates the same feeling as picking up a collection of sci-fi short stories. You don't always know what to expect, and not everything is brilliant, but you're guaranteed to experience something interesting. That was especially true of volume 3 of the animated anthology, which offered nine shorts, [...]

Apple is officially rolling out the next generation of CarPlay - and it's called CarPlay Ultra. The update is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the US and Canada, but it will be rolling out to existing models with supported infotainment systems in the coming weeks." Carmakers like Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis are [...]

Microsoft is shutting off access to its Bing Search results for third-party developers. The software maker quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11th and that any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available [...]

The future of everything from smartphones, to military equipment, to electric vehicles hangs on 17 rare earth minerals and the magnets that they're made into. And China, the world's largest refiner and producer, is tightening its grip and threatening the US' largest automakers. Over the last 30 years, China has methodically cornered the market on [...]

The latest versions of OpenAI's multimodal GPT AI models are now rolling out to ChatGPT. OpenAI announced on Wednesday that GPT-4.1 will be available across all paid ChatGPT account tiers and can now be accessed by Plus, Pro, or Team users under the model picker dropdown menu. Free users are excluded from the rollout, but [...]

Apple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary. Daring Fireball's John Gruber spotted that a red exclamation mark icon is being prominently displayed on the App Store listing for Instacar, alongside a message warning users that it doesn't use Apple's private and secure [...]

Leica is bringing a new kind of filter effect called Artist Looks" to its Lux camera app for iPhones, with the first one adjusting your photos to resemble the style and body of work of celebrity photographer Greg Williams. Artist Looks, like the other color and black-and-white looks in Leica's app, are essentially one-click filter [...]

We Are Rewind, a Paris-based company that has relaunched the cassette player with modern features like support for wireless headphones and rechargeable batteries, has announced a larger boombox version. Streamlining the design of the portable stereos that were popular in the 80s, the 449 (around $500 USD) GB-001 can function as a Bluetooth speaker and [...]

EA is asking employees to return to the office for three days per week under a hybrid model - and it sounds like the company will be significantly reducing remote hiring. CEO Andrew Wilson and president of EA Entertainment and technology Laura Miele sent emails to staff about the change, IGN reports. Kotaku's Ethan Gach [...]

Music-sharing platform SoundCloud is saying it has never used artist content to train AI models," and that it's making a formal commitment that any use of AI on SoundCloud will be based on consent, transparency, and artist control." The update comes several days after artists reported that changes made last year to its terms of [...]