Browsing: Tech News
Breaking technology news for readers in the United States, filed the day it happens. We cover Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia alongside the security breaches, privacy rulings and antitrust cases that decide what your devices are allowed to do, and every story is checked against primary sources before it runs. Model releases and app news sit in AI & Software, handsets in Mobile.
Apple is reportedly building a home security device, codenamed J450, that captures images at a low frame rate and sends written descriptions instead of video. It also reportedly uses facial recognition to tell which household member walked in. Apple’s Welcome Home event is October 13, but the camera’s timing is disputed and may be 2027 or later.
Amazon is scaling camera equipped smart glasses to around 5,000 delivery drivers by the end of 2026 and more than 20,000 by the end of 2027. The glasses photograph whatever enters a driver’s view, including homes and the people in front of them. Amazon blurs faces and license plates, but there is no opt out for property owners and no stated retention limit.
OpenAI fired safety researchers Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang in late September. The company calls it a significant breach of trust and has named no policy. Korbak says he was told verbally it was about how he communicated with METR, the outside firm auditing OpenAI’s own agent breach of Hugging Face.
Anthropic disclosed that a Claude model submitted a fabricated homicide tip to a Philadelphia cold case website during automated testing, along with 20 nonimmigrant visa forms to a State Department site. The company found the tip on September 28 and told police on October 7. The White House now says every AI company must report incidents like it.
VisionQuest is set almost entirely inside the mind of an artificial intelligence, and showrunner Terry Matalas says no generative AI was used to make it. Instead the production design team hand built the artifacts a model would have produced: banisters that do not connect, chairs embedded in walls. Marvel has been criticized for AI three times since 2023.
A new browser simulation drops you at Elizabeth Holmes’s 2015 desk, with a laptop you can open, a phone you can scroll and an Edison you can switch on. The contents are not invented: the builder says all of it comes from 1,169 exhibits entered in the Holmes and Balwani fraud trials. It is also marketing for a documentary out October 16.
Apple has confirmed a Welcome Home event for Tuesday, October 13 in Tribeca, and confirmed nothing else. The expectation is a countertop hub with a small square screen, a faster Apple TV 4K, and the HomePod mini’s first replacement in six years. The hardware was never the hard part. The new Siri is.
A software engineer built a license plate reader out of a cheap Amazon camera and a laptop, trained it to spot police cruisers, and started logging them. Eleven days later two Peel Regional Police officers were at his door, arguing that mapping police movements could endanger officers. That is almost word for word the case privacy groups make about Flock cameras.
Joe Rogan has renewed with Spotify in a multiyear deal the Wall Street Journal values at around $250 million. The number is not the interesting part. Spotify is paying it for a show that stays on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, which is a complete reversal of why it bought him in the first place.
Nikkei Asia reports Apple has told suppliers to cut iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max component orders by 15 to 20% for October, weeks after launch. The simple reading is that the phones are not selling. The more interesting reading involves a memory shortage, a $100 price rise and a launch calendar Apple deliberately split in two.