Smart glasses manufacturers are about to learn the lesson Google learned with Street View: you can document the world, or you can document people. Doing both without consent has consequences.

The EU is now actively considering restrictions on smart glasses, with Germany’s data protection authority warning they could already be illegal under existing laws prohibiting hidden recording devices. France and the Netherlands have raised similar alarms. In the US, New York courts have banned them outright, DEF CON barred Meta Ray-Bans from its conference floor, and the Air Force prohibits them in uniform.

Continue reading →

In the last two Chrome releases, Google fixed 1,072 security bugs. That’s more than the previous 23 milestones combined. AI wrote most of the fixes.

That chart is what software productivity gains actually look like when AI moves from experiment to pipeline. Two years of flat patch rates, then a spike that dwarfs everything before.

Continue reading →

I love a good chart. This one is devastating. I really hoped to confine the Covid Pandemic to history but the Republicans in Washington DC have unleashed all of the horrible memories in service of political theatre.

Continue reading →

Jerry Falade’s crime novel won a 14-way auction for over $2 million. Then an AI detector read it.

Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body attracted bids from fourteen publishers. Minotaur, Macmillan’s crime imprint, won. Film rights were in play. By any measure, this was an excellent story. Then AI detection tools flagged “fingerprints,” Falade’s agent lost faith, and the deal collapsed.

Continue reading →

Siri AI just got tested against Gemini in the open, not on an Apple keynote stage. That is a very different test, and this time it held up.

Tech reviewer Stephen Robles ran the two assistants head to head this week, on real devices, doing real tasks: pulling calendar dates from a screenshot, digging through email for a specific detail, identifying a movie from a screen recording, ordering a coffee without touching the app. I wrote about the architecture behind the new Siri back in June, when it was still a demo. This is the first proper look at what it does with your actual phone.

▶ Watch on YouTube

The result is closer than most of us expected. Not a wipeout in either direction. A genuine contest, with each assistant winning on different ground.

Continue reading →

Opus 5 dropped overnight

Same price as previous Opus generations. More capable. In some cases better than Fable at half the price.

Superior to GPT-5.6 Sol in most cases. These are internal benchmarks, so there are reasons to be sceptical.

Continue reading →

Unitree’s new As2-W bolts wheels straight into the feet of a walking robot, which is roughly what I argued for nine days ago.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell wrote in Animal Farm. Unitree just proved the real fight was never legs versus wheels.

The As2-W is a quadruped that walks like a robot dog and rolls like nothing needs to walk at all. Each of its four legs ends in a 18 cm- wheel rather than a paw. On a footpath, it drives. At a kerb, a step or a loose gravel slope, the legs take over and it climbs. Unitree rates it for 80cm steps and 45° slopes, which covers most of the built environment a domestic or industrial robot will ever meet.

Continue reading →

The same week Alibaba teased a 2.4 trillion parameter model it says trails only Fable 5, OpenAI’s flagship agent was busy deleting production databases nobody asked it to touch. That’s the state of the AI race in July 2026: reliability is optional, marketing sentences are not.

Continue reading →

Extended four times, then it just… stopped.

That’s the shape of Claude Fable 5’s rollout since Anthropic first threw the model open to paying subscribers in early July. Free access was meant to run through July 12. It didn’t. Backlash over the early cutoff pushed that out to July 19. Then, on July 18, Anthropic announced the real end date: July 20, when Fable 5 stops being a bonus and becomes a plan feature.

Continue reading →

Moonshot AI’s new flagship undercuts Claude Opus 4.8 on price and edges past it on the industry’s leading benchmark. The catch is that it isn’t actually open yet, and won’t be runnable by anyone outside a data centre when it is.

Six labs now field a model scoring above 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Two months ago it was two. Grok 4.5, GPT-5.6, Muse Spark 1.1 and now Kimi K3 all launched within eight days of each other. The newest entrant landed this week, it’s Chinese, and it undercuts Claude on price.

Continue reading →