Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan are facing backlash after regulatory opposition helped derail Amazon’s bid for iRobot, resulting in the Roomba maker falling into Chinese ownership.

Will Your Favorite Apps Be Along for the Ride? Tech companies are calling AI the next platform. But some developers are reluctant to let AI agents stand between them and their users. Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI are racing to develop "operating systems" for AI-powered devices--and 2026 is likely the year these efforts will start to take off. The devices are largely built around a future where AI agents can take actions on a user's behalf, without requiring them to visit an app or website.

Online detectives are inaccurately claiming to have identified the federal agent who shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minnesota based on AI-manipulated images. Federal agents push through a crowd of bystanders as they leave the scene where a woman was fatally shot by an agent in Minneapolis, Minn., on January 7, 2026. In the hours after a masked federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis, social media users have been sharing AI-altered images they falsely claim "unmask" the officer, revealing their real identity. The agent was later identified by Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin as an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer. The shooting occurred on Wednesday morning, and social media footage of the scene shows two masked federal agents approaching an SUV parked in the middle of the road in a suburb south of downtown Minneapolis.

Campaigners have accused the government of dragging its heels on implementing a law which would make it illegal to create non-consensual sexualised deepfakes. It comes amid a backlash against images created using Elon Musk's AI Grok to digitally remove clothing - with one woman telling the BBC more than 100 sexualised images have been created of her. It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but new legislation that would make it a criminal offence to create or request them is still not in force despite passing in June 2025 . But it is unclear whether all of the unclothing images created by Grok would fall foul of this law. The BBC has contacted the government for comment.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Astronomers have spotted an asteroid the size of nearly eight football fields, with the help of the largest digital camera in the world and a new space observatory. Asteroid 2025 MN45 measures about a half mile in diameter and is the fastest spinning asteroid of its size ever recorded. The team from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and United States Department of Energy (DOE) presented their findings in . To spot this asteroid, the team used the cutting-edge Vera C. Rubin Observatory .

Robots, toys and practical tech dominated our time on the show floor. CES 2026's second day was all about hands on time with new tech. From Lego's most ambitious play experiment yet to assistive mobility tech, smart home ideas that actually feel affordable and robots that might one day fold your laundry, here's what stood out most on January 7. LEGO's new Smart Play system feels far more compelling in person than it did on stage. The Smart Brick, combined with Smart Tags and Smart Minifigures, responds dynamically to movement, proximity and context, triggering sounds and interactions without screens or apps. Seeing kids physically act out Star Wars battles while the bricks reacted in real time made it clear this is designed first and foremost for active social play, not digital distraction. WheelMove's motorized wheelchair attachment is compact, surprisingly quick to install and genuinely empowering in action.

Google Is Adding an'AI Inbox' to Gmail That Summarizes Emails New Gmail features, powered by the Gemini model, are part of Google's continued push for users to incorporate AI into their daily life and conversations. Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes . In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian mortality rates on the front lines are rising to levels that cannot be sustained by the current method of voluntary recruitment, Ukrainian figures suggest. "In December, 35,000 occupiers were eliminated - and this has been confirmed with video footage," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Monday evening address.

Elon Musk's Grok AI appears to have made child sexual imagery, says charity The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) charity says its analysts have discovered criminal imagery of girls aged between 11 and 13 which appears to have been created using Grok. The AI tool is owned by Elon Musk's firm xAI. It can be accessed either through its website and app, or through the social media platform X. The IWF said it found sexualised and topless imagery of girls on a dark web forum in which users claimed they used Grok to create the imagery. The BBC has approached X and xAI for comment.

We were fired, and we're owning it - here's how to find a new job that works for you The new year is a natural time to reflect, and for many of us, that involves thinking about our careers. Kristina O'Neill and Laura Brown are both editors who lost their jobs after restructures, and they initially thought it was the end of the world. I poured my heart into the role... I believed in the values we promoted. Yet, when it came to me, those values weren't there, says Laura.