CES 2026: What to expect from tech's biggest conference in January Expect big announcements out of the annual show taking place in Las Vegas, with news from Samsung, Sony, NVIDIA and many more. CES is the January trade show where the tech industry kicks off the year with a bevy of new and notable announcements -- and it's less than a week away. The CES 2026 show floor is officially open from January 6 through 9, but the fun kicks off with events on Sunday January 4 and a host of press conferences on Monday. As always, product demos, announcements and networking will be happening at the Las Vegas Convention Center and other hotels all over the city. As usual, Engadget will be covering the event in-person and remotely, bringing you news and hands-ons straight from the show floor.

Acquisition would further expand SoftBank's investments in artificial intelligence as it tries to center itself in the boom SoftBank Group will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge Group in a deal valued at $4bn, the companies said on Monday, as the Japanese investment firm looks to deepen its AI-related portfolio. The acquisition would expand SoftBank's exposure to digital infrastructure as the Japanese conglomerate is positioning its portfolio to focus on artificial intelligence. SoftBank's billionaire founder Masayoshi Son is seeking to capitalize on surging demand for the computing capacity that underpins artificial intelligence applications. DigitalBridge invests in digital infrastructure sectors such as datacenters, cell towers, fiber networks, small-cell systems and edge infrastructure, with a portfolio including companies such as Vantage Data Centers, Zayo, Switch and AtlasEdge. Founded in 1991 as real estate-focused Colony Capital, the firm pivoted under CEO Marc Ganzi into digital infrastructure and rebranded as DigitalBridge in 2021 after shedding most of its legacy property assets.

Switch 2 games are on sale through Jan. 5 Expect big announcements out of the annual show taking place in Las Vegas, with news from Samsung, Sony, NVIDIA and many more. Tech's biggest annual conference is starting in just under two weeks, and we already know some of the products and announcements that could be in store. The CES 2026 show floor is officially open from January 6 through 9, but the fun kicks off with events on Sunday January 4 and a host of press conferences on Monday. As always, product demos, announcements and networking will be happening at the Las Vegas Convention Center and other hotels all over the city. As usual, Engadget will be covering the event in-person and remotely, bringing you news and hands-ons straight from the show floor.

Takeda's psoriasis pill developed with AI assistance succeeds in trials Psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes rashes marked by itchy, scaly rashes and afflicts more than 125 million people worldwide. Takeda Pharmaceutical announced that its oral psoriasis drug zasocitinib proved safe and effective in late-stage trials, marking a milestone in its effort to treat the incurable skin condition and offset looming revenue pressure. Patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis who took the once-daily pill showed significantly clearer skin compared with those on placebo or the existing therapy apremilast, the company said in a statement Thursday. Takeda plans to submit data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulators beginning in fiscal year 2026. If approved, zasocitinib would join the small but growing oral psoriasis treatments -- long a market dominated by ointments and injectable antibody therapies -- and stand out as one of the first drugs discovered with the help of artificial intelligence.

Expect big announcements from the likes of Samsung, Sony, NVIDIA and many more. CES doesn't start until January, but whispers of the products and announcements that could be in store for tech's biggest annual conference have already started to take shape. The CES 2026 show floor is officially open from January 6 through 9, although the show kicks off with events on Sunday January 4 and a host of press conferences on Monday. As always, product demos, announcements and networking will be happening at the Las Vegas Convention Center and surrounding hotels all over the city. As usual, Engadget will be covering the event in-person and remotely, bringing you news and hands-ons straight from the show floor.

As OpenAI scrambles to improve ChatGPT, it's ditching a feature in its free tier that contributed to last summer's user revolt. OpenAI has quietly reversed a major change to how hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT . On a low-profile blog that tracks product changes, the company said that it rolled back ChatGPT's model router--an automated system that sends complicated user questions to more advanced "reasoning" models--for users on its Free and $5-a-month Go tiers. Instead, those users will now default to GPT-5.2 Instant, the fastest and cheapest-to-serve version of OpenAI's new model series. Free and Go users will still be able to access reasoning models, but they will have to select them manually.

In October, the company announced plans to fire 14,000 employees globally amid its deepening embrace of AI. Amazon's logo on the side of a logistics center. Amazon is set to fire 370 people at its European headquarters in Luxembourg in the coming weeks, as reports. Amazon initially planned to reduce its headcount there by 470, but under European Union law, companies have to negotiate layoffs with employee reps and, in some cases, governments. Amazon reportedly told employees at the European HQ in a memo the layoffs are adjustments that reflect business needs and local strategies.

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2 to take on Google and Anthropic The new model is all about professional work. OpenAI's code red response to Google's Gemini 3 Pro has arrived . On the same day the company announced a Sora licensing pact with Disney, it took the wraps off GPT-5.2 . OpenAI is touting the new model as its best yet for real-world, professional use. "It's better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long contexts, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step projects," said OpenAI.

Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal - what happens next? Disney's famous Mickey Mouse character will soon be available for use in AI-generated videos The world's best-known AI company and the world's best-known entertainment firm have come to a surprise agreement to allow AI versions of some of the most iconic characters in film, TV and cartoons to be used in generative AI videos and images. Social media is dead - here's what comes next The Walt Disney Company has signed a deal with OpenAI that will allow the AI firm's Sora video generation tool and ChatGPT image creator to use more than 200 of Disney's most iconic characters. Meanwhile, Disney remains in dispute with another AI firm, Midjourney, over alleged infringement of their intellectual property (IP), claiming Midjourney aims to "blatantly incorporate and copy Disney's and Universal's famous characters" into their image generating tool. The characters now deemed fair game for OpenAI users include the likes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Simba and Mufasa from and Moana, as well as Marvel and Lucasfilm characters, including some of's most well-known names.

Official court press releases from Germany's highest courts present and explain judicial rulings to the public, as well as to expert audiences. Prior NLP efforts emphasize technical headnotes, ignoring citizen-oriented communication needs. We introduce CourtPressGER, a 6.4k dataset of triples: rulings, human-drafted press releases, and synthetic prompts for LLMs to generate comparable releases. This benchmark trains and evaluates LLMs in generating accurate, readable summaries from long judicial texts. We benchmark small and large LLMs using reference-based metrics, factual-consistency checks, LLM-as-judge, and expert ranking. Large LLMs produce high-quality drafts with minimal hierarchical performance loss; smaller models require hierarchical setups for long judgments. Initial benchmarks show varying model performance, with human-drafted releases ranking highest.