Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated TV Show. The company licensed the character for a new Amazon series--made with AI--without her consent. Author and illustrator Loryn Brantz never imagined that a popular cartoon character she created almost a decade ago would one day be the subject of an intellectual property dispute involving BuzzFeed, Amazon's video streaming service, and generative artificial intelligence. But that's exactly the situation she finds herself in today. "Nothing said in good faith by managers and executives was followed through with," Brantz says of BuzzFeed, her former employer.

I Gave Gemini Spark Access to My Life. Google's new AI agent combed through my emails, documents, and calendar to plan a birthday party and still didn't clock the person most important to me. At its recent I/O developer conference, Google introduced Gemini Spark as an always-on agent that connects to your personal data, completes online tasks, and automates aspects of your daily interactions. It's Google's take on the viral OpenClaw agent that rocked Silicon Valley at the start of 2026. OpenClaw's early adopters handed their entire lives over to an AI agent for messaging and scheduling automation--sometimes with bot-induced mishaps causing embarrassing results.

We Asked the Author to Explain How He Used AI. A book about how AI shapes perceptions of reality came under fire for using AI-generated quotes. Its problems go beyond that. Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum's buzzy new book,, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people's sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes.

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he's got the attention of the industry. For one thing, Olah is an atheist who at 15 rejected his evangelical Christian upbringing. As a Thiel fellow, he accepted a grant from the guy who thinks that anyone who slows down AI progress is a legionnaire of the antichrist . Olah is also a cofounder of Anthropic, a leading AI company reportedly about to go public with a nearly trillion-dollar valuation. Olah commented on the oddness in his remarks at the Vatican.

Plus: Anthropic is now valued higher than OpenAI. How a new extraction process could unlock the world's lithium A new method for extracting lithium could cut costs and emissions from one of the world's most important materials for EVs and energy storage. The technique uses a weak acid to dissolve silicate minerals. That frees not only the lithium but also other useful materials, including alumina and silica. "At scale, we believe this will be the lowest-cost way of sourcing lithium in the world," says Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor who co-authored a study of the process published yesterday in . Startup Rock Zero is already working to commercialize the research.

PCWorld highlights Google's Gemini Daily Brief as a standout AI feature that creates personalized to-do lists by scanning Gmail, Google Calendar, and recent chats. Available on Google's AI Pro and Ultra plans, the feature provides actionable buttons like "add to calendar" and "mark complete" for enhanced task management. While Google I/O introduced many AI announcements with limited immediate impact, Daily Brief proves genuinely useful for organizing daily commitments and appointments. Google's big I/O event came and went last week, stuffed to the gills with new AI announcements and functionality. Most of it left me cold . But one -- and only one -- of those Gemini announcements is actually making a difference for me in the week following Google I/O, and it's relatively humble: Daily Brief, a Gemini-generated daily to-do list based on your Google Workspace data.

Data in the report show 4% of workers believe they have already lost a job because of AI. Data in the report show 4% of workers believe they have already lost a job because of AI. Exclusive: IPPR thinktank calls for new measures to boost employees' influence at'pivotal moment' in history Workers urgently need more bargaining power over the way AI is adopted in the workplace to ensure the benefits are fairly shared, according to a TUC-backed report from a leading thinktank. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is calling for a package of measures to boost employees' influence at what it calls a "pivotal moment in the history of work". Its report cites survey data showing that while 20% of workers say AI is making their working life better, 21% say it has made it worse - and 4% believe they have already lost a job because of the technology.

Anthropic has usurped OpenAI as the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup, soaring to a $965bn valuation ahead of expected public listings by the rival firms. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of chatbots, said on Thursday that it had raised $65bn from private investors after a fundraising round led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital. "This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner hailed the adoption of Claude among the "world's most demanding organisations" as evidence of Anthropic's command in the field. "This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead," Gerstner said.

Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative artificial intelligence to enterprise clients rather than general users. Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at $965 billion, more than its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic's place as one of the most significant players in AI, with the startup led by Dario Amodei having drawn fans for its coding powers and state-of-the-art models. Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by OpenAI. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Conformal prediction (CP) and its extension, conformal risk control (CRC), are established frameworks for quantifying uncertainty in supervised machine learning through formal guarantees. However, recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have been driven by unsupervised generative models, such as large language models (LLMs) and image generators, which are not directly compatible with CP or CRC. In this work we introduce conformal generation (Conf-Gen), a general framework adapting CRC to generative tasks while relaxing its theoretical assumptions. Conf-Gen unifies and generalizes previous attempts to apply CP to LLMs, and extends conformal methodology to entirely new domains. We demonstrate the flexibility of Conf-Gen through some novel applications, including obtaining conformal guarantees on: image generators producing non-memorized images, conversational AI systems having asked enough clarifying questions, and the output of AI agents being correct.