The AI assistant had its personality stripped in pursuit of a more consistent experience. Copilot is getting yet another visual overhaul as Microsoft reconsiders its approach to AI across Windows and its various apps. The new changes are focused on the version of Copilot accessible in Microsoft 365, and visually streamline the AI assistant to using it more consistent across apps like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The most striking difference in Copilot's new look is how little color it has. You can still get Copilot to produce full-color outputs and it will reference other apps by their colorful app icons.

Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Anthropic reaches valuation of $965bn, beating OpenAI to become world's most valuable AI firm Claude's parent company's $65bn in latest funding round underscores vast sums of money still flowing into industry Anthropic, the AI firm behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Thursday it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. The move makes Anthropic the world's most valuable AI startup, eclipsing its competitor OpenAI. The deal marks an exceedingly successful period of growth for Anthropic, which was once considered to be a smaller player in the global AI arms race.

PCWorld reports that Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 focuses on improving AI honesty by teaching the model to admit when it lacks information. The model achieved near-perfect scores in honesty benchmarks for coding questions and exhibited evaluation awareness during testing. Opus 4.8 represents a significant step forward in making AI systems more transparent about their knowledge limitations and uncertainties. Honesty is a key sticking point with even the most powerful LLMs. It's not so much that they're intentionally lying to you; instead, they'll confidently tell you things they're not 100 percent (or even 50 percent) sure about. With Opus 4.8, its latest Claude model, Anthropic says it's made Claude more honest about telling you what it doesn't know, or if it has a low level of confidence in what it's telling you. Released Thursday, Claude Opus 4.8 is Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic's new "frontier" model that's so powerful, only a handful of "trusted partners" have been allowed to test it for security reasons.

LinkerBot makes dexterous robotic hands for as little as $600. It wants to become the standard for humanoids and automated factories--and eventually replace human labor altogether. If you could buy a humanoid robot for less than a smartphone, would you? Would you buy several robots to handle cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and even your job? This is the pitch being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, one of China's leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands.

The complaint, filed on Thursday, said that Perplexity unlawfully copied thousands of CNN stories, videos and images to power its products and distribute "identical or substantially similar" competing content. CNN is asking for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking Perplexity from violating its intellectual property rights. "CNN's lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits," the Warner Bros-owned news company said in a statement. Anthropic was the first AI company to settle one of these cases last year, agreeing to pay $1.5bn to resolve a class action lawsuit from a group of authors. Perplexity is also facing lawsuits from The New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones, among others.

Mathematicians have never been so sought after by the world's richest people. At universities across the world, academics are seeing their colleagues mysteriously disappear and join private companies. Some of these companies are household names, like OpenAI and Google, but others are newly formed and just months old, hoping to capitalise on a moment in which mathematics is seen as the secret ingredient with which to improve artificial intelligence - which may in turn transform mathematics itself. "Last May, I was honestly kind of grieving for my scientific identity," says Ken Ono, who in 2025 went on leave from a professorship at the University of Virginia to join Axiom Math, a start-up aiming to build a maths-focused AI. Ono had been asked by a different company, called Epoch AI, to help craft a set of hard-to-solve maths problems that would test AI's problem-solving ability .

Oura's New Ring 5 Is Smaller and Lighter--and Adds an AI Health Coach But the real upgrade is Oura's push into AI-powered health insights and proactive monitoring. Two years on since the Oura Ring 4, Finnish health tech company Oura is back with a new smart ring --right in time to compete with the other screenless fitness tracker of the moment, the Fitbit Air . The Oura Ring 5 doubles down on the company's minimalist ethos with a smaller ring design, upgraded durability, and--unsurprisingly--a suite of AI-powered wellness features . The Ring 5 is available for preorder today and begins shipping June 4. It starts at $399 in silver and black, while premium finishes--Stealth, Brushed Silver, an updated Gold, and a new Deep Rose color--cost $499.

New mothers working in software development are staring down an AI-pilled workplace they barely recognize. As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention. Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This "meta" prompt makes the AI critique your question and suggest alternatives that might work better. The hardest part about working with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is getting the prompt just right. If you're too specific, the AI may give you a narrow answer that misses the big picture. Or maybe you're asking the model to solve a problem that doesn't actually need fixing.

Are robots nearing their ChatGPT moment? Last month at Beijing's half marathon, a robot named Lightning beat the human world record by nearly seven minutes. It's the latest in a string of AI-powered milestones that have got people wondering whether robots are about to enter our everyday lives, just as chatbots have. And the country leading the charge is China, where the government has pledged to invest more than £100bn in robotics over the next 20 years. To find out how robots are already entering the workforce, and what needs to happen to get them cleaning our homes and weeding our gardens, Ian Sample hears from the Guardian's senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins, and from Nathan Lepora, professor of robotics and AI at Bristol University, who researches how robots can achieve human-like dexterity