Mark Zuckerberg arrives to the Los Angeles superior court on 18 February 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Mark Zuckerberg arrives to the Los Angeles superior court on 18 February 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US - and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies' responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jumped ship from Google as it battles OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for AI dominance, and Meta's smart glasses face a fearsome backlash.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Versus Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series ChatGPT can't join you, but it can make a reservation for you. Shannon Connellan is Mashable's Senior Editor, General Assignments, based in London. She has been Mashable's UK Editor (and still manages the illustrious UK team) and Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives searching for . A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror, and loves to nerd out with movie stars, filmmakers, and TV creators . People are using ChatGPT to sell their homes, message Tinder matches, book flights, browse their medical records, write essays, fabricate receipts, argue with their partners, shop online, talk to their cars, and order their coffee, and now they can make restaurant reservations within the app.

A New Trick Reveals AI Models' Inner Thoughts Researchers devised a way to extract "reasoning traces" from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models. Computer scientists recently discovered a way to extract the hidden "thinking" that frontier AI models perform as they work through complex problems. The findings provide some evidence--although not conclusive proof--that certain Chinese models may have been trained by " distilling " reasoning information from US models that was supposedly hidden because of how closely some of their thinking or reasoning patterns seem to match. The researchers have also demonstrated that the method could be used to recover personal information, like passwords and API keys, from a model's inner reasoning, although this vulnerability has been fixed.

OpenAI is giving some members of its Daybreak cybersecurity program access to a new model that's less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks. The company is also expanding access to Daybreak to more partners, including Accenture, IBM, CrowdStrike, Cisco, Sophos and Cloudflare. OpenAI says the companies will use the cyber models available through Daybreak to protect their customers. Under the expanded program, Daybreak is available to partners in two tiers. Daybreak Blue gives them access to frontier general-purpose models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol, OpenAI's most advanced one yet.

At a convening for the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, I saw how academic researchers are facing up to the challenges of the AI era. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI researchers in the world. I was hosting roundtable interviews and speaking at a media training for a convening of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, an initiative funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that supports academics whose work involves AI. The fellows list is a who's who of AI luminaries, and though not all of them made it out to the Bay, every time I turned a corner I saw a scientist whom I'd interviewed previously or whose research I admired. It's a weird time for university AI researchers, who make up most of the AI2050 group. In the past four years, AI research has reoriented around large language models, and its cutting edge has moved from academic institutions to private companies.

Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Mashable Selects Say More Versus Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Claude Code's auto mode will be on by default, Anthropic confirms The idea is to speed up your coding even more. Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Anthropic's AI programming tool just made a somewhat big change.

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to'pause AI development' in interest of humanity Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to'stop building machines that humans cannot control' Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace. In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country's leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words.

Say More Look Up Total Solar Eclipse 2024 Mashable Selects Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Meta's Muse Glimmer wants to bring AI agents to your laptop Muse Glimmer can run directly on a high-end laptop or PC as Zuckerberg challenges OpenAI and Anthropic for keeping their AI models private. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen Claude's Record-a-Skill cut my research from hours to 30 minutes - but the magic has limits I used Claude Cowork to automate a workflow, and the result was remarkably effective, but it exposed four drawbacks. Claude turns narrated screen recordings into reusable skills. Last month, Anthropic announced a new Claude Cowork feature: the ability to narrate a screen recording and turn it into a Claude skill . I tried it and, well, as they say, All magic comes with a price. Let's set the stage by defining what we're after here. A skill is a very detailed canned prompt that can be run like a program from within Claude (and many other AIs).

What Does the Humbling of Leopold Aschenbrenner Mean for the A.I. Bubble? In the classic book " Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises," the economic historian Charles Kindleberger divided episodes of speculation into five stages. Citing the work of Hyman Minsky, the post-Keynesian theorist, Kindleberger writes that the process begins with a displacement, such as the emergence of an important new technology, or a major policy shift, that gets investors excited about the future. They start to bid up asset prices, and capital floods into the affected sector. As optimism spreads, an investment boom--the next stage--develops, much of it facilitated by credit expansion, and the repercussions are felt in the broader economy.