Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has quickly become one of the leading AI companies and a worthy competitor to OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft with its Claude models. Building on this momentum, the company held its first developer conference, Thursday, -- Code with Claude -- which showcased what the company has done so far and where it is going next. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant Anthropic used the event stage to unveil two highly anticipated models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Both offer improvements over their preceding models, including better performance in coding and reasoning. Beyond that, the company launched new features and tools for its models that should improve the user experience. Keep reading to learn more about the new models.

Is Google's new AI Mode feature theft? The News/Media Alliance, trade association representing news media organizations in the U.S. and Canada, certainly thinks so. At Google's I/O showcase earlier this week, the tech company announced the public release of AI Mode in Google Search. AI Mode expands AI Overviews in search and signifies a pivot away from Google's traditional search. Users will see a tab at the top of their Google Search page that takes them to a chatbot interface much like, say, ChatGPT, instead of your typical Google Search results.

AI and creators mix much like oil and vinegar -- not at all unless you use a very specific technique (whisking) for a very specific purpose (making salad dressing). For Darren Aronofsky, the director behind Requiem for a Dream, The Whale, and Black Swan, that technique involves using Google DeepMind's research team and three filmmakers to produce short films that embrace new technology and storytelling. The partnership between Aronofsky's venture Primordial Soup and Google DeepMind will create frameworks for AI's role in filmmaking in an effort to prioritize artists in the conversation. It was announced during Tuesday's Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference. "Filmmaking has always been driven by technology," Aronofsky said in a press release.

A swath of US technology firms announced deals in the Middle East as Donald Trump trumpeted 600bn in commitments from Saudi Arabia to American artificial intelligence companies during a tour of Gulf states. Among the biggest deals was a set signed by Nvidia. The company will sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips in Saudi Arabia, with a first tranche of 18,000 of its newest "Blackwell" chips going to Humain, Saudi Arabia's sovereign-wealth-fund-owned AI startup, Reuters reported. Cisco on Tuesday said it had signed a deal with G42, the AI firm based in the United Arab Emirates, to help the company develop that country's AI sector. Trump plans to visit the UAE on Thursday.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone said it plans to buy back as much as 200 billion ( 1.4 billion) of its shares, joining a growing list of such measures bolstering the Japanese market. The buyback will take place from May 12 through March 31 and is geared toward lifting capital efficiency and boost shareholder returns, the company said in a statement on Friday. Shares of Japan's biggest telecom operator were up about 3.4% as of 1:40 p.m. in Tokyo, off its day's high of 5.6%. NTT also forecast full-year operating income and announced quarterly profit that trailed analyst estimates. The buyback news comes on the heels of a decision to take over NTT Data Group in a deal worth 2.37 trillion -- a move it said would speed up its ability to make big bets on artificial intelligence.

Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, announced a voluntary software recall for its vehicles. The company had paused its driverless vehicle operations for a review following an incident last month where a Zoox car and a passenger car collided in Las Vegas. According to the report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the crash did not cause any injuries. CNBC reports that Zoox has resumed usual operations following the software update. "After analysis and rigorous testing, Zoox identified the root cause," the company said in a blog post today.

OpenAI has reversed course in the process of transforming into a for-profit entity, announcing on Monday that its non-profit arm would continue to control the business that makes ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) products. Previously, the company had sought more independence for its for-profit division. "We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware," said CEO Sam Altman in a letter to employees. Altman and the chair of OpenAI's non-profit board, Bret Taylor, said the board made the choice for the non-profit to retain control of OpenAI. A press release from the company said that the for-profit portion of the company, through which Altman has been able to raise billions to fund OpenAI's work, would transition to a public benefit corporation, a mission-driven designation for a corporate structure that is still aimed at profit but also "has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission".

Meta is releasing a new tool it hopes will encourage developers to use its family of Llama models for their next project. At its inaugural LlamaCon event in Menlo Park on Tuesday, the company announced the Llama API. Available as a limited free preview starting today, the tool gives developers a place to experiment with Meta's AI models, including the recently released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick systems. It also makes it easy to create new API keys, which devs can use for authentication purposes. "We want to make it even easier for you to quickly start building with Llama, while also giving you complete control over your models and weights without being locked to an API," the company said in a blog post published during the event.

OpenAI announced today that users will soon be able to buy products through ChatGPT. The rollout of shopping buttons for AI-powered search queries will come to everyone, whether they are a signed-in user or not. Shoppers will not be able to check out inside of ChatGPT; instead they will be redirected to the merchant's website to finish the transaction. In a prelaunch demo for WIRED, Adam Fry, the ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, demonstrated how the updated user experience could be used to help people using the tool for product research decide which espresso machine or office chair to buy. The product recommendations shown to prospective shoppers are based on what ChatGPT remembers about a user's preferences as well as product reviews pulled from across the web.

Nearly two months after hundreds of prospective California lawyers complained that their bar exams were plagued with technical problems and irregularities, the state's legal licensing body has caused fresh outrage by admitting that some multiple-choice questions were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence. The State Bar of California said in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam. But it declined to acknowledge significant problems with its multiple-choice questions -- even as it revealed that a subset of questions were recycled from a first-year law student exam, while others were developed with the assistance of AI by ACS Ventures, the State Bar's independent psychometrician. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at UC Irvine Law School. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using ...