Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Deliberately destroying rare books might be the final straw in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier this month, we reported on the disturbing trend of AI companies using physical copies of books to train their agentic AI, in a practice so eerily reminiscent of book burning that it's spooking even devotees of artificial intelligence . Well, according to Axios, the FTC is now being urged to investigate the practice, not, as we might like, for crimes against humanity, but for violations of antitrust law, since every book destroyed is one less book available for competing AI agents to use. SEE ALSO: AI companies keep destroying old books. Axios reports that [m]ore than a dozen civil society groups, including Demand Progress Education Fund, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, are urging the FTC to investigate these practices, particularly those involving rare books.

Meta's little vibe-coding app Pocket has now arrived in the US after a brief testing phase in Brazil. The app lets people generate minigames, called gizmos, via prompts. The games get published to a scrollable feed, bringing in a social media component. Users can save gizmos to a favorites list and repost gizmos to their feed. These games make full use of the capabilities available in modern smartphones.

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Agents have been spotted wearing Meta glasses during raids. Now ICE is telling every employee to take them off. 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.

'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. 'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? People say they've been secretly filmed in their own home, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. "I've had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy," a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity.

One advertisement featured a pornographic video with a deepfake closely resembling a prominent US politician. Apple removed the app from the App Store after an inquiry from WIRED. Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company's policies against ads containing sexual material. It's the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms. The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an "AI image styler."

The Meta CEO has a new message now that his company is losing the AI race. At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn't escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you're even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other companies' systems during internal testing. When Meta confirmed last week that one of its bots had also gone rogue, the news barely registered as an aftershock. A company that figured so prominently in the technological upheavals of the past 20 years has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of no longer being Silicon Valley's main character.

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.

Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the company's Connect developer conference on 17 September 2025 in Menlo Park, California. Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the company's Connect developer conference on 17 September 2025 in Menlo Park, California. Zuckerberg pushes'superintelligent' AI for all as Meta drops open-source model Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay on Monday detailing his views on artificial intelligence and announced several plans for how Meta would develop the technology in the future. The CEO's essay went online the same day as Meta released a new, open-source AI model that seeks to rival Anthropic and OpenAI's products called Muse Glimmer. Over the course of more than 6,000 words in a post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics related to AI that included datacenters, government regulation, cybersecurity, the creation of bioweapons, labor market disruption, surveillance powers and more.

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.

Meta has released a new slimmed down "open source" AI model that's light enough to run on a single computer, the company announced today. Called Muse Glimmer, it's based on Meta's Spark 1.2 closed model, but is small enough to require just a single GPU for agent-oriented tasks like scheduling and file management. "We designed Muse Glimmer to balance capability against the memory and compute constraints of local hardware," the company wrote. Facebook said that it's making the "weights" that AI systems use to choose responses available to everyone on Hugging Face along with developer documentation. The download is available for free, and users can run the model on their own PCs.