Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Look Up Creator Playbook Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series 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. This Tweet is currently unavailable.

Chinese robots have quickly entered global public consciousness in recent years, appearing as background robo-dancers in pop concerts and as humanoid marathon and sprint runners outpacing elite athletes ( 1). Domestically, robots are deployed as traffic guides and restaurant service staff, while swarms of drones entertain audiences in urban light shows or deliver takeout to high-rises ( 2, 3). These public debuts serve to both normalize automation in everyday civilian life ( 4) while projecting international soft power. Behind the public spectacle lies a bold agenda for global economic dominance. In its geopolitical contest with the United States, Beijing sees robotics as the core engine to project power and dictate the future of global supply chains ( 5).

Sen. Roger Marshall calls a New York Times report on lawsuits against his former OB-GYN patients a "hit job" planted by Chuck Schumer as the Kansas Senate race tightens.

The president has doubled down on data centers and AI. His base is running in the opposite direction. Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season's biggest issue: data centers. If you've got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.

Executives from OpenAI and Microsoft were reportedly worried about ChatGPT training that scraped millions of news articles, The New York Times reported. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, said OpenAI's work was akin to the "largest theft of labor in human history" that could create a "doom loop," while OpenAI exec Nick Turley said it represented an "existential threat to publishers." Those comments came out of newly unsealed court documents as part of a lawsuit launched by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023. Only snippets from the documents were made public without any context around them. Several such lawsuits have already swung in favor of AI companies, but judges have pointedly stated that their rulings were made because the law around AI use has yet to be settled.

Anthropic has disrupted several attempts to use its artificial intelligence models for research that could help develop biological weapons, the United States technology company has reported. The firm listed the cases in a report issued on Thursday outlining misuse of its models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Concern continues to rise over the potential dangers posed by AI development. The company said it erred on the side of caution. In one case in May, a scientist sought help with a grant application to engineer mutations to chikungunya - a mosquito-borne virus similar to malaria - to make it more harmful in live animals.

The US government wrote a letter in support of OpenAI's argument that training AI on others' intellectual property is fair use. The Trump Administration just took OpenAI's side in the artificial intelligence company's legal battle with the New York Times. Now, the government has stepped in, arguing that OpenAI's actions were within bounds. "Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," lawyers for the government wrote. While the letter focuses on the New York Times and OpenAI, the government noted that its arguments apply to all of the parties in this case and related cases, including other publishers and authors.

Creator Playbook Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series Are you a'meat proxy'? The latest AI slang, explained. If you send unreviewed ChatGPT outputs to your coworkers, this new insult may apply to you. 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.

Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Hub Versus Say More Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Apple could spend nine figures on publisher deals to help Siri AI get better at keeping up with current events. 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.

The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates. If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it's like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom's Met Office. Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America's 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation's capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.