Google will pay £260m to settle a UK class action over Play Store fees

Google will pay £260m to settle a UK class action over Play Store fees

Google has agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action brought for UK app developers over Play Store commissions, weeks before it was due in court. The claim was originally valued at over £1bn. £100m of the settlement covers the cost of running the case.

August 31, 2026 - 1:28 pm





Alphabet logo displayed on a smartphone screen, with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s profile photo in the background.
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Google has agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action brought on behalf of UK app developers, ending a case that was due to go to trial next month. The deal appeared on Thursday and is worth about $353m, Reuters reported.

Lawyers had previously valued the claim at just over £1bn. It sought compensation for developers who sold apps on the Play Store in the UK.

Barry Rodger, a competition law academic, brought the case as class representative. His lawyers alleged that Google abused its dominant position in two ways. It prevented developers from distributing apps by other routes, and it charged an unfair commission, usually 30%.
Google admits nothing

The settlement needs approval from London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will consider it at a hearing in September. Google made no admission of liability or wrongdoing. The 19-page agreement states that the company “believes it has strong defences to Professor Rodger’s claim”.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The company has not commented publicly on the deal since.

Bloomberg Law reported the underlying allegation in the claimant’s own words. Google, it said, imposed “excessive and unfair” commissions on transactions running through the Play Store.

Rodger called the outcome “a great outcome” for app developers. He had been due in court next month, and the settlement takes the trial off the calendar. “If approved, meaningful financial compensation will become available for businesses that could never have taken on a company like Google alone,” he said in a statement.
Where the money goes

The £260m splits in two. £160m goes to developers who sold an app on the Play Store between August 2018 and July 2026. The remaining £100m covers the costs of bringing and funding the lawsuit.

That means 38% of the settlement pays for the case rather than the claimants. Litigation funding is how these actions get built in the UK, because no individual developer could carry the cost alone, which is the point Rodger made in his statement.

Bloomberg Law reported that the claimant and his lawyers described it as the largest settlement to date under the UK regime. Alphabet’s figure converts to roughly $354m at Thursday’s rate. The Financial Times carried the same £260m number.

The settlement is about a quarter of the original claim. Rodger’s lawyers put the case at just over £1bn. Google has agreed to £260m of that, and to nothing else.
What a developer actually gets

Nobody knows yet. The £160m pot is fixed, but the number of developers claiming against it is not. A larger turnout means a smaller cheque each, and the tribunal has to approve the distribution before anything moves.

The eligibility window is wide. It runs from August 2018 to July 2026, which covers eight years of Play Store sales. Any UK business that sold an app in that period sits inside the class, whether or not it ever heard of the case.

That is the design of the UK regime. A class representative sues for everyone at once, and the people represented usually find out afterwards.
The fourth case of its kind

This is the fourth such action against a major tech company since the start of 2025, according to Reuters. Apple lost a UK lawsuit over App Store commissions in October last year. Qualcomm said in February that claimants would drop a case over smartphone chip royalties. Sony is still fighting a £2.7bn case over PlayStation Store prices.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal now prices app-economy grievances in Britain. Its regime allows a single class representative, in this case an academic, to sue on behalf of thousands of businesses that would never file individually. Litigation funders pay the bills and take their cut from the award.

The commission at the centre of the claim is the one every app economy argument turns on. Google takes up to 30% of transactions made through the Play Store. Developers have spent a decade calling that unfair, and regulators on three continents are now testing whether it is.

Google is fighting the same argument on several fronts. It lost its final appeal over the record 4.1bn euro EU Android fine in July. Rivals then began lining up for damages after Brussels issued its first Digital Markets Act penalty.

In the US, a judge told Google in August to stop making rival app stores hard to install. The Play Store has since started carrying competitors, and a Lisbon company called Aptoide walked in first.
What the UK regulator is doing separately

The settlement does not touch the commission itself. Google can keep charging what it charges, and the agreement says nothing about future rates. A payout closes the past. It does not reprice the next decade.

Britain’s competition regulator is working on that from another direction. In June it proposed letting developers steer users away from Apple and Google payment systems. That proposal, not this settlement, is what would change the 30%.

Nothing in the deal changes the rules for developers outside the UK. UK sales define the class, and the agreement binds Google only in this jurisdiction. European developers watching the number will have to look to Brussels, not London.

Two things follow. The tribunal decides in September whether to approve the deal, and only then does any money reach a developer. Every UK developer who sold an app on the Play Store between August 2018 and July 2026 is in the class, and the size of each payout depends on how many of them come forward.

Clippers and owner Ballmer punished in salary cap probe

 Clippers and owner Ballmer punished in salary cap probe. The NBA yesterday suspended LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for one year, fined the team $30 million, and docked it five first-round draft picks beginning in 2029, saying the team and its leadership circumvented the league’s salary cap for Kawhi Leonard. The league said a law firm’s investigation found “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations,” including helping Leonard secure off-court deals. The team maintained its innocence, saying, “We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings,” and that it plans to challenge the findings and the penalties.

Gates-backed TerraPower targets British nuclear power plant start by 2034

Gates-backed TerraPower targets British nuclear power plant start by 2034

Published by Global Banking & Finance Review

Posted on September 7, 20262 min read

· Last updated: September 7, 2026Add as preferred source on Google
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Quick Summary

TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, aims to have its Natrium reactors delivering electricity in the UK by 2034—its first market outside the U.S.—leveraging supportive UK policy frameworks and ongoing regulatory steps.

Table of Contents: TerraPower's Expansion and the Future of Natrium Reactors in the UK
TerraPower's UK Ambitions
UK Government Support for Nuclear Innovation
Progress and Regulatory Status
Regulatory Approvals and Assessments
Technical Specifications and Fuel Supply
Natrium Reactor Capabilities
Fuel Production Initiatives
Economic Competitiveness and Site Selection
Cost Competitiveness
Potential Locations and Partnerships
Expansion Plans and Collaborations

Gates-backed TerraPower Targets First UK Natrium Nuclear Reactor by 2034
TerraPower's Expansion and the Future of Natrium Reactors in the UK

By Susanna Twidale
TerraPower's UK Ambitions

LONDON, Sept 7 (Reuters) - TerraPower, the U.S. nuclear developer backed by Bill Gates, expects its Natrium reactors to begin generating electricity in Britain by 2034, its CEO told Reuters, making the UK its first market outside the United States.
UK Government Support for Nuclear Innovation

Britain has backed the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) to help to increase energy security and meet climate targets, launching an Advanced Nuclear Framework this year to support privately funded projects.
Progress and Regulatory Status

Newsletter: Stay ahead of the markets. The day's essential banking & finance news, free to your inbox. Subscribe

Chris Levesque, TerraPower's president and CEO, said progress on the company's first Natrium reactor, due to be completed in 2031, showed that "2034 nuclear electricity in the UK from Natrium is very possible".
Regulatory Approvals and Assessments

The technology has cleared regulatory requirements in the United States, where the first plant is being constructed in Wyoming and is currently being assessed under Britain's Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process.
Technical Specifications and Fuel Supply
Natrium Reactor Capabilities

Each sodium-cooled Natrium reactor generates 345 megawatts of baseload power and includes storage capable of boosting output to 500 MW for more than five hours. The reactors run on high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
Fuel Production Initiatives
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Britain and the U.S. are both building plants to produce the fuel, which was previously only commercially available from Russia.
Economic Competitiveness and Site Selection
Cost Competitiveness

Levesque said electricity generated by Natrium plants would be competitive with other low-carbon technologies, including combined solar-and-battery projects, at less than £100 ($135.32) per megawatt hour.
Potential Locations and Partnerships

TerraPower has yet to choose a site for its first UK project, but said its British subsidiary is likely to be based in Liverpool, northwest England, close to the country's nuclear regulator.
Expansion Plans and Collaborations

In the U.S., the company has an agreement with tech giant Meta to develop up to eight reactors. Levesque said TerraPower could seek similar partnerships in Britain.

($1 = 0.7390 pounds)

(Reporting by Susanna Twidale. Editing by Mark Potter)
Key TakeawaysTerraPower anticipates UK Natrium reactors to start powering the grid by 2034, following its first U.S. plant due in 2031 (gov.uk).
The UK government’s Advanced Nuclear Framework encourages privately funded SMR and advanced reactor projects, offering regulatory clarity, planning support, and fuel strategy alignment (gov.uk).
TerraPower has launched TerraPower UK, entered Step 1 of the UK Generic Design Assessment (GDA), and is collaborating with KBR on site evaluations and supply chain planning (terrapower.com).

Android 17 encrypts your web traffic so ISPs can't track which sites you visit

 

Android 17 encrypts your web traffic so ISPs can't track which sites you visit

Android 17 is closing a privacy loophole that has existed since the early days of mobile internet. Even when a connection is secured with HTTPS, the initial handshake between a phone and a website has always broadcast the destination domain in plain, readable text, meaning internet service providers and anyone else monitoring a network could see exactly which sites a user visits. Google is addressing this with four network security upgrades baked into Android 17, the most significant of which is Encrypted Client Hello, or ECH, which scrambles that handshake data so it is legible only to the intended destination. Built alongside Jigsaw and supported by developers through OkHttp 5.5.0, the feature makes Android the first major mobile operating system to roll out ECH broadly.

The update also takes aim at a specific criminal technique known as SMS blasting, in which bad actors use rogue devices to force nearby phones onto outdated 2G networks and then push phishing messages that bypass modern spam filters. Android 17 allows participating carriers to disable 2G connectivity by default, cutting off that attack path entirely without requiring any action from users. Two additional security upgrades round out the package, together addressing what Google describes as some of the most persistent privacy gaps remaining in how phones connect to the world. Android 17 is not yet released, but the groundwork being laid now, from developer library support to carrier partnerships, suggests these protections will be in place when the update arrives later this year.

Zillow settles FTC claims it paid Redfin to stop competing on apartment listings

Zillow settles FTC claims it paid Redfin to stop competing on apartment listings
Published Mon, Aug 24 202611:35 AM EDT

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a group of states settled with Zillow ahead of trial on Monday, ending claims the online real estate platform illegally paid Rocket Companies’ Redfin $100 million to stop competing in apartment rental listings.

The FTC and five states were ready to argue at trial scheduled to start Monday that the Zillow-Redfin partnership drove up costs for landlords and decreased listing quality for renters. More than 30% of Americans rent their homes, according to census data.


Under the settlement, Redfin can continue to display Zillow ads on its sites but will resume its rental advertising business within six months, the FTC and states said.

While Democratic state attorneys general have clashed with the Trump administration on other matters, both the FTC and the states called the settlement a win.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the lawsuit restored competition in online listing platforms, “critical tools that New Yorkers rely on to find affordable homes.”

Virginia, Arizona, Connecticut and Washington were also plaintiffs.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said the settlement will provide competition in rental markets that is “an integral component of President Donald Trump’s domestic housing agenda.”


A Redfin spokesperson said the settlement allows the company to maintain its partnership with Zillow through at least 2030 while building its own rentals business.

Zillow rentals executive Michael Sherman said the settlement is positive and “enables us to keep our energy on innovating for renters and property managers.”
Zillow-Redfin partnership allegedly raised ad prices


Zillow and Redfin made a deal in February 2025: Redfin would wind down its rental listing business, refer its customers to Zillow, and display copies of Zillow’s listings on its site. Redfin agreed to stay out of the business for up to nine years.

In return, Zillow agreed to pay Redfin $100 million, plus fees for each renter who signalled interest in a property.

The FTC sued the companies, as did New York, Virginia, Arizona, Connecticut and Washington. They said that before the deal, Zillow and Redfin were competing to list vacancies in buildings with more than 25 units.

After Redfin stopped competing, Zillow customers paid an average of 14.5% more per listing, an expert for the FTC and states estimated, while some property managers stopped buying online listings.

Zillow had said in court papers that the deal put more listings on both sites and helped it compete with market leader CoStar Group. Exclusive deals are common in the industry, Zillow had said.

How Seoul became the busiest international airport

 

How Seoul became the busiest international airport

Olga Pak / Getty Images

As a result of turmoil in the Middle East, Dubai’s 12-year reign as the top destination for international travelers is over. Seoul’s Incheon Airport has become the world’s busiest hub for international travel over the first six months of this year, according to data from Airports Council International (ACI).

Since the Iran war started in February, the shift away from the city where Tom Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa has been drastic:

• The number of international passengers going through Dubai fell from 7.4 million in February to 2.5 million in March (but rose to 4.7 million in June).
• Meanwhile, Incheon in Seoul served 38.4 million international travelers in the first half of the year.

Lost connection: Transfer traffic in the Middle East has fallen by half since the war began, according to the New York Times. Much of that traffic is going through Asia instead: From January to June, Incheon saw an 18% rise in flyers making a connecting flight and a 63% increase in passengers connecting to Europe, compared to a year earlier.

Plan ahead: The International Air Transport Association reported that bookings are down in the Middle East for June through September. But they’re up 33% from a year ago in the Asia-Pacific region for the same time period.

Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

  

Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

To put it in terms familiar to anyone who’s seen clips of these humanoids, shares of China’s Unitree Robotics did more than a quadruple backflip yesterday in its stock market debut.

It’s a blowout showing from a company whose bots have attracted viral attention over the past year (see: Unitree robots doing synchronized kung fu, surviving martial-arts kicks, and mouthing off as the TikTok star Rizzbot):

• Shares of Unitree surged nearly 630% in China, before closing up 460%.
• The company raised $900 million in its debut. Strategic investors included Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, a group associated with tech giant Tencent, and several state-owned utility companies.
• The IPO valued Unitree at ~$9 billion. That’s more than 200x its earnings last year.

This is the first humanoid company to go public in mainland China, and demand was overwhelming. Retail traders were 5,000x oversubscribed, as China’s world-leading humanoid market is predicted to balloon from $2 billion this year to $15 billion by 2030, per Morgan Stanley.

Zoom out: Unitree is the second major Chinese company in a month to list its shares in Shanghai rather than the US, underscoring China’s efforts to keep its tech players domestic and away from Silicon Valley.

Overwhelming Majorities in Canada, U.S. Say No to Local Data Centre Development

Overwhelming Majorities in Canada, U.S. Say No to Local Data Centre Development
August 19, 2026
Reading time: 4 minutes

Author: The Energy Mix staff
Full Story: The Energy Mix



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Public opposition to artificial intelligence (AI) data centre projects is surging across Canada and the United States, as outrage over the projects’ energy and water use, noise pollution, carbon footprint—and their proponents’ habit of often ignoring or flouting community opposition—unites voters across the political spectrum.

The latest news showed up this week in an exclusive poll for Heatmap that showed public support for data centres collapsing over the last year, with 75% of respondents now saying they oppose development in their communities. The poll results arrived hot on the heels of a decision this week by the Alberta Utility Commission (AUC) to disallow a $1-billion, 1,400-megawatt gas power plant that would have powered a data centre in the rural community of Olds, where 900 people out of a population of about 9,500 were given standing to speaking out on the project.

The data centre and gas plant. proposed by Synapse Real Estate Corp., would have been a “threat to our health, to our financial health, to our children’s future, to the future of Olds as a community,” Olds resident Carol Edwards, a retired finance professor at Simon Fraser University, told The Energy Mix. “There was absolutely no doubt in our minds that this would be the death of our town, that nobody would want to live here, no one would want to buy our houses, and this place would become a ghost town.”

The Heatmap poll by Embold Research found that three-quarters of Americans would oppose a local data centre project, with 60% saying they would strongly oppose it. Those numbers reflect a steady increase from 42% last August, to 51% in February, to 70% in May.

“The shift against the facilities is represented across age, gender, income, partisan ID, and the rural-urban divide,” Heatmap writes. “Data centres are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.”

The trend is particularly powerful among rural voters who’ve “skewed more Republican over the past decade,” with whom local data centres are now 63 points underwater—meaning that number of respondents who oppose them is now 63 percentage points higher than those who support them. The projects are only doing marginally better with urban and suburban voters.

The shift has U.S. politicians either embracing the public rage or scrambling to catch up with it. In Democratic Party primaries earlier this month, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and House of Representatives nominee Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, both won their races with campaigns that emphasized their opposition to local data centre development, Politico reported at the time. Kansas gubernatorial nominee Cindy Holscher won her campaign after shifting her position and calling for a statewide data centre moratorium, while Tennessee House nominee Justin Pearson has been a sharp opponent all along.

“People really effing hate data centres,” El-Sayed told an event last month.

This week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro “enacted new rules that effectively halt any new data centres that face opposition from local officials,” Politico reports. That’s a big pivot for Shapiro, who’s considered a possible presidential nominee in 2028 and “has gone from wooing tech companies a year ago to calling for action against “greedy developers.” His Republican opponent for governor, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, is calling for an outright ban.

Other Republicans are calling for “guardrails” on data centre development “protect skeptical communities from unchecked AI growth, as well as the rollback of industry tax breaks,” Semafor writes. Donald Trump said Wednesday the industry “could use a little public relations help,” after introducing a ratepayer protection pledge in March that would have developers paying for the hundreds or thousands of megawatts of electricity the centres demand.

Earlier this month, Allie Rosenbluth, campaign manager at Oil Change Action, said rising energy costs due to U.S. liquefied natural gas exports and data centre development are shifting the dynamics in the midterm campaign.

“People are really starting to connect the dots that energy affordability and climate are major issues,” Rosenbluth told The Mix. “They’re experiencing it in their energy bills, and they’re also experiencing it if they live next to a data centre or an LNG export terminal. So these things are top of mind to voters.”

Recent polling in Canada suggest the fierce opposition to the Synapse project in Olds is the leading edge of a bigger trend. In a Nanos Research survey for the Globe and Mail, released this week, 64% of respondents said they would oppose or somewhat oppose financial incentives for data centre development.

Opposition was a bit stronger—43.1% against, and 24% somewhat opposed—among Canadians aged 18 to 34. “If you’re a 20-something Canadian, and you’re hearing that the government wants to promote AI data centres, you might be wondering whether the government is investing in something that will put you out of a job,” Nanos founder Nik Nanos told the Globe.

Last month, 81% of participants in a Leger poll said they were worried that data centres would lead to higher power bills, while 79% were concerned about their energy consumption, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions, The Canadian Press reported at the time. At the same time, 46% said domestic data centres would give Canada more control over its digital footprint, and 44% said they would support data centre development in their provinces, compared to 42% opposed.

In June, 68% of respondents told the Angus Reid Institute that AI and tech companies should be subject to heavy regulation, even if it slowed down development, although 74% said they doubted governments could keep up with the technology.
This story is part of The Energy Mix’s partnership with Small Change Fund.

China sentenced Evergrande founder to life in prison.

  China sentenced Evergrande founder to life in prison. A Chinese court sentenced Hui Ka Yan, the property tycoon and founder of real estate developer Evergrande, to life in prison for financial fraud related to the collapse of the company. Evergrande defaulted on more than $300 billion in debts and collapsed in 2021, setting off China’s property crisis. The 67-year-old Hui, who at one point was believed to be the richest man in China, pleaded guilty to an assortment of financial crimes, including embezzlement and bribery. “The amount involved is exceptionally large, the circumstances are particularly egregious, and extraordinarily heavy economic losses have been caused,” the court said in a statement.

China successfully tests high-speed laser link between Earth and the Moon

 

China successfully tests high-speed laser link between Earth and the Moon

Chinese researchers have successfully established a two-way high-speed laser communication link between Earth and the Moon, spanning more than 400,000 kilometers. Announced by the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the milestone follows more than a year of in-orbit testing and represents a significant extension of China's laser communications capabilities beyond near-Earth orbit into deep space. Compared with traditional microwave systems, laser communications deliver faster speeds, greater bandwidth, stronger security, and more compact hardware, advantages that become increasingly critical as lunar ambitions grow more complex.

To recover a signal so faint that ground telescopes catch only a handful of photons at a time, drowned out by moonlight, starlight, and urban light pollution, the researchers developed superconducting single-photon detection hardware and high-sensitivity algorithms. Special coding schemes and high-bandwidth signal processing pushed the link to verified rates of 1.25 Mbps uplink and 100 Mbps downlink. With China planning manned lunar landings and a permanent lunar research station, the volumes of imagery and scientific data that future missions will generate would quickly overwhelm conventional radio links, making this laser highway a foundational piece of infrastructure for the next era of lunar exploration.

Senators demand answers about TikTok’s “depraved” experiment

 📱 Senators demand answers about TikTok’s “depraved” experiment. Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a letter to TikTok executives demanding answers about an experiment the company conducted that withheld a safety feature from millions of users. According to Bloomberg, TikTok intentionally removed a safeguard from 10% of users, subjecting them to potentially harmful content as part of a control group. One of the users in the group was a 16-year-old who was reportedly shown thousands of videos about loneliness and suicide before he died by suicide in 2022. TikTok did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment

13 executives who left OpenAI in 2026

 13 executives who left OpenAI in 2026

By Katherine Li , Lauren Edmonds ,and Brent D. Griffiths

OpenAI continues to undergo significant leadership shake-ups, with multiple senior executives departing in 2026. Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
Aug 26, 2026, 7:22 AM GMT-7





OpenAI's revolving door is still spinning.

The ChatGPT maker has lost a string of senior leaders in 2026, including former operating chief Brad Lightcap, applications CEO Fidji Simo, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, and executives overseeing marketing, enterprise products, science, safety, and ethics. Some left to start new ventures, while some stepped back for health reasons.

The departures follow another year of turnover in 2025, when OpenAI lost its chief people and communications officers, a top researcher who went on to launch an AI-science startup, and at least seven researchers recruited by Meta.

Here are the prominent OpenAI leaders who have headed for the exits in 2026.


Denise Dresser
Denise Dresser is leaving her role as OpenAI's chief revenue officer. Bloomberg/Getty Images


OpenAI announced in August that its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, is leaving the company. Dresser began the position in December 2025.

"Denise will leave OpenAI to pursue other opportunities following a transition period, during which she will work closely with the business team to support our customers," the company wrote in a blog post.

Dali Rajic will take over the role.

Brad Lightcap
Leigh Vogel/Getty Images The Hill & Valley Forum


Brad Lightcap, who worked at OpenAI since 2018, announced his departure on X in August. Lightcap told his followers that he's leaving the startup "to start something new."

"Over the last few months, I've been focused on the next horizon and what would stand in the way of mission success. I believe there are a few important new things the world will need to get right as we enter this next period," Lightcap said on X. "I'll have more to share soon, but I believe in OpenAI more than ever and am excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point."

Lightcap began his tenure at OpenAI as chief financial officer before transitioning to chief operating officer in 2022. In April, OpenAI said Lightcap moved to a role focused on special projects.

Fidji Simo
JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images


In July, Fidji Simo announced she would step down from her role as OpenAI's CEO of applications and transition to a part-time advisor role. Simo, who was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, in 2019, initially took medical leave in April.

"Over the last seven years, I've spent countless hours in doctors' offices, dealing with symptoms, treatments, insurance, uncertainty, and all the invisible work that comes with being a patient," Simo wrote on X in July. "Like millions of others living with chronic illness, I've experienced firsthand how difficult healthcare can be to navigate, even when you have every possible advantage."

Simo became the CEO of applications in May 2025.

Kevin Weil
Bloomberg/Getty Images


Kevin Weil announced his departure on X in April.

"It's been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science," he said.

Weil first joined OpenAI in 2024 as its chief product officer. He later served as vice president of OpenAI for Science, an initiative to build an AI-powered platform to accelerate scientific discovery, starting in October 2025.

Currently, Weil heads an AI science startup that sought a valuation of at least $750 million.

Bill Peebles


Bill Peebles worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for three years before leaving the company in April 2026. Peebles served as the head of Sora, an AI model that uses text prompts to create videos.

"While the original Sora ignited a huge amount of investment in video across the industry, it took the next generation of models with Sora 2 for the broader public to understand the transformation happening," Peeble said on X. "I'm proud of all the sleepless nights before and after the launch this team endured in order to deploy the technology in a responsible way and help steer societal norms."

The video generation AI model first became available to users in December 2024. Nine months later, OpenAI released an updated model — Sora 2 — and an app meant to rival social media sites.

Although the app drummed up major hype, its momentum quickly faded.

OpenAI shut down Sora and its app this April.

Srinivas Narayanan


Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's chief technology officer for business applications, announced in April that he was leaving after three years.

"Leading the b2b engineering team has been an enormous privilege," Narayanan wrote on LinkedIn. "With the recent/upcoming product launches, this felt like the right time to step back."

Narayanan said he planned to spend time with his parents in India before deciding what to do next. He joined OpenAI as vice president of engineering and led teams working on ChatGPT and the company's enterprise products.

Kate Rouch


Kate Rouch stepped down as OpenAI's chief marketing officer in April to focus on her recovery from breast cancer.

Rouch joined OpenAI in December 2024 after more than a decade at Meta, where she served as global head of brand and product marketing. She took medical leave in 2025 while undergoing treatment, then returned to OpenAI.

OpenAI previously said Rouch could eventually return in a more narrowly defined position when her health allowed, and that the company was searching for a new chief marketing officer.

Barret Zoph


Barret Zoph left OpenAI in June, about five months after returning to lead its enterprise AI sales efforts.

Zoph initially departed OpenAI in September 2024 and cofounded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati. He returned to OpenAI in January 2026 after leaving the rival startup.

OpenAI did not disclose why Zoph left.

Chloé Bakalar


Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI's head of ethics, left the company in July, less than a year after joining.

Bakalar joined OpenAI in August 2025 after spending about six years working on responsible AI at Meta. At OpenAI, she examined questions surrounding model behavior, human relationships with AI, and whether advanced systems could warrant moral consideration.

Johannes Heidecke
Johannes Heidecke (right). Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images


Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI's safety systems team, left the company in July amid a reorganization of its safety operations.

Heidecke joined OpenAI in 2021 and took charge of safety systems in 2024. His team evaluated models for potentially dangerous capabilities and developed safeguards intended to prevent harmful behavior.

Following his departure, OpenAI placed its safety teams under Mia Glaese, its vice president of research and safety.

Joshua Achiam
Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images


Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist, left the company in July after nearly nine years.

Achiam previously led OpenAI's mission alignment team, which was tasked with helping the company uphold its founding goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. OpenAI disbanded that team in early 2026 and moved Achiam into the chief futurist role.

Caitlin Kalinowski


Caitlin Kalinowski, who led OpenAI's robotics and consumer hardware team, resigned in March over concerns about the company's agreement with the Pentagon.

"Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got," Kalinowski wrote on LinkedIn. She later said her objection was primarily about governance and that the agreement had been announced before its safeguards were fully defined.

Kalinowski joined OpenAI in November 2024 after leading Meta's augmented-reality hardware efforts, including its Orion glasses project. OpenAI said its Pentagon agreement prohibited domestic surveillance and the use of autonomous weapons.

Kaylin Voss


Kaylin Voss, vice president of sales in the Americas, resigned a week after Dresser left the company.

The news was first reported by The Information.

Before joining OpenAI, Voss worked at Salesforce, where she served as chief revenue officer of Slack and later as executive vice president, Agentforce and Datacloud, according to her LinkedIn.

Chris Malone


Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers, left the company in August, according to The Wall Street Journal. Data centers are crucial to OpenAI's infrastructure. They allow the company to power AI models. Malone's exit comes at a time when AI data centers are deeply unpopular with Americans.

Malone took on the role in March 2025 after working at Meta and Google.

"We recently reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work," an OpenAI spokesperson told the outlet. "We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans."

ChatGPT conversations have no legal protection and are showing up in court

 

ChatGPT conversations have no legal protection and are showing up in court

As people increasingly turn to ChatGPT to work through relationship problems, seek medical guidance, or think through sensitive work matters, many assume those conversations carry some degree of privacy. A review by The Washington Post found otherwise, identifying chatbot conversations cited in at least 12 civil and criminal court cases over the past two years, and legal experts believe the actual number is considerably higher, since not all collected evidence surfaces in court. Unlike communications with a doctor or attorney, conversations with an AI chatbot carry no recognized legal privilege, meaning they can be subpoenaed and used as evidence without the protections many people might expect. The nature of chatbot conversations makes them especially revealing as a paper trail.

Where a search engine query might show only what someone wanted to know, a full ChatGPT exchange captures the reasoning, context, and thought process behind a question. In one Missouri criminal case, police discovered that a suspect had asked ChatGPT whether investigators could determine his responsibility for damaging 17 cars, a conversation that later appeared in the case and contributed to a guilty plea on felony property damage charges. In a separate employment dispute, ChatGPT exchanges about recovering deleted emails became part of an argument that evidence had been withheld during discovery. OpenAI's own policies acknowledge that data can be retained beyond standard deletion windows when compelled by lawful legal process, meaning that neither deleting a conversation nor using Temporary Chat guarantees the record is gone. In just the second half of 2024, OpenAI received 75 government requests for content and disclosed data in 62 of them.

One-third of all published web pages show signs of AI

 The web has changed. Ever since ChatGPT was released, and as of July 2026, one-third of all published web pages show signs of AI authorship. What are we actually reading, and did a person write any of it? Think on that. In related news, Apple Music will start labelling tracks that were generated using AI, following in the footsteps of Spotify and Tidal. Another AI giant in the news is Meta, with its creepy camera-equipped smart glasses. After being banned in numerous social establishments, UK theatres are now considering a ban over piracy concerns. Interestingly, the US ICE also banned employees from using them during active duty, while the same product has also become a nightmare for kids in schools.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of nearly half a million English-language webpages finds that roughly one in ten commercial websites now show meaningful signs of AI authorship, a figure that has risen sharply since ChatGPT's public debut in late 2022. The shift is most pronounced on “.com” domains, where AI-linked linguistic patterns appear at about double the rate seen on “.org” sites and roughly ten times the rate found on.edu” and “.gov” pages. For anyone who reads, publishes, or relies on web content for research or commerce, the data offers the clearest large-scale picture yet of how thoroughly AI writing tools have reshaped the everyday internet.

“In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released,” says Pew Research. Among the most telling signals: em dashes now appear roughly twice as often on webpages as they did in 2023, Oxford comma usage is up 63 percent, and AI-favored vocabulary, words like "delve," "interplay," "pivotal," and "testament", has more than humans typically do in frequency. The rhetorical construction "it's not just X, it's Y," a form of negative parallelism that AI models favour, has nearly tripled in prevalence over the same period. The trend shows no signs of plateauing, and with AI chatbot use now reported by roughly half of U.S. adults, the proportion of machine-assisted content across the web is likely to keep climbing in the years ahead.

YouTube Premium is getting another round of price hikes

YouTube Premium is getting another round of price hikes, and it could hit your wallet soon
Users across multiple markets are sharing new prices, while YouTube has yet to announce a broader global increase
By Paulo Vargas Published August 21, 2026 3:02 AM

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YouTube Premium appears to be getting more expensive again, with subscribers in several countries reporting fresh price increases. Singapore has the clearest confirmed change so far, while Android Authority reports higher prices showing up in parts of Europe. The latest reports follow another recent YouTube Premium price hike in the US.

In Singapore, The Straits Times reports that an individual subscription is rising from S$13.98 to S$15.98 per month, while the family plan jumps from S$27.98 to S$31.98. New subscribers are already paying the higher rates, while existing members will see them take effect after at least 30 days.

Elsewhere, the picture is less certain. Subscribers in several European markets are reportedly receiving emails showing higher prices, but YouTube hasn’t published a wider list of affected countries or new rates.

Where prices are going up

The Singapore increase shows this isn’t purely speculative, but the wider pattern is still being pieced together from regional reports and subscriber notices.

That makes the scope hard to pin down. A hike reported in one country doesn’t necessarily tell you what another market will pay, and the changes can vary depending on the plan. YouTube has also recently raised the price of YouTube Music Premium, adding to the sense that its subscription pricing is moving upward more broadly.

If you already subscribe to Premium, your billing email may be the first reliable sign that your price is changing.
Why this rollout is messy

Without a broader announcement from YouTube, there’s no single place to check which markets are affected. Users are instead relying on local reports and individual notices.

The reported increases also don’t appear to follow one universal jump. That makes it difficult to compare countries or predict what a subscriber elsewhere might end up paying.Unsplash

The evidence, however, points to another round of increases rather than one clearly defined global change.
What subscribers should watch next

The safest move is to keep an eye on your next YouTube Premium billing notice or email. Until YouTube publishes something broader, that will likely be more useful than assuming every country is changing at once.

A higher monthly bill can also change how easy Premium is to justify, especially if you’ve been letting the subscription renew automatically. If the increase reaches your market, it may be worth comparing the full plan against YouTube Premium Lite before the next renewal.

For now, the clearest signal will be what YouTube tells subscribers directly in each affected market.


Paulo Vargas
News Writer
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Paulo Vargas is an English major turned reporter turned technical writer, with a career that has always circled back to…

Bill Gates warns ‘there is no plan’ for AI transition

 

Bill Gates warns ‘there is no plan’ for AI transition

Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

One of the world’s greatest tech innovators just rang one of the loudest AI alarms yet. “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” Bill Gates wrote in an essay yesterday, saying he doesn’t “see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.”

“We need time to prepare for the social, political, and economic upheaval,” the Microsoft co-founder and former AI optimist wrote in the nearly 6,000-word essay. According to Gates:

• The threat that AI and robotics present to blue- and white-collar jobs isn’t comparable to previous technological transitions, which happened over generations and resulted in tech that required—not replaced—human cognition.
• “This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills,” Gates wrote, referencing the rise of deepfakes and chatbot sycophancy alongside AI’s burgeoning capabilities for cyberattacks and bioterrorism.

What do we do? Gates urged governments to impose taxes on AI tokens and bots, set aside certain jobs for humans, and cooperate internationally on regulation—especially the US and China.

Tea: “I don’t really know anybody who’s not concerned,” Gates told Axios, saying that many of the largest tech companies are privately worried about what they might create.

A phone you can repair is finally landing in the US stores

 

A phone you can repair is finally landing in the US stores.

The phone you can actually repair yourself is finally coming to the US. The Dutch company, known across Europe for building devices you can crack open and fix yourself, just launched the Fairphone 6+ stateside, and it arrives with credentials no major brand can match. iFixit handed it a perfect 10/10 repairability score. The warranty runs five years. Software support stretches to 2033. Compare that to what happens when you break a screen on an Apple, Samsung, or Google phone, where a single repair can cost $300 or more.

Twelve modular components sit inside the 6+, and every one of them is designed to be swapped at home. No technician, no appointment, no sealed enclosure. Ordering a replacement screen? That's $90. A fresh battery is $40. The USB-C port, which tends to be the first thing to fail on any phone, costs $20 to replace. The hardware itself is capable rather than flashy: a Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 chip paired with 12GB of RAM. Fairphone lists it at $650 on Fairphone.com, and it works on both T-Mobile and AT&T.

Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter

Image Credits:SOPA Images/Contributor / Getty Images

Anthony Ha
Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+


Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, according to a new report in Bloomberg.

OpenRouter helps customers to select different AI models to perform different tasks, depending on their specific needs and budget. The company announced in May that it had raised a $113 million Series B, at a reported $1.3 billion valuation. (Investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s Capital G.)

At the time, OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallah described the company as the equivalent of Stripe for AI, because it provides customers with a single access point for different systems and prevents lock-in. The startup also claimed to have 8 million global users and to provide access to more than 400 models.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Stripe and OpenRouter were in acquisition talks. Now, Bloomberg said those discussions have led to a deal price of more than $7 billion.

A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

But Biden’ excuses are just admissions Trump has failed

But Biden’ excuses are just admissions Trump has failed
Comments:by Joslin Joseph, opinion contributor - 08/10/26 7:30 AM ET

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President Donald Trump boards Air Force One, Friday, Aug. 7, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

We have all had the similar experience over the last year. When talking about how bad things are going in this country, whether in-person or online, with either family, friends or strangers you will inevitably get hit with an excuse that begins, “But Biden …”

It seems that no matter how badly things are going, President Trump, his administration, his army of cable news talking heads, podcasters, influencers, and regular supporters have a default excuse. “But Biden,” then fill in the blank is supposed to shut you up and accept that the current train wreck should be much, much worse.

It really doesn’t work anymore, does it? I mean, back in January 2025 and the early part of the second Trump term, it was very much a safe way to explain why his “day one” promises didn’t come to fruition right away. But inflation has gone up since the end of Biden’s term. Prices have gone up, the war with Ukraine did not end, we started a whole new war with Iran that was also won on Day One (but not really), gas has skyrocketed, and the list goes on.

It is now August 2026. More than 560 days have passed since Trump took office again. He has attained more power, surrounded himself with yes-men, has a Republican House and Senate, a 6-3 tilt on the Supreme Court, and no excuse to fail. But here we are, with Trump polling in Biden territory and trying to convince Americans that things are going great. And yet, when pressed, Trump and company keep defaulting to how bad things were under Biden.

A leader takes accountability for his job and his mistakes. The effect of tariffs didn’t have the impact that Trump promised, they hurt American businesses and our international trade relations. How badly? Well companies were refunded $100 billion and Trump still keeps pursuing this folly. It is hard to defend Trump as this point, but people still do so by blaming someone else.

We have all dealt with kids that haven’t learned how to take responsibility for their actions. There is always someone else to blame because they believe that their parents, teachers or other adults will believe them.

Sometimes kids will be caught red handed and still try to blame others. It is funny when they are young but aggravating when they get older. Now we are dealing with adults who can’t seem to take account of the fact that they voted for a disastrous president. We have seen countless Trump voters still blame others for Trump’s sole failures.

From Biden to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to just about anyone, it has gotten quite pathetic that people just can’t come to terms with the fact that he has messed up.

The Iran war should be a breaking point for any American. No one likes the theocratic regime in Iran, but Americans were very reluctant to get involved in yet another war in the Middle East. And yet, Trump plunged the country headfirst into a war with no plan and no realistic goals or endgame.

Here, the excuses begin with “But Obama,” in that the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama negotiated was horrible and needed to be withdrawn from. This ultimately led to us attacking Iran. It is a bit curious that the man who brags that he has mastered the art of the deal didn’t even try to fix the alleged problems of the Obama deal and resorted to bombing instead. But here we are.

We all know there is no way Trump will ever hold himself accountable. His bizarre statements where he claims that we are in a “golden age” and everyone loves him is a testament to his worsening mental acuity. But we should stop entertaining those who still make excuses.

In the run up to the midterms, expect a lot of “buts” — “but Biden,” “but Obama,” “but Kamala,” “but Clinton,” “but the Democrats,” “but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” “but Zohran Mamdani,” et cetera. Such excuses will be spouted by many looking to deflect, unwilling to admit that the horse they backed is lame. Democrats must pounce without pulling any punches when it comes to these excuses from MAGA land.

Whenever Trump or his acolytes start to excuse him for his failure with this sort of whataboutism, politely tell them that using past politicians to excuse Trump’s current mess is already an admission that he has failed. He asked for complete power and the voters handed it to him. If he was unable to improve the situation over the predecessors he was criticizing, then he has failed.

When a president fails, it means our country is in bad shape. And you can’t argue that our country isn’t in bad shape. There is no need anymore to blame others for our current condition. Using Biden, Obama, or anyone as an excuse at this point is an admission that Trump has failed.

Joslin Joseph is a recipient of the Military Reporters and Editors award for Best Commentary-Opinion. A graduate of Harvard and Ohio State, he is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq. He currently lives in Anaheim, Calif.

Claude content will soon get invisible AI watermarks

 

Claude content will soon get invisible AI watermarks

Samuel Boivin/Getty Images

Anthropic’s models are about to start telling on themselves. Yesterday, the company announced plans to watermark anything that Claude creates or edits, in compliance with European transparency regulations.

Everything the light touches. The policy will apply worldwide to all text and files that Claude models spit out, whether they’re AI-generated cover letters or AI-proofread lines of code. Loopholes exist: Heavy editing or file conversions may shed the watermark. Otherwise, the virtual scarlet letter will be invisible to the human eye but detectable by Nicolas Cage squeezing lemon juice on it machines. Anthropic said it will help users and other third parties detect the mark, with details to come in “forthcoming documentation.”

Timeline: Watermarking will come with any Claude model launching after Aug. 2, which is when the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code kicked in. It carries a four-month grace period for existing models, so Anthropic said it’s working to get its older Claudes up to par.

Other companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have also pledged to follow the EU’s new rules.

Zoom out: Anthropic’s move comes as backlash mounts against sneaky AI content. Allegations of computer-generated writing plague the book-publishing world. Meanwhile, AI music platform Suno recently said it would watermark its tracks, and Substack recently launched a tool for flagging AI writing that postures as human-made—something the newsletter company’s CEO referred to as “Claudefishing.”