The NAACP sued xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging that they violated the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. The number of unpermitted turbines rose to 57 by mid-May and there were plans to install two more, the NAACP said in a June 12 filing.

"Defendants’ Colossus Gas Plant powers xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center, which in turn powers the chatbot 'Grok,'" the lawsuit said. The gas turbines have fueled both health concerns and noise complaints.

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During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its “HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials” offering for free for “up to one year,” per a press release. HPE’s website describes its virtualization platform as a “VMware alternative.” It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you’re ready,” HPE’s website says.

“New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services,” HPE’s announcement reads, referring to HPE’s group for helping IT teams manage funding.

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It's easy to see why horizontal gene transfer would be common among microbes. They often live in complex communities that are likely awash in the DNA of dead and damaged cells. Plus, bacteria and archaea lack a membrane between their DNA and the rest of the cell, making it easier for environmental DNA to find its way to the genome.

However, a new study this week shows that horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common even in multicellular animals. And it does so by examining the genomes of multiple cockroach species, which have had bits of bacterial DNA for millions of years.

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"They're built, and sitting in a payload processing facility waiting for trips to orbit," said Steve Metayer, vice president of Amazon Leo Production Operations, during a teleconference with reporters. "And we're currently manufacturing several satellites a day."

Metayer spoke on the eve of the company's next mission, during which an Ariane 64 rocket will launch three dozen Amazon Leo satellites into orbit from a spaceport in French Guiana. Liftoff is targeted for 7:53 am ET (11:53 UTC) on Wednesday.

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The plan, as announced on May 13, would have treated usage of the Claude Agent SDK (including via third-party apps and the programmatic "claude -p" command) separately from "standard" Claude usage via the chat interface or the official Claude CLI. As of June 15, Anthropic said that kind of outside SDK usage would be billed at Anthropic's prevailing API rates, with subscribers receiving a simple monthly usage credit equal to their subscription price.

That would have been a major change from the current setup, where Agent SDK use is limited only by the standard weekly caps applied to a user's current Claude subscription tier. Those generous limits allow power users to squeeze a lot more usage out of those paid subscriptions than they would get by paying the same price for API fees. One analysis suggests that Claude Opus users start saving money from their subscription after just two to three messages per day, and that their subscription could be worth many multiples of its monthly cost in API usage.

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But according to The Wall Street Journal, the DOJ career lawyers who led that investigation "were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law." DOJ senior leaders closed the investigation "before career staffers who were concerned about the acquisition had an opportunity to object, according to people familiar with the matter," the WSJ reported.

Commenting on the report that the decision to allow the deal surprised staff investigators, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that "the American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor. This reeks of corruption."

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Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael highlighted AI-generated reports to Congress as a key example of how the Department of Defense—stylized as the Department of War under the Trump administration—has adopted generative AI during an event hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, DC, on June 12. The Pentagon has made AI tools, starting with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, widely available to members of all six military branches through the department’s bespoke GenAI.mil platform since December 2025.

“I have to report to Congress every year on this thing,” Michael said. “Let me load all the papers onto it and have it draft me a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staffing time and do it in five hours.”

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Google no longer uses an unmodified version of Android on its phones—the Pixel build includes numerous features that are distinct from Android 17 itself. Other device makers will include versions of some of these features when they eventually update their phones, but for now, Google's Pixel phones are the only way to experience Android 17.

The multitasking Bubbles system in Android 17 expands on a similar (but underutilized) messaging feature. In Android 17 on Pixels, you can long-press on any app icon to open that app as a floating window. When minimized, these bubbles stay on top of other apps. On foldable phones, the bubbles dock into a "bubble bar" for easy multitasking.

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On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, DC, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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It comes just two days after SpaceX's unprecedented IPO and a few months after the merger of SpaceX and xAI, which brought a significant restructuring of xAI.

Cursor was one of the first tools to fully bake features that leverage large language models into an IDE. It's a branch of Visual Studio Code with heavy AI integration. However, incumbent platforms and bigger AI companies have since rolled out comparable features.

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The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI's reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company's monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.

But the company's fast-growing revenues are still dwarfed by its even more significant expenses. OpenAI's total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025. Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.

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"Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment."

The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.

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You don't have to have been a reader since 1998 to weigh in, either. Whether you're a first-time reader, an old grizzled forum veteran, a front page comment maven, a newbie sysadmin, or a CEO, we want to hear what you have to say, no matter who you are. The only requirement is that you're a human! (Aliens are welcome as well, though we didn't really define any demographic categories for extraterrestrial beings. We'll tackle this issue if it comes up, I suppose.) There are a few text fields. Yes, we will read what you write there!

To assay, perchance to sing

Fortunately, this isn't a long survey—just a handful of targeted questions. We're not collecting any personally identifying information, and responses will only be viewed in aggregate. None of the data will be analyzed by anyone except us, and none of it will be sold or otherwise distributed outside of Ars. (We're using SurveyMonkey for our survey platform, the same as we have many times in the past.)

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Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.

Jumping over guardrails

One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as <img> and <form>. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker’s web server, where the secret information is captured in logs.

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The name behind the bestselling desktop PC in history came back about a year ago. Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, best known for running the Retro Recipes (now known as Retro Recipes x Commodore) YouTube channel, acquired the Commodore Corporation and "100 percent of the original and official trademarks that defined the Commodore name since 1983,” per a July 2025 press release. Simpson said the price was “in the low seven figures.” Since the acquisition, the brand released the Commodore 64 Ultimate and the Commodore 64X PC, a mini PC housed in a chassis that resembles the Commodore 64.

Today, the new Commodore announced a new device in a dated design: a flip phone.

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The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause."

The two-stage, 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket was awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. It was the fourth time in five months that Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, Germany, had reached a target launch date for the second test flight of the Spectrum launch vehicle.

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The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell.

The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.

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"We’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in the announcement.

In addition to the ban on social media, Starmer's government said it will impose "world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s... Restrictions on these functionalities will also be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds to prevent a cliff-edge at 16." The livestreaming and stranger-contact rules would apply to a range of services, such as online gaming.

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In a marquee seven-part bond offering, the company will issue a wide range of maturities from two years to 30 years, according to a term sheet seen by the FT.

The issuance was upsized from $20 billion after receiving more than $85 billion in orders by early afternoon in New York, according to people familiar with the deal.

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The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

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