The chipmaker’s board approved plans to invest up to $500 million in OpenAI preferred stock reserved for large investors and another $500 million to purchase Anthropic common shares at the latter’s expected IPO price, according to Reuters. Such an investment may give markets “a shot of confidence as the artificial-intelligence trade shows signs of strain,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

But analysts also warned that such circular financing among investors, suppliers, and customers has made it difficult to evaluate real market demand for AI-related hardware and services, according to the Journal.

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The order came after the DOJ asked LinkedIn to turn over 18 months of communications from targeted journalists who collectively published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics over that time period. The request was not limited to journalists involved in a controversial report from a news outlet that Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. (The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets.) Instead, the DOJ cast a wide net, requesting extensive LinkedIn data on journalists who had any possible link to the journalists around the time the report was drafted.

The majority of journalists have LinkedIn accounts and publish their contact information to encourage sources to connect on the platform, LinkedIn argued. So allowing that government overreach went beyond harming targeted journalists and threatened to undermine a critical platform where journalists frequently connect with confidential sources, judges ruled. Even more concerning, the Trump administration secured a secrecy order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the sweeping request for a year. That left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised, judges ruled.

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This particular controversy has been brewing behind the scenes for months, as judges and jury members for the prestigious Independent Games Festival Awards discussed the issue in private discussion groups. But the debate started to break into public view on Monday when 19 members of the 50-plus-member jury released a signed statement outlining a stance "declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity."

Noting "a significant increase in the number of submitted games developer with generative AI tools," the group of jurors called out AI's ecological, economic, psychological, and labor harms in rejecting tools whose use, they said, is still "not a foregone conclusion in our industry."

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On Tuesday night, Apple posted a message to the Apple Support Community announcing the forum's closure:

The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.

You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.

We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.

For 28 years, the forum has provided Apple users with a way to get quick technical advice about their products. That advice usually came from fellow users, though Apple employees occasionally chimed in. As with any community forum, the helpfulness and accuracy of the advice varied.

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The changes greatly expand the scope of its next-generation Nighthawk general-use processors by adding a version with over 500 programmable qubits. At the same time, it's stepping back a bit on its plan to link multiple Nighthawk processors together, dropping the intended number of linked systems from nine to two.

The total number of qubits planned for next year will remain the same; how the company is getting there, however, will be different.

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Ars’ attempts to get DoT to tell us more about the potential influx of little vehicles have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But this week, there has been movement on the topic, with Toyota announcing that it will bring back the Scion brand with the KEI-01.

What’s a Kei car?

In the US, the preponderance of humongous SUVs is a consequence largely of government policies, specifically corporate average fuel economy standards that made it less profitable to sell smaller, efficient cars. Japan’s Kei cars are what happens if the government instead restricts the size, engine capacity, and power output.

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Conducted as a sort of proof-of-concept project in just four weeks, the work is significant in two ways. It serves as further independent validation of the cryptography that protects massive quantities of the world's communications on platforms like the Signal app, Google Messages, and WhatsApp. And it demonstrates Google DeepMind's formal verification capabilities using a new AI framework called AlphaProof Code.

More broadly, AI-aided formal verification is having a moment, but it is unclear how practical it will be for widespread use and how effective it can be at securing large amounts of code. Proponents of formal verification have long referred to it as a sort of holy grail in software security, because it uses math to check and validate that software is functioning as intended—in other words, that it doesn't have critical vulnerabilities.

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The FireCuda Forge is available right now through Seagate's web store, and comes in 8TB ($699) or 20TB ($899) HDD configurations—neither of which includes the required SSD. Users will have to bring their own SSD, with some specific restrictions. The FireCuda Forge is compatible with M.2 2280 NVMe drives that are PCIe Gen3 or higher. The maximum supported NVMe capacity is 1TB, which means that's as much data as you'll be able to dedicate to storage on the "fast side" of the hybrid setup. The NVMe will require minimum speeds of 2,400MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write, and a unit with DRAM cache is recommended. Seagate claims 2,500MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write speeds for the combined system, along with USB4 and support for Windows 11 and macOS 26+.

Credit: Seagate

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The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital has twice in the last two weeks announced it was sending cash to two of SpaceX's competitors in the launch business. First, on October 26, the office announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space. Military officials revealed a second $150 million Pentagon loan Tuesday for Rocket Lab.

Stoke Space and Rocket Lab are the first two launch companies to receive significant support from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), an organization established in 2022 to infuse companies developing "vital" national security technologies with capital. OSC has been on a loan spree in recent weeks, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to companies specializing in batteries, drones, and semiconductors. In the space sector, the office also provided a $150 million loan to LeoLabs, a commercial satellite tracking company, for production and deployment of radar units.

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The Ring Rover Cam and Ring Drone Cam are expected to reach customers starting at the end of 2026 and in early 2027, respectively, according to an Amazon announcement posted on November 10. Amazon describes the devices as relying on an AI Pilot system that uses each device’s cameras along with “specialized vision models, on-device sensors and cloud processing” to plan patrol routes while autonomously navigating around obstacles such as furniture.

Both devices also use that AI Pilot system to digitally map the floor plan of the customer’s home or business. This setup process occurs after the customer carries the Ring drone through their indoor spaces or allows the Ring Rover to do some autonomous exploration.

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"After the American people last week overwhelmingly rejected the MAGA agenda, there is no justification for this committee to advance partisan nominees during the lame-duck period," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said today at the Commerce Committee's nomination hearing for Danielle Thumann Severs, Trump's pick to fill an empty commissioner's seat.

Thumann Severs, an attorney and senior counsel to Carr, faced questions from Democrats about whether she supports Carr's attacks on TV broadcasters.

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The information is revealed through links allowing Grok Build users to share their apps with others. Grok takes steps to randomize the URLs so only people who know the exact URL can access the data stored there. A design decision by developers of the platform, however, completely torpedoes that objective and makes it possible for anyone to enumerate thousands of live Grok Build projects. Except in rare cases, clicking those links opens the app and reveals all data associated with it.

You had one job

Research from security firm Claroc shows that the exposed data includes things like internal business plans, ad proposals, medical exam results, galley checklists from a celebrity cruise line, and employee names and ID numbers. Ironically, some of the sensitive data comes from two-dozen apps built by SpaceXSI (the name of the now-merged SpaceX and xAI) itself. A small sampling of the documents revealed in the SpaceXSI apps—Claroc found 24 of them—include an onboarding plan, marked confidential, for a new member of SpaceXSI’s enterprise sales team, a sales territory map of 594 accounts, internal system addresses for sales team tools, and advertising proposals.

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Strogatz is perhaps best known in his field for his co-authorship of a seminal 1998 paper with Duncan Watts on the collective dynamics of small-world networks. He has also studied chaos theory as applied to physics, the geometry of supercoiled DNA, and the biological collective oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies and crickets that chirp in unison. In 2005, Strogatz extended his study of synchronicity to the crowds that caused the wobbling of London's Millennium Bridge.

An award-winning communicator, Strogatz wrote three series of columns on mathematics for The New York Times in 2010, 2012, and 2025 and hosted a podcast for Quanta magazine from 2020–2021. He has written four popular books: Sync (2003), The Calculus of Friendship (2009), The Joy of X (2012), and the New York Times bestseller Infinite Powers (2019).

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Google's MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) launched in 2015 as Project Fi with support for both T-Mobile and Sprint service. The service initially only worked on Google's Nexus phones, which would switch between networks based on signal strength. After T-Mobile absorbed Sprint, Fi switched to being a single-network service in the US while continuing to hop between networks for international travel.

With the super network, Google Fi is again a dual-carrier service stateside. Phones connected to Fi will be able to hop between T-Mobile 5G and a different 5G network to provide the best possible connectivity. Google's blog post announcing the change conspicuously doesn't mention either network, saying only that it supports "two of America’s best 5G cellular networks."

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The Pixel 11 was Google's first foray into "Gemini Intelligence" branding, something we'll see a lot more of going forward. Some of the features under that heading were limited to Google's newest phones (and in some cases, Samsung's phones). The November Pixel Drop will expand these AI features to the Pixel 10 lineup, but importantly, that doesn't include the budget-oriented Pixel 10a.

For starters, the Pixel 10 series will get the improved personalized suggestions (previously known as Magic Cue) that debuted on the Pixel 11. This enables things like sending grocery lists to Google Keep from other apps and generating summaries from the context menu. Rambler, Google's AI-assisted voice input system, is also coming to the 2025 phones. Likewise, Gemini app automation will roll out on Pixel 10 with this update. This feature is still limited to select apps in rideshare, food delivery, travel, and a few other categories.

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Tubi is a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service that has both live channels and on-demand content.

Today, the Fox-owned company announced “Mixtapes” as a way for users to make watchlists from Tubi’s “nearly 400,000 movies and TV episodes,” Tubi’s announcement said, adding:

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Valve has been collecting anonymized frame rate data from Steam players who opt in since February. Yesterday evening, the company announced it has started sharing that data on many Steam Store pages as averages and histograms for both the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

Valve acknowledges that players enabling VSync or frame rate limits can bias the collected data somewhat and that the measurements don't account for custom in-game settings that Steam Deck users may tinker with to get a game running. Regardless, Valve says it has nonetheless "found that the framerate data consolidates around relatively narrow ranges."

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Annual greenhouse gas emissions are much less variable, having increased fairly steadily, but many complicating factors can still muddy the picture. Sometimes those factors conspire to throw a year off the trend. It looks like 2026 will be one of those years.

A new analysis led by Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia estimates that fossil fuel emissions have fallen about 0.4 percent from last year. This probably isn’t a peak that symbolizes heartening progress on climate change, though; the researchers think it’s a short-term dip driven by the war in Iran and its effect on oil prices.

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The lawsuit involves two of the most prominent companies in this competition, Houston-based Axiom Space and Long Beach, California-based Vast Space. And it is surfacing as final proposals for private space stations are due from companies to the US space agency a little more than one month from today, on December 14.

According to the court filings unsealed by a November 4 order from US District Judge Charles Eskridge, Axiom is pursuing a False Claims Act case against Vast in which Axiom accuses Vast of presenting NASA with a fraudulent mission-planning document that incorporates Axiom's proprietary information.

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DeepMind's physical AI platform has several computational layers between user input and robotic action. There's the vision-language model piece, which is Gemini Embodied Reasoning. Essentially, it takes your instructions and uses live video to plan how the robot can accomplish the task. The other main component is the vision-language-action (VLA) that actually generates robot actions, like moving an actuator—that's Gemini Robotics, which has been bumped to version 2.5.

DeepMind says that Gemini Robotics 2.5 is much better at tasks that require a high degree of dexterity. The model was evaluated across more than 200 activities, including serving food with tongs and using a pipette, as you would see in a laboratory. Google also showed that Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid robot with Gemini Robotics 2.5 can now tie a bow with its five-fingered hands, a notable feat, because deformable objects (like ribbon) are notoriously difficult for robots to manipulate.

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