The NFL season just got underway, but preparations for the 2027 Super Bowl began at ESPN as soon as the 2026 game ended this past February. 

An advertising company is challenging consumers to pick their AI-generated ad out of a lineup, and so far, participants aren’t up to the task.

As more women join the workforce and gradually gain representation in leadership roles, the lack of resources like affordable childcare and paid maternity leave has become increasingly consequential. 

The key to Adidas’s recent revival? Getting rid of all the “no-sayers,” CEO Bjørn Gulden told an audience at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. He credits this strategy for turning the brand around after a tumultuous period.

Barclays workers in the United Kingdom are protesting the bank’s move from two office days a week to three (with senior staff expected four days) and demanding that the firm cover costs associated with the policy. 

As concern rises over the risks of artificial intelligence, hopes for any kind of global approach depend on cooperation between the U.S. and China — superpowers that seem only to be more skeptical of each other’s AI strategy.

AI governance is expected to be on the agenda in a meeting planned for next week in Washington between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The topic has gained urgency in both countries, with American tech leaders saying that averting worst-case scenarios for rogue AI depends on a degree of cooperation with China.

But both countries are vying for a decisive advantage on AI, with Trump warning that any efforts to regulate the technology would help China. That sets up a meeting in which any agreements might be superficial but a possible start to something larger.

“A formal agreement or consensus may be near impossible, but they do not need to go that far,” said Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies’ Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs. “Trump and Xi just need to create political space by acknowledging AI poses risks to both countries.”

Despite being the third-largest fast-food hamburger chain in the world and the second-largest in the U.S. after McDonald’s, Wendy’s has struggled lately with declining sales and a shrinking store footprint.

Someone can convert an idea into reality faster than ever before with the help of generative AI, and that makes the role of humans in the process even more important. “More is not always better. Faster is not always better,” said Emily Galloway, Spotify’s senior director of product design, at The New Rules of Great Design panel during the 2026 Fast Company Innovation Festival. “Human judgment is becoming so important.”

If you’ve ever wanted more information about what’s going on inside your mouth between dental visits, you’re in luck. Now, there’s an at-home oral-care system designed to give you exactly that.

In the past 10 years, OnlyFans has paid out $30 billion to its creators. And while most people still associate it with the sort of giggle-inducing adult content that put the platform on the map, you might be surprised by who is cashing in now.

The past few weeks have seen a host of AI model and tool releases, and—although it might sound cliché at this point—it’s fair to say the abilities of AI today make what was available even six months ago seem like toys. During the same period, the AI industry has faced growing backlash over concerns about how it will affect the environment, destroy creativity and critical thinking, or even self-organize in ways that could be destructive to, well, all of humanity.

A few years ago, I ended a client relationship over what I’ll call “values misalignment.” It had been steady work for many months. But the company’s public positions on several issues were in direct opposition to things I believed in. Even though my work was mostly behind the scenes, I didn’t want to be associated with the company in any way. It wasn’t worth the stress.

Nelson Griggs, Nasdaq’s president and head of its Capital Access Platforms Division, sat down with Fast Company senior writer Ainsley Harris during this year’s Innovation Festival to discuss how the new era of mega-IPOs could reshape industries, the public stock market, and the economy.

For more than two decades, truck driver Joe Macken spent his free time building a massive scale model of his native New York City out of balsa wood and foam board.

When he finished, his daughter convinced him to show off the sprawling basement creation—encompassing over 800,000 structures—on TikTok. The video clips almost immediately went viral.

Now Macken’s model is on display at the Museum of the City of New York, which reached out to him after seeing his TikTok videos gain more than 10 million views in one week. “He Built This City,” as the exhibit is called, opened in February along Manhattan’s museum row near Central Park. It runs through Oct. 12.

“I never really thought about finishing it because I had so much fun building it,” he said on a recent visit to the exhibit.

The museum’s chief curator, Elisabeth Sherman, said the model is a rare piece that appeals to both social media followers and traditional museum goers.

“I think people always want to get their arms around this whole city, this city that is impossible to know, impossible to grasp, and this is a way to see it from a bird’s-eye view,” she said. “We rarely have anything these days that reaches everyone in that way. We love that kind of energy it brings.”

Anthropic’s Claude is helping the company develop the next, more intelligent version of the model, the artificial intelligence lab said in an announcement Thursday.

Claude is leading 26% of Anthropic’s model research and development, which the company said means it can complete most of a given task “end-to-end from a high-level prompt” while still being under human supervision. The model is not yet working completely autonomously.

Still, about 90% of the company’s research and development is done in “collaboration” with Claude, which Anthropic said means the model can do “large chunks of work under close human direction.”

The announcement came as some leading figures in AI, led in large part by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns.

As leaders consider pacing AI’s development, “we should do everything possible to minimize the gap between what frontier labs know and what the public knows,” the company said in a blog post. “This means better measuring the development of AI, reporting on it publicly, and giving society an opportunity to decide how to use this information.”

The company said that models accelerating their own development could make it “more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems.” It argued that sharing these metrics could lead to better understanding of how close leading AI labs are to reaching recursive self-improvement, or a model’s ability to autonomously build its successor.

Anthropic also urged other AI developers to share similar metrics on a regular basis, encouraging the use of a public methodology so the numbers could be compared over time, and potentially across labs.

It was unclear from Anthropic’s disclosure how close the company believes it is to achieving recursive self-improvement, but the pace at which Claude has increasingly contributed to research and development is notable. The portion of work Claude “leads,” or does in large part while remaining under human supervision, was none in February. Six months later, it was leading a quarter of research and development work, reaching that benchmark in August.

The company also shared details of agent oversight measures it has in place, noting that there were approximately 30,000 agents doing research and engineering work as of August. Oversight measures are crucial for seeing how often agent misbehavior is detected by monitoring systems, the company said. Anthropic recently committed to setting up external third-party evaluators who will be embedded within the company to monitor safety efforts.

An Anthropic researcher kicked off much of the recent dialogue around AI safety when he resigned last week with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity. Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk and other tech leaders have since supported the idea of slowing down development, but other tech leaders and President Donald Trump have pushed back.

Warren Buffett has stepped down as chairman at Berkshire Hathaway Inc., effectively immediately. 

In 2025, Amazon settled allegations brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it used deceptive practices to enroll customers in its Prime membership.

The history of in-home coffee making is a story in and of itself. Over the past century, home coffee brewing has evolved from simmering pots and boiled water to percolators and, in the 1970s, the automatic drip machine, which became a fixture of modern kitchens.

Industry players say agentic commerce is the next big revolution in retail. I’ve spent my career in payments infrastructure and watched the same pattern repeat with every new commerce technology. It gets built on rails that weren’t designed for it, and nobody notices until something breaks.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, observed in a May 2026 New York Times podcast that the rate of change we’re living through is unlike anything humans evolved to process. And the data backs him up.