Ukategorisert – Page 5

Installs of DuckDuckGo are soaring amid Google’s AI search push

DuckDuckGo has become popular with the anti-AI crowd. (Picture: generated)

Google has made it clear that they are no longer a search company, but an AI company — further expanding AI Mode, extending AI overviews, and changing the iconic search box. Some people aren’t having it.

One practical effect of this can be seen in downloads of alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which have greatly increaesed in the last few weeks, TechCrunch writes.

From May 20 to May 25, just after Google unveiled a new search box, weekly installs went up 18.1%, peaking at 30% on May 25. It grew even stronger on iOS, peaking at 70% week on week in the same period.

— Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg tells TechCrunch, — We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.

The search engine does use some AI to filter out images, and offers an AI chat product at duck.ai, but is famously privacy-focused, doesn’t store a thing, and also provides the AI-free noai.duckduckgo.com.

Go read the full story at TechCrunch

Robinhood unleashes stock trading agents for consumer accounts

Major brokerages already use AI, and now it is coming to consumers. (Picture: Robinhood)

The stock trading platform is announcing agent-based accounts that will trade stocks based on different profiles, and also launched a credit card for them to use online.

— Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents, CEO Vlad Tenev said, according to CNBC.

The company says the service is designed with a safety-first mindset, meaning you retain control over trades and purchases by requiring approval first, and get notifications for every transaction.

It works by setting up a dedicated trading account for your agent, separate from your main portfolio. Then you can transfer funds and let the agent trade based on strategies you set out.

It is not the first such agentic framework, there are already specialized stock trading agents from public.com and there’s TradingAgents, but it is for a major player.

Read more: Robinhood’s announcement, CNBC, TechCrunch, and The Verge.

China begins restricting foreign travel for private AI professionals

China is increasingly worried about technology leaks and talent poaching. (Picture: Adobe)

Sources are telling Bloomberg that China has established a list of AI engineers that will now have to ask permission from authorities before traveling abroad.

The move comes after seeing the astronomical wages being offered for valuable AI competence by US labs, such as Meta, Bloomberg writes, but notes that China sees AI labs as a strategic asset and are concerned about data leaks.

The previous policy included restrictions for individuals that were senior researchers in education, nuclear scientists and top executives of government companies, Tom’s Hardware writes.

Before this, AI workers on the list only had to report where they were traveling, but did not have to ask for specific permission.

The new rules might inspire early-stage talent with international ambitions to leave the country before getting added to the list, and dissuade overseas talent from moving home to China, Bloomberg says.

Read more: Bloomberg, Tom’s Hardware, and The Decoder.

Mythos finds 10K severe bugs in a month, as Anthropic widens release

Anthropic is now expanding availability for government and qualifying security teams. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Officially dubbed the Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s code-busting agent has worked with about 50 partners to find ten thousand high-severity bugs in the month since release:

— Progress on software security used to be limited by how quickly we could find new vulnerabilities. Now it’s limited by how quickly we can verify, disclose, and patch the large numbers of vulnerabilities found by AI, Anthropic says.

Of those vulnerabilities, 6,202 were serious finds in open source software, where Anthropic has partnered with «more than 1,000» projects. Mythos actually found 23,019 bugs, but most were estimated at medium or low severity.

— Models with similar cybersecurity skills to Mythos Preview will soon be more broadly available, says Anthropic.

— There is a clear need for a larger effort across the software industry to manage the volume of findings that these models will generate.

Therefore, Anthropic is widening the release of Mythos, making it available to «qualifying» security teams «on request.» In the future, they say they hope to develop safeguards strong enough to make it generally available, but no such safety features exist as of today.

Read more: Anthropic’s findings and Engadget. Discussion on r/cybersecurity

OpenAI’s Q1 2026 ended with $5.7 billion in revenue, and a -122% margin

OpenAI is still leading the pack, but is facing increasing headwinds. (Picture: Adobe)

The Information (paywalled) says sources are telling them that OpenAI landed a billion dollars ahead of Anthropic last quarter, but «only» has an annualized run rate of $30 billion versus Anthropic’s $45B.

The AI lab estimates that its adjusted income margin was at -122%, meaning it lost $1.22 for every dollar earned, driven by high investment costs for infrastructure and compute.

The growth was driven mainly by Codex and enterprise customers, the report said — although ChatGPT growth stalled at about 905 million weekly users in the latest quarter.

OpenAI is said to reveal its IPO plans «within weeks,» Reuters reports, and possibly as soon as «this Friday,» according to CNBC.

Its most recent funding round valued the company at $852 billion, just short of Anthropic’s $900 billion — but their funding round came a little later.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), Ed Zitron on X.

«Anti-doomers» breathe easy after Trump cancels AI executive order

Not singing anything today. Executives and insiders were worried about their competitive edge. This image is from April 30. (Picture: Whitehouse.gov)

The White House was all lined up for a long-rumored executive order on AI, but it was abruptly canceled at a late stage.

Donald Trump declared that «I don’t like certain aspects of it,» and said that the USA is «leading China, we’re leading on everybody» and that he doesn’t want to get in the way of that.

The draft order was designed to appease «doomers» within the Trump coalition who were worried about the advanced capabilities of some models that might pose serious cybersecurity risks.

One of the provisions was to have AI labs «voluntarily» submit their models to the government for review 90 days in advance, and also give access to «critical infrastructure providers,» Reuters reported.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis reckoned in January that China is «just months» behind the US in capabilities, and many advocates said the provision could hurt this competitiveness.

The order is now indefinitely postponed, but The White House has other AI security initiatives in the works, Axios reports.

Read more: Axios, Reuters, Washington Post (paywalled), and The NYT (paywalled).

Anthropic aims for first profitable quarter in Q2, with $559 million in the green

Anthropic is reaching for profits, but compute costs might be a damper. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Last quarter ending in March saw an 80-fold growth for Anthropic and a revenue of $4.8 billion, a record for the AI lab.

Next quarter will be even better, sources are telling Reuters and WSJ — projecting a revenue growth of 130% and landing at $10.9 billion, more than double their previous number.

That should land them an operating profit of $559 million, Reuters reports.

This unprecedented growth underscores how Claude has boomed in the new year for coders and enterprises alike, that OpenAI is racing to catch up to.

The Wall Street Journal does however warn that this growth in subscribers also translates to higher computing costs, that might put a significant dent in their yearly profits.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to file for IPOs in the near future, and OpenAI might file in the coming weeks.

Read more: Reuters, WSJ, and TechCrunch.

xAI owner SpaceX publicly files for IPO, gets $15 billion per year from Anthropic

SpaceX is a history making IPO, but its AI efforts are loss leaders. (Picture: SpaceX)

The company is mostly known for its space endeavors, like shipping crew and cargo to the International Space Station, deploying satellites, and its Starlink service — but SpaceX merged with x.com and xAI just this February.

Back then, the combined company was valued at $1.25 trillion, and it’s IPO is expected to be the largest in history — in addition to being the first major AI lab to go public, as a small test of market appetite.

SpaceX spent 60% of its $20 billion in capital expenditures on its xAI division in 2025, while losing billions and only seeing growth of about 22%, TechCrunch writes.

In another TechCrunch report, they note from the filing that xAI lost about $6.5 billion in 2025, and is making $365 million in subscriptions together with x.com.

What xAI does have is massive compute resources, which Anthropic is renting for $15 billion per year, Axios reports — and they are looking to expand more.

While the IPO might be tempting for a whole host of reasons, Elon Musk will retain a supermajority in the company from his 85% stock ownership, NBC News says.

Read more: The SEC filing, CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch on capex, TechCrunch on losses, and Axios on the Anthropic deal.

Recapping Google I/O: New Gemini, video generator and search box

Google I/O produced a flurry of AI announcements, as expected, and since it’s hard to keep up with everything they launched, here is a small recap.

Read on for the news in short on the new Gemini, the Omni video model, new subscription plans, the Gemini Spark agent and the revamped search box…

Continue reading “Recapping Google I/O: New Gemini, video generator and search box”

Musk’s OpenAI trial gets tossed by jury

OpenAI is off the hook for their for-profit organization. (Picture: Adobe)

The jury spent less than two hours Monday to deliberate on the case, and dismissed Musk’s claims for being filed after the statutory limitation of three years.

The trial had been brought in 2024 over a 2019 decision by OpenAI to create a for-profit arm, which was later expanded into a public benefit corporation — allowing OpenAI to raise massive funds and possibly go public at a later stage.

Elon Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, but left the board in 2018. He argued in court that it was set up as a charity, and his lawyers claimed that OpenAI’s executives had enriched themselves at the cost of the charity’s mission.

As the court decided on a technical issue, the jury never touched the actual merits of the case, Musk argues, and vows to appeal.

Read more: NBC News, CNBC, Reuters, and The Verge.

Catch up on the weekend’s news

Chatbots are terrible radio show hosts. (Picture: Adobe)

There is not much happening over the weekend, but here’s what you need to catch up on the news:

OpenAI makes OpenClaw better with GPT, and its creator, Peter Steinberger, incurs a $1.3 million bill.

ChatGPT Financial is here for Pro users. GPT can now connect to your financial accounts and help you budget and plan. 200 million people per month ask GPT financial questions. [TechCrunch, Mashable]

OpenAI offers Malta a free year of ChatGPT, all citizens need to do is pass an AI literacy exam by the University of Malta and they get a full year of GPT Plus. [Reuters, Engadget]

What happens when AI chatbots run radio stations? Andon Labs tried to find out, and it didn’t go so well. Gemini started listing off mass casualty events, GPT got hung up on ICE shootings in Minneapolis and Claude went all in on workers’ rights. Grok played identical weather reports every three minutes. [Gizmodo, The Verge]

Week ahead: There’s Google I/O on Tuesday and Wednesday where I expect lots of AI news. The keynote stream is already registered and starts Tuesday at 10am Pacific/7pm European Central. Then there’s Nvidia Q1 earnings on Tuesday, and Code With Claude on the 19th in London.

Codex goes mobile with ChatGPT

Without touching your Codex box, you can now control it from your phone. (Picture: OpenAI)

Instead of lugging your half-open laptop around to stay on top of Codex work, you can now simply leave it in the office and check in from anywhere.

Having Codex on your phone means you can «answer questions, review code, change direction, approve what comes next, or add a new idea,» OpenAI says.

This way, Codex never gets stuck on reviews or permissions, as you will be able to easily guide it from where you are.

You can also chat with it and add specific instructions, like dropping output in a Slack channel or send it on for review by others.

All your credentials, permissions and general setup stays on the machine Codex is running on, while just the updates and requests get routed to your phone.

Codex on ChatGPT for mobile is out today on iOS and Android, available to everyone, but only works with connected macOS machines. A Windows version is «coming soon.»

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, Engadget, TechCrunch.

Anthropic approves $30 billion in funding at a $900 billion valuation

The huge funding haul would surpass OpenAI’s record valuation of some $852B in April, and comes hot on the heels of Anthropic rebuffing bids at a mere $800B valuation recently.

Their last funding round was at a $380 billion valuation in February, which is less than half of todays numbers just three months ago.

The news was first reported by The Financial Times, who says the round is co-led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital, all offering $2B each, while Anthropic is in talks with «additional investors.»

Anthropic has been on a tear lately, growing its user base 80-fold last quarter, and struggling with the compute power needed, but this is now largely solved.

They are also expected to pass $45 billion in annualized revenue «shortly,» which is five times what they had at the end of last year, Investing.com writes.

Read more: Financial Times (paywalled), The Information (paywalled), and Investing.com.

Google reimagines the mouse pointer with AI-enabled commands

Commands are simple once the mouse knows where it is pointing. (Picture: Google)

The common mouse pointer hasn’t changed in half a century, Google says — so it has infused it with context-aware AI to let you simply speak to it.

The general idea is to have an AI system be aware of where or what you are pointing at, and then use the microphone on your computer to give simple commands without careful prompting.

This should allow for easier AI interactions like «show me directions» when looking at a building, or «book a table» while hovering over a restaurant.

This sort of pointer needs the OS or app to be context-aware, and there is no system like this yet. It is, however, rolling out in Gemini in Chrome «starting today,» and will roll out «soon» as Magic Pointer, a major feature of the freshly announced Googlebook.

It is also available to test in AI Studio, where you can use it to edit an image or find places on a map. Do note that the system uses your microphone.

Read more: Google’s blog, 9to5Google.