Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in landmark social media addiction trial
The jury says Meta and YouTube will have to pay $3 million in damages.
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Meta is cutting several hundred jobs
The cuts will impact employees in the U.S. and other international markets.
Apple overhauls its app developer platform with 100 new metrics, more tools
Apple is adding 100+ new App Store Connect metrics, giving developers deeper, first-party insights into monetization, subscriptions, and user behavior as it doubles down on its app ecosystem in the AI era.
Bernie Sanders and AOC propose a ban on data center construction
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced companion legislation to halt construction on new data centers until Congress passes comprehensive AI regulation.
Pepper acquires YC-backed Alima to bring AI to food distribution’s messy product catalogues
Pepper, a New York-based technology platform for independent food distributors, has acquired Alima, a Y Combinator-backed startup that built ordering and procurement software for small food distributors in Latin America. The deal, announced on Tuesday with no disclosed financial terms, brings Alima’s two cofounders into Pepper’s leadership team and extends the company’s push into AI-driven […]This story continues at The Next Web
DeleteMe acquires social media security tool Block Party
Tracey Chou founded Block Party in 2018 as a tool to help people stay safe from targeted harassment on Twitter, inspired by her own experiences.
Your finance team is still chasing invoices. Here’s why that costs more than you think
The average small business processes around 500 invoices per month. When that workflow runs on email threads, spreadsheets, and manual check runs, each invoice costs somewhere between $15 and $40 to handle. That is not a technology problem. It is an operational tax on growth, and most finance teams have been paying it for years […]This story continues at The Next Web
Google launches Lyria 3 Pro music generation model
Google is launching Lyria 3 Pro, an upgraded music model that generates longer, more customizable tracks, as it expands AI music tools across Gemini, enterprise products, and other services.
Russia arrests alleged owner of cybercrime forum LeakBase, report says
Russian state-owned media reported that police in Russia arrested the administrator of LeakBase, a large hacking forum.
London’s Granola raises $125M to turn meeting recordings into enterprise AI infrastructure
Granola, the London-based AI meeting app that records conversations without dropping a bot into the call, has raised $125 million in a Series C round led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. The round values the company at $1.5 billion, a sixfold increase from its $250 million […]This story continues at The Next Web
Waymo relies on firefighters and police to bail out stuck robotaxis
In at least six instances identified by TechCrunch, first responders have had to take control of Waymo vehicles and move them out of traffic during emergency situations.
Reddit takes on the bots with new ‘human verification’ requirements for fishy behavior
Reddit will require suspected automated accounts to verify they’re human, as it ramps up efforts to curb bot-driven spam and manipulation.
Decathlon doubles warehouse output with Exotec’s climbing robots across seven European sites
The world’s largest sporting goods retailer has turned seven of its European warehouses over to robots, and the early results suggest the machines are earning their keep. Decathlon announced on Tuesday that its partnership with Exotec, a French warehouse robotics company, has delivered what it calls significant productivity gains across sites in France, the United […]This story continues at The Next Web
How soap opera-TikTok hybrids became a billion-dollar business
Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They’re called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading […]
Meta cuts hundreds more jobs across Reality Labs, recruiting, and sales as AI spending doubles
Meta began cutting hundreds of jobs on Wednesday across Reality Labs, Facebook, recruiting, sales, and global operations, according to people familiar with the matter and LinkedIn posts from affected employees. The layoffs are the latest in a rolling series of workforce reductions that have accelerated sharply in 2026, as the company redirects resources toward artificial […]This story continues at The Next Web
OpenAI Sora is gone. The artists are still working.
Last September, when OpenAI quietly released the Sora 2 app to the public, the discourse around it was not quiet at all. Commentators who had spent months watching the model’s preview clips, the golden retriever bounding through autumn leaves, the Tokyo street scene that looked almost real, lined up to declare that something had shifted. […]This story continues at The Next Web
PAVE Space raises $40M to build orbital transfer vehicles
The Swiss startup, spun out of EPFL’s student rocketry programme that built Europe’s first student-made reusable rocket, has raised one of the largest seed rounds ever in European space. Visionaries Club and Creandum led; Lombard Odier, Atlantic Labs, and Sistafund also participated. The satellite lifecycle has a structural inefficiency baked in. Launch vehicles deliver payloads […]This story continues at The Next Web
Origin raises $30M Series A+ to give multinationals visibility into a benefits budget
The London startup, founded by the team behind Darwin, acquired by Mercer in 2016, has built an AI platform that ingests fragmented global benefits data from PDFs, insurance contracts, and vendor portals into a single intelligence layer. Notion Capital led the round; HSBC Innovation Banking UK also contributed growth financing. One CFO told Origin’s CEO […]This story continues at The Next Web
RWS launches Language Weaver Pro
The AIM-listed language technology company says its new model, the largest dedicated translation model in production, ranked first in 31 of 32 languages in internal benchmarking against DeepL and Gemini. The model is natively integrated into the Trados portfolio. The problem RWS is describing is a real one in enterprise translation: the tools that move […]This story continues at The Next Web
Galtea raises $3.2M to help enterprises test AI agents
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center spin-off, founded eighteen months ago, uses AI to generate realistic test scenarios that expose failures, hallucinations, bias, and security risks before enterprise AI agents go live. 42CAP led the round; Mozilla Ventures participated. The gap between an AI agent that works in a demo and one that works in production is, […]This story continues at The Next Web