Tech Roundup: Google Finance AI Revamp, OpenAI GPT-5 & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Apple announces an overhaul of the App Store's age rating system across all of its platforms; adds three new age rating tiers — 13+, 16+, and 18+ — to the existing 4+ and 9+ classifications, while removing the 12+ and 17+ categories, and requires developers to disclose app content.
• Lyft rolls out letting riders "favourite" or block drivers to enhance loyalty from riders and drivers; favorites get priority for future scheduled rides.
• Amazon updates its colour screen Kindle Colorsoft with a cheaper 16GB model for US$ 250 and a kids-focused bundle with one year of Kids Plus for US$ 270.
• Google launches its virtual clothes try-on feature, letting users upload photos of themselves, in the U.S.; adds a new shopping feature in search that allows users set an alert for a product and specify their preferred size and colour, as well as the price they want to pay.
• Google DeepMind unveils Aeneas, an AI model for contextualising ancient Latin inscriptions, to help historians interpret, attribute, and restore text fragments.
• Apple launches AppleCare One, an insurance plan covering up to three devices for $20 per month, including battery replacements and accidental damage.
• The European Commission accuses Temu of breaching the DSA by failing to do enough to stop the sale of illegal products on its platform.
• Google plans to roll out AI Mode in the U.K. in the coming days after launching in the U.S. and India.
• Anthropic announces new rate limits for Claude Pro and Max starting August 28 in an attempt to curb users who run Claude Code "continuously in the background, 24/7."
• OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent passes Cloudflare's CAPTCHA verification checks by clicking on the "Verify you are human" checkbox, which is designed to to keep automated programs like itself at bay.
• The U.S. smartphone market grows 1% in Q2, as the share of U.S. smartphone shipments assembled in China shrinks from 61% in Q2 2024 to 25% in Q2 2025, with India taking its spot to become the leading manufacturing hub for smartphones sold in the U.S. for the very first time.
• Microsoft adds Copilot Mode to Edge to make browsing an agentic AI experience, as Google Chrome debuts AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers, letting users click an icon left of the URL in the address bar to show a popup with store reputation information gathered from Trust Pilot, ScamAdvisor, Google, and others.
• Music streamer Spotify reports monthly active users in Q2 2025 up 11% YoY to 696 million, with paying subscribers up 12% YoY to 276 million; launches its Audiobooks+ service in the U.S., Europe and Australia, after trials in Canada and Ireland.
• Apple responds to the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit from March 2024, accusing Apple of an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market, saying it sets "a dangerous precedent" and "threatens the very principles that set iPhone apart."
• Google's YouTube rolls out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience using signals like the YouTube activity and the longevity of a user's account (Google is also planning to start rolling out AI-powered age estimation in the U.S. "over the next few weeks" to detect if users are under 18 and enable existing protections); updates its content guidelines to allow content creators to upload videos with strong profanity in the first seven seconds without any risk of being demonetised, reversing previous restrictions that limited ad revenue.
• Australia says it will include YouTube in its ban on social media for children under 16 years of age, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the platform.
• Google launches new AI Mode features, including Search Live with video input, Canvas for planning, image and PDF uploads and AI Mode in Google Lens in desktop Chrome; introduces Video Overviews to NotebookLM to allow users to create videos on requested topics and pulls data from a user's uploaded images, diagrams, quotes and documents.
• Browser maker Opera files a complaint against Microsoft to Brazilian antitrust authority CADE, alleging the tech giant gives its Edge browser an unfair advantage over competitors.
• Yelp debuts a new feature that creates videos about restaurants and other businesses using AI-generated scripts and voice-overs based on reviews, with user-posted pictures and videos.
• OpenAI unveils a ChatGPT study mode that's designed to guide students through learning material at their level, available to logged-in Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users.
• Block-owned Cash App unveils Pools, a new peer-to-peer feature for group payments, and says users can accept contributions via Apple Pay or Google Pay.
• Adobe rolls out new generative AI features for Photoshop to let users more easily add or remove people and objects, including a feature called "Harmonize" compositing that automatically adjusts the colour, lighting, shadows and visual tone of the added element to naturally blend it into the main image when adding a new object to a photograph; releases Windows on Arm versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition and Media Encoder.
• Google increases Gemini 2.5 Pro limits for Gemini for Education users at no extra cost; adds thumbnail preview when hovering over a video's progress bar in Google Drive.
• Apple announces customers in India can now connect with an Apple Specialist over a live video session while shopping for Apple products on its regional online store, marking the service's first expansion outside of the U.S., where it debuted in March 2023.
• Italy opens a probe into Meta, alleging it may have violated E.U. competition rules by integrating its Meta AI assistant into WhatsApp without user consent.
• TikTok adds new safety features, including enhanced parental controls, publicly launches Footnotes, its Community Notes-like feature, in the U.S., and gamifies mindfulness with new Well-being Missions that lets users earn badges for completing challenges related to balanced digital habits.
• TikTok tests a "content check" feature that will allow creators to preview whether their videos have issues that might prevent them from appearing in the coveted "For You" feed; launches a new version of its app called TikTok Pro in Germany, Portugal and Spain, allowing users to earn "virtual sunshine" by supporting charities.
• Google says it will sign the E.U.'s AI Code of Practice, in a boost to the bloc's efforts to regulate AI in the face of opposition from Meta and pressure from the U.S.
• The Indian government says it has received 6,915 comments from members of the public as well as stakeholders as it works to finalise the country's Digital Personal Data Protection Rules 2025.
• JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase team up to directly link customers' bank accounts to their cryptocurrency wallets.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims superintelligence is in sight, and that "we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves"; says "we believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives" and "We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source."
• Google DeepMind unveils AlphaEarth Foundations, an AI system that processes satellite data 16x more efficiently to create detailed Earth maps for tracking deforestation, climate change, and environmental shifts.
• Dropbox plans to discontinue Dropbox Passwords, launched in 2020, on October 28, 2025, to focus on its core product; recommends 1Password as a replacement.
• The U.S. government says Apple, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and 60 other companies have pledged to make data sharing seamless across health care systems.
• Indian and U.S. space agencies launch a US$ 1.5 billion, first-of-its-kind radar imaging satellite called Nasa-Isro Synthetic Aperture Radar (Nisar) to help enhance global monitoring of climate change and natural disasters.
• Microsoft's GitHub Copilot crosses 20 million all-time users, as the tech giant tops US$ 4 trillion in market cap, joining NVIDIA.
• Meta reports 3.48 billion family daily active users in Q2 2025, up from 2.1 billion in early 2019, as Snap says it has 469 million global daily active users and Duolingo says it has 47.7 million daily active users.
• Uber Eats adds AI tools to generate for menu item descriptions and enhance food images; to pay customers in some countries for uploading food photos.
• Amazon-owned social cataloging website Goodreads redesigns its logo; integrates users' Want to Read list within Your Books on Amazon and expands its audiobook catalog.

The new Google Finance

• The U.K. communications watchdog Ofcom launches an investigation into 34 pornography sites regarding their compliance with the controversial U.K. Online Safety Act; says the sites, which have over 9 million unique monthly U.K. visitors, have failed to implement adequate age checks for U.K. visitors.
• Truecaller plans to discontinue its call recording function on iOS starting September 30, 2025, just over two years after launching the feature (the feature will continue to work on Android); says it intends to focus on Live Caller ID and automatic spam blocking features.
• Anthropic details "persona vectors," patterns of activity within an AI model's neural network that control its character traits, such as evil and sycophancy; revokes OpenAI's API access to Claude, citing ToS violations, including comparing its models' behaviour against Claude's.
• A U.S. jury finds Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act when it intentionally recorded the health data of women via the period tracking app Flo.
• Google clarifies that it will preserve "actively used" goo.gl URLs, after announcing last wekk that all existing goo.gl links would stop working in August 2025.
• Meta's Instagram enforces new policy that requires users to have a public account with more than 1,000 followers to go live, aligning with TikTok; lets users repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts, displayed in a designated tab; adds a Snapchat-like, opt-in maps feature; and a new Friends tab in Reels to see "public content your friends have interacted with."
• Reddit pauses plans to let users make subreddits with content behind a paywall, as it focuses on other priorities, including "accelerating international growth"; reports 110.4 million daily active users, up 21% YoY, over 70 million weekly active unique users for its core search feature, and 6 million weekly users for AI-powered Reddit Answers. (The development comes as X and Reddit have been observed blocking wide-ranging content, including about parliamentary debates, Ukraine, and Gaza, to comply with the U.K. Online Safety Act.)
• Google rolls out Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, its most advanced reasoning model, which considers multiple ideas simultaneously, to its US$ 250/month Ultra subscription.
• OpenAI removes a ChatGPT feature that let users make their conversations discoverable by Google and other search engines, calling it a "short-lived experiment." (It has since emerged that more than 130,000 conversations with AI chatbots including Claude, Grok, ChatGPT and others are discoverable on the Internet Archive, highlighting how peoples' interactions with LLMs may be publicly archived if users are not careful with the sharing settings they may enable.)
• Apple sell over three billion iPhones since its 2007 launch, touching 1 billion in July 2016 and 2 billion around September 2021;
• Coinbase expands its offerings beyond cryptocurrency by turning into an "everything exchange" that includes tokenised assets, stocks, derivatives, and prediction markets; to be available for U.S. users in the coming months.
• Google faces major legal setback after its loses its appeal of a U.S. court order in October 2024 requiring it to overhaul its Google Play Store policies in an antitrust case filed by Epic Games; mandates that the company stop forcing apps to use Google Play Billing, allow app developers to freely steer their users to other platforms, and limit the perks it can offer in exchange for preinstalled apps.
• Roblox's average daily active usrs grows 41% YoY to 111.8 million in Q2 2025 and hours engaged rises 58% YoY to 27.4 bilion, driven by the success of tycoon-style farming game Grow a Garden.
• Microsoft plans to end support for Windows 11 SE in 2026, five years after launching the operating system for low-cost laptops designed to compete with Google Chromebooks.
• Swiss company Proton releases a dedicated two-factor authentication app for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux.
• SAP plans to acquire HR software company SmartRecruiters, which was valued at US$ 1.5 billion in a 2021 funding round.
• Japan's Fair Trade Commission establishes new guidelines that require Apple and Google to stop favouring their own apps and services by hindering competitors' apps' presence or visibility in their respective app stores; also mandates them to establish a firewall that prevents their own teams from accessing and leveraging sensitive developer data when building competing products, and submit yearly compliance reports.
• Spain's competition watchdog expands its investigation into Apple, citing "new evidence" the tech giant requires developers to follow a pricing schedule set by Apple in order to sell their apps in its marketplace, a move that could potentially restrict competition.
• Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules, network blocks and website no-crawl directives.
• Google unveils Kaggle Game Arena, a benchmarking platform where AI models compete head-to-head in strategic games, starting with a chess tournament.
• OpenAI says ChatGPT now offers "gentle reminders" to take breaks during long sessions, and it is building tools to better detect signs of emotional distress; comes as the service is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March 2025.
• Google agrees to pause non-essential AI workloads, like processing a YouTube video, to protect power grids when demand spikes; says "by including load flexibility in our overall energy plan, we can manage AI-driven growth even where power generation and transmission are constrained."
• Spotify announces that it's raising prices for Premium subscriptions in multiple countries across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region so that it can "continue to innovate" on product offerings and features and "bring users the best experience."
• X Owner Elon Musk says the company is working to restore user access to Vine, a short-form video sharing platform that was acquired by Twitter way back in 2012 and shut down four years later.
• Google expands NotebookLM for 13+ users to "help them learn, study and understand their class materials"; launches Weather Lab, a new data and visualisation platform hosting the National Hurricane Center's real-time and historical predictions.
• The U.S. state of Illinois passes into law a bill that bans the use of AI for mental health services.
• Wikipedia adopts a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations.
• Google updates its Gemini app to let users create "personalised, illustrated storybooks complete with read-aloud narration" that can incorporate uploaded photos; Google DeepMind releases its Genie 3 model, which can generate 3D worlds from a natural language prompt and retain consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p.
• OpenAI releases gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, its first open-weight models since GPT-2, with the latter capable of running local on a consumer device with 16+ GM of RAM.
• Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 to paid Claude users, in Claude Code, and via its API, featuring broad improvements to agentic tasks, real-world coding and reasoning.
• Meta's WhatsApp adds a new "safety overview" that appears in new group chats, including information on the group and when it was created, to help protect users from scams and takes down 6.8 million accounts linked to scammers; tests a new guest chats feature that allows people to communicate with users over the platform even if they don't have an account via a chat link.
• Roku launches Howdy, an ad-free streaming service for US$ 2.99 per month, initially only on Roku devices, with content from Lionsgate, WBD, FilmRise, and others.
• ElevenLabs launches Eleven Music, letting individuals and businesses use its AI model to generate music cleared for commercial use via English-language prompts.
• Disney says it is "fully integrating" Hulu into Disney+ and plans to launch a "unified" Disney+ and Hulu app in 2026.
• Social media platform Truth Social tests Truth Search AI, a new search feature powered by Perplexity, on the web.
• Google launches its asynchronous coding agent Jules out of beta, with a free plan capped at 15 daily tasks and higher limits for Google AI Pro and Ultra users; unveils a Guided Learning mode within its Gemini chatbot to take on ChatGPT's study mode, and says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been "relatively stable" YoY and it's sending "slightly more quality clicks" than a year ago to counter criticism that AI search features tanking website traffic.
• Chinese authorities warn about the dangers of sharing biometric information, such as iris data, with foreign companies in exchange for cryptocurrency; says they pose a "threat to personal information security and even national security."
• Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech with a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative.
• Japan passes a new regulation called Mobile Software Competition Act that will require Apple to allow non-WebKit web browsers in the App Store on the iPhone by the end of the year without imposing "unreasonable technical restrictions."
• Google tests a revamped version of Google Finance that's "reimagined with AI at its core," allowing users to "ask detailed questions about the financial world and get a comprehensive AI response."
• OpenAI releases GPT-5, its new flagship model, to all of its ChatGPT users and developers, alongside GPT-5 pro, a version with extended reasoning exclusive to ChatGPT Pro subscribers; plans to deprecate all previous models over the next 60 days, and allows Plus subscribers to continue using GPT-4o.
• Microsoft plans to phase out its Lens scanner app for Android and iOS, launched in 2014 as Office Lens, starting in mid-September.