Tech Roundup: Brazil Age Verification Laws, Google Mixboard & More

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

• Brazil passes the Digital ECA law requiring companies to introduce age verification checks to limit children's access to sexual and violent content, as well as introduce parental control systems to let parents limit a child's use of their platforms and ban them from using children's data for targeted advertising.
• Nepal lifts social media ban on 26 social media sites after the move sparks protests, leading to clashes between police and demonstrators that left at least 19 people dead and injured more than 100 others.
• Google updates its Veo AI model with support for vertical video and 1080p; adds audio files support for the Gemini app, expands AI Mode to support Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese, and clarifies Gemini 2.5 Pro's usage limits: five prompts per day for free users, 100 prompts for AI Pro and 500 for AI Ultra subscribers.
• Retail giant Amazon takes a stake in Colombian delivery startup Rappi.
• Encrypted messaging app Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100 MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100 GB of storage for US$ 1.99/month, marking its first paid feature.
• Anthropic becomes the first major AI company to back SB 53, a California bill that requires large AI companies to disclose safety testing protocols, and revamps its sales restrictions to unsupported regions, including Chinese companies which it claims continue to access it services through subsidiaries incorporated in other countries; updates Claude to create PDFs, slides, and spreadsheets for Max, Team, Enterprise and Pro users.
• Four current and ex-Meta staffers submitted documents and affidavits to U.S. Congress alleging that the social media giant suppressed research on child safety risks in its VR platforms, according to a report from The Washington Post; comes as the former head of security at WhatsApp filed a lawsuit accusing the company of ignoring privacy and security issues that allegedly endangered users' information, per The New York Times. (The WhatsApp suit alleges that approximately 1,500 WhatsApp engineers had unrestricted access to user data, including sensitive personal information, and that the employees "could move or steal such data without detection or audit trail.")
• Bluesky adds the ability for users to bookmark posts for later viewing on mobile and web apps.
• Amazon updates its Amazon Music streaming app with themed AI generated playlists that are created weekly based on users' listening habits; comes as Spotify rolls out new smart filters to screen library content by activity, genre or mood.
• Google updates NotebookLM with the ability to specify the structure, style and tone when creating reports, a language picker to create reports in over 80 supported languages, dynamic suggestions for topics or themes based on sources, and blog posts as a new stock report option.
• Meta's WhatsApp tests support for Live Photos in its iOS app across in chats, groups and channels; starts rolling out message translations on iOS and Android for English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic.
• Adtech company PubMatic sues Google over monopoly violations, accusing it of illegally monopolising the ad technology market.
• Google temporarily pulls the plug on a new AI-powered Daily Hub feature in Pixel 10 devices to "enhance its performance and refine the personalised experience."
• Nvidia unveils Rubin CPX, a new chip system designed for AI tasks like video generation and software creation; set to launch at the end of 2026.
• Apple unveils new iPhone Air, iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro Max models with A19 and A19 Pro chips, 18MP Center Stage front cameras, 48MP rear cameras, 256GB of base storage (and up to 2TB for the first time in a Pro Max model), and in-house built wireless networking chip N1; debuts AirPods Pro 3 with heart-rate sensing and live translation using Apple Intelligence, and adds hypertension and sleep-quality monitoring to newly launched Watch Ultra 3 and Series 11 smartwatches. (However, AirPods' new Live Translation won't be available to users in the E.U. and with an E.U.-region Apple Account, likely due to E.U. regulations.)
• Google announces an AI Plus subscription tier for emerging markets, offering "more access to Gemini 2.5 Pro" and tools like Flow, starting with Indonesia; tests adding support for attaching Google Drive files in Tasks.
• Meta signs a multi-year contract worth more than US$ 100 million to use technology from AI image startup Black Forest Labs; fixes an Instagram issue that caused posting multiple Stories to tank users' reach.
• Apple releases iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26 on September 15, 2025.
• Anthropic's recently announced US$ 1.5 billion book piracy settlement is put on pause after the federal judge overseeing the class action case raised concerns about the terms of the agreement, including that authors are being strong-armed into signing a deal.
• Apple gives iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users an extra year of free access to satellite connectivity features.
• Google's YouTube rolls out multi-language audio after a two-year pilot; says "on average, creators uploading Multi-language Audio tracks to their videos saw over 25% of their watch time come from views in the video’s non-primary language."
• Bluesky says it will comply with South Dakota and Wyoming age-verification laws, which "currently strikes the right balance," after blocking access in Mississippi; to restrict unverified and underage users from accessing adult content, as well as from using certain features, like direct messaging. (The state of Mississippi, on the other hand, requires platforms to verify the ages of users when they create an account.)
• ByteDance launches Seedream 4.0, an AI image model it claims can beat Google's viral "nano banana" model in prompt adherence, alignment and aesthetics.
• Reddit launches free tools for publishers as part of Reddit Pro, to track article performance and get suggestions on which communities to share their stories in; removes subscriber counts from subreddit pages, replacing them with past seven-day metrics to show how many users visited and made how many contributions. (The information is still accessible to subreddit moderators.)
• The U.S. states of California, Colorado, and Connecticut team up to contact businesses that may not be processing opt-out consumers' requests to stop selling their personal data or using Global Privacy Control (GPC).
• Microsoft announces that individual Windows developers will no longer have to pay a one-time fee for publishing their applications on the Microsoft Store; to bundle sales, service, and finance Copilots into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) sues Uber, alleging the company discriminates against passengers with disabilities.
• Snapchat gets accused of leaving an "overwhelming number" of drug dealers to openly operate on the platform, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA.
• OpenAI and Microsoft say they have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for the next phase of their partnership, and are working to finalise a definitive agreement, as OpenAI says its non-profit parent will continue to have oversight over the company and will own an equity stake of more than US$ 100 billion.
• Google plans to shut down its Airtables rival Tables in December 2025; directs users to migrate to Google Sheets or AppSheet.
• Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity, alleging that it unlawfully scraped their websites and redirected their traffic to its AI summaries.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) orders Google, OpenAI, Meta, Snap, xAI and Character.AI to provide information on how their AI chatbots impact children and teens.
• Google adds a new Purchases label in Gmail to bring purchase and delivery updates in one place, alongside summary cards for packages arriving soon; updates the Promotions category with the ability to sort by "most relevant" promotional emails.
• Apple says it does not have a monopoly position in Australia or in any market around the world, after Australia's federal court ruled last month that its App Store had violated competition laws by prohibiting sideloading and alternative payment methods.
• Anthropic updates its Claude AI chatbot to "remember" the details of previous conversations without prompting for Team and Enterprise users, after rolling it to Max subscribers last month.
• The French government is reportedly working on a law that would ban kids under the age of 15 from social media; to also introduce a nighttime curfew for children aged 15 to 18.
• Mastodon plans to roll out quote posts next week, with safety features that give users several ways to control how their posts can be quoted.
• OpenAI introduces Grove a new program for early tech entrepreneurs looking to build with artificial intelligence; debuts GPT‑5-Codex, a version of GPT‑5 optimised for agentic coding in Codex and says it spends its "thinking" time more dynamically than previous models.
• Google releases VaultGemma, a 1B-parameter model that it says is the largest open LLM trained from scratch with differential privacy, on Hugging Face and Kaggle; updates Gemini 2.5 Flash with better response formatting and image understanding, and releases new 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash-Lite previews for developers.
• Small businesses worldwide are being extorted by fraudsters who post or threaten to post fake one-star reviews on Google Maps or post fake negative reviews and then demands a payment to remove them, according to an investigation from Fake Review Watch.
• China launches probes into alleged U.S. discrimination against Chinese chip companies and suspected dumping of U.S. analog chips used in devices like Wi-Fi routers.
• U.S. publisher Penske Media, the publisher for Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and others, files a lawsuit against Google, claiming the tech giant illegally powers its AI Overviews feature with content from its sites.
• Snapchat introduces new "highly requested" features, including "Infinite Retention," which lets users keep chat histories and prevent messages from disappearing and "Group Streaks," which makes it possible to contribute to a collective Streak with friends.
• The Internet Archive reaches a confidential settlement with Universal Music Group and other major labels, "ending a closely watched copyright battle over the non-profit's effort to digitise and stream historic recordings."
• Microsoft adds Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and agents to Office apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, for all Microsoft 365 business users.
• Apple officially releases iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 With 'Liquid Glass' UI overhaul; drops iCloud support for iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, and adds a new Recovery Assistant to macOS Tahoe to troubleshoot issues.
• Google says users increasingly want "contextual answers and summaries," but reiterates it's not going to abandon the model that provides "10 blue links."
• Walt Disney and Webtoon announce a new digital platform with more than 35,000 Disney comics.
• Google tests a new experimental Windows desktop app that brings Mac's Spotlight-like search bar to PC users, allowing them to search local files, Google Drive and the web; updates Gemini to let users share custom Gemini AI assistants known as Gems.
• The U.S. government extends the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations until December 16, 2025, the fourth such extension; comes amid reports that the U.S. spin-off of TikTok will use ByteDance's Chinese algorithm as part of a U.S.-agreed framework that includes "licensing the algorithm and other IP rights," as China calls the deal a "win-win."
• OpenAI announces it will launch a dedicated ChatGPT experience with parental controls for users under 18 years old as the artificial intelligence company works to enhance safety protections for teenagers; says it may require ID verification in some cases or countries and that it's worth the privacy-vs.-safety trade-offs.
• Consumer Reports calls on Microsoft to extend the October 14th deadline that will cut off free security updates for Windows 10 computers, stating the move "risks harming the consumer as well as co-opting the machine to perpetuate attacks against other entities, risking national security."
• Google's YouTube debuts new generative AI tools like Veo 3 Fast to create Shorts content and showcases live streaming features that give content creators new ways to grow their audiences and interact with viewers (includes an option to transition between public and members-only streams), and announces AI tools for podcasters to turn video podcasts into clips and create video for audio-only podcasts; plans to expand its likeness detection tech to all Partner Program creators in the next months and responds to concerns about drops in views from creators, pointing out that ad blockers can "impact the accuracy of reported view counts."
• Google says it has paid out more than US$ 100 billion to YouTube content creators over the last four years, as it adds new ways for them to earn money with brand deals, including making it possible to swap out brand sponsorships in long-form videos.
• Salesforce launches Missionforce, a new business unit focused on incorporating AI into defense workflows concerning personnel, logistics and decision making.
• Google's Cloud division says it now works with nine of the 10 leading AI labs, including OpenAI and with 60% of the world's generative AI startups, fuelling its growth.
• Walt Disney, Comcast's Universal and Warner Bros Discovery sue China-based MiniMax, alleging that its image- and video-generating service Hailuo AI was built from stolen intellectual property.
• Google launches the Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, designed to securely facilitate agent-led payments across platforms, with the support of over 60 organisations.
• Reddit rolls out new rules that sets a moderation limit of a maximum of 5 communities with over 100,000 visitors; says the change impacts "0.1 percent of our active mods" and will help enable "diverse perspectives and experiences."
• Google adds new features to YouTube Music, allowing users to set countdowns for upcoming releases and pre-save tracks or albums before they officially release.
• The U.K. ramps up the use of facial recognition, AI and internet regulation to address crime and other issues, stoking concerns of surveillance overreach.
• China's internet authority, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), bans the nation's biggest firms from buying chips from U.S. tech giant NVIDIA.
• Meta's display-equipped smart glasses, Ray-Ban Display make their debut, offering the ability to view messages, take video calls, read live captions, see walking directions and preview pictures taken with the built-in 12 MP camera; launches a new version of its popular Ray-Ban smart glasses with an upgraded eight-hour battery life, partners with Oakley to release Vanguard glasses for high intensity sports, unveils a new Hyperscape feature for Quest VR headsets to allow users to scan their surroundings and transform them into a digital space, and rolls out a Horizon TV entertainment hub for Quest headsets.
• Meta upgrades Horizon Worlds with Meta Horizon Studio, letting creators use AI prompts to build worlds, powered by its new "built from scratch" virtual engine.
• Google updates its Search app's Discover page to let users follow specific publishers and creators; plans to add YouTube Shorts, and X and Instagram posts.
• Apple adds a new Home app feature called Adaptive Temperature in iOS 26 to adjust the thermostat automatically when leaving the house or arriving back home.
• A U.S. district court rules Amazon violated consumer law by collecting Prime subscribers' billing info before disclosing terms, as the Federal Trade Commission argues the online retailer signed up tens of millions of customers for Prime without their consent.
• Google adds the ability to track step counts on Android devices using Health Connect using the built-in sensors.
• Zoom launches an upgraded AI companion that can work across meeting apps, as well as allow users to jot down their own notes during meetings; launches new calendar-related features to find slots that work for all attendees and photorealistic AI avatars.
• OpenAI releases first-of-kind study revealing how people are using ChatGPT for everyday tasks; says it's mostly used for "getting everyday tasks done," such as practical guidance, seeking information and writing.
• The study comes as the company also acknowledged that large language models tend to make stuff up because "the majority of mainstream evaluations reward hallucinatory behavior," rather than the correct answer.
• OpenAI said AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust, adding "large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty.
• Rival Anthropic, in its Economic Index report, said users are increasingly using Claude for coding, educational and scientific tasks.
• China drops antitrust probe into Google, opened in February 2025 over Android dominance and its impact on Chinese phonemakers, amid U.S.-China trade talks.
• xAI's Grok chatbot hits 64 million monthly active users; launches Grok 4 Fast, a multimodal model with a 2 million context window and a unified architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning modes.
• Productivity platform Notion launches customisable agents that can create documents and perform other actions in the background.
• Samsung rolls out a software update to display promotions and ads on the Cover Screens of some Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. as part of a pilot program.
• Meta announces a preview of the Wearable Device Access Toolkit, which lets developers build apps that use the vision and audio capabilities of its RayBan and Oakley smart glasses.
• Google unveils new AI features for the desktop version of Chrome on Windows and macOS, including allowing users begin AI Mode searches from the omnibar for U.S. users; adds a new Gemini button to summarise content across open tabs and surface websites from browsing history using natural language prompts (e.g., what was that blog I read on back to school shopping?)
• The FTC and seven states sue Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary for failing to curtail the use of bots and large-scale resale operations.
• Google partners with StopNCII.org and says it will start using its hashes to proactively identify nonconsensual images in search results and remove them.
• PayPal announces a new multi-year partnership with Google that will see the payments giant using Google's AI technology to create new AI-powered shopping experiences.
• Uber plans to test using drones for Uber Eats deliveries in some U.S. markets by the end of this year in partnership with Israeli startup Flytrex.
• Mastodon, the nonprofit behind the social network, plans to offer paid hosting, moderation, and support services for organizations joining the fediverse.
• Tests reveal OpenAI's Sora can closely mimic Netflix shows, movies, TikTok videos, and Twitch streams, suggesting it was trained on versions of such content, according to The Washington Post.
• Microsoft plans to raise Xbox Series X price by US$ 50 to US$ 649.99 and Series S by US$ 20 to US$ 399.99 starting October 3, 2025, citing "changes in the macroeconomic environment"; begins rolling out the beta version of its AI-powered Gaming Copilot to Windows 11 systems for users aged 18 or older, excluding those in mainland China.
• Microsoft supercharges Teams with new AI agents to establish an agenda, keep the meetings on track, take real-time collaborative notes, manage tasks, create documents, capture ad-hoc discussions, and draft a status report, among others; tests a new feature in Windows 11 that makes it possible to share a window with Copilot when mousing over an opened app on the taskbar.
• Meta gets sued by Strike 3 Holdings in the U.S., alleging the tech giant pirated copyrighted adult videos to train its AI models.
• Google says has finally completed moving "the best" of its Nest-branded smart home devices from the Nest app to the Google Home app, as it integrates Gemini into the latter and begins rolling out its AI assistant to Google TV.
• Happn, a dating app with 170 million registered users that matches people based on where they cross paths, agrees to a takeover deal with Beijing-based Hello Group.
• TikTok has over 183 million U.S. monthly active users on iOS and Android as of August 2025, up 16% YoY, compared to Instagram's 169 million, Facebook's 157 million, Pinterest's 100 million and Snapchat's 70 million, according to data from Similarweb.
• China's market regulator opens a probe into Chengdu Kuaigou, a Kuaishou unit involved in livestream shopping, for suspected violations of e-commerce rules.
• Microsoft-owned LinkedIn announces plans to revise its terms of service for members in the E.U., EEA, Switzerland, Canada and Hong Kong to start using personal data to "train content-generating AI models that enhance your experience and better connect our members to opportunities," including profile details and public content; to come into effect on November 3, 2025.
• Google temporarily pauses AI-powered 'Homework Helper' button in Chrome over cheating concerns.
• Huawei develops a safety-focused version of DeepSeek's open-source model R1, called DeepSeek-R1-Safe, that's "nearly 100% successful" in preventing politically sensitive topics by training it on 1,000 of its Ascend AI chips; comes as DeepSeek says it only spent $294,000 on training its R1 model by "distill[ing] several smaller models."
• Meta faces flak after it advertises to a 37-year-old man pictures of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their names and faces visible as part of posts encouraging him to "get Threads;" Instagram debuts its automated Teen Accounts setting for users in Canada, the U.K. and Australia that uses AI to guess at a user's age and limit messaging capabilities and activate content filters to prevent them from viewing harmful content and age inappropriate interactions. (In a related development, Meta said Instagram now has 3 billion monthly active users and that it's testing opening directly into Reels in India. Facebook reached 2 billion daily users in 2023, and WhatsApp passed 2 billion monthly users in 2020.)
• Coinbase plans to become a financial super app that integrates its cryptocurrency offering with traditional banking services.
• Google DeepMind updates its Frontier Safety Framework to account for new risks, including the potential for models to resist shutdown or modification by humans; launches its Search Live feature in the U.S., letting users ask questions in AI Mode while sharing their phone's camera feed for real-time help.
• Alibaba releases Qwen3-Omni, a family of open-source AI models that can process text, audio, image and video inputs and generate both text and speech outputs; also releases the Qwen3-VL vision models, the Qwen3Guard "safety moderation" models, and three closed-weight models, including Qwen3-Max with 1T+ parameters.
• Meta rolls out an AI assistant for Facebook Dating in the US and Canada, to reduce "swipe fatigue" by letting users find matches via natural language prompts.
• Perplexity debuts Email Assistant for Gmail and Outlook, which can manage inboxes, schedule meetings, and more, for subscribers of its US$ 200/month Max plan.
• GPU maker NVIDIA plans to invest US$ 100 billion in OpenAI progressively as part of a deal to deploy at least 10 GW of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI's infrastructure.
• eBay announces plans to acquire social marketplace platform Tise, as it seeks to modernise its platform to attract younger shoppers and expand its social commerce tools.
• Major U.S. record labels amend their lawsuit against Suno, alleging that the AI startup knowingly pirated songs from YouTube to train its generative AI music models; accuses Suno of unlawfully "stream ripping" tracks on YouTube in violation of the platform's terms and employing "code to access, extract, copy, and download” copyrighted works from Universal, Sony and Warner."
• More than 200 prominent figures sign Global Call for AI Red Lines, calling on governments to enact meaningful control over AI systems by the end of 2026.
• Mozilla announces a new feature that enables Firefox extension developers to roll back to previously approved versions, allowing them to quickly address critical bugs and issues.
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Go in Indonesia for ~US$ 4.50 per month, expanding its budget-friendly ChatGPT subscription plan after debuting it in India in August.
• Huawei's HarmonyOS maintains its lead over Apple's iOS for the sixth consecutive month in mainland China, as the tech giant steps up its self-sufficiency efforts.
• Uber launches prepaid passes, letting customers pay a discounted price in advance on frequently taken trips, in bundles of 5, 10, 15, or 20 rides, with the bigger bundle earning the bigger discount.
• The European Union seeks information about whether Apple, Google and Microsoft are doing enough to prevent the proliferation of online scams on their platforms.
• Microsoft is reportedly preparing a Publisher Content Marketplace to compensate publishers when their work is used in AI products like Copilot; brings Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 AI models to its Microsoft 365 Copilot, as the company goes beyond OpenAI's range of models, and says it plans to let Copilot take control of users' browsers to complete tasks and navigate tabs.
• Privacy startup Duality says it has developed a private LLM inference framework that uses fully homomorphic encryption to let LLMs answer encrypted prompts.
• A joint investigation by Canadian privacy authorities finds that TikTok collected sensitive personal data from hundreds of thousands of Canadian children under 13.
• Google introduces Mixboard, an AI-powered tool that lets users in the U.S. create mood boards; rolls out an AI-powered conversational photo editing tool, previously exclusive to the Pixel 10 series, to all Google Photos users on Android in the U.S.
• Snowflake, Salesforce, and dozens of other companies announce the Open Semantic Interchange, a vendor-neutral standard for how business data is defined and shared across platforms.
• Google adds a new You tab to Google Play, featuring player account information, personalised content recommendations and rewards; announces Play Games Sidekick for Android, an in-game overlay that provides access to Gemini Live while playing games downloaded from the Play Store.
• Amazon plans to close all 19 Fresh stores in the U.K. and convert five of them into Whole Foods Market shops, four years after launching the first grocery shop in London.
• Google releases updates to Google Home for web that are optimised for bigger screens with capabilities to "you can edit automations with the script editor, check live streams of multiple Nest cameras at once, or keep the live stream playing in the background while you work on other things."
• Spotify reinstates integration with third-party DJ software such as rekordbox, Serato and djay for Premium subscribers in 51 markets, including the U.S., after pulling support in 2020.
• Google expands its new, cheaper AI Plus plan to more than 40 countries, including Angola, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, after launching it in Indonesia earlier this month. (It's worth noting that OpenAI has also brought its cheaper ChatGPT Go plan to Indonesia after introducing it in India last month.)
• Apple asks the E.U. to repeal the Digital Markets Act, saying the law "is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the E.U." and "exposing them to new risks"; claims it reduces choice by making iOS resemble Android and creates unfair competition by not applying to Samsung.
• In response, the European Commission has said it has "absolutely no intention" of the regulation and that there is nothing in the DMA that requires companies to lower their privacy or security standards.
• The pushback against DMA is unlikely to end anytime soon. The U.S. ambassador to the E.U. Andrew Puzder said the E.U. must either prove that its digital rules, such as the DMA, do not punish U.S. tech companies or change them.
• Google asks the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the permanent injunction ruling that would require it to stop app developers to use its Google Play Billing for payments, allow them to link to other ways to pay and other places to download apps, and set their own prices, as it plans to appeal the case by October 27, 2025; comes weeks after a U.S. appeals court has denied Google’s request to pause the order.
• An Indian court in the state of Karnataka dismisses X's March lawsuit challenging the government's content takedown orders, ruling foreign platforms can't invoke free speech protections.
• Google's YouTube adds a "hide" button to allow users dismiss recommendation pop-ups that appear at the end of videos, following user feedback that pop-ups were distracting.
• OpenAI partners with SAP to launch OpenAI for Germany, bringing its AI tools to Germany's public sector through SAP's Delos Cloud; introduces Pulse, a new ChatGPT feature that generates five to ten personalised daily reports based on their chats, feedback and connected apps overnight for Pro users on its US$ 200/month plan.
• Alphabet's Waymo launches Waymo for Business, a service targeting employers, universities, and event organizers, in select cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
• Google launches the Data Commons MCP Server, allowing developers to integrate its collection of public datasets into AI systems via natural language queries; confirms its plans to merge Android and ChromeOS to create a new operating system for computers next year.
• Amazon agrees to pay US$ 2.5 billion to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it deceived users into paying for Prime memberships and making it difficult for them to cancel it; to pay a US$ 1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund US$ 1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers who were impacted by "unwanted Prime enrolment or deferred cancellation."
• Microsoft launches Microsoft Marketplace, combining Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource in a single destination for cloud tools and AI apps and agents; testa a new Windows 11 feature that automatically categorises photos in the library using AI.
• A China Labor Watch six-month investigation at Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPhone factory finds tough working conditions for seasonal staff building the latest iPhones.
• Meta rolls out Vibes, a platform where users can create and share short-form, AI-generated videos, in the Meta AI app and on the meta.ai website.
• Cloudflare announces plans to launch NET Dollar, a US dollar-backed stablecoin designed to support payments for the "agentic web".
• Google's DeepMind unveils Gemini Robotics 1.5 and Robotics-ER 1.5, enabling robots to perform multi-step tasks like sorting laundry, including by using web search.
• OpenAI releases GDPval, a benchmark to test AI performance on "economically valuable, real-world tasks"; says Claude Opus 4.1 is the best performing model.
• The E.U. prepares to issue preliminary findings that Facebook and Instagram lack an adequate "notice and action mechanism" to let users flag illegal posts, according to Bloomberg.
• Microsoft blocks the Israeli military's access to cloud and AI services that have been used in the mass surveillance of Palestinian civilians; says it's taking steps to ensure its services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians.
• Google says the U.S. government's call for a divestiture of Google Ad Manager would "make it harder for publishers to monetise their content and more expensive for advertisers to reach new customers," as the Justice Department's lawsuit against the company over its ads business enters the remedies phase. (Earlier this year, the judge overseeing the case ruled that Google operated an illegal monopoly in digital advertising.)
• Meta brings its "pay or consent" model to the U.K., allowing users to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram by paying £2.99 a month on web (or £3.99 a month for Android or iOS).
• Google's YouTube pilots AI hosts that provide relevant stories, fan trivia and commentary about the music users are listening to, in the YouTube Music app through its new Labs program.
• Perplexity launches Search API, giving developers direct access to the same web index that powers the startup's answer engine.
• Mozilla Firefox plans to offer visual searching on images with AI-Powered Google Lens.