Tech Roundup: Google Personal Intelligence, Anthropic Claude Design & More

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

• Google announces a Gemini app integration between Personal Intelligence and Nano Banana 2 to let the AI image generator "automatically reflect" users' tastes; expands Personal Intelligence, which lets users connect their Google accounts for tailored Gemini answers, to India, initially for AI Pro and Ultra users.
• OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.0 with new "thinking capabilities" globally for ChatGPT and Codex users, allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt (it knowledge cut off is December 2025); says it has a stronger understanding of non-Latin text rendering in languages like Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Bengali.
• India's central bank cancels Paytm Payments Bank's banking license, after imposing business curbs over non-compliance with rules in January 2024.
• Meta has a system in India to "automatically restrict content, at scale" to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers, according to a report from The Hindu.
• X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store with support for end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages; comes as the platform announces plans to retire its Communities feature by May 30, 2026, citing low usage, and plans to increase group chat limits to 1,000 in the next two weeks.</li>
• Spotify lets users create and manage folders on mobile, bringing the streaming platform's apps closer to parity with the web experience.
• Microsoft says it will allow users to indefinitely delay updates up to 35 days at a time; makes Copilot's agentic features in Word, Excel and PowerPoint generally available and enabled by default for 365 Copilot and 365 Premium.
• Norway plans to ban children from using social media until they turn 16, with the government to introduce a bill in parliament by the end of 2026; Turkey's parliament passes a bill requiring social media and online game companies to restrict access for children under 15, following a school shooting.
• DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months; DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6 trillion total parameters, its largest model by that metric, and V4 Flash has 284 billion parameters.
• Meta's WhatsApp partners with PayU to roll out prepaid mobile recharges in India, as it remains a marginal payments player in India despite launching payments in 2020; Instagram launches Snapchat-clone Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy and Spain, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions.
• OpenAI launches GPT-5.5, designed to handle complex tasks with minimal guidance; rolls it out to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, and GPT-5.5 Pro to Pro, Business and Enterprise users in ChatGPT.
• Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug and a system prompt to reduce verbosity; expands its directory of connected services for Claude, adding integrations for AllTrails, Audible, Booking.com, Instacart, Intuit Credit Karma, Intuit TurboTax, Resy, Spotify, StubHub, Taskrabbit, Thumbtack, TripAdvisor, Uber, Uber Eats and Viator.
• Social media platform BlueSky adds support for better-quality photos with a maximum size of 2MB and maximum resolution of 4000 x 4000.
• Google updates its AI-powered health coach in Fitbit with the ability to provide weekly fitness plans based on users' goals and preferences, as well as customise the plan, targets and workouts; starts rolling out Ask Gemini and AI Overviews to Google Drive.
• Meta plans to allow parents to see the topics their teens discussed with Meta AI to ensure a more safe experience.
• Lyft agrees to buy London black cab app Gett, its third acquisition in the past year, as the company expands its presence beyond the U.S.
• OpenAI teams up with Indian IT services company Infosys to bring AI tools to more businesses, and help the latter's clients automate workflows and deploy AI systems; gives users of its Business, Enterprise, Edu and Teachers plans access to cloud-based "workspace" agents available in ChatGPT to perform business tasks on their own.
• Google brings Gemini-powered "auto browse" capabilities to Chrome for enterprise users, letting workers automate tasks like research and data entry; announces the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a revamped developer tool built on Vertex AI that manages the full lifecycle of AI agent fleets, and begins offering two research agents: Deep Research, replacing its December preview release, and Deep Research Max via Gemini API paid tiers.
• Amazon Music partners with Bandsintown for concert listings, allowing users to see live events of an artist on their Amazon Music profile.
• Australia's eSafety Commissioner issues transparency notices to Roblox, Microsoft's Minecraft and other online gaming platforms to detail child safety measures, as Roblox reaches settlements totaling $35.8 million with the U.S. states of West Virginia, Alabama and Nevada over child-safety protections. (Roblox will pay $12.5 million and implement age verification for all users as part of a settlement with Nevada over claims it failed to protect young users.)
• Tencent launches an international beta for QClaw, its OpenClaw-based AI agent, and says the Chinese version, launched last month, reached over 1 million users in 10 days.
• Google's YouTube makes its deepfake detection tool available to anyone at high risk of having their likeness abused, expanding it from public officials and politicians; to begin muting push notifications from creators that users don't engage with for a month.
• Anthropic starts requiring government-issued photo IDs and selfies from some users to prevent access from U.S. adversaries like China, Russia, and North Korea.
• SpaceX says it's working with Cursor to build "the world's most useful models" and it has the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10B for the partnership.
• X launches Custom Timelines, a Grok-powered feature letting users pin any of over 75 topics to their home tab, in early access to Premium subscribers on iOS; increases the cost of posting links to X through custom social media software from $0.01 to $0.20, a 1,900% jump.
• A U.K. tribunal rules Microsoft must face a lawsuit alleging it overcharged U.K. businesses to run Windows Server on cloud services from Amazon, Google and Alibaba.
• Meta faces a new lawsuit over its advertising practices after non-profit group Consumer Federation of America (CFA) files a proposed class-action suit against the company for "failing to protect users" from scam ads on Facebook and Instagram. 
• Yelp updates its AI assistant to answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversation.
• Microsoft pauses new GitHub Copilot signups for Pro, Pro+ and Student tiers; tightens usage limits, removes Opus models from Pro, and limits Opus 4.7 to Pro+ subscribers.
• Alphabet an Amazon invest billions of dollars in Anhtropic, as AI race continues to heat up.
• OpenAI rolls out Chronicle, which builds memories from screen captures to make Codex more aware of context, as a research preview for Pro subscribers on macOS.
• A U.S. jury finds Uber liable for a sexual assault by a driver in 2019, handing Uber a second consecutive defeat in its first trials of more than 3,000 pending lawsuits.
• Apple says John Ternus is succeeding Tim Cook as CEO, with Cook assuming the role of executive chairman on Sept 1, 2026.
• The U.K. government plans to formally ban mobile phones in schools as part of an amendment to the children's wellbeing and schools bill.
• Sony says PlayStation will require players to verify their age later this year to keep using communication features like messages and voice chat.
• Music streaming service Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, accounting for nearly 75,000 AI-track uploaded every day, but make up just 1-3% of consumption.
• Microsoft's LinkedIn tests a feature called Crosscheck that allows Premium users to test out some of the latest AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and other companies without having to worry about token limits or paying for an extra subscription.
• Google expands Gemini in Chrome to markets in Asia and the Pacific, including Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam, after bringing it to Canada, India and New Zealand; updates AI Mode in Search to help users find products in stock nearby.
• WhatsApp says it is testing a new subscription called WhatsApp Plus, which includes features like expanded pinned chats, custom lists, and new chat themes.
• Moonshot introduces Kimi K2.6, an open-weight model that it says shows strong improvements in long-horizon coding tasks.
• Adobe introduces CX Enterprise, an AI agent-based platform that aims to help corporate customers automate digital marketing and other functions.
• China's smartphone shipments decline 4% YoY in Q1 2026 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grows 2% YoY for a 20% market share and iPhone grows 20% for a 19% share; India's smartphone shipments fall 3% YoY in Q1 2026, a six-year low, as price hikes weigh on sales and over 80 smartphone models see price hikes of about 15%.
• Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides and one-pagers using Claude.
• Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed to help with content discovery; says it intends to use AI for content creation and recommendations.
• World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification.
• Mozilla launches an open-source AI client called Thunderbolt for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure.
• Meta gives Threads on web a redesign and finally adds direct messages.
• Perplexity launches Personal Computer, an expansion of Perplexity Computer that integrates with local files and apps on a Mac, for Max subscribers.
• OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory and plugin support; launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen.
• Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop and search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile; launches Skills, repeatable AI prompts that Chrome users can run with a keyboard shortcut, alongside options to either set up their own Skills or choose from over 50 presets.
• Alibaba unveils Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, an open-weight MoE model with 35 billion total and 3 billion active parameters, saying it rivals larger dense models in agentic coding tasks.
• Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, which can generate editable layered designs from conversational prompts using Canva's foundation model built specifically for design.
• Roblox revamps Roblox Assistant, its plain-language AI tool for game development, with agentic tools to let developers plan, build, and test games.
• Google's YouTube now lets users set a zero-minute Shorts time limit, effectively removing them from its iOS and Android app (the lowest previous option was 15 minutes); makes it easier to share videos from a specific timestamp from its mobile apps.
• Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code.
• Google launches a Gemini Mac app that features a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, and image generation with Nano Banana; releases a Windows desktop app with a macOS Spotlight-like search box for the web, Google Drive, and local files, and a screen sharing feature.
• Anthropic launches a repeatable routines feature for Claude Code as a research preview, allowing developers to schedule and automate software development tasks; redesigns Claude Code on desktop, adding a sidebar for managing multiple sessions, a drag-and-drop layout, an integrated terminal, and a file editor.
• Amazon's AWS launches Amazon Bio Discovery, an AI-powered application designed to speed up drug development, giving scientists access to biological foundation models.
• Apple launches its new all-in-one Apple Business platform for device management, email and customer engagement.
• Amazon agrees to acquire satellite operator Globalstar to expand Leo; Amazon and Apple say Leo will power some iPhone and Watch services.
• X launches Cashtags, a feature that lets users view real-time financial data on stocks and crypto directly in their timelines, in the U.S. and Canada.
• DeepL, best known for its text translation tools, launches DeepL Voice-to-Voice, which enables real-time spoken translation, with add-ons for services like Zoom.
• Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant to orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps.
• Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the U.S. and U.K., powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match scanning tool to support over 30 languages.
• The EU unveils an open-source age verification app, which requires showing ID, to shield kids from harmful content, as it aims to step a standard for verification technology.
• Amazon quietly expands Amazon Autos to offer cars from Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep, after launching with Hyundai in over 130 U.S. cities.