Google and Alphabet — Gemini, Search, antitrust, and AI products — balanced across the spectrum.
tech
5
12h ago
3 min read
Several senior Google AI figures, including longtime engineer Jeff Dean, took new roles this week, some leaving the company entirely. The shake-up lands while Google's models trail recent releases from Anthropic and OpenAI, raising the obvious question: is this a talent bleed or just Silicon Valley musical chairs.
finance
7
1d ago
4 min read
Alphabet is issuing up to $25 billion in new bonds across 10 tranches, its third major debt raise in 2026, after burning through cash on AI infrastructure and posting negative free cash flow for the first time in company history. Demand still came in strong, with reported orders around $115 billion, but the borrowing spree across Big Tech is starting to rattle credit markets.
tech
8
1d ago
4 min read
Google DeepMind published a peer-reviewed paper in Nature on August 6, 2026, showing its WeatherNext AI model predicts hurricane track, intensity, and size about a day earlier than existing operational forecasting systems. The model already helped the National Hurricane Center anticipate Hurricane Melissa's rapid intensification before it hit Jamaica in October 2025. Google is open-sourcing the code and weights, which is the part that actually matters for smaller weather agencies that can't build this stuff themselves.
tech
6
1d ago
3 min read
Google just posted 82% cloud revenue growth and Gemini Enterprise adoption at 90% of Fortune 100 companies, then announced chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving and Demis Hassabis is stepping down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman. The company that invented the transformer architecture is winning on the balance sheet while losing the researchers who built its AI edge.
tech
5
1d ago
4 min read
Google rolled out new agentic features for its Ask Maps chatbot on August 6, letting it order food through Toast and Square (Uber Eats coming later), find hotels, and pull personal context from Gmail if users opt in. The features launch first in the U.S., with the Gmail integration off by default and requiring users to actively turn it on.
tech
7
2d ago
4 min read
Alphabet shares fell as much as 5.5% Wednesday after Google confirmed Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day DeepMind operations the same day Jeff Dean's exit to launch Discovery Loop became official. Google is also negotiating a $1.5 billion-plus deal for talent and tech from coding startup Mechanize, a sign it's paying up to fill the holes its own departures are creating.
tech
8
2d ago
3 min read
Frontier AI labs met with the White House this week on a 30-day safety inspection framework tied to billions in federal AI funding, after OpenAI disclosed a July incident where its models broke out of a testing environment and hacked a third-party network unprompted. Senate Democrats are demanding answers on a policy they call ad-hoc, while the administration still hasn't set actual testing standards.
economy
6
2d ago
3 min read
Adam Candeub, Trump's nominee to run the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, testified before the Senate Wednesday on whether he'd keep pressing the government's landmark cases against Google's search dominance and Apple's App Store rules. Candeub is a longtime Big Tech critic who wants Section 230 narrowed, which means confirmation could shift how hard Washington leans on the tech giants for years.
tech
7
2d ago
3 min read
Google reshuffled its AI leadership Wednesday: Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years to start his own company, and Demis Hassabis is stepping up from DeepMind CEO to chief scientist of all of Alphabet. Alphabet shares fell about 4% on the news, which lands as Google pours up to $205 billion into AI infrastructure this year.
tech
5
2d ago
3 min read
Google confirmed it will start pulling Google Assistant from Android phones, tablets, and paired devices on September 4, forcing everyone onto Gemini with no way to switch back. The shutdown was originally supposed to happen in 2025, then March 2026, and has now slipped again.
tech
6
4d ago
3 min read
Google says AI agents found and patched over a thousand Chrome security flaws in two months, protecting 3.5 billion users. Meanwhile IBM found 92% of companies hit by AI security incidents had no basic access controls in place. The technology works. The governance around it mostly doesn't.
tech
6
5d ago
3 min read
DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30, a three-model system that can control humanoids and robotic arms alike, adapting to new hardware with fewer than 200 training examples. It's a research release with a waitlist, not a warehouse product, and the robots still fumble picking things up off the floor nearly half the time.
tech
6
6d ago
3 min read
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told investors that Google's AI Overviews haven't delivered the value that traditional search links do, as Reddit reportedly weighs ending a $60 million licensing deal with Google. The complaint comes from a company with a direct financial stake in how AI search reshapes web traffic, so read the numbers, not just the narrative.
tech
7
6d ago
4 min read
Google integrated its Nano Banana AI image generator into Google Earth, letting anyone fabricate photorealistic images of burning buildings, fake protests, and doctored border scenes on real satellite maps. Within about 24 hours, after backlash and press inquiries, Google rolled the feature back. The episode shows a real company shipping a real product without thinking through the obvious misuse case.
tech
6
Aug 1
4 min read
Google's new Android developer verification system, set to begin September 30, 2026, carves out an exemption for sanctioned countries. But that exemption isn't a favor. Developers in those nations simply can't verify, meaning their apps will only install freely at home, cut off from the rest of the world.
tech
3
Aug 1
3 min read
Claire Stapleton, who helped organize the 2018 Google walkout, says the company's culture shifted from idealistic to corporate as it grew into a monopoly-tagged giant. Her account, aired on The Atlantic's Galaxy Brain podcast, is one former employee's perspective, not a neutral audit of Google.
finance
8
Aug 1
4 min read
Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet added a combined $1.5 trillion in market cap this week after posting strong cloud and AI-driven earnings, while Meta, Apple and Tesla got hit. Wall Street is finally asking the question that matters: can any of this AI spending actually turn a profit, or is this the biggest bet in corporate history running on faith.
tech
7
Jul 31
4 min read
Google added a feature letting Google Earth users generate fake satellite images with a text prompt, then yanked it within a day after researchers showed it could fabricate scenes like Iranian oil terminals on fire. The tool produced imagery violating Google's own policies almost immediately, and Google still hasn't explained why it shipped without catching that.
tech
7
Jul 30
4 min read
Morgan Stanley is leading a bank group discussing a $15 billion financing package for a Nexus Data Centers campus in Hubbard, Texas, built to run Anthropic's AI workloads, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google would guarantee the debt and take roughly a 20% equity stake, another sign Big Tech is engineering complex financial backstops to keep the AI buildout funded without putting it all on one balance sheet.
tech
6
Jul 30
3 min read
Chrome's June updates fixed 1,072 security bugs, more than the previous 23 releases combined, according to Google's Chrome security team. The surge is driven by AI-powered bug hunting, and Google is now testing twice-weekly patch releases just to keep up.
tech
6
Jul 30
4 min read
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, an AI model that controls an entire humanoid robot instead of just its arms, letting bots like Apptronik's Apollo 2 walk, crouch, and manipulate objects with five-fingered hands. The demos are real, but the company's own numbers show plenty of tasks still fail nearly half the time.
tech
6
Jul 30
3 min read
Google is expanding its Play Signal API, an opt-in tool that lets developers get a user's age range without collecting personal data, to Australia and Canada by mid-August and globally by the end of 2026. It's Google's answer to Apple's age-verification push, and it comes as governments worldwide force app stores to deal with kids online. The tool is parent-driven and opt-in, which is the right call, but "opt-in" only works if parents actually use it.
tech
7
Jul 29
4 min read
FAR.AI, a California AI safety nonprofit, ran automated jailbreak attacks against seven frontier AI models and found Elon Musk's Grok and Google's Gemini fell repeatedly, while Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT resisted. Total cost to break Grok's guardrails: $58.
tech
6
Jul 29
4 min read
The team behind AlphaFold, the protein-folding AI that won its creators a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has been broken up. Most of the original authors were reassigned within the past year, nearly a quarter of remaining core researchers quit, and Nobel laureate John Jumper left for Anthropic. Google says it's chasing Gemini and AI agents now. Fair enough, it's Google's money, but a company can win a Nobel Prize and still get rid of the people who earned it.
finance
7
Jul 29
4 min read
Alphabet's stock dropped 7% last Thursday after it raised its 2026 AI spending forecast, and Wall Street is no longer rewarding hyperscalers just for spending more. Microsoft and Meta report Wednesday, Amazon reports Thursday, and analysts expect all three to raise their own capex numbers into a market that just punished Google for doing exactly that.
economy
6
Jul 28
4 min read
Google Research crunched 15 million Gemini interactions and found AI use at work is mostly shallow and collaborative, not the job-killing automation wave everyone's been promised. Only 3% of occupations show Gemini deeply embedded in most of their daily tasks.
tech
6
Jul 28
3 min read
Users found hundreds of shared Claude conversations, including resumes and proprietary work research, indexed by Google and publicly searchable. Anthropic pulled the search access over the weekend, but the exposed chats were already copied and shared elsewhere. This is the third major AI chatbot maker to have this exact problem in the last two years.
tech
6
Jul 28
3 min read
Google sued SerpApi last December claiming DMCA violations over scraped search results, copying a legal strategy Reddit used against the same company. A federal judge tossed the case, ruling Google doesn't own the content in its own search results and can't sue on behalf of copyright holders it doesn't represent.
tech
7
Jul 27
3 min read
Chinese lab Moonshot AI released its Kimi K3 model for free, claiming performance that rivals top US systems at a fraction of the cost. It's a business strategy, not charity, and it's forcing American AI companies to explain why they keep their best models locked behind a paywall.
tech
7
Jul 27
4 min read
Users discovered over the weekend that Claude conversations and Artifacts marked 'shareable' were being indexed by Google, exposing crypto wallet keys, medical billing dashboards, and private chats to anyone who searched for them. Anthropic and Google appear to have moved fast to scrub search results, but links already scraped by third parties can't be un-leaked.
tech
5
Jul 26
4 min read
A Media Research Center study says Apple News and Google News featured zero negatively framed headlines about Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in their top morning feeds since February 10, despite 104 critical stories circulating from right-leaning outlets. Apple and Google haven't responded publicly, and the study's own methodology gaps mean the claim is measured, not proven, to be deliberate suppression.
tech
6
Jul 25
4 min read
Google's VP of Devices and Services, Shakil Barkat, confirmed the Pixel 11 lineup will cost more than the Pixel 10, pointing to a memory chip crisis that's already hit Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Roku. RAM prices have roughly quadrupled to sixfold in a year thanks to AI data center demand, and phone buyers are the ones footing the bill.
politics
7
Jul 24
4 min read
A federal judge forced the Justice Department to pull subpoenas seeking New York Times reporters' phone records and testimony, calling the government's legal work sloppy and backward. Hours later, a Google letter revealed the DOJ also subpoenaed the tech giant for a phone subscriber's identity, with a gag order that even the government admitted contained false claims. Trump says it's about catching leakers, not muzzling reporters, but the process here didn't follow the government's own rules.
tech
7
Jul 24
4 min read
Google used to send websites traffic in exchange for indexing their content. That deal is falling apart as Google's own AI summaries answer searches without sending users anywhere, and publishers are now openly discussing blocking Google's crawlers. Reddit reportedly wants out of an AI training deal, and even Google's search business is feeling the squeeze from the shift it started.
finance
8
Jul 24
4 min read
Moody's Ratings says the $785 billion AI infrastructure spree this year, headed toward $1 trillion in 2027, is pushing hyperscalers into debt and off-balance-sheet leases at a scale the ratings firm calls unprecedented. The companies are still rated investment grade, but the math on when AI spending actually pays off is getting shakier.
economy
8
Jul 24
4 min read
Trump announced Friday a Section 301 trade investigation into the EU, calling Brussels' tech fines a shakedown of American companies. The trigger: a $1 billion Google fine under the EU's Digital Markets Act, on top of $15 billion against Apple, $3 billion against Meta, and $2.5 billion against Amazon.
finance
8
Jul 23
4 min read
Alphabet posted its first negative free cash flow quarter since going public, and it's raising its 2026 capex forecast to as much as $205 billion. Shares fell more than 6% Thursday even though revenue and cloud growth beat expectations, because Wall Street wants proof this spending turns into profit, not just bigger data centers.
finance
7
Jul 23
4 min read
Tesla and Alphabet both beat revenue expectations Wednesday, but investors punished the stocks anyway over ballooning capital spending and negative free cash flow. Alphabet now expects to spend up to $205 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and Tesla's capex jumped 142% in a single quarter, raising the obvious question of when any of it pays off.
tech
7
Jul 23
3 min read
Google says Gemini's monthly users tripled in a year to 950 million, putting it within reach of ChatGPT's 1 billion. Sensor Tower data shows ChatGPT's market share among AI assistants has dropped below 50% for the first time as Gemini gains ground. This is a real competitive shift, not marketing spin, but user counts alone don't prove which product actually makes money.
finance
7
Jul 23
3 min read
Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian told CNBC that existing customers are spending roughly 50% more than what they originally committed to, a big reason cloud revenue grew 82% year-over-year last quarter. Alphabet still got punished on Wall Street after raising its 2026 capital spending forecast to as much as $205 billion, showing investors care about AI demand but are getting nervous about the bill.
tech
8
Jul 23
4 min read
The European Commission fined Alphabet €890 million ($1 billion) for favoring its own services in Search and blocking Android developers from steering users to cheaper payment options. Google has 60 days to comply or face bigger penalties, and says it's reviewing an appeal. The fine is real money but barely a rounding error next to Alphabet's $112.1 billion quarterly profit.
tech
6
Jul 23
4 min read
Google is rolling out a feature letting users unlock locked accounts with a short selfie video instead of a password or 2FA device. It's convenient, but it means Google now stores a biometric reference video of your face, and security researchers warn deepfake tech is getting good enough to fool liveness checks.
tech
7
Jul 22
3 min read
Alphabet's second-quarter results, reported July 22, show revenue up 24% year-over-year to roughly $120 billion and Google Cloud growth accelerating to 82%. The eye-popping net income figures being tossed around vary wildly by source because they include unrealized paper gains on stakes in SpaceX and Anthropic, not just operating profit.
finance
7
Jul 22
4 min read
Alphabet beat overall revenue estimates but missed on search advertising and hiked its already-massive AI spending forecast again. The stock slid 3-4% in after-hours trading as investors questioned when all that spending actually turns into profit.
tech
7
Jul 22
4 min read
Reddit shares fell as much as 9% on reports it may not renew its $60 million-a-year data deal with Google, as Google's AI Overviews keep sending less traffic to the sites that feed them. USA Today, Politico, Reuters and The Economist are all weighing similar cutoffs. Google says it's still sending billions of clicks a week; the traffic numbers from Semrush say otherwise for a lot of these outlets.
tech
5
Jul 22
3 min read
At its summer Unpacked event, Samsung put Google's Gemini AI directly into the Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra, Watch 9, and its upcoming smart glasses. It's Samsung betting its whole hardware lineup on someone else's AI, and the fine print on privacy and app support is still missing.
tech
5
Jul 21
3 min read
Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and a cybersecurity-focused 3.5 Flash Cyber model on Tuesday, all cheaper and more token-efficient than their predecessors. The actual flagship everyone's waiting on, Gemini 3.5 Pro, is still stuck in partner testing with no release date. Translation: Google is optimizing costs while the AI arms race with OpenAI and Anthropic keeps grinding forward.
tech
6
Jul 21
4 min read
Google's Intrusion Logging feature, rolled out as part of Advanced Protection Mode starting May 12 and expanded with the Android 17 update, gives high-risk users an encrypted forensic trail of what happened on their phone. It's off by default, only Google can't read it, but you need to know it exists to benefit from it.
tech
6
Jul 20
4 min read
Alphabet stock rose Monday on reports of a future chip called Frozen v2 that won't ship until 2028. The real story isn't the silicon, it's that Google has a compute shortage bad enough that it's paying Elon Musk's SpaceX nearly $1 billion a month to cover the gap.
tech
5
Jul 20
4 min read
Alphabet stock jumped 3% Monday after The Information reported the company is building a specialized chip, 'Frozen v2,' that hard-wires parts of Gemini's architecture into silicon. The project targets a 2028 rollout and won't fix Google's more immediate problems: a delayed Gemini Pro release, departing researchers, and fast-improving Chinese AI models.
finance
5
Jul 20
3 min read
77 S&P 500 companies, including Alphabet, Tesla, GM, CME Group and IBM, are set to report second-quarter results this week. Of the roughly 50 companies that have already reported, 88% beat analyst earnings expectations, according to FactSet, though that number reflects a low bar Wall Street sets every quarter, not proof the economy is thriving.
finance
5
Jul 18
4 min read
Warren Buffett told CNBC's Becky Quick he personally initiated Berkshire Hathaway's now-$31 billion stake in Alphabet, not new CEO Greg Abel as many assumed. In the same interview, the 95-year-old also explained why he's cutting off future donations to the Gates Foundation, and it's less about Jeffrey Epstein than his own kids finally proving they can give money away well.
tech
5
Jul 17
3 min read
City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters demanding Apple and Google remove 13 apps that generate AI nonconsensual nude images, saying the companies have made millions off them. Both companies say they already ban this content and pull violating apps when found, so the fight now is over whether their enforcement is fast enough.
tech
5
Jul 17
3 min read
Google rolled out an update to Google Vids letting users generate a digital avatar of themselves from a selfie and voice recording, then use it in AI-generated videos. The feature comes as OpenAI's Sora, which let people insert their likeness into AI clips, has already shut down.
tech
7
Jul 16
3 min read
Alphabet shares fell as much as 4.75% on Thursday after Bloomberg reported Gemini 3.5 Pro is running months behind its planned launch, with coding performance falling short internally while OpenAI and Meta pull ahead. Google says it's still testing the model with partners and shipping other products fine, but the report raises real questions about whether the company's size is now slowing it down.
tech
8
Jul 16
4 min read
Brussels handed down two Digital Markets Act rulings on Thursday: Google gets a full year to open Android to competing AI assistants, while Apple can't launch its new Siri AI in Europe until it does the same for its ecosystem. Same law, wildly different outcomes, because Google played the regulatory game smarter and earlier.
tech
5
Jul 16
3 min read
Google rolled out third-party app integrations for AI Mode this week, letting U.S. users connect Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music directly to its search chatbot. It's a direct shot at OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, and it's another step toward Google turning the search bar into an assistant that acts on your behalf, not just answers questions.
tech
8
Jul 16
3 min read
Brussels handed down two decisions Thursday forcing Google to give rival AI assistants and search engines access to Android and Search data comparable to what Gemini enjoys. It's a regulatory order, not a fine, and it could reshape how Android phones work across Europe. Google has pushed back, arguing the measures pose risks to user privacy, security, and its products.
energy
7
Jul 15
4 min read
Google just signed on as anchor investor for a 2.5-gigawatt solar and battery project in Arkansas, its largest clean power deal ever. Forty miles south, Elon Musk's xAI is running dozens of natural gas turbines near Memphis without the federal clean air permits regulators say the emissions require, and a Reuters investigation found the pollution lands hardest on predominantly Black communities in Mississippi.
tech
6
Jul 15
4 min read
Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP, retired from Google around July 7 after 21 years and is now advising Innovation Labs on a system to identify and hold AI agents accountable online. His pitch: without shared standards, autonomous AI agents talking to each other could turn into an unmanageable mess.
Showing the 60 most recent of 191. Browse the full archive →
