Gemini is moving into Google Play, and it has front-row seat to your spending habits

Ask Google Pay uses Gemini to analyze spending and explain financial topics, while a new SBI partnership expands Google’s app-based Flex credit card in India.

Gemini on Mac can now type what you say and act on what it sees

Google is upgrading the Gemini app for Mac with system-wide dictation triggered by the Fn key, plus an opt-in mode that lets Gemini pull context from what’s on screen for more complex tasks.

Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon – nonfiction tomes that he […]

Gemini can now summarize the messiest comment threads in Google Docs

Gemini can now sort sprawling Google Docs comments by reviewer or theme, surface unresolved questions, draft responses and suggest edits, though access depends on the right plan, settings and document permissions.

Google’s priciest Pixel 11 may bring a smaller battery and a bigger bill

A new leak points to smaller batteries inside both Pixel 11 Pro models, while the Pro XL could cost £80 more than last year’s equivalent.

Google scraped the web to build itself. A court just said others can scrape Google.
Google scraped the web to build itself. A court just said others can scrape Google.

Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google. On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpA…

ChatGPT has quietly stopped writing like your favourite author
ChatGPT has quietly stopped writing like your favourite author

Ask ChatGPT for a chapter in the voice of Stephen King and it now says no. It offers instead to write something with “the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread,” while staying “its own.” OpenAI has quietly changed how i…

AI leaders sign a statement asking the government to do something about automated AI
AI leaders sign a statement asking the government to do something about automated AI

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development – or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts. “Al could help create a dramatically better […]

AI’s finally expensive enough to make Wall Street nervous
AI’s finally expensive enough to make Wall Street nervous

It’s earnings season, and investors got an unpleasant surprise from Google: an increase on its spending estimate, to as much as $205 billion – from the last quarter’s projection of up to $190 billion. Even the lower end of Google’s new projected range – $195 billion – is much more than the company had previously […]

Anthropic says your leaked Claude chats are working as intended
Anthropic says your leaked Claude chats are working as intended

Type the right query into Google over the weekend and you could read strangers’ conversations with Claude. Some held medical records. Some held company files and children’s phone numbers. The chats were not hacked or leaked in any technical sense. User…