Latest | New in AI

Money

Stripe is buying the meter on AI spending

OpenRouter sits between developers and 400-plus models, so it already knows which ones get picked and what they cost. That ledger now belongs to a payments company.

Cabling routed between rows of networking equipment in a dark server cabinet

Chandni Melwani · Aug 24, 2026

Legal

The Justice Department told a federal judge that Minnesota's nudification ban sweeps too broadly, without joining the case.

The United States is not a party to xAI's lawsuit against Minnesota. It filed anyway, arguing the state law risks paralyzing the AI industry.

Bound legal reference volumes and law dictionaries standing on a shelf

Chandni Melwani · US · Aug 23, 2026

Big Story

GitHub's autoscaler was watching a number that could not see the thing filling up.

GitHub.com was degraded for 7 hours 47 minutes on August 17. Copilot stayed broken for four and a half of them, because a retry bug in VS Code kept hitting the service that had just come back.

A row of cooling fans on rack-mounted hardware, lit in pink and blue

Chandni Melwani · Aug 22, 2026

Jobs

Journalists at USA Today Co. protested AI on their lunch break. They are not asking the company to stop using it.

The demand from 31 union locals is guardrails, disclosure and a say in how the tools arrive, which is what a bargaining unit asks for when it cannot stop a deployment.

Chandni Melwani · US · Aug 22, 2026

Marketing AI

You can buy ads inside ChatGPT. You cannot check whether your own ran.

Meta has the Ad Library, Google has the Ads Transparency Center, TikTok has a Commercial Content Library for Europe. The AI answer surfaces have nothing.

Two facing shelf stacks of white storage boxes each printed with the word archive, forming an aisle that ends at a closed wooden door beneath a clock

Chandni Melwani · Global · Aug 21, 2026

Retail Adoption

Six weeks out from Q4, three quarters of the biggest US retailers still have no direct line to a shopping agent

Almost the entire AI-shopping leaderboard reshuffled in a single quarter, and the catalogues agents will recommend from this holiday are being prepared now.

A store aisle lined with stocked shelves and numbered aisle signage

Chandni Melwani · Global · Aug 20, 2026

Infrastructure

The UAE spent years getting permission to buy advanced AI chips. Powering them is the longer wait.

A data centre with its chips installed still cannot switch on without a power transformer, and in the US the order book for those runs about 30 months.

A large grey power transformer in an electrical substation

Chandni Melwani · GCC · Aug 20, 2026

Products

Telling ChatGPT you are an adult no longer settles it. A selfie does.

If OpenAI's model estimates an account belongs to someone under 18, the teen experience applies, and the route back is identity verification.

A row of closed salmon-coloured metal school lockers with combination dials, against a tiled corridor wall

Chandni Melwani · Aug 19, 2026

Safety

OpenAI put a number on what safety costs: about a fifth of the compute it watches

The largest planned frontier training run is still on hold, and the monitoring around it runs at roughly 20% of the inference compute being monitored.