Cognition, a San Francisco–based AI company, has finalised an agreement to acquire Windsurf, including its IP, product, trademark, and remaining workforce.

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.

According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity.

The goal of FAIR is not to fork WordPress. We’re still using the same core software. We’re not building a separate platform. We are adding a new distribution layer and putting our own governance on top of it. It’s a new path within WordPress, not outside it.

Remix v2 had become such a thin wrapper around React Router that an artificial separation developed between the two projects.

Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions.

Again, Sweeney is not a moron, he has to know all of this. But why simply sit quietly when you have an excuse to poke the bear again and raise hell for your cause? So that’s what he’s doing. He wasn’t going to win the legal fight, but he could win the political one. And now he’s not going to win this legal fight, but he can win the pressure campaign. Especially important in the weeks leading up to WWDC...

"We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. Thank you for being part of our journey over the years—we're proud of the impact Pocket has had for our users and communities.
"

Data analytics startup Databricks said Wednesday that it is buying Neon, a cloud-based database software vendor, for about $1 billion.

Apple has filed an emergency motion asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to pause key parts of a recent ruling that dramatically changes how the App Store operates, following a contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.

Following a court order that blocks Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says on X that the company plans to bring Fortnite back to iOS in the US “next week.”

Before entering into talks to acquire artificial intelligence code-writing startup Windsurf, OpenAI looked at buying another option: Cursor.

Windsurf, the maker of a popular AI coding assistant, is in talks to be acquired by OpenAI for about $3 billion

Humane announced on Tuesday that most of its assets have been acquired by HP for $116 million. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of its $499 AI Pins. Humane alerted customers who have already purchased the Pin that their devices will stop functioning before the end of the month — at 12 p.m. PST on February 28, 2025, according to a blog post.

Things have gone off the rails...

"Like everyone else, I had heard all the hype around NotebookLM, the new AI product from Google in which you give it content to ingest and it spits out a... podcast."

Over time, Musk claimed the operating costs of his Cybercab would be 20 cents per mile, “and yes you’ll be able to buy one,” he told the crowd to excited shrieks. “We expect the cost to be below $30,000,” Musk said, before expounding on a business model where instead of the company owning and operating these allegedly revenue-generating assets itself, they are instead owned by private individuals who each give Tesla its regular cut.

You may be aware of a bizarre feud between WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg and website hosting platform WP Engine.

Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly clear: he’s in charge of WordPress’ future.

The world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. The core issue is the fight between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.

For now, the bug is triggered when someone replies to a shared watch face in a thread on Messages in iOS 18. The threaded responses feature allows you to have an inline conversation about a specific message that may have been sent earlier in the chat.

Disney tried to force the case into arbitration by citing the agreement on the widower’s Disney Plus trial account.

Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

Some pre-prompt instructions for Apple’s upcoming AI features are stored on your Mac, saying ‘do not hallucinate’ and to avoid ‘negative’ themes.

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI has officially become more complicated.

Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person.

In a rather stark turnaround, Google is no longer ending support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser.

Meta is planning to spend billions to buy roughly 5 percent of ​​EssilorLuxottica, the €88 billion European eyewear giant it has collaborated with on two generations of Ray-Ban smart glasses. The Financial Times and other outlets earlier reported news of the talks, which I’ve also confirmed. I’m told the negotiations are advanced and it’s likely Meta will make the investment.

Apple this weekend approved free PC emulator “UTM SE” for the App Store on iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro. The app allows users to emulate old versions of Windows OS, macOS, Linux, and more to fire up classic software and games on Apple devices.

Has AI frozen the gates of hell?

Humane is telling AI Pin owners today that they should “immediately” stop using the charging case that came with its AI gadget. There are issues with a third-party battery cell that “may pose a fire safety risk,” the company wrote in an email to customers.

Humane, the startup behind the poorly-reviewed AI Pin wearable computer, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, which says the company — led by former longtime Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno — is “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion.”

"We have made the decision to discontinue Car Thing. This means that Car Thing will no longer be operational. This decision wasn't made lightly, and we want to assure you that our commitment to providing a superior listening experience remains unchanged."

"I wrote a blog post the other day about how Next.js Middleware can be useful for working around some of the restrictions imposed by server components. This led to some fun discussions in the world about whether this was a reasonable approach or if Next.js DX was just... bad."

Sound is an outcast in Software Design. We may embrace the aesthetics of animation and visuals, but sound is different. It’s intrusive. Unlike visuals on a screen, you can’t look away or ignore it. It’s enough to make you rip the batteries out of a toy or frisbee an iPad across the room (speaking from experience).

Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.

In a move that has broad implications for the cloud infrastructure technology market, IBM announced on its earnings call on April 24th that it is buying cloud technology firm HashiCorp for $35 a share, or $6.4 billion.

Tesla has issued a recall for effectively every Cybertruck it’s delivered to customers due to a fault that’s causing the vehicle’s accelerator pedal to get stuck.

"Autocode is shutting down..."

The term "open" has no agreed-upon definition in the context of AI, and is applied to widely divergent offerings with little reference to a stable meaning.

Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.

For me, the most unexpected part of the document was the DoJ’s explanation that Apple’s success as a company largely stems from… the DoJ itself. It points out that Apple’s resurgence early in this century was due to the release of the iPod, which only became a hit when it arrived on Windows. The DoJ argues that the iPod’s presence on Windows was only due to Microsoft being under a consent decree from the DoJ for monopolistic behavior.

"We recently announced that Apple approved our Epic Games Sweden AB developer account. We intended to use that account to bring the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to iOS devices in Europe thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). To our surprise, Apple has terminated that account and now we cannot develop the Epic Games Store for iOS. This is a serious violation of the DMA and shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices."

In a packed theater in Laguna Beach on Thursday morning, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe opened his presentation to resounding whoops from the audience, well before the company unveiled its three buzzy new vehicles, the Rivian R2, R3, and R3X.

Makers of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu owe Nintendo $2.4 million after reaching a settlement with the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developer, following a lawsuit over the open-source emulator just last week.

Microsoft has entered into a multi-year partnership with Mistral AI, a French startup specializing in artificial intelligence.

Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car, executives announced in a short meeting with the team Tuesday morning. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team and all work on the project has stopped, TechCrunch has learned.

Amid rumors that the European Commission will soon fine Apple 500 million euros for breaking EU law over access to streaming music services, Apple today commented on its relationship with Apple Music competitor Spotify and the ongoing complaints that Spotify has made to the EC to attempt to get the App Store rules changed.

Intuitive Machines’ uncrewed Odysseus spacecraft made the first moon landing by an American vehicle in more than 50 years Thursday evening, finishing a week-long voyage from the Earth after a short delay and marking the first-ever soft lunar landing by a private company.

Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.

The Walt Disney Company and Epic Games will collaborate on an all-new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences. Disney will also invest $1.5 billion to acquire an equity stake in Epic Games alongside the multiyear project. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

Since launching last year, Canadians have been eager to collaborate with our state-of-the-art AI models and starting today, Gemini (formerly Bard) is available in Canada from coast-to-coast-to-coast, in both English and French, along with 40 other languages worldwide.

A year ago today, Microsoft unveiled its ambitious plans for an AI-powered Bing search engine. It was the biggest launch in the history of Bing, helped push AI usage even further into the mainstream, and spurred a wave of dreams and panic about what AI could impact next. The launch was even successful enough to rattle Google, which was quickly seen as falling behind on artificial intelligence.

Adam Neumann wants to buy real estate company WeWork, the company he co-founded in 2010 that ousted him nine years later, out of bankruptcy citing the support of “well-known capital sources” including Dan Loeb’s Third Point.

Snap gave up on its Pixy flying selfie camera drone after just four months, but it turns out the company sold under 71,000 drones — and now the company is recalling every one of those drones because their batteries pose a fire hazard. Yes, the entire drone is being recalled, not just the removable battery, likely because Snap doesn’t make those batteries anymore.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added his voice to those criticizing Apple’s compliance with the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which forces Apple to open up its App Store and allow developers to use their own payment systems, among other things. During Meta’s Q4 earnings call this afternoon, Zuckerberg responded to an investor question asking for Meta’s thoughts on the DMA by saying Apple’s new rules were “so onerous” that he would be surprised if any developer adopted them.

"Here is our vision. It’s really simple. You tell Arc what to do, and Arc will go and do it for you."

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has started a podcast, and earlier this month he posted an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Apple is finally opening the iPhone to third-party app stores in the European Union, kicking off a potentially vibrant, unwieldy, and eclectic new era for its app ecosystem. At least, it might, depending on how developers respond to a hurdle that is at once tiny and immense: a €0.50 fee.

Apple has developed a backup plan for if the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 are import banned again. As it currently appeals the US International Trade Commission’s (ITC’s) ruling that its watches violate a patent owned by Masimo, Apple has come up with a software workaround that strips its current smartwatches of their controversial blood oxygen monitoring capabilities.

The Supreme Court denied both sides’ appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers.

Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app.

What I had been seeing during the week before Christmas is that Beeper Mini half-worked: messages from Beeper Mini on Android would go through to Messages on an Apple device, but from any Apple device, you could get one message through to an Android device running Beeper, but only one. After that, messages sent from an iMessage user on an Apple device to a user running Beeper Mini would silently fail.

16 handy things to keep in mind from Sam Altman.

Adobe just abandoned its $20 billion deal to buy Figma, and now we know why. In an interview on the Decoder podcast with The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, Adobe general counsel Dana Rao said that the company couldn’t prove to European regulators that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition in the future — that is, that Adobe or Figma wouldn’t eventually do more to compete with one another.

Astro has become my JavaScript framework of choice for web projects going into 2024. I always found myself struggling with feeling like I had a whole bunch of complexity I didn't need with frameworks like Next.js, but not enough power or flexibility with pure static site generators like Hugo. Astro's "just in time" approach to handling dynamic web apps — from a singly dynamic component to full-blown server-side rendering — has me convinced that it's the right default choice for most new web projects today.

Fifteen months into the regulatory review process, Figma and Adobe no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of our proposed acquisition.

The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.

Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

As first reported in October, Apple will discontinue the standalone iTunes Movies and iTunes TV Shows apps on the Apple TV box, starting with tvOS 17.2 The warning message seen above has started appearing in the release candidate version of tvOS 17.2 beta, released yesterday.

When OpenAI’s board asked Sam Altman to return a day after they fired him, he initially felt defiant, hurt, and angry.

Artificial intelligence is the current tech industry hype. And OpenAI is by far the leading company in the AI space. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman was quickly becoming the face of AI as a whole.

Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI

RCS or Rich Communication Services, a communications standard developed by the GSM Association and adopted by much of the Android ecosystem, is designed to universally elevate messaging communication across mobile devices. Even though Apple has been working with the group, it has until this moment steadfastly refused to add RCS support to iPhones. Now, however, Apple is changing its tune.

A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of all seven criminal counts against him. The FTX founder faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison.

Unity, the company behind the game development engine of the same name, has just announced that its president, CEO, and chairman John Riccitiello “will retire” effective immediately.

Executives from Microsoft met with Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, who brokered the current search engine relationship with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, to discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing.

Hollywood heaves a sigh of relief. The WGA and major studios and streamers have reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract that promises to end the 146-day strike that has taken a heavy toll across the content industry.

A little more than a week after announcing a disastrous new pricing model that infuriated developers, Unity has introduced its revamped version.

We are excited to announce that after nearly 2 years of sustained effort since releasing Remix version 1 — 19 minor releases, over 100 patch releases, and thousands of closed issues and pull requests — we are releasing Remix v2 into the world today.

This comprehensive guide rounds up all of our coverage, making it a great resource for casual users who haven't had a chance to test out ‌iOS 17‌ and those who might not remember all of the new features. Everything is organized by app or feature to make it easy to find what you might be looking for.

The game developers affected by Unity’s new pricing model are striking back. A collective of developers across 19 companies, mostly based in Europe and mostly developing mobile games, has put out an open letter urging Unity to reverse course on its recently announced pricing model changes.

The Juno Awards say a controversial "deep fake" song featuring unauthorized sound-alike vocals of Drake and the Weeknd won't be eligible at next year's celebration of Canadian music.

Game developers aren't happy with a new policy from Unity that will cost developers a small fee every time someone downloads a game built on Unity's game engine.

So, here's something that makes me feel old: React celebrated its 10th birthday this year!

"I've seen a lot of true believers argue for virtues of their favorite paradigms and methods over the decades working in software. And mostly, I look at people with a passionate preference and smile. Isn't it great that people care so much about their craft that they volunteer to extol the benefits of their favorite tools!"

The Steam Deck has kickstarted a wave of handhelds from some of the big names in PC gaming. Asus has its Windows-powered ROG Ally, Lenovo just announced its own Legion Go handheld PC, and Logitech released a cloud-focused handheld. AMD has been quietly arming an entire new wave of Steam Deck competitors, so where is Microsoft’s Xbox handheld?

As I remember it, at least 10 years ago, I began to hear anecdotes from developers who built apps for both iOS and Android about their economics.

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red says its upcoming expansion, Phantom Liberty, will serve as the game’s one and only expansion because of its “technological decision” to move from CDPR’s own REDengine technology to Unreal 5.

"There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge."

For the first few years of the iPhone’s existence, Apple introduced a single new model every year. In that time, total iPhone sales shot up from nothing to $100 billion a year. Not bad!

Amazon has acquired Fig, a Y Combinator (YC) alum that has been setting out to turbo-charge the command line terminal.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a message to employees who don’t want to return to the office: “It’s not going to work out for you.” That’s according to a report from Insider, which says Jassy made that statement during a meeting earlier this month.

“It was like seeing Fantastical for the first time,” he says. “It felt like I was part of the app.”

It starts with what devices we need (or can live without) and cascades into charging bricks and cords and anything else that will keep us powered up and not feeling regret about having left an essential device behind.

As part of Amazon’s aggressive effort to get employees back to the office, the company is going a step further and demanding that some staffers move to a central hub to be with their team. Those who are unwilling or unable to comply are being forced to find work elsewhere, and some are choosing to quit, CNBC has learned.