An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country's flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.

"You need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University," Neha Singh, a professor of communications, told state-run broadcaster DD News this week in remarks that have since gone viral.

But social media users quickly identified the robot as the Unitree Go2, sold by China's Unitree Robotics for about $2,800 and widely used in research and education globally. The episode has drawn sharp criticism and has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on India's artificial intelligence ambitions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973. Newfangled computers were actually at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper. What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity was for several years a bust. This unexpected outcome became known as Solow's productivity paradox, thanks to the economist's observation of the phenomenon. "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics," Solow wrote in a New York Times Book Review article in 1987.

New data on how C-suite executives are -- or aren't -- using AI shows history is repeating itself, complicating the similar promises economists and Big Tech founders made about the technology's impact on the workplace and economy. Despite 374 companies in the S&P 500 mentioning AI in earnings calls -- most of which said the technology's implementation in the firm was entirely positive -- according to a Financial Times analysis from September 2024 to 2025, those positive adoptions aren't being reflected in broader productivity gains.

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the last three years, the research noted. However, firms' expectations of AI's workplace and economic impact remained substantial: Executives also forecast AI will increase productivity by 1.4% and increase output by 0.8% over the next three years. While firms expected a 0.7% cut to employment over this time period, individual employees surveyed saw a 0.5% increase in employment.

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a "1M token context window" and delivers a "full upgrade of the model's skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design." From Anthropic: Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users. Improvements in consistency, instruction following, and more have made developers with early access prefer Sonnet 4.6 to its predecessor by a wide margin. They often even prefer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.

Performance that would have previously required reaching for an Opus-class model -- including on real-world, economically valuable office tasks -- is now available with Sonnet 4.6. The model also shows a major improvement in computer use skills compared to prior Sonnet models. The free tier now uses Sonnet 4.6 by default and with "file creation, connectors, skills, and compaction" included.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple is reportedly developing AI-powered smart glasses, a wearable pendant, and camera-equipped AirPods that connect to the iPhone and use "visual context" to let Siri perform real-world actions. The Verge reports: Apple is reportedly aiming to start production of its smart glasses in December, ahead of a 2027 launch. The new device will compete directly with Meta's lineup of smart glasses and is rumored to feature speakers, microphones, and a high-resolution camera for taking photos and videos, in addition to another lens designed to enable AI-powered features.

The glasses won't have a built-in display, but they will allow users to make phone calls, interact with Siri, play music, and "take actions based on surroundings," such as asking about the ingredients in a meal, according to Bloomberg. Apple's smart glasses could also help users identify what they're seeing, reference landmarks when offering directions, and remind wearers to complete a task in specific situations, Bloomberg reports.

The company is reportedly planning to develop the frames for the smart glasses in-house, instead of partnering with a third-party company like Meta does with Ray-Ban and Oakley. Prototypes of the glasses use a cable to connect to a battery pack and an iPhone, but Bloomberg reports that "newer versions have the components embedded in the frame." Apple reportedly wants to make its smart glasses stand out by offering a high-quality build and advanced camera technology. The company is still working on AI-powered smart glasses with a display, though their launch "remains many years away," Bloomberg says.

Apple's plans for AI hardware don't end there, as the company is expected to build upon its Google Gemini-powered Siri upgrade with an AirTag-sized AI pendant that people can either wear as a necklace or a pin. This device would "essentially serve as an always-on camera" for the iPhone and has a microphone for prompting Siri, Bloomberg reports. The pendant, which The Information first reported on last month, is rumored to come with a built-in chip, but will mainly rely on the iPhone's processing power. The device could arrive as early as next year, according to Bloomberg.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!"

Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.

As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence.

"If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"

Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe's largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning permission in January 2025, and the company intends to break ground this year on a development it estimates will cost more than $5 billion.

The UK government's decision to classify data centers as "critical national infrastructure" and a new "gray belt" land designation that loosens building restrictions on underperforming greenbelt parcels helped clear the path for approval -- even though objections from locals outweighed signatures of support by nearly two-to-one during the public consultation. A protest group of more than 1,000 residents has since appealed to a third-party ombudsman and the UK's Office of Environmental Protection, but has so far failed to overturn the decision.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry's first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS -- roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.

The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two variants: the Pro, available in capacities up to 30.72 TB, and the endurance-oriented Max, topping out at 25.6 TB. Both variants share the same peak sequential and random speeds but diverge on mixed workloads and endurance ratings -- the Max 25.6 TB carries a random endurance rating of 140,160 TBW compared to 56,064 TBW on the Pro 30.72 TB.

Power draw holds at 25 watts, unchanged from high-end PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs, though the 9650 is Micron's first drive to support liquid cooling alongside air. Consumer platforms are not expected to adopt PCIe 6.0 until 2030.

The software industry's decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences.

As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way to consumption-based and hybrid alternatives. Snowflake and Databricks (valued at $134 billion) already charge based on usage. Salesforce initially priced its Agentforce customer relations bot at $2 per conversation but faced customer pushback and now offers action-based pricing, upfront credits and fixed fees.

ServiceNow's finance chief Amit Zavery said last month that some customers aren't ready for purely consumption-based models. Goldman Sachs estimates US software spending will nearly triple to $2.8 trillion by 2037 as automated tasks blur the boundary between IT and wage budgets, but that money will no longer arrive in the neat recurring instalments that investors and private equity firms have come to expect.

Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group's technology analyzes which musicians' songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contribution of each original work, such as "30% of the music used by the Beatles and 10% by Queen," for example.

If the AI developer agrees to cooperate for the analysis, Sony Group will obtain data by connecting to the developer's base model system. When cooperation is not attainable, the technology estimates the original work by comparing AI-generated music with existing music. The AI boom has sparked numerous cases in which AI developers are accused of using copyrighted music, video and writing without permission to train machines. In the music industry, AI-generated songs using the voices of well-known singers have been distributed online. The Japanese company thinks the technology will help create a system that distributes revenue generated by AI music to original songwriters based on their contribution.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled "built-in artificial intelligence features" on corporate tablets after its IT department assessed it couldn't guarantee the security of the tools' data.

"Some of these features use cloud services to carry out tasks that could be handled locally, sending data off the device," the Parliament's e-MEP tech support desk said in the email. "As these features continue to evolve and become available on more devices, the full extent of data shared with service providers is still being assessed. Until this is fully clarified, it is considered safer to keep such features disabled."

The music industry's long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone -- roughly 39% of the French service's daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.

Streaming services now host 253 million songs, according to Luminate's most recent annual report, after adding 51 million tracks over the course of 2025 at an average pace of 106,000 uploads a day. Spotify has already responded by requiring songs to hit at least 1,000 plays in the previous 12 months to qualify for royalties, and Luminate reported that 88% of tracks received 1,000 or fewer plays in 2025.

The distribution layer is in flux too: Universal Music Group is trying to acquire Downtown Music, owner of DIY distributor CD Baby, TuneCore's head recently stepped down without a planned replacement, and DistroKid is reportedly up for sale.

Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a "Zero-peeking privacy" toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user's shoulder.

The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display's Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC 2024, which adjusts viewing angles on a pixel-by-pixel basis -- and leaker Ice Universe has shared a video of the feature selectively hiding content in banking and messaging apps using AI. Samsung's Unpacked event is scheduled for February 25th.

Western Digital's entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company's second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.

The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and has signed long-term agreements stretching into 2027 and 2028 that cover both exabyte volumes and pricing. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of Western Digital's total, according to the company's VP of Investor Relations, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%.

Human software engineers and AI are currently in a "centaur phase" -- a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone -- but the window may be "very brief," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on chess as precedent: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's moves could beat a standalone AI or human, but machines have since surpassed that arrangement entirely.

Amodei said the same transition would play out in software engineering, and warned that entry-level white-collar disruption is "happening over low single-digit numbers of years."

A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined $7,000 by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI. From a report: The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.

More than two dozen staff have been caught over this financial year using AI tools for internal exams, according to KPMG. The incident is the latest example of a professional services company struggling with staff using artificial intelligence to cheat on exams or when producing work for clients. "Like most organisations, we have been grappling with the role and use of AI as it relates to internal training and testing," said Andrew Yates, chief executive of KPMG Australia. "It's a very hard thing to get on top of given how quickly society has embraced it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" -- meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.

The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."

That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Axios: "The Department of War's relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people."

Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently available in the military's classified systems, and is the world leader for many business applications. Pentagon officials heartily praise Claude's capabilities.

Sony is considering delaying the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029 as a global shortage of memory chips -- driven by the AI industry's rapidly growing appetite for the same DRAM that goes into gaming hardware, smartphones, and laptops -- squeezes supply and sends prices surging, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

A delay of that magnitude would upend Sony's carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. The shortage traces back to Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron diverting the bulk of their manufacturing toward high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's AI accelerators, leaving less capacity for conventional DRAM. The cost of one type of DRAM jumped 75% between December and January alone. Nintendo is also contemplating raising the price of its Switch 2 console in 2026.

IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he's finally found evidence AI is impacting America's economy. This week America's Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025's payroll growth — while real GDP "remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter." This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterised the past decade... The updated 2025 US data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output.

Micro-level evidence further supports this structural shift. In our work on the employment effects of AI last year, Bharat Chandar, Ruyu Chen and I identified a cooling in entry-level hiring within AI-exposed sectors, where recruitment for junior roles declined by roughly 16% while those who used AI to augment skills saw growing employment. This suggests companies are beginning to use AI for some codified, entry-level tasks.
Or, AI "isn't really stealing jobs yet," according to employment policy analyst Will Raderman (from the American think tank called the Niskanen Center). He argues in Barron's that "there is no clear link yet between higher AI use and worse outcomes for young workers." Recent graduates' unemployment rates have been drifting in the wrong direction since the 2010s, long before generative AI models hit the market. And many occupations with moderate to high exposure to AI disruptions are actually faring better over the past few years. According to recent data for young workers, there has been employment growth in roles typically filled by those with college degrees related to computer systems, accounting and auditing, and market research. AI-intensive sectors like finance and insurance have also seen rising employment of new graduates in recent years. Since ChatGPT's release, sectors in which more than 10% of firms report using AI and sectors in which fewer than 10% reporting using AI are hiring relatively the same number of recent grads.
Even Brynjolfsson's article in the Financial Times concedes that "While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend." And he's not the only one wanting evidence for AI's impact. The same weekend Fortune wrote that growth from AI "has yet to manifest itself clearly in macro data, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok." [D]ata on employment, productivity and inflation are still not showing signs of the new technology. Profit margins and earnings forecasts for S&P 500 companies outside of the "Magnificent 7" also lack evidence of AI at work... "After three years with ChatGPT and still no signs of AI in the incoming data, it looks like AI will likely be labor enhancing in some sectors rather than labor replacing in all sectors," Slok said.

Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn't ask before making "Meta AI" an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

"The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — raises an important question about what's in it for the internet companies..." Behind the scenes, the companies are laying the groundwork for a digital advertising economy that could drive the future of the internet. The underlying technology that enables chatbots to write essays and generate pictures for consumers is being used by advertisers to find people to target and automatically tailor ads and discounts to them....

Last month, OpenAI said it would begin showing ads in the free version of ChatGPT based on what people were asking the chatbot and what they had looked for in the past. In response, a Google executive mocked OpenAI, adding that Google had no plans to show ads inside its Gemini chatbot. What he didn't mention, however, was that Google, whose profits are largely derived from online ads, shows advertising on Google.com based on user interactions with the AI chatbot built into its search engine.

For the past six years, as regulators have cracked down on data privacy, the tech giants and online ad industry have moved away from tracking people's activities across mobile apps and websites to determine what ads to show them. Companies including Meta and Google had to come up with methods to target people with relevant ads without sharing users' personal data with third-party marketers. When ChatGPT and other AI chatbots emerged about four years ago, the companies saw an opportunity: The conversational interface of a chatty companion encouraged users to voluntarily share data about themselves, such as their hobbies, health conditions and products they were shopping for.

The strategy already appears to be working. Web search queries are up industrywide, including for Google and Bing, which have been incorporating AI chatbots into their search tools. That's in large part because people prod chatbot-powered search engines with more questions and follow-up requests, revealing their intentions and interests much more explicitly than when they typed a few keywords for a traditional internet search.