Technology

During a two-hour hearing in the US Senate Wednesday, top executives from Waymo and Tesla urged lawmakers to take action on long-stalled legislation to speed the deployment of self-driving cars on public roads. But after two hours of Q&A around a number of hot-button topics, including robotaxi safety, legal liability, remote operation, and China, it was clear that lawmakers were no closer to passing any bill related to autonomous vehicles.Waymo faced questions about its decision to use a Chinese-made vehicle for its next-generation robotaxi, as well as several incidents in which its vehicles failed to stop behind a school bus during student pickups. Tesla was asked about its decision to remove radar from its vehicles, its position on binding arbitration, and its misleading marketing...

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has earned more than $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The company announced the milestone as part of its Q4 2025 earnings report released on Wednesday, which highlights the 15 percent year-over-year increase as its cloud business and YouTube continue to grow.As noted in the earnings report, Google’s Cloud business reached a $70 billion run rate in 2025, while YouTube’s annual revenue soared beyond $60 billion across ads and subscriptions. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors that YouTube remains the “number one streamer,” citing data from Nielsen. The company also now has more than 325 million paid subscribers, led by Google One and YouTube Premium.Additionally, Pichai noted that Google Search saw more usage over the past few mon...

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Federal safety regulators are once again taking a hard look at self-driving cars after a serious incident involving Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Alphabet.This time, the investigation centers on a Waymo vehicle that struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, during morning drop-off hours. The crash happened Jan. 23 and raised immediate questions about how autonomous vehicles behave around children, school zones and unpredictable pedestrian movement.On Jan. 29, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed it had opened a new preliminary investigation into Waymo's automated driving system.Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive d...

Though the Virtual Boy was both a commercial and critical failure, the console’s infamy is part of what has made it such a fascinating piece of Nintendo’s history. Original units are still going for hundreds of dollars on bidding sites, and hobbyists have spent years keeping the Virtual Boy alive through emulation and homebrew games. For a long while, it seemed like Nintendo wanted nothing more than for the public to forget that the Virtual Boy ever existed. But over time, the company has become more comfortable acknowledging and even joking about the system through references in games like Super Smash Bros. Melee, Tomodachi Life, and Luigi’s Mansion 3.Looking back on the Nintendo 3DS and more recent experiments like the Nintendo Switch and Labo, it wasn’t exactly surprising to learn th...

Sam Altman (X):First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (...

Overwatch 2, the sequel to Activision Blizzard’s hit hero shooter Overwatch, was announced in 2019 but didn’t arrive for another three years, eventually bringing a shift to five-on-five matches in PVP, and a few new characters, including Overwatch’s first Black female hero. After canceling planned PvE content and unlocking its hero pool, the game’s developers eventually brought back a lot of things, like 6v6 gameplay, loot boxes, and, in 2026, its name. Overwatch 2 is now just Overwatch again. Catch up on The Verge’s coverage of the game right here. Overwatch 2 is gone — now it’s just Overwatch. Overwatch MOBA? Overwatch 2 is adding a CS:GO-style mode and bringing back loot boxes Marvel Rivals takes a page from Rocket Le...

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about the most ambitious crossover event of all time: the infinity war between technology and politics. Not subscribed yet? Come on, do it!Washington might seem slower than Silicon Valley. But that’s because it’s more turbulent. In order to achieve anything, one has to navigate the sheer amount of chaos that emerges when thousands of federal elected officials, staffers, political appointees, lobbyists, corporations, lawyers, journalists, and influencers are trying to push their interests, often at the same time.For the past 20-odd issues of Regulator, I’ve written weekly about the big stories in tech’s growing influence in Washington, both as a tool used by politicians to achieve power and as an industry trying to bend t...

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying — and mostly failing — to test Ikea’s new Matter-over-Thread gear. These highly anticipated smart home devices include programmable buttons, smart bulbs, plugs, and temperature and motion sensors — all of which should work with any smart home platform and start at just $6.But I’ve hit several walls trying to connect them to any smart home platform, and I’m not alone. The Tradfri subreddit is filled with Ikea customers sharing similar frustrations, reviews on Ikea’s website point to issues, and colleagues at The Verge have also been having problems.Of the six devices I’ve tried to connect, I’ve so far successfully onboarded just one Kajplats smart lightbulb to Apple Home — after seven attempts — and one Alpstuga IAQ monitor to Home Assistant — a...

OpenClaw, the AI agent that has exploded in popularity over the past week, is raising new security concerns after researchers uncovered malware in hundreds of user-submitted “skill” add-ons on its marketplace. In a post on Monday, 1Password product VP Jason Meller says OpenClaw’s skill hub has become “an attack surface,” with the most-downloaded add-on serving as a “malware delivery vehicle.”OpenClaw — first called Clawdbot, then Moltbot — is billed as an AI agent that “actually does things,” such as managing your calendar, checking in for flights, cleaning out your inbox, and more. It runs locally on devices, and users can interact with the AI assistant through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and others. But some users are giving OpenClaw the ability to access their e...

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing from her home in the Catalina Foothills area near Tucson after she failed to appear for church and could not be reached by family. When deputies arrived, several things stood out. Her phone, wallet and car keys were inside the home. The daily medication she relies on was left behind. Given her age and mobility challenges, investigators said she would not have left voluntarily.The Pima County Sheriff's Department has since stated publicly that the case is being treated as a suspected abduction, and the home was processed as a crime scene. As the search continues, investigators are piecing together not only physical evidence and witness tips...