Recent AI news and official updates

TechCrunch AI published: Poke, the startup that lets people use AI agents through simple text messages, has become the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media , Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks Tags: google , journalism , ai , ai-ethics

TechCrunch AI published: Creators often have to parse through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the new AI assistant, they can get quick answers to questions like "When should I post?" and "What are people saying in my comments?"

MIT News AI published: IAIFI enters its second phase with increased funding, broader ambitions, and a growing community at the frontier of AI and fundamental physics.

TechCrunch AI published: The California startup released the fourth-generation of its home assistance robot, Stretch.

MIT Technology Review published: This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by…

MIT Technology Review published: Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting…

TechCrunch AI published: Lovable and Google signed an expanded multiyear deal that involves a 5x expansion of Lovable's footprint on Google Cloud, and expanded access to Anthropic Claude.

MIT News AI published: MIT researchers use the classic game as a test bed for AI agents, finding a small AI model can outperform the biggest ones at 1 percent of the cost.

TechCrunch AI published: If Alphabet's record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings, we can see that investors are ready to chow.

TechCrunch AI published: Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" culled from the personal data in your Google account.

TechCrunch AI published: Amazon will use visual search and AI to show AI-generated product images that match your search queries. The retailer says it will help guide users to products.

TechCrunch AI published: The startup's own stack for Africa and Middle East is now handling more than 17,000 calls per day.

TechCrunch AI published: U.K. regulators are requiring Google offer a tool allowing website publishers to opt-out of generative AI search features. The option will be tested in the U.K. then rolled out globally.

TechCrunch AI published: WhatsApp will charge businesses for using its AI agent based on token usage.

TechCrunch AI published: Coralogix is among a growing number of infrastructure firms betting that as AI systems move into production, demand will rise for tools that can monitor their behavior, troubleshoot failures, and provide the operational data needed to keep them running reliably.

Google AI Blog published: Uncover second-hand scores with AI tools in Google Search and Shopping.

MIT Technology Review published: This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. 5 key points in Trump’s new AI order Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote…

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular token-burning coding agents were about to become. Natalie Lung for Bloomberg: The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. That means spending on one tool doesn’t have a bearing on the budget for another. The limits, which have been instituted in recent months, only apply to agentic coding software such as Cursor or Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code. A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending, and much more sensible than those tokenmaxxing leaderboards encouraging employees to compete for as much AI usage as possible. It's also interesting in that it hints at a real dollar value for what Uber is getting out of these tools. If we assume two actively used tools per engineer that's $3,000 * 12 = $36,000 cap per engineer per year. Levels.fyi lists the median yearly compensation package for Uber software engineers in the USA at $330,000. That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Those plans are no longer available to larger companies like Uber. Their new policy means if I were working at Uber I'd still have ~$500/month of tokens to spare for each of those tools, given my current usage patterns. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , llm-pricing , coding-agents , uber

MIT News AI published: The new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.