Many of Netflix's biggest critically acclaimed hits have been the products of its multiyear production deals with noted directors like David Fincher and Shawn Levy. In the past few weeks, though, the streamer has brought some of those partnerships to an end in a way that feels indicative of a larger strategic shift. With rival studios Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on the verge of a megamerger that will reshape the entertainment landscape, Netflix is clearly thinking about how it can continue to hold its own in the ongoing streaming wars. But as the company charts its path forward, its plan to court subscribers might not put so much em …

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The open-source smart home platform Home Assistant is kicking the cloud to the curb - in name at least. "We are renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, because we hate clouds," founder Paulus Schoutsen told The Verge in an interview ahead of today's announcement. "Big tech ruined the cloud, so we're out."

The move is part of a long-term strategy Schoutsen and his team have been pursuing to make Home Assistant a mainstream smart home platform. Schoutsen says most users find the powerful platform after hitting the limits of mainstream options like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Home. But it has a steep learning curve, and …

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Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls. "Sometimes people will tell me they have a shellfish allergy, and I'll come back, and they won't ask me any questions," says Madison, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her identity. "And they'll order a fish dish that comes with a broth that is made of shellfish."

When she tells them a dish contains an allergen, she's had guests push back, saying ChatGPT disagrees. "They just want to talk to ChatGPT," Madison explains. "You're allergic to shellfish, and ChatGPT says there's no shellfish …

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I'm pretty sure I won't be buying the $1,299 Meta VR Glasses. That's too rich for my blood in today's economy, and my feelings about Meta are… conflicted. But I want you to understand that Meta just changed the game. We've had glasses, but we've never had glasses like this.

The Meta VR Glasses are not an opaque VR headset. They are not a pair of transparent AR glasses. They might be the best of both. After playing with the Meta VR Glasses, Valve's Steam Frame, the Apple Vision Pro, and the Google / Xreal Aura back to back, I think they're the first design that could convince regular people to give VR a chance.

It's not because they look l …

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Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hosted an intimate, invite-only event for leaders from some of its key enterprise customers. Instead of a flashy media event, Nadella outlined the future of Copilot directly to the customers Microsoft really cares about, pitching its latest rethink of the AI assistant as the "OS for work."

Microsoft is adding coding and agent capabilities directly into Copilot, as well as bringing the full power of Office into Copilot for the first time. Nadella is betting that AI will change the way people work in the same way that Microsoft Office did in the '80s and '90s.

"How did a multinational company do a fore …

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New York City residents struggling to get out of recurring subscription fees can now submit complaints to the city government. As of Thursday, the city's click-to-cancel rule has taken effect, which requires businesses to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up. That means a gym that lets you join online, for example, can't make you call or go in person to end your subscription.

It's the first municipality to see the rule take effect, after an appeals court struck down a federal version for procedural issues. The city expects it to save New Yorkers anywhere from $21.5 million to $162.5 million annually. And to NYC Depar …

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At OpenAI's annual DevDay conference, the company pulled out all the stops to compete with its rivals - primarily Meta, whose Muse AI agent platform has seen early runaway success. CEO Sam Altman walked onstage to cheers and announced Dots, a "real-deal AI" agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, "inspired by the cool agents that we all watched in movies growing up." Similar to Muse, Dots aims for disarming cuteness, taking the form of colorful, personalizable blobs with eyes. OpenAI fired shots at Meta by demonstrating Dots' ability to not just act as helpful assistants but build metaverse-esque virtual worlds. But in one key area, Dots strikingly fa …

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On Monday, Variety reported that RoseBerry Media is recutting episodes of the Australian soap opera Neighbours "into microdramas." These clips will be available on Epis, a short-form vertical video streaming platform. Though Neighbours ran for 41 seasons from 1985 to 2025, at launch, RoseBerry is only recutting two storylines from the late aughts focused on a character played by the now-internationally famous Margot Robbie.

In a statement about the project, RoseBerry cofounder / CEO Guy Hameiri described Neighbours as "an iconic piece of television history" that's well suited to be adapted for vertical viewing with the company's proprietar …

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While AI has made plenty of inroads on people's phones and computers, it's largely failed in dedicated devices. But over the next year, two major AI companies, Meta and OpenAI, will attempt to change that. And they're apparently betting on a similar path: testing appetites for physical hardware with their cutesy software agents.

"Hardware is hard" is a tech industry mantra. Dedicated AI devices like the Friend and Humane AI Pin have inspired mainly frustration and backlash, which may only worsen as public anger toward AI grows. Meta and OpenAI, however, are both pushing ahead. OpenAI is working with famed ex-Apple designer Jony Ive and pla …

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This spring, the United States banned all future foreign-made consumer routers - effectively all future routers - unless their makers could 1) convince the US government that they weren't a national security threat, and 2) submit "a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States."

As of September 9th, Asus now has an exemption from the ban, just in time to bring its first early Wi-Fi 8 routers here. But Asus has not publicly announced any plan to bring manufacturing to the US. It would not even confirm to The Verge whether it had submitted a US manufacturing plan.

Initially, Asus spokesperson JJ Guerre …

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The Wing Hummingbird 7000W-B delivery drone weighs less than 15 pounds. It has 16 propellers - four for horizontal movement and 12 for vertical - a top speed of 60 miles per hour, a carrying capacity of up to 2.7 pounds, and a delivery radius of about six miles. It is authorized by the FAA for beyond-line-of-sight piloting. As a feat of engineering, it is impressive.

So far I've mostly used it to send people potatoes.

It all started a few Sunday mornings ago when my neighbor Will added me and a half dozen other local dads to a group chat. I only recognized a few of the numbers.

"Anyon …

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For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public. CEO Sam Altman says it won't happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight. "We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims," Altman said Tuesday during a Q&A with reporters after his DevDay keynote. At the same time, he said, waiting too long for an IPO would be "bad for the world."

Altman's comments come after months of controversy about whether or not OpenAI and its rivals can c …

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On Tuesday, OpenAI's annual DevDay event began with protests, flyers, and chants. "Sam Altman, get off it, put people over profit," said a group of protesters marching in a circle in front of a series of signs that spelled out "PEOPLE OVER PROFIT."

More than a dozen organizations came together to sponsor a rally outside the entrance to the event venue at San Francisco's Fort Mason, including Bay Resistance, Tech Workers Coalition, Service Employees International Union, San Francisco Rising, and the San Francisco Labor Council. A large orange sign read "Drop the ICE contract." Multiple people dressed in cardboard robot costumes waved cardbo …

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As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US and China to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. But wrangling leaders in both countries to take action could be a long shot.

In letters shared exclusively with The Verge, Khanna - the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China and a possible presidential contender - asked a US intelligence agency and Chinese AI companies whether they would be prepared for an incident like OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face this summer. The companies included DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI, all of which …

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OpenAI popularized the modern generative AI chatbot, but as its 2026 DevDay event approaches, it's fallen behind in one of the industry's hottest categories: continuously running, consumer-facing AI agents. On Tuesday, it will likely try to capture the lead in that race. Rumors abound that OpenAI will release its own AI agent, dubbed Aeon - its answer to Meta's Muse, SpaceX's Grok Bot, OpenClaw, and many more.

Aeon could have a shot at success, but to beat the competition, it would need to pull together the best features of several different agent platforms. The ideal system would be as useful as the open-source OpenClaw, as cheap and easy …

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In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian's Door. Vivian's Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. The work sometimes put it in close contact with these companies' financial data, which was stored on its systems. But suddenly, concerned callers from all over the world warned they'd been getting emails "begging for money" - which she hadn't sent.

The organization's third-party IT team pulled its systems offline for three days while they investigated the issue and plugged up the vulner …

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I don't think I'm going to hurt anyone's feelings by pointing out that Decap doesn't have the name recognition of Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX. But his fingerprints are all over tracks from them, as well as many other artists, including Freddie Gibbs, Bad Bunny, Mac Miller, BTS, and even Ludwig Göransson's score for Oppenheimer.

Nicholas Piantedosi, better known as Decap, is a record producer, but perhaps more importantly, he's the man behind Drums That Knock, a series of sample packs that have found their way onto countless records across genres. The line is so successful that, after debuting in 2016, it's now on its 11th …

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There's a good chance that my next laptop will be a Googlebook. If you're an Android user like me, then yours might be too, because Google is making a compelling pitch: The Googlebook does for the Android phone what the MacBook does for the iPhone (and then some).

John Maletis, Google's head of laptops and tablets, said at my press briefing that the Googlebooks were designed to "work seamlessly with your Android phone." You can start using an app on your phone then pick it up on the laptop, navigate your phone's files from the laptop, run any phone app from the computer, and manage all your notifications in one place.

It's a good pitch. A …

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