Google faced the ire of educators and parents earlier this week when it announced a new AI policy for K–12 schools. Google said that it developed its new approach to give schools more control, but early reporting also suggested Google would block search access for schools that didn't want to use AI. Google didn't see the backlash coming, but now that it's here, the search giant is clarifying what exactly its new policy means and what's changing.

The gist of the new policy, according to Google's blog post, is that schools using Google apps will have to opt into its AI products going forward. Since the company considers search part of its AI portfolio (Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Search), schools have to specifically turn that on for logged-in student accounts.

When Google revealed its new policy, the company's VP for education spoke exclusively to The New York Times, which interpreted the situation as Google will "turn off search" if schools reject AI. This has a nefarious vibe, but it's probably not the most accurate way to describe how Google's educational AI system will operate. Google's approach may not be entirely altruistic, but it technically offers schools more choice and control than they have now. Instead of Google turning off search, it will let schools make that decision based on their internal AI policies.

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© Ryan Whitwam

While Google is trying to move beyond Chromebooks, the ubiquity of these devices has made the company's education products huge in schools. Now, Google says it will let educators choose whether to allow its AI tools in the classroom. However, blocking AI tools also means giving up search, leaving schools with a difficult decision.

Google's new overarching approach to AI in K-12 classrooms sounds good on the surface. After consulting educators, researchers, and lawmakers, Google has decided that schools using its education products will be opted out of AI tools by default. It will be up to administrators to manually enable them when these changes roll out in the coming months.

When you look at what Google considers to be an AI tool, the nature of the Faustian bargain becomes clear. The affected products are Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. There's no picking and choosing—you either allow all the AI or none of it.

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© Aurich Lawson

Google's Threat Intelligence Group says it has shut down a massive botnet called x.cpe. At its height, x.cpe ran on more than 1.3 million Android TV devices, and unusually, these were Google-certified boxes. Google says its screening process missed the malware due to "obfuscation techniques" employed by Shenzhen-based Videostrong Technology.

In a detailed blog post, the Threat Intelligence Group explains how the x.cpe botnet evolved quickly from a single-stage dropper into a modular three-stage malware platform that sold access to third parties. Manufacturers must have their devices certified if they want access to Google apps and branding, a process that is supposed to catch threats like this. However, Videostrong's compromised boxes, mostly sold under the MECOOL brand, evaded detection by using a backdoor to remotely install the malware after the devices were set up and online.

After devices appeared online, a stub application called x.cpe or com.oemservice would phone home. This package did not have any malicious capabilities of its own, but it had the system-level permissions necessary to install malware modules at the operator's behest. It also disabled Play Protect, which would have otherwise flagged the silently installed packages as malicious.

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The year was 1998. Britney Spears topped the charts, Bill Clinton was impeached, and a couple of little websites called Google and Ars Technica came online. It was also the year Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. Google, which has come to dominate the Internet (Ars is still working on that), is celebrating the imminent release of the Ocarina of Time remaster by temporarily transporting us back to that storied year with a search Easter egg.

To access the Google time machine, you just have to search for either "Zelda" or "Ocarina of Time." Google will load the standard 2026 results page, but you'll see an animated Master Sword in the lower right corner. It appears on both mobile and desktop—just click the sword and enjoy the show.

After a little time-skipping animation and a Link shout (you know the one), you'll swear it's 1998 again. The search page is transformed into a simple list of blue links with retro Google branding. This is particularly apt given the time-shifting mechanics in Ocarina of Time.

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Google parent Alphabet reported its Q3 financial results on Wednesday afternoon, showing a healthy rise in revenue for the months of July to September. But the company's stock price has taken a beating, marking one of the largest post-earnings drops in its history. It comes down to several troubling aspects of the new report, including an admission by the company that AI search isn't earning as much as organic search, and despite that, Google expects to spend even more on AI next year.

The company took in almost $128 billion in Q3 2026, earning more than $26 billion in net income. These may sound like good numbers, but financial markets are not impressed. While revenue is up 25 percent versus last year, net income is almost $9 billion lower. As of this story's publication, the stock price is down almost 12 percent, and it was down about 13 percent earlier in the day.

While revenue was up 25 percent year over year, analysts expected more. Google reported earnings per share of $2.12, but the consensus projection ahead of Wednesday was $3.02. Google's Cloud products actually beat expectations, crossing $30 billion in revenue. That's about a billion more than analyst guesses.

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It's almost like Google's got something to prove after taking a break from releasing new frontier AI models earlier this year. Just two weeks after rolling out Gemini 4 Argon, Google has announced Gemini 4 Carbon. This isn't the Flash model equivalent we've been waiting for but, rather, is an improvement on Argon, and like that model, Google is working on a staged release that could take a while.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Google says its latest AI model reaches a new threshold in coding, agentic tasks, and scientific analysis. It's so capable, in fact, that Google can't let you use it just yet.

Gemini 4 Carbon reportedly makes big gains in cybersecurity applications. Google says the model shows a "significant leap" in vulnerability detection, validation, and remediation. Carbon is also apparently twice as likely to generate code that is free of vulnerabilities versus Argon. Meanwhile, the Chrome team claims that Carbon is 10 times better at generating "high-quality" patches compared to non-Google models. Google also notes that Carbon has increased its score by 89 points on WebDev Arena, now ranking at number four on the leaderboard.

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If you ask some prominent US politicians who won the 2020 presidential election, you might get some weasely answers that fail to directly acknowledge Joe Biden's win that November. If you ask Google's AI Mode the same question, you might get an evasive answer that simply tells you to consult with outside sources.

When I put the direct question of "Who won the 2020 presidential election?" to Google's AI Mode this morning (after seeing complaints about cagey answers on social media), I got the following surprisingly indirect response:

"To review the official results and statistics of the 2020 United States presidential election, including the final electoral college breakdown, popular vote counts, and winner certification, please consult the official report compiled by the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

My testing resulted in a similarly indirect answer when asking about the 2024 presidential election, with Google's AI telling me to just consult the FEC for that information. Asking about 2012 election resulted in a link to The American Presidency Project's 2012 Data Center rather than a direct answer. But AI Mode seemed perfectly willing to give me a detailed and correct responses for the winner of every other presidential election going back to 2000.

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Subsea cable projects owned by US companies such as Google and Meta face some of the greatest risks from the threat of deep-sea sabotage in the Pacific Ocean, according to a new report. That coincides with Chinese research ships spending an extraordinary amount of time apparently surveying undersea cables—not to mention Chinese commercial ships being investigated for cutting cables in both European and Asian waters.

Most damage to the undersea cables that form the Internet’s backbone is the result of accidents involving bottom-trawling fishing nets and ship anchors dragging on the seabed, with storms and undersea landslides also factoring in. But the recent rise in international tensions and open conflicts have placed new scrutiny on more suspicious instances of cable-cutting damage, with analysts warning about Russia and China in particular engaging in cable sabotage or tampering as “gray zone” tactics that fall short of direct military confrontation.

One of the newest risk assessments of China’s gray zone tactics targeting the Internet’s undersea infrastructure comes from a research report published by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent government commission that advises Congress. The report was contracted to the London-based think tank China Strategic Risks Institute and published in September 2026.

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Running an app ecosystem has gotten a lot more complex for Google after its loss in the Epic Games antitrust case. While US users can access app stores in Google Play by court order, international users will use Google's voluntary Registered App Stores program. Google has announced that stores wishing to be part of that program are now free to apply, and support will roll out to some Android devices later this year.

App stores accepted into the program will enjoy preferential treatment on the Android platform. Users of approved stores will be able to install apps with a single click, similar to the experience in the Play Store. These stores will also be allowed to update apps silently in the background like Google's store does.

"In March, we announced the Registered App Stores program to give third-party app stores a more streamlined way to reach users while maintaining the safety and security of the Android ecosystem," said a Google spokesperson. "Eligible app stores outside the US can now apply to register their stores ahead of the new simplified installation experience rolling out to users later this year."

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Last year, Google DeepMind sent gaming stocks tumbling with the reveal of its Genie 3 world model. Since then, world models have become a major focus of AI labs around the world, but Google isn't resting on its laurels. Researchers have been hard at work on an updated model that improves on Genie 3 in almost every way. And if you pay Google enough money, you might actually get to use Genie 4 before too long.

It's easy to look at the output of Genie 4 and see a video game, which is why Genie 3 caused so much consternation in the gaming industry. DeepMind doesn't think about it that way, though. According to Google, world models are a key element in the march toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). A world model creates a virtual world, but it doesn't require pre-rendering environments or programming interactive elements. You simply tell the model what you want, and it generates the experience frame by frame in real time as you explore it.

DeepMind says this technology could create infinite training environments for physical robots or unlock new avenues of rapid prototyping for creative fields. Of course, that requires the model to accurately simulate what you want. Genie 4 has several improvements that make its simulations more useful, and that's thanks in part to Google's updated Gemini models.

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Using Google's products and services has always been fundamentally precarious—doing so gives the world's largest advertising company a lot of juicy personal data. Google has long said it won't use the sensitive data from products like Gmail, Drive, and Photos for ad personalization, but a change to the company's privacy policy appears to dismantle that firewall.

On October 16, Google issued an update to its privacy policy, spotted by Android Authority. The ad personalization section used to include a clear limit on data from certain apps. "We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos," the document said. Now, Google has updated it with the following language.

Updated language on when your sensitive data might inform ads. Credit: Google

This equivocation opens the door to using data from apps like Gmail and Photos in ads when it's shared with other Google services, and it just so happens Google has a mechanism for doing that, with Personal Intelligence. The company released Personal Intelligence in early 2026, allowing users to hand data from multiple apps to Google AI products. The idea is that the added context from your existing data will lead to better AI answers, but it's also proving to be a privacy minefield.

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Google would certainly prefer that everyone used its Gemini models with Google Cloud services, but soon, you'll have more options. OpenAI and Google have come to an arrangement that will see the former's frontier models arrive in Google Cloud services. Perhaps more importantly, GPT models will soon appear in Antigravity, Google's agent-powered coding tool.

For enterprise customers and AI enthusiasts, OpenAI's latest model will appear in Google's "Model Garden" in the coming weeks, adding to its 200-plus options. The garden already offers access to Google's Gemini models, as well as an assortment of open models like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma. Anthropic's Claude AI has also been available for some time. Google says it's now the only large cloud provider offering access to all three leading closed LLMs.

While OpenAI notes that Microsoft continues to be its primary cloud partner, the full suite of current GPT 6 and 6.1 models—Astra, Sol, and Luna—will launch on Google Cloud. Astra will naturally cost the most to run, but Google's system supports dynamically moving workloads between LLMs based on performance, latency, and efficiency.

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Google kicked off 2026 with the addition of Personal Intelligence to Gemini, allowing its AI to pull in more of your data to formulate answers. It started as a paid feature but eventually came to all Gemini users. However, this feature wasn't available in the car until now. Google is rolling out Personal Intelligence to Android Auto and Google Built-in, and it is still, thankfully, an optional feature.

As Google points out, a generative AI's outputs are better "when it knows the world and knows you," which is correct in an uncomfortable sort of way. The more context you can provide to a model, the better the output will be at the end of the token shuffle. Since Google has so much of your data already, it sees Personal Intelligence as a differentiator versus other AI systems. You don't have to provide the AI context because it already has it from apps like Gmail and Calendar.

Personal Intelligence is beginning its rollout in Android Auto today, and it will come to vehicles with Google built-in in the next few months. As an aside, "Google built-in" is questionable branding, but it refers to cars that run Google software in the infotainment system rather than projecting an interface from your phone. Very few vehicles have Google built-in, but Google often releases new car features on them first. This time, it's the other way around.

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Android was designed for phones, but that hasn't stopped Google from trying to adapt the OS and its apps to larger machines over the years. Googlebooks are just the latest attempt after tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables induced little change in how people interact with Android software. These new Android-powered laptops are designed to pick up where the web-focused ChromeOS left off, offering premium hardware and native support for Android apps.

Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.

For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.

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