Author: Chema Carvajal Sarabia

Apple has sued OpenAI in federal court, saying in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that OpenAI, io Products, Tang Tan, and Chang Liu were involved in efforts to get hold of trade secrets tied to unreleased Apple hardware. In the filing, Apple asks for damages, a jury trial, and court orders that would block any use of its confidential materials and force their return or destruction. Apple says the information at issue includes product details, parts, drawings, engineering presentations, and technical specifications for devices that haven’t been announced, and argues this wasn’t an isolated mistake but part of a broader recruiting and hardware effort.

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Apple says the internal investigation began after Chang Liu allegedly didn’t return a company laptop in January 2026. In the complaint, Apple claims Liu later exploited an unknown security flaw to keep accessing Apple systems after joining OpenAI and downloaded confidential files.

The complaint also says Tang Tan asked candidates to bring “actual parts” to interviews. Apple points out that OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees, while OpenAI rejected the accusations in a statement, saying it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

The lawsuit marks a clear break after Apple and OpenAI had been working together on ChatGPT features for the iPhone. It also lands as OpenAI moves deeper into hardware following its acquisition of Jony Ive’s io Products in a deal reportedly worth about $6.5 billion, with smart speakers and smart glasses having surfaced in earlier reports as products under consideration.

If you keep a close eye on Apple and OpenAI, this is a case to watch. You can follow it in the Northern District of California as the early-stage proceedings start to unfold.

A new study on KIC 8462852, better known as Tabby’s Star, has just come out, and it points to a possible giant planet that could help explain the star’s long-running, irregular fading. The main clue, according to the paper, is a single transit seen in September 2019. It lasted roughly 21 hours and looks consistent with a companion around ten times Jupiter’s mass. Tabby’s Star has stood out for more than a decade because its dips in brightness don’t look like normal planetary transits, and some of those drops have reached about 22%.

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Lead author Cristina Madurga-Favieres and her colleagues say a planet that large could stir up comets, planetesimals, or other material, creating uneven dust clouds and giving the system a plausible source for its messy dimming. Madurga-Favieres also noted that no transiting companion had been detected there before.

For people who’ve followed the Tabby’s Star mystery, this also fits the bigger picture. Citizen scientists with Planet Hunters first flagged the star in 2015 using NASA’s Kepler data. The alien megastructure speculation lost momentum later, once follow-up observations showed that more blue light was being blocked than red. In 2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian raised more than $100,000 through Kickstarter for follow-up work. And over time, other ideas, from comet swarms to a destroyed exomoon, stellar changes, and a nearby companion, have more and more given way to explanations built around dust and debris.

You can read the new findings in the latest study, though the paper is careful on one point: a single transit still doesn’t confirm the planet.

Disney is reportedly working on a free, ad-supported Disney+ tier that would let people watch at least part of the service without paying. Disney hasn’t announced anything yet, and there’s no launch date, but a free plan would give the company another way to grow in a crowded, price-sensitive streaming market, especially among viewers who don’t want to take on one more monthly bill.

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It could also pull some of those viewers into paid plans later, particularly families and younger audiences.

And Disney wouldn’t be starting from zero. In the first three quarters of 2026, 30.6% of Disney+ subscribers worldwide, about 47.2 million people, were already using Disney+’s paid ad-supported plan. In the U.S., that figure was 43.2%.

Across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, combined ad-supported monthly active users also rose from 157 million in January 2025 to 164 million in May 2025.

The broader shift points the same way. Free ad-supported streaming made up 18.7% of U.S. TV viewing in April 2026, up from 12.7% two years earlier.

So if price is the reason you’ve been passing on Disney+, this could be worth trying if it actually launches, though a free Disney+ tier probably wouldn’t include the full catalog. More likely, it’d offer a curated lineup of older movies, selected series, or pilot episodes.

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There are downsides for Disney, too: lower revenue per user, more downgrades, and heavier ad loads. For now, there’s nothing to download, although Disney has also been testing short-form vertical video, podcasts, micro-dramas, and free releases on YouTube.

Volkswagen is reportedly putting together a “Future Plan” overhaul that could bring job cuts, plant closures, and a much leaner model lineup over the next decade. The numbers being floated are big: as many as 100,000 jobs, roughly 15% of Volkswagen’s workforce, could disappear, up from an earlier 50,000-job target.

Reports also say the Volkswagen brand may cut its model range in half, slash options by 75%, and shrink production capacity from 12 million vehicles before the pandemic to about 9 million.

That push makes sense when you look at the pressure it’s under: a 3.3% operating margin in the first quarter, high costs in Germany, soft demand, Chinese EV competitors that are ahead on both price and software, and declining sales in China. Put all that together and it’s not hard to see why Volkswagen wants fewer vehicles, fewer variants, and a smaller manufacturing footprint.

And the factory piece is where this gets serious. Reports say Volkswagen is considering shutting its Zwickau, Emden, and Hanover plants, along with Audi’s Neckarsulm factory, by 2034, a move that would affect about 40,000 workers.

The same reports point to production moving in part to Eastern Europe, and to Volkswagen ending ID.4 production in Chattanooga so it can focus on higher-demand combustion SUVs. That says a lot about where the market is right now: heavy EV spending running straight into uneven demand and the need to protect short-term profits.

For now, though, this is still only a reported plan. And any deep cuts in Germany would still have to make it past IG Metall, worker representatives, Volkswagen’s supervisory board, and the state of Lower Saxony.

The American Medical Association has released a new international survey, and the picture is pretty clear: data from smartwatches and fitness trackers still rarely makes it into routine care.

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These devices can track heart rate, sleep, daily activity, and in some cases even warn of possible atrial fibrillation. But the AMA found that in no country surveyed did clinical use of that data rise above 6%. In the U.S., just 6% of physicians said they’d incorporated wearable data into practice, even though 46% of U.S. adults own a wearable and 59% of those owners have already talked about that data with a healthcare provider.

The holdup isn’t lack of interest. It’s the healthcare system’s back-end mess: fuzzy reimbursement rules, questions about legal risk and data accuracy, packed clinical workflows, and data formats that don’t line up across watches, rings, chest straps, and electronic health record systems.

That gap matters. The report points to a market expected to hit $109 billion in 2026, with 614 million wearable shipments worldwide. FDA-cleared features for atrial fibrillation and sleep apnea could help push adoption forward, but they still don’t replace full diagnostic testing.

If you use a wearable to keep tabs on your health, this one should be on your radar, especially with Medicare’s 10-year ACCESS pilot now starting to reimburse some wearables and apps used for chronic disease management.

You can read the AMA survey findings and the Medicare ACCESS pilot details online.

On Thursday, the European Commission said Meta is facing a preliminary finding under the EU Digital Services Act, putting the company at risk of a huge fine over what regulators call the “addictive design” of Facebook and Instagram. The Commission said design choices on Meta’s platforms, including the Facebook and Instagram iPhone apps, can pull people into compulsive, “autopilot” use. The concern is especially sharp for children, teens, and other vulnerable users.

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The case focuses on infinite scroll, video autoplay, and recommendation systems built to drive engagement. EU regulators say Meta didn’t do enough to assess or reduce the physical and mental health risks tied to those features, particularly for minors and vulnerable adults.

If that finding stands, Meta could be fined as much as 6% of its global annual revenue, which would put the penalty at more than $12 billion. The European Commission also wants changes to the default experience: key features turned off unless you actively opt in, stronger tools that push people to take breaks, and less dependence on recommendations.

The Commission also says the current time limits and parental controls are too easy to ignore, dismiss, or switch off, or else too cumbersome to stick with.

If you use Facebook or Instagram a lot, this one matters. Meta says it has already rolled out Teen Accounts, parental supervision, nighttime restrictions, and daily screen-time limits. EU investigators aren’t persuaded, and pressure is building not just in Europe, but in the UK and the US as well, where thousands of lawsuits make similar claims against the company.

Facebook and Instagram are available on iPhone and other platforms.

AI image generators have gotten good enough to turn out cleaner hands, sharper lighting, believable textures, and that glossy finish you usually see in ad campaigns, stock photos, and work from professional design teams.

The old tells are still around: extra fingers, warped faces, bad shadows, broken teeth, mangled jewelry, garbled text, weird background objects. But you can’t count on those anymore. These generators keep getting better at composition and skin, at fabric and reflections, at depth of field, and at the polished visual style used in beauty ads, direct-to-consumer branding, and luxury editorial shoots.

A lot of the most convincing fakes aren’t even trying to pass as raw documentary photos. They’re built to mimic luxury product shots, travel campaigns, influencer posts, and e-commerce imagery, which means a fake skincare ad, restaurant promotion, hotel listing, product drop, event, or destination can look real at a glance, especially on your phone.

If you shop, scroll, book, or trust visuals online, pay attention to this jump in AI image quality. Premium-looking fakes can now push counterfeit products, misleading promotions, fake reviews, fabricated lifestyle content, and polished sponsored posts that blend right in with real listings and even news-adjacent imagery.

And it’s already showing up across social feeds, marketplaces, ads, and listings as cheap, scalable AI-generated imagery.

Arm, Intel, and AMD are reworking their next chip designs so more generative AI can run directly on phones and laptops. You’ll start seeing that in the next wave of Windows 11 PCs and next-generation smartphones.

The main shift is where the work gets done. Instead of sending every AI request to the cloud, or asking a power-hungry GPU to take care of it all, more of those tasks should run on the CPU alongside NPUs. That can mean less lag, better privacy for your messages, documents, and photos, and lower power use. Industry estimates put many NPU workloads at 5 to 10W, compared with roughly 30 to 40W on a GPU. If those estimates hold up, that could translate to about 1.5 to 3 extra hours of laptop battery life.

On the PC side, AMD says its Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 300 chips can reach up to 50 TOPS, about three times the last generation. Intel is making a similar claim: it says Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake are aiming for roughly triple the neural performance of earlier chips, with Lunar Lake expected to clear 40 TOPS for Copilot+ PCs.

On the mobile side, Arm says Cortex-X925 improves AI performance by 41%. It’s also pushing its Kleidi libraries for PyTorch and TensorFlow, which should make CPU acceleration easier to work with. Intel and AMD are also backing ACE to standardize x86 AI features.

If you use assistants, writing tools, or image features on a regular basis, this is something to watch. Still, it’s smart to wait for independent battery and speed tests before putting too much weight on the early numbers.

You won’t download this as an app. It’ll arrive in upcoming Windows 11 PCs and next-generation smartphones.