OpenAI is working toward creating a desktop “superapp” that will consist of its three tools: ChatGPT, the coding platform Codex and the Atlas browser, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI executives said the goal behind this new desktop app is to improve the user experience.

The move comes after the Journal reported earlier this week that OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo told employees the company wanted to focus on its core business instead of side projects.

In a Thursday memo to staff reported by the Journal, Simo, who leads development of the new app, said the company was spreading its “efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts.”

ChatGPT is the signature chatbot from OpenAI, Codex is a coding platform designed for software developers, and Atlas is the AI-first browser from the company, which acts like a traditional internet browser, but with ChatGPT as an assistant.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, parent company of CNET, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

By creating a single app, OpenAI hopes to better compete with rivals like Anthropic. Responding to the Journal report in a post on X, Simo said the move is intended to build on the recent success of Codex, a competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code.

“Companies go through phases of exploration and phases of refocus; both are critical,” Simo said. “But when new bets start to work, like we’re seeing now with Codex, it’s very important to double down on them and avoid distractions. Really glad we’re seizing this moment.”

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, OpenAI announced its new GPT-5.4 mini and nano, smaller and faster versions of its ChatGPT 5.4 model. These coding models also highlight the company’s focus on supporting coders and enterprises instead of dabbling in various projects.

If you’re looking for an upgrade to your home audio, but you don’t have a lot of room to spare, the Bose Smart Soundbar is an excellent option. Normally $499, it’s currently marked down to just $419 on Amazon. With full Dolby Atmos spatial audio, a unique musical profile, and all the features you’d expect from a modern soundbar in a small package, there’s a reason it’s our favorite compact soundbar.

The biggest selling point here is the design. The Bose Smart Soundbar has an impressively small footprint, perfect for apartment-sized entertainment centers and cramped living rooms. It’s just 2.2 inches tall, making it easy to slide under basically any screen, and its 27-inch width even makes it a viable option for smaller panels. There are a surprising number of speakers inside, including a pair of proper up-firing drivers, so you get real spatial audio and full Dolby Atmos support, something fairly uncommon for soundbars.

Despite the size, the Bose Smart Soundbar has a great audio profile and feature set that’s just as good as any full-size bar. It has a more musical quality than most, which works just as well for an action movie or catching up on your favorite show as it does for listening to some music while you hang out on the couch. If you have a pair of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, you can even pair them up for a personal surround setup, a feature unique to the Bose.

If you often have trouble catching what characters are saying, there’s an AI Dialogue mode that boosts the clarity and volume of speech. It’s a feature we’ve seen on other soundbars, but it stands out here with its excellent implementation, bringing any dialog into sharp focus at the push of a button. You can really hear the difference when switching the feature on and off.

If you have a little more space under your TV, or you’re just curious what other options are out there, make sure to check out our full guide to the best soundbars. Otherwise, you can head to Amazon to grab the Bose Smart Soundbar for just $419.

The UK challenger bank is rolling out Starling Assistant to personal account holders today, billing it as the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant. It can set up savings goals, organise bill payments, and even quiz you on your own spending, all from a voice or text prompt.

Starling Bank has been building methodically towards this moment for the better part of a year. In June 2025 it became the first UK bank to put a natural language AI interface over customer spending data, with Spending Intelligence.

In October it launched Scam Intelligence, which lets customers upload images of marketplace listings or suspicious messages and receive a fraud-risk assessment. Both ran on Google Gemini on Google Cloud. Both were billed as UK firsts. On Friday, the bank announced the next step: Starling Assistant, which it is calling the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant.

The distinction matters, at least in principle. Spending Intelligence and Scam Intelligence are read-and-respond tools: they analyse data and surface outputs.

Starling Assistant is designed to act, to take a voice or natural language prompt, and execute banking tasks directly on the customer’s behalf. It is also the umbrella under which those earlier tools now sit, creating a single conversational interface for what was previously a set of separate features.

The range of what it can do is more specific than most agentic banking announcements tend to offer. A customer planning a holiday can say they need to save £500 for a trip to Paris in July and ask the assistant to calculate a monthly savings schedule and set up automatic transfers to a dedicated Space.

Someone wanting to restructure their finances on payday can instruct it to create Spaces for groceries, bills, travel, and eating out, and specify how much to route to each. The press release also lists the ability to answer questions about direct debits and outstanding bills, analyse transaction history with specific payees, and, a detail that stands out, generate a quiz in which the assistant asks the customer to guess their top merchant for the last month or the category where they spend the most.

One caveat worth flagging: voice prompts are enabled by the user’s mobile keyboard rather than by native voice recognition built into the assistant itself. The distinction is small in practice but matters for anyone expecting a fully hands-free experience.

The assistant also has an explicit welfare dimension. Customers with vulnerability or accessibility needs can ask for specialist support without speaking to a human agent: it can help hard-of-hearing customers set up Starling’s sign language service, guide customers through setting up gambling blocks, and point those in financial distress to specialist resources.

Harriet Rees, Starling’s group chief information officer, described the launch as the culmination of eight years of AI development at the bank. Raman Bhatia, the group chief executive, called agentic AI “the next step in banking.”

Starling Assistant is live for personal current account customers from today, with business and joint accounts to follow. It is opt-in, and Starling says all data remains within its Google Cloud environment and is not used to train the underlying models. Graham Drury, director of FSI at Google Cloud UK and Ireland, described the shift as moving from navigating complex app menus toward simply having a conversation about your money.

The context around this launch is not entirely uncomplicated. The bank was fined £29 million by the Financial Conduct Authority in October 2024 for anti-money laundering and sanctions screening failures covering the period from 2017 to 2023, a fine reduced from £41 million after Starling cooperated with the investigation.

Building a reputation as the UK’s most ambitious AI-driven bank requires that the underlying compliance infrastructure is demonstrably sound. The welfare features built into Starling Assistant, the opt-in model, and the explicit commitment not to use customer data for model training are all consistent with a bank that has spent the past year investing heavily in rebuilding regulatory credibility alongside its product roadmap.

In the neobank sector more broadly, the race to agentic AI is accelerating. Revolut has signalled it is exploring AI agents but has not yet launched a comparable product in the UK. Bunq launched an AI assistant in 2024. Klarna has deployed AI extensively across customer service. For the moment, Starling is making the argument that the field in UK retail banking remains its to define.

Kalshi has been temporarily banned in Nevada, marking the latest escalation in the widening regulatory war over prediction markets. The First Judicial District Court of Nevada has issued a 14 day restraining order, effective immediately, barring the company from “offering a derivatives exchange and prediction market which offers event-based contracts relating to sports, election, and entertainment related events” without first obtaining gaming licenses.

This is the first time a US state has forced the company to cease operations. Kalshi declined to comment.

This particular legal battle began just over a year ago, when Nevada regulators sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter demanding that it stop offering sports-related events contracts. That initiated a messy tug-of-war between plaintiffs and defendants as the case moved between state and federal court. Until now, Kalshi could keep operating in the state as its lawyers sparred with authorities in what the company has described as a “jurisdictional quagmire.”

After the 14 days, the court will then assess whether to extend the ban for the duration of the court case. “The expectation here is that the judge will convert the 14 day TRO to a case-long preliminary injunction,” says gaming lawyer Daniel Wallach.

The ruling comes after a particularly turbulent few weeks for Kalshi. On Tuesday, the Arizona attorney general brought criminal charges against the company, accusing it of running an illegal gambling operation. Just days earlier, Kalshi filed a lawsuit against Arizona state regulators pre-emptively challenging any effort to make it follow state gambling laws.

Dozens of similar legal battles are underway across the country over whether prediction markets should be forced to abide by state gambling laws, including in Ohio, Tennessee, and Massachusetts.

A number of prominent prediction market platforms, including Kalshi, offer sports-related contracts to people over 18 across the United States, even where state gambling laws prohibit sports betting. The result is that a 19-year-old in Utah can put money on the outcome of a soccer game through prediction markets, but not through sports betting, since the state outlaws it altogether. It also means that a 19-year-old in Indiana can make a similar prediction market wager, even though state gambling law prohibits people under 21 from placing bets. This has made a growing group of bipartisan lawmakers furious.

Kalshi argues that its sports-related event contracts—where, for example, someone can wager on which teams would win the Super Bowl or a particular March Madness basketball game—are not a form of betting. Instead, the company says they should be viewed as financial instruments known as “swaps.” So far, the federal government agrees. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the US agency that oversees swaps and other derivatives markets, maintains that it has exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets. The agency’s head, Michael Selig, has forcefully rejected claims that the industry should be subject to state gambling laws, telling critics that he will see them “in court.”

The federal government’s stance hasn’t deterred various state attorneys and gaming commissions from continuing their legal fights—and they’ve recently notched some notable victories. In January, Nevada blocked Polymarket from operating within the state; the temporary restraining order is in place through April. It was a victory for the prediction markets-are-gambling side, albeit a limited one:While Polymarket does have a modest official US presence, the bulk of its trading volume takes place on its global exchange, which is technically blocked in the US but accessible to traders willing to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the ban.

Last week, a judge in Ohio rebuffed Kalshi after the prediction market company filed for a preliminary injunction to prevent state regulators from pursuing it for violating state gambling laws. In her order denying Kalshi’s motion, United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio Judge Sarah D. Morrison wrote that the court had an obligation to “avoid absurdity.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered federal agencies to patch a maximum-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-20131, in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) by Sunday, March 22.

Cisco published a security bulletin about the flaw on March 4, urging system administrators to apply the security updates as soon as possible and warning that no workarounds are available.

The Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) is a centralized administration system for critical Cisco network security appliances, such as firewalls, application control, intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and malware protection.

“A vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary Java code as root on an affected device,” Cisco says in the advisory.

The issue is caused by insecure deserialization of a user-supplied Java byte stream and is exploitable by sending a specially crafted serialized Java object to the web-based management interface of an affected device.

On March 18, the vendor updated its bulletin to warn of active exploitation of CVE-2026-20131 in the wild. Amazon threat intelligence researchers confirmed that threat actors are leveraging the vulnerability in attacks, noting that the Interlock ransomware gang had been exploiting it as a zero-day since the end of January.

Amazon stated that the ransomware threat actor exploited CVE-2026-20131 more than a month before the vendor published the patch.

Interlock ransomware has claimed several high-profile victims since its launch in late 2024, including DaVita, Kettering Health, the Texas Tech University System, and the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The threat actor is also using the ClickFix technique for initial access, as well as custom remote access trojans and malware strains like NodeSnake and Slopoly.

CISA has added CVE-2026-20131 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, marking it as “known to be used in ransomware campaigns.”

Given the severity of CVE-2026-20131 and its active exploitation status since late January 2026, CISA gave Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies only until this Sunday to apply the security updates or stop using the product.

CISA’s deadline is relevant to all entities subject to the Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01, but private firms, state/local governments, and all non-FCEB organizations are still recommended to consider it and act accordingly.

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Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers. We love seeing the enthusiasm!

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 20, 2026

from the corruption-is-patriotic dept

When he’s not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps.

Carr recently began circulating plans for something he claims will restrict U.S. telecom companies’ ‌use of foreign call centers and require foreign-based customer service workers to be proficient in American Standard English. The plan is vague, but Reuters unskeptically frames it as a good faith effort to protect U.S. consumer privacy, improve customer service, and protect Americans from the scourge of foreign accents:

“Carr noted that nearly 70% of U.S. businesses outsource at least one ‌department, ⁠including customer service and call center operations, to overseas locations.

“As a result, too many Americans have struggled to resolve an issue with a representative due to cultural and language barriers,” Carr said, adding foreign customer ​service centers “also raise ​concerns about ⁠protecting consumers’ personal information.”

What is Carr really up to here? I suspect he’s working closely with U.S. telecoms to craft pseudo-patriotic/nationalistic cover for another brutal round of layoffs. Some of which will be caused by AI, but a huge amount of which will have been caused by Carr’s love of rubber stamping harmful telecom industry consolidation.

For one, there’s no real evidence that overseas customer service centers create serious cybersecurity issues. As he did with his recent effort to remove phone unlocking rules, Carr likes to use cybersecurity as a bogeyman when convenient to something unpopular he’s trying to help industry sell.

Then, with his other hand, Carr is busy making U.S. consumers less safe and secure by gutting functional oversight of giant telecoms (despite the recent massive Salt Typhoon hack by China).

It’s also not really clear the FCC even has this authority. Especially in the Trump era, which has involved the Trump courts taking an absolutely brutal hatchet to regulatory independence. This sudden micromanagement of telcom support runs contrary to Carr’s “light regulatory touch” rhetoric. It’s also worth noting that a lot of telecoms, like Charter, already have mostly U.S. support agents.

But here’s the more important thing. I’ve covered Brendan Carr probably longer and more extensively than pretty much anybody alive. And I can tell you, with 100% certainty, that Carr doesn’t do anything that’s just inherently in the public interest. That’s simply not who he is.

He’s always working an angle for industry or large companies, usually media and telecom giants. There’s just no evidence that he’s a good faith operator in any of the arenas Reuters gives him unearned credibility for, and his ethics and principles, as we’ve seen repeatedly, are not consistent.

So I really doubt this has anything to actually do with improving customer service, or holding telecoms accountable for shoddy overseas support. I suspect he’s cooking up a stage play.

We’ve long noted how these consolidated regional telecom monopolies have some of the worst customer service ratings of any industry in America (which is truly saying something). Maybe AI will improve some aspects of that, but as we’ve seen in other arenas where AI is layered on top of very broken sectors (journalism, health insurance) by unethical executives, the end result isn’t particularly great.

If you don’t fix the underlying monopolization, you can’t fix the symptoms of monopolization, which generally are high prices, spotty service, slow speeds, and abysmal customer service. Layer AI on top of a broken industry, and you usually get a badly automated broken industry.

It will be worth keeping an eye on Carr’s final proposed plan. But I suspect it mostly involves him working closely with telecom giants to put a nationalistic, racist veneer on looming plans to dramatically accelerate layoffs in a telecom sector that’s already seen massive workforce reductions, largely due to the mindless consolidation Carr regularly rubber stamps.

Filed Under: brendan carr, call centers, customer service, fcc, offshoring, onshoring, telecom, wireless