It more than doubles your gaming time while giving you a better grip.

Generalist hopes to make ‘general intelligence’ robotics a reality.

US AI robotics company Generalist has raised $400m at a reported $2bn valuation to accelerate its plans towards achieving “physical” artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures, Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, World Labs founder and leading AI expert Fei-Fei Li, and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

Other participants include 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, NFDG and serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant.

With a team of AI and robotics experts with experience across Big Tech, Generalist hopes to make “general intelligence” robotics a reality.

The company was founded in 2024 by former DeepMind scientists Pete Florence, Andy Zheng, and former Boston Dynamics roboticist and Harvard machine learning scientist Andrew Barry.

Generalist launched its Gen-0 class of AI models last November, which it said was trained on an “unprecedented” scale of real-world data. The company said the model proved that physical experience and larger models could predictably produce more capable systems.

In April, it launched Gen-1, which showed commercial viability, it added. Gen-1 was three-times faster than similar state-of-the-art models, showcasing 99pc reliability on diverse tasks and demonstrated the ability to learn new and complex physical skills, according to Generalist.

“Scaling robot learning creates better models, better models can do more useful physical work, and data from real businesses drives the next generation of more capable models,” the company said in a statement.

The new funding will allow Generalist to continue “scaling robot learning”, including building new models, scaling its physical data engine, expanding compute and training infrastructure and working with industries for commercialisation.

“Our goal is not to tie ourselves to any single method or label. Our goal is to build whatever is needed to make physical AGI real,” said the company.

The exact definition of AGI is difficult to pin down. According to Google, AGI refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that allows it to “understand” or “learn” intellectual tasks that humans can, while IBM calls it the “abstract goal of AI development”, where human intelligence can be replicated by machines or software.

Robotics rise

The robotics industry has gained renewed energy in recent years, fuelled by AI. For the world’s biggest chipmaker Nvidia, robotics represents the biggest market for potential growth after AI.

Last month, Meta acquired US start-up Assured Robot Intelligence to reportedly pursue its plans for humanoid robotic hardware to help with household chores, and Amazon made its own robotics-related acquisition with Fauna Robotics in March.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s robotics software R&D company Intrinsic joined Google to work in close proximity with DeepMind, as well as tap into Google’s Gemini AI models and cloud services.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

AI apps led App Store growth in 2025, with the entire ecosystem garnering $1.4 trillion in payouts. Apple’s take of that is only 10%, assuming you agree with how they count.

Every year, typically right before WWDC, Apple releases a study showing how the App Store has fared over the prior year. In 2025, the App Store facilitated more than $1.4 trillion in developer billings. And, it said that the App Store ecosystem has tripled in size since 2019.

“Developers are the heartbeat of the App Store, and this year’s incredible milestone is a testament to their boundless creativity,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We are deeply committed to providing developers with the tools, technologies, and trusted platforms they need to build for the future,” Cook added. “Together, developers are creating apps that enrich the lives of users around the world.”

Commission eligible and ineligible revenue

Apple notes that for more than 90 percent of the billings and sales, Apple did not receive a commission. That means that most apps are making money outside of the App Store.

The study reports that 90% of App Store sales are commission-free. The study lists this number as $1,437 billion, or what most people, and Apple, generally call $1.4 trillion.

Image credit: Apple & Analysis Group

Interestingly, Apple counts digital goods and services purchased outside the App Store as sales that are not eligible for commissions, but still in the $1.4 trillion total. These include subscriptions to Hulu, Audible, Spotify, and the New York Times.

It’s hard to understand where exactly Apple fits into this. If a person purchases a subscription to, say, YouTube Premium outside of the App Store, but watches it on their Apple TV, does that count in this number?

The methodology mentioned in the study isn’t helpful, either. It reads:

“Sales and distribution of digital goods and services can occur through the App Store in the form of paid app downloads and in-app purchases, through linking out to webstores where content is consumed in-app but payments are made outside of the App Store, or through the sale of digital content and subscriptions from multi-platform apps that allow for the use and consumption of the app, both in the App Store ecosystem and elsewhere.”

It’s unclear whether the data includes purchases made after a user manually enters a website address to buy digital goods, or only purchases made through links accessed via buttons in the app.

The study also doesn’t say where it gets its data, really. A small line reads “data sources include data from Apple, app analytics companies, market research firms, and individual companies.”

So the digital goods and services section is a bit hard to parse. And it accounts for about 10.3% of Apple’s total $1.4 trillion revenue figure, or $149 billion.

Other sources of revenue include physical goods and services, such as buying items on Amazon or ordering delivery through Instacart. Lastly, it mentions in-app advertising revenue, including ads displayed on TikTok, Instagram, and in games.

AI market saturation

This year, Apple is placing special emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), claiming that apps featuring consumer-facing AI have seen four times the growth of their non-AI counterparts. This specifically refers to the top 100 apps, of which 40 currently have some form of consumer-facing AI.

Of course, it’s hard to tell if AI was the primary growth driver or if the most popular apps were going to integrate AI regardless.

For example, 99% of Fortune 500 companies were using AI in some capacity in 2025. Customer service saw a 2199% growth increase between January 2025 and January 2026.

Global growth, by region

The App Store saw growth worldwide in 2025. And in some regions, that growth has exploded in the last several years.

According to the study, billings and sales facilitated by the App Store have more than doubled in China in the last six years. In that same time period, it’s more than tripled in the U.S. and Europe.

Image credit: Apple & Analysis Group

Globally, physical goods and services accounted for the majority of all sales made in the App Store.

However, sales differed a little across regions. For example, travel was the second-largest category of spending in physical goods and services in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.

However, in Korea, food delivery was the second most popular. In the Chinese market, grocery and food delivery rounded out the top three slots.

Apple’s investment in developers

In 2025, Apple hosted thousands of developers at its developer centers. There are more than 20 Apple Developer Academies around the world, including Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the U.S.

Apple plans to open a Developer Center in Berlin sometime in 2026.

WWDC 2026 kicks off on June 8, allowing Apple to connect with developers and offer the first look at what tools and technologies will be available for the upcoming Apple operating system lineup.

Developers and students will have access to more than 100 new video sessions about tools, technologies, and design. They will also be invited to participate in Group Labs and join conversations in the Apple Developer Forums.

Every new AI agent your team deploys starts from scratch: no memory of how the business works, where data lives, or what rules apply. And as agentic coding tools spin up applications faster than anyone can govern them, each one risks becoming another silo outside your data layer entirely. Microsoft is addressing both problems directly at Build 2026.

According to VentureBeat’s VB Pulse’s Q1 2026 RAG Infrastructure Market Tracker, hybrid retrieval intent among 100-plus employee organizations tripled from 10.3% in January to 33.3% in March, a signal that enterprises have moved past expanding RAG coverage and are now focused on the architecture underneath it. Shared business context is the part retrieval does not solve.

On the context side, Microsoft is expanding Fabric IQ, its existing business data context layer, into a broader unified system called Microsoft IQ, adding three additional context sources covering how the organization works, what it knows and real-time global signals from the web, so any agent can tap all four as a single foundation. On the application side, Rayfin, a new open-source SDK and CLI, deploys agent-built applications directly to Fabric as a governed production backend, routing application data into the same platform rather than spinning up new silos.

Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft Fabric, reached for a film analogy to explain where the data platform fits. The green screen of cascading code in “The Matrix” wasn’t atmosphere, it was the layer that built the world Agent Smith operated in.

“Our job in the world of data is creating reality for agents based on data,” Netz told VentureBeat.

Microsoft IQ unifies four context sources into a single agent foundation

Microsoft IQ brings together four context sources that until now existed separately, designed so a developer can connect a new agent to all four in a single integration step.

Work IQ. Captures how the organization operates day to day, drawing on email, documents, meetings and schedules to give agents an understanding of people, teams and workflows.

Foundry IQ. Manages institutional knowledge, curating and indexing knowledge bases so agents understand what it means to work within the organization, what rules apply and what procedures to follow.

Fabric IQ. Models the live operational state of the business through data, defining entities, relationships and business rules grounded in real-time signals from Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. Ontologies, the layer that captures that operational context, are expected to reach GA in the coming months.

Web IQ. Adds real-time global context from the web, giving agents a current picture of the world outside the organization alongside its internal data.

“The agents are going to become highly informed virtual employees,” Netz said. “That’s where the world is heading.”

Rayfin routes agent-built applications into the same data foundation

Building shared context solves one half of the problem. The other is what happens when agents start generating applications. Every new app needs a backend, and without a governed deployment path each one creates a new data silo outside the context layer entirely.

Rayfin provides an enterprise-grade back end and deploys agent-built applications directly to Fabric, so application data lands in Microsoft OneLake by default and feeds back into the Microsoft IQ context layer rather than accumulating outside it.

Microsoft positions Rayfin against Supabase and Neon, the Postgres-compatible backends that agentic coding tools default to. The differentiator is governance: Rayfin routes the entire application fleet through Fabric’s unified data and compliance layer rather than creating isolated silos.

Netz described the relationship as bidirectional. The agent building a Rayfin application draws from the organization’s ontology. The data that application generates then enriches that ontology for the next agent.

Every major data platform is chasing the same answer, but execution is unproven

Microsoft is not the only platform building a shared context layer for agents. Snowflake announced its own context capabilities this week with semantic capabilities. Pinecone has its Nexus platform that expands the vector database to become a knowledge engine and Redis has developed its Iris context and memory platform.

Microsoft’s approach further reinforces the trend that RAG and model availability aren’t the issue anymore.

“Fabric IQ and Rayfin are important because the enterprise AI challenge is no longer just about the model availability,” Robert Kramer, managing partner at KramerERP told VentureBeat. “The real question is whether Microsoft simplifies execution and strengthens trust or adds another layer to an already complex environment.”

Mustafa Suleyman has identified Microsoft’s biggest AI competitor, and it is not OpenAI. “Anthropic is extremely expensive and I think many people are urgently looking for alternatives,” the head of Microsoft’s in-house model effort told Bloomberg in an interview.

The statement is more than competitive positioning. It is a declaration of intent. “We pay a lot of money to Anthropic, so our goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate that cost,” Suleyman said.

To back it up, Microsoft this week announced seven new in-house AI models at its annual Build conference for developers, including MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model it says matches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on a widely used coding benchmark at a lower price point.

The price pitch

Suleyman’s argument arrives at a moment when enterprise AI spending is becoming a genuine problem. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months and introduced a $1,500 monthly cap per employee per tool. Walmart has similarly capped access to its internal AI assistant after usage exceeded expectations.

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For Microsoft, which uses enormous quantities of AI tokens across Copilot and its own engineering teams, the cost question is existential. “Many, many people in our organisation are spending millions of dollars” on AI tokens, Suleyman said. Building cheaper in-house alternatives is not just a competitive move against external providers. It is a way to protect Microsoft’s own margins.

After refining its models for consulting firm McKinsey, Microsoft claims it was able to outperform OpenAI’s GPT 5-5 with 10 times better cost efficiency, according to Suleyman. The company has also been talking with Adobe about using the in-house models, Bloomberg reported.

From contractually bound to building its own

Until late 2025, Microsoft was contractually prohibited from independently pursuing frontier AI development under its partnership with OpenAI. A renegotiated agreement freed the company to build competing models while retaining licence rights to everything OpenAI builds through 2032.

That clock is now ticking. Suleyman’s MAI Superintelligence team, formed in November 2025, has shipped its first public models within six months. For a company with virtually no track record in frontier model development, the pace is aggressive but the gap remains real.

Suleyman was candid about that. “We’ve closed an enormous gap in six months,” he told Benzinga, while acknowledging that Anthropic has released two more advanced models since Opus 4.6, giving it a lead of several months.

Why Anthropic, not OpenAI

The strategic calculus is revealing. Microsoft retains discounted access to OpenAI’s models through 2032. It does not have a comparable arrangement with Anthropic. That makes Anthropic the more expensive dependency, and the one Suleyman can most directly address by building in-house alternatives.

There is also a competitive logic. Anthropic’s Claude models have become the default choice for enterprise AI coding tools, and the company is preparing an IPO that could value it above $1 trillion. If Microsoft can offer comparable performance at lower cost, bundled with the Azure infrastructure its enterprise customers already use, it undercuts the case for buying Anthropic separately.

Whether Microsoft’s models can actually match Anthropic’s latest generation, rather than a prior one, is the question Suleyman’s seven new models do not yet answer. Matching Opus 4.6 on a benchmark is a credible starting point. But Anthropic has already moved past it, and in a market where the frontier shifts every few months, catching up and staying there are very different problems.

from the that’s-now-how-any-of-this-works dept

There’s just an exhaustingly long list of reasons why the $111 billion planned acquisition of Warner Brothers by Larry Ellison and Paramount is very, very bad. Bad for consumers, bad for labor, bad for journalism, bad for democracy, and bad for markets.

For one thing, it’s financed by a bunch of murderous overseas autocrats. The massive debt load from deals like this always result in mass layoffs, higher prices for consumers, and corner cutting, resulting in a steadily shittier company, worse overall products, and a less healthy media. There’s also issues with Ellison trying to buy up all the news outlets and turn them into (even worse) right wing coddling bullshit and agitprop machines helmed by incompetent bad actors like Bari Weiss.

So it’s great timing for former Democratic California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to pop up over at The Hollywood Reporter to give a pathetic defense of the deal that pretends none of this is happening.

Trade mags are generally terrible. Most of the merger coverage at places like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Variety go comically out of their way to avoid acknowledging these giant deals are always bad. As in, it’s not any sort of actual debate. There are fifty years of very clear history on this subject, recently culminating in the giant turd that was the AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Bros disaster.

But here comes the 85-year-old Lockyer, who pretends to care about antitrust reform, right before he insists that people should ignore all of the terrible problems with Paramount’s latest deal. One of the central themes in his piece is that Paramount and Warner Brothers have to merge because it’s the only way they can compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Apple:

“Traditional studios are no longer competing only with one another. California cannot and should not ignore that reality. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are competing against global technology platforms and streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, Apple and others with enormous financial resources, diversified revenue streams and worldwide reach.”

That’s simply not how any of this works.

A Trump-allied oligarch and his nepobaby kid taking on a mountain of debt doesn’t magically result in a company that’s healthier and more competitive. All the debt costs are offloaded onto the back of workers, consumers, and product quality. These mergers always result in a less healthy company than ever, regardless of whatever silly smoke David Ellison is trying to blow up the ass of Hollywood elite.

It’s possible Lockyer is engaged in a DC policy paid advertorial on behalf of Paramount, though the Hollywood Reporter doesn’t offer any sort of financial conflict of interest disclosure, so one just has to assume Lockyer, like so many Democrats, doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about when it comes to things like modern politics in the authoritarian era, or modern antitrust reform.

Though given Lockyer’s personal history of approving harmful consolidation (like his office allowing the Hearst Corporation-owned San Francisco Examiner to acquire its competitor the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999) or weak-kneed settlements or antitrust policy failures (Microsoft, Sutter Health), it’s maybe not surprising that he thinks one of the worst mergers in media history should be approved.

Lockyer’s also quick to shoot down concerns that Ellison’s domination of media is any sort of real world problem:

“Some have raised broader concerns about media ownership, editorial influence or political viewpoints, as the combined company would own both CBS News and CNN. This debate will undoubtedly continue to dominate talk shows and social media. I, too, worry about plutocratic dominance of media markets. But merger enforcement should remain focused on competition and the potential for consumer and worker harm — the core pillars of antitrust — not political disagreements over content or viewpoint.”

But this isn’t 1997. It’s now impossible to untangle corrupt authoritarian domination of media, and their relentless dismantling of media consolidation limits, from broader antitrust arguments (though I know there are centrist Democrats and MAGA “antitrust enforcers” who would very much like to). There are vast harms caused by the destruction of what’s left of journalism and public interest media, and any “antitrust reform” that doesn’t factor in media audience welfare and the health of electoral consensus in the age of Elon Musk and Larry Ellison enabled fascism isn’t reform, it’s patty cake.

Meaningful DOJ Antitrust reform would be nice, but it can’t fix things alone. We need an FCC that also actually cares about media consolidation. And it might be nice, as Gigi Sohn has long argued, to begin looking at meaningful media ownership diversity requirements in a bid to protect minority and independent journalism.

But we don’t have that. We have an FCC actively waging a war of censorship on anybody critical of an unpopular autocrat. We have a DOJ actively encouraging harmful consolidation at the hands of technofascist billionaires keen on pummeling the electorate with right wing agitprop. And an opposition Democrat party with weak knees and zero credibility on antitrust or media reform.

Trump and friends are self-serving autocrats dead seat on dismantling whatever’s left of meaningful competition and opposition. That Netflix, Comcast, Disney, and Apple still exist isn’t any consolation if the obvious ultimate end goal is zero restrictions on total consolidation. Instead of proudly advertising he doesn’t understand current political and market realities, Lockyer should probably just enjoy retirement.

Filed Under: antitrust, authoritarians, Bill Lockyer, diversity, larry ellison, media consolidation, mergers, reform

Companies: paramount, warner bros.

Waymo has announced a deal with an energy storage company called B2U to use retired robotaxi batteries to serve electricity grids in California and Texas.

The deal helps answer the question of how Waymo is thinking about the end-of-life treatment of the thousands of robotaxis it has deployed around the United States. Almost all of those are currently Jaguar I-Pace EVs, though the company has recently started deploying a limited number of vans built by Chinese automaker Zeekr.

Waymo said the partnership will involve the deployment of “hundreds of megawatts of storage capacity” but did not offer any further specifics.

B2U is one of numerous companies focusing on battery repurposing rather than recycling. Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel and backed in part by Waymo’s parent company Alphabet, recently spun up its own second-life storage business using old EV batteries.

It’s hard to believe it has been 47 years since Bowers & Wilkins first released their iconic 800 series loudspeakers with the original 801 in 1979. The speakers developed such a reputation for precise, natural sound virtually overnight that Abbey Road Studios brought a pair in to serve as their studio monitors while recording and mixing classic albums by The Beatles and Pink Floyd and legendary soundtracks like John Williams’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (Brief aside, you haven’t heard the “Raiders” soundtrack until you’ve heard it on a pair of B&W 801 speakers).

Today, at the High End HiFi show in Vienna, the legend continues with the unveiling of seven new models in the brand new Diamond D5 version of the 800 series loudspeakers. Price for the new models start at $15,000 USD/pair for the 805 D5 stand-mount (bookshelf) speakers up to $65,000/pair for the flagship 801 D5 towers. The price for the flagship is certainly a bit higher than what the “Series 80, Model 801” sold for in 1979 ($2,850/pair) – even when adjusted for inflation – but 40 years of good old-fashioned British sonic research and engineering has brought these speakers to their highest levels of both performance and industrial design.

The company unveiled a full suite of D5 800 series speakers at the show, not only for two channel music listening, but also for home theater implementations with dedicated center channel speakers that provide a perfect tonal match to other speakers in the line. Whether you’re upgrading a classic two-channel HiFi system or building out a custom home cinema, there’s an 800 series D5 speaker (or twelve) for you, as long as your financial situation can accommodate the hefty price tags.

The Diamond D5 line-up is the fifth generation of the 800 series loudspeakers to use the company’s diamond dome tweeter which is primarily responsible for the speaker’s open airiness, realistic sound staging and sonic transparency. The company says the new 800 Series Diamond D5 range introduces “extensive acoustic, mechanical, and electrical improvements aimed at taking the already category-defining performance of the outgoing range to all-new heights.”

Most of the enhancements have been inspired directly by the company’s highest performance “Signature Series” D4 loudspeakers. And most of the tweaks are designed to further reduce unwanted cabinet resonance and vibrations. Some of these refinements and technology highlights include:

• Space Frame Bracing
• New Plinth with Tuned-Mass Damping
• Improved All-New Aluminum Top Plate
• Enhanced Matrix Internal Bracing
• New Aluminium Mid-range Enclosure (804 D5)
• Signature specification grille mesh and drive unit motor systems
• Upgraded wiring harnesses and crossovers
• All Aluminum crossover mounting plate

More details on each of these enhancements can be found on the Bowers & Wilkins web site.

In addition to the sonic refinements, the Diamond D5 line-up features an new luxurious and lustrous aesthetic with four new finishes: Stealth Black, Warm White, Light Walnut and Dark Walnut.

The Reference Loudspeaker for Denon and Marantz

The Bowers & Wilkins 800 series speakers aren’t just featured in recording studios, and in the homes of well-heeled audiophiles and music lovers worldwide, they’re also used as reference speakers by sister companies Denon and Marantz. Every time a new Denon or Marantz A/V product is being developed, the company’s “sound masters” do extensive listening sessions at the company’s headquarters in Japan to evaluate the performance each piece of new gear. And the final approval from each soundmaster is only given after listening to each on Bowers and Wilson flagship 800 series speakers.

At a recent visit to these offices, we got to see (and hear) so many demos of the previous generation 801 D4 speakers playing vinyl and hi-res audio music tracks with top notch Denon and Marantz amps and receivers that we were trying to figure out how to sneak a pair out and hide it in with our carry-on luggage (but alas, they were too big for that).

Full Lineup and Pricing of Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series D5 Speakers:

• 801 D5 | £43,000 / $65,000 / €50,000 per pair
  The new no-holds-barred flagship three-way tower loudspeaker from Bowers & Wilkins.
• 802 D5 | £32,500 / $45,000 / €37,000 per pair
  Smaller version of the 801, but with the same cabinet proportions as the flagship for a slightly more compact and more affordable option with minimal compromises.
• 803 D5 | £25,500 / $35,000 / €30,000 per pair
  An even more compact “headed” three-way loudspeaker design with both the midrange and tweeter separated from the main bass cabinet for optimal isolation in a smaller overall footprint than the larger tower speakers.
• 804 D5 | £16,000 / $25,000 / €18,000 per pair
  The company’s most compact (and most affordable) three-way floor-standing tower in the Diamond D5 line-up.
• 805 D5 | £10,000 / $15,000 / €12,000 per pair
  The two-way 805 D5 stand-mount loudspeaker is ideal for smaller spaces or for more compact home theater systems that use powered subwoofers for low frequency response and effects.
• HTM81 D5 | £10,000 / $15,000 / €12,000 each
  A high performance three-way center channel for use with 801 and 802 D5.
• HTM82 D5 | £8,000 / $12,000 / €10,000 each
  A slightly more compact three-way center channel for use with 803 and 804 D5.
• FS-805 D5 | £1,600 / $2,000 / €1,800/p
  High-performance speaker stand, for use with 805 D5.
• FS-HTM D5 | £1,100 / $1,500 / €1,300 each
  Center-channel speaker stand for use with HTM81 D5 or HTM82 D5 for ideal speaker height.

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I’d just finished off several waves of fighter planes and attack helicopters headed for the last port still under the control of my desperate nation, keeping our feeble chances alive for one more day. I returned to our base, an aging aircraft carrier, to chat with the corporate bigwig who’d thrown in with our ragtag remainders. He pulled out his smartphone and showed me how he was manipulating photos to make it look like we had more fighter jets than the few we possessed, projecting strength through misinformation.

Strangereal is getting a dose of 2026’s reality.

As the first Ace Combat game in seven years, and the first on this generation of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has a lot of technical and story modernizations. At a preview in Los Angeles, I played several hours of the game across six different missions. Rest assured: It wholly embodies the franchise’s particular flavor of tense aerial combat without the severe complexity of ultrarealistic flight simulators. 

It’s also undeniably set in the Ace Combat world of Strangereal, a fictional setting of vaguely European-styled nations embattled in generational wars fought with real-world planes… as well as massive flying wings and land battleships that wouldn’t look out of place in an anime. Yet in my time with the game, it’s what the developers at Project Aces — Bandai Namco’s internal team behind the Ace Combat series — pulled from our real-world 2026 that stuck with me.

It’s integral to Project Aces’ framing for Ace Combat 8, which focuses on relationships between pilots and people close to the player. The game opens up with an unnamed player character being rescued from the sea and taken aboard an aircraft carrier carrying the last military resistance of the Federation of Central Usea, or FCU, following its defeat by the Republic of Sotoa. Before long, the player takes on the role of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot whose identity is obscured so that when one is shot down, another takes their place. 

Taking on the mantle to preserve the myth is an old storytelling theme, but it takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Project Aces wanted to bring the lens down from the skies to a more personal level, connecting players with the people they’re flying alongside and protecting aboard the ship. But the breaks between missions, when players bond with these fictional characters, also show them shooting smartphone videos of the Wings of Theve that are sent far and wide as promotional footage. As intentionally surreal as Strangereal is — an abstraction built to stage colossal wars and geopolitical upheaval — it’s still a little bizarre to see real-world smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds bleed into a franchise centered on fighter jet dogfights.

As CNET’s supervising editor of mobile coverage, it’s surreal to see social media warfare make its way into a military sim. But when the media sat down with Kazutoki Kono, the Ace Combat series brand director, at the preview, and I asked him about the inclusion of smartphone propaganda, Kono said he sees it as an extension of the player’s journey toward becoming an ace pilot.

“Obviously, there’s massive boss fights, different encounters, super challenging situations that you’ll have to deal with in dogfight situations, perhaps other ace pilots that are your rivals,” Kono said. “But on a much larger scale, I think social media and misinformation is another challenge that teams have to overcome nowadays. You could say that social media is just one among a wide range of challenges that needs to be overcome so the player feels that sense of growth.”

It’s a very specific choice considering which elements of our 2026 reality Project Aces didn’t include — such as drones, which have become more and more a part of modern warfare. I first spoke with Kono back in December after Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the Game Awards 2025. He shared that the unmanned aerial vehicle drone enemies included in Ace Combat 7 were disliked by fans; they wanted the man-on-man dogfight experience with radio chatter and human tension.

“There is always going to be this reality line that we’re going to want to aim for. That being said, we still can’t go for that line at the expense of the player experience,” Kono said in December. “For the player to have fun is always going to be a priority for us as a game design philosophy.”

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Playing Ace Combat 8: Becoming the wings of legend

I was thinking about this push and pull between reality and fiction as I sat down at my station for the preview. Kono’s comments about eschewing real-world elements such as the rise of UAV aircraft made me wonder how much of Ace Combat 8 would be geared toward preserving the dogfighting fantasy evoked in popular media such as Top Gun, even as modern air combat continues to veer toward drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.

Indeed, after my player character was rescued and met the crew, he was sent into the air in the backseat behind the current Wings of Theve, whose aviator sunglasses and charming smile looked uncannily like those of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun. In another nod to misinformation, the pilot, Cope, has had his record of enemy kills greatly exaggerated. When an enemy ace shot our plane down, Cope’s untimely death paves the way for the player to take his mantle — though he sticks around as a ghostly presence to guide you going forward. It’s a fun bit of torch-passing flavor that also provides context, as the player character is a classic wordless protagonist.

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After that prologue, the first mission has the player character taking on the mantle of the Wings of Theve as a publicity move to keep morale up. The second and third missions bring me together with my squadmates — former community college academic The Professor, taciturn Noise and former stunt pilot Tasha (whose colorful hair wouldn’t look out of place on a K-pop idol).

In-game, you can command them to focus fire on targets, choose their own or form up on you. It’s a nice bit of flexibility to suit your play style, though I often lost track of what they were doing while I focused on my mission objectives. Mostly, I enjoyed the radio chatter as they ribbed one another.

You can also kit them out with different aircraft and missile or bomb loadouts tailored to each mission, though I didn’t notice much of a difference when I split them between A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft and Eurofighter Typhoon air-superiority jets. (It’s possible I wasn’t paying close enough attention.) After starting out in the F/A-18C multirole fighter — which Kono told me in December is his favorite and serves as the game’s “hero aircraft”– players can unlock more than 30 real and fictional aircraft, each with its own stats and payload options. That variety makes some better suited for dogfights and others more effective against ground targets.

Unlocking is handled through a tech tree of sorts, starting with the F/A-18C and branching out not just to new aircraft but also to perks, including improved missile performance and larger bomb payloads. These can be equipped before missions, though each jet has a different perk capacity. With more than 100 standard missiles and dozens of additional missile and bomb options, armaments have always been where Ace Combat shifts from realistic aviation to arcade-style air combat. But it serves the heroic-pilot fantasy well — and makes missed shots a lot less painful.

We jumped around for the last segment of the preview. The fourth mission was a good blend of targets below and above, featuring harbors full of naval vessels to bomb, protected by enemy fighter jets. But it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: taking on a land battleship that looked like the USS Iowa on treads. My objective was to immobilize it while the iron leviathan’s guns, hovering quadcopter escorts and swirling defensive drone swarm tried to blast me out of the sky. They succeeded a few times, and it took several retries (and collapsed hotel buildings) to finally lock the beast in place.

The last mission we got to play, the 11th, had my squad taking on massive flying-wing aircraft transporting land battleship parts into enemy territory. Thanks to radar jamming, I had to track the skyborne behemoths by their long contrails, then bring my squad in close and rely on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Flanked by fighter escorts, I screamed through the clouds in a visually breathtaking sequence, seeing firsthand the game’s Cloudly tech that Kono had described to me back in December.

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This feeling of breathless adventure among the clouds is one of the three core pillars at the heart of Ace Combat 8’s design philosophy, Kono told me and other media at the preview. Every decision they made needed to feed or strengthen one of them.

“The first [pillar] is photorealistic expression of the sky and giving the player the freedom to soar through it how they see fit,” Kono said. “The second is also at the player’s discretion, which enemies to engage with and the satisfaction of dogfights in the sky. The third is this process of becoming an ace pilot in the world, so you go from rookie to hero in the world of Ace Combat.” (Then he laughed, saying that there might be a fourth pillar they hadn’t even realized existed, given how vocal fans have been about the franchise’s background music.)

For all the effort devoted to realism, from recreating the world’s most iconic fighter aircraft to simulating cloud moisture droplets on the cockpit canopy, Ace Combat still delivers a powerful fantasy: that of a skyborne gunfighter fighting for what’s right. While I was caught off guard by Ace Combat 8’s decision to incorporate social media warfare, I was still swept up in watching my pilot’s legend grow — ideally through missiles and slick flying rather than doctored smartphone videos.