Ihza sabil/Shutterstock

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Keeping your driveway clean is an important step in maintaining your home’s appearance. The benefits aren’t just cosmetic, either. Mold, algae, and moss can make pavement slippery and unsafe to walk on. Automotive fluids, such as oil and transmission fluid, can degrade the structural integrity of the concrete. Even simple dirt accumulation can create beds for weeds, allowing their roots to widen existing cracks. So, in a very real sense, keeping your driveway clean helps to preserve its safety and structural integrity.

One of the easiest ways to clean a driveway is by investing in a good pressure washer from a major brand. All you need to do is hook it up to your hose, power it up, and blast away. Not only does this clean the surface of your concrete, but it penetrates deep into the pores. That said, a lot of people might not want to purchase an expensive and space-consuming tool just to do one job.

Advertisement

Fortunately, there are two main methods of cleaning: mechanical and chemical. Using a pressure washer is a form of mechanical cleaning — literally blasting the dirt and debris from the concrete. It’s highly effective and requires minimal effort. That said, it isn’t the only way to clean your old driveway so it looks new again. You can also use a chemical cleaning solution with a bit of extra elbow grease. There are plenty of cleaning chemicals that are designed specifically for removing grime from driveways. But if you’re really in a pinch, you might even be able to use something that’s already sitting in your cabinet: baking soda. Additionally, there are several smaller and more affordable pressurized nozzles for you to choose from.

Advertisement

Driveway cleaning compounds

There are a lot of different compounds out there that are designed explicitly for cleaning driveways, patios, and other paved surfaces. Simple Green Concrete and Driveway Cleaner with Oxy Solve is one of the better-selling and higher-rated products on Amazon. This cleaner has a 4.2 out of 5-star rating aggregated from over 4,900 reviews. It’s primarily designed to work in tandem with a pressure washer, but the company also gives directions on how to apply it manually. To use it without a pressure washer, you need to mix two cups of the cleaner with one gallon of water, and then apply it with a soft-bristle brush or other scrubbing apparatus. Once the driveway is thoroughly scrubbed, let it sit for five to seven minutes, then hose it off. 

There are several other similar options available as well. Zep Driveway and Concrete Cleaner has garnered quite a reputation on TikTok as a solution that works wonders on oil stains. Meanwhile, Wet and Forget Outdoor Cleaner is specifically designed to target moss, mold, mildew, and algae. Those who don’t want to purchase a special cleaner for the job might be able to get away with just using baking soda. It’s abrasive, alkaline — and best of all — cheap.

To clean your driveway with baking soda, start by sweeping off as much debris as you can. Then get a large bucket and combine a cup of baking soda and about ¼ cup of dish soap per gallon of water. Stir this up good and then pour it over the parts of your driveway you want to clean. Let it sit for about 15 to 30 minutes, but don’t let it go dry. Then you’ll need to scrub it with a brush and, finally, hose it all down.

Advertisement

There are other ways to add pressure

Cleaning compounds and elbow grease will win the day if you don’t own a pressure washer, but there are a few tools that can add a bit of blasting power to your hose without the need for a motorized pressure washer. The most basic of these is a simple hose nozzle. There are tons of multi-setting options, like the Automan Garden Hose Nozzle, that offer multiple watering patterns. If you own one of these, then the ‘jet’ setting is probably your best bet. There are also twist nozzles, like the Gilmour Heavy Duty Brass Twist Hose Nozzle, that can be twisted until they unleash a similarly concentrated stream.

That said, one of the best options if you don’t have a pressure washer is to get yourself a high-pressure nozzle. You can get the Carfka Jet Nozzle High Pressure Wand for just $19.99, for instance. This utilizes the same narrow frame and tip as a pressure washer, but it concentrates the water from your hose into a narrower stream instead of using gas or electricity to generate pressure. As such, the PSI will depend entirely on the output of your spigot.

Advertisement

There are also options with a more ergonomic design. The JetHose Pressure Washer Jet or the Pocket Hose Arrow, for example, both use a similarly narrow tube and small-opening tips to build pressure. Unlike the wands, they have a pistol grip with a lever to control the stream. These tend to be a bit pricier, however, generally retailing for around $50.

from the glorified-lapdogs dept

You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval of The Ellison family’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a “ombudsman” at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king.

This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by Republicans about stuff like the “fairness doctrine,” and other short-lived government attempts to set acceptable contours for journalistic speech. The appointment didn’t even really appear necessary, given Bari Weiss’ pretty obvious loyalty to oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu.

The guy they appointed, Kenneth Weinstein, unsurprisingly had no qualifications for the role. Weinstein had been the head of the faux-academic right wing Hudson Institute “think tank,” and has absolutely no experience in journalism or television whatsoever.

Similarly unsurprisingly, a new New York Times report indicates that Weinstein has largely been invisible and pointless since his appointment. He doesn’t issue statements, he doesn’t appear to help anybody dealing with internal chaos being caused by Weiss, he doesn’t respond to direct questions from politicians, and he barely shows up at the office:

“In the nine months since he was hired, Mr. Weinstein has issued no public statements about CBS News’s coverage or its controversies. He has not issued any guidance or feedback in staffwide emails or memos, three employees said. He has told some employees that he is scheduled to work only one day per month, two people said, though one said he responded to queries outside his monthly workday.”

As I predicted, there’s just not much for him to actually do at a company that’s innately so dutifully loyal to the nation’s richest assholes. The New York Times at one point seems confused by the idea this “watchdog” does do any useful watchdogging:

“As CBS News has been shaken by infighting between management and its star correspondents this year, Mr. Weinstein’s silence is being criticized by media experts. They say Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, has essentially hired a watchdog who doesn’t bark.”

Of course Weinstein wasn’t appointed to be a “watchdog” or to help the network or its employees. He was hired so that the Trump administration could be ensured a direct line to the leadership of a media company being converted into a propaganda mill, something that’s likely not even necessary due to the ample close connections between the Ellisons, CBS leadership, and the administration.

Weinstein’s other job was to simply ensure that CBS was remaining dutifully loyal to the president, a role that’s also not really necessary since folks like Bari Weiss have no integrity.

The New York Times doesn’t mention how much Weinstein is being paid for his single day of “work” a month, and how many shitcanned CBS journalist salaries it would have paid for.

Filed Under: bari weiss, cbs news, fcc, kenneth weinstein, media, ombudsman, propaganda, the hudson institute

By Maril Vernon, GRC Engineering Evangelist, Anecdotes.

Every vendor on every panel right now is saying the word “agentic.” But most of them can’t explain what actually changes when you stop treating GRC like a filing cabinet and start treating it like a fluid system.

I spent years on the offensive side, red and purple teaming, breaking the controls that GRC teams swore were working. Same findings, same gaps, different quarters. So when I tell you agentic AI is about to reshape how GRC operates, I’m not selling you a buzzword. I’m telling you what I’d be paying attention to if I were still trying to get past your controls.

Here is the honest version of where this goes, and what one of these agents actually looks like when you build it.

What “Agentic” Actually Means Here

Automation is not new to GRC. We have been scripting evidence collection and bolting RPA onto workflows for years. The problem is that most of it just moved the busywork around faster. It still produced static artifacts, still ran on a schedule, still answered the only question legacy GRC knows how to ask: “Did this control pass?”

An agent is different in three specific ways. It has autonomy, so it acts when a condition is met instead of waiting for a human to kick off a task. It has context, so it works against the actual state of your program rather than a screenshot from last quarter. And it executes multiple steps, so it can analyze, decide, and act in sequence rather than dumping a row into a report for you to deal with later.

The systems we are governing have already gone agentic. Cloud is elastic, identity is fluid, infrastructure is ephemeral, AI is non-deterministic, and CI/CD never stops. Attackers figured that out a long time ago but too many compliance programs are still trying to govern real-time systems with point-in-time assumptions.

Now, agentic does not mean handing judgment to a stochastic parrot, in fact most of the work should remain deterministic. The model provides reasoning, summarization, and orchestration. Your controls, thresholds, and policy decisions should still come from humans.

Frankly, this is one of the best use cases for AI in cybersecurity. GRC is full of high-volume, repeatable work performed against known baselines. That’s exactly the kind of problem machines excel at. We already trust AI to help us detect anomalies, prioritize alerts, and sift through mountains of telemetry.

Using it to help analysts identify evidence gaps or trace control drift is hardly the radical leap some people make it out to be.

Bottom line: AI should not replace judgment. It should give practitioners more opportunities to creatively apply it.

Three Things That Actually Change

The analyst’s job shifts from collecting to managing. Nobody gets into GRC because they dream of chasing screenshots and manually updating spreadsheets. The analyst’s job changes, but not in the way people fear.

Agents don’t turn practitioners into passive supervisors. Agents don’t replace practitioners; they give them back the time to apply judgment where it actually matters.

Compliance moves from periodic to continuous. Historically, annual and quarterly cycles existed because humans couldn’t continuously evaluate every control and every change. Agents dramatically expand that capability, making continuous assessment practical where periodic reviews once were the only option.

The moment that constraint goes away, “are we compliant right now” becomes a question you can actually answer, not a snapshot you defend three months after it stopped being true.

Trust becomes the bottleneck. Keep in mind: pass/fail is a compliance outcome. Confidence is a security outcome.

People underestimate this one because once effort is cheap, the hard question is whether you trust what the agent did and can prove it, or did you simply shift the manual work to the verification tax? That is a governance problem, and it is the one worth your attention.

What It Looks Like to Build One

Theory is easy to consume and file away. Here is the concrete version, using Anecdotes Agent Studio, which is the no-code builder my team put into early access. The mechanics are the point, so follow the structure even if you use something else.

Agent development comes down to three decisions:

Pick a trigger. This is the condition that wakes the agent up. It might be a schedule (run every Monday), or it might be an event in your program (a risk level changes, or evidence for a control goes stale past a freshness threshold you set). I prefer event triggers, because they fire the moment something changes instead of waiting for the next scheduled run, which is what makes the monitoring continuous rather than periodic.

Describe the work in plain English. You write the instruction the way you would brief a junior analyst, no code needed. Take ISO 27001:2022 control A.8.5, secure authentication.

The instruction might read: “When the MFA evidence for A.8.5 is older than 24 hours, query the identity provider for the current MFA enforcement policy, compare it against the organization’s required MFA baseline, and if any group has fallen out of enforcement, open a finding and assign a remediation task to the control owner.” Start from a prebuilt recipe or write your own.

Deploy and watch. Now trace what the agent actually does when that trigger fires.

It reads the live MFA policy from your identity provider through the connected plugin (Okta, Entra ID, whatever you run), pulls the current enforcement state for each group, compares it to the A.8.5 baseline you defined, and finds that a newly provisioned admin group was created without an MFA policy attached. It opens a finding, attaches the policy snapshot it pulled as evidence, links it to A.8.5, and assigns remediation to the IAM owner.

Each of those steps lands in an execution log: the trigger event, the data it read, the comparison it ran, the decision it reached, and the action it took.

That single run is the difference between “we passed A.8.5 at the last assessment” and “A.8.5 is enforced right now, and here is the timestamped evidence.”

The Part Security People Will Push On (Correctly)

If your instinct reading this was “I am not handing compliance decisions to a black box,” good. Keep that.

Agentic GRC is defensible for one reason: the work is observable. A useful execution log captures the trigger that fired, the exact inputs the agent read, the rule or baseline it evaluated against, the decision it reached and why, the action it took, and the evidence it touched; all timestamped. That record is what lets you reconstruct any decision after the fact and hand it to an assessor without taking the agent’s word for anything.

Two scoping rules keep it safe. Give the agent least privilege: read-only access to the systems it evaluates, and write access only to the GRC objects it is allowed to create, like findings and tasks. Then gate anything consequential behind a person. Detecting drift and opening a finding can run unattended; closing a risk or marking a control effective should route to a human for sign-off.

Plan for the agent being wrong, because a non-deterministic model sometimes will be. If it opens a finding on A.8.5 that turns out to be a false positive, the log shows exactly what it read and concluded, so you fix the instruction instead of guessing.

An action you can trace is an action you can reverse, and that is why the log matters more than the model.

Where to Start

Don’t start with your highest-stakes control. Start with the task that is high-toil and low-judgment, the one your team does the same way every week and hates.

Think evidence gap detection, extracting findings from audit reports, or generating analysis rules for evidence that has no testing procedure. Prove the pattern there, read the logs, build the trust, then expand.

If you want to go deeper on this, it’s the whole agenda at the GRC Data & AI Summit 2026 on August 12, a free virtual event where security, risk, and compliance leaders work through what being agent-ready actually requires. Save your spot here.

I did not come back to GRC because it was comfortable. I came back because it was unfinished. Agents are the first time the tooling has started to match the speed, scale, and interconnected nature of the systems we’re trying to govern. If you want to see what building one feels like, Agent Studio is in early access now. 

My advice? Build the boring one first. Then tell me what changed.

---

Maril Vernon is a former red and purple team operator and the Principal GRC Engineering Evangelist at Anecdotes. She writes and speaks on GRC Engineering, continuous controls monitoring, and pushing compliance into the same decade as the systems it governs.

Sponsored and written by Anecdotes.

Acoustic Energy is extending its anniversary campaign with the AE2 40th Anniversary, a limited-edition standmount loudspeaker that will make its world premiere at the North West Audio Show in Cranage, UK, on June 27-28, 2026.

Following the AE1 40th Anniversary in 2025 and the launch of the fully analog AE Active at High End Vienna 2026, the new AE2 looks back to one of the British brand’s more ambitious compact loudspeaker designs—only with considerably more modern engineering under the gloss finish.

Rather than simply dusting off an old badge and hoping nostalgia does the heavy lifting, Acoustic Energy has redeveloped the AE2 around the later AE2 Signature concept. The new speaker uses technology derived from the AE1 40th Anniversary, adds internal steel reinforcement to reduce cabinet coloration, and is positioned above the AE1 for listeners who want more scale, bass weight, and dynamic capability without surrendering the placement flexibility and imaging strengths of a proper standmount.

The AE2 40th Anniversary will be demonstrated publicly for the first time ahead of its wider launch later this summer. Acoustic Energy’s intent is clear: take the compact-monitor attitude that made the AE1 famous and give it enough muscle to annoy a small floorstander.

From Acoustic Energy: “Building on the unprecedented success of the AE1 40th Anniversary Edition, the AE2 uses the same newly developed woofer and tweeter drive units from the AE1. The AE2 40th Anniversary derives from the legacy of the highly renowned flagship ‘AE2 Signature’ model of the 1990s. The same technological refinements from the AE1 have been used to update the performance to today’s level, along with aesthetic detail sympathetic to the original.”

Driver Design

The AE2 40th Anniversary uses the same newly developed tweeter and mid/bass driver platform as the AE1 40th Anniversary, but applies it to a larger offset MTM configuration intended to deliver more bass extension, headroom, and authority. Acoustic Energy has also added strategically placed internal steel plates to reduce cabinet coloration and help the larger enclosure match the quieter, more controlled behavior of its smaller sibling.

The 29mm anodized aluminum dome tweeter carries over the AE1 40th Anniversary’s larger 29mm voice coil and slightly increased radiating area. Like the original AE designs, it is ferrofluid cooled and damped, a combination intended to improve power handling, dynamics, and thermal stability without abandoning the metal-dome character that helped define the brand.

The mid/bass drivers use Acoustic Energy’s spun, hard-anodized aluminum cone design, reinforced with a thick ceramic coating on both sides. The 125mm cone offers more radiating area than the original AE1 driver, which Acoustic Energy says contributes to higher efficiency, lower distortion, and greater air displacement. In the AE2, that shared driver platform is paired with the larger cabinet and twin-driver arrangement to give the speaker more scale than the AE1.

Reduced Cabinet Coloration

Acoustic Energy has scaled up the AE2 40th Anniversary with greater bass extension and dynamic headroom, which the company says should translate into lower distortion through the midband and greater transparency at typical listening levels.

The goal was to retain the tonal character and punchy dynamics of the smaller AE1 40th Anniversary within a larger offset M-T-M driver layout. That required more than simply adding a second mid/bass driver and three front-firing bass-reflex ports. To keep the larger enclosure’s coloration in line with the AE1, Acoustic Energy has added strategically placed internal steel plates to the cabinet structure.

The idea is straightforward: deliver the scale and authority expected from a small floorstander while preserving the low coloration, imaging precision, and placement flexibility that made the AE1 such a compelling standmount in the first place.

Performance and Amplifier Matching

Acoustic Energy positions the AE2 40th Anniversary for listening rooms of around 25 square meters (about 270 square feet) and larger, where its additional bass extension and dynamic headroom should give it more authority than the smaller AE1 40th Anniversary.

Its published specifications support that positioning: a claimed frequency range of 35Hz to 45kHz, measured within ±6dB; 88dB sensitivity at 1 metre/2.83V; a nominal 6-ohm impedance; and 200 watts of power handling. Those are sensible figures for a substantial standmount designed to play with more scale and composure than its dimensions might suggest.

The AE2 is not being pitched as a difficult loudspeaker, but it should reward an amplifier with proper current delivery and some reserve power. The goal is the weight and room-filling authority of a compact floorstander, combined with the imaging, low cabinet coloration, and placement flexibility that remain central to the AE1 and AE2 design philosophy.

Crossover & Cabinet Finish

The AE2 40th Anniversary uses a minimalist, low-order crossover network set at 2.2kHz. Acoustic Energy says the approach is intended to preserve the lively, direct character of the original AE2 Signature, rather than bury the music beneath a small mountain of crossover components.

The cabinet is available in High Gloss Black or High Gloss Walnut, with each finished in ten layers for a properly luxurious appearance. At 385 x 235 x 315mm (HWD) and 14.5kg each, the AE2 is a substantial standmount, but not one that requires a civil-engineering permit before you put it on proper stands.

From Acoustic Energy: “Building on the unprecedented success of the AE1 40th Anniversary Edition, the AE2 uses the same newly developed woofer and tweeter drive units from the AE1. The AE2 40th Anniversary derives from the legacy of the highly renowned flagship ‘AE2 Signature’ model of the 1990s. The same technological refinements from the AE1 have been used to update the performance to today’s level, along with aesthetic detail sympathetic to the original.”

Comparison

Acoustic Energy Model	AE2 40th Anniversary Edition	AE1 40th Anniversary Edition
Product Type	Standmount Speaker	Standmount Speaker
Price (pair)	€2,799	£1,049 – £1,500
Design	2-way, Three front reflex ports	2-way, twin front reflex ports
Tweeter	1 x 29mm anodized aluminium dome	1 x 29mm anodized aluminium dome
Mid/Bass Driver	2 x 125mm spun, hard-anodised aluminium cone	1 x 125mm spun, hard-anodised aluminium cone
Frequency Range (±6dB)	35 Hz – 45 kHz	50Hz – 45kHz
Sensitivity (1m/2.83V)	88 dB	87dB
Power Handling	200 W	150W
Crossover Frequency	2.2 kHz	2.8kHz
Impedance	6 ohms	6 ohms
Cabinet	18–32mm RSC HDF/bitumen construction, braced	18–22mm RSC HDF/bitumen construction, braced
Grilles	Cloth, magnetic fit	Cloth, magnetic fit
Dimensions (HWD)	385 x 235 x 315mm	295 x 180 x 255mm
Weight	14.5 kg each	7kg each
Finishes	High Gloss Walnut, High Gloss Black	High Gloss Walnut, High Gloss Black

The Bottom Line 

The AE2 40th Anniversary is not simply an AE1 40th Anniversary in a larger cabinet with a fancier badge. Its real purpose is to take the newer AE1-derived driver platform and apply it to a larger offset M-T-M design with twin mid/bass drivers, three front-firing ports, and additional steel cabinet reinforcement.

That makes it the more ambitious option for AE1 fans who want greater bass weight, higher output capability, and more convincing scale in rooms of roughly 270 square feet and larger, but still prefer the imaging precision and placement flexibility of a proper standmount speaker.

It is aimed at listeners with a capable amplifier, proper stands, and no interest in buying a full-size floorstander simply because their room needs more than a compact monitor can comfortably deliver. The AE2’s appeal is straightforward: more authority than the AE1 without abandoning the fast, direct, metal-driver character that made Acoustic Energy’s original compact speakers such enduring cult favorites.

Price & Availability

The AE2 is expected to be available by the end of 2026 with a recommended retail price of €2,799 per pair (US pricing not yet available) with a choice of Walnut or Piano Black finishes through Authorized Acoustic Energy Dealers in the US, UK, and Other Regions.

For those attending the UK Northwest Audio Show held from June 27-28, getting a listen to these will be worth the stop. 

Related Reading:

DATABASES

Open source advocates remain concerned over lack of binding commitments 

Oracle has promised a new phase in its custodianship of MySQL following the creation of a lobby group concerned about its future independence and long-term development.

A new governance model, a new steering committee, and support for the MySQL community are among the measures Big Red announced for the open source database whose intellectual property it owns.

However, a co-founder of the OurSQL Foundation – an independent organization claiming to represent the interests of MySQL users and developers – says Oracle has yet to make binding commitments about the database’s future governance and management.

In a blog post this week, Oracle said it was “taking the next step” in terms of transparency in MySQL development and engagement with its wider community.

“Our goal is simple: accelerate innovation and contributions, make it easier for the community to participate meaningfully in the evolution of MySQL, and grow the MySQL Ecosystem.”

In the “spirit of collaboration,” Oracle said it would establish a new governance model in which community members can contribute through code, testing, documentation, reviews, and technical discussions. Experienced contributors can take on extra responsibilities as “committers,” Oracle said. They would help review changes and maintain code quality.

“Stronger governance gives the MySQL community clearer ways to participate and accelerate innovation while preserving the quality, security, and compatibility users expect,” said Jason Wilcox, senior vice president, Data and AI Platform Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The governance model also includes a technical steering committee, which will serve as a forum for strategic guidance and community representation, bringing together perspectives from across the MySQL ecosystem. The initial steering committee will include cloud giants Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Oracle, with additional perspectives from as-yet-unnamed users of MySQL. Microsoft – provider of DBaaS Azure Database for MySQL – is notably absent.

“We are continuing to expand opportunities for engagement through public roadmap discussions, Contributor Summits, GitHub-based collaboration, Early Access releases, technical design conversations, and enhanced developer resources,” Oracle said.

The OurSQL Foundation formed in May following a period in which the MySQL community expressed concerns about Oracle’s long-term commitment to the database and willingness to open its governance to external contributions.

In September last year, Oracle made “widespread layoffs” across its core MySQL development team. Michael “Monty” Widenius, who co-authored the original MySQL in the 1990s, said the job cuts had left him “heartbroken,” but not surprised.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of open source consultancy Percona, one of the organizations behind the OurSQL Foundation, welcomed Oracle’s new tone and openness around its management of MySQL.

“This is a step and in the right direction,” Zaitsev said. “We welcome Oracle engaging the MySQL ecosystem as a whole. For the last nine months, Oracle has shown a desire to show more openness to the community in terms of sharing and including the wider community in the decision-making process. This is all great.”

However, the OurSQL Foundation would continue to hold Oracle to account as questions remained about whether its commitment to open governance was binding.

“If you read all those announcements they say, ‘we will involve the community in an advisory capacity,’ which is of course better than nothing, but it’s not really PostgreSQL-type community engagement, where community is really able to plot a path forward for users,” he said.

Zaitsev expressed concern that any direction set for MySQL could ultimately be changed by new Oracle management. “There’s nothing binding in this regard.”

A test of Oracle’s determination to live by its commitment would come when the community wants to make changes to the database that Oracle might consider detrimental to its commercial interests. “Would those be accepted?” Zaitsev asked.

Another test would be whether the community was willing to contribute to a system whose future it believed Oracle controlled entirely. ®

The northern lights could mean lights out for the infrastructure we rely on.

What happens when solar storms reach Earth?

Power Grids

Satellites

Radio communications

Internet

Preparing for the worst

Display size, tech, resolution, refresh rate, brightness 6.3-inch OLED; 2,424×1,080 pixels; 60 to 120 Hz variable refresh rate 6.3-inch LTPO OLED; 2,856×1,280 pixels; 1 to 120Hz variable refresh rate 6.8-inch LTPO OLED; 2,992×1,344 pixels; 1 to 120Hz variable refresh rate 6.3-inch POLED, 2,424×1,080 pixels, 60-120 Hz variable refresh rate Cover display: 6.4-inch OLED; 2,364×1,080 pixels; 60 to 120Hz refresh rate; Inner display: 8-inch OLED; 2,152 x 2,076 pixels; 1 to 120Hz refresh rate (LTPO)

Camera 48-megapixel (wide), 13-megapixel (ultrawide), 10.8-megapixel (5x telephoto) 50-megapixel (wide), 48-megapixel (ultrawide), 48-megapixel (5x telephoto) 50-megapixel (wide), 48-megapixel (ultrawide), 48-megapixel (5x telephoto) 48-megapixel (wide), 13-megapixel (ultrawide) 48-megapixel (wide), 10.5-megapixel (ultrawide), 10.8-megapixel (5x telephoto)

Special features Gorilla Glass 2 Victus cover glass; 3,000 nits peak brightness; Satellite SOS; Dual-eSIM; Wi-Fi 6E; NFC; Bluetooth 6; 30W fast charging (wall charger not included); Qi2 15W wireless charging; support for PixelSnap magnetic accessories; Google VPN; Super Res Zoom up to 20x; Camera Coach; Add Me; Macro mode; Face Unblur; Auto Best Take; IP68 rating for dust and water resistance; 7 years of OS, security, and Pixel Drop updates; Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 polished back
with satin finish aluminum frame Gorilla Glass 2 Victus cover glass; 3,300 nits peak brightness; Satellite SOS; Dual-eSIM; Wi-Fi 7; NFC; Bluetooth 6; 30W fast charging (wall charger not included); Qi2 15W wireless charging; support for PixelSnap magnetic accessories; Google VPN; Pro Res zoom up to 100x; Camera Coach; Add Me; Macro mode; Face Unblur; Auto Best Take; High-Res Portrait mode; IP68 rating for dust and water resistance; 7 years of OS, security, and Pixel Drop updates; Corning Gorilla GlassVictus 2 silky matte back with polished finish aluminum frame; ultrawideband chip Gorilla Glass 2 Victus cover glass; 3,300 nits peak brightness; Satellite SOS; Dual-eSIM; Wi-Fi 7; NFC; Bluetooth 6; 45W fast charging (wall charger not included); Qi2.2 25W wireless charging; support for PixelSnap magnetic accessories; Google VPN; Pro Res zoom up to 100x; Camera Coach; Add Me; Macro mode; Face Unblur; Auto Best Take; High-Res Portrait mode; IP68 rating for dust and water resistance; 7 years of OS, security, and Pixel Drop updates; Corning Gorilla GlassVictus 2 silky matte back with polished finish aluminum frame; ultrawideband chip 7 years of OS, security and Pixel feature drops, Gorilla Glass 3 cover glass, IP68 dust and water resistance, 3,000-nit peak brightness, 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 30W fast charging with 45W charging adapter (charger not included), 10W wireless charging Qi certified, Satellite SOS, Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, Bluetooth 6, dual-SIM (nano SIM + eSIM), Camera Coach, Add Me, Best Take, Magic Eraser, Magic Editor, Photo Unblur, Super Res Zoom, Circle to Search; colors: lavender, berry, fog, obsidian (black) IP68 rating, gearless hinge, cover and internal screen 3,000 nits peak brightnes, Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 cover and back glass, Satellite SOS, ultra-wideband chip, Qi2-certified, free Google VPN. 7 years of OS, security and Pixel Drop updates

OpenAI made its debut at the Cannes Lions advertising festival this week, but it did not book a beach club on the Croisette alongside Meta, Amazon, and Google. Instead, the company summoned reporters and agency executives to a semi-secluded villa near the harbour, a staging choice that doubles as metaphor: OpenAI is in the ad business, just not in the way the incumbents are.

The pitch was led by David Dugan, a former Meta executive who spent more than twelve years as vice president of global clients and agencies before joining OpenAI as VP of advertising earlier this year. He told attendees the company has already attracted “thousands of advertisers” and that the strongest-performing categories are travel, retail, health, beauty, and financial services.

The revenue gamble

OpenAI began testing sponsored links at the bottom of ChatGPT responses on 10 February, starting with free-tier and Go-plan users in the US. The ads have since expanded to seven countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, with plans to add Brazil and Mexico in the coming weeks.

The effort sits inside a much larger financial bet. Axios reported in April that OpenAI has projected $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026, rising to $11 billion by 2027 and $100 billion by 2030.

Dugan declined to comment on those figures at Cannes.

To reach that target, OpenAI would need to capture roughly a tenth of the global digital advertising market within four years, a market currently dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. The company’s pitch rests on a simple proposition: chatbot users volunteer exactly what they want, which means ChatGPT could deliver the highest-intent ad surface on the internet.

Early cracks in the model

The early data, however, tells a more complicated story. OpenAI launched its ad pilot at a $60 CPM, a premium rate that reflected scarcity and novelty.

Within ten weeks, that figure eroded to as low as $25, and the company shifted its pricing model to cost-per-click bidding with bids between $3 and $5.

The ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualised revenue in under two months with fewer than 600 advertisers. OpenAI opened a self-serve ads manager on 5 May with no minimum spend, a move designed to scale advertiser volume but one that also signals the initial premium pricing could not hold.

At Cannes, agencies were polite but cautious. Michael Cohen, an executive at Horizon Media, said the firm is “still in the early stages of investment” and that the focus is “a little bit less on maximising performance today and more on learning alongside OpenAI as the platform evolves.”

The format question

Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s vice president of monetisation and another former Meta executive, said the company is already experimenting with ad formats beyond sponsored links, though he was not ready to announce specifics.

He offered a hypothetical: a user asking the chatbot how to fix a squeaking door might benefit from a video ad for a hinge lubricant.

“If there’s a product like a grease for the hinge, actually would a video explaining how it works be helpful? Maybe,” he said.

The gap between that vision and what agencies can currently buy is substantial. Omnicom’s chief technology officer Paolo Yuvienco described OpenAI’s ad effort as “relatively successful” but “immature to a certain degree,” noting that agencies buy ad placements in milliseconds while it still takes seconds to generate an AI response.

The competitive landscape

OpenAI’s move into advertising is being watched closely because it breaks a tacit consensus among AI companies that chatbot ads are premature. Anthropic used a Super Bowl ad in February to declare that Claude would remain ad-free, framing the decision as a matter of trust: “Users shouldn’t have to second-guess whether an AI is genuinely helping them or subtly steering the conversation towards something monetisable.”

Google has denied current plans to bring ads to its Gemini chatbot, though SVP Nick Fox has since said the possibility is “not ruled out.” The company already runs ads in AI Overviews and is testing them in AI Mode, which means the question is not whether Google will monetise AI-assisted search but how quickly it moves beyond its existing surfaces.

Why it matters for the IPO

The advertising push is inseparable from OpenAI’s path to a public listing. The company spent $34 billion in 2025 against $13 billion in revenue and does not expect to reach profitability until 2030.

It filed confidentially with the SEC on 8 June, targeting an autumn debut at a valuation that could exceed $1 trillion.

Advertising revenue is the lever OpenAI needs to convince public-market investors that it has multiple revenue streams beyond subscriptions and API access. ChatGPT’s user base, which crossed one billion weekly active users in May 2026, gives it the scale.

What it lacks is proof that the ad model converts at rates that justify the projections.

The company’s $100 billion target assumes ChatGPT’s products will reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030, nearly triple the current figure, and that the AI advertising market will grow large enough for a newcomer to take a meaningful share from Google and Meta.

The trust problem

The deeper challenge is whether advertising inside a conversational AI degrades the product itself. OpenAI says it will not allow money to influence ChatGPT’s answers and will keep conversations private from advertisers.

Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers will remain ad-free.

But the company’s own pricing trajectory suggests the market is still working out what a ChatGPT ad is actually worth. A CPM that halves in ten weeks is not the behaviour of a product that has found its fit.

It is the behaviour of a product that is still searching for it, from a villa hidden behind the bushes at the industry’s biggest party.

Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned. These deadhead miles — an industry term for miles driven without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robotaxi companies and profitability.

Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a fix: parking space-sized automated pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for the robotaxi industry. And the idea has caught the attention of investors.

Aseon Labs has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital also participated, along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.

Aseon Labs is still in the early stages. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.

“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up,” Kalligeros told TechCrunch. “You need the robotaxi in continuous operation during the entirety of the demand curve of the day.”

Aseon’s pitch is that a network of distributed autonomous pods would slash deadhead miles, and inevitably turn robotaxi services into profitable enterprises.

Kalligeros and co-founder and COO Dan Keene come from outside the autonomous vehicle world. But they bring experience developing and scaling a hardware-and-real estate company. Kalligeros worked as a mechanical design engineer at Bentley Motors and Tesla before he and Keene founded Pushme in 2016 to build battery-swapping infrastructure for micromobility fleets. Pushme was building a battery-swap network in Europe when it was acquired in January 2020 by Tier Mobility.

“The parallel I’ll draw is we were basically tasked by SoftBank to put this across as many markets where it made sense for Tier within a very short and compressed period of time,” Kalligeros said. “The playbook became, how do we sprinkle the locations across the center of the city, where it makes sense, but at the same time, make it easy to deploy as non-permanent infrastructure?”

Aseon Labs is applying the same thinking to autonomous vehicles.

As they researched the industry, the pair visited AV depots, where fleets of robotaxis are inspected, maintained, cleaned, and charged. The cost of real estate often prompts companies to locate these depots outside the city center, where most of the ride-hailing activity occurs.

“Depot infrastructure is the key requirement for the launch of a new city for any AV operator,” he said. “And what happens in the depot right now — the operational backbone of autonomy, really — is not fully baked.”

The founders settled on the idea of creating smaller, independently powered autonomous pods that could be dispersed throughout a city but as importantly, they could also be moved as needed. The units, which include cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interiors, are considered temporary structures. That classification helps Aseon Labs avoid a lengthy permitting process and allows the company to relocate units if a location underperforms.

The units are designed to run on a propane generator for power or connect to an existing power source through partnerships with EV charging companies. They are meant to operate autonomously, although early versions will be staffed, according to Kalligeros.

Aseon Labs isn’t trying to tackle every edge case, either. Instead, it leans on computer vision and AI — specifically vision-language-action models common in modern robotics — to detect problems the pod shouldn’t try to solve. For example, if a camera detects melted chocolate on a backseat, the robotic arm stands down since attempting to clean it could make the stain worse. Instead, the vehicle will be charged and dispatched directly to that company’s central depot for a human to handle.

Aseon Labs hasn’t signed contracts with any robotaxi companies yet, but Kalligeros said there is widespread interest in the concept. “Pretty much everyone wants to try it,” he said.

Unya-mt/Getty Images

Imagine what a scammer could do with your personal data in six months. Depending on what data was mined, a scammer could open credit accounts in your name, drain your bank account, and even share your information on the dark web. It’s a potential nightmare that would take you years to resolve, and yes, it could happen to you. The average number of days it takes a company to detect a data breach is a staggering 181, and it then takes, on average, another 60 days to contain it. Meanwhile, you’re guessing who accessed your data and what they plan to do with it.

Three million Texas license buyers have been left wondering just that after a data breach involving a vendor associated with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department license system. The leak was detected by Texas Cyber Command and involves customers of the hunting and fishing license program in the Lone Star State. While their Social Security numbers were not compromised, an unauthorized person was able to access driver’s license information, email addresses, phone numbers, residential addresses, and even passport numbers. Birth dates and credit card details were reportedly not exposed, but that may be little consolation to those involved.

Texas Parks and Wildlife assured the public that no customers under the age of 18 were affected by the breach, and it has put additional security measures in place. It’s also working with the vendor to ensure such a breach doesn’t happen again, but some customers are questioning why so much personal data is necessary for a hunting or fishing license.

Advertisement

How can you protect yourself?

Matejmo/Getty Images

These breaches are incredibly frustrating for Americans because we expect our information to be secured. Today, the only surefire way to avoid becoming a victim is to completely opt out of sharing personal data — an impossibility in modern life. When a simple application for a fishing or hunting license can lead to data breaches, what can we do to protect ourselves?

State agencies are a common target for malicious actors. Last year alone, there were thousands of incidents involving these agencies and associated vendors. In Texas, affected customers are being offered one year of free credit monitoring, but there are also steps you can take before a data leak occurs that will help protect your sensitive data.

Advertisement

First, keep your own accounts secure. Use strong, unique passwords, and don’t share passwords across multiple accounts. Change your passwords regularly. Update apps and software to ensure that you’re taking advantage of critical security updates, and enable two-factor authentication when possible. To protect against identity theft, don’t carry your Social Security card with you, but store it somewhere safe and secure. Shred any documents that contain personal information, and regularly review your financial statements and credit reports for irregularities. You can also request a security freeze that restricts access to your credit reports, and if you think you’re at risk, a fraud alert will require lenders to take extra steps to confirm your identity.