Plenty of people remain spooked by autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Some experts and policymakers have cautioned that AVs won’t necessarily make roads safer. When it comes to partial or full autonomy, the picture isn’t entirely clear, in part because there aren’t enough self-driving cars to make meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons.

Yet mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash significantly less often than people, and with far fewer injuries. Evidence also shows that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and other building blocks of autonomy—some of which are already mandated on every new car—are also reducing occupant and pedestrian injuries and deaths, along with insurance claims.

On the ADAS front, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems that recognize people in front of the car cut pedestrian crashes by 27 percent. Those AEB systems are mandated for all light vehicles in the U.S. by 2029, and more than 90 percent of new models already comply under a voluntary automakers’ agreement. A separate IIHS study found that automated braking greatly reduced rear-end crashes, by 50 percent, and their injuries by 56 percent. The Highway Loss Data Institute found that cars with AEB alone showed a 13 percent drop in property-damage claims. Cars that bundled ADAS features, including automatic braking for pedestrians, adaptive cruise control, and lane-departure warnings, saw claims reductions up to 39 percent.

Move to Level 4 autonomy, and Waymo says its robotaxis have now given 20 million paid rides over 220 million miles, the equivalent of 250 lifetimes of driving. In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments. That included 92 percent fewer pedestrian injuries, 83 percent fewer crashes with airbag deployments, and 82 percent fewer crashes with any injuries whatsoever. That included a 96 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes at intersections, among the deadliest environments for any automobile.

How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics?

A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions.

The IIHS is looking to dig deeper by cleaning up often-incomplete data. Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes. That potentially skews safety numbers in favor of human drivers. And while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven.

Related: Rivian’s Gambit for Full Autonomy

The IIHS’s latest July study flatly stated that automated cars crash less often than people. But it also sought clarity by creating a more-reliable category of “police-reportable crashes.” It then compared crash rates of human-driven cars against Waymo taxis in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin. Waymo’s Jaguar I-Pace taxis traveled about 50 million driverless miles over the study period, versus 222 billion human miles in the same cities.

In a potential boost for public trust, the study generally supported Waymo’s own findings. Waymo taxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes overall than human drivers: 76 percent lower in Phoenix, 71 percent in LA, and 35 percent in San Francisco. A 4 percent higher Waymo rate in Austin may reflect an extremely small sample size. Significantly, Waymo’s injury crashes were still 81 percent lower on a per-mile basis.

The industry and its supporters continue to press the safety advantages of autonomous vehicles that never get drunk, drowsy, or distracted. Yet for this fledgling AV industry, there are still no national performance or safety standards. A crazy quilt of state or local regulations can allow or prohibit their deployment. That balkanized approach makes it harder to compare crash rates, according to the IIHS, which is calling for better federal reporting standards.

A posting on the IIHS website quotes the institute’s director of statistical services, Eric Teoh: “Those are encouraging signs for the future of driverless vehicles.” Teoh, who was also the lead author of the institute’s study, added that “Now we need to get the data-collection system right, so that we can ensure that level of safety continues as these technologies become more prevalent.”

Amazon’s Zoox Gets an Exemption for its Robotaxis

On July 30, in a move seen as fast-tracking the tech’s deployment, NHTSA granted Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, the first-ever exemption from certain motor-vehicle safety standards. That will allow commercial operation of Zoox’s toaster-shaped robotaxis, which have no steering wheel or pedals aboard. The agency determined that Zoox’s purpose-built robotaxi “would provide an equivalent level of safety” as a compliant vehicle, thereby satisfying the standard for an exemption.

On that final day of the SAE’s Automated Transportation Symposium, NHTSA also announced a partnership with SAE Industry Technologies to develop the nation’s first performance and competency standards for AVs, via a three-year, $5 million “A2SCEND” consortium.

Some doctors and health professionals are arguing that policymakers need to stop viewing self-driving cars as a tech moonshot but rather as a critical public-health intervention. Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, makes a powerful case for the medical and societal benefits of AVs. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health say that highlighting the social value of AVs is critical to driving public trust and adoption.

Consider that roughly 40,000 people in the U.S., including more than 7,000 pedestrians, are killed each year in roadway accidents. About 1.16 million people die in roadway crashes around the world, making them the leading cause of death for children and young adults between the ages of 5 and 29. Cutting that by even 50 percent—let alone the 90 percent reductions suggested by some studies—would save 580,000 lives a year. That social and economic gain would dwarf that of seat-belt adoption or anti–drunk driving campaigns.

This article was updated on 08 September 2026.

Platforms that permit adult content must employ effective age assurance methods, according to Ireland’s Online Safety Code.

Elon Musk’s social media platform X is under investigation yet again; this time for its alleged non-compliance with regulations around age assurances and parental controls.

Ireland’s media regulator Coimisiún na Meán (CnaM) has today (8 September) launched its first investigation under the Online Safety Code to probe whether X is effective in ensuring children don’t come across sexual and other adult content on its platform.

Under the Online Safety Code – which came into complete effect last year – age assurance is a requirement for platforms that permits adult-only content such as pornography, or content that consists of real or realistic gore and violence.

Age assurance measures can include age estimation, which often uses AI technology to estimate a user’s age, while increasingly stricter regulations also require platforms to verify users’ ages via photo identification.

For years, users, including minors, could self-declare as adults while signing up to platforms. Under new regulations, this is no longer an acceptable age barrier.

In addition, platforms such as X are also required to provide parental control systems to ensure that guardians can steer what type of content their children encounter.

CnaM said it launched its probe after its platform supervision team raised concerns around X’s compliance with regulations. It found that parental controls put in place by X “may not be effective, do not have minimum requirements, are hard to locate and are not brought to the attention of new users at sign-up stage”.

The new investigation will probe whether X is employing effective age assurance measures, whether parental control systems it uses reach the minimum functional requirement, and whether it directs new users to the available controls.

“We understand the concerns that parents and guardians have about content their children may be seeing online and concerns of strangers seeing their children’s content,” said CnaM’s digital services commissioner John Evans.

“Platforms which allow users under the age of 16 must have parental controls which are under the control of parents and guardians, they must ensure that these parental controls are effective and easy to locate, and they must draw users attention to these parental controls at account sign-up stage, for any parent or guardian who wishes to use them.

“Platforms which are accessible to children and allow adult-only video content, such as pornography or extreme and gratuitous violence or acts of cruelty, must ensure that this content cannot normally be accessed by children by implementing effective age assurance measures,” Evans added.

The Irish regulator opened a different probe into X last year to investigate whether the social media platform broke the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) with its content moderation policies.

The platform, meanwhile, is also being separately investigated by the EU – alongside CnaM – the Data Protection Commission, and the UK government over its Grok AI chatbot, which enabled users to generate millions of non-consensual sexually explicit content. X faced the first penalty issued under the DSA last year after it was fined €120m for breaking rules around transparency obligations.

The bloc is tightening regulations around social media platforms as lawmakers grapple with its long-term negative effects on children. 28 large platforms and services are being monitored in the EU under some of the world’s strictest laws around social media harms, while an increasing number of member states are opting to ban platforms for minors altogether.

Several non-EU countries have taken similar routes, all following behind Australia, the first country to ban social media for under 16s. Research, however, reveals that a complete platform ban for minors may not work.

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Elon Musk at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, September 2025. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 4.0)

OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 with two new API models, one of which Adobe has already put into Firefly. The company says more than 3 billion images a week are created across ChatGPT and its image API. The notable additions are interface features rather than model research, including the ability to share the prompt alongside an image

OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 on Tuesday. The company said in its announcement that the model brings sharper detail, more precise editing and up to 50% lower latency than Images 2.0.

Two new models go to developers. GPT-Image-2.5 Flare is the default, and Sunburst is the slower, higher-control option for production creative work.

Adobe is a launch customer

The detail worth pausing on is in the testimonials. Adobe says the new GPT-Image-2.5 models are now in Firefly, its creative AI studio.

Matt Chotin, a senior director of product at Adobe, framed Firefly as bringing leading AI models together with Adobe’s own tools in one place. That is a company positioning itself as the interface rather than only the model.

It is a deliberate strategy, not a concession. Firefly has been built as a conversational layer over the whole toolset, and model choice is part of that pitch.

The traffic runs both ways

Adobe is inside ChatGPT too. More than 70 Adobe tools are available there.

So each company is a distribution channel for the other. Neither can be confident it owns the moment a creative task begins.

That ambiguity is the whole competitive question in creative software right now. Whoever owns the starting point captures the workflow.

Prompts become objects

OpenAI is answering that question with a social feature. When you share an image now, you can attach the prompt that made it, and someone else can run it with their own photos.

OpenAI links to a viral 1980s headshot prompt as the example. That is a distribution mechanic dressed as a convenience.

A shareable prompt is a template that spreads on its own. It also keeps the loop inside ChatGPT rather than inside anyone else’s canvas.

The other new features point the same way

Sketch lets you draw in ChatGPT and use the drawing as a reference. Templates offer starting formats such as posters and merchandise, and comments can be placed directly on an image.

None of this is model research. It is interface work, and interface work is what you do when you want people to stay.

Availability is broad. Images 2.5 is rolling out to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex users on every tier, across desktop, mobile and web.

Three billion a week

The scale figure is the one to sit with. OpenAI says more than 3 billion images are created weekly across ChatGPT Images and the GPT-Image models in the API.

That is the company’s own number and is not independently audited. Taken at face value it is a vast quantity of synthetic imagery entering circulation every week.

OpenAI says it applies C2PA metadata and invisible watermarking, alongside prompt and image checks, and has published a system card for the release. Provenance marking at that volume is a genuine engineering commitment.

Whether provenance survives contact

Marking images is necessary and not sufficient. Metadata is routinely stripped by platforms, screenshots and re-encoding, and invisible watermarks vary in robustness.

Regulators are still working out what any of it means legally. Brazil has been defining what counts as a deepfake ahead of its vote.

The prompt-sharing feature cuts against provenance in one respect. It makes it easier for a distinctive look to be reproduced by many people from the same recipe.

The competitive picture

The reference-photo improvements target the most commercially valuable use. Putting a real person or product into new settings is what advertising, ecommerce and social content actually need.

Higgsfield and Manus, both quoted in the announcement, are building on the API rather than competing with it. Manus says Flare runs two to four times faster than the previous model in its own evaluations.

Others are going the other way. Freepik rebranded as Magnific as a profitable AI creative platform on $230m of recurring revenue, built as its own destination.

What to watch

Watch whether Adobe keeps naming its model suppliers. A studio that aggregates models is strong while it can choose, and weaker if one supplier becomes indispensable.

Watch the prompt-sharing numbers too, if OpenAI ever publishes them. Adobe has been assembling its own answer across Firefly, GenStudio and partnerships, and the contest is over where work starts rather than which model renders it.

Nintendo used this morning’s Direct to give Switch 2 its first real collector finish, timed to forty years of The Legend of Zelda. Officially called Nintendo Switch 2 – The Legend of Zelda – 40th Anniversary Edition, the system arrives October 29, one week before the Ocarina of Time remake on November 5.

Gold stands atop black on the dock, displaying a giant Triforce on the front, while icons and symbols march across the dock and tablet’s surfaces. The traditional green and gold Joy-Con 2 controllers attach with magnets Green. Nintendo’s design draws on iconic series colors, as well as some game-related adornment. Check out the stills, which show the original Link from 1986 clutching the Triforce on one controller and a Zelda sprite on the other. It’s a great look, and the metal surface reflects light in a more muted way than pure gold.

LEGO The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – The Final Battle – Building Set for Adults, Ages…

• GAMER COLLECTIBLE MODEL KIT – Adults ages 18 and up can share their love of video games with the LEGO The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – The…
• LEGO CASTLE RUINS BUILDING SET – This detailed gaming collectible features a ruined castle area, Link, Zelda and Ganondorf minifigures, and 2 more…
• FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS – Recreate the final battle scene with movable rubble, a button to raise Ganondorf from the ruins, the hidden Megaton Hammer…

The internal specifications remain unchanged, including the regular 7.9-inch 1080p screen and HDR for the Switch 2, 256GB of storage (some back for the system), magnetic Joy-Con 2 that act as mouse support in some games, and 4k output at up to 60 when the TV and game allow it. Only the anniversary paint, no additional power under the hood. The box contains the tablet, green and gold Joy-Con, wrist straps, dock, grip, AC adapter, USB-C cable, and Ultra High Speed HDMI cable. There is no game in the box, therefore you will need to purchase the Ocarina of Time remake separately.

The special edition console is priced at $519.99 in the United States, which is $20 higher than the base $499.99 model following the most recent price increase. In Japan, the Zelda Pro version costs 62,980 yen, tax included. A Zelda Pro controller costs $99.99, while a version with a display stand costs $109.99 and is only available in a few limited locations. There’s also a carrying case with screen protector for $39.99, which features the same types of designs. Preorders for this special edition hardware opened today at Nintendo and Best Buy, allowing you to purchase it before it sells out.

CarPlay is great as it comes, but a few personalization tweaks make it even more convenient.

Rearrange apps and use widgets in CarPlay

Adnan Ahmed for Engadget

Judging by a leaked Apple identifier, the next-generation Apple TV will get a major upgrade with the A19 or A19 Pro system-on-chip.

In June 2026, tvOS 27 code revealed that the Apple TV 4K was on track to receive Siri AI support. Now, Apple’s own code has revealed even more about the hardware that will make this change possible.

According to MacRumors, the model identifier of the upcoming Apple TV 4K suggests the device will feature the A19 or A19 Pro chip. While this change will undoubtedly give the new model 8GB or 12GB of RAM, up from 6GB on the 2022 variant with the A15 Bionic chip, it will also allow for Apple Intelligence.

Additionally, the alleged use of an A19 or A19 Pro chip aligns with a June 2026 leak claiming the new Apple TV 4K would ship with Apple’s N1 networking chip. The N1 is already found in devices that feature Apple’s A19 and A19 Pro chips, those being the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro.

It would make sense for Apple to use a tried-and-true combination for its upcoming Apple TV 4K refresh. New chip aside, however, Tuesday’s leak doesn’t offer any significant details about the next-generation Apple TV.

Previous rumors have suggested that the device will ship with a new Siri Remote, though it’s unclear if this accessory will include new features like ultra-wideband support or Find My integration. Going back even further, an August 2025 rumor claimed the next Apple TV 4K would gain the A17 Pro chip, though this seems unlikely at this point.

Apple could unveil an updated Apple TV 4K at its “Surprise and Shine” event, which will be held on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. However, there have been rumors for about 18 months that the device is imminent.