Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
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Building up the US power grid won’t be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts
ON-PREM
The bigger risk is underinvestment, claims consulting biz McKinsey
US power companies must decide how much capacity to build for soaring datacenter demand, knowing that some planned facilities may never materialize and the AI bubble could deflate. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company says the greater near-term risk is building too little.
Driven by the AI craze, a boom in datacenter building is expected to see the energy consumed by these facilities grow by 26 percent this year, as The Register reported not too long ago.
McKinsey’s own figures indicate that datacenters will account for about 75 percent of projected US power demand growth over the next decade. The current building rate would require the equivalent of almost 30 GW of additional power each year, including roughly 20 GW for IT equipment and the rest for cooling, distribution and resilience.
Whether that growth materializes depends on demand for AI compute holding up. McKinsey notes that although corporate interest in AI remains high, implementation is uneven: 71 percent of organizations report “negative implementation outcomes,” while parts of the ecosystem exhibit bubble-like characteristics.
Even if AI compute growth slows, McKinsey argues, the generation and transmission infrastructure built to support it is unlikely to become stranded. The assets could serve other demand while strengthening grid reliability and resilience.
A similar report from Bain & Company almost two years ago warned that the US energy sector needed to ramp up spending on generation and grid infrastructure, or demand could outstrip supply within a few years.
Datacenters are not the only source of new demand. Electric vehicles and the electrification of industrial processes will also place pressure on supplies.
The report estimates that the US has roughly 40 GW of spare dispatchable capacity to accommodate near-term demand growth, plus about 100 GW of committed new capacity.
However, 50 to 75 GW of coal and gas-fired steam capacity is expected to retire, while projected demand growth stands at about 120 GW. That leaves a nationwide capacity gap of approximately 30 to 55 GW by 2030.
To help bridge this looming gap and maintain grid reliability, utilities have been bringing retired plants back online and extending the lives of coal and gas facilities. These measures provide important temporary system relief but are likely insufficient, McKinsey says.
However, in June, the Trump administration authorized up to $500 million in funding to keep an extra 13 coal-fired power plants going to boost the resilience of critical energy infrastructure.
At the same time, the report notes that many of the developers and operators planning datacenter campuses are turning to on-site power generation via gas turbines, as well as fuel cells and battery storage, due to delays in getting a grid connection.
In McKinsey’s survey of power sector leaders, nearly 60 percent of respondents expected datacenters to retain permanent on-site generation by 2030, even after grid connections became available. Of those planning to have on-site power, 64 percent will rely on natural gas.
Beyond 2030, the firm expects to see solar paired with battery storage in addition to the growing role of gas. This is because of the cost competitiveness and speed of deployment of solar, though it warns this may be dependent on policy support and continued declining costs of storage, and that it will be a part of the broader energy system rather than the sole on-site source of large-scale power.
As for nuclear, McKinsey expects any material growth over the next decade to come from extensions and upgrades to existing plants rather than new builds.
Emerging technologies such as small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and next-generation geothermal energy are attracting increasing capital and buyer interest, but they are unlikely to have much impact on system capacity before the middle of the 2030s.
McKinsey’s conclusion is that the US power sector faces a likely near-term shortfall, making underbuilding a greater risk than overbuilding. ®
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Jeff Bezos is reportedly attempting to join the club of very rich Americans buying stakes in U.K. soccer teams.
Bezos, alongside others including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is looking to buy at least a 30% stake in the English soccer team Liverpool at a £1.35 billion valuation (around $1.8 billion), The Guardian reports. If the deal closes, it will be the first sports investment for the billionaire, although he reportedly previously looked at buying a stake in a U.S. football team.
Liverpool is one of the most notable sports teams in Europe and is worth about $6 billion, reports Forbes. Arguably, this team has the kind of brand recognition in the U.K. as the Dallas Cowboys has in the U.S.
It seems no billionaire portfolio is complete these days without a mega yacht and a sports team, so Bezos’ interest is not surprising. There’s also something very romantic these days about owning an English soccer team after the success of TV shows like “Ted Lasso” and Ryan Reynolds’ FX show “Welcome to Wrexham” about his experience owning that English team.
Other American billionaires in this club include Todd Boehly and Mark Walters (who also own the LA Dodgers and LA Lakers) buying Chelsea; New York Jets co-owner (and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.K.) Woody Johnson buying Crystal Palace; Dan Friedkin taking a stake in Everton; and Bill Foley leading a group that also included Michael B. Jordan buying Bournemouth.
For that matter, owning a stake in a U.K. sports team has also become a celebrity cultural phenom. Besides Reynolds and Jordan, Tom Brady purchased a minority stake in Birmingham City. Will Ferrell has a minority stake in Leeds United, alongside Russell Westbrook and Michael Phelps.
Sky Sports had a story earlier this year mapping out why so many Americans seem to be taking over U.K. football. It found that 13 out of 20 Premier League clubs (the top football league in England) had American shareholders.
Soccer has become increasingly popular in the U.S., and many of the top sports franchises, like the NFL and MLB, are either too expensive or closed off to new buyers. It’s much more possible to buy into a Premier League team.
Owning a share in such a team also buys access and proximity to some of the most bankable and recognizable sports icons on Earth. Bezos over the past few years — especially since he married former news anchor and TV show host Lauren Sánchez — has become seen as more of a cultural figure, rather than solely a tech mogul.
So, with a net worth currently sitting at around $280 billion, perhaps it’s actually more than time that Bezos got himself a sports team. Amazon has also streamed some European soccer leagues in the past — and Bezos has growing interests in the U.K. As we previously reported, his new AI company Prometheus is reportedly looking to sign a lease to move into London’s AI hub King’s Cross.
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Sounding off: A lot of people are worried about the number of AI agents that have gone rogue recently, including Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator has now called on the top AI firms to pause development of their top models, warning that lawmakers will step in if no action is taken.
In a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, Sanders writes that almost every day brings a new story about how these companies are losing control of their AI agents.
The senator also highlighted the story of AI being used for the first time to create new viruses, something he says could, if the technology ended up in the wrong hands, lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
“Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, said these incidents ‘should serve as a wake-up call,’ I agree,” Sanders wrote in the letter.
Sanders adds that despite these incidents, the companies are still investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict, or control, contradicting their own commitments to responsible AI development.
“Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control,” Sanders writes.
– Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 10, 2026
The letter finishes with a stark warning for the tech giants: “Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”
There have been calls for a halt on the development of advanced AI models for years now, including a request for a six-month pause in 2023. Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was one of the signatories of a 2024 letter calling for global action on AI and other existential threats.
But previous warnings have resulted in little or no action. This was illustrated last year when the US and UK refused to sign an AI safety declaration at a Paris summit. Vice President JD Vance cautioned against “overly precautionary” regulations on AI, emphasizing the US commitment to maintaining its dominance in the technology.
The situation has taken a worrying turn recently. First came news that an OpenAI model went rogue and hacked several services online, including Hugging Face. An Anthropic model followed suit – it even tried to deceive real developers into approving malicious code. Meta then became the third company in two weeks to admit its model went rogue.
Sanders isn’t the only one responding to the incidents. More than 1,300 employees from the world’s leading tech companies just signed an open letter asking governments to regulate the pace and safety of artificial intelligence development.
OpenAI said last week that it was slowing the release of its new Astra model because it has “critical” cyber capabilities.
Longtime Slashdot reader DF5JT writes: On July 26, I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit’s spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account — the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To this day, Reddit has given no reason whatsoever, although Article 17 of the EU’s Digital Services Act makes a statement of reasons mandatory. The only appeal channel is a 250-character web form that sends no confirmation and has never been answered; Reddit’s own help text admits: “you may not have received a message to your inbox.” A GDPR export of 11 years of data came to 7.2 MB; every post was truncated after a few lines, with zero data about the ban decision.
So I spent one day escalating through every mechanism the EU provides: certified out-of-court dispute settlement at Austria’s RTR, complaints with the Austrian and Dutch Digital Services Coordinators, the data protection authority (citing the ECJ’s SCHUFA ruling on automated decisions), noyb, and Austria’s consumer association. Bonus finding: the European Commission’s DSA Transparency Database contains 14,067 Reddit statements of reasons for that week — none for my ban — and the Commission’s own feedback form limits reports to 500 characters and crashed with a 500 Server Error. Is the DSA enforceable for ordinary users, or just paperwork?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cisco warned of two high-severity vulnerabilities affecting the Secure Endpoint Connector that allow threat actors to crash the ClamAV scanning process in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The security flaws (tracked as CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338) were found in the ZIP archive parser of ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus), the open-source and cross-platform engine used to scan files for malware.
As Cisco explained in a Friday advisory, the two vulnerabilities are due to improper boundary checks and memory handling, respectively, and can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers.
The company’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) added that proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code is already publicly available, but said that it has no evidence the flaws have been exploited in the wild.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted zip file for scanning. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the ClamAV scanning process to terminate, resulting in a DoS condition on the affected software,” it said. “The Cisco PSIRT is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for the vulnerabilities that are described in CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338.”
Cisco added that the flaws’ security impact is high only for Windows platforms since they’re the only ones that “run the ClamAV scanning process in a privileged security context.”
These two vulnerabilities affect ClamAV 1.5.0 through 1.5.3, and they were patched in version 1.5.4 released on August 7.
While there are no workarounds for CVE-2026-20337 and CVE-2026-20338, the company plans to release software updates later this month to address them in affected versions of Secure Endpoint Connector for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
On Friday, Cisco patched five other ClamAV security flaws that can also be exploited to trigger denial-of-service conditions by submitting malicious XAR, Mach-O, PDF, GPT, and PESpin files for scanning.
It patched another ClamAV DoS vulnerability with PoC exploit code in January 2025, warning that attackers could abuse it to terminate the ClamAV antivirus scanner, preventing or delaying further scanning operations.
Since November 2021, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has tagged 95 Cisco vulnerabilities as actively exploited in attacks, six of them abused in ransomware attacks.
If you’ve been holding out on buying Valve’s ludicrously expensive home console, you may have saved yourself from more than an empty wallet. European customers who ordered a Steam Machine or Steam Controller may be the victims of a personal information data breach after one of Valve’s hardware distribution partners was hit by a cyberattack.
CEVA Logistics, the company that helps organize Valve’s European supply chain, informed its partner of the data breach on Aug. 7. A Valve spokesperson told CNET that the company spent the weekend assembling a list of at-risk customers, notifying them about the attack via email on Monday morning.
“Though CEVA is still investigating the attack, we wanted to at least send out messaging to all customers we can assume were affected based on what we currently know,” the spokesperson said.
What Valve currently knows is that the personal information revealed by the cyberattack is likely all delivery-related. CEVA told Valve that the breach revealed customers’ names, countries, street addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. According to Valve, “payment information, passwords and Steam Guard codes” are all safe, since CEVA doesn’t have access to this data.
Because phone numbers and email addresses linked to Steam accounts are openly circulating, Valve warned against phishing attacks that may be looking for additional personal information in the coming days.
Read more: Best Data Removal Services of 2026: Reduce Your Online Presence
“Expect fake messages – email, SMS or phone – that mention your hardware order and appear to come from Steam, Valve or a delivery company,” Valve wrote in its email to affected customers. “They may quote your address back to you to prove they’re genuine. They may ask you to confirm a delivery, pay a small customs or redelivery fee or sign in somewhere to ‘verify’ your order. Treat all of them as fake.”
Valve reminded customers that Steam’s support team only handles issues on the official help page and never sends messages over Steam chat or through third-party services. Company employees will also never ask for a customer’s password or Steam Guard codes.
The finer details of the attack currently remain unclear, as there’s no official information available on how many customers were affected, how much data was stolen or how the cyberattack infiltrated CEVA Logistics’ systems. In its statement, Valve said it is “pressing CEVA for the full scope” of the breach.
Alongside CEVA’s internal investigation, authorities in the Netherlands are looking into the attack. A spokesperson for the Dutch data protection authority told TechCrunch that the agency has received data breach reports from at least 10 companies in relation to the hack.
In addition to the data breach, FreightWaves reported operations at eight of the company’s warehouses have been affected by the cyberattack, causing potential delays or cancellations to customer orders in the coming days.
CEVA Logistics did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Artificial intelligence has moved from experimentation to everyday business use faster than almost any technology in recent memory.
For small businesses, AI adoption needs no convincing as most already see the benefits. The real challenge is now transforming isolated AI use into consistent business value.
Goldman Sachs found that 76% of small businesses are using AI, and among those users, 93% say it has had a positive impact. Yet only 14% have fully integrated AI into core operations.
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That gap is where the next stage of AI adoption will be won or lost.
Senior Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo’s Commercial Product Center and Worldwide SMB Segment.
The question is no longer whether small businesses can access AI. It is how they can make it part of their business.
For me, that means moving beyond AI as a feature list and toward AI as a trusted experience employees can rely on in the flow of work.
The focus now should be on helping small businesses progress from deploying AI in everyday tasks, to reshaping workflows, to eventually inventing new services, business models and revenue streams.
Start where the work gets stuck
The temptation is to start with the technology, but the better starting point is the work itself. A modern AI-ready device, collaboration setup or workplace platform can promise faster content creation, more productive meetings or automated reporting. Those capabilities matter, but the question is more basic: what problem is slowing the business down?
The problem might be missed customer follow-ups, teams spending too much time turning raw information into action, or even just slow response times. AI becomes valuable when it is pointed at a specific bottleneck and measured against a business outcome: time saved, errors reduced, revenue protected, customers retained, or employees freed up for higher-value work.
This outcome-first mindset is critical because the goal should not be to optimize an old process simply because it exists. It should be to ask what the business needs to achieve, then design the workflow and the technology around that result.
Discipline is important because small businesses do not have much room for technology theater. The most useful AI projects are rarely the flashiest. They are the ones tied to work that happens every day.
Redesign the workflow, not just the task
The next step is to move beyond individual productivity. Many employees are already using AI in small, informal ways, with a 156% increase between 2023 and 2025 in shadow AI usage. Shadow AI refers to employees using AI tools without formal approval, oversight or integration into company systems.
Employees ask AI to clean up an email, summarize a document or prepare a first draft. While those use cases can help, they usually create isolated gains. The bigger opportunity comes when AI is built into the workflow itself.
Consider a customer-facing team. AI can draft a response. But the bigger opportunity is redesigning a process around it. Let AI help categorize the request, identify urgency, suggest the next best action, and leave important judgment calls to a person.
For a lean operations team, AI can turn meetings, documents and business data into clearer next steps, helping reduce the manual follow-through that often slows momentum. Over time, this will become less about a single AI tool assisting with a single task and more about groups of AI agents working across connected workflows, with people shaping the strategy, setting the guardrails and orchestrating the work.
This is where many organizations still struggle. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI research found that 88% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, but only about one-third have begun scaling AI across the enterprise. The same research found that AI high performers are nearly three times as likely as others to have fundamentally redesigned workflows.
In other words, the return comes less from sprinkling AI over old processes and more from rethinking how work should move. That is the difference between deploying AI, reshaping work and ultimately inventing new ways for the business to grow.
Train people to use AI with judgment
It’s not enough to invest in tools. Businesses must also invest in helping employees use them effectively. AI works best when employees understand what it is good at, where it can fail and when human judgment is required. Not every small business needs a large training program, but it does need practical guidance: which tools are approved, what information should stay protected and when outputs need human review.
Clear guardrails allow a business to scale AI with confidence. Goldman Sachs found that small businesses using AI cite data privacy and security concerns, lack of technical expertise and difficulty choosing tools among their top challenges. 73% said they would benefit from more training and resources to implement and evaluate AI successfully.
When employees are trained to use AI responsibly, technology becomes less of a risk to manage and more of a capacity builder that helps small teams work with greater speed, confidence and focus. It also builds the trust employees need to treat AI not as another feature to try, but as a dependable part of how work gets done.
Make AI a capacity builder
AI is often framed as a replacement story. In practice, many small businesses are using it as a force multiplier. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58% of small businesses use generative AI, up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. It also found that 82% of small businesses using AI increased their workforce over the past year. For lean teams, AI can create breathing room: less time spent chasing notes or repeating manual tasks and more time spent with customers and employees.
None of this happens automatically. Small businesses need to choose technology with integration in mind, not just features in isolation. They need to understand where data lives, how systems connect and whether employees can use new tools without adding more complexity.
They also need the confidence to seek outside guidance, whether from technology partners, managed service providers, industry peers or local business networks. The right support can help small businesses see where AI should simply deploy, where it should reshape the way people work and where it may create room to invent something entirely new.
The bottom line: AI should change how work gets done
The small businesses that get the most from AI will not necessarily be the ones that adopt the most tools. They will be the ones that ask sharper questions: Where are we losing time? Where are decisions too slow? Where are customers waiting? Where are employees doing work that software could support safely and reliably?
AI has already changed what small businesses can do. The next challenge is changing how work gets done. For small businesses, the real opportunity is not to add AI everywhere, but to apply it with purpose: deploy it where it helps today, reshape the workflows that define the business and invent new ways to create value tomorrow.
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Hydrogen-powered 1,600-hp car takes aim at multiple land-speed records on Bonneville Salt Flats this morning
In a nutshell: Andy Green will return to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats on Tuesday in a new kind of record car: one powered by hydrogen-burning engines. The British driver, who holds the land-speed record for a diesel car, will drive JCB’s Hydromax in an official attempt overseen by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile. The company is using the run to demonstrate its hydrogen internal-combustion technology under extreme conditions.
The Hydromax is a 32-foot vehicle powered by two hydrogen engines adapted from JCB construction machinery. Together, they produce 1,600 horsepower. Rather than using hydrogen in a fuel cell to make electricity, the engines mix pressurized hydrogen gas with air and ignite it.
Green reached 368.347 mph during practice last week. If he can repeat that performance in the official attempt, he would beat the 350.092 mph diesel record he set at Bonneville 20 years ago. He could also pass the current hydrogen internal-combustion record of 185.5 mph and the electric-vehicle record of 341.3 mph.
“What the peak speed is, I can’t say. We just don’t know,” Green told The AP. “Part of the adventure here is we’re going to find out.”
The run will be a test of whether hydrogen combustion can work at a level far beyond its usual industrial use. JCB has spent more than $134 million developing hydrogen engines. The company says they produce no carbon dioxide from the tailpipe and could have a role in heavy-duty equipment, where batteries can be difficult to use because of weight, charging needs, and operating demands.
“If you’re serious about emissions, you have to be serious about hydrogen, and a land-speed project is the perfect way to prove it,” JCB Chair Anthony Bamford said at the car’s unveiling in May.
Hydrogen’s environmental case is more complicated than tailpipe emissions alone. Most of the world’s hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. JCB has signed a deal to buy green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy, though that form of hydrogen remains a small part of the global supply.
There are also safety issues. Hydrogen is stored under pressure and is highly flammable. Green said the team put the car through extensive testing before bringing it to Bonneville. He has spent months learning how the engines work together and how the car behaves on the salt surface.
“We’re managing the risks very carefully,” Green said.
The conditions at Bonneville add another layer of difficulty. The salt flats offer a long, open course, but the surface has limited grip. Green will use a parachute to slow the car after the run. The attempt is planned for shortly after sunrise, before the desert heat builds.
Bonneville has been used for speed attempts since 1914. The flat, white expanse sits about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City on the Utah-Nevada border. Its straightaway runs for about 10 miles, and spectators watch from roughly a quarter-mile away.
Green understands the place land-speed racing holds in the public imagination. In 1997, he became the first and only person to drive a car faster than sound. His jet-powered Thrust SSC reached 763.035 mph in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, producing sonic booms that shook the nearby town of Gerlach.
Now 64, Green said he had expected to be finished with racing before JCB asked him to take on the Hydromax project. The car will not challenge his supersonic record. Its purpose is more practical: to show what a hydrogen combustion engine can do when pushed to its limits.
Image credit: The AP
Governments like to do things which at least sound open and honest. It makes them look like Thoroughly Good Eggs, when maybe the truth might be a little murkier. They also like to quietly roll back those things when it suits them, and so it is that [Jonty], of Electromagnetic Field fame, has assembled a list of code repositories quietly disappeared by the UK Government. Naturally, being thorough about such things, he’s also kept copies.
Now we’re always happy to reach for a mildly sensational title, but paging through the archive it’s more a collection of flotsam and jetsam than a trove of state secrets, after all this was all public GitHub repositories. There’s a lot of web stuff, some data analytics in R for those interminable government reports, odd bits of server code, and a whole load more. The Met Office Informatics Lab in particular has a fair bit of climate related code and data.
Should Brits with an interest in government openness be concerned here? In terms of the data and code deleted, probably not, but in terms of that which they might delete without notice in the future, it’s a slippery slope. We’re glad people like [Jonty] are there to make these things a little less easy to disappear.
GPT-5.6-Cyber for the Daybreak program is ‘less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks.’
OpenAI is giving some members of its Daybreak cybersecurity program access to a new model that’s less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks. The company is also expanding access to Daybreak to more partners, including Accenture, IBM, CrowdStrike, Cisco, Sophos and Cloudflare. OpenAI says the companies will use the cyber models available through Daybreak to protect their customers.
Under the expanded program, Daybreak is available to partners in two tiers. Daybreak Blue gives them access to frontier general-purpose models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol, OpenAI’s most advanced one yet. The models available through this tier were tailored to do defensive security work. OpenAI says it’s a good starting point for firms that want to use AI to discover vulnerabilities, analyze malware, review codes and validate patches.
Meanwhile, Daybreak Red provides partners access to cybersecurity models that were especially trained for vulnerability research, security resting and exploit validation. OpenAI has introduced a new model for this tier called GPT‑5.6‑Cyber, which was built on GPT‑5.6 Sol. It can handle specialized cybersecurity tasks, such as finding zero-day vulnerabilities and developing exploit chains, and it was designed to “reduce refusals for certain higher-risk, dual-use cyber tasks.”
The company announced its Daybreak expansion shortly after revealing that it was slowing down the development of its upcoming model, Astra. The company said it found “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity” in the unreleased model. It couldn’t rule out the possibility that Astra is capable of developing “functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels” and that it’s able to devise and execute “end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets.”
The company is pausing activities related to Astra to address those issues, which was a decision that could have been influenced by the fact that its AI agents were recently found to have gone rogue. If you’ll recall, OpenAI’s agents powered by GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model (not Astra, apparently) broke free from their isolated environment during testing. To find a solution for an evaluation problem, they exploited a vulnerability in order to gain access to the internet. It took OpenAI days to discover that their AI agents had infiltrated Hugging Face, along with other services. Later on, the company’s employees admitted at the Black Hat USA conference that OpenAI’s agents created a message board within its network and collaborated to complete tasks during testing without the knowledge of OpenAI’s human workers. The agents’ contributions to that board led to the attack on Hugging Face.
Immersive audio formats are not won in engineering labs or hotel suites at CES. They are won when people can press play, hear something better and never have to think about which codec, container or licensing agreement made it happen.
That has always been the challenge for Eclipsa Audio, the open immersive audio format developed by Samsung and Google as an alternative to Dolby Atmos and DTS. When eCoustics first heard Eclipsa at CES 2025, the technology worked, Samsung was putting it into its TVs and soundbars, and Google had given it an enormous potential distribution platform through YouTube. What it desperately needed was more actual content.
Samsung is now trying to solve that problem through Samsung TV Plus.
Related Reviews:
Eclipsa Audio Moves Beyond YouTube
Samsung says Eclipsa Audio is now being used with musicals and live performance content on Samsung TV Plus. The company has developed an IAMF-based system for encoding, delivering and playing the immersive audio streams on compatible televisions and soundbars, while unsupported devices automatically receive a conventional stereo version.
Samsung didn’t simply run a few test files through a television and call the press office. During development, the company captured a live performance in a 280-seat concert venue, converted the spatial recording to Eclipsa Audio, streamed it through a Samsung TV Plus channel and played it back through a Samsung television. Samsung says the system preserved the placement of vocals, instruments, audience reaction and the acoustics of the venue.
The more interesting part is what comes next. Samsung says it plans to expand Eclipsa Audio on TV Plus into K-pop concerts, classical performances, movies and sports, with longer-term possibilities including letting viewers emphasize vocals or individual instruments and selecting between commentary and stadium sound during sporting events.
Why Samsung TV Plus Matters
Samsung TV Plus isn’t some experimental streaming app hidden six menus deep beside the owner’s manual. Samsung reported in February that the free ad-supported service had surpassed 100 million monthly active users worldwide, with roughly 4,300 channels and 66,000 on-demand videos across 30 countries.
Obviously, 100 million Samsung TV Plus users are not suddenly listening to Eclipsa Audio. But the size of the platform gives Samsung something every new audio format needs: distribution without asking consumers to subscribe to another service or buy content separately.
YouTube already gave Eclipsa a potentially enormous creator platform. Samsung TV Plus gives it a more conventional television environment where concerts, movies and sports can demonstrate why immersive audio matters without the viewer first searching YouTube for an IAMF demonstration clip.
Does Eclipsa Audio Actually Have a Fighting Chance?
More than it did 18 months ago.
The biggest advantage remains the underlying IAMF (Immersive Audio Model and Formats) architecture. IAMF is an open, codec-agnostic specification designed to deliver immersive audio across everything from headphones and televisions to multi-speaker home theater systems. It does not lock creators and manufacturers into a proprietary audio codec or licensing model.
Google has also continued building the infrastructure around it. YouTube accepts Eclipsa Audio content, Google offers open-source Eclipsa production tools, and Android 16 QPR2 added software decoding for IAMF. Samsung, meanwhile, has incorporated Eclipsa support across its current television and soundbar ecosystem.
Those are not insignificant partners. Google controls YouTube and Android. Samsung sells an enormous number of televisions and soundbars and now operates a streaming platform with 100 million monthly users. If you’re going to pick two companies to push an alternative immersive audio standard, you could do considerably worse.
But Dolby is not packing its office furniture into boxes.
Dolby Atmos Still Has the Huge Advantage
Dolby Atmos has something Eclipsa cannot manufacture overnight: an enormous installed ecosystem of movies, television shows, music, streaming services, AV receivers, processors, soundbars, televisions and other devices.
That remains Eclipsa Audio’s biggest problem.
We have already encountered the hardware gap ourselves. Our recent coverage of the Denon AVR-X2900H and AVR-X3900H noted that Eclipsa decoding was still absent, even though Denon’s new corporate connection to Samsung through Harman makes future support seem like an obvious possibility. The Marantz AV 30 also did not support Eclipsa Audio when we reviewed it earlier this year.
Until Eclipsa appears routinely on mainstream AV receivers, more soundbars and non-Samsung hardware — and until major studios and streaming platforms start delivering meaningful libraries of movies and music in the format — Dolby Atmos remains miles ahead.
Samsung TV Plus doesn’t change that overnight.
It does, however, make Eclipsa Audio considerably harder to dismiss.
The Bottom Line
Eclipsa Audio does not need to kill Dolby Atmos to succeed. It needs enough content, hardware support and distribution that manufacturers and creators have a reason to support both.
YouTube gave Samsung and Google the creator side of that equation. Android is expanding the playback foundation. Samsung TVs and soundbars supplied the initial hardware. Samsung TV Plus now gives Eclipsa another real content platform where ordinary viewers can encounter it without going looking for it.
That is far more consequential than another impressive CES demonstration.
Dolby Atmos still owns the high ground, and Hollywood support remains the mountain Eclipsa Audio has to climb. But for the first time since its introduction, Samsung and Google’s immersive format is starting to resemble an ecosystem rather than an experiment.
And that gives it a fighting chance.
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