Apple has officially launched Apple Upgrade, a leasing program that lets customers pay monthly for an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch instead of buying the device outright. The program went live today on Apple’s website in partnership with Klarna, replacing the iPhone Upgrade Program that Apple has offered since 2015.

What you can lease and what it costs

The lease length depends on what you’re planning to get. Phones and watches get shorter terms, 12 or 24 months, while iPads and Macs stretch to 24 or 36 months, giving those categories more room before the lease is up. The program covers most current hardware, including iPhones, the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Studio, iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad mini, Apple Watch Series 11, and Apple Watch Ultra 3. However, the iPhone 16, base iPad, and MacBook Neo aren’t eligible. Anyone leasing an iPhone also needs to be on a postpaid plan with AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, as prepaid carriers don’t qualify.

Pricing differs from device to device. A 256GB iPhone 17 Pro starts at $31.99 a month on the 24-month plan, or $45.99 a month for those who want out in a year. Tablets and laptops land in similar territory, with a 256GB iPad Pro starting at $24.99 a month over 36 months and a 16GB MacBook Pro starting at $38.99 a month over the same term.

Apple doesn’t require a security deposit for the lease, but it also doesn’t allow customers to make a down payment to reduce their monthly payments. The one lever customers do have is a trade-in, which can reduce the monthly rate for the length of the initial lease.

What you’re actually committing to

Signing up is simple on paper. Apple requires a Klarna account and runs only a soft credit check, so applying won’t affect credit scores, but Klarna then owns the relationship for the life of the lease, handling billing through its own app rather than Apple’s.

The terms get more complicated after that. Upgrading to a new device before a lease ends is allowed, but the fee for doing so grows the more payments are still owed, which turns an early upgrade into a calculated cost rather than a simple swap. A device also has to come back in good condition when the term wraps up, or Apple will charge a damage fee, something customers can offset with an AppleCare plan, though it isn’t bundled into a lease price the way it was under the old iPhone Upgrade Program.

Apple is also offering a short window to walk away entirely. Canceling within 14 days of receiving a device cancels the lease outright, but missing that window means paying an early termination fee instead. Customers who ride out the full term get three options. They can upgrade and return the current device, leave the program and return it, or pay a one-time fee through Klarna to buy it outright. Waiting more than six months to decide removes the choice, since Apple will automatically charge the purchase fee by default.

Apple Upgrade retires a financing model Apple built around outright ownership and replaces it with one in which monthly payments don’t guarantee owning anything at all. Customers deciding whether to sign up should read the fee structure in Apple’s FAQ closely, since it does more to define the actual cost of the program than the marketing copy on the page.

AI and ML

For enterprise agents, less is more

Anthropic and OpenAI have both proposed the deployment of agent armies as a way to maximize the notional benefits of artificial intelligence systems.

But the optimal agent workforce isn’t necessarily the largest. Researchers affiliated with the NTT Research’s Physics of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Lab and Harvard University’s Center for Brain Science (CBS) say there’s a point at which enterprise AI agents get in each other’s way.

Back in 2024, OpenAI used the term “swarm” to describe multi-agent architecture, before settling on a more anodyne term “OpenAI Agents SDK.” Anthropic is focused on multi-agent orchestration.

In both cases, the implication is that productivity rises along with the number of agents you run, an idea that means you spend more at OpenAI and Anthropic.

But according to Elizabeth Pavlova, senior data scientist at Harvard CBS, and Hidenori Tanaka, head of NTT’s PAI Lab and associate professor at Harvard CBS, adding agents doesn’t necessarily improve productivity and may hinder it at some point.

The ideal number of agents is 16, they say, at least for the Flag Game used to assess multi-agent interaction. With fewer than 16 agents, the software cannot gather enough evidence to reach a consensus decision. With more than that, the agents become polarized and split into opposing camps.

In a paper scheduled to be presented at the ICML 2026 Workshop AI4GOOD, Pavlova and Tanaka describe the Flag Game, which is intended to measure the tension between an agent’s private evidence and how that gets reconciled with social input from other agents.

The goal of the game is to guess a national flag for which each agent has only a fractional view.

Distributed systems require some consensus mechanism in order to work together. So the agents are allowed to communicate with each other.

Each agent in the game considers the fraction of a flag that it can see and each makes a guess about the full flag. The agents then interact, passing their guess on to a listener, broadcasting their guesses to other agents, or engaging with a manager system that takes their guesses and returns an opinion about the nature of the flag.

The game ends when 85 percent or more of the agents agree on which country’s flag they “see” during three consecutive rounds of analysis, or after some limited number of allowed steps.  

Adding agents improves performance up to a point, but then becomes a problem. When the agent population is large, groups emerge, each of which validates its collective position through the consensus of its members.

“Our research shows that simply adding more AI agents does not necessarily improve performance — just as hiring more people does not automatically make a company more effective,” said Tanaka in a statement. “Communication becomes harder, and groups can split into competing camps.”

The authors’ message for enterprise leaders is that when it comes to AI agents, focus on quality rather than quantity. ®

When I first caught a glimpse of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, it sparked a great sense of anticipation within me. After all, Square Enix and Claytechworks were collaborating to bring a brand new HD-2D RPG to the table, which appeared to combine sprinklings of classic Zelda titles with the visual, sonic, and environmental grandeur from series such as Mana and Dragon Quest.

I’m a huge fan of the HD-2D graphical style, and massively enjoyed recent releases such as Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles and Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake, but I still wasn’t quite sure if I’d love The Adventures of Elliot. Was the action combat going to be polished and engaging enough? Was the world going to deliver the spectacle and appeal conjured up with other series? Would the narrative have me hooked?

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei responded on Monday afternoon to murmuring in the industry that his company somehow supports efforts by the U.S. government to ban open-weight Chinese models, or possibly open-weight models generally.

“Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure, but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” he wrote, emphasis his own.

His response came after Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took to X (his first post on the platform) to share an open letter on Friday in which Nvidia and a long list of other AI companies including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia urged policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models.

While that letter did not mention China specifically, the debate in the industry has centered on allegations that Chinese AI labs are growing in capability often by stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts. One method is distillation, where an AI bombards another model with prompts to learn how it works.

Amodei said in the blog post published Monday that he views open-weight models as falling into a different bucket than the threat China poses. “Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don’t cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers.”

Amodei said in his post that he has longstanding fears about AI, but businesses using open-weight models, even ones from China, are not among them.

His fear is that “authoritarian governments” will build models that are more powerful than those in the U.S. to achieve “permanent military superiority” and/or use AI to repress their own people. He said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t the only authoritarian government he’s concerned about, but it is the “most capable.”

Amodei also said he fears AI will enable “biological attacks” not just cybersecurity ones. And, in his view, open-weight models are more dangerous in those scenarios because it’s difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage. He also noted, citing a UK AI Security Institute report, that once open-weights are released they cannot be withdrawn

This runs counter to what open source advocates argue: that access to powerful open models not controlled by a single entity helps defenders protect themselves.

Amodei listed actions he believes would thwart China, including restricting its access to powerful chips (which has been a longstanding U.S. policy) and calling for a formal crackdown on distillation. The U.S. has threatened sanctions against China if it determined there was IP theft involving U.S. models.

Interestingly, Amodei also said he supports growing efforts, some led by the U.S., to create a model safety testing organization, especially if the entire world, including China, agreed to submit to it.

“I think this idea is actually close to a consensus: I have been heartened both that the Trump administration has moved in this direction in recent months, and by recent industry proposals that would apply such testing to the most capable models regardless of their country of origin or whether they are open or closed (while exempting less capable models, such as those from startups and academia, entirely),” Amodei wrote.

“Note that to be effective,” he added, “testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible … limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China’s interest too.”

It’s not as if John Ternus was likely to shut down Apple TV, but he has now affirmed that it will continue to develop when he becomes Apple CEO.

If you subscribe to the argument that Apple should be making hardware devices instead of TV shows, you could have expected engineer John Ternus to agree. Or at least that his focus as CEO would be on devices instead of movies.

Speaking at the launch of the new fourth season of “Ted Lasso,” Ternus said all the right things to reassure Apple TV viewers and staff. According to Reuters, he described Apple TV as amazing.

“I think we have such tremendous momentum right now on Apple TV,” he said. “There’s so many amazing shows, so many amazing characters and stories, and so we’re just gonna keep building on that momentum.”

Tim Cook was also at the “Ted Lasso” launch and talked about the aims he has had since the start of the streaming service in 2019. “Our role is to be the best, that’s our lane,” he said.

“We’re not about the most, there are… other companies that do that,” he continued, “but we’re about the best, and I feel like we really hit our stride in providing that.”

Cook also said that the intention with Apple TV is to produce shows where the company thinks it can be unique. “Where we can innovate in a way that others might not be able to,” he said.

Season four of “Ted Lasso” was launched on July 27, 2026, at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. It’s debut on Apple TV is on August 5, 2026.

from the state-department-is-run-by-white-nationalists dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

Filed Under: bigotry, donald trump, europe, racism, samuel samson, south africa, state department, uk

Companies: free speech union, lex libertas