Amazon’s Memorial Day sale delivers a $50 price cut on AirPods Pro 3, with the entire AirPods line eligible for discounts.

Apple AirPods Pro 3 are on sale for $199 at Amazon today, which matches the lowest price seen this quarter.

Buy AirPods Pro 3 for $199

If you’re looking for the lowest price across the AirPods line, Amazon has AirPods 4 without ANC on sale for $99, while AirPods Max 2 are marked down to $509 in select colors. That’s the best price we’ve seen on the 2026 over-ear headphones release.

Today’s top AirPods offers

Even more Apple deals for Memorial Day weekend

Save across Apple product lines.

There are plenty of Memorial Day weekend sales going on across Apple’s product lines. Here’s a sampling of our top picks, with hundreds of bargains available in the AppleInsider Apple Price Guide.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle is a fun word with many meanings. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Read more: New Study Reveals Wordle’s Top 10 Toughest Words of 2025

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has one repeated letter.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has one vowel.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with C.

Wordle hint No. 4: Last letter

Today’s Wordle answer ends with K.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can mean to throw or toss something. It’s also a nickname for Charles. It’s also a cut of beef.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is CHUCK.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, May 22, No. 1798, was VOCAL.

Recent Wordle answers

May 18, No. 1794: LOATH

May 19, No. 1795: DUSTY

May 20, No. 1796: WRECK

May 21, No. 1797: AGREE

Public Sector

Government’s ‘rushed’ plans damaged public confidence before ministers had even explained how the system would work

Britain’s digital ID push has been mauled by MPs after the government unveiled plans that appeared to arrive several steps ahead of actual policy.

A report from Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee this week concluded the government’s handling of mandatory digital ID plans was “rushed, poorly thought out and failed to make a convincing case.” It warned that ministers had already undermined public confidence with what MPs described as a rushed and inadequate announcement.

According to the committee, there was “no rigorous policy development and no public consultation ahead of the announcement,” which left ministers struggling to answer basic questions about privacy, implementation, safeguards, and how the system would actually operate in practice.

The report said the proposal “came out of the blue, causing alarm and uncertainty” and warned that the government’s “incoherent approach to policy development cannot be repeated if public trust is to be rebuilt.”

The committee stopped short of opposing digital identity outright. Instead, MPs argued that digital ID could still improve access to public services, but only if ministers stop treating national identity infrastructure like a last-minute product launch and start acting as though the public might reasonably want to know what they are signing up for.

Opposition to the wider scheme has been building for months. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham previously warned that tying digital ID to employment checks risked creating a “backdoor national ID system,” while privacy campaigners and civil liberties groups have repeatedly raised concerns about surveillance, data sharing, and function creep since the plans were first unveiled last year.

The government’s approach to consultation has also come under fire. Last month, it barred journalists from joining a digital identity advisory panel event, which did little to quell accusations that ministers were trying to build critical pieces of national identity infrastructure behind closed doors.

Chair of the committee Dame Karen Bradley described the government’s early efforts as “nothing short of a fiasco,” adding: “To the public this announcement came out of the blue and made little sense.”

The report also highlighted growing concern around digital right-to-work checks, which ministers still intend to make mandatory even after backing away from compulsory government-issued ID cards earlier this year. MPs warned this could effectively mean UK citizens would need either a passport or a digital ID simply in order to work legally.

“It is vital that this change is not just treated as an afterthought to digital ID,” the committee wrote, warning that the implications for people without passports had barely been addressed in consultation documents.

The committee also warned that rebuilding confidence may prove difficult given what it diplomatically called the government’s “poor track record of digital transformation.”

In other words, MPs aren’t entirely convinced the same government that brought Britain some of its more memorable public sector IT disasters should be trusted to build national identity infrastructure. ®

A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a near-weekly episode, corrupting hundreds of open source tools, extorting victims for profit, and sowing a new level of distrust in an entire ecosystem used to create the world’s software.

On Tuesday night, open source code platform GitHub announced that it had been breached by hackers in one such software supply chain attack: A GitHub developer had installed a “poisoned” extension for VSCode, a plug-in for a commonly used code editor that, like GitHub itself, is owned by Microsoft. As a result, the hackers behind the breach, an increasingly notorious group called TeamPCP, claim to have accessed around 4,000 of GitHub’s code repositories. GitHub’s statement confirmed that it had found at least 3,800 compromised repositories while noting that, based on its findings so far, they all contained GitHub’s own code, not that of customers.

“We are here today to advertise GitHub’s source code and internal orgs for sale,” TeamPCP wrote on BreachForums, a forum and marketplace for cybercriminals. “Everything for the main platform is there and I very am happy to send samples to interested buyers to verify absolute authenticity.”

The GitHub breach is just the latest incident in what has become the longest-running spree of software supply chain attacks ever, with no end in sight. According to cybersecurity firm Socket, which focuses on software supply chains, TeamPCP has, in just the last few months, carried out 20 “waves” of supply chain attacks that have hidden malware in more than 500 distinct pieces of software, or well over a thousand counting all of the various versions of the code that TeamPCP has hijacked.

One of Berlin’s rising-star, early stage startups, Peec AI, just crossed $10 million in annualized revenue, according to internal dashboard data seen and verified by TechCrunch.

Peec AI raised its $21 million Series A six months ago. While CEO Marius Meiners wouldn’t disclose its valuation to me at that time (only revealing that it was above $100 million), he did say the startup had grown its revenue to more than $4 million in the 10 months since its launch.

So, it has more than doubled its revenue trajectory, and at a faster pace.

Peec helps brands track and improve their visibility in AI searches. While based in Berlin, it recently opened an office in New York. 

It’s also serving as proof of one of the key market shifts happening in Europe’s tech scene. 

“Founders these days track revenue much more closely,” Antler partner Christoph Klink was telling me just a couple of days ago. Sitting in a hotel lobby bar during an event-laden week for the tech ecosystem, the Berlin-based VC had offhand mentioned Peec AI as one of the most successful companies in his portfolio, alongside Lovable and others. 

My next question was how he defined success, which led to a discussion of recent market cycles. Compared to six years ago, he said, the big change is that success is now defined by growth, not valuation.

Having learned lessons from 2021’s frothiness and subsequent painful return to reality, investors now know that revenue can’t be an afterthought. The corollary is that it isn’t something you can just check on every couple of weeks, Klink told me. 

Startups now tend to keep running dashboards on revenue progress, sometimes — as is the case at Peec — visible to all employees.

For some founders, this has required some adjusting; but others were born just for this new cycle.

Peec AI’s product takes the same approach as SEO dashboards, except it helps brands track generative engine optimization (GEO) — visualizing whether they show up when users type a certain set of prompts into ChatGPT and the like. 

But as Meiners then told me, he is also a former esports athlete who once ranked among the top 100 League of Legends players. This explains why he would share a revenue tracker with his whole company: his background gave him a unique take on what makes a winning team.

Talent is the first ingredient, and Peec AI took an innovative approach to hiring in Berlin’s competitive market. 

Like many startups in the Bay Area, but very few in Europe, it invested in billboards to pitch itself not only to prospective clients, but also to applicants. In our conversation, Klink had recalled with a smile that these billboards were more often than not strategically placed in front of other tech companies across the city.

What those billboards say may differ, but they are part of a narrative that attempts to position Peec AI as a company worth jumping ship for. According to Klink, this signaling is particularly important in the current AI cycle, where companies and investors are piggybacking on trends that are only just emerging — such as AI search.

This bet on undercurrents applies to many startups Klink has invested in, which is why he understands why portfolio companies like Peec AI — and Lovable — not only closely track ARR, but also sometimes publicly disclose revenue milestones despite having absolutely no obligation to do so. 

“That’s a way to show it’s working,” Klink said. “It also shows a focus on growth that sets the culture.”

As OpenAI prepares an IPO, information suggests it is bleeding money. Apple, on the other hand, continues to benefit from AI without all of the spend.

If you didn’t predict it already, you could sense that AI was past its sell-by date when you watched the 2026 Google I/O conference. Half the hyped new technologies seemed worthless or at best old hat, and half were yet again preposterous exaggerations about saving the human race from something or other.

What never changes is that AI is both said to be this staggering technology right now and, if you press a little, to well, no, it isn’t, but it’s going to be someday. You just have to believe, and to spend money.

And this is where we are now. Companies keep spending incredible sums of money, but according to The Information, OpenAI itself has lost $1.22 for every $1 it made in revenue.

The firm does predict that it will hit $30 billion in revenue for the whole of 2026. But according to the Wall Street Journal, it’s going to spend around $600 billion on servers and datacenters in the next few years.

This includes around $100 billion just on datacenter capacity. Between now and around 2033, it has committed to $1.4 trillion in deals with processor manufacturers and cloud providers.

That money is not going to come out of CEO Sam Altman’s pocket. Instead, OpenAI hopes to get help from the federal government. It wants the government to guarantee financing for the processors it needs.

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” said OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. “[That] can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion.”

Friar said that in November 2025, and at the same time denied that the company was planning an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to raise money. Now CNBC reports that the firm will be filing for an IPO in the next few weeks, although it continues to deny this.

Sam Altman [left] and Jony Ive [center] speaking to Laurene Powell Jobs – Image Credit: Emerson Collective/YouTube

OpenAI also continues to seek out funding, most recently securing $122 billion in March 2026 to keep things going. It claimed previously that it would have gigantic losses every year until 2030.

But it’s okay, it’s fine, because in 2030 we will all apparently see that OpenAI was right. Through advertising in ChatGPT, OpenAI says it will create around $100 billion that year.

No more worlds to copy

AI stole the entire world’s published knowledge to create its Large Language Models, and it’s been allowed to do it. AI firms repeatedly say that if they had been forced to pay for what they did, they would not exist.

Throughout all of this, the only answer to that has been yes, you wouldn’t exist. Then there are stronger answers to how AI firms have subsequently protested that their own work is being stolen.

Your heart bleeds for them, but then you are an AI user. You have found out firsthand that AI is actually brilliant at certain really specific things. You’ve also found out how pointlessly wrong it is about the simplest things.

AI is so useful that you probably have certain tools you rely on already, such as AI transcription of recordings. But AI hasn’t written the next great novel — though it may have written a prize-winning short story — and the only life-changing impact it has had is on those people who’ve lost their jobs.

Companies are shedding workers on the belief that AI can replace them. Some are finding out that this belief was premature, if not idiotic. Just ask the Pizza Hut franchisee who says they’ve lost $100 million because of a botched AI kitchen management system.

There are signs that firms are hiring people back. But they’re hiring them back at lower salaries than before.

Companies are not learning that this gets them staff who can’t do the job either.

But then companies are still spending similar sums to OpenAI in this dream of AI wonderment. Or at least this nightmare of being overtaken by rivals.

According to FastCompany, AI spending for 2026 amongst the biggest technology firms is:

• Amazon: $200 billion
• Microsoft: $190 billion
• Google/Alphabet: $180 billion to $190 billion
• Meta: $125 billion to $145 billion

Spot the missing company

That same list of technology firms’ spending on AI included one more company. The figure has to be estimated, but it is Apple at around $13 billion for the year.

This is the company that for years has been practically mocked for being behind in AI. It’s also, though, the firm that is predicted to make a cool $1 billion for doing practically nothing.

That’s the sum Apple is expected to earn from the App Store and its share of the sales of apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Speaking of ChatGPT, OpenAI is reportedly considering suing Apple because its integration into Apple Intelligence has not earned it enough money. But this deal is the one that sees Apple Intelligence send anonymized data to ChatGPT and demands that none of it be retained for training.

If it can’t profit from a user’s personal details, and it can’t even train on what they ask for, it’s hard to conceive how OpenAI thought this would be a cash cow.

OpenAI may have hoped that its deal with Apple would expand out in some way. If so, it too fell foul of the nonsense it peddles about some far-off brilliant future.

There’d be irony in that, but it’s hard to be amused when the prospect of AI has created as much damage to employment as if it really could do what it’s promised.

But then, it may be equally presumptive to say we’ve got as far with AI as we’re going to get. After all, OpenAI has this Jony Ive AI device that will be coming out.

Some day.